The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett
“I know, I know that,” he said, and draped an arm over her shoulder. Monty had taken off his tie because lunch wasn’t so formal. “All I’m saying is that people remember. Everybody loved you guys. Really, Sabine, you should think about coming back on your own, when you’ve had a little more time. We’ve got lots of women magicians now. It’s not like the old days.”
But everything in the Castle was the old days. It was forever a Hollywood set, a soundstage for some Dean Martin film. Parsifal was always telling Sabine he wanted her to take over the act, start performing on her own.
“There’s no reason that you couldn’t do this,” Parsifal had told her. “You know all the tricks. All the props will be yours, you know everybody at the clubs.”
“We haven’t done a show in two years.”
“Those people haven’t all died, Sabine. You could go back to them. You could get someone to help you. You could even get an assistant of your own.”
“Why are you saying this?”
“Because I did all the work. I made those tricks.” He spoke so loudly he frightened the rabbit, who flattened himself down to scoot underneath the sofa. “There are things I do that no one else but you knows how to do. I don’t want all that work to be lost. It was a good show. There’s no reason you couldn’t do it.”
“Except for the fact that I’m not a magician. I’m the assistant. It isn’t the same thing.”
“You’re the one that does the tricks,” he said bitterly. “You just refuse to see it. You do the tricks hanging upside-down in a box.”
Sabine shook her head. “I couldn’t even think of it,” she said to Monty. “That’s not what I do.”
“Well, you should think of it.” He winked at Mrs. Fetters, who looked flattered. “She should think of it. Sabine’s great.”
“You go on in,” Sally said. “Get lunch over with so you can come down for a show. Sam Spender is doing close-up. You know Sam.”
“Sure,” Sabine said.
Sally nudged Bertie and pointed at the stuffed owl perched inside the bookcase. “Go up to the owl and say ‘Open Sesame.’ That’s how you get in.”
Bertie looked shy. She didn’t want to speak to the dead owl. Sabine herself simply refused to do it. She would always wait and slip in behind someone else. “Go on,” Sally said. “It’s the only way.”
But Bertie just stood there. “I’d really rather not,” she said. “Mama, you do it.”
So Dot Fetters, without giving it a thought, walked up to the bird and did what needed to be done. If you had to say “Open Sesame” to get through the door, then that’s what she would do. The bookcase slid open.
“They really want to give you a job,” Dot Fetters said, taking Sabine’s arm. “You should be flattered.”
All through lunch there was a steady stream of people at the table paying respects, giving condolences, heaping Parsifal’s memory with lavish compliments to honor the Fetters. One by one, magicians left their scotch-and-sodas at the bar and came to sit with them for a moment, tell a few stories, as if these women were some leftover Maña wives. The Fetters were overwhelmed by the attention. They let their hands be kissed by showmen. And Sabine was glad to do it, glad to show them how greatly Parsifal was loved, but for herself she felt like the secret panels in the walls were closing in.
“So now I’ve taken the guy’s watch,” the magician at the table next to them told the magician he was eating with. “I do a few little tricks for the other people and I’m waiting and waiting for this fellow to notice his watch is missing, until finally I got to move on so I say to him, ‘Can you tell me the time?’ And the guy looks at his wrist and he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not wearing a watch.’”
“He doesn’t know?” the other magician said.
“No idea. So I say, ‘Did you have one on earlier?’ I mean, hint, hint, and the guy touches his wrist, like maybe he’s double-checking, and his wife pipes up and says, ‘He can never remember anything. He’d leave his arms at home if they weren’t attached.’”
“Now there’s the kind of broad you want to have around. What kind of watch?” the other magician asked.
“It’s a Sea Master. It’s no Rolex, but still we’re talking a grand.”
The other magician whistled.
“Well, you know this trick. I got the watch sealed up in an envelope inside a zipper wallet in my pocket. Perfectly done. A sweet trick, if someone misses their watch.”
“But in this case...”
“Exactly. I can’t just give it to the guy, say, ‘Oh, in fact you did put your watch on this morning, you idiot.’”
“So?”
“So I turned it in to the lost-and-found, thinking sooner or later he’d wise up. Stayed there for a month and then they gave it to me.” The magician pushed up his shirtsleeve to show the watch. “Omega,” he said. “Keeps time like a Swiss train.”
Sabine sighed and accepted a refill on her coffee. A magician’s assistant was flatly nothing without a magician. There would never be a night when the assistant took the stage alone. “Look how well she holds the hat,” they would say as she stood there, hat in hand, her face one bright smile. No one wanted to watch her put herself in a box and take herself out again. No one cared how gracefully she moved, how good the costume was. She held the rabbit tenderly. She caged up the doves. Who cared? They didn’t know how often she was the one working like a plow horse while Parsifal fluttered his hands through the spotlight and smiled. Back in the old days, before Parsifal decided the three-part box was an exercise in misogyny, she was sliding around inside a platform on her back, sticking up a leg, popping her seemingly disconnected head into the top box, waving her hand through a trapdoor. And when Parsifal finally reconstructed her, she could not appear sweaty or out of breath. She had to look surprised, grateful. By professional standards, Sabine was much too tall to be an assistant. The little women, like Bess Houdini, could squeeze themselves into anything, while Sabine had to be vigilant to keep herself thin and limber. Still, Parsifal said, better to have an assistant who looked like a stretched-out Audrey Hepburn, and there were plenty of tricks she didn’t figure into at all. Magicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost. Even if Sabine had never loved magic the way she loved Parsifal, she realized that it was one more thing that was over for her. She had been a brightly painted label, a well-made box, a bottle cap. She was never the reason.
After lunch she took them to the Houdini’séance room, the Dante room, the Palace of Mystery. They went backstage, where Mrs. Fetters tapped her foot suspiciously on the floor. What a night it had been when Parsifal first took Sabine to the Castle, how impossible it was to think that someday they would perform there. Inconceivable that one day they would get tired of performing there.
“Look at this,” Bertie said, and touched the figure of Houdini wrapped in chains. His eyes looked as if he suffered from lack of oxygen, or possibly a thyroid condition.
Everything was a prop. Once it had thrilled Sabine, too, now it made her feel abandoned. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get to the show if we want a seat.”
The meal was the price you had to pay to see some magic. That was the trick of the Castle. You had to make it past the food and drinks, give them a chance to make their money before you got to see the show.
“How often did the two of you perform here?” Mrs. Fetters asked Sabine.
“A week a year, usually, sometimes more if there was a cancellation. It was a lot of work for not a lot of money.”
“But it must have been so much fun,” Bertie said. “I can’t even imagine it, getting to come here every night.”
Sabine nodded and turned away, pretending to study the framed caricatures that lined the walls. She focused her eyes on the blank space in between Harry Blackstone, Senior, and Harry Blackstone, Junior. Bertie was right. It had been fun. It was a completely different lifetime, one without sickness, without knowledge of past or f
For the lunch crowd there was only close-up magic, mostly card tricks, hoops, and coins, maybe a little mentalism. No one got sawed in half at lunch, no one vanished. Like Parsifal, it was this smaller magic that Sabine had come to prefer, not as showy and, therefore, more difficult. It was always harder when the audience was pressed up against you, the closest row practically pushing on your knees.
“I can’t believe you did this,” Mrs. Fetters whispered as Monty came out to introduce Sam Spender. “It’s so exciting.”
Spender was a thin, dark-haired man in his middle thirties. He and Parsifal had only overlapped by a year or two, Parsifal winding down from the business just as Sam was coming up. All that Sabine knew about him was that he was two people, one on the stage and one at the bar after the show. His true self, she believed, was onstage, where he was graceful and nearly handsome. He had what Parsifal used to call bravado. But at the bar after the show he was nobody, a man who could vanish in a crowd without any tricks.
He began the patter, the Ladies-and-gentlemen-I-want-to-welcome-you-to. Dot and Bertie Fetters sat forward in their seats, so thrilled to be entertained that for the moment they forgot that the purpose of their trip was to mourn. But then that was the point of magic, to take people in, make them forget what was real and possible. They were so utterly game that when Sam Spender asked if there was anyone in the audience from out of town, they raised their hands, not knowing that everyone in Los Angeles was from out of town.
Sabine turned her eyes away. She could not imagine how she’d thought that going to the Castle would be a good idea. She felt the pressure of sadness rising up in the back of her throat. She stared at the bandage on her hand, at that damn engagement ring she had forgotten to take off. Think about none of it. She tried to concentrate on the strip mall she was building. She would need to buy some small-grain veneer, some corrugated plastic. She would make a list of what she needed to buy. But even as she concentrated, she could hear it. From someplace far away, the farthest left-hand corner of hell, she heard her name. Dot Fetters touched her wrist.
“It’s you,” she whispered.
“Sabine,” Sam Spender said, and held out his hand to her.
She shook her head.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Sabine Parsifal, one of the truly great magicians’ assistants.”
One of the truly great hood ornaments. One of the world’s best bottle caps. There was applause.
“Now, when you take someone you don’t know from the audience, everyone suspects they’re a plant, that person must be in on the trick,” Sam Spender’s voice chimed and sang. “But when you pull a professional out of the audience, then everybody knows something must be up. Sabine, come on down here.”
She held the armrests of her chair. She would bury herself in that seat. They would never find her.
“Sabine,” Bertie said, and shook her as if asleep. “Go on up, he wants you.”
People never seem to. take into account that they can say no. In Sabine’s life she had seen people who truly, desperately did not want to be called onto stage, who begged to be passed over, but when they were pressed, they always went, resigned, as if to their deaths. When the magician asked, no one ever thought to tell him to go to hell.
She was lifted up, Bertie and Dot Fetters lifted her from her seat. She was not walking. She was being passed hand over hand through the air, above the audience, until she was delivered to the stage. Once their hands were free of her they clapped wildly. Sabine smoothed down the sleeves of her blouse. Sam Spender kissed her cheek, said something about having her back and how it was good. The lights were in her eyes.
No one had ever been alone this way before.
“So, are you going to be able to help me out with a couple of things, Sabine?”
She looked at him, begged him in the secret language of assistants and magicians. There was still time to get out of this, even if it didn’t seem that way. She knew the location of every trap in the floor. There were lines in the light scaffolding overhead; if she could only reach them, she could pull herself up. It is a fact about human nature: People look down, not up.
“What I’m going to ask you to do is just hold on to this hoop, just a plain silver circle.”
He put the hoop in her hand. It was cold, thin, light. It trembled with her hand.
“You got that there? Now I want you to pull on it. Go on and really give it a good pull, feel it all over and tell me if it’s solid.”
It was solid. It would be solid to anyone but Sabine, who knew the trick, knew the hoop like her name. She moved it around and around through her fingers. Parsifal hadn’t done a hoop trick in fifteen years. It was a good warm-up, it looked good from the audience, but it had become too easy for him and so he stopped. When things were too easy, they didn’t interest him anymore. Some of the things he did that were the hardest didn’t even look so complicated, but those were the ones he stayed with and loved. He was that sort of magician. She was that sort of assistant.
“How does that look to you?”
The hoop fed itself endlessly through her fingers. She could not see Sam Spender, but she could remember him. A decent magician, a dull man. She and Parsifal were years past hoop tricks, lifetimes past. There was no need to check the hoop. It was rigged, there was a hair catch. Nothing you could see, you just had to know it was there. You knew because someone had told you. But there was nothing to do but check it over and over again. No place to go. Sabine stood there, hearing Sam Spender’s questions without being able to answer. She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t walk off the stage. All she could do was check the hoop, and so, over and over again, she did.
“Come on, Sabine.” She felt something, a tug and then emptiness. The hoop was out of her hands. “Here you go,” Mrs. Fetters said, and gave the magician his hoop. “Come on, let’s go home.” Mrs. Fetters put her arm around Sabine’s waist and led her off the stage, down the three short steps. Sabine was crying in a way that kept her from seeing. She would never stop crying. Bertie ran her hand in circles across the small of Sabine’s back. They left the magic parlor, the three of them together.
When people approached them, Mrs. Fetters waved them away. “She’s fine,” she told Sally. A he so obvious that it said, none of your business, leave us alone. The valet brought the car up without questions and Bertie got into the driver’s seat. Mrs. Fetters got into the back with Sabine. She held her there, stroked her hair.
“Which is worse,” Mrs. Fetters said, “that man asking you to come up on stage or me telling you to go?”
Bertie drove out of the parking lot and safely to another street before parking in the slim shade of a palm tree. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “We never should have asked you to take us there.”
“We’ve been thinking about ourselves,” Mrs. Fetters said. “We should be thinking about you. Poor baby, all you’ve been through.”
Sabine was embarrassed in so many different ways she couldn’t begin to list them. What had she done up there? What was she doing now? She tried to tell the Fetters it was all right, that she would be fine in just one minute, but she couldn’t make the words. Parsifal would never be in the house when she came home. She would never open the door and find him there again. Not even once.
“I’ve got some Kleenex,” Bertie said, and began rifling through her purse.
Sabine thanked her, took a deep breath, and tried to sit up straight. “I’m fine, really. I’m sorry.” She wiped a straight line beneath each of her eyes. There were dark, wet stains on the front of her blouse.
“Nothing for you to be sorry about,” Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine looked at her hands and laughed.
“So why don’t we take you home?” Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine shook her head. “We’ll go out to the cemetery.” It seemed fine, better even, to go to someplace Parsifal was rather than someplace he was not. Sabine opened up the car door and got out. “Come
“You don’t want to go to the cemetery,” Bertie said.
“Sure I do.” Sabine could breathe again. She stretched up on her toes. “Nobody minds a crying woman in a cemetery.”
Bertie scooted awkwardly over the gearshift and let Sabine have the driver’s seat.
“When my husband died, I used to cry like that,” Mrs. Fetters said, leaning forward, her safety belt undone. “I cried like that, and I hated the man. I cried just because everything was different. So I can’t imagine what it would be like, crying over a husband that you loved as much as you loved Guy.”
Sabine was touched by Mrs. Fetters calling Parsifal her husband. “When did Mr. Fetters die?”
Bertie looked down at her hands. She adjusted her engagement ring so that the tiny diamond stood straight up.
“Albert died when I was pregnant with Bertie. That’s why I named her Albertine.” Mrs. Fetters reached up and patted her daughter on the shoulder. “The only thing this girl got from her father was his name. That’s why she’s so sweet.”
“How did he die?” Sabine wouldn’t normally have asked, but obviously no one was going to be breaking down over this particular loss.
“He was in an accident,” Mrs. Fetters said. “It was a real shock. One minute he’s there, the next minute—” She swiped her open hand through the air and then made a fist. “Gone.”
The lilies had opened up. Their white waxy petals made twin bridal bouquets on the grass of the twin graves. Sabine sat with her back against the brick wall that protected them from seeing Lincoln Heights. She watched the flowers and listened to the light music that was pumped in for the wealthy dead while Mrs. Fetters chatted with the marker, retelling the day’s events, the rug store, the Magic Castle, what she took to be her fault in all of it. Sabine considered getting up and correcting her, explaining to Parsifal that it, in fact, was not his mother’s fault at all. She smiled to know that she wasn’t so far gone that she couldn’t see what a stupid idea that was.
Mrs. Fetters licked her finger and rubbed at a tiny spot on Phan’s marker. “Everything is so clean around here, there’s nothing to do. The people running this place don’t understand psychology. People need things to do at cemeteries to make themselves feel useful. It’s like fluffing up pillows for the sick. It doesn’t make the sick person feel better, it makes you feel better.”