 'My father is a well-known magician who traveled the country with his magic show. I was inspired to write the story after seeing a photo of my mother emerging from white vapor in his illusion called Woman by Chemistry. Because my father is a magician I always believed magic to be a real possibility. I want my stories to be like magic shows: other worldly and mysterious with lots of top hats, doves and trick boxes..' - Katy Grabel |
Erza disappeared piece by piece; leg, torso, shoulder, head and one pale arm, thin and crooked like a calf leg, bending and folding as she dropped down into the dark little compartment smelling of greasepaint and whiskey. I held the lid as she went. "There you go," I told her.
Erza was too fresh from the prairie to complain. After twenty-six years on the road I needed a break from those crusty road-smart box jumpers who dropped my show secrets to every slum magician who hired them.
Now Erza twisted into a fetal curl in the nook of the plywood base. Her delicate profile outlined against black: one cheek, half a nose, half a mouth, one eye shooting wildly around and up at me. Welcome to show life.
I was no big illusion man. Just like the Great Cardini, cards were my specialty. Then the talkies closed the vaudeville houses, and I needed a new gimmick. Playbills reading,The Magnificent Malcomb creates woman from smoke and chemicals, would lure folks to town for a show.
The Woman by Chemistry was a big plexiglass bowl on a black and red platform with gilded gold legs and lion paw feet. A peculiar relic from the Great Zokar's illusion show. I had found red sequins and strands of long blond hair in the bowl.
Tonight it debuted in Broken Bow before the esteemed members of the Buffalo Bill Lodge. We arrived at the grange hall early to rehearse. I set up the illusion on the dull pine floor scattered with hay and buffalo grass carried in on the boots of farmers. I reached down and patted Erza's contorted shoulder. At least she fit in it. "You're doin' fine, girlie," I told her.
Erza had never lived out of a suitcase; never eaten two eggs, a link and a pancake at some sticky-booth diner at midnight; never bared her legs and painted her lips red. She was green, but I'd been in a bind. Three days before the tour my assistant joined a low-class conjurer promising her a feature spot in the Floating Lady and Decapitated Princess . Finally, I reached a place I'd never been before; a place called the end of the rope in Sioux City. Then Erza answered my ad. Stage-struck and stranded on her father's corn farm, Erza was dreaming of that Greta Garbo mystique as she planted cauliflower by moon phases in her mother's garden.
I closed the lid on Erza, placed the bowl on top of the pedestal and moved a small lever with my foot, which opened a hidden ice box filled with dry ice. White fog drifted into the bowl, clouding up the glass and tumbling over the top.
"Erza, come out now." I stood back to view the full effect. I heard the lid open and movement in the bowl, then Erza slowly emerged through the white vaporous drifts. I saw her face first, drained of flesh-tone, shoulders slumped and head swaying to and fro as if her neck muscles had given out. Blinking her eyes, she grabbed on to the bowl to steady herself.
A fainting lady was no grand production. The excitement of tonight's show might be too much. I lifted her out of the bowl and walked her to a crate. Erza leaned against it and wrapped her arms around her body as if she had lost it and now claimed it back.
She was a plain gal with a wide, vacuous face and thin, unripe lips. Her russet hair was tied back with yellow yarn. Lucky for me she was average looks. Prima donnas don't do well in magic shows; it irks them to see the magician bow for sawing them in two.
"You're just feeling light-headed from all the excitement," I reassured her. Still pale and shaky, she shook her head and sharply breathed in. "I've never felt this way before." She dropped her arms and I saw her hands clenched. Tight red fists, sore and achy, like she'd just put up her dukes against a bunch of trouble.
*
The Woman by Chemistry was performed around the world. Zokar pulled it by mule through the jungles of Peru and salvaged it from the Baltic sea when his steamer sank. He had performed it before the Czar of Russia and the Sultan of Turkey. His widow opened the doors of his warehouse after his funeral. She directed the exodus of tricks being carried off with her cane.
The chiffon scarf draped across her flimsy camisole did not hide her powdery, ancient bosom. "This one," she had said to me, stroking the bowl like a cat "will keep them guessing." It had been nicked, scratched and bloated from salt water damage. Nothing a coat of flat black paint couldn't hide.
In the last act each night Erza climbed into the hidden nook of the illusion and waited for her cue, and each night she slowly emerged from the white billows, pale and dazed. Her fingers clamped hard around my arms as I helped her out, but once her feet touched the floor, she was steady enough to bow and run off stage.
After a show in the Ottawa town theater with threadbare curtains saturated with prairie dust, I said to Erza, "Lookie here, you're a fine box jumper. You carry out all stage duties, don't swear or drink, have good hygiene and travel as well as any song and dance man, but that Woman by Chemistry gives you a case of stage fright."
Erza sat on a crate looking at a movie magazine with photos of MGM actresses. She shook her head. "Frightened of the devil, Mr. Malcomb. I can feel a fiend in that contraption."
Several wives and many more hired assistants have taught me that understanding women was not worth the work; their mystery beat my own, on stage, anytime.
"It takes time for a gal to gain confidence for a grand finale number. You're nervous is all," I told her. "Remember, Orson Wells sawed Marlene Dietrich in two."
I yanked a white carnation from behind her ear. She smiled and twirled it thoughtfully in her hands. She now appeared calm and fine. I was relieved. If she bailed now I'd be left with five more states and half a show.
Erza adapted well to the road. She didn't mind greasy fried eggs, old musky cottages near the highway or the big red-faced farmers and wiry tractor merchants in the front seats. She set up props early, broke them down during the show and was always ready to move out. In the afternoon before each performance she wrote letters home. Sitting back stage with a tablet of paper on her knees she looked like a school girl. Later, I saw stacked on top of her trunk envelopes addressed in curly blue letters to Grandma Mini May, Uncle Phinus, Aunt Kitty Bell and Uncle Oat.
Farm folk. Each time I passed their run-down jalopies on the road I blessed my alligator shoes bought in New York City. But at night heading to the next town I always searched for their lighted farm houses in the dark.
Sweet and tart apple cobbler wet my mouth when I saw those yellow lights. I was filled by the uncommon comfort of knowing the bed I would sleep in and who tucked in the sheets.
During my years on the road I'd always been on the outside of these solid, lighted homes, passing by in my car with a cold easterly whistling through the windows and a colder rump. My thoughts were drawn into the windows and inside that warm honey glow as welcoming as a love and tip-starved waitress on a lonely strip of Route 66.
But after the show each night as Erza and I traveled through the vast dark wheat fields to the next city, she did not look at the many farms we passed or talk of home, even if her purse was filled with fresh letters. Instead, she spoke of actresses she'd read about, and the need for tap dance lessons to keep up with Mickey Rooney.
One night she became flushed and her eyes sparkled in the blue car dial lights as she softly turned to me, words rushing out like uncorked wind. "I aspire to be a movie star, Mr. Malcomb. You know this business better than anyone I've ever met. Tell me, how can I become a star?"
I felt the pull of the old clanky trailer behind me and the next ratty motel room ahead of me, but for a moment I joined a league of more elevated, glossier beings. I answered her with these weighty words: "It takes talent, yes, but also tenacity. Never falter, never give up." I wagged a long creased finger and added, "Beware of mediocrity."
Later that night after the lights of the last town receded and the midnight smells of animal and moist grass filled the car, Erza breathlessly whispered, "Spirit told me to come to you. He called to me in the field back home and pointed to the road outside beyond the acre and he said, 'Godspeed to you.' "
And when the green eyes of prairie dogs gleamed in the passing darkness, and the white lines of the road had lulled her into the safe hollow of sleep, I told her about the cards. "Cardini said I had the best four ace trick he'd ever seen," I said to her slumbering form. "Cardini brought class to the cards. And he told me, a fancy card manipulator was a grand calling."