Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  “And here, just for watching the boys,” Mr. Carter dropped a final bill onto the stack.

  When he became aware that Charles was still there, Mr. Carter waggled his fingers at him. “Go wash up,” he said.

  Charles watched the money slip into Jenks’s pocket. He wished he could vanish it. Instead, he entered the house. He walked up the staircase, holding the banister tightly, feeling that he was more tired than he had ever been.

  In the bathroom, steam was rising, clouding the windows. James sat on the rim of the bathtub as it filled with water. The remains of his costume were on the floor, including their father’s soiled nightshirt. Charles removed his own clothing; when he was done, he saw that James was holding the white rock, the egg rock, between his fingers.

  “Here,” James said. “You can be the magician.”

  Charles took the rock, and covering it with his fingertips, made it disappear. James made no response, so Charles pulled the rock out from behind James’s ear. “Father was right, you are dirty,” Charles said.

  James snorted. Then he was quiet.

  “I’ll need an assistant sometimes.”

  Their eyes met, and James’s watered. He looked away.

  “It’s all right,” Charles added. “I can do it alone.”

  James slipped into the tub, under the water, and then resurfaced.

  Later, Charles, too, would get into the tub, but for now he stood alone and held the rock in his hand, because it had already started for him: his hands felt naked without something in them—a card, a coin, a rope—and whenever they held something secretly, they felt educated.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mrs. Carter returned to San Francisco after two years of therapy, glowing with the wonders of psycho-analysis. In her first months back, she encouraged her boys to lie eyes closed on the chaise longues in the parlor, her hands extended to their foreheads, and tell her how they’d felt about her while she was gone, and how they felt about her now that she was back. She declared aloud “that’s a breakthrough” so many times that James and Charles often asked to be excused early to go to bed.

  She encouraged her husband to write down and interpret his dreams. She was disappointed—so much so that she secretly considered divorcing him—that they were almost always about stock market hunches.

  But the Carters were allies, regardless, and Mr. Carter took seriously his wife’s suggestion that their elder son was in the grip of an interesting passion; they should let Charles find his way in the world.

  He passed quite unexpectedly from amateur to professional magician when he was a fifteen-year-old student at the Thacher School, a private academy in Ojai, California. Thacher was both rural and academically challenging: in addition to the regular slate of courses to prepare for Yale—all Thacherites went to Yale—the boys were each given a horse to care for, as Sherman Day Thacher had declared there was something about the outside of a horse that was good for the inside of a boy.

  Carter later claimed he had entered Thacher on a “wizardry” scholarship. There was of course no such thing. Thacher was a cradle for future politicians and captains of industry. As a lower lower, or smut, the term used for boys who were so hopelessly green they came back from camping trips covered in soot, he practiced his card effects in his room in the hour between supper and study hall.

  He was an indifferent student, excited by Shakespeare, better than anyone expected at physical sciences, hopeless at economics, mediocre in debate, and excellent (as was any Pacific Heights boy raised under the influence of stocks, bonds, and notes) in the areas of deportment and social hygiene. That Thacher was a gateway to Yale meant little to him, for college meant preparation for banking, and Carter, unlike his classmates, lacked the soul of a banker. He made no lasting friends. His horse, a gelding he spoiled on apples and licorice, loved him very much.

  Instead of burning the midnight oil with other students, Carter romanced the arcanae of physiology and self-improvement. He filched anatomy books from the library and studied the architecture of his palms, the bones like irregular cobblestones packed together under sheaths of muscle and fibrous ligaments. He was hypnotized by certain etchings, such as the bands of muscles around the thumb: the abductors, the adductors, the saintly flexor ossis metacarpi pollicis, the muscle of the opposable thumb, which separated man from the animals and, when exercised, the magician from his fellow man.

  Success, it was said in Ottawa Keyes, and in many other books (he now learned), hinged upon the application of will against the physical body. Great challenges to his willpower would come soon enough—more immediately, Carter learned about the tools he had: skin, muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones.

  The palm bones were named in times that respected mysteries: here was the cuneiform bone, the unciform, the semilunar, the pisiform, which sounded as if they’d been discovered by candlelight and recorded on papyrus by hooded men with long-quilled pens. The fingers radiated action, intelligence, deviousness. “This is no longer the shaft of my thumb,” Carter thought, “but my abductor pollicis, and my fingertips are flexor sublimi capped by flexor profundi.” He felt like he could shoot sparks off them.

  One night in the spring of his sophomore year, there was a lecture on moral instruction that no one wanted to miss. The speaker was Borax Smith, whose wealth, it was said, exceeded even the imaginations of boys who’d had their own fair taste of money.

  Smith took the podium in the faculty chapel, looking as old and plump and simple and kindly as a grandfather. Born and quickly abandoned near the Erie Canal sometime around 1840 (he never knew how old he was or where his parents went), Francis M. Smith matured into a hoodlum, but not a very good one. After many abominable exploits—he admitted he’d stolen linen from churches, forged cheques, rolled the intoxicated, and poured spiked drinks in a thieves’ den—he drifted to Nevada, with a mule and a stake of fifty acres of worthless land—Teel’s Marsh. Here he prospected hopelessly for gold. He dug alone in the blazing sun for many days, and then saw a single raincloud, which he prayed would cross over him. In the midst of a downpour that lasted only seconds, he heard the voice of God, which commanded him: “Be good.”

  When Borax reached this part of his lecture, there were suppressed snickers all around, as the voice of God was a silly old chestnut. But the rest of the story left the boys silent, for that cloudburst had pounded away the sand at Borax’s feet, revealing the top layer of a white vein of a curious substance, a scouring agent that could clean glass or metal. Smith told them he was disappointed—gold or silver would have been nice—but still he thanked God.

  As it turned out, Teel’s Marsh contained 98 percent of the world’s supply of borax. Smith started a company, Twenty Mule Team Borax; within a year, he became a millionaire, and within ten years, wealthy beyond calculation, for he allowed the women of America to drive away dirt and grime, achieving a domestic sheen their mothers could never dream of.

  Carter, who had arrived late to the lecture, was unimpressed with the speaker—the idea of the richest man in the America reminded him, faintly, of the tallest man in the world, and the only other prospector he’d known was Jenks. He spent the lecture practicing looking attentive; in fact he was thinking about cryptic shuffling illustrations deep in Professor Hoffman’s Modern Magic.

  Borax told the boys that he still listened daily for the voice of God, which had told him to be good, and that was why he had come to live in Oakland. He had built there, on the grounds of his great estate, a first-class home for unfortunate women. His theory was that with the feeling of luxury under their feet, these women would go forth and be good themselves, and not abandon their fatherless children. Borax slowed down here, explaining that a man could have a thousand interesting investments but what counted in this life and the next was good works: his was the rehabilitation of lost women.

  He asked for questions. Immediately a dozen boys in succession asked him in various ways how rich, exactly, he was. He admitted he didn’t know, no, he was sure he didn�
�t know, and they asked, well, compared to Morgan, for instance, are you richer than he is, and he had to admit he didn’t know that, either, nor compared to Hearst, nor Rockefeller, and gradually his answers grew shorter, and then he said “Thank you,” and there was some applause.

  The boys disbanded, most striding immediately to the dormitory for tea and debates of how much Borax must have netted in his lifetime. Carter, however, did not follow; he hesitated on the patio outside the chapel, under the pepper tree. After a moment of consideration, he opened a deck of cards and squinted at them as if they were ill-behaved children. He might have found an avenue for bottom-dealing Professor Hoffman had inadequately explored. He couldn’t tell if the effect would be transparent to an audience, and he was cursing himself for not having brought a mirror as he flexed his thumb—which was over the deck—and at the same time fired cards out with his ring finger.

  He realized he was being observed. Borax Smith watched him with lucid brown eyes. Carter looked around; they were alone on the patio.

  “I have been watching you for two, three minutes,” Borax said, raising his bushy eyebrows. “You been involved.”

  Carter put the cards away. His ability to dismiss Borax as yet another prospector vanished. Man-to-man, he felt intimidated to be alone with him. “I’m sorry. I . . . I wasn’t gambling, sir.”

  “That’s all right. I done worse things.” Borax dug in his pocket and pulled out a quarter dollar. “Show me what else you do.”

  Carter looked blankly at the coin, making no connection between it and what he’d been doing. Borax misunderstood, and with a deep sigh of “Thacher boys,” pulled out a dime. “There,” he said, “thirty-five cents. I want to see a private show for thirty-five cents.”

  “Oh!” He almost handed the money back, for he had no routine and no particular idea of constructing one. But it was late in the month and he’d torn through his allowance, and thirty-five cents would carry him through nicely. So he did a series of fans and ruffles, then asked to borrow Borax’s handkerchief, which he vanished and then found wrapped around a deck of cards in his pocket. He had recently heard much about the coin techniques of T. Nelson Downs, and so he pretended to double and triple and quadruple the thirty-five cents Borax had given him. Finally, he grew bolder, shaking money out from under Borax’s shabby straw hat.

  When he was through, he took a shallow bow, and Borax applauded thoughtfully. He asked if Carter had considered taking his act on the road. Carter hadn’t, but he knew the right thing to do was nod. “You can meet plenty interesting folk out there,” Borax continued. “Play on the same bill as the Barrymores, or the divine Sarah Bernhardt, or la Loie Fuller. There are plenty magicians in vaudeville who aren’t half as good as what you could do.”

  Carter had been brought up well, and so he said “Thank you, sir,” and he timidly accepted Borax’s card, and promised to keep him posted as to how his career advanced.

  He had no plan to perform onstage, but a seed had been planted. By that night, shoots and leaves and flowers erupted: he could be paid money, night after night, to do his magic. This was far superior to tallying numbers in a ledger. If he did well enough onstage, he needn’t go to college at all.

  But the thought of performing for an audience unnerved him. Though he preferred being alone, on some Sunday afternoons, when the rest of the fellows had ridden their horses into town, Carter often felt a desire to be among a population of people who were like him. Being onstage would be a grand way to meet people. The thought was a tremendous attraction, like an open window.

  He wrote a letter to his parents, mentioning to his mother what an adventure it might be and to his father the financial possibilities and asking them both if they knew how one joined a vaudeville troupe.

  . . .

  The idea of Charles touring as a magician for a summer amused his parents, who imagined it like packing off to sea as a cabin boy, though safer, landlocked, and temporary. Mr. Carter was actually well equipped to help: a man from Albee’s Keith-Orpheum circuit, the best of all vaudeville shows, had recently solicited his aid in securing a loan to build the San Francisco Port, a small, refined theatre that would feature European performers only.

  So, rather quickly, Charles Carter was given an audition at the Keith-Orpheum’s United Booking Office, where he sweated through a ten-minute scarf-and-coin act cobbled together with bits and pieces of patter from his magic books. It failed to impress the United Booking Office much. They gave him a letter of recommendation to the lesser circuits, the dustier venues that were more desperate for acts. Three auditions and three rungs down the ladder later, he had his first paying job.

  During the summer break of 1906, between his junior and senior years at Thacher, Carter toured the shoddy Lyceum circuit, and played halls in the Deep South, where the playbills shaved five years off his age and claimed he was “nature’s prodigy.” On what the troupers called Lyceum time, Carter was devoured by fleas, his earnings were regularly stolen, and he returned to California smelling like a smoldering cheroot. He loved every moment of it.

  His senior portrait in the 1906 Highwayman, the Thacher yearbook, showed him in school tweeds standing on the same riverbank where all senior portraits were taken. Below his name was written “Destination Yale,” as was written below all the senior names that year. However, close inspection revealed his true destination. Though some of his classmates distinguished themselves in their photographs by affecting a pipe or consulting a railway watch, Carter simply fanned a deck of cards in each hand, all of them aces.

  Contrary to vaudeville’s claims, he wasn’t a prodigy. He had a workman’s undistinguished face, lacking all suggestion of precocious brilliance. In the sepia tone of the Highwayman photograph, the full effect of his ice-blue eyes was muted. His hair was a midnight black, and his features had not sharpened yet. His contemporaries had trouble describing him, and he was difficult to pick out in group photographs.

  His anonymity appealed to him. “Because I am so plain faced, the audience at first expects little of me,” he wrote to James. “Were I handsome, I should not be so much in control, as they would expect such great things.”

  . . .

  The summer of 1906, Charles Carter, age eighteen, moved up in rank to the nine-week Redpath Chautauqua Circuit, which had been founded by revivalists. Though the circuit no longer had a religious slant, its reputation remained, and the crowds were well behaved and the shows exuded an air of moral order. He made twenty a week, which was standard. He did well enough with his cards, coins, scarves, and paper flowers that a scout for the Keith-Orpheum circuit asked if he might join their circuit at, say, twenty-five a week.

  Now that his physiological abilities had been appreciated, just a little, Carter began to work on his application of willpower. At a welcome-home dinner, he broke the news to his parents carefully, phrasing it as not just a tremendous opportunity but a financial advancement. He told them he was postponing Yale, but just for a year, to build “character.” He’d read that Pierpont Morgan valued this above all else. His father protested, but hesitantly, for he, too, had read what Morgan valued.

  “But just for a year,” his father confirmed.

  “Of course,” Carter nodded, delivering his most rational smile. “Just a year.”

  A year later, at the next welcome-home dinner, the conversation was repeated, more or less as before, the element most changed being Mr. Carter’s squint when his son said he was postponing college for just another year.

  At successive annual dinners, 1908 and 1909, Carter was increasingly declarative about his intentions: some performers, he said, made five thousand a week. None of them had gone to college, not one of them. Even if he did only a tenth as well, five hundred a week, which he could manage with enough experience, he could establish a profitable career.

  In September 1910, when Carter was twenty-two and his fifth annual tour was about to leave San Francisco, his rhetoric began to fall apart. His father invited him to the study
for a glass of wine, a Semillon grown from grapes harvested at their Napa property. Then: “How is your progress toward that five hundred a week going, Charles?”

  “It’s coming along,” Carter said. In fact, it was: he was making thirty-five a week, up from the previous year by four dollars. Conversation foundered, as it often did, and then his father produced from his jacket a letter from one of Carter’s former teachers at Thacher. For long minutes, Mr. Carter read aloud, as the chatty missive described how many young men from the class of ’06 had already made senior clerk or junior auditor. This recitation became a lecture, then an argument, then, rather abruptly, silence, for, though he would rather die than admit it aloud, Charles Carter was starting to agree with his father. Magic could be a career for certain talented men, but its potential was passing Charles Carter IV by.

  After a dispirited dinner with his parents, Carter walked through the city alone late that night. He was almost twenty-three years old. He had worked his way up to thirty weeks of continuous employment on the Keith-Orpheum, almost respectable for show business. But he had stalled. For four years, he had been Karter the Kard and Koin Man. His billing was mediocre—he appeared smack in the middle of the program, presenting his eighteen minutes of effects between Laszlo and His Yankee Hussars, a musical group who imitated famous band conductors, and Fun in Hi Skule, antic sketch comedy with jokes stolen from better acts.

  He ached to be better than he was, but he didn’t know how. Though he had ideas for spectacular illusions, he had no chance to implement them, as his contract specified that he would stick with small tricks—close-up magic. When he met other magicians, or when his parents inquired as to his progress, he had to say that he was still performing in-one, on the apron of the stage, curtain down, no large-scale work.