Carter Beats the Devil Read online

  All magicians had boyhood stories. Kellar, Houdini, Thurston, and many of the best found inspiration during periods of illness and bed rest, when a relative would bring them a magic set to while away their days. But not Carter. Instead, his first performance took place in a deserted house in the dead of winter, when he was nine years old.

  At first, the house was full. He grew up in San Francisco, Pacific Heights, specifically Presidio Heights, 3638 Washington Street between Spruce and Locust. This was a three-story Italianate built in 1874 to house the Russian consulate. But after a decade of poor fur-trapping seasons, the Russians could no longer pay the mortgage. Mr. and Mrs. Charles Carter III, newlyweds, moved in.

  On the ground floor was the foyer, then the parlor and the drawing room, with chairs and tables from Gump’s and window boxes around the fireplace where the ladies sat for tea in winter. The grand piano was in the parlor, and there Charles was forced to sit upright twice a week, pecking note by note through “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and other tunes from Instructive Melodies, the worn cloth songbook his humorless teacher pointed to with bony fingers.

  Running from the parlor to the back dining room were forty-five feet of freedom, in the form of a hallway with rugs that always slipped, and when they were being cleaned, Charles tiptoed from room to room, looking for every adult—mother, father, nurse, cook, valet, maids—and if all of them were upstairs, he kicked off his shoes and skidded down the floors in his stocking feet. Then he was the lookout while his brother James had a go. James, younger than Charles and devoted as a duckling, never instigated, and was brilliant at behaving innocently when called upon. They never pushed their luck. Just two or three transits down the floorboards, enough to find exactly the right posture to carry them farthest and fastest—they were racehorses, freight trains, comets—then Charles would crouch in the breakfast nook, retying his shoelaces, and James’s, and putting on his sweetest face to ask Cook for a glass of milk.

  The house was paid for, as were most houses in Pacific Heights, on the trading of stocks, bonds, and notes. Their father was an investment banker, and better than most in his character and intuition, riding out the occasional panic and run on gold with good humor. Further, Mr. Carter was blessed with a hobby to which he could apply his imagination: he collected. When it was fashionable to collect European artwork, he did so, and when fashions shifted to Japan, the Carter house was home to three—but what three!—scrolls mounted behind glass that showed the cast of Genji Monogatari. Though the Japan mania caused many of the Pacific Heights social set to fill room after room with woodcuts of every single one of the 53 Stages of the Tokaido, Mr. Carter believed that to have three of anything was a collection. Then it was time to move on.

  Charles’s mother, Lillian, was a complexity: she had grown up in a house of New England Transcendentalists and passionately pursued the riches of interior life. A robust woman who could argue the politics of suffrage for three hours straight, Mrs. Carter also suffered fainting spells, allergies, and the overaccumulation of nervous energy. In one year, she received a neurologist, who said she had a depletion of phosphorous so that her nerve cells conducted electricity improperly; a somatic hygienist, who prescribed bed rest to replenish nutritional energies lost to excessive thinking and feeling; a psycho-analyst, who wanted to explore her girlhood conflicts with her parents; a hypnotist, who put her into trances to relieve her overstimulated emotions; and a spirit medium, who led a séance to rid her of abnormal spirit clusters.

  “I have many, many neuroses,” she declared at a parlor room tea to which Charles and James had been invited as long as they were quiet.

  “I have them, too,” said Mrs. Owens, who was competitive.

  “But I’ve been invited to Boston for a study,” Mrs. Carter said, which defeated Mrs. Owens and caused many of Mrs. Carter’s other friends to ask questions: was she following the theosophists? Or a more traditional field?

  Mrs. Carter was in fact to be a patient of Dr. James Jackson Putnam, a psycho-analyst and Harvard professor. “He recommended this book,” she explained, displaying with pride her inscribed copy of Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders.

  “Oh, psychic treatment,” Mrs. Owens said. “That was popular . . . several years ago.” Her lip curled with sympathy.

  “No, no, this is quite new. Honestly.” Mrs. Carter looked to her husband for support.

  “It’s . . .” Mr. Carter met his wife’s eye and he charted another course. “It can’t be dismissed.”

  Charles, almost nine years old, followed the conversation with an interest that deepened as he realized his mother was considering a trip to Boston. How long would she be away? Could he go with her? He glanced at James, who was just six years old, and who turned the pages of a stiff-backed Famous Men and Famous Deeds, humming quietly to himself. He almost whispered, “James, pay attention,” but he didn’t want to be dismissed from the room. The topic was abandoned, but Charles listened for the rest of the afternoon for clues: was his mother actually going away?

  A few nights later, she sat at the end of his bed and explained that he and his brother wouldn’t be left alone: there was his father, and Fräulein Reinhardt, and of course the rest of the servants.

  “I need you to have a stiff upper lip,” she continued. “James will look to you for guidance. You can’t let him down.” Charles watched her twist her necklace between her fingers. “He’s so young he’ll wonder why he can’t come with me.”

  Charles considered, then, a different question to ask her. “When are you coming back?”

  “That’s a tremendous question, Charles. There are circles within circles. In fact, Dr. Putnam compares the experience to the Divine Comedy. You know.” His mother nodded at him, and he nodded back, to show he understood. At bedtime, she had a habit of talking as if they were allies sharing a confidence. “First, you descend into your emotional life with a doctor as your guide, and then the repressed memories are washed away in the Lethe.”

  When she spoke—she was adept at speaking and annoyed at those who merely talked—his mother drew on many dramatic gestures whose source Charles could hardly guess at, as she shunned the theatre itself. Describing her progress through psycho-analysis, she flamboyantly waved her fingers and winced as if in pain. “You pass the moaning souls in the lake of fire, but you must push on past that despair”—she displayed a faraway gaze of contemplation—“till you come to”—with a sigh of release—“inner resourcefulness.”

  Charles followed the gestures and the sound of her voice, but little else. She was going to have an adventure, and when she came back, she would be more experienced and in better mental health. But there was no way to know how long it would take.

  His last sight of her that night was in the doorway, her hand on the wall as she dimmed the light, her face illuminated by the dying orange cast of the gas jet. Lillian Carter knew how to leave a room with a flourish, and Charles loved the pauses before she left. She whispered, eyebrows arching, “The next time we see each other, we’ll both have changed so much!” She put her fingers to her lips as if she’d just told him a secret. As she closed the door, slowly, stepping backward into the hall, Charles memorized the look of promise on her half-shadowed face, the way she anticipated a great mystery. It would be his last sight of her for two years.

  CHAPTER 2

  Immediately after his mother left, Charles became his father’s shadow. On long Sunday afternoons, Mr. Carter could barely walk from his bookshelves to the ledgers on his desk without becoming entangled with his elder child.

  On the longest wall of Mr. Carter’s study were woodcuts set behind beveled glass, matted with hand-cut linen, and placed, because the wall had so many other pieces of art on it, at a child’s eye level. All three woodcuts depicted instruments of torture: the bilboes and the pillory and the brank.

  The bilboes looked like handcuffs that went around the ankles. The prisoner lay flat on his back, in the dirt, his feet suspended in the air by a length of iron
bar to which the bilboes were fastened. The penitent faced a jeering crowd of angry faces and fists raised high over buckled hats.

  Charles couldn’t quite understand the punishment. His father explained it: it was humiliating to lie in the bilboes, to be restrained against your will in front of all those people. Your reputation was forever ruined.

  Running a finger around the frame’s edges, Charles repeated this. “Your reputation.”

  “Please don’t get your fingers on that, Charles,” his father said, and to close the matter, he reiterated, “The bilboes disgrace you.”

  Now Charles understood. “Oh, yes. Because you don’t know how to get out.”

  “No,” his father sighed, “that certainly isn’t it.”

  Charles was no closer to understanding why he was so interested. That night he lay in bed long after he was supposed to be asleep, wondering what it was like to be clapped into the leg cuffs and pelted with rocks by the crowd. His legs up in the air so that coins might fall from his pockets—they would be Sommer Islands tuppence and sixpence, Willow Tree shillings from the coin collecting books his father read with him. Yes, it would be humiliating not to know how to escape from the bilboes.

  When his nurse, Fräulein Reinhardt, woke Charles in the morning, she pinched his cheek and hissed, “No, no, beds are for sleeping the other way,” because she found him with his feet jammed into the cutout fleurs-de-lis of his headboard.

  The illustration of the pillory was less enticing to him. Standing with his head and wrists pinned with a makeshift stocks was tiresome, so he never pretended to be pilloried.

  However, according to a Boston Settlement Court record that his father had copied and displayed on the wall, in 1659, a certain Thomas Carter—almost certainly an ancestor—had been “nayled by both eares to the pillory, 3 nailes in each ear.” His crime was being “an incorrigible forestaller.”

  “They nailed him to the pillory?”

  “Yes,” his father sighed, for these conversations were becoming more frequent.

  “Put nails through his ears?”

  “Yes.”

  Charles asked his father, eagerly, if the woodcut above the court record showed their ancestor himself being punished. But no, to his disappointment, it just depicted a “typical” prisoner. Still, he was rather excited by all this, so he looked from the ledger to the picture. “What is a forestaller?”

  With this question, Mr. Carter put down his reports. “Just before a French ship carrying sailcloth was about to dock, he bought the whole inventory and arranged to sell it at retail.” For the first time in his life, Charles saw his father’s eyes probing his own for interest. “He bought low and sold high and he was punished for it.”

  The clocks in the study ticked, and one of them purred, as it was about to chime the half hour. Charles knew he was supposed to have a response, and he didn’t want his father to dismiss him. “If he wasn’t just locked in . . . but if he was nailed to the pillory,” he said slowly, “it would be much, much harder to get out.”

  “Yes?” His father’s lips pursed as if he would continue, but only if Charles earned it.

  Charles looked away from his father. He could think of nothing further to say. He pretended new interest in the pictures on the wall until his father returned to his financials. Though he didn’t want to look at it—he never wanted to look at it—Charles was staring directly at the depiction of the brank.

  Once, he had been on a train that had hit a team of horses. His mother covered his eyes. He fought to see between his mother’s fingers, and simultaneously wanted to be protected from seeing. This is how it was with the brank.

  . . .

  One afternoon in October, Charles and James came home from school and saw, as if it were St. Nick’s sleigh, a cab waiting in front of their house. They ran as fast as they could, shouting to each other that their mother was returning.

  But the driver was carrying trunks out of the house. They belonged to the valet, and to one of the maids. In Mrs. Carter’s absence, they had broken into the liquor supplies, and Mr. Carter had immediately sacked them.

  Fräulein Reinhardt was the next to go. In November, she received a transatlantic cable, from Mölln, where her father had suffered a stroke, and by that afternoon, she was crying—something Charles couldn’t have imagined her doing—when she hugged him and James good-bye.

  Because it was impossible to hire domestics with references during the holiday season, Mr. Carter told his sons they would muddle through with just Cook and Patsy until after the first of the year. Charles felt nervous about this, but hoped it would at least mean their father would forget certain rituals, like washing behind the ears (he didn’t) and piano lessons (he did). James asked their father if he would read them stories at bedtime, and, to Charles’s surprise, Mr. Carter said he would be delighted.

  Mr. Carter turned out to be a terrible reader, but Charles was so pleased to hear any voice at all he didn’t complain. He didn’t even mind that to make things more efficient, Mr. Carter made James’s bedtime the same as Charles’s and that the brothers had to share a bed.

  After the first night’s reading, a Brothers Grimm tale, Mr. Carter wished his sons good night, and departed. Charles waited a moment, until he heard his father’s door close, and then whispered, “James, remember how Fräulein Reinhardt reads? How she does all the voices?” When James made no response, Charles shook him, but James was already asleep.

  His father read to them every night for two weeks and, every night, James drifted off quickly and Charles was left awake. It was worse, it turned out, to lie awake with company than to do so alone. He would wait until he heard the clock strike midnight, then he would crawl out of bed and slip into the hallway, listening for his father, or Cook, or Patsy.

  The house was larger at night, swollen with dark shadows and strange creaks that terrified him, and yet Charles could not help exploring it. Sometimes he prowled into his father’s study and took out the coin collection, which he wasn’t allowed to touch, pointing to each drachma, each half-cent, and whispering its story aloud, “Only six hundred experimental proofs were made that year, and the designer was Christian Gobrecht, a master craftsman.” Sometimes he imagined there were fairies in other rooms, wicked imps, urging him to discover them. Come look at the brank, they said. If he concentrated hard enough, maybe his mother would hear him wandering and would come back.

  At the rear of the house, by the kitchen and the pantry, was the dark and formal dining room, where Charles would push under the curtains, and surface on the other side, his breath making half-dollar-sized clouds on the window, to watch the wild back garden and listen for the faint wheeze of an accordion.

  The Carters’ garden was a menacing place, with vines and nettles and bushes that were more thorn than rose. But still Charles would have played there were it not for their gardener, the deformed and hostile Mr. Jenks. Jenks gardened mostly at night, rarely visiting the daylight, except to growl at children or animals who mistakenly came too close. He lived in a cottage on the far side of the garden, past the cloaking row of elms, where Charles wasn’t allowed to go alone.

  In the middle of the night, Charles sat in the velvet folds of the curtains, and felt afraid. He was afraid of losing the rest of his family. When James was fresh-born, his mother had put Charles’s hand on top of his bald head, and said, “Feel that movement? The bones of his skull haven’t grown together yet,” and from then on, he feared for James’s fragility.

  He made himself small there in the window, imagining all the things that frightened him. Bullies. Falling down the stairs. Wolves. Mr. Jenks. The clothes mangler. How the orphans in the stories his mother’s club read aloud to make each other weep forgot their parents’ voices. He hadn’t forgotten how his mother spoke, nor would he, and some nights he crept into her closet to smell her remaining clothes. “The souls in the lake of fire,” he whispered, grimacing and waving his arms in a way that wasn’t quite right.

  In the middle o
f the night, with his father and brother asleep, and his mother having an adventure, he felt fits of longing for places he’d never been, places he couldn’t describe, and he wondered if there were anyone else like him in the world, awake and catching glimpses of the unknown. He wondered if he were truly related to his family, or if instead he had dropped in among them, a changeling.

  . . .

  Mr. Carter was not immune to the house’s atmosphere, as it was hard to ignore two anxious boys in a household of slowly dwindling numbers. Further, in December, holiday wreaths began to appear on neighbors’ doors, and letters from Mrs. Carter began to hint at presents to come, which made both his sons now follow him from room to room.

  One day, he arose early and announced he had a treat for them. He had outfitted the spider phaeton carriage for a trip, which struck Charles as treat enough already—whereas their mother always made them take the surrey, which was slow and safe, the spider was slight and spry and jumped excitingly over cobblestones.

  “We’re going to a fair,” his father said, clapping his hands. “It’s all the way in the wilds of Berkeley.” Charles’s face fell. He had been to fairs before, and suspected that this would be as much of a treat as a trip to the grocer’s. Fairs were for women to display quilts and merchants to gaze fondly at displays of new cotton batting. At best, he might get pie.

  But on the ferry to Berkeley, with the three of them huddled in the spider phaeton’s seat, and salt spray rising bracingly in their faces, Mr. Carter explained that this was different. The old fairs they knew were things of the past, stale and dead, and, he noted with disdain, unprofitable. Now they’d been revitalized by capitalists who had added amusements and frivolities. “Since we’re coming out of a depression, the country needs a little diversion,” he said, holding out a broadside so that James could see it over one shoulder and Charles the other. Mr. Carter drew a finger down what looked like a diagram of a village square. “The Midway Plaisance.”