Against the Day (67 page)

She
felt an unaccustomed pressure against her leg and looked down. “Nice outfit,”
commented an oily voice which seemed to, and in fact did, proceed from the
region of Dally’s elbow, belonging to one Chinchito, a jumpedup circus midget
currently appearing on the Bowery stage, whose value at these gatherings,
according to Katie, had to do with a sexual appetite, not to mention organ,
quite out of proportion to his stature. “How about getting lost,” Dally suggested,
although in tones not entirely free of fascination. Chinchito took this with a
suavity earned over years of summary dismissal. “Don’ know whatcher missin,
Red,” he winked, strolling away and soon obscured by the crowd.

Not
the end of Dally’s difficulties, however. She was next approached by a smooth
gent with blindingly pomaded gray hair and a gigantic emerald ring on his
pinky, who pressed upon her cup after cup of a strange incandescent liquid from
a punch bowl until she was seeing nickelodeon shows in the wallpaper.

“I’ve
watched you devotedly down in Chinatown. Try never to miss a performance. You
make such an appealing captive,” and before she knew it, he seemed to have
taken one of her wrists and begun to slip onto it half of a pair of exquisite
silver manacles.

“I
think not,” said a calm voice from somewhere, and Dally found herself being
steered toward an elaborate box labeled
cabinet
of mystery
by a tall figure in a cape who turned out to be the
magician’s assistant.

“Here,
quickly. In here.” Dally was not the swooning type but this would have done the
job all right, because just before the door closed, the air seemed to grow
clear and she recognized the very same woman she had seen in Smokefoot’s store
yesterday, now wearing dancer’s tights and a velvet cape with spangles ajitter
all over it. And sneaking in by way of Dally’s nose, something else, beyond
time, before memory or her first baby words, the snootsubverting fragrance of
lilies of the valley.

She
might’ve had time enough to mumble, “Well my, my, and whatever has become of my
brain?” when, owing to some kind of a Mickey Finn in the punch—if Katie
was right about this Vibe crowd, there had to’ve been— Dally did not so
much pass out as experience a strange eclipse of time, at the

far end of which she became aware of
a door she ought to’ve seen all the time and yet only now was able to reach for
and open. She stepped out into the Lower West Side, right in front of her
rooming house in fact, and there sat Katie on the stoop in her scarlet turnout,
smoking a Sweet Caporal. It was not long after dawn. The magicians who had
rescued her were nowhere in sight, no more than their Cabinet of Mystery, which
Dally thought to turn and look for but which had itself disappeared.

“You all right?” Katie yawning and
stretching. “I won’t ask if you had a good time, but I know I did.”

   
“This
is pretty strange, ’cause just a minute ago—”

   
“No
need to explain, he was sure an appealing young specimen.”

   
“Who?”

“I told you that gown would work
magic. What do you mean ‘who?’ you don’t have to be coy with me.”

“Katie.” She sat down next to her
friend, in a great rustle of taffeta. “I can’t remember a blessed thing.”

“Not even the
name
of that
magic act, I’ll bet.” With such an exceptional tone of regret that Dally, puzzled,
reached to pat her shoulder before remembering her tall deliveress in the
spangled cloak.

   
“You’ll
go away now,” Katie puffing forlornly, “and maybe for good.”

   
“Not
a chance.”

   
“Oh,
Dahlia. You knew all along.”

“It’s peculiar. I did. But I didn’t
know I did. Not till she”—shaking her head in some wonder—“came for
me?”

The Zombini residence
, which Dally recognized from her nowbattered copy
of
Dishforth’s Illustrated Weekly
,
was
an extensive “French flat” in a recentlyerected building on upper Broadway,
which Luca had chosen for its resemblance to the Pitti Palace in Florence,
Italy, and referred to as a
grattacielo
or skyscraper, rising as it did
twelve highceilinged stories. The rooms seemed to run on for blocks, stuffed
with automata human and animal assembled and in pieces, disappearingcabinets,
tables that would float in midair and other trick furniture, Davenport figures
with darkrimmed eyes in sinister faces, lengths of perfect black velvet and
multicolored silk brocade ariot with Oriental scenes, mirrors, crystals,
pneumatic pumps and valves, electromagnets, speakingtrumpets, bottles that
never ran empty and candles that lighted themselves, player pianos, Zoetropic
projectors, knives, swords, revolvers and cannons, a coopful of white doves up
on the roof. . .

   
“What
you might call a magician’s house,” said Bria, who had been showing

her around. Straight from some matinée, in her red spangled
knifethrower’s costume, she managed to look like a nun not above some mischief,
as much of it in fact as a situation might require. She kept directing
unsymmetrical grins in Dally’s direction, which Dally took to mean something
but couldn’t decode.

In general, she found her newlymet
stepbrothers and sisters a wellinformed and considerate bunch of children, except
when they were being horribly impossible to live with. The older ones worked
onstage with their parents, went to school, had parttime jobs downtown, and
were as apt to be down on the floor assaulting the carpet with one another’s
heads as sitting together peacefully on a Sunday morning, one in the lap of
another, reading
Little Nemo
in the
Journal.
Among their more
disgusting habits was drinking the water from the melted icebox ice. The really
little ones, Dominic, Lucia, and Concetta, the baby, lived in a cheerful
clutter of dolls and doll furniture, rolling chime toys, drums, cannons and
picture blocks, cheerful majolica cuspidors, and empty Fletcher’s Castoria
bottles.

   
Dally
wasn’t in the house ten minutes before Nunzi and Cici accosted her.

   
“You
need change for a quarter?” Cici said.

   
“Sure.”

   
“Two
dimes and a nickel O.K.?”

She saw Nunzi rolling his eyes, and
when she looked in her hand, sure enough, Cici, the coin specialist in the
family, had palmed and switched the dimes for threecent pieces, adding to what
was already a small fortune.

   
“Pretty
good,” said Dally, “but take a look at that quarter.”

   
“Wait
a minute, where is it? I just—”

“Heh, heh, heh,” Dally rolling the
coin side to side over the backs of her fingers, doing a couplethree passes,
and producing it finally out of Cici’s nose.

“Hey—how about the Indian Rope
Trick,” announced Nunzi, producing from his pocket a length of rope and a giant
pair of scissors, while he and Cici hummed in harmony the familiar theme from
La
Forza del Destino,
looping the rope in a complicated way, cutting it into
several pieces, waving a silk cloth, and restoring the whole rope in one piece,
good as new.

Recognizing this as a standard
effect, “That’s a pip, all right,” said Dally, “but wait, I thought the Indian
Rope Trick was where you climb straight up a long piece of freestanding rope
till you disappear into thin air.”

“No,” said Cici, “that’s the ‘Indian
Rope Trick,’ this is the
I
ndian
Rope
trick, see, we bought the rope down the Bowery, off
of a Indian guy? so it’s a Indian Rope, see—”

   
“She
gets it,
cretino,
”
his
brother slapping him across the head.

   
Concetta
came crawling in, spotted Cici and looked up at him, her eyes hugely shining
and expectant. “Ah, the little Concertina!” cried Cici, picking up his sister
and pretending to play her like a squeeze box, singing one of his vast
repertoire of Luigi Denza songs, the baby meantime squealing along and making
no real effort to escape.

Dally had
imagined
once that if
she ever found Erlys again, she’d just forget how to breathe or something. But
having been gathered into the family chaos with little or no fuss, soon, like
some amiable stranger, she was only looking for chances to scrutinize them
both—Erlys when it didn’t seem she was looking, and then herself in one
of the mirrors that stood or hung everywhere in these rooms—for signs of
similarity.

Even
without theatrical shoes on, Erlys was taller than Luca Zombini, and kept her
fair hair in a Psyche knot, out of which the less governable tresses continued,
with the day, to escape. Dally, reckoning that the way a woman, in her
continuum of Tidiness, deals with hairirregularity can provide a clue to some
other self she might be keeping less available, found, somewhat to her relief,
that Erlys more often than not would go entire waking days without bother from
the stray undulations, though she was known to blow away as needed the more
persistent strands that got in her line of vision.

Erlys
was everywhere, passing through the farflung rooms, all but invisibly taking
care of chores, smiling, speaking little, though the children seemed to know,
and respect, her wishes more than their father’s. Dahlia allowed herself to
wonder if this wasn’t one more “effect,” with some reasonably twin assistant
having long ago been switched for the real Erlys, who had earlier stepped over
into the Cabinet of Ultimate Illusion, known also as New York City, and found
there true disappearance, the kind the toughest audiences will believe in. In
this curiously unbounded apartment, the only audience seemed to be Dahlia.
Something, something like the silvering of a mirror, remained between them. If
Dally wanted to throw herself into those arms in their carefully kept sleeves,
she would not be pushed away, she was at least that sure, but past that, where
all that ought to matter lay, she saw only a blackvelvet absence of signs. Was
she being played for a sucker? Were these people not related at all, but just
some Bowery acting troupe between engagements pretending to be a family? Who’d
be the best one around here to bring it up with?

Not
Bria. Not even when she started working as Bria’s knifethrowing dummy would
Dally give that much trust away to her. She noted the girl’s

look of indifference when her father
addressed her as
“
bella,
”
though
that never kept him from saying it. He was clearly enraptured with all of his
children, from the most obvious future criminal to the most radiant saint.

“Don’t
mistake me for one of these Neapolitan spaghettibenders,” Nunzi in a fair
impression of his father, “I come from Friuli, in the north. We are an Alpine
people.”

   
“Goatfuckers,”
clarified Cici. “They eat donkey salami up there, it’s like Austria, with
gestures.”

Luca
Zombini liked to explain the business, at various times, to those of his
children he deluded himself were eager to learn, even someday carry on, the
act. “Those who sneer at us, and sneer at themselves for paying to let us fool
them, what they never see is the yearning. If it was religious, a yearning
after God—no one would dream of disrespecting that. But because this is a
yearning
only
after miracle,
only
to contradict the given world,
they hold it in contempt.

“Remember,
God didn’t say, ‘I’m gonna make light now,’ he said, ‘Let there be light.’ His
first act was to
allow light in
to what had been Nothing. Like God, you
also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to.”

He
unrolled an expanse of absolute fluid blackness. “Magiciangrade velvet, perfect
absorber of light. Imported from Italy. Very expensive. Dyed, sheared, and
brushed by hand many, many times. Finished with a secret method of applying
platinum black. Factory inspections are merciless. Same as mirrors, only
opposite. The perfect mirror must
send back everything,
same amount of
light, same colors exactly—but perfect velvet must
let nothing escape,
must hold on to every last little drop of light that falls on it. Because
if the smallest amount of light you can think of bounces off one single thread,
the whole act—
affondato, vero?
It’s all about the light, you
control the light, you control the effect,
capisci?
”

   
“Gotcha,
Pop.”

   
“Cici,
a little respect here, someday I’m gonna make
you
disappear.”

“Now!”
cried two or three young Zombinis, jumping on the upholstery. “Right now!”

Luca
had long been interested in modern science and the resources it made available
to conjurors, among these the Nicol prism and the illusionary uses of double
refraction. “Anybody can saw their assistant in half,” he said. “It’s one of
the oldest effects in the business. The problem is, she always gets
reassembled, there’s always a happy ending.”