The essential peter s be.., p.16
The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volume 1, page 16
Not until she opened her eyes in a different darkness to the crowing of a rooster and a familiar heavy aroma did she realize that she was walking down the hallway leading from the Santeria shop to . . . wherever she had really been—and where Marvyn still must be, for he plainly had not followed her. She promptly turned and started back toward last Thursday, but halted at the deep, slightly grating chuckle behind her. She did not turn again, but stood very still.
El Viejo walked a slow full circle around her before he faced her, grinning down at her like the man in the moon. The dark glasses were off, and the twin scars on his cheeks were blazing up as though they had been slashed into him a moment before. He said, “I know. Before even I see you, I know.”
Angie hit him in the stomach as hard as she could. It was like punching a frozen slab of beef, and she gasped in pain, instantly certain that she had broken her hand. But she hit him again, and again, screaming at the top of her voice, “Bring my brother back! If you don’t bring him right back here, right now, I’ll kill you! I will!”
El Viejo caught her hands, surprisingly gently, still laughing to himself. “Little girl, listen, listen now. Niñita, nobody else—nobody—ever do what you do. You understand? Nobody but me ever walk that road back from where I leave you, understand?” The big white half-circles under his eyes were stretching and curling like live things.
Angie pulled away from him with all her strength, as she had hit him. She said, “No. That’s Marvyn. Marvyn’s the witch, the brujo—don’t go telling people it’s me. Marvyn’s the one with the power.”
“Him?” Angie had never heard such monumental scorn packed into one syllable. El Viejo said, “Your brother nothing, nobody, we no bother with him. Forget him—you the one got the regalo, you just don’t know.” The big white teeth filled her vision; she saw nothing else. “I show you—me, El Viejo. I show you what you are.”
It was beyond praise, beyond flattery. For all her dread and dislike of El Viejo, to have someone of his wicked wisdom tell her that she was like him in some awful, splendid way made Angie shiver in her heart. She wanted to turn away more than she had ever wanted anything—even Jake Petrakis—but the long walk home to Sunday was easier than breaking the clench of the white-haired man’s malevolent presence would have been. Having often felt (and almost as often dismissed the notion) that Marvyn was special in the family by virtue of being the baby, and a boy—and now a potent witch—she let herself revel in the thought that the real gift was hers, not his, and that if she chose she had only to stretch out her hand to have her command settle home in it. It was at once the most frightening and the most purely, completely gratifying feeling she had ever known.
But it was not tempting. Angie knew the difference.
“Forget it,” she said. “Forget it, buster. You’ve got nothing to show me.”
El Viejo did not answer her. The old, old eyes that were all pupil continued slipping over her like hands, and Angie went on glaring back with the blue eyes she despaired of because they could never be as deep-set and deep green as her mother’s eyes. They stood so—for how long, she never knew—until El Viejo turned and opened his mouth as though to speak to the silent old lady whose own stone eyes seemed not to have blinked since Angie had first entered the Santeria shop, a childhood ago. Whatever he meant to say, he never got the words out, because Marvyn came back then.
He came down the dark hall from a long way off, as El Viejo had done the first time she saw him—as she herself had trudged forever, only moments ago. But Marvyn had come a further journey: Angie could see that beyond doubt in the way he stumbled along, looking like a shadow casting a person. He was struggling to carry something in his arms, but she could not make out what it was. As long as she watched him approaching, he seemed hardly to draw any nearer.
Whatever he held looked too heavy for a small boy: it threatened constantly to slip from his hands, and he kept shifting it from one shoulder to the other, and back again. Before Angie could see it clearly, El Viejo screamed, and she knew on the instant that she would never hear a more terrible sound in her life. He might have been being skinned alive, or having his soul torn out of his body—she never even tried to tell herself what it was like, because there were no words. Nor did she tell anyone that she fell down at the sound, fell flat down on her hands and knees, and rocked and whimpered until the scream stopped. It went on for a long time.
When it finally stopped, El Viejo was gone, and Marvyn was standing beside her with a baby in his arms. The baby was Black and immediately endearing, with big, bright, strikingly watchful eyes. Angie looked into them once, and looked quickly away.
Marvyn looked worn and exhausted. His eyepatch was gone, and the left eye that Angie had not seen for months was as bloodshot as though he had just come off a three-day drunk—though she noticed that it was not wandering at all. He said in a small, dazed voice, “I had to go back a really long way, Angie. Really long.”
Angie wanted to hold him, but she was afraid of the baby. Marvyn looked toward the old woman in the corner and sighed; then hitched up his burden one more time and clumped over to her. He said, “Ma’am, I think this is yours?” Adults always commented on Marvyn’s excellent manners.
The old woman moved then, for the first time. She moved like a wave, Angie thought: a wave seen from a cliff or an airplane, crawling along so slowly that it seemed impossible for it ever to break, ever to reach the shore. But the sea was in that motion, all of it caught up in that one wave; and when she set down her pipe, took the baby from Marvyn and smiled, that was the wave too. She looked down at the baby, and said one word, which Angie did not catch. Then Angie had her brother by the arm, and they were out of the shop. Marvyn never looked back, but Angie did, in time to see the old woman baring blue gums in soundless laughter.
All the way home in a taxi, Angie prayed silently that her parents hadn’t returned yet. Lidia was waiting, and together they whisked Marvyn into bed without any serious protest. Lidia washed his face with a rough cloth, and then slapped him and shouted at him in Spanish—Angie learned a few words she couldn’t wait to use—and then she kissed him and left, and Angie brought him a pitcher of orange juice and a whole plate of gingersnaps, and sat on the bed and said, “What happened?”
Marvyn was already working on the cookies as though he hadn’t eaten in days—which, in a sense, was quite true. He asked, with his mouth full, “What’s malcriado mean?”
“What? Oh. Like badly raised, badly brought up—troublemaking kid. About the only thing Lidia didn’t call you. Why?”
“Well, that’s what that lady called . . . him. The baby.”
“Right,” Angie said. “Leave me a couple of those, and tell me how he got to be a baby. You did like with Milady?”
“Uh-huh. Only I had to go way, way, way back, like I told you.” Marvyn’s voice took on the faraway sound it had had in the Santeria shop. “Angie, he’s so old.”
Angie said nothing. Marvyn said in a whisper, “I couldn’t follow you, Angie. I was scared.”
“Forget it,” she answered. She had meant to be soothing, but the words burst out of her. “If you just hadn’t had to show off, if you’d gotten that letter back some simple, ordinary way—” Her entire chest froze solid at the word. “The letter! We forgot all about my stupid letter!” She leaned forward and snatched the plate of cookies away from Marvyn. “Did you forget? You forgot, didn’t you?” She was shaking as had not happened even when El Viejo had hold of her. “Oh, God, after all that!”
But Marvyn was smiling for the first time in a very long while. “Calm down, be cool—I’ve got it here.” He dug her letter to Jake Petrakis—more than a little grimy by now—out of his back pocket and held it out to Angie. “There. Don’t say I never did nuttin’ for you.” It was a favorite phrase of his, gleaned from a television show, and most often employed when he had fed Milady, washed his breakfast dish, or folded his clothes. “Take it, open it up,” he said now. “Make sure it’s the right one.”
“I don’t need to,” Angie protested irritably. “It’s my letter—believe me, I know it when I see it.” But she opened the envelope anyway and withdrew a single folded sheet of paper, which she glanced at . . . then stared at, in absolute disbelief.
She handed the sheet to Marvyn. It was empty on both sides.
“Well, you did your job all right,” she said, mildly enough, to her stunned, slack-jawed brother. “No question about that. I’m just trying to figure out why we had to go through this whole incredible hoo-ha for a blank sheet of paper.”
Marvyn actually shrank away from her in the bed.
“I didn’t do it, Angie! I swear!” Marvyn scrambled to his feet, standing up on the bed with his hands raised, as though to ward her off in case she attacked him. “I just grabbed it out of your backpack—I never even looked at it.”
“And what, I wrote the whole thing in grapefruit juice, so nobody could read it unless you held it over a lamp or something? Come on, it doesn’t matter now. Get your feet off your damn pillow and sit down.”
Marvyn obeyed warily, crouching rather than sitting next to her on the edge of the bed. They were silent together for a little while before he said, “You did that. With the letter. You wanted it not written so much, it just wasn’t. That’s what happened.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Me being the dynamite witch around here. I told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters.” She had grown so unused to seeing a two-eyed Marvyn that his expression seemed more than doubly earnest to her just then. He said, quite quietly, “You are the dynamite witch, Angie. He was after you, not me.”
This time she did not answer him. Marvyn said, “I was the bait. I do garbage bags and clarinets—okay, and I make ugly dolls walk around. What’s he care about that? But he knew you’d come after me, so he held me there—back there in Thursday—until he could grab you. Only he didn’t figure you could walk all the way home on your own, without any spells or anything. I know that’s how it happened, Angie! That’s how I know you’re the real witch.”
“No,” she said, raising her voice now. “No, I was just pissed-off, that’s different. Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off woman, O Mighty One. But you . . . you went all the way back, on your own, and you grabbed him. You’re going to be way stronger and better than he is, and he knows it. He just figured he’d get rid of the competition early on, while he had the chance. Not a generous guy, El Viejo.”
Marvyn’s chubby face turned gray. “But I’m not like him! I don’t want to be like him!” Both eyes suddenly filled with tears, and he clung to his sister as he had not done since his return. “It was horrible, Angie, it was so horrible. You were gone, and I was all alone, and I didn’t know what to do, only I had to do something. And I remembered Milady, and I figured if he wasn’t letting me come forward I’d go the other way, and I was so scared and mad I just walked and walked and walked in the dark, until I . . .” He was crying so hard that Angie could hardly make the words out. “I don’t want to be a witch anymore, Angie, I don’t want to! And I don’t want you being a witch either . . . .”
Angie held him and rocked him, as she had loved doing when he was three or four years old, and the cookies got scattered all over the bed. “It’s all right,” she told him, with one ear listening for their parents’ car pulling into the garage. “Shh, shh, it’s all right, it’s over, we’re safe, it’s okay, shh. It’s okay, we’re not going to be witches, neither one of us.” She laid him down and pulled the covers back over him. “You go to sleep now.”
Marvyn looked up at her, and then at the wizards’ wall beyond her shoulder. “I might take some of those down,” he mumbled. “Maybe put some soccer players up for a while. The Brazilian team’s really good.” He was just beginning to doze off in her arms, when suddenly he sat up again and said, “Angie? The baby?”
“What about the baby? I thought he made a beautiful baby, El Viejo. Mad as hell, but lovable.”
“It was bigger when we left,” Marvyn said. Angie stared at him. “I looked back at it in that lady’s lap, and it was already bigger than when I was carrying it. He’s starting over, Angie, like Milady.”
“Better him than me,” Angie said. “I hope he gets a kid brother this time, he’s got it coming.” She heard the car, and then the sound of a key in the lock. She said, “Go to sleep, don’t worry about it. After what we’ve been through, we can handle anything. The two of us. And without witchcraft. Whichever one of us it is—no witch stuff.”
Marvyn smiled drowsily. “Unless we really, really need it.” Angie held out her hand and they slapped palms in formal agreement. She looked down at her fingers and said, “Ick! Blow your nose!”
But Marvyn was asleep.
This was the first story since my novel A Fine and Private Place that I drew specifically from my New York Jewish childhood. (“My Daughter’s Name Is Sarah,” based on a story from my mother’s childhood, was published later than A Fine and Private Place, but written a few years earlier.) It is also powerfully influenced by three of my mother’s four brothers, Raphael, Moses, and Isaac Soyer, who all became well-known painters in the New York realist style. As a child I spent a lot of time in my uncles’ studios, whether visiting or actually posing for them, and Uncle Chaim’s Greenwich Village atelier is based on my memory of Uncle Moses’ workplace. Uncle Moses wasn’t at all like my fictional Uncle Chaim in his speech and his mannerisms; but in terms of their attitudes toward their work, I do believe the real uncle and the imagined one would have understood each other.
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and The Angel
My Uncle Chaim, who was a painter, was working in his studio—as he did on every day except Shabbos—when the blue angel showed up. I was there.
I was usually there most afternoons, dropping in on my way home from Fiorello LaGuardia Elementary School. I was what they call a “latchkey kid,” these days. My parents both worked and traveled full-time, and Uncle Chaim’s studio had been my home base and my real playground since I was small. I was shy and uncomfortable with other children. Uncle Chaim didn’t have any kids, and didn’t know much about them, so he talked to me like an adult when he talked at all, which suited me perfectly. I looked through his paintings and drawings, tried some of my own, and ate Chinese food with him in silent companionship, when he remembered that we should probably eat. Sometimes I fell asleep on the cot. And when his friends—who were mostly painters like himself—dropped in to visit, I withdrew into my favorite corner and listened to their talk, and understood what I understood. Until the blue angel came.
It was very sudden: one moment I was looking through a couple of the comic books Uncle Chaim kept around for me, while he was trying to catch the highlight on the tendons under his model’s chin, and the next moment there was this angel standing before him, actually posing, with her arms spread out and her great wings taking up almost half the studio. She was not blue herself—a light beige would be closer—but she wore a blue robe that managed to look at once graceful and grand, with a white undergarment glimmering beneath. Her face, half-shadowed by a loose hood, looked disapproving.
I dropped the comic book and stared. No, I gaped, there’s a difference. Uncle Chaim said to her, “I can’t see my model. If you wouldn’t mind moving just a bit?” He was grumpy when he was working, but never rude.
“I am your model,” the angel said. “From this day forth, you will paint no one but me.”
“I don’t work on commission,” Uncle Chaim answered. “I used to, but you have to put up with too many aggravating rich people. Now I just paint what I paint, take it to the gallery. Easier on my stomach, you know?”
His model, the wife of a fellow painter, said, “Chaim, who are you talking to?”
“Nobody, nobody, Ruthie. Just myself, same way your Jules does when he’s working. Old guys get like that.” To the angel, in a lower voice, he said, “Also, whatever you’re doing to the light, could you not? I got some great shadows going right now.” For a celestial brightness was swelling in the grubby little warehouse district studio, illuminating the warped floor boards, the wrinkled tubes of colors scattered everywhere, the canvases stacked and propped in the corners, along with several ancient rickety easels. It scared me, but not Uncle Chaim. He said, “So you’re an angel, fine, that’s terrific. Now give me back my shadows.”
The room darkened obediently. “Thank you. Now about moving . . .” He made a brushing-away gesture with the hand holding the little glass of Scotch.
The model said, “Chaim, you’re worrying me.”
“What, I’m seventy-six years old, I’m not entitled to a hallucination now and then? I’m seeing an angel, you’re not—this is no big deal. I just want it should move out of the way, let me work.” The angel, in response, spread her wings even wider, and Uncle Chaim snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake, shoo!”
“It is for God’s sake that I am here,” the angel announced majestically. “The Lord—Yahweh—I Am That I Am—has sent me down to be your muse.” She inclined her head a trifle, by way of accepting the worship and wonder she expected.
