Yes, on the rippled textile was the shadow of a body — a woman’s body. A woman with hair, and breasts — he started — and, he was certain, wearing nothing! The slim darkness of an arm raised on ivory cloth; on the hanging folds, her silhouette turned. The sill was at her thigh, and as she strained to do something behind, he could see the apex of light between her legs as one went back. The line of a hip — her breast again. Body of shadow, body of light, held a moment — and the illumination that articulated her dimmed… then puffed out!
Within gray stone, the window’s rectangle was black.
The surprise of her vanishing made him gasp. With thudding chest, slowly he went down on the knees of his union suit before the painted wainscot beneath his own sill. The drape fell against his jacket shoulder, slid behind him.
Her window remained dark.
Cold air leaked under the edge of his own.
After a moment, down on his knees, Sam lifted his elbows out and up, grasped the metal handles on the lower sash, and raised it. Over the tiny chill real cold fell in under his thumbs, wrapped its feathery tickle around his chin and neck, pried inside his long-john top. Beyond the wooden trough — a black, splintered canyon in water-rotted wood — out on the dry stone a snow pillow curved away, glittering. He raised the sash another inch, then a foot — then six more inches; raised himself to look again toward that black window. His breathing had become so shallow that, now, he gasped a chest full of icy air. On his knees, it made him reel. Rising again, he leaned forward, thrust his face under the sash — brought his mouth slowly to the snow.
And kissed it.
Crystals melted before his lips — he closed his eyes — and a water bead ran along the crevice between. He opened his mouth just a little — and a cold drop rolled within, warming. Mouthing snow, he took in only the tiniest bit of air through lattices of white fire.
Two days later on his third trip underground to Times Square and Forty-second Street specifically to find it, almost by accident Sam turned to see the window full of false noses, exploding cigars, and sneezing powder — more jokes in the window, actually, than the magic tricks that had first caught his attention. The shop’s exotic name was Cathay. It also had lots of Chinese boxes for sale, and ivory carvings with black wood bases, Japanese fans and Oriental scarves that were not particularly magic at all. Maybe he had passed it before and, for all the other things there, hadn’t recognized it. But there was the top hat, the wand… Inside, the bearded man with the bottle-bottom glasses was a Mr. Horstein, who, soon as they got to talking, explained how he’d been a magician back in the ’nineties — oh, yes, the magic was the first reason for Cathay’s existence. The rest was all because sailors on leave and sometimes tourists liked to buy them. Clearly Mr. Horstein loved to talk to his customers. He talked about the great Harry Houdini, who, no, never came to Cathay. But Mr. Horstein had met him in Chicago and then again in Syracuse. Apparently they were acquaintances. “Not friends. But we say ‘Hello,’ as men who share the same profession.” Last year when Houdini had played the Jackson Theater, Sam and Lewy had not been allowed to go — because neither Papa nor Lewy’s stepfather would allow his children to go to a segregated theater. John’s mother didn’t mind though; and Lewy and Sam might well have snuck in with him. (Going with someone whose parents said it was all right made it not quite so much like sneaking.) But that week John was sick and had his throat tied up with a scarf full as asafœtida.
Mr. Horstein (Sam had been in the store for almost three hours) had introduced Sam to several of his customers by now: “This is Sam — isn’t this a good-looking, intelligent colored boy? He’s a real credit, and I like to have this kind of young fellow here.”
Riding home on the subway, Sam read an article in a red pamphlet with lots of fancy symbols on the cover about astrology Mr. Horstein had sold him for a nickeclass="underline" it talked about the Transit of Mercury, that happened this year, and might even — this part Sam wasn’t clear on — fall on Sam’s birthday, though such transits were more common in November than in May.
When he got home, Hubert — or Clarice — had left Views of Italy open under the reading lamp. He picked it up, turned the lamp on, and held it down under the light to look at a photograph of a hill — northwest of Siena, the caption said. The hilltop was ringed by a wall, set at equal distances with blocky towers: seven towers, Sam counted — though the caption said there’d once been fourteen.
Insistent through sleep, voices like water met him, within some dream, listening. The long sounds of morning, the tired sounds, indistinct — metal hit metal somewhere and reverberated. Someone shouted. As far away as the train tracks a siren complained of its windy wound. All muffled in sleep, signs tangled in the sheets around him, vanishing. (Who is this woman with us…?) A truck lumbered east. Another one braked — and a motor started. Someone shouted — again. Something hit something else, dully. Outside, in half light, beyond the window, April snow still fell — and sounds rose; morning sounds carrying away his drowsiness. He turned under the quilt (to face the draped window), wondering if they might return it. Soft sounds slid around him, slipped over him like a sleeve, waiting in the winter-dimmed city. Outside, the black stones of Mount Morris would be a pillow of white. (A black woman clothed in white moving through the white city… a white woman on a cloth of light.) He could see, through the edge of the glass beside the drape, smoke spill from a roof vent into smoke, to wander up the sky, wash off in winter wisps.
Under the covers, Sam thought: And beside me.. .
He moved his hand with their thickened fingertips out from the depression his body had warmed to the cold place where no one lay. (A white woman in the heart of… a black woman in a city of light.) Somewhere a siren sounded, weaving together for him the possibilities of his vacant day.
Saturday at Corey and Elsie’s there was a short, sharp argument between Sam and Hubert: Sam was happy to do his tricks for Hubert — and even Clarice — back at Hubert’s, but Hubert suggested after dinner that Sam perform one of Cathay’s wonders for his sisters: a vanishing coin. Sam had brought the trick over, after all, in his inner jacket pocket, precisely for that. But Hubert’s request got only Sam’s refusal, first a quiet one, then an insistent one, then — with red-cheeked embarrassment — a loud one, when Hubert wouldn’t stop.
But, at least partly, it was because Mr. Carter, a Columbia Teacher’s College friend of Elsie’s, was there that afternoon for dinner — a mahogany-complected, articulate young man from Philadelphia, who cut all his food with his fork. But Mr. Carter displayed a smiling, inquisitive awe before Elsie and her siblings that Sam recognized: it was the air other ministers, especially white ones, displayed when they visited Papa socially at home. And nothing made a social situation more uncomfortable for Sam. It turned everything you did into a performance, and always left him somewhere between tongue-tied and belligerent.
“I’d like to see you do a magic trick,” Mr. Carter had prompted across the remains of dinner, in what clearly he thought was an encouraging way.