"Yes." Kitty nodded. "Yes, yes, yes." She fell back in her chair, exhausted from the anticipation. She was smiling like a girl, so huge and open that Sabine could see not only how beautiful she must have been when she was the assistant, but how beautiful she was now. The card trick had made Kitty beautiful. "That was wonderful. Pure genius. You are wasting yourself here with us. You have to be a magician."
Sabine was so pleased to have done well for Kitty. "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you want to."
"Bullshit." Kitty waved her hand. "You just aren't used to thinking of yourself that way. This is brilliant, Sabine. What a waste it would be not to use this."
Sabine smiled, flattered. She swept up the cards in one hand. "There are so many people who can do what I can do. To really make it work you have to have something else. Parsifal had it. He made tricks up. He could convince people of things."
"I have to wonder what would have become of Guy if he'd stayed here. I wonder if he would have been a magician in Nebraska. He could have performed at the schools, I guess. Fairs, parties, maybe."
Sabine tried to see it, the gymnasium hot and crowded, children squirming against the cold metal of folding chairs. The rabbit slips from Parsifal's hands and shoots into the tangle of feet. All of the children go onto the floor, scoot under the chairs. "No," she said. "He was a Californian through and through. He didn't even like to play in Vegas. We traveled all the time but anywhere we went, all he could talk about was going home. I think no matter what happened he would have wound up out there sooner or later."
Kitty's eyes were half closed. Sabine wondered what she dreamed about. "I'm sure you're right. It's just that I remember him here. I know that he hated it, but this is where I see him. I see him in this house. I always have." Kitty picked up the deck of cards from the table. She fanned them out and closed them up again. "Did he do a lot of card tricks?" Her hands were fluid.
"In the end. The last few years, all he wanted to do were cards."
"I didn't picture him sawing people in half."
They had sold the saw box years ago to a married couple who called themselves the Minotaurs. They still had the zigzag box, though. It was such a good one that Parsifal hated to get rid of it, even when he refused to use it. It was made out of teakwood, painted with red and yellow diamonds. The inside was lined in cool blue satin. It was in one of the guest rooms now. It made a pretty little armoire. "He sawed me in half plenty. He folded me down and stuck swords through the box. He made me disappear in a locked trunk and brought me back as a rabbit. That was in a less enlightened time, but we did it all."
Kitty spread out the cards and stacked them up, spread them and stacked them as if she were trying to figure out how they worked. "I'm surprised." She tapped the deck thoughtfully. "He didn't like to be closed in."
"He hated to be closed in. He closed me in, but he never got boxed himself. Parsifal needed a Valium just to get on an elevator, for God's sake." Sabine had looked into the dark barrel of the MRI machine. She had pressed herself into a tenth of that much space. She'd told him it didn't look so bad. "Your mother told me about the time he cut his face with the hedge shears, how they tied him up in a sack."
"I remember that."
"I would think after something like that, small spaces are always going to make you nervous."
Kitty nodded and tapped the deck again absently. "They do." Outside, the dark clouds were making the smallest re-lease, a snow so light it looked like talcum powder. "It wasn't that sack that scared him. I'm sure it didn't help, but that wasn't it."
"The refrigerator, you mean."
Kitty blinked, startled awake. "He told you about that?"
He had told her plenty. He told her about taxes and headaches and men he was in love with. "He got trapped in an old refrigerator when he was a kid. He was playing and the door shut behind him."
Kitty folded her lips into her mouth to have the pleasure of biting down on both of them at once. The face she made was old, empty. "No."
"Oh, Christ." Sabine put her forehead down on the table. "This is going to be another one of those stories, isn't it? Parsifal's life in hell. Why can't you tell me all of them in one shot? Tell me the worst of it and let me go home."
"You already heard the worst of it. Guy killed Dad with a bat in the kitchen. Guy went to reform school. Guy left Nebraska. That's the very worst of it."
"And the refrigerator? Where does that fit into the picture? How bad on the scale of bad things is this?"
Kitty seemed to mull the question over, to see if there was some sort of rating system. "Our father locked him in the refrigerator. Guy was nine. Eight, nine. He had eaten something, I can't remember what it was now. Something he wasn't supposed to eat. Something my father wanted. He put Guy in the refrigerator."
"Nobody does that. You can't."
"Listen, I'm not making this up to provide colorful stories about the past. This is what happened to Guy. I don't know what I'm supposed to tell you. I don't think about these things. I don't think about them-and now I do. Do you want me to tell you?"
What Sabine wanted was Fairfax. Jews did not lock their children in refrigerators. She wanted her own parents, who were in their yard now, a thousand miles away, watering the azaleas while the rabbit napped at the end of a leash her mother held with two hands. "Your father put him in the refrigerator." The words came out slowly, carefully. She remembered that she wasn't angry at Kitty, though just as quickly she could feel herself forgetting.
"My father had good qualities," Kitty said, "but I can't remember them anymore. I know there were moments that I loved him but I can't remember when they were. With him, you could do something nine times in a row and it was fine, and then the tenth time it wasn't fine. The tenth time he'd kill you for it. He'd kill Guy for it, or my mother. Sometimes me, but not so much at all. I felt bad about that. Who knows what Guy ate, but when my father asked him, just by his voice you knew this was going to be time number ten. There was nothing to say except, 'What? Yeah, I ate it.'"
"So he opened up the door and stuffed him inside? That's a big boy, eight or nine." It was the magician's voice, confident, controlling. Pick a card. Sabine could feel her hands starting to shake and she sat on them.
"He made Guy take everything out first." Kitty picked up the deck and began dealing a single hand; one, two, three, four, five, she counted the cards silently out on the table.
"Made him take out the food?"
"The food, the shelves. There wouldn't have been room for him otherwise. The refrigerator was full and it all went very slow. It took him a long time. He put the food on the counter and on the breakfast table and the floor." Kitty pointed as if to say, that counter there. "Guy was crying a little and my father was harping at him, 'Always stuffing your face, always taking what doesn't belong to you.' At one point he called him a fat boy, which just made no sense. When he took his shirt off you could see his ribs, for Christ's sake."
Parsifal at the beach had taken off his shirt, raised his arms in the Southern California sun, turned in front of Sabine, who was sitting on her towel. "Tell me the truth," he'd said.
"So we were scared, but not so scared. It was crazy stuff. We thought, Guy and I thought, that he was bluffing. If things took too long he just lost interest. We thought once everything was out, he'd turn around and tell Guy to put it all back in and that would be that. That was the sort of thing he'd do, give you plenty of time to think about how you'd never eat something you weren't supposed to again."
"Did you help him take things out?"
"I wasn't allowed." Kitty scooped up the cards and tapped them on the table to straighten them out.
"But you were there."
"I was always there," Kitty said. "When I was there things didn't get so out of hand. Things didn't usually get so out of hand, but this time, I don't know. Finally all the food was out. He left the things in the shelves on the door and he left the things in the freezer. It was just one of those little freezer boxes at the top that pretty much just hold ice. He told Guy to take out the shelves and out they came. By now we're sure it's over. Dad says, 'Get in,' and Guy does. I almost laughed, I was thinking, My father has let this go too far and he's looking stupid now, it hasn't been a good lesson. Guy made a face at me like, Hell, I'm in the fridge. Then just at that minute when it's all supposed to be over, Dad shuts the door. Not even a slam, just a real normal click like he'd just gotten himself a beer. It's one of those big old refrigerators with the bar across the front like a safe and when it's shut it looks absolutely locked and I started screaming my head off. I think the neighbors must have heard me. Guy told me later that once you're in there you can't really hear anything."