You didn't know?" asked Harry.
"No, I—" She could not complete her remark. All she could do was repeat the word "No," her face a mask of disconcertment.
"Well, that's good news, isn't it?" he asked. "It means he's probably changed his mind."
"You really think so?" asked Cassandra. For a moment there, she sounded almost optimistic; about what I had no idea—but then you already know the sum total of my knowledge of events transpiring: zero.
Harry gestured as if to comment, Why not?
"Babe, he could have said 'no' on the phone," he told her.
When she failed to respond, he added, "Why ask me all the way up here just to turn me down?"
She remained unconvinced; that was easy to see, even for a head of lettuce.
"I'm sure that's what it is," persisted Harry. He assumed his "serious" mien. "What about Vegas, babe?" he asked. "Can he handle it? Even with you?"
"I don't know," she murmured. I could tell she was conversing with him and dealing with her thoughts at the same time, a skill she'd carefully developed.
"Was Baltimore as bad as I heard?" he asked.
She was back now, in control; it hadn't been a serious unhinging. She looked at Harry with an expression of deep distress; it almost seemed real—was it? "You can't imagine," she told him quietly.
Harry put his arms around her and she leaned her forehead on his shoulder. He stroked her back and told her he was sorry. "It must have been a nightmare," he said.
What is this? I wondered.
"God," Cassandra sobbed, and damned if it didn't sound perplexingly genuine. "To stand there on the stage with him, watching him drop things."
Oh, now wait a second, my mind protested.
"Watching him miss verbal clues … visual clues—obvious ones," she went on. "Watching him bungle hand manipulations he could do in his sleep a few years ago. Flounder through his performance. Flounder, Harry! Him! The Great Delacorte! The most gifted—"
She began to cry harder.
If I hadn't been already speechless, I would have been speechless.
Could this be true?
Max floundering? Bungling hand manipulations? Missing clues? My son, Maximilian, The Great Delacorte?
It had to be impossible. I didn't think I could endure the pain of it being true.
Harry obviously felt helpless before her grief. (I felt helpless myself; it seemed so real.) All he could do was pat her clumsily on the back and murmur, "Easy, babe, easy." "It broke my heart to watch him," Cassandra said, able to speak once more. She drew in a lengthy, trembling breath, then raised her head and shook it slowly. "Followed by three long months up here, watching him sink a little deeper into despair every day."
I felt myself swallow. Max had seemed very gloomy in the past few months. His attentions and words to me had been dispensed with enervated melancholy. I had equated it with his unhappy marriage.
But his career?
Now Cassandra clutched at Harry's arms so tightly that it made him wince.
"You're his best friend, Harry," she told him. (There she lost me.) "You're his only friend." (Lost me double!) "If you can't talk him into this …"
She sobbed, began to cry again. If it was an act, it was of Tony, Oscar, and Emmy caliber.
"Easy, babe," he said. "I think he's changed his mind, that's why he asked me here today. It's gonna work."
She looked at him uneasily. "Did he say anything in particular that makes you think that?" she asked.
"No, but why else would he ask me here?" he counter-questioned. "Like I said, if he wanted to say no, he could have done it on the telephone."
"I suppose." She still didn't sound convinced.
"Has he been to a doctor?" Harry asked.
A doctor, for God's sake? Now what were they talking about?
Cassandra's sigh had been a heavy one. "He won't go to a doctor," she said.
"You think he's afraid of what he might find out?" Harry asked her.
She shook her head. "I just don't know."
Harry grimaced. "He's not that old," he said. "What, fifty-one?"
"Fifty-two," she answered.
"That's not old."
"His father wasn't that old either," said Cassandra.
That sent a chill right through me, let me tell you. Had Max also suffered a stroke, albeit a mini? Enough to diminish his physical and mental capabilities?
The thought was shocking to me.
Cassandra had walked to the picture window and was gazing out. "It's going to rain," she murmured. She sighed again and looked toward the desk chair as though Max were sitting there. Another sigh. Moving to the chair, she pushed idly at its high back, making it revolve.
She then began to pace the room, her expression one of mounting anguish. (I hated the ambivalent emotions she was arousing in me.)
"I remember every detail of the night I first saw him," she said. "The Orpheum in London. God, he was magnificent! The most majestic-looking man I ever saw on stage!" Of course, she'd never seen me. "The way he moved. The grace—the flow—the total, overpowering magnetism of him! It was awesome! The audience was his slave. And so was I."
She was at the fireplace now, staring into its shadowy depths. She shook her head, a smile of bitter self-reproach on her lips. "But I'm living in the past," she said. "All I see now is a crumbling edifice. A parody of what he was." (This was more in keeping with the Cassandra I knew; or, the Cassandra I thought I knew.)
Harry moved to her and put his arms around her once again. She leaned against him wearily.
"He's going to let you do it, babe," he said.
"I don't know that, Harry," she responded.
"Babe, he isn't going to let the whole act die," he said. "He's not a stupid man." (That much Harry had correct at any rate.)
"I hope so," Cassandra murmured.
She straightened up, a look of grim determination on her face.
"I can do it, Harry," she declared. "I've worked for years! I'm not saying I'm as good as he is." How modest of her. "But I can do magic. I can do it."
"Shh. Babe. Easy." Harry was patting her back again. "Am I arguing with you? I want to see you make it too; you know that. I want to see you playing the best clubs and theaters in the country—hell, in the world! The first really important female magician!"
Using the act that I—then Max—developed over the past half-century, I thought, a bile of angry resentment adding my insides.
"It's gonna happen, babe," Harry told her confidently. Bastard, I thought.
"I can do it, Harry!" she said, her tone a fierce one now. Max really had a battle on his hands, I saw.
"Sure you can," said Harry. "That's why I'm here. To make it happen."
Cassandra visibly calmed herself. She looked at him almost pleadingly. "You're my last hope, Harry," she said. "If it doesn't happen today …"
What was going to happen that day was eons beyond what any of us could have imagined in our wildest flight of fancy.
"It'll happen," Harry said though, unaware. "Take my word for it."
She looked hopeful for a moment. "It would be so simple to update the act," she said.
Ah-ha, I thought. So that was it.
"The basic effects are there, as good as ever. All they need is modernizing; we could do it easily."
Poor Max, I thought.
"We could be on top again," she said. "He could be on top again. Where he belongs." Was she, in fact, sincere then? "That's what I want—for both of us." No way.
"Come on now, babe," Harry reassured her. He bussed her lightly on the cheek. "It's in the bag."
She managed a sound of amusement. "If you can manage this, I'll toast you with the best champagne in town."
He ran a hand down her back and across the curve of a buttock; a Kendal move if there ever was one. "Well, I might want just a little more," he said.
He had begun to kiss her when she stiffened, looking toward the desk chair. My eyeballs struggled to the task of seeing what she saw.
In pushing the chair she had caused it to stop moving when it was reversed. (Or had it been reversed when none of us was looking?)
A puff of gray-white smoke was rising from the chair now.
Cassandra jerked away from Harry, looking stricken; that's the word.
Noting her expression and the fixed direction of her gaze, he, too, looked toward the chair. (That made three of us.) They stared at it in choked silence.
At last the chair turned slowly to reveal the final principal in the murderous drama about to unfold.
My son, Maximilian Delacorte.
