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1
It was mum who kept trying to make a lady of me through all my growing-up years but it was Grams who taught me her magic tricks and how to be a pickpocket, and of the two of them I have to say that Grams' lessons certainly proved the more valuable to me in my life.
"Head up," Mum would say. "Shoulders back, Caressa, never say ain't, watch your manners, be a lady and learn to roll with the punches."
Grams, bless her, would only laugh and say, "Waste—all waste!"
Much to my amusement I have at last become a lady, quite elegant and proper in these later years, and if I take up my pen to write of the strange events in my past I do this because they've been kept secret for too long. I indulge myself: the time has come to place on paper who and what I have truly been—and what I have seen—and to record all that happened to me during those years when I was young and counted dead by the world, my bones assumed to be whitening under the desert sun with all the others who were murdered. To speak of those years becomes important, too, because of the stranger who came to my door this morning asking to see Lady Teal about a certain antiika nahet with a green stone in it that came from a queen's tomb in the Sahara. What memories that brings back! I'm sure Bertram thought him mad—Bertram is a very proper butler—but he carried the message to me faithfully. The stranger was being discreet, of course, for antiika nahet means in Arabic a discovered the green stone to be an emerald of much value. He was speaking of the tomb of Queen Tin Hinan, officially found southwest of the Hoggar Mountains in 1925 by Reygasse and deProrak, but how the man had learned of the existence of the little stone figure that I took from the tomb, cr for that matter of my own existence I don't know, for I've had many names and it happened so long ago, when this century was not many years old.
I did not see the man; I told Bertram to say I was indisposed . . . an interesting word. Still, I've lived a longer life than most, and if I should die next week, the prehistoric carving ought to be returned to the country it came from, and Deborah should know why. A pity I'll not be able to see her face when she reads what I write now. Only two people know of my past and both of them are dead, but Deborah always assumed her father was the man I married; it will be one of those shocks that have to be endured when Truth is laid out as bare as the naked lady at Mr. Laski's. As for Mum, if she happens to be looking over my shoulder from that Heaven she always believed in, I'd like her to know that I really learned to roll with the punches—a few too many, I might add—and became a lady after all, with a capital L at that.
Lordy, she'd say—but just listen to me, slipping back into how we talked in Oklahoma, when this is 1980, and I long ago learned to speak what Linton called Impeccable English and have known my share of prime ministers and ambassadors, a dull lot usually, but how easily the mind slips into the past at my age. I don't tell my age now, and I don't look into mirrors either. Beauty is beauty and I had it in abundance, but whether it was a curse or a blessing is not for me to say. Grams told me it was my fate, and "look at the lines in the palms of her hands," but Mum's lips would only tighten and she refused to look, saying stubbornly, "She'll do fine if she's ladylike and learns to roll with the punches."
When I was young I told people I came from a circus family but that was long ago and only half-true because after my father fell from his trapeze and missed the net, dead on arrival it was said, Mum and Grams left the circus to begin their own plunge down, which ended in their being carny folk—big-time and then ragbag—where Grams told fortunes in the mitt camp and Mum was in the cooch show, although later, no longer so young, she was the headless woman. If I close my eyes and listen hard I can hear the sounds now: the steam organ on the calliope pumping out its rollicking music, the screams from the Loop-o-plane, the shuffle of a hundred feet tramping the midway, the smell of sawdust and hot grease and popcorn. I can hear the talker shouting his come-ons, the grinders and openers shouting their spiels to the tip: "See the tattooed lady! the sword swallower! Only a nickel to see real, live, mankilling snakes! See the contortionist—the geek! Thrill a minute, folks, thrill a minute. . . . Step up and try your luck at the Cat Rack . . . at Spin the Arrow . . . a prize every time! . . . the bucket game, skillo. . . . Win a doll, win a teddy bear . . . !"
And since the carny was usually full of strong games, and the fuzz paid off, I would be mingling with the crowds, no longer in boys' overalls but an innocent child with a ribbon in my hair and a few ruffles and a washed face, and a vast number of pockets inside my dress for the wallets and bills I collected during the night, handing them to Grams in her tent when my pockets grew stuffed.
I had good fingers for a pickpocket, Grams told me, long and tapering, the first and middle fingers nearly the same length, and she made me take good care of them and rub glycerine or petroleum jelly on them every night. With constant practice I learned all the tricks. It was like conjuring, Grams emphasized, not so different at all from palming coins, needing keenness of eye and quickness, and two strong supple fingers. Picking a pocket was easy enough at the carnival when a mark was intrigued by a game and reached into his pocket for money, advertising where he kept it, but as I gained in skill Grams saw to it that I practiced now and then on the streets in a village, with her observing from a distance and me carrying a cape or sweater over my arm to conceal what my fingers did. I would bump into a man and apologize or brush against him or inquire directions of an amiable-looking one, or in similar manner distract while my two fingers slid into his pocket to open like a pair of scissors and extract what it contained. Later I went to the streets alone; it needed experience to know just how firmly to grasp a bulky wallet without losing it, and without thrusting too deeply into that pocket. Oh, I was good, I really was.
Would Linton call this "emotion remembered in tranquility?" I never knew whether he actually loved me but he made an honest woman out of me—a titled one at that— before he had the tact to die. But I was useful to him, and I was still beautiful when he died, not an aging woman with arthritic knees, although thank God my fingers are still supple and I can wear all my rings . . . strange unusual rings, museum pieces now, probably, coming from such faraway places.
If the stranger returns will I see him? What would I say to him, what would I admit? It suddenly brought too much back to me, the nose-quivering smell of the dried cheese they called tikamarin, and the gruel—assink—they fed me; the beat of drums can still do this—bring it all back, and too much at once.
What I didn't know in those contented carnival days was how determined Mum was to make a lady out of me, and why she squeezed every penny until it screamed. It was not enough for her to see me stand up straight and say please and thank you; she had A Plan. Over the years, moving from place to place, she'd taught me to read and write and do sums; presently, between shows, she began to dress up in her best clothes, ask her way to a public library and smuggle out books that she never returned, and suddenly I must learn history, spelling and geography. When I was fourteen her Plan was divulged: I was to go to Boston the next year to a school for young ladies, an expensive one called Miss Thirstlethwaite's Finishing School for Young Ladies. Worse, I had already been accepted.
"But why, Grams, why?" I cried.
"It's her dream," Grams said, brushing my hair. "People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food."
"But what about my dreams?"
She smiled faintly. "And what might your dream be?"
"I can be a magician," I reminded her.
"You're already a magician, and you'll always be a magician."
"Then make her stop, Grams," I pleaded. "Even the name Thistlethwaite sticks in my teeth. I don't want to leave you or the carny, this is home."
But Grams only shook her head. "It's not just her dream, it's more than that."
"What, then?" I asked stormily.
"It's fate working through her," she said. "It's the beginning."
