8

Universe

'I've only been here three days,' Del was saying, now positively sounding nervous, 'but I didn't want to just live out of suitcases, the way they're doing. I wanted to get my stuff set up.' There came a sound of scuffing feet. 'Well, what do you think?'

'Wow,' Tom said, not quite sure what he thought, except that wonder played a large part in it. In the dim light, he could not even see all of Del's things. On the wall behind the bed hung a huge star chart. The opposite wall was a frieze of faces - framed photographs. He recognized John Scarne from the photo on a book he owned, and Houdini, but the others were strangers to him. They were men with serious, considering, summing-up kinds of faces in which their theatricality appeared as an afterthought. Magicians. A skull grinned from a shelf at waist level beneath the photographs, and Del hopped around him to light a little candle within it. Then Tom saw all the books held upright by the skull. The middle of the room and the desk were crowded with the paraphernalia of magic tricks. He saw a glass ball on a length of velvet, a miniature guillotine, a top hat, various cabinets filigreed and lacquered with Chinese designs, a black silver-topped cane. Before the long windows, entirely covering them, a big green tank sent up streams of bubbles through a skittering population of fish. 'I don't believe it,' Tom breathed. 'I don't know where to start. Is all this stuff really yours?'

'Well, I didn't get it all at once,' Del said. 'Some of this stuff has been around for years - since I was about ten. That's when I got involved. Now I'm really involved. I think it's what I want to be.'

'A magician?' Tom asked, surprised.

'Yeah. Do you too?'

'I never thought about that. But I'll tell you one thing I just thought right now.'

Del lifted his head like a frightened d—.

'I think school is going to be a lot more interesting this year.'

Del beamed at him.

Bud Copeland brought them Cokes in tall frosted glasses with a lemon slice bumping the ice cubes, and for an hour the two boys prowled through Del's collection. In his eager, piping voice, the smaller boy explained to Tom the inner workings of tricks which had puzzled him for as long as he had been interested in magic. 'All these illusions are the flashy stuff, and no one will ever see how they work, but I really prefer close-up magic,' Del said. 'If you can do close-up card work, you can do anything. That's what my Uncle Cole says.' Del held up a finger, still in the dramatic persona he had put on with his top hat at the beginning of the tour. 'No. Not quite. He said you could do almost everything. He can do things you wouldn't believe, and he won't explain them to me. He says certain things are art, not just illusion, and because they're art they're real magic. And you can't explain them.' Del brought his finger down, having caught himself in a public mood at a private moment. 'Well, that's what he says, anyway. It's like he's full of secrets and information no one else knows about. He's kind of funny, and sometimes he can scare the crap out of you, but he's the best there is. Or I think so, anyway.' His face was that of a dark little dervish.

'Is he a magician?'

'The best. But he d-sn't work like the others - in clubs and theaters and that.'

'Then where d-s he work?'

'At home. He d-s private shows. Well, they're not really shows. They're mainly for himself. It's hard to explain. Maybe someday you could meet him. Then you'd see.' Del sat on his bed, looking to Tom as if he were almost sorry he had said so much. Pride in his uncle seemed to be battling with other forces.

Then Tom had it. The insight which had given him knowledge of the other boy's loneliness now sent him a fact so positive that it demanded to be spoken. 'He d-sn't want you to talk about him. About what he d-s.'

Del nodded slowly. 'Yeah. Because of Tim and Valerie.'

'Your godparents?'

'Yeah. They don't understand him. They couldn't. And to tell you the truth, he really is sort of half-crazy.' Del leaned back on stiffened arms and said, 'Let's see what you can do. Do you have any cards, or should we use mine?'

Years later, Tom Flanagan described to me how Del had then quietly, modestly, almost graciously humiliated him. 'I thought I was pretty good with cards when I was fourteen. After my father got sick, I sort of more or less threw myself into the work. I wanted to get my mind off what was happening. I had my card books damn near memorized after a month.' We were in the Red Hat Lounge, where Sherman had told me Tom was working - it was not the 'toilet' Sherman had called it, but it was only a step above that. 'I knew that Del was very accomplished after he had shown me all of the stuff in his room. He had the basis of a professional kit, and he knew it. But I thought I could hold my own in card tricks - the close-up work he especially liked. I found out I couldn't get a thing by him. He knew what I was going to do before I did it, and he could do it better. He didn't like any of the obvious stuff, either - misdirection and forcing. Del had a fantastic memory and great observation, and those faculties have more to do with great card work than you'd believe. He wiped me off the board… he blew me away. He must have been the slickest thing.I'd ever seen.' Tom laughed. 'Of course he was the slickest thing I'd ever seen. I hadn't seen much before I met Del.'

Del revolved the head of the dim light so that it faced the wall, and darkened the room. Now, with the big tank blocking most of the light from outside, his bedroom was the same tenebrous cloudy gray that the library had been that noon.

'I ought to call my mother,' Tom said. 'She'll be wondering what happened to me.'

'Do you have to leave right away?' Del asked.

'I could tell her to come over in an hour or so.'

'If you'd like. I mean, I'd like that.'

'Me too,'

'Great. There's a phone in the next bedroom. You could use that.'

Tom let himself out into the hall and went into the next bedroom. It was obviously the bedroom used by Del's godparents; expensive leather suitcases, laden with loose and tumbled clothes lay open on the unmade bed, labeled boxes were stacked on a chair. The phone was on one of the bedside tables. Ths telephone book sat beside it, its green cover bearing the graffiti of real-estate agents' names and telephone numbers.

Tom dialed his own number, spoke to his mother, and hung up just as he heard a car coming into the driveway. He walked over to the window and saw a boatlike gray Jaguar stopping before the garage doors.

Two people in bad humor got out of the car. Either they had just been quarreling or their bad temper was a moment's paring from a lifelong and steady quarrel. The man was large, blond, and florid; he wore a vibrant madras jacket the gaiety of which was out of key with the petulance and irritation suffused through his neat, puggish features. The woman, also blond, wore a filmy blue dress; as her husband's features had blurred, hers had hardened. Her face, as irritated as his, could never be petulant.

In the hall, their voices rose. Bud Copeland's last name was uttered in a flat Boston accent. In anyone else's house, Morris Fielding's or Howie Stern's, this would be the time for Tom to go to the staircase, announce himself, and speak a couple of sentences about who he was and what he was doing. But Del would never take him down to meet those two irritated people; and the two irritated people would be surprised if he did. Instead Tom went to the door of Del's room - Del's 'universe' - and slipped around it, and doing so, helped to shape the character of his own universe.

When his mother arrived, Tom followed Bud Copeland down the stairs to the front door. Tim and Valerie Hillman were standing with drinks in their hands in the box-filled living room, but they did not even turn their heads to watch him leave. Bud Copeland opened the door and leaned out after him. 'Be a good friend to our Del, now,' he said softly. Tom nodded, then by reflex held out his hand. Bud Copeland shook it warmly, smiling down. An odd look of recognition, disturbing to Tom, momentarily passed over the butler's face. 'I see the Arizona Flanagans are gentlemen,' he said, gripping the boy's hand. 'Take care, Red.'

In the car, his mother said, 'I didn't know that the house had been sold to a Negro family.'

Take care, Red.