Camille DeAngelis - Petty Magic: Being the Memoirs and Confessions of Miss Evelyn Harbinger, Temptress and Troublemaker

A LSO BY C AMILLE D E A NGELIS

Mary Modern

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Camille Marjorie DeAngelis

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeAngelis, Camille.
Petty magic: being the memoirs and confessions of Miss Evelyn Harbinger, temptress and troublemaker / Camille DeAngelis.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Older womenFiction. 2. World War, 19391945VeteransFiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)Fiction. 4. MagicFiction. I. Title.
PS3604.E159P47 2010
813.6dc22 2009034348

eISBN: 978-0-307-45425-6

v3.1

For Kate

W ITCH , n. 1. Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. 2. A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary

T HERE ARE many misconceptions of which I must disabuse you, but the most offensive concerns the wands and warts and black pointed caps. Some of us may be wizened and rather hairy in unfortunate places, but were certainly no uglier than the rest of you lumps.

I look grandmotherly enough myself though, for its a rare morning I dont nab a seat on the uptown 103and when I am compelled to stand, the respectable citizens around me will grouse on my behalf at the bad manners of those buffoons claiming knee injuries or feigning deafness. As I disembark I wish the respectable ones a pleasant day, and I can see I remind them of their dear great-aunties. Dont I look like the sort who bakes oatmeal cookies by the gross, slips a fiver into your birthday card? Nobody ever has an inkling, do they?

Some nights I ride the bus a third time, but you wouldnt recognize me then. Ill tell you how I do it. First I run a crooked forefinger over these travertine teeth, so when I look into the mirror over the mantel I can flash my old Pepsodent smile. Then I kick off my orthopedic shoes, say the right words to shrug off this sagging elephant hide, and in a moment Im lithe as a teenager again. Thus liberated (and three inches taller besides), I take a long hot bath with bubbles and candles, draw concentric hearts in the steam on the mirrors, and spend an hour or more lounging about my bedroom with party clothes strewn across the unmade bed and the contents of my makeup case all over the vanity table. When Im finally dressed, perfumed, and done up, I survey myself once more in the mantel mirror. Cant help grinning like a feline at what I see. The beldame has sharpened her knives!

So I go out and avail myself of some delicious little boy Ive found at a bar Ive never been to before and will never visit again. Some nights its cinnamon vodka in china teacups and other times Ill settle for a two-dollar draftnot that I ever pay for my own drinks, mind! I dont just go for the pretty ones, either; hes got to sustain my attention for the hours it takes for three or four rounds and a scintillating tte--tte, a cab ride home (his place, always his), and a lively tussle in the sack.

You ought to know I never go for the ones whore already taken, no matter where their eyes might wander. Wouldnt be right. But I watch how men and women alike guard their lovers: he spots another man eyeing his girlfriends cleavage, drapes his arm over her shoulders, and looks daggers at the interloper; she sees a single girl like me merely glancing at her man, shoots me a glare, and kisses him midsentence. How primitive it is, the way they lay claim to one another.

Not me, though. Im only asking for the night. Not even, because I leave as soon as he falls asleep. At daybreak I find the city is at its bleakest: through the window of a speeding cab I see the flickering neon of a twenty-four-hour diner peopled with insomniacs, raccoon-eyed girls teetering home on broken heels, men too sauced to bother ducking into alleyways to relieve themselves. Even at this ungodly hour the taxi driver is on his mobile. I lean my still-smooth forehead against the frosted window, the ghosts of his hands roving under my evening garb.

My taste varies by the night. Sometimes I set my eye on a playboy and revel in my triumph when he loses sight of every other girl in the club. (Arent I doing them all a favor? And doesnt he deserve the shame and indignation hell feel when he rings the number Ive left him and the woman who answers says, Good afternoon, Greenacres Funeral Home?) On other occasions I mark the loneliest boy in the room and take a purer kind of pleasure in alleviating his melancholy.

There are other things you ought to know. We dont even use our broomsticks for their ostensible purpose, let alone as a means of nocturnal transport. We do not shoot craps with human teeth. We do not thieve the peckers of men whove spurned us and squirrel them away in glass jars. Think of us as sibyls or seraphs: fearsome, oh yes, but more or less benevolent. I may use magic to retrieve my youth, but when these boys climb into bed with me, they do so unenchanted.

M Y FATHER lasted longer than average, and so I have two sisters. We are evenly spaced at eleven months: Helena is the eldest; then Morven, who lives with me on the Lower East Side; and then me. Helena is 151 but she still runs a B and B in the house we inherited from our great-auntie Emmeline, the house we grew up in. H ARBINGER H OUSE , says the sign beneath the porch light; rather ominous, Ill admit, but the most traumatic thing that ever transpired there involved a holiday turkey that broke out of the oven. Featherless and terrified out of its last wit, our would-be dinner rampaged through the downstairs rooms and sent all the family shrieking for cover before Helena could put an end to it. Good thing our china never breaks.

Blackabbey, the towns called now: a spurious name for a place off the Jersey turnpike. There was a community of Franciscans there at some stage, but who knows why they named it Blackabbeyafter all, no plague ever decimated their number. But Blackabbey is a far better name than Harveysville, which is what the town was called up until the First World War. Harveysville sounds like a hamletful of inbreds.

Harvey was the name of the innkeeper who supposedly put up George Washington two nights before that great man crossed the Delaware. The inn is still there, stodge central, every wall covered with plaques boasting of its one famous guest who only stopped in for a pint of ale, if he stopped at all. Even in the eighteenth century, on the surface at least, it was a dull little town full of ordinary people.