Page, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “We’d just like you to think about it, that’s all, because we know you have it, too.”

  “Have what exactly?”

  “The feeling.” Lucy straightened her spine in the chair. “When I was in the circle, I saw a wand lit by fire in a night sky, and I knew it was Lindy’s wand, too, a sign of the feeling cure.”

  “The feeling cure?”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” she said. “The magic, the old language. It’s running through me right now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A woman breathes in and out. Are you listening? She parts the ear tips of the stethoscope and fits them into the other woman’s ears. Can you hear the heartbeat? Yes. Yes, I hear it. An old woman asks, “How old am I?” And her daughter answers, “Ninety-four.”

  The narrator takes her position in the night sky and looks down at the city, at all the cities. Something is happening. Something is about to happen. What time is it? It is the time of your reading, Madam, and it is the time of the story, which, of course, are not the same times.

  Something is happening in the nighttime of the book. It is happening now. Oh, she said to her sister, remember the stars at home? In New York, the same stars disappear in the burning haze of urban light, hidden by the hubris of the city.

  Far below are two tiny figures, two women who cannot see the stars. They are crossing 109th Street on Riverside Drive and walking south. They cross the street in our past but in their present and, as they walk, I adopt the present tense because you and I are with them now. It is May 17, 1979, Norway’s national holiday, which, unlike so many national holidays, the tall young woman who goes by the name Minnesota tells her much shorter companion, Lucy, is not a celebration of revolutionary frenzy and stormed fortresses and running blood and hundreds of martyred corpses piled up in the streets, but the day the Norwegians adopted a constitution in 1814. Ninety-one years later, they peaceably voted themselves into independence from the Swedes. Lucy knows nothing or very little of either Norwegians or Swedes, and she nods as the two of them continue to walk toward the apartment that belongs to Patricia Thistlethwaite and her beloved friend, Moth, born Deidre Wood somewhere out West, but Lucy can’t remember exactly where, what state, that is, except that little Deidre had polio and spent time in an iron lung many years before she “named the shadow” and became Moth.

  As she walks with Lucy, Minnesota remembers lining up in the school gym to receive the sugar lump steeped in a pink liquid that melted in her mouth so she would never get polio or need to wear braces on her legs, the kind Laura Larsen had, who worked at the Public Library built by Andrew Carnegie to display his great benevolence for the immigrant swarms who had pushed out the Lakota and had raised their farms and had sometimes starved or gone crazy out there on the land. Yes, it was only time before the children of those immigrants traipsed in and out of libraries in little towns all across the country.

  The stars are foggy and the city pops and drones and whistles and heaves with a cacophony of sounds, and just as the two women pause at a curb, they hear footsteps close behind them, heavy, quick, and determined. The sound is memory, and Minnesota startles. Her hands fly out and her chin bobs as if she has been knocked on the head. She stops breathing, and the man who has been at their heels walks swiftly past them. It was nothing, nothing at all, and Minnesota feels acutely embarrassed. The kind, good Lucy, the Lucy of the broom and the violet dress, not the other less kind, less good Lucy whose temper flares for inexplicable reasons, places her hand on Minnesota’s forearm, wraps her fingers around it, and squeezes the flesh for a moment. Lucy parts her lips to speak, hesitates, and closes her mouth.

  Minnesota is skittish, easily rattled by noise or shadow or even a passing odor if the smell she inhales doesn’t seem to belong to its whereabouts. The explosive dream has stopped coming, but her restive state will continue for months, and she will shy from the sexual attentions of men for a year. Instead she will hit the foam on her cheap mattress in the room with its orange-crate bed and desk and bookshelf and bang safely with various phantoms, more often women than men during the months after the night of May 7 that became May 8. Yes, something is happening to our protagonist. Minnesota doesn’t want to be pushed anymore. She does not want to be prodded or kicked or thrown, and yet she cannot say these simple words silently to herself or aloud because her case is not grave enough to warrant that kind of verbal attention. Just think of all the suffering in the world. Who does she think she is? Not a single broken bone.

  Minnesota is looking for a story, but it is not among the stories she has been writing. Sometimes her characters meander into the rooms and streets and byways where the larger story is taking place, but her view is too pinched to see the city as a whole. A narrator whispers in her ear. The young woman needs a key. Remember that. She will get a knife, but what she needs is a key.

  * * *

  I am probably the only guest who attended the dinner party on that spring evening who is still alive. I was young. The others were not. On May 18, I inscribed them into my notebook as if they were characters in Minnesota in Manhattan or The Mystery of Lucy Brite. My eagerness to translate my life into Novelese can in part be explained by the fact that the novel I had hoped to finish was stalled for lack of a driving plot, and desperation had begun to haunt my hours at the typewriter. My original ambition—to pit the artificiality of Holmesian reasoning against the unpredictability and irrationality of actual human behavior—had imploded, not because it was a bad idea but because Ian and Isadora seemed to have their own ideas about where they were going and were not at all happy embodying my abstractions. The Rebellious Debutante, on the other hand, seemed to write itself. I had firm control over the heroine of that novelized memoir. She came to life via literary conventions that had long been established. She was written to please; her spunk subject to final approval by the boss.

  May 18, 1979

  As we walked to dinner last night, I knew Lucy wanted to tell me something but was holding back. I could feel her inhibition as a pressure in my own chest. When we reached Patty and Moth’s building on Riverside Drive, she halted abruptly on the sidewalk, looked up at me, and said loudly, “I wanted to tell you this yesterday, but I wasn’t sure how to read the sign. Now I do.” Lucy looked behind her as if someone might be listening. She spoke fast in a low voice. “You know the night you stayed with me? Well, that morning when I came into the room, you were on the sofa sleeping, but you weren’t alone.” Lucy’s eyes looked wet in the light from the lamp over the door. “Lindy was sitting in the chair next to you watching you sleep. My Lindy was there, just as she used to be, unhurt, nothing wrong with her, perfect.” Lucy breathed in deeply; then came a shuddering exhalation. “She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. She looked at me and smiled!” Lucy’s lips quivered. “I can’t tell you what it means to me. Everything has changed.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You brought her back. Well, my helping you brought her back. Don’t you see? It’s all tied together. I saw the circles and faces and vines in your notebook. It took me a while to find the answer, but last night I had another sign.” She smiled. “Then I knew it was okay to tell you about Lindy. It’s all about that night when you were attacked. I made noise. I yelled. I hit the wall with the broom. I ran over to you. She’s forgiven me because of you. Now there’s hope. I’m not being punished anymore.”

  “Circles and faces and vines, Lucy? They’re just my doodles. Nothing more.”

  “That’s what you think. It doesn’t mean the old magic isn’t working. It doesn’t mean it’s not a sign. You just don’t know how to read it.”

  “But Lucy.” I dragged out the S-sound like a hiss. “I made those drawings. You’re telling me I don’t know what I drew?”

  Lucy smiled at me as if she were indulging a four-year-old. “You think that what you think you’re doing is what you’re really doing? That’s naïve, you know.”

  I gaped at her, my frustration growing. “Let me get this straight. You believe that you saw something in my drawing of circles and faces and vines that’s connected to Lindy? You’re telling me you saw her ghost?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. Ghost sounds a tad primitive to me. I saw her astral body.”

  Then Lucy glanced at her watch and said cheerfully, “Dear me, we’d better go in.” She fluttered her fingers a couple inches from her ears, apparently a signal to hurry. In the elevator I told Lucy that we had to talk more about “all this.” Oh yes, we would do that, she said, but right now we were going to a dinner party, and I watched her smooth her hair and then pinch her cheeks with her fingertips.

  By the time Moth opened the door, my thoughts were whirling with circles and faces and vines and ghosts. Lindy watching me as I slept. “You brought her back.” I did not. Moth was greeting us with shouts of “Alice! Alice! Down! Down!” a reference to the frenzied yellow mutt with a good deal of terrier in her who leapt, ran in circles, and barked at us until I reached down and let her sniff my hand, after which she wagged and licked my fingers. Moth’s gray frizzled hair had been pulled up loosely toward the top of her head and she had a multicolored shawl with little mirrors and beads sewn into it wrapped around her shoulders, a garment Lucy immediately declared “festive.”

  As I stood in the hallway staring at an odd geometric print on the wall with a pentagram at its center and Latin inscriptions, I wondered if the image was another goddamned sign and what the hell I was doing there. My gratitude to the Ladies of the Broom had waned. “She’s forgiven me because of you.” No, she hasn’t.

  Moth was warbling about how happy she was to have us and wouldn’t we come into the living room and just ignore the piles of books because there was nothing to be done about them. Patty would not be reasoned with when it came to books, and soon they would be pushed out of the apartment altogether because there would no longer be room for the two of them to sit or eat or sleep. It’s hard to say whether I was glowering or not, but I imagined I was. People die. They don’t evaporate into astral bodies. They decay and putrefy. Ashes to ashes. I had to calm my breathing. Large apartment. Were they rich?

  I looked at Moth as she tottered on her stiff legs at great speed with Alice trotting behind her through the maze of volumes along both walls and stacked up in small towers in the hallway. The dog’s nails clattered noisily on the parquet floorboards, hammering into my temples. Those nails needed clipping. I tried to focus on the present. Lucy pressed her lips together and smoothed her hair again. I found her gestures so annoying, I clenched my jaw.

  Moth ushered us into a room darker than the hallway, and it took me a minute to adjust to low lamplight, candles, cigarette fog, and a faint herbal odor that permeated the room. Books were everywhere, stacked on the floor, on tables, and on a row of straight-backed chairs. All four walls bulged with books, pushed vertically into the tall shelves, but also squeezed in horizontally when there was space above them. A wooden ladder leaned against one of the shelves attached to a rail, and despite my irritable mood, I silently wished for a library ladder in my future life. Moth’s excited talk escalated without any interference from us, and I heard her voice rise in a screech of new ardor. She waved toward the far end of the room, “Patty, I have the two of them here. Isn’t it lovely?” And then she asked Lucy and me about wine—red or white or rosé; they had all three—and rosé made Moth think of the summer in Provence she and Patty had together, and she could almost smell the lavender, holy shit, it was such a great smell, and Lucy and I declared our preference for rosé, having been swayed by the imaginary lavender, and she rushed off to fulfill the request with Alice rattling and wagging happily at her heels.

  When I turned, I saw Patty seated in a chair near the end of the large room, her big smooth face illuminated by a standing lamp, the rest of her bulky form in shadow. The angle of the lamp ignited the planes of her white cheeks and forehead, and I vaguely recalled characters in novels whose skin had been described in terms of marble or alabaster. As Lucy and I walked toward her, the perfume I had detected moments before grew stronger—sweet and green, but with low medicinal strains that reminded me of Aunt Irma’s drawers, some lavender perhaps, but mingled with other potent ingredients, a whiff of camphor? The scent struck my nose in waves, and each wave was accompanied by a tug at my nostrils. I felt strangely warm and, seconds later, slightly dizzy. Didn’t the others smell it? I had a brief memory of leaves floating in my tea and then a confused thought that ghosts and odors are somehow alike. Lucy was standing beside me. I glanced at her. She had a pleased look on her face that increased my annoyance. And then I became suddenly conscious of my swallowing—once, twice, three times. Don’t count, I told myself.

  Patty, emanating the strange perfume, looked up at me, and I noted her milk-white skin and her calm gaze as she fixed her eyes on mine.

  “I’d like to show you something.” Patty’s expression was friendly, but I made a point of sealing my own face of all emotion. After Lucy’s bizarre confession I felt defensive. “Interpretation,” Patty was saying, “is a curious thing, don’t you think? Everything depends on how we read the world, and yet we’re always misreading it. I think those misreadings often depend on what we’ve left out, what we’ve forgotten. We’re not operating with a full deck, as it were, but with a few cards we shuffle and distribute to all the players as if it were the whole deck. The players have to make sense of the game, and they do, but they don’t realize that cards are missing. They don’t understand that if they had all the cards, they would be playing a whole different game.” Patty nodded sagely.

  The metaphor made a kind of sense, but I didn’t know what she was driving at.

  Patty smiled up at me from her chair. “Let’s say that someone has hidden all the queens, or worse, someone has burned the queens, but it happened so long ago that no one knows the queens ever existed in the deck.”

  “I’m not sure that playing without queens would make that much difference,” I said. “The rules are arbitrary, and they change. There are many games that can be played with fewer cards.”

  Patty nodded. “But let’s say for argument’s sake that the deck is standing in for everything, for the whole. Then the suppression of the queens does make a difference.” She gestured toward a small table with a burning candle. “The green volume there on top of the pile. I’ve marked a page for you. But what I really want you to see is the little drawing inside.”

  As I turned my head in the direction of the book, I felt dizzy again, and I thought I should probably sit down.

  “But first,” Patty said in her deep tones, “let me introduce my colleague, Alistair Frame.” She pointed to her left. There in the relative gloom I saw a bald man, his narrow feet stretched out on an ottoman. He was smoking with one hand and clutching a glass of red wine in the other. An ascot bulged at his neck. Why hadn’t I seen him?

  “Look in the book!” Lucy’s excitement had a tremulous quality.

  I picked up the green volume and read the title aloud, “The Key of Solomon.”

  “Clavicula Salomonis,” Patty intoned beside me. “A grimoire.”

  “What’s a grimoire?” I said. My voice was strong and clear. The sound of it comforted me.

  “Magic,” Lucy said.

  As I stared at the book’s cover, I listened to Patty explain that it was an English translation from 1889, but its sources were much older. I think she said the sixteenth century. “The author claims that the wisdom is straight from Solomon, but that’s nonsense. What did Solomon know of Christianity? It’s a Christian grimoire, an instruction book for how to cast spells. There are many from that period.” I was still thinking about the hidden or burned queens, but I opened the book, held it near the candlelight, flipped over a few pages, and began to read. The book’s author, whoever he was, was insisting on calm weather. He recommended weather without wind, weather “without clouds running hither and thither over the face of the sky.” Without stillness, the spell would fail. I turned to the marked page: “The Construction of the Circle.” Take a knife or a quill pen and cut circles within circles—“the second circumferential line.”

  A knife. A circle. Circumference. I thought to myself, Gus wins: a circle-and-knife cult. “She thinks you might be one of us.” No, ladies, I am simply an admirer of Emily Dickinson: “And back I slid—and I alone—A Speck upon a Ball—Went out upon Circumference—”

  Lucy put her arm around my waist. “You have to look at the picture in the book! Hold it under the light!” I stared down at a page of mostly unintelligible drawings:

  Patty’s resonant voice rumbled beside me with further explication, but my vertigo was worse. I carried the book with me to the velvet sofa across from Patty and sat down. Lucy followed me with the candle, holding it over the image. Patty was still talking. She had found the volume in a used bookstore about ten years ago during what she called “the political upheavals.” She had bought the book, taken it home, and discovered the small drawing tucked inside it. “That drawing,” she said, “helped me to see what was missing. I have no idea who the artist was. It may have been just an attentive reader who drew what she had discovered. I assume it was a woman. I like to think of the drawing as the key behind the Key. Solomon’s key is nonsense. It’s the partial deck. The real key is not in the book at all. It’s in that picture. It’s there in the glassine envelope.”

  Lucy handed me the candle and carefully removed the drawing from its envelope and held it out for me.