The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  “And tonight it’s ours,” he said.

  “No watchmen?”

  “The watchmen are at the front doors, the main entrance,” said Clyde, gesturing to indicate I should follow him along a row, which I did. “They won’t bother us.”

  “What won’t they bother us doing?” I asked, suspicious.

  “We’re going to find you a name.”

  “Why?”

  “No one goes to see the Amazing Ada. Or the Amazing—what did she call you?” he said.

  “Vivi.”

  “Vivi? Awful. Won’t do.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “I’m full of ideas,” he said and then, jauntily, “Oh, don’t look at me in that tone of voice. Come on.”

  We stopped in front of a shelf next to another window, this one larger and higher than the one where we’d come in. With only two of us here in the huge dark space, only a small puddle of light around us, it felt like the most private place in the world. It was warm. Clyde shed his overcoat, and I followed suit, letting the coat fall in a heap at the end of the shelf before we stepped further in.

  “Duck, duck, duck, duck,” he said, running his finger over a long row of books and then stopping at a series of matching brown spines, “goose.”

  I leaned in to read the gold lettering. “Shakespeare?”

  “Only the best,” he said. He reached for the leftmost book and opened it.

  I brought my face close to the book—The Merchant of Venice—so I could make out the words in the dim light. He leaned closer, but not too close. He brushed his finger across the page, saying, “Portia?”

  “It might suffice,” I said.

  “It won’t.” He took the book from my hands, tucked it back into its place, and handed me the next.

  I flipped the pages into motion then stopped them with an outstretched finger. “Here. How about Cressida?”

  “No, not enough poetry to it. Cress is like salad,” said Clyde.

  He lowered his hand on top of mine and removed it from between the pages, sending a long and trembling shiver up my arm like the bubbles in champagne.

  I jerked my hand back. It was a powerful reminder, and I knew it was the moment to speak.

  “Clyde,” I said.

  He turned to look at me, and I held his gaze. “Yes?”

  Then I said, sharply so he couldn’t mistake me, “Look. We need to work together. That’s a fact. And I’ll do it because it’s necessary and for Adelaide’s sake. But let me make this clear. If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”

  Nothing registered on his face. Not surprise or fear or amusement. Nothing at all.

  After a pause, he said, “You won’t.”

  “You doubt me?”

  “No,” he said calmly. “I don’t doubt you in the least. What I mean is, I won’t give you cause.”

  I had no idea whether to believe him. But I’d made myself clear, and at the moment, I could do no more.

  We tried book after book. Juliet was too obvious, he said; Constance sent the wrong message, I countered. He suggested Lavinia, but I refused to be named after a girl with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out.

  Just when it seemed we’d never reach agreement, he said, “Here! I found it.”

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  “Arden,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “that’s not right. There’s no character anywhere in Shakespeare named Arden.”

  “You’re right. But you’re wrong.”

  He brought the book closer to my face so I could see. The word was right there at the tip of his finger. Arden.

  They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.

  “The first time I read this,” said Clyde, “it sounded like heaven to me.”

  “‘Fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world,’” I said. “It does sound wonderful.”

  “And there’s this,” he said, closing the book and showing me the tiny raised letters along the bottom of the spine, which I’d missed in the dim light: The Arden Shakespeare.

  “Arden. Do you think it’s a sign?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  It seemed right to me somehow. “All right then.”

  “All right. You have a company. You have a name. You have a manager. I think we’re in business. Only one thing left to do. Shake on it.”

  “I suppose.”

  He lifted his hand then hesitated, looking down. “Though you said not to touch you.”

  “For a handshake, this once, I’ll make an exception.”

  “Truce, Arden?” he said, and offered his hand.

  “Truce,” I echoed, and shook it.

  Chapter Twenty

  1900

  Light and Heavy Chest

  As the Amazing Arden, I booked a dozen shows before I’d even performed my first. Part of it was Clyde’s hustle and his excellent connections. But part of my appeal was inherent. A female illusionist was a true curiosity. There were no others. Men were the magicians and women the assistants, and any woman on the stage was clearly being acted upon, not acting. Wives of famous magicians were often privileged to be more active assistants than the average, but they were still merely assisting. In this world, the next-best curiosity was Harry Kellar’s wife Eva, whose role in his act also included playing the cornet. Adelaide Herrmann herself had been the only true female illusionist, the only woman whose company was in her own name. And she had withdrawn from the field.

  Those first weeks, I thought about her every moment, every day, wishing I had had more time with her, more guidance. But I respected her decision. She had given her youth and her looks and her husband and half her life to magic. It would be churlish to ask her to give anything more. Anything I hadn’t learned in more than three years on the road with her, I would have to figure out for myself.

  In the handful of years we’d been performing as a company, the competition between stage magicians had become somewhat more fierce. It was obvious there was money in magic. Vaudeville audiences enjoyed singers and dancers, but every small-town Susie with a mouth and two legs thought she was the next Lottie Collins, and magicians were somewhat harder to come by. With fewer of us available, we could negotiate for more money, because the booking agents were gladder to have us. Neither was vaudeville the only option for a magician with a good name and reputation. Harry Kellar, whose star began burning brighter after Alexander’s death, even alternated tours on the road with much longer engagements in a single city. While I loved traveling, there was something that sounded utterly luxurious about a seven-month run at the Egyptian Hall in Philadelphia. If things went well with my act, I knew settling in was a strong possibility, but for now, I knew just as certainly I had to take to the rails again.

  I couldn’t quite pick up where Adelaide had left off, not exactly, but neither was I starting from scratch. When the members of the company came to get their final pay from the office, I was there to explain what I needed from them. On the surface, for them, it was good news. They didn’t have to go looking for something new. They could stay on in the same role for the same pay, if they chose. They only had to hold on for two weeks until our debut, not far away at the Golden Garden in the Bronx. It would be easier to stay than to go.

  Explaining the situation to them one by one was excruciating. Seeing the flicker in their eyes when they saw me sitting behind the desk. The distrustful way they reached out for the check Clyde handed them. And it was unpredictable, which ones would say yes and which no. Billy seemed confused and reluctant, but in the end, agreed to stay. Jack, on the other hand, didn’t even stay to hear my speech. He grabbed the check and was gone.

&n
bsp; “We’ll find someone new,” Clyde said. “Don’t you worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said, and I wasn’t.

  I knew part of the gift Adelaide had given me was the freedom to make the act my own. We put half of the illusions in storage, especially the bulkier ones with the more complicated sets, and I said a fond good-bye for now to the picture frame of the Dancing Odalisque. I decided to part with the animals, reluctantly, because their care and feeding complicated things, and I didn’t want to be an animal act. We sold them at auction, which I didn’t attend, trusting Clyde to handle it in all aspects. I spent that afternoon with the musicians, thanking them for their service and paying them a generous farewell.

  I was careful about what I kept and how to deploy it. I revised Light and Heavy Chest, planning a new presentation where larger and larger men would fail to pick it up, then smaller and smaller women would succeed. The trick was not new, but the message was. No one else dared put women above men onstage in any way. It was an outrageous statement. I hoped it would be unusual enough to begin to build my reputation. The novelty of being a woman would get audiences in the theaters once, but I needed to handle them just right once they were there.

  The night of my solo debut, I trembled in the wings as I watched the audience trickle in. Even after I should have taken my position to start, I lingered with my eyes on the empty seats, praying more theatergoers would appear at the last minute.

  “Arden,” Clyde said from behind me. His voice was firm but not without sympathy. “You’re not here to watch them. They’re here to watch you.”

  I always fed off the energy of the crowd. I said, “I need them.”

  “The only one you need is you. Curtain time. Go.”

  I’d chosen a haunting flute, three notes repeated, as my cue to begin. Clyde signaled to the musician. The curtain began to slide aside, and as the third note sounded, I stepped onto the floorboards for my first appearance as the Amazing Arden.

  I began with cards and coins, a few small tricks to warm my hands up, and immediately I realized that had been a mistake. The crowd occupied about two-thirds of the small theater, and without a strong start out of the gate, their early applause was polite and scattered. I feared their lack of enthusiasm would sink me.

  Even worse, as I gestured to cue the two assistants who would help me with Light and Heavy Chest, only one appeared. Otis was here—dragging the chest behind him, because what else could he do?—but Billy hadn’t shown. My mind racing, I called out to the audience for a volunteer and assigned him to help Otis carry the chest out. As a result, there were several long, still moments as I struggled to get the audience member to do what a trained assistant would have done by instinct. Still, I’d chosen luckily. He followed orders well enough. And again I chose luckily when it came time to conclude the illusion. A cheerful little girl, no more than seven years old, happily bounded up to the stage and lifted the chest in her two little hands, exclaiming in the most charming soprano voice, “My word, that was easy!” It brought the house down.

  A half hour into the show, I took my first breath in the wings while Jeannie stripped off one gown and quickly buttoned me into another. Then I caught sight of Billy, chatting easily with Otis, as if he hadn’t caused any trouble at all.

  “You,” I said.

  He turned, offering a sheepish smile.

  I didn’t return it. “You’re fired.”

  The smile disappeared. He said, “I had trouble finding the place.”

  “Funny how no one else did. You’re fired,” I said. “Get out.”

  He scowled and started toward me. I thought for a moment he might even hit me, but I didn’t let myself cower.

  Clyde clapped a hand on his shoulder and stopped him still. “We’re done here.”

  Deliberately, silently, I turned my back.

  My heart was hammering as I readied myself to go back onstage, but I wasn’t sorry. Boundaries had to be set. If I didn’t establish my authority now, I would never get it back. The first time had to be the only time for any misbehavior, or we’d be sunk.

  That unpleasantness out of the way, I found the audience more responsive as we presented our second half hour. They applauded in the right places and laughed as they should. When I asked for volunteers, a smattering of hands went up, both male and female, which I was heartened to see.

  At the end, as we made our bows and curtsies, the audience cheered us. It hadn’t been the success of Adelaide’s farewell show—not even an echo of it—but neither was it a failure. It would do to start with, and to build on.

  With the next twelve shows set up and the logistics of the train already arranged to get us from one to the next—the gift of Adelaide’s railcars, including her sumptuous home on wheels, being one of her most valuable—I knew we were only at the beginning of everything. I was ready to look forward, and go forward, an optimist.

  ***

  The first month, at Clyde’s suggestion, I didn’t emphasize my womanhood. I wore a man’s evening suit of tailcoat and trousers, carefully tailored to my slightly curved shape, complete with a matched waistcoat, white bow tie, and black top hat. It was his belief that this would make me seem even more of a novelty, a woman with the spirit of a man and yet not one. The audiences liked it fine, but I liked it less and less each night. I didn’t feel like myself. As we began the second month of shows, I appeared onstage one night in one of Adelaide’s old costumes altered to fit my smaller shape, a frothy confection of white organza that made me look like an elegant ghost, and after that, the tails hung unused on one of Jeannie’s costume racks. Clyde said nothing. I felt like I’d won an important victory, even though we hadn’t been in battle. It was harder to hide away props and charges in the sleeves of a gown than of a tailcoat, but I assumed the challenge as part and parcel of the female magician’s lot and adapted quickly.

  And as the second and third months went by, every part of the act become second nature. My gestures became more confident. My patter between illusions got smoother. I developed a better sense of what played best with a particular crowd and learned how to adjust my presentation on the fly. The longer we were on the road, too, the more confident and relaxed the other performers became, and we could all feel the difference, both onstage and off. We’d started out as survivors of Adelaide’s company, but now we were our own company, and I was glad.

  Once things were solid enough, we hired two more performers, a round-cheeked Pennsylvania farm girl named Doreen and a dusky-skinned young woman named Giulia who could pass for Hindoo, Italian, Spanish, or any other exotic nature called for. Giulia kept her name, but Doreen I renamed Contessa. She protested that she felt odd not using her real name, and I felt a bit of Adelaide’s spirit in me as I informed her, “They are all real.”

  And instead of hiding my gender and trying to do a man’s work onstage, I redesigned the whole act to celebrate womanhood. I dreamed the name Woman on Fire and devised an illusion to match it: a young woman dances alone on a stage in a soft white light then dances with a handsome young man as the light begins to glow red like embers, and as he spins her faster and faster, she seems to explode, leaving his arms empty, and the lights give way to darkness. It could be done in nearly any theater, since the lighting did most of the work, and a nimble girl could do the rest. The implication was a bit risqué, but not too shocking for the audience if the rest of the evening were properly reserved. To balance it, I invented the Magic Milliner, a version of the Dove Pan that produced a beautiful hat out of nothingness, which one woman a night from the audience was allowed to keep. Clyde found a place below Canal to buy them by the dozens. I dropped the card tricks entirely, feeling like they didn’t make sense for the new act. Instead, I taught them to the newly christened Contessa so I could call on her to fill time between illusions in an emergency and gave her several of Adelaide’s treasured decks.

  I also invented a new coin
trick, almost by accident. For some of the close-in magic, I liked to walk down into the audience, so close to them that my skirt would brush their arms. I was spinning a silver coin between my fingers, saying, “And this coin, I must tell you, it’s simply an ordinary coin. Would anyone like to take a closer look? Prove to us all it’s nothing remarkable?” And as I always did, I scanned the audience to find someone to offer the coin to then noticed an unusual pair a few rows up.

  The man was brightly dressed in a resplendent suit. His silk tie was a brilliant crimson, the silk square in his pocket perfectly chosen to coordinate, in a repeating pattern of crimson and cream. The woman next to him, clearly his wife, was drab by comparison, in a faded dress the color of bricks. She was craning her neck to get a closer look at the coin, her hand outstretched, offering to take the coin for examination. Her husband, not even glancing her way, pushed her hand back down to her lap, not gently, and reached his own hand out instead.

  I felt sorry for the woman, clearly the peahen to a peacock, and I wanted to do something for her. The idea came to me immediately. “Ah, I seem short of coins tonight. Sir, might I have the coins from your pocket?”

  Clearly proud to be singled out, the man didn’t hesitate. He produced a leather wallet and poured a small river of coins into my waiting hands. I also asked for and received the square of silk from his pocket, wrapping the coins inside. I raised the bundle over my head, shaking it vehemently, repeating the words “Shake, shake, shake, shake.” On the final shake, I thrust my hands upward, and the square of silk flew up into the air, empty, and fluttered slowly back down to earth.

  There was a murmur, and people looked around.

  “Madam,” I said to the peahen, “if you’ll look into your purse, you might find a pleasant surprise.”

  She opened the purse, and with a cry of delight, pulled out her own coin purse, now heavy with her husband’s coins.