Pilgrims

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  lower floor rooms for the trees, and was frustrated. Ace reas-

  sured him that the leaves would be gone by autumn, but Hoff-

  man was afraid that Bonnie would be dead by autumn. This

  was difficult for him to take. He was no longer allowed to go

  over to the Wilsons’ property and look into the basement win-

  dows, since Ruth-Ann Wilson had called the police. He was no

  longer allowed to write threatening letters. He was no longer

  allowed to call the Wilsons on the telephone. He had promised

  Ace and Esther all of these things.

  “He’s really harmless,” Esther told Ruth-Ann Wilson, al-

  though she herself was not sure this was the case.

  Ronald Wilson found out somehow that Hoffman had been

  in prison, and he’d contacted the parole officer, who contacted

  Hoffman and suggested that he leave the Wilsons alone.

  “If you would only let him search your home for the rabbit,”

  Ace Douglas had suggested gently to the Wilsons, “this would

  be over very quickly. Just give him a half-hour to look around.

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  The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick It’s just that he’s concerned that Bonnie is trapped in your

  basement.”

  “We did not move here to let murderers into our home,”

  Ronald Wilson said.

  “He’s not a murderer,” Esther protested, somewhat lamely.

  “He scares my wife.”

  “I don’t want to scare your wife,” Hoffman said.

  “He’s really harmless,” Esther insisted. “Maybe you could buy

  him a new rabbit.”

  “I don’t want any new rabbit.”

  “You scare my wife,” Ronald repeated. “We don’t owe you any

  rabbit at all.”

  In late spring, Hoffman cut down the smallest oak tree be-

  tween the two houses. He did it on a Monday afternoon, when

  the Wilsons were at work and Esther was performing magic for

  a Girl Scouts’ party and Ace was shopping. Hoffman had pur-

  chased a chain saw weeks earlier and had been hiding it. The

  tree wasn’t very big, but it fell at a sharp diagonal across the

  Wilsons’ back yard, narrowly missing their arbor and destroying

  a substantial corner of the garden.

  The police came. After a great deal of negotiating, Ace

  Douglas was able to prove that the oak tree, while between the

  two houses, was actually on his property, and it was his right to

  have it cut down. He offered to pay generously for the damages.

  Ronald Wilson came over to the house again that night, but he

  would not speak until Ace sent Hoffman from the room.

  “Do you understand our situation?” he asked.

  “I do,” Ace said. “I honestly do.”

  The two men sat at the kitchen table across from each other

  for some time. Ace offered to get Ronald some coffee, which he

  refused.

  “How can you live with him?” Ronald asked.

  Ace did not answer this but got himself some coffee. He

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  opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk, which

  he smelled and then poured down the sink. After this, he

  smelled his cup of coffee, which he poured down the sink, as

  well.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” Ronald asked.

  “Is Richard my boyfriend? No. He’s my very good friend.

  And he’s my brother-in-law.”

  “Really,” Ronald said. He was working his wedding band

  around his finger, as though he were screwing it on tight.

  “You thought it was a dream come true to buy that nice old

  house, didn’t you?” Ace Douglas asked. He managed to say this

  in a friendly, sympathetic way.

  “Yes, we did.”

  “But it’s a nightmare, isn’t it? Living next to us?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Ace Douglas laughed, and Ronald Wilson laughed, too.

  “It’s a complete fucking nightmare, actually.”

  “I’m very sorry that your wife is afraid of us, Ronald.”

  “Well.”

  “I truly am.”

  “Thank you. It’s difficult. She’s a bit paranoid sometimes.”

  “Well,” Ace said, again in a friendly and sympathetic way.

  “Imagine that. Paranoid! In this neighborhood?”

  The two men laughed again. Meanwhile, in the other room,

  Esther was talking to her father.

  “Why’d you do it, Dad?” she asked. “Such a pretty tree.”

  He had been weeping.

  “Because I am so sad,” he said, finally. “I wanted them to

  feel it.”

  “To feel how sad you were?” she said.

  “To feel how sad I am,” he told her. “How sad I am.”

  Anyway, in July he started to build the tower.

  Ace had an old pickup truck, and Hoffman drove it to the

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  The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick municipal dump every afternoon so that he could look for wood

  and scrap materials. He built the base of the tower out of pine

  reinforced with parts of an old steel bed frame. By the end of

  July, the tower was over ten feet high. He wasn’t planning on

  building a staircase inside, so it was a solid cube.

  The Wilsons called the zoning board, which fined Ace

  Douglas for erecting an unauthorized structure on his property,

  and insisted that the work stop immediately.

  “It’s only a tree house,” Esther lied to the zoning officer.

  “It’s a watchtower,” Hoffman corrected. “So that I can see

  into the neighbors’ house.”

  The zoning officer gave Hoffman a long, empty look.

  “Yes,” Hoffman said. “This truly is a watchtower.”

  “Take it down,” said the zoning officer to Esther. “Take it

  down immediately.”

  Ace Douglas owned a significant library of antique magic

  books, including several volumes that Hoffman himself had

  brought over from Hungary during the Second World War, and

  which had been old and valuable even then. Hoffman had

  purchased these rare books from Gypsies and dealers across

  Europe with the last of his family’s money. Some volumes were

  written in German, some in Russian, some in English.

  The collection revealed the secrets of parlor magic, or draw-

  ing room magic, a popular pursuit of educated gentlemen at

  the turn of the century. The books spoke not of tricks, but

  of “diversions,” which were sometimes magical maneuvers but

  were just as often simple scientific experiments. Often, these

  diversions involved hypnosis, or the appearance of hypnosis, or

  would not be successful without a trained conspirator among

  the otherwise susceptible guests. A gentleman might literally

  use smoke and a mirror to evoke a ghost within the parlor. A

  gentleman might read a palm or levitate a tea tray. A gentleman

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  might simply demonstrate that an egg could stand on its end, or

  that magnets could react against one another, or that an electric

  current could turn a small motorized contrivance.

  The books were exquisitely illustrated. Hoffman had given

  them to Ace Douglas back in the 1950s, because he had hoped

  f
or some time to re-create this lost European conjury in Pitts-

  burgh. He had hoped to decorate a small area within the Phar-

  aoh’s Palace in the manner of a formal upper-middle-class

  Hungarian drawing room, and to dress Ace in spats and kid

  gloves. Ace did study the books. But he found that there was no

  way to accurately replicate most of the diversions. The old tricks

  all called for common household items which were simply not

  common anymore: a box of paraffin, a pinch of snuff, a dab of

  beeswax, a spittoon, a watch fob, a ball of cork, a sliver of saddle

  soap. Even if such ingredients could be gathered, they would

  have no meaning to modern spectators. It would be museum

  magic. It would move nobody.

  To Hoffman, this was a considerable disappointment. As

  a very young man he had watched the Russian charlatan and

  swindler necromancer Katanovsky perform such diversions in

  his mother’s drawing room. His mother, recently widowed,

  wore dark gowns decorated with china-blue silk ribbons pre-

  cisely the same shade as the famous blue vials of Hoffman’s

  Rose Water. Her face was that of a determined regent. His

  sisters, in childish pinafores, regarded Katanovsky in a pretty

  stupor of wonder. Gathered in the drawing room as a family,

  they had all heard it. Hoffman himself — his eyes stinging

  from phosphorous smoke — had heard it: the unmistakable

  voice of his recently dead father speaking through Katanovsky’s

  own dark mouth. A father’s message (in perfectly accentless

  Hungarian!) of reassurement. A thrilling, intimate call to faith.

  And so it was unfortunate for Hoffman that Ace Douglas

  could not replicate this diversion. He would’ve liked to see it

  tried again. It must have been a very simple swindle, although

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  The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick an antique one. Hoffman would have liked to hear the hoax

  voice of his dead father repeated and explained to him fully and

  — if necessary — repeated again.

  On the first day of September, Hoffman woke at dawn and

  began preparing his truck. Months later, during the court pro-

  ceedings, the Wilsons’ attorney would attempt to show that

  Hoffman had stockpiled weapons in the bed of the truck, an

  allegation that Esther and Ace would contest heatedly. Cer-

  tainly there were tools in the truck — a few shovels, a sledge-

  hammer, and an ax — but if these were threatening, they were

  not so intentionally.

  Hoffman had recently purchased several dozen rolls of black

  electrical duct tape, and at dawn he began winding the tape

  around the body of the truck. He wound the tape, and then

  more tape over the existing tape, and he did this again and

  again, as armor.

  Esther had an early-morning flute class to teach, and she got

  up to eat her cereal. From the kitchen window, she saw her

  father taping his pickup. The headlights and taillights were

  already covered and the doors were sealed shut. She went out-

  side.

  “Dad?” she said.

  And Hoffman said, almost apologetically, “I’m going over

  there.”

  “Not to the Wilsons’?”

  “I’m going in after Bonnie,” he said.

  Esther walked back to the house, feeling somewhat shaky.

  She woke Ace Douglas, who looked from his bedroom window

  down at Hoffman in the driveway and called the police.

  “Oh, not the police,” Esther said. “Not the police . . .”

  Ace held her in a hug for some time.

  “Are you crying?” he asked.

  “No,” she lied.

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  “You’re not crying?”

  “No. I’m just sad.”

  When the duct tape ran out, Hoffman circled the truck and

  noticed that he had no way to enter it now. He took the sledge-

  hammer from the flatbed and lightly tapped the passenger-side

  window with it, until the glass was evenly spider-webbed. He

  gently pushed the window in. The glass crystals landed silently

  on the seat. He climbed inside but noticed that he had no keys,

  so he climbed out of the broken window again and walked into

  the house, where he found his keys on the kitchen table. Esther

  wanted to go downstairs to try to talk to him, but Ace Douglas

  would not let her go. He went down himself and said, “I’m

  sorry, Richard. But I’ve called the police.”

  “The police?” Hoffman repeated, wounded. “Not the police,

  Ace.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Hoffman was silent for a long time. Staring at Ace. “But I’m

  going in there after Bonnie,” he said, finally.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “But they have her,” Hoffman said, and he was weeping.

  “I don’t believe that they do have her, Richard.”

  “But they stole her!”

  Hoffman snatched up his keys and climbed back into his

  taped-up truck, still weeping. He drove over to the Wilsons’

  home, and he circled it several times. He drove through the

  corn in the garden. Ruth-Ann Wilson came running out, and

  she pulled up some bricks that were lining her footpath, and she

  chased after Hoffman, throwing the bricks at his truck and

  screaming.

  Hoffman pulled the truck up to the slanting metal basement

  doors of the Wilsons’ house. He tried to drive right up on them,

  but his truck didn’t have the power, and the wheels sank into the

  wet lawn. He honked in long, forlorn foghorn blasts.

  When the police arrived, Hoffman would not come out. He

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  The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick would, however, put his hands on the steering wheel to show

  that he was not armed.

  “He doesn’t have a gun,” Esther shouted from within Ace

  Douglas’s house.

  Two officers circled the truck and examined it. The younger

  officer tapped on Hoffman’s window and asked him to roll it

  down, but he refused.

  “Tell them to bring her outside!” he shouted. “Bring the

  rabbit and I will come out of the truck! Terrible people!”

  The older officer cut through the duct tape on the passenger-

  side door with a utility knife. He was able, finally, to open the

  door, and when he did that, he reached in and dragged Hoff-

  man out, cutting both of their arms on the sparkling glass of the

  broken window. Outside the truck, Hoffman lay on the grass in

  a limp sprawl, facedown. He was handcuffed and taken away in

  a squad car.

  Ace and Esther followed the police to the station, where the

  officers took Hoffman’s belt and his fingerprints. Hoffman was

  wearing only an undershirt, and his cell was small, empty, and

  chilly.

  Esther asked the older police officer, “May I go home and

  bring my father back a jacket? Or a blanket?”

  “You may,” said the older police officer, and he patted her arm

  with a sort of sympathetic authority. “You may, indeed.”

  Back home, Esther washed her face and took some aspirins.

  She called the mother o
f her flute student and canceled that

  morning’s class. The mother wanted to reschedule, but Esther

  could only promise to call later. She noticed the milk on the

  kitchen counter and returned it to the refrigerator. She brushed

  her teeth. She changed into warmer autumn boots, and she

  went to the living room closet and found a light wool blanket

  for her father. She heard a noise.

  Esther followed the noise, which was that of a running auto-

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  mobile engine. She went to the window of the living room and

  parted the curtain. In the Wilsons’ driveway was a van with

  markings on the side indicating that it belonged to the ASPCA.

  There were grills on the windows of this vehicle. Esther said

  aloud, “Oh, my.”

  A man in white coveralls came out of the Wilsons’ front door,

  carrying a large wire cage. Inside the cage was Bonnie.

  Esther had never been inside the local ASPCA building, and

  she did not go inside it that day. She parked near the van, which

  she had followed, and watched as the man in the coveralls

  opened the back doors and pulled out a cage. This cage held

  three gray kittens, which he carried into the building, leaving

  the van doors open.

  When the man was safely inside, Esther got out of her car

  and walked quickly to the back of the van. She found the cage

  with Bonnie, opened it easily, and pulled out the rabbit. Bonnie

  was much thinner than last time Esther had seen her, and the

  rabbit eyed her with an absolutely expressionless gaze of non-

  recognition. Esther carried Bonnie to her car and drove back to

  the police station.

  Once in that parking lot, she tucked the rabbit under her left arm. She got out of the car and wrapped the light wool blanket

  she’d brought for her father completely around herself. Esther

  walked briskly into the police station. She passed the older

  police officer, who was talking to Ace Douglas and Ronald

  Wilson. She raised her right hand as she walked near the men

  and said solemnly, “How, palefaces.”

  Ace smiled at her, and the older police officer waved her by.

  Hoffman’s jail cell was at the end of a hallway, and it was

  poorly lit. Hoffman had not been sleeping well for several

  weeks, and he was cold and cut. The frame of his glasses was

  cracked, and he had been weeping since that morning. He saw

  Esther approaching, wrapped in the light gray wool blanket,

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  The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick and he saw in her the figure of his mother, who had worn cloaks