Magic Lessons

by Alice Hoffman

  “My boy was eleven years old when it happened,” he began. While he spoke, he appeared younger, as if he’d gone back to that time. “I will not begin to tell you how clever he was, every father will tell you that about his son. But I will tell you that no one has as big a heart. The midwife told us so when he was born, she said it filled up his chest, and even before his birth, I could put my ear to my wife’s stomach and hear it beat, it was so loud, I knew he would not be like anyone else.

  “We were not home when the terrible thing happened. We had gone into the forest, to meet with the owner of a ship, a man who swore he would take us far from the perils of Portugal. Everyone wanted to go to Amsterdam, and we were willing to pay whatever was asked. It turned out the man we met was a liar and took our most precious belongings: a strand of gold that belonged to my wife, a silver prayer cup, and two strands of pearls my daughters were meant to wear on their wedding days.

  “We rushed back home, expecting to fetch my wife and the girls so they could join us in the woods, but it was too late. My wife was taken; my daughters were gone. I told Samuel not to leave the house, but as you know he will never do as he’s told. He went out into the square, searching for his sisters and mother. Our family had come to Portugal from the city of Toledo in Castile, Spain, then known by its Arabic name, Tulaytulah. We thought we would be safe in this new country, we had paid a high price to enter Portugal. Our family had been forcibly converted, but we practiced our religion in secret. The madness continued, with autos-de-fé, mass murders of conversos. It was a world of black and gold and then a world of blood. Samuel saw everything that day. The hoods they made our people wear, the lashings they gave them, the fires that burned. Flesh became ash; body became soul. Afterward he did not speak, not a word.

  “We stole the ship we were promised with the help of our neighbors who were to travel with us. I murdered the ship owner and his captain; I kept the crew who would be loyal to us and killed the rest. I made them jump into the sea and had no compassion when they drowned. That was what my life had done to me.

  “Samuel sat in silence with the navigator, a Jew named Lazarus, and that was how he learned to follow the stars. I thought he might never speak again, but he did, almost two years later, soon after his thirteenth birthday. He had become a man while we were searching for a place where we might be safe. We went to Brazil, but the Inquisition had followed the Portuguese to the new land they had claimed. At last we made our way to Curaçao, where people such as ourselves were allowed to live. We were in shallow seas when Samuel jumped off the bow. He yelled out ‘Look, Papa!’ I didn’t even recognize his voice because it had changed. He was a man with a man’s voice, but he still had a boy’s joy, for on this day he recognized the beauty of the world. There he was, riding on a dolphin’s back. I could hear him laughing. It was the day I had hoped for. I knew that as long as he kept talking he would be all right. That is why I’m telling you this, Maria. Don’t let him be silent.”

  The old man had taken her hand in his. He still wore his wedding ring, for Jews had given such tokens to one another since the tenth century as a declaration of love and faith. His was decorated with Hebrew symbols for luck, fashioned out of gold filigree and blue enamel. It was his greatest treasure. He had worn it for so long he could barely move it past his swollen knuckle; now when he did there was a deep indentation around his finger, the mark of his married life. He asked Maria to give the ring to Samuel, then told her that after his death he wished to be wrapped in white cloth and placed into the ground without a coffin so that he might become one with the earth. He was accustomed to living on land. He had come to love New York, and the sea was only a memory. You never know what you want or need until you are old, for old age is a mystery that is impossible to unwind until you step into its maze. Thorn, blood, earth, love—that was the riddle that Abraham Dias held in his hand.

  Maria wept as he was dying. Her tears burned her and left red marks on her face, and Abraham asked her not to cry. Instead he asked for something else, a last wish that could not be denied, one he had been thinking about every minute of every day during his last months. He wished for her to take care of his son.

  “Of course,” Maria assured him.

  “I mean in every way,” the old man urged. “The way a man needs to be cared for. With all your heart.”

  Maria laughed. “That is none of your business,” she told Abraham in a firm, gentle voice.

  “Love is my business,” he insisted. “Long ago I was an artist. You didn’t know that, and why should you? You don’t know everything about me. That was what I did before I went to sea. I made the most beautiful marriage contracts that could be had. A bride-to-be would have her family pay any price for my work. I constructed them from a single piece of parchment that I cut into shapes and words with a small pair of shears. When the brides-to-be saw the documents, they wept. The grooms fell to their knees, grateful to be alive in the world. Believe what I say. I know about love.”

  Maria was forced to lean close, for she could hardly hear him. His voice was a whisper; it was leaving him now. The light inside him was rising up. She opened the windows so his spirit would be free once it left his body. We are birds, Hannah had once told her. They sit inside of us waiting to fly away.

  “No one can fall in love with me,” Maria told Abraham. “Don’t wish that on your son.”

  “I know love when I see it,” Abraham Dias insisted. “I see it in you.”

  He gave her his ring and told her the secret that he had learned about love during his time on earth. Then he closed his eyes. He had nothing more to say; he wasn’t even in the room anymore, not in Manhattan, not in the year of 1691, not in a house on Maiden Lane. He was with his wife when he first met her. How beautiful she was, with her straight black hair that was so long she could sit on it, or wear it wound atop her head so that she looked like a queen who wore a dark crown. When you fall in love like that, time doesn’t matter. This was the secret he told Maria, the last words he ever said.

  What belonged to you once, will always belong to you.

  Be grateful if you have walked through the world with another’s heart in your hand.

  * * *

  Abraham Dias was buried in the First Shearith Israel Graveyard near Chatham Square, wound in white linen, as he’d wished to be, placed into his grave without a coffin so that he might become a part of the earth without delay. He had belonged to a congregation of Sephardic Jews who had wandered the globe, searching for a safe place in which to live and die. They had found what they were searching for in Manhattan. The burial took place on a blue June day, and the achingly beautiful weather made the loss cut more deeply. It would have been more fitting had there been rain or hail or black storms blowing in from the sea, a world from which a man wished to escape, not this perfect day. The women stood on the fringes of the gathering, their heads covered, and the men wore prayer shawls that their wives and daughters had stitched. The men joined in the mourner’s Kaddish, the ancient Aramaic prayer Jews recited to honor the dead. Samuel Dias did not practice his religion, but with a borrowed prayer shawl over his shoulders, he, too, recited the Kaddish and sang laments in Portuguese, as his father had done on the night of their family’s murder. Then he got down on his knees at the gravesite and wept. He had refused to shave and his hair fell to his shoulders; he looked rough, but he cried more than any man the congregation had seen before.

  The unmarried women watched him, so moved by his raw emotion they felt their feet lift off the ground. How could a man feel so much? What else was inside of him? If only they could find out, if only they knew, a great mystery would be revealed to them. The married women gazed at their own husbands with disapproval, for the men looked away from Samuel’s passionate display. It was too much for them, it was a story they had forgotten a long time ago, when they were thirteen and became men and locked their emotions away so they might navigate the cruelty of the world.

  * * *

  That night t
he house on Maiden Lane felt much too empty. Samuel had torn his clothes, as mourners are commanded to do. For seven days he sat outside, even when it rained. He wept until his dark, handsome face was swollen; he had stopped talking, as his father feared he might. Instead, he began to drink rum and he didn’t stop, growing more silent and moody with every drink. When he finally came inside, Maria brought him his father’s wedding ring, hoping it would start him talking. Samuel held it up to the firelight, squinting to see it more clearly.

  “There’s a reason my father left this with you,” he said.

  “Because he wanted you to have it.”

  Samuel Dias shook his head. He knew the way his father approached the world and he knew the meaning of the gift. This ring was a message, one he was grateful to receive. One he hoped Maria would accept. “No. He wanted you to have it.”

  Maria shook her head. “It’s a family treasure. I couldn’t possibly.”

  “If he wanted to give it to me, he would have placed it on my hand,” Samuel said. “No. It should belong to you. We should do as he wished.” Dias knelt before Maria and slipped the ring onto her finger. “This is what he wanted. For you to be mine.”

  She didn’t wish to hurt him. “It cannot happen if I don’t agree to it, and you know I can’t.”

  “But you have agreed. See! It won’t come off. We’re married in my father’s eyes,” Samuel insisted. He was making a fool of himself, but he didn’t care. “That’s why he gave you the ring. That’s our tradition.”

  Maria attempted to slide the ring off, but it was stuck; even when she took a bar of soap to the band, the ring would not move past her knuckle. It seemed impossible, her hand was so much smaller than Abraham’s.

  “The ring fits the person it should belong to,” Samuel told her.

  “Are you trying to annoy me?” Maria said.

  Samuel shrugged. He didn’t care if he was annoying. He’d certainly been called worse. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”

  Rather than argue, they went upstairs. The bed was small, but it didn’t matter. Rain began in the middle of the night, but they didn’t care. Once more and then never again. That’s what she told herself, but it was a lie and her mouth burned even though she didn’t say the words aloud. He saw that she wore the sapphire and he laughed out loud. She was his, he was sure of it, certainly she was his in bed when she told him never to stop. But in the morning, as they sat across from one another at the table, Samuel took Maria’s hand, and she drew away. She’d thought they had a tacit understanding. No love, no commitment, and certainly no marriage. He, of all people, should understand, for he’d been with her on her hanging day.

  “You wanted me here last night,” Samuel said. “Was that a favor because my father died?”

  “It was a mistake,” Maria said.

  “Because of a curse?” He was as outraged as she’d seen him. “That’s a fool’s belief.”

  “Because words have power. And they can’t be taken back.”

  Samuel Dias was a practical man, yet in his travels he had seen astonishing things he would never have believed could exist. Such miracles had changed him, convincing him that anything was possible in this world. He had seen golden lions sunning themselves on the rocks of the Barbary Coast, whales with long twisted horns floating under the sea, stars falling from the sky, parrots that could speak as well as a man, clouds of pink birds on the coast of Africa all taking flight at once, a woman with dark hair whom he wanted no matter what the cost.

  “A curse can be broken,” he told her, convinced that miracles were not so difficult to find.

  She shook her head and refused to agree. Causing him harm was not a risk Maria was willing to take. “Sell the house or keep it. I can find somewhere else to live.”

  Dias talked for an hour, then two. He was good at it, and had learned from the best. He told her what it was like to stand in the woods and watch her on Gallows Hill; his heart had been ready to explode, it was a bird, he said, struggling to be free of the cage of his ribs to be beside her. But she told him that what was done could not be undone. A witch who cast a spell upon herself could not escape its chains with her own magic. No ritual she called forth could undo the damage. It had happened to her mother and now it had happened to her. There was only one woman she had known who would have been capable of undoing such damage, and Hannah Owens wasn’t there to break the curse.

  “If your answer is no, then you stay here,” Samuel told her. “I’ll go.”

  He wished that he had told her he loved her before her hanging day. He wished he had admitted that as soon as he knew, when he thought his life was ending in Curaçao and he realized that she was the miracle who had come to him. As they sat across from one another at the table, he gazed at her, doing his best to memorize everything about her. Her black hair, her gray eyes, the mourning dress she had worn since her daughter’s disappearance with its mother-of-pearl buttons, her throat, her moon-shaped fingernails, her beating heart, her beautiful mouth. There was much he hadn’t told her, hundreds of stories, perhaps a thousand, and it pained him to think that it was quite possible that he never would. He should have told the story of stumbling upon the magnolia, how he’d sunk to his knees and cried, overwhelmed by its beauty. He should have told her that while they were on the Queen Esther he’d wished they would never reach Boston, and how he had worried over her fate in Essex County, and how he would worry about her still.

  He stood so quickly the chair skittered backwards and fell to the floor. “If you tell me to go, and you mean it, this time I won’t come back.”

  Maria Owens looked away, and he had his answer.

  She felt something pierce through her as she watched him go out the door and walk across the garden. Hollyhock, lilac, sunflower, lavender, thyme. There were all the trees he’d brought to her, each rarer than the next. If Abraham had still been among them, perhaps there might have been a chance for them; the old man was as persuasive as he was intelligent. As Samuel walked into the garden, he thought he glimpsed his father reclining in his favorite chair near the rows of lettuce and beans, but it was only a shadow. What was gone was gone. The ground was muddy, and the herbs in neat rows turned the air spicy and green. It was a good time of year to plant the tree he had brought from St. Thomas, ignored for as long as he’d been here, its roots wrapped in burlap, its leaves still coated with salt. It was not a magnolia, the one genus that might have convinced even the most contrary woman to fall in love, cursed or not. All the same, the roots of the Tree of Heaven would take hold long after the red flowers fell off and scattered. Samuel hoped it would tolerate the chilly climate of New York and did his best to help it do so, choosing a sheltered place beside the barn where it would be protected in winter. The mourning period had ended. For seven days Samuel had wept. He had torn his shirt and cut off his hair as offerings of his grief, which was twofold now. When it was time for him to leave, he did so. He left most of his belongings in the barn, for he didn’t need much in the world. He didn’t stop to say good-bye and he didn’t plan on returning. There was nothing for him here without Maria. Still, all the while he was gone he would think of her and wonder why if she didn’t want him she had stood at the door on that seventh day. If she had been another woman, he would have sworn there were tears in her eyes.

  A witch’s tears burn, they turn her inside out, they are not meant to be, and yet once they began they were difficult to stop. A witch could drown in her own tears if she wasn’t careful; she could scorch the ground beneath her. As Maria watched Samuel go, she was thinking of Abraham, buried a mile away, an expert on love, who had told her in the moments before his death that he saw love inside her. It looked like a dove, he said, but appearances could fool you. Some people mistakenly believed it was peaceful and calm, but that wasn’t what love was. It was a wolf. If you open the door and call it inside, you must sink to your knees and say its name, you must do so whether you are cursed or not.

  That was the mystery Abraham had c
ome to understand. Always and everywhere, love was the answer.

  PART FOUR

  The Charm

  1691

  I.

  One morning Faith awoke to the scent of apple pie, the fragrance so strong she could have sworn that her mother was in the kitchen, baking her favorite treat. She looked out her window to see that her foster mother had pulled up all the plants in her herb garden by their roots, and was busily tossing them into a bonfire. Faith had carefully planted the ingredients for Courage Tea, currants and thyme, and now they were little more than twigs, along with all the rest. Martha hadn’t worn gloves and her hands bled, pierced by thorns and brambles; all the same she ignored her wounds as the pious must, and stood close to the heat to make certain it flared.

  When Faith came into the yard, she was distressed to see her ruined garden. She let out a sob that chased the sparrows from the trees, and a wind rose from the sea, filled with stinging salt. Martha grabbed Faith’s hand and surprised her by stabbing her with the small paring knife she’d used to cut down the stalks that now lay in shambles. Two drops of black blood fell onto the ground, burning through the grass.

  “It’s still inside you,” Martha cried when confronted with this sight. After all she’d done to save the child, the girl was still tainted. She’d given up everything for Faith: her home, her house, her past. A bloodline witch could not be cured or changed or charmed or made to obey, even if she pretended to be perfect. Martha went upstairs to search the girl’s room and soon found the black mirror and the notebook. She ripped the notebook into shreds, and when Martha broke the mirror, the glass shattered into a thousand black pieces, one of which stabbed her directly below her eye, leaving a small deep mark, as if she’d been pecked at by the beak of a bird. From then on the windows in Faith’s chamber were nailed shut. Her door would be locked from the outside at night.