Jeffrey Ford - The Girl in the Glass

"There could be some dubious rigmarole," said Antony.

"Let me think about it," said Schell.

In the days that followed, I made it my mission to get to the bottom of Schell's predicament. This, of course, was easier said than done. Wandering around like a somnambulist, he skipped meals, slept late, and forsook his usual work of perfecting new seance techniques. The classical dirges never stopped flowing from his Victrola. More than once I found empty wine bottles in the kitchen garbage. Whatever time he did spend employed in some conscious task was spent in the Bugatorium, away from Antony and me.

I knew I couldn't get him to discuss his feelings (I'd have had more success with Wilma the snake were she still alive), and whenever through the years I'd tried to get him to talk about his past, he'd always slyly change the subject. Instead, I decided to pump Antony for information, thinking that the key to the trouble lay somewhere back in the caterpillar stage of Schell's life. It made sense to me that the grim aspect that had recently emerged and spread its dark wings had its origin sometime in those early years before I knew him. Otherwise, I was sure I'd have understood. I didn't agree with Antony's assessment that it had to do with the " unhonestness " of our present occupation. I'd read Freud just the previous year and rather believed the issue was something more fundamental.

On the third day following our engagement with Parks, I asked Antony to take a walk with me. Schell was holed up with his butterflies. We left the house through the back door and struck out on the path that led through thick woods to a cliff overlooking the sound. I carried a notebook and pencil with me. He was amused by my earnest nature, but I didn't care.

"Who are you, Walter Winchell?" he asked.

I cut him a look, and he knew from then on I meant business.

We came to the end of the trail-an awe-inspiring vista of the sound framed by two huge oak trees, their gnarled roots growing out of the cliff-side into thin air. He sat down on a fallen log and lit a cigarette. I took up a position on a flat rock some few feet across from him. It was a clear, windy day. Branches swayed and leaves fell around us.

It had struck me at the wake, when Schell had told me a snatch of how Morty had taken him in from time to time when he was a kid, that I had never heard the story of his early years.

"I'll tell you what I know," said Antony, "but I'm not saying it's the truth. Schell's a strange cat. The man has secrets."

I nodded.

"Okay," he said, "here goes. What I know is he was born in Brooklyn, I think. His mother died when he was a babe-two, three maybe. Only kid. His old man was a piece a work, a gambler. I'm not just talking like a poker game here and there, I mean a real gambler, a shark and a sharp. A legend with the cards. You see the stuff that Schell does with a deck? Child's play compared to what his old man could do. I never saw it, but it was said he knew how to throw a single card with such force and accuracy, it could paralyze a man.

"I'd heard his name before I even met Schell. Magus Jack was what they called him. He did some sleight-of-hand stuff too, worked a smooth con from time to time, would bet on just about anything, knew everyone from Legs Diamond to Jimmy Walker when they were all on the way up.

"So he had this kid. He took good care of the kid. Everything was slicker than snot on a doorknob until he got involved in one particular con. I don't know, I think him and a couple of other guys were trying to blackmail this businessman. They set him up with a young down-and-out actress that they hired. The usual-caught him up in a compromising situation and then threatened to have the tart spill to the guy's wife. It was low stuff, not the kind of thing that Magus Jack usually got involved with. Stupid. I don't remember the details, but it ended with this milquetoast businessman going on a rampage and shooting the young actress, the wife, and himself to finish it off. A fucking bloodbath. Now, almost nobody knew Magus Jack was behind it, but he did. He was offstage, so to speak.

"Anyway, after that disastrous con, Magus Jack started to slip into the bottle, if you know what I mean. The kid was older now, maybe around eight, and the old man would take off and leave him in the apartment for a couple a days at a time. Whenever Jack would return, he'd make amends by spending time with the kid, but instead of going to a ball game or something normal, what he did was teach the kid how to work the cards. Instead of taking the kid to church on Sunday, he'd take him out to the park and show him how to con people.

"By the time he was twelve, Tommy was basically on his own, running the streets, involved in all kinds a cons and games and shenanigans. That's around the time that he met Morty. I think he tried to scam him on the street one day with a three-card monte or something, and Morty just took him apart. But Mort saw potential in the kid and took him under his wing somewhat. The old man came home less and less and the kid was left more and more on his own until he was paying for the apartment himself and living there like it was his own place when he was fifteen.

"I know he's not really your old man, but he might as well be. He's got a brain like you do, you know, for book study, and it was Morty turned him on to books. Mort was a kind of scholar, I guess you could say. Schell taught himself everything he knows. I think he only got up to about the first year in high school and then bagged it. But when he was seventeen, around there, he got himself hooked into some deep trouble. I don't know what it was, but the cops had the nippers on him, and he was drug before a judge. The judge gave him a choice: join the service or go to jail. So, the army not being good enough for him, he joined the marines and went to war.

"He wound up in France and saw the real shit. I know for a fact he was at this famous battle at a place called the Balleau Wood. I met a guy who knew him then, was there with him. The Germans were held up in this wood, and the good guys didn't know how much firepower they had. They could've just shelled the whole thing to splinters but they didn't. Tommy's regiment, division, whatever it was, was made to charge the wood across a wheat field. The Huns just tore them to ribbons with machine guns. I heard it was the worst beating we took in the war.

"Schell survived and came back home to find that his old man was killed, rubbed out by some shady characters he got involved in a card game with. Magus Jack was a has-been by then, squeezed through the end of a whiskey bottle. He got sloppy and took these mooks' dough too fast. They caught him crimping cards, put a bullet in his head, and threw him in the East River. I'll say no more about this but that Schell later caught up with them and settled the score.

"Afterward, he figured for a while he needed a bodyguard. Hal, you know, the dog man, sent him to me. I was looking to get out of the strongman trade. You can only have so many cars run over your head before it gets tiresome. I couldn't bring myself to bend another iron bar with my teeth, but I didn't mind busting heads if I had to. That's easy, almost a pleasure sometimes. So me and Schell hooked up, became partners sort of and worked together ever since. How's that?"

I looked down at my notebook and realized I hadn't written a word. Antony's recounting of Schell's life had been as complete as I could ask for, but nothing in it, although it was turbulent, led me to see why he'd envision a little girl on the pane of a glass door.

"Thanks," I said.

"What's your diagnosis?" he said.

I shook my head, "I'm more confused than before," I told him.

He smiled and lit another cigarette.

"What about the butterflies?" I asked.