The Great Baldini: A Memoir and a Collaboration

Make an elephant disappear in Yankee Stadium? It couldn’t be done —or could it? Jack Baldini thought it possible, and if it had not been for Derek Marchmont...

But enough. It is better that the reader get the facts from the nonpareil of American letters, Edmund Wilson, who tells of his collaboration with the late Edwin O’Connor, and exhibits some of same.

MEMOIR I

When I first knew Edwin O’Connor in the late forties, he was spending his summers near me at Wellflect on Cape Cod. He was working at a broadcasting station in Boston and had very little money to spend on vacations. He lived in a shack on one of the “ponds”—which to us non-New Englanders seem more like “lakes” —with an equally unaffluent friend, and he rode around on a bicycle. We would see him on the beach writing, and he occasionally came to call on us. When his first book, a short novel called The Oracle, was published in 1951, he gave me a copy and asked me to read it. It was a caricature of a stuffed-shirt radio broadcaster, and although I was amused by the ironic tone, I could not believe in the central character as a genuine human being, nor did he quite achieve the dignity of a striking comic creation. We did not talk in those days about books very much, but we discovered a common interest in amateur magic. We kept up with the literature of the subject—I find that Ed had collected a considerable library, which was almost exclusively technical, whereas mine ran considerably more to historical and biographical material. We frequented magicians’ supply stores and exchanged secrets of sleight of hand. At one point Ed had acquired a new method of performing “the pass”—which “Professor Hoffmann,” that curious Victorian broker who became the pioneer in English of literate writing on magic, has described as “the very backbone of cardconjuring”—that was smoother than the old-fashioned method but which I was never able to master. The same qualities that made Ed a raconteur who could hold the attention of any company and keep them continually laughing made him an expert at what the magicians call “presentation,” which involves a similar kind of semi-hypnotic skill.

It was only after I had gradually got to know him that we talked about literature and religion. In the meantime, I had been rather astonished by the success of his second novel, The Last Hurrah, which was not only so much more successful commercially than The Oracle had been, but was also quite three-dimensional as the earlier book was not. Ed O’Connor became not only rich but a writer to be specially noted—though his financial success was at once so conspicuous that the reviewers, in this case and in the cases of his subsequent novels, were unwilling to acknowledge this. What with a prize, a movie contract, and a large advance from his publisher, The Last Hurrah had made many thousand dollars before a word of it had been printed; and, with the exception of the unsatisfactory interludes of the diabolic fairy tale Benjy and the adapted play I Was Dancing, his later books were also best sellers. These, The Edge of Sadness and All in the Family, were occupied, like The Last Hurrah, with the Irish Catholic world of Boston, which had never before been exploited with this seriousness, intelligence, and intimate knowledge. The Last Hurrah had dealt with the old-fashioned Irish political boss, frankly corrupt and feudally benevolent; The Edge of Sadness dealt with the priesthood and, in one of its most effective scenes, pitted the sophisticated and snobbish Boston priest against the sincere ascetic who has chosen a self-mortifying devotion to an illiterate and discouraging parish; his last novel, All in the Family, represents the Kennedy generation, which stands somewhere between the old Irish world of Boston and the new world of cocktails and enlightenment. In all this, there is no attempt whatever to fall into the once accepted clichés and represent the Irish Americans as lovable or humorously happygo-lucky or, except in a satiric fashion, to touch the chords of “Mother Machree.” O’Connor gives us rather the brutal and quarrelsome and histrionic sides of the Irish, and his attitude toward them, though friendly, is sometimes extremely acid. He specialized in hypocritical, tyrannical, and completely self-centered old men—old Carmody in The Edge of Sadness, who exhibits a scene of contrition on what he pretends is his deathbed but repudiates it when he recovers—and vituperative and wrangling old women, such as the sister in I Was Dancing. He composed so many conversations in which the parties were slanging and scoring off one another that I was interested to hear him say, after his first visit to Ireland, that he could not stand the literary life of the pubs—Ed did not drink at all—on account of its malignant backbiting. I was amused by his relations with Mayor Curley, who had more or less inspired Frank Skeffington, the boss politician of The Last Hurrah. A Boston paper sent the book to Curley, inviting him to review it. Curley looked at it and wrote the editor that he was putting the matter in the hands of his lawyer. When, however, the author by chance met the mayor for the first time, the latter said, “What I liked best was where I say on my deathbed that if I had my life over, I’d do it all over again.” It was The Last Hurrah, apparently, that stimulated Curley later to write an account of his life. He there confessed to misdeeds that profoundly shocked Ed: Ed could never have invented such unscrupulous wickedness as Curley’s public support of the Ku Klux Klan, let alone a public official who was shameless enough to tell about them.

Yet Ed’s powers of invention were of the vital kind that not merely reports on a social group but produces imaginary personalities. Though, for example, he knew the Kennedys and was very much interested in watching their careers, the Kinsellas of All in the Family are something quite other than the Kennedy’s. But curiosity about the Kennedys gave rise for the book to a false publicity—which Ed did nothing to encourage—as a kind of roman à clef. Aside from the fact that the younger Kinsellas—the family in the novel—are of the Ivy League generation of Boston Irish. I cannot see that the dramatic situations to which their respective careers gave rise have much in common with the adventures of the Kennedys. They took place entirely in the imagined world which Edwin O’Connor had created. So I found out in talking to Ed that the ecumenical priest in the Kinsella family, who is always going array on missions to non-Catholic churches and of whom it is said that in his present phase he will hardly speak to a Catholic, is as much a comic invention as the manager of the Dublin hotel with his ironical glamorizing of Ireland and his curious unexpected laugh.

Ed was also a master of mimicry, in dramatizing his anecdotes in conversation as well as in making his creations talk. Certain of his friends and acquaintances became his favorite evocations, and he was able to imitate them so vividly that they almost became characters in his fiction. The two phonograph readings which he made from his novels— which are soon to be put on the market by CMS (Columbia)—shore that in this capacity he might have qualified as a professional entertainer. He was very attentive to accents, and it is interesting on these records to hear the voices in which he imagined Skeffington and Iris other characters speaking. His one dramatic weakness, which he was trying to overcome, was his tendency to prolong conversations, making them loop around and around without satisfactorily progressing. This, I think, was his chief difficulty in writing plays, in which a dialogue must not go on too long and must take steps to arrive at some destination.

In the meantime, the effect on Ed of passing suddenly from the routine of radio to riches and reputation was to make him play a new role of humorous ostentation. I think, however, that he perhaps really reveled in his passing to this luxury from his old habitation. I remember his saying on one occasion that he had to go back to Boston in order “to be near the bank.” He purchased a Mercedes, which he treasured with special solicitude, and he rented—at, I learn, however, a very low rate, since the owner was an enthusiastic admirer—a magnificent residence on Chestnut Street, the property of a rich Boston art-lover who had furnished it with Renaissance Italian furniture and other foreign rarities in the taste of Isabella Gardner’s museum in Boston. There was a sedan chair in the hall, and I told him that I supposed he used it to be carried up to the State House every day—an idea which he at once accepted. This establishment reminded me of a story that a friend of mine had told me of having once had dinner in Boston at the house of “Honey Fitz.” a prominent local politician. There had been footmen who waited on table in kneebreeches and silk stockings. Fitzgerald called one of them over for the benefit of the guest. “See,” he said, pinching the footman’s calf, “Two pairs.” “Why two pairs?” “He’s a hairy son of a bitch!”

Ed enjoyed playing some such roles, and I never could be sure, when I visited him, that we were not in one of his novels. He developed a slight impatience of a kind characteristic of the rich with the tiresome, the incompetent, and the unreliable. He later moved into and actually purchased an even more monstrous mansion on Marlborough Street just off Arlington which he said the former owner had built with the ambition of being the possessor of the biggest private house in Boston. When we first went to dinner there, Ed said as he showed us in, referring to the mansion itself, “We have to go through this gatehouse first.” It was a little too large for comfort. The rooms were too spacious to talk across, and one would have to group in isolated pairs that were out of communication with one another. Along the wall, beneath the high ceilings, were empty niches that should have had busts in them. It proved, however, to be too much for the O’Connors to keep up, and Ed eventually sold it at a profit.

This was not the literary life as the New York intellectuals understood it. Ed’s two latter novels were also best sellers, and a literary intellectual objects to nothing so much as a best-selling book that also possesses real merit. Only Irish Catholic readers, who recognized, as one of them told me, all their “old uncles and aunts” in these books, seem fully to have appreciated them, and, except for Professor John Kelleher, no one, so far as I know, wrote anything intelligent about them. Yet The Edge of Sadness and All in the Family went much deeper than The Last Hurrah. They are only incidentally humorous. In the first of these, the dreariness, the blankness of the priest’s lonely Christmas in his decaying parish represents the ordeal and the unrewarded triumph of Father Kennedy’s religious vocation. I was unaware until Ed told me that Father Kennedy’s dedication to this unattractive and alien neighborhood, inhabited mostly by Syrians, Greeks, Italians, “a few Chinese,” and “the advance guard of Puerto Ricans,” and his boring and ridiculous Polish curate, who is given, however, his moments of dignity, represent an attempt on the part of the author to encourage the Catholic Church in Boston to work beyond the somewhat exclusive limits which the Irish had tended to impose on it. In his next novel, All in the Family, he is evidently trying to deal, in a firm although underground way, with the sexual Puritanism of Irish Catholicism. The unexplained suicide of the narrator’s mother is echoed and balanced later on by the unfaithfulness and flight of his wife —which, however, since times are changing, does not turn out to be equally serious, for the couple are later reunited. At the time of Ed’s death, he had begun a new novel about an eighty-year-old cardinal —the inevitable O’Connor old man—who knows that he is doomed to die of cancer. At his age and trained in the traditional ways, he cannot understand what at the present time is going on in the Catholic Church, and Mr. Kelleher tells us that he was to be confronted with a variety of Catholic types who would give voice to a variety of points of view.

At some point, when I was spending my winters in Cambridge. Ed and I decided to compose together, contributing alternate chapters, a novel about a magician named Baldini. The results of this kind of collaboration may turn out to be very curious. In 1907, at William Dean Howells’ suggestion, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar published a serial called The Whole Family, of which each chapter, supposed to be written by a different member of the family, was contributed by a different American novelist. “The Married Son,”who is an artist and hopes to study in France, was assigned to Henry James, who developed it with his usual patience, and scrupulously prepared a confrontation which was to lead up to the chapter that was to follow; but it evidently did not occur to him that there would be nobody, according to the scheme of the story, to report, except at second hand, what happened in this private interview on a bench in Central Park, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a writer of religious novels, who was to do “The Married Daughter” chapter, disregarded this proffered cue, and went on with no reference to what had gone before to rather a vulgar un-Jamesian monologue. So, in writing alternate chapters with Ed, I very soon ran into difficulties. He would not always accept my cues or my methods, and I found my narrative blocked. I suspected that this was deliberate, and that we were playing a game of chess, and this suspicion has been corroborated by Mrs. O’Connor’s telling me that, in sending back Chapter Four, Ed had said to her with satisfaction, “Well, I guess I’ve got him now.” One of our principal points of divergence was that I wanted to keep the conjuring within the limits of the possible whereas Ed did not hesitate to make it fantastic. The trick, for example, of the chosen card that appears between two plates of glass is something every conjuror knows, but it was plausible that Baldini at that time should not yet know that it had been found to be possible to set the trick off through an electronic device by simply raising one’s voice at a distance from the frame. Then the elephant: it was true that Houdini had been able to make an elephant disappear on the ample Hippodrome stage, which had room for a very large cabinet in which the vanishing elephant could be concealed. But Ed wanted to have Baldini perform the trick out of doors in the Yankee Stadium “beneath the folds of crimson and gold" of an all-enfolding wrap, as is possible with the levitated girl who, covered with a similar blanket, has been floated out over the audience and then, when the blanket has been snatched away, is seen to have disappeared. I had to accept this, although I could not imagine the practical means by which the feat could be accomplished. Another thing that annoyed me, though I had to accept it too, was the appearance of Derek Marchmont. I had invented him merely in order to introduce his complaint, on the grounds of good taste, of the practice of an American magician of producing a borrowed pearl necklace from his mouth, which I had seen in the London Letter of the magicians’ magazine The Sphinx. I had not been prepared to have Ed bring him back in the role of an important character. We thus very soon reached an impasse, and, having then other things to do, I dropped Baldini for two years or so. I was planning, however, to revive it, not wanting to be outwitted by Ed, and, not very long before his death, had got the manuscript out to study it. I shall not discuss my further plans for it till I have presented the unfinished fragment itself.

COLLABORATION

CHAPTER I (E.W.)

Jack Baldini was baffled.

He had seen the trick a hundred times: the chosen card with the corner torn off that suddenly appeared in the frame between the two panes of glass. But in Esmeralda’s apartment there was no confederate to set it off, at least none that Baldini could see, nor could he detect any threads. She had simply taken the frame from a shelf and set it up on the table.

“A camera timer?" he asked.

“Guess again.”She let him wonder a moment. “No: a new electronics job. Cute? All I have to do is raise my voice. Or a pistol shot if you want that old gag.”

Without giving him a chance to examine it, she put the apparatus away.

“That’s one I hadn’t heard about,”he was forced to admit, “it might open up huge horizons.”

“It’s not on the market,” she said, pouring him another drink from the cloisonné cocktail shaker.

She offered him a stuffed date.

“Do they go with absinthe?”

“I love them.”

He stood up, with the date in his fingers, and looked about her curious living room. He was embarrassed at her scoring off him with the new electronics trick.

“You’ve got some nice items here.”

There were photographs of Adelaide Hermann and other woman magicians, besides several of Esmeralda—Esmeralda the Great, as she called herself—one showing her in the toreador costume in which she always opened her show. To the accompaniment of fiery music, she would maneuver with a bullfighter’s cape and produce from it a bouquet of silk flowers, a pair of red rubber lobsters, a bowl of goldfish, a birdcage with a plastic parakeet, and finally a pretty Spanish dancer, who carried on with the castanets while Esmeralda changed to something more feminine: a simple green evening gown, which seemed to offer no place of concealment for the properties that magicians call “loads.”

One picture Jack Baldini did not like to see: a signed photograph of handsome Derek Marchmont, the distinguished English magician, in his flight commander’s uniform embellished with decorations. He had a BBC voice and accent which Baldini could not abide, and at the time when he had contributed a London column to an American magicians’ magazine, he had complained of the bad taste of an American performer who had borrowed a lady’s necklace, pretended to spill the pearls into an omelet, tasted a morsel of the omelet, and then produced the necklace intact from his mouth. He had now returned to London after a highly successful visit to the States, during which he had appeared with Danny Kaye; but there had been a good deal of talk about him and Esmeralda, and now Baldini thought he noticed a distinct veneer of BBC overlaying Esmeralda’s Middle Western accent. And her father was a circus man! He found the stuffed date rather sickening.

“But that’s gimmicks, that electronic card-frame!” He turned abruptly and addressed her with a loud authority. “You don’t need gimmicks, Mamie! There’s nobody that doesn’t need gimmicks like you. Won’t you show me that dice routine, darling, that everybody raves about. I’ve only heard about it—I’ve never seen you do it.”

“Oh. that silly old routine,” she replied. “You really want to see it?”

“I’m crazy to.”

She left the room. Jack resented as unbecoming what he felt was a false note of modesty that she had learned no doubt from the gentlemanly Marchmont.

He studied, where it stood in a corner, made uncanny by a mask-shaded light, a replica of the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, which he had never seen her use on the stage and which seemed to him a little more sinister than anything he would care to use himself.

She came back with two very large dice boxes, from which she scattered on the table large dice. Then with brusque and rapid gestures, as if with impatience, she shuffled them about on the table with the dice boxes held bottom up. He admired her long expert fingers. She seemed to be shoving the dice off the table, but when one looked at the carpet, they were not there, and then, when she lifted up the boxes, they would be seen to be piled up neatly in stacks as if they were children’s blocks. Later on, they all seemed to coagulate to produce two larger dice, and then these coalesced in one giant. This was a magician’s trick, which required enormous skill but—since it could not be watched on a stage—was quite useless for public performance.

“Mamie, you’re out of this world!” exclaimed Jack. He took a sip of his absinthe cocktail in its queerly calyxed green glass goblet. He thought he knew where the dice had gone, but he refrained from scrutinizing her bodice, whose content so invited admiration. Or did he know? He usually could see what his masculine confreres were up to. But did she hypnotize him, or was it the absinthe that left him somewhat puzzled and dazed? He found that he was suddenly shy about bringing up the business he had come to discuss. He had to pluck up his courage. She was a master magician undoubtedly, but then, after all, so was he. They both stood at the top of their profession, and there had come to be between them a certain rivalry. But why should they not join their forces? Why not do a show together? The element of the dramatic and the picturesque was something they had always had in common. Their shows were both brilliant masquerades. Not only did Esmeralda open with her toreador “production" act, she appeared again in Spanish costume at the end of the first half of the show and sang a flamenco which ended with a flight of tumbler pigeons (instead of the conventional doves) released from a small casket, which, as she sang, contained her true love’s heart; and then later, yet again, as a Castilian beauty, when she would “vanish,” in magic parlance, a lover whom she had hidden behind a screen simultaneously with a frantic husband who had rushed behind the screen to kill him; a shot was heard, and then the screen was folded up and removed—both the men had disappeared. As for Jack, he did impersonations, and, as was recognized, delightful ones: an Italian, a Chinaman, an Austrian, all imitated from foreign magicians—his bald head made wig-wearing easy; and in one of his “illusions” he sprang into a chest as a hunted Sicilian gangster, and then when the chest was shown empty, he suddenly appeared in a box, wearing kilts and a Harry Lauder cap and shouting, “Hoots, Jack Baldini, laddie, ‘tis a bonnie braw act ye gie us!" and vaulted down onto the stage, to be met by tremendous applause.

And Esmeralda had long exercised on Jack a queer kind of fascination; he had seen her show again and again. Though they bad always been on friendly terms, she had held him off, he felt, as a male competitor, and he wanted to know her better. After years of cute little assistants, who had been chosen for their appearance in short skirts, high heels, and bras as well as for some modest competence as contortionists or acrobats which qualified them to turn cartwheels at the end of an act and to compress themselves into narrow spaces for the girl who is sawed in two or the girl in the wicker basket which is run through and through with swords, he felt that he could love such a woman. Did he love her already? He hardly dared ask. With her rich and abundant black hair, her long artificial lashes, her full figure, and her mesmeric gaze, which made “false direction” so easy that, for her fellow magicians, no matter how persuasive, it almost appeared to be cheating, she seemed sometimes a real enchantress who possessed some power other than that of trickery when she would cause a great iridescent ball to float out over the heads of the audience, or produce at command from an aluminum shaker which had previously been shown to be empty innumerable kinds of drinks. One did know how these tricks were done, but there were others of which she had never told the secret and which none of her fellow magicians could do. Jack had realized, since looking at that photograph of the so much admired Marchmont, that he could not introduce into his own show a burlesque of a British magician.

But he now decided to take the leap. “Mamie,” he began, “you and I have the only shows in magic now that are really imaginative works of art, the only shows with real personality—”

She forestalled him before he had finished: “I’m glad you came in tonight, Jack. I’ve been toying with the notion of a project that I think you might possibly be interested in. Since Derek’s gone back to England, I don’t know anybody else I could trust.”

“What is it?”

She looked at the grandfather’s clock which was one of the guaranteed American antiques that contrasted so oddly with her more exotic furnishings.

“There isn’t time for it now, I’m afraid. I’ll have to dash out in a minute. I’ve got to be in a benefit tonight, and I’ve got to get to the goddam hall to check on my props and things.”

Since it was Sunday, he had hoped to have dinner with her.

“What benefit?”

“The crippled glassblowers.”

This was puzzling, but he did not inquire.

“Can’t you give me some idea what you have in mind?”

“I’d rather talk about it when we’ve got more time. Come around after the show on Thursday.

“I’ve had an idea, too. A kind of a dramatic show that we might do together—”

“You won’t need your accents and false mustaches for the act that I’m thinking about.”

He felt a little hurt.

“My public are used to seeing me in character—”

“After a minute or two, you won’t be seen at all,” she said. She grinned in the friendly way that always made her audiences feel that the sorceress was one of themselves, the women that she was one of the girls, the men that they could take her out.

Site struck a Javanese hell with her palm, and the girl who played the Spanish dancer came in, without looking at Jack.

“Get the floating globe ready.” And to Jack: “Have you seen my new one? I’ve got the whole geography of the world on it. It lights up from inside and looks lovely. When it’s hanging in the middle of the house, it explodes and scares them crazy. It’s a poor night when we don’t get some screams. I can’t do all that, though, this evening. —Well, good-bye now. See you Thursday.”

She held out her sharp-nailed hand. “Not so practical for card work,” he thought. “Except of course for marking the backs.”

CHAPTER II (E.O’C.)

Baldini lived in a small apartment on the West Side, an apartment so small that, had it not been for the magician’s cunning, it would have seemed barely habitable. Thanks, however, to a most ingenious arrangement of mirrors, the place looked easily seven times its size, and the casual visitor, entering Baldini’s tiny—nine by twelve—drawing room for the first time, received instantly the impression of limitless space.

For three days following his Sunday meeting with Esmeralda. Baldini remained in his apartment. There was work to do; he did not do it. More than a month before, he had agreed to perform his wonders at a children’s party, to be given by the irascible soda-crackers monopolist, Shepherd O’Brien. Moreover, in a moment of weakness, he had agreed to perform his most celebrated illusion —The Vanishing Elephant. The party was to have been on Monday. Monday came, the children gathered, the air rang with shrill voices and the munching of a million soda crackers, but—Baldini was not there.

He had stayed at home. For the first time in his professional career, the conjurer had failed to fulfill an engagement. For a time he attempted to justify his behavior to himself by complaining of the lack of props. Elephants, he reminded himself, were in notoriously short supply these days; then too, once secured, they were apt to be something of a nuisance offstage. Expensive, too; Baldini was not cheap, but the thought of his bills for hay alone sometimes made him shudder.

Still, the trick was a great one. The effect of a mature elephant, vanishing at a word from beneath the folds of crimson and gold with which the magician had draped it—this was something to behold! Baldini knew this, it was the trick of which he was most proud; it was the trick which, above all others, had gained him his enviable reputation—and yet, it was a trick for which he now felt something very close to hatred! For it was this trick—this same superb illusion—which had once made him a figure of fun in the eyes of Esmeralda.

It had happened nearly a year ago now. He had promised to perform the feat for her alone; he had chosen as his site a deserted corner beneath the center-field bleachers at Yankee Stadium. He had performed as never before; even the fact that Esmeralda had appeared accompanied by Derek Marchmont had failed to dim the luster of his performance. The silken folds swiftly and silently cloaked Randy, the double-tusked behemoth, and then, at the single peremptory magical word “Neh-ru!”, the silk was whisked away, and the great beast was gone!

Esmeralda’s eyes had shone, her lovely, luscious body had quivered with an admiration which was close to passion, it was a moment for which Jack Baldini had hoped for years. But alas, it was a moment which was destined to be spoiled. For Derek Marchmont, consumed with envy, nevertheless had leaned negligently on his whangee, and said, in a drawling voice, “Good show, Sabu!”

SABU! With the utterance of the dreadful word, so humiliating in its implications, a change had come over Esmeralda’s face. On her full lips suddenly appeared the slightest of smiles, a mocking light came into her eyes, and Baldini, with sinking heart, knew that he was forever to be joined in unlovely combine with a dwarfish, nut-brown mahout.

From that awful day, he had eliminated the Elephant Vanish from his repertoire. It had made a difference, even to an illusionist of Baldini’s astonishing versatility; the old proverb “ To lose an elephant is to make a hole” has seldom found truer illustration. Yet such was the measure of his skill that he had been able to survive the calamity; his gifts for mimicry and disguise had stood him in good stead. Joining them to his magnificent technical abilities, he had remained at the top of his profession, and only Baldini himself knew how bitterly he mourned the loss of his pièce de résistance, and how eagerly, how passionately, he had planned for some trick, a great trick, a Baldini trick: a trick worthy of succeeding its splendid predecessor.

And now, at last, he had found it! A trick so astonishing, so ingenious, so unduplicable that, once performed, it would be his forever. His—and Esmeralda’s. For in the performance of this simple yet extravagant illusion lie would require a confederate. And no ordinary confederate—in a word, no “stooge”—would do. No, here he needed someone who commanded a powerful stage presence, who was at home in the great, rather than the routine, feats of magic, and who was, above all else, a woman.

Esmeralda, of course, who else? No one; among the prestidigitators of her sex, it was Esmeralda who stood paramount. He teas eager to confide in her, to tell her at once every last detail of his scheme for their joint future, yet here he was, alone in his apartment, forced to wait until the appointed Thursday. It was a necessity which left him impatient, even mildly angry; with a frown, he filled his sword stick with absinthe, and slowly began to drink from it. Glasses, goblets, and tumblers were all very well in their way, but when it came to serious drinking, Baldini had always felt there was nothing like a sword stick.

After about a half hour of steady drinking, Baldini rose from his chair and began to perform. Drink, he knew, had a retarding effect on other magicians; on him, however, its only effect was to sharpen his wits. Watching himself covertly in the multiple mirrors in which his apartment abounded, it seemed to Baldini that he had never been more brilliant. Cards poured from his hands in bewildering profusion, often in midair apparently changing in color and size; a live rabbit was produced, not from a hat, but from an object no larger than a tennis ball; then, turning to his genius for impersonation, he mimicked the great Chinese magician, Long Tack San, in his most renowned trick: placing a bowl of water in his hands, he completed a somersault in the air, emerging with the bowl still full and, moreover, three goldfish swimming about. Baldini, as he did this trick, became completely submerged in the character of the agile Chinese; rather short and portly himself, he seemed to gain at least a foot in height, and his eyes acquired a peculiar slant; most astonishing of all was the fact that, although he was bald as an egg, he now, without recourse to a wig of any sort, seemed possessed of a full head of lank black hair!

He rounded out his performance by doing a short but debasing imitation of Derek Marchmont. He did a series of easy, almost childishly simple tricks, and did them clumsily. As he performed, he talked. In the beginning, Derek’s BBC accent was faithfully duplicated; then, as cards slipped from his fingers, as props fell to the floor, as effect after effect of the supercilious Britisher failed to come off, Baldini altered his voice so that eventually it became a revolting, supplicating cockney whine.

“Lor’ lumme, Guv’nor!” wheedled the pseudo Marchmont. “I ain’t ‘arf bad todye, I ain’t! ‘Arf a mo’ wile I give it anuvver try!”

This pleased Baldini; as the sword stick tilted once more to his lips, he smiled thinly and thought of the possibility of actually reducing his rival to such abjection. Perhaps when he and Esmeralda had presented their act he could somehow bring this to pass.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, there was Esmeralda. He would, at that time, inform her of his plans. And it was only now, for the first time, that he recalled her saying that she had some plans! Plans that apparently included both of them, plans that might very well parallel his own. For she had spoken, in a casual way, of the possibility of their appearing together: this was all to the good. What was not all to the good was the suggestion that in this act Baldini would be both silent and invisible. It was not quite what he had in mind for himself; shrewd showman that he was, he felt instinctively that if he could neither be seen nor heard, his role might perhaps be a subordinate one.

Was this, in fact, what Esmeralda really wanted? Could this be? Was it perhaps conceivable that the whole proposal had been cunningly inspired by the distant Marchmont? Baldini frowned and went once more to his sword stick. He simply did not know; he would have to wait until Thursday to find out.

CHAPTER III (E.W.)

“You were terrific, darling,” said jack, when he found Esmeralda in her dressing room after her show on Thursday night. “What gets me is that you didn’t just clip those pigeons so they wouldn’t get away. You taught them that circus routine so that they fly around the house and then come and perch on your shoulders.”

“Oh. I hoped you’d miss that silly production act. Production is such a bore. I’ve put in some gags to make it even sillier so people will begin to laugh: the sausages and the cabbages and the lobsters. I’ve been playing with the idea of a chamber pot. Let it slop out and then pretend to empty it on the audience.” She made a brusque gesture of flinging the contents.

“I don’t like it. I’d cut all that out. It’s beneath the dignity of a show like yours. Just build up the pigeons and the dancer. Maybe a big silk with a bull’s head. That thing that you wave around suddenly turns out to have a bull on it.”

“I’d like to have a real bull, but they’re not so easy to handle as elephants.”

He was silent a moment. Was this a sneer?

“Have a bull with a man inside, if you really want to be that comic. Then Irena could dance with the bull.”

“Irena isn’t a comic. She wants to be taken as a serious artist. I wanted her to skip rope with the sausages, and it made her furious.”

“What about your floating ball? It didn’t explode tonight.”

“I haven’t got it rigged right yet, and I didn’t want to spoil the act.”

“Sardi’s restaurant,” said Baldini to the taxi driver.

“Let’s go where we can be more private.” She gave the man another address.

It was a dark little restaurant in the West Fifties where jack had never been before. She led him to a corner table.

“Let me hear your idea first,” he said, when they had ordered spiced beef sandwiches and Pernods.

She demurred for a moment, reflected. “If you’ve got something to say, say it now.”

He needed the support of the Pernod, and he drank it all down in two draughts.

“It’s this idea I’ve had for a show. Now, you re the biggest woman magician that the world has seen since Adelaide Hermann.”

“She wasn’t so hot,” said Esmeralda, chewing a bite from the sandwich. “She just used Hermann’s old illusions after his death.”

“All right then—there never was a woman magician who was in the same class as you—and very few men, I may add.” As she stared at him, not recognizing a compliment, he was sorry he had added this. “Well, there’ve never in tire history of magic been two topflight magicians who worked together—a man and woman would make it sensational. I’ve been thinking that you and I could put on a show that would mark a new summit in magic.”

He paused. Site was attentive, perhaps interested.

“Of course, you’d have some wonderful ideas, and I’ve got a few myself. Here’s my conception of the second half. The Queen of Sheba comes to see Solomon. She comes in on a richly caparisoned elephant with a bodyguard in beautiful costumes and ladies of the court and all that. Solomon bows low and greets her in a guttural ancient Hebrew accent —he speaks like old Schildkraut when he was playing in English. Long handsome beard and scepter and a huge high crown on his head. She smiles at him graciously and proudly dismounts. Solomon flourishes his scepter, and the elephant disappears. My old gag, but it’ll do to start with,” he added in a deprecatory tone. “Waiter, two more of these. —Well, Solomon and Sheba are both magicians, and they vie with one another giving presents and performing miracles. He gives her a big bowl of goldfish—we’d have to have it made a special shape so it wouldn’t look too much like a party for the kiddies—and she whips out a purple silk shawl with the Star of David on it. He comes back with an ostrich-feather headdress, and she counters with a couple of dwarfs that play leapfrog and turn handsprings. He lets fly with the tumbler pigeons that go to perch on her shoulders. Then Solomon claps his hands, and a banquet appears from nowheres —the attendants all have flowing robes. Sheba takes a jug from one of her maidens and asks Solomon what he’ll have to drink: white wine or red wine or mead or myrrh or whatever they drank in those days. He says he’ll have a highball—that brings a laugh—and she pours out a mahogany-colored number. She says she always starts with Pernod, and she pours out something cloudy. Then comes the Sauterne and Burgundy and she asks the majordomo what he’ll have. He says a Bloody Mary. Solomon raises his eyebrows. ‘You must have been out with the Golden Calf,’ he says. Then what will her chief lady-in-waiting have? ‘A very dry martini, please, Your Highness.’ ‘Olive or onion?’ she asks. ‘She was out last night, too,’ she says to Solomon, but Charmian’s a girl who can take it.’ Of course we’ll do better than this—I’m just improvising at the moment. While they’re dining, the dancing girls dance—that gives Irena a chance for her act— and when the banquet is over, the majordomo pulls the cloth away from under the things on the table and begins to juggle with the cups and plates. I’ve got a topnotch juggler, and he can sail plates out over the audience. What happens at the end we’d have to decide. I’ve got one new stunt that I’d like to have you see.”

She had listened without interrupting, smoking her cigarette. Yet he felt that he had not succeeded in communicating to her his own enthusiasm. But now she said, “Maybe I’ve got it,” looking down and flicking the ash.

He was taken aback for a moment: his heart had been set on the trick on which he had been working so passionately; but after all they might use them both.

“What do you have in mind?” he asked.

“Well, you know the old challenging problem that nobody has ever solved: how to make a man disappear, without any drops or traps, in full view of the audience?”

“It could be done with mirrors but hard to manage.”

“Mirrors are out,” she said. “How do you get him behind them without having something to hide it, and then, anything that’s near enough is going to be reflected in the mirrors.”

“My juggler might distract attention.”

“I think I’ve got the solution.”

“She vanishes the majordomo.” He was fitting it into the spectacle.

“I need a good magician. It would have to be you.”

“And then Solomon appears in a box, and he makes a majestic bow like Chaliapin in Boris Godunov.” Demonstrating, he bowed from the waist and, trailing his right arm, saluted from the level of his cheek.

She did not comment.

“Well, what’s the gimmick?" He gave her the smile of a man of the world.

“I haven’t got it all worked out yet. It’s a little bit tricky—I’ve been getting into things that you can’t always depend on for a public performance. Let’s talk about it later.”

“But you think that our show’s a good notion?”

“Let’s think about it. I’ll call you up.”

“Well, let me tell you the idea I’ve been working on.”

“I’ve got to get home,” she said. “Irena’s got some kind of bug, and I sent her home to bed after the opening act. You tell me about it next time.”

He concealed his disappointment and paid the check.

“Why the glassblowers?” he asked as they were going out.

“That benefit? Oh, I’m crazy about them. It fascinates me to see them do it: making vases and goblets and things. And I like to see them swell and swell and then go off.”

“The glass, you mean?”

“Yes, they blow those big glass bubbles, and if they keep on blowing, the bubble explodes. I used to know a professional glassblower, and I used to make him do it for me.”

“He was the only man you ever loved,” said Baldini in a tone of banter.

“I had a passion for him,” she said, “while he lasted. It makes some people nervous to watch it,” she laughed. “And if the pieces fall on you, they burn—it’s molten.”

Baldini was silent.

“Don’t take me home,” she said.

“Of course I’ll take you home.” — “We might have that in the show,” he said as they were sitting in the taxi. “It’s another of Sheba’s entertainments. There’s your perfect distraction. The glassblower makes vases for Solomon, and then when one explodes, he vanishes.”

“I’m working on it, but you have to have a furnace and a lot of apparatus.”

She smiled warmly when he dropped her at her door, with a caress of her velvet eyes.

“I’ll hear from you? I can get the backing.”

It was too early to kiss her, he thought.

Ah, what a queen she would make, riding in on his well-trained elephant!

CHAPTER IV (E.O’C.)

There followed two weeks in which Baldini did not see Esmeralda. He talked to her once over the telephone; she had called him to cancel a dinner date.

It was during this call she had announced, disquietingly, that she had had second thoughts about “Solomon and Sheba”; she was now against it. Furious, he had asked why.

“Physically, Sheba’s not right for me,” she said. “With that long nose and everything.”

As patiently as he could, he explained to her that she was thinking not of Sheba, but of Cleopatra.

“Oh, well,” she said negligently, “what’s the difference?”

It was a maddening question. Baldini was not an intellectual snob, but he had majored in history at Long Island University. Only the fact of Esmeralda’s beauty saved her from a cutting and well-merited rebuke.

And yet he was not as upset about this as he would have been a week ago. The simple truth was that the “Solomon and Sheba” routine had begun to seem less attractive to him, considerably less attractive. He was unwilling, as he grew older, to work his old Elephant Vanish. Not merely because Derek Marchmont had once poked fun at this feat; not merely because there was some slight element of danger to his person; but more because with age his skill increased, and he had now reached the point where he feared that one day he would perform so skillfully that the elephant would indeed vanish in fact, instead of simply appearing to do so. And if this should happen—if, thanks to his magic, the elephant really disappeared and could not be returned—it would mean that he would lose a fresh elephant with every performance! Baldini was not without private means, but he was reasonably certain that such an expense would soon prove burdensome.

He went back, now, to some of his old tricks that he had experimented with years ago, but had abandoned. Levitation in particular captured his attention once again. He envisioned Esmeralda, placed in a handsome mother-of-pearl sarcophagus, drifting slowly over the heads of the audience— could this be done? He thought it could, and if so, it would be a far more effective trick than her own proposed feat of vanishing a man or woman without the use of drops or drapes. Indeed, as a showman, he had a certain contempt for this trick; privately he thought it good enough for a woman magician, but not quite up to the standard he had established for himself.

He called Esmeralda at the end of two weeks.

“Mamie: tomorrow at eight?”

She had agreed—it seemed to him reluctantly.

“Is it terribly important?” she said. “I’m really not in very good shape.”

“Your shape always looks good to me,” he sniggered. As soon as he said this, he knew he had done it again. It was his weakness: the coarse streak which occasionally cracked through his otherwise impeccable veneer. He suspected that in the past it had cost him employment at several children’s parties.

“Good-night,” she said icily. Though of Hungarian birth, she was always the perfect lady.

The following evening, Baldini took a taxi to Esmeralda’s apartment house. As usual, he proposed to the driver that they toss for the fare: double or nothing; as usual, the driver accepted; as usual, thanks to his manipulative skill, Baldini paid nothing. It was a way he had of cutting down expenses.

He went up to her apartment quickly, and a little nervously. Would she be angry still, following his coarseness of the evening before? He hoped not, but if she were, he was confident that what he had to tell her would melt her wrath.

To his surprise, he heard voices, laughter through her door. He pushed the buzzer; there was a silence, then the sound of scuffing; then, finally, the door opened, and there stood Esmeralda, her eyes shining, a glass in her hand.

“Why, Jack!” she said. “That’s right, you were coming tonight, weren’t you?”

He nodded; he did not trust himself to speak.

“Well, come in, come in,” she cried. Possibly because she was a European, she added, “Entrez!'’ Her hand shot out in a beckoning gesture; from her fingers seemed to flow a succession of gay, multicolored silk flags.

What a ham, thought Baldini morosely: always on stage. And with those lousy, childish tricks! But he went in, and as he crossed the threshold, he stopped short. For there, lounging negligently on the long expensive couch that he—Baldini—had given Esmeralda for her birthday, was Derek Marchmont!

“Hello, Goldoni,” he drawled. “Long time no see!”

Goldoni! It was the last straw! Baldini boiled with rage; he wanted more than anything else in the world to reach out, grab this insolent British mountebank, and beat him into insensibility. Unfortunately, he could not do this. His innate good manners forbade it; also the knowledge that he would receive a severe trouncing.

He stood there, seething quietly. Marchmont rose languidly from the couch, unexpectedly performed a front somersault, and came up smiling and bearing in his hands a small fishbowl, filled to the brim, and with a single goldfish swimming around in it.

“My compliments,” he said mockingly, handing the bowl to Baldini. “Think of it as a tranquilizer, old man; it will help you while you seethe.”

“Now, now, boys,” said Esmeralda prettily. “Let’s all be friends and have a party. After all, Jack, Derek’s just flown over from England. He’s only been here a few days.”

“I didn’t expect to be here at all, actually,” drawled Marchmont. “But duty called: I had to give a command performance at the glassblowers’ benefit.”

Baldini stared at Esmeralda. “The glassblowers’ benefit? But that’s the one you were—”

She cut in smoothly; too smoothly, he thought. “Imagine my surprise,” she said, “to find Derek on the bill with me. And all the time I thought he was in England!”

“England couldn’t contain me, dear lady,” said Derek, with a flourish, “as long as you and the glassblowers were here!”

If it weren’t for my rage, thought Baldini, I would be nauseated. Fighting a desire to drown them both in a cascade of vituperation, he said, as calmly as he could, “I see. You performed together, then?”

“Quite,”said Marchmont. “And brilliantly, may I add. Not a rehearsal, everything improvised, yet it all went like clockwork. Even Esmeralda’s pigeons seemed to take to me; it was as if we’d worked together for years!”

“Yes, it was lovely,” Esmeralda said, and Baldini noticed that a glow came into her eyes as she said this. He felt like running her through with his sword stick. Continuing, she said animatedly, “In fact, Jack, Derek and I have something to tell you!”

“I wonder if you can guess what it is?" asked Marchmont nastily. “Eh, Goldoni? You should be able to, you know: a man with your professional background. Didn’t you once do a mind-reading act? Extrasensory perception and all that sort of thing? Well, think hard, old man, and see if the Master Mentalist can’t put two and two together and come up with four. Look here, I’ll even give you a clue!”

And with just the trace of a sneer on his thin aristocratic lips, Marchmont began to juggle a series of thin golden bands, finger-size, in the air; at the same time he hummed nasally a tune which Baldini, after a moment or two, recognized as “The Wedding March.”He stared, first at Marchmont, then at Esmeralda, with horrified eyes; thanks to his training as a Master Mentalist, he was beginning to glimpse just what the despised Marchmont was driving at.

“Get it, old man?” said Marchmont, smirking unpleasantly. “Not too subtle for you?”

“Oh, Derek, you’re such a clown!” cried Esmeralda, giggling happily.

It was the first time Baldini had ever heard Esmeralda giggle; it struck him as a most unbecoming sound. It was the last sound he heard before slumping to the floor. Jack Baldini had fainted.

I must not finish the story along my own lines now that Ed cannot contribute his chapters; but I shall give a brief summary of what I intended.

My next chapter was to take place in a New York shop that dealt in magic supplies. Attached to it, as is often the case, is a workshop where “illusions” are manufactured. The craftsman who makes these and the proprietor of the shop are discussing a rather curious order which Esmeralda has just put in. She has supplied certain specifications but has not explained what she wants to do, and the man who constructs apparatus is in some doubt as to how to proceed. It comes out in the course of the conversation that they do not quite like Esmeralda. At this moment, Esmeralda herself arrives to inspect what is being done. Baldini now also drops in. Esmeralda is not very cordial and does not talk about her project; but Baldini, who is mesmerized by her, is deferential toward her reticence, since it is customary for inventive magicians to keep their secrets at first from their colleagues. I do not know what Ed would have made of this, but my idea was to have it later suspected by Baldini when he is coming to rebel against Esmeralda’s domination, that, in pretending to make him disappear in full sight of the audience, she is preparing to do something dangerous. He is put on his guard by the men in the shop, who are coming to have some inkling of the nature of the contemplated “illusion.” What has happened is that Esmeralda has learned from the head glassblower, whose hobby is physics, how to vaporize in an instant on a limited scale. A flash and some smoke will be seen by the audience, and Baldini will have disappeared, Esmeralda, it turns out, is a fanatical man hater, on account of having been sent, as an orphan, to live with an uncle who raped her. The new destructive powers she has now acquired are prompting her to give vent to her lifelong antagonism by more and more extravagant feats. Could she not make the glassblowers themselves disappear? They are to open up the performance with a prelude for what is to come, by blowing up their glass bubbles till they burst with a bang. Why not vaporize Derek, too? He and Baldini are to be permitted to put on individual acts and to have their little applause before her own great feats of annihilation. Why not—her madness accelerates —turn the wonder-gun on men in the audience, too? She comes out in a sweat as she thinks of it. She tries to control herself, assure herself that the disappearance of Baldini alone may be accepted as a magician’s secret, and his subsequent non-appearance be explained away as a retirement from the profession on account of illness. She has yielded to Baldini’s desire for the Solomon and Sheba spectacle. She, as Sheba, will top Solomon’s magic by making him vanish in a puff. Site grimly enjoys this prospect. But Baldini, by the time of the performance, has been tipped off by the magical-supply men that Esmeralda is mad as a hatter. He has had her watched, and her diary has been read, and her lethal intentions have been discovered. Just before the Solomon and Sheba act, her gun has been confiscated. She is arrested and put under restraint just in time to avert the massacre. But the show must still go on. It is announced that Esmeralda is ill, and one of the girl assistants acts as her understudy. Irena has had also to be restrained and has bitten a policeman’s wrist. The performance ends successfully with the spectacular finale, which involves the girls doing cartwheels, the appearance of cobras from baskets, and the production of national banners, including both the Israeli and the Arab flags but not those of the Communist countries or Franco’s Spain. Baldini in the costume of Solomon is the hero of this dazzling number and takes the bows at the end, with a speech of thanks in a heavy Yiddish accent. But Derek Marchmont has climbed up on the elephant, which has been made to reappear, and is waving the Union Jack.

MEMOIR II

At the time that Ed and I were discussing the revival of Baldini, I received the following letter accompanied by a glossy photograph of a very third-rate-looking dancer majestically posed in a lace mantilla:

January 24, 1967
(NEW STYLE)
My dear, dear Mr. Wilson,
I am writing to you on this occasion because I have only in the week just past received the most joyful news that you are proposing to lend your magnificent talent to a book about my son, otherwise perhaps known to you as “ Jack Baldini.” Surely you will sense at once with your keen eye that this is a genuine letter from an A-Number-One mother, lot the accompanying photograph, taken only a very few years ago, is my darling son’s favorite of me, which he always kept very close to his person in his boudoir.
I must tell you I took the occasion to write first to your friendly collaborator, Mr. Edwin O’Connor, that highly gifted man. He said I should immediately write to you because of the purpose of my entreaty. He said to me, he said, “Wilson is the money man, my dear lady; I deal only in ideas!”
Accordingly then, to you I write. Naturally a book provided by you for the markets of the world, about such a son of such a mother, can be expected to realize much in the way of valuable moneys. Although I am of course an artiste and under most circumstances cannot trouble my pretty head with such bagatelles, just for fun, for a singing lark, as you Americans sometimes express it, I think I would like to ask you for a small part of those moneys. A novice in these crude affairs, I hardly know what next to say; perhaps “fifty per cent” would not be amiss?
My my, what a happy time we will have, all working together! I intend to spend most days of the spring and summer months very close to you on that blessed spit of sand, Cape Cod. I will be in residence at the Hotel Holiday from Memory Day, May 30th; I will be accompanied by a young Polish boy of nineteen whose spiritual counsel I now feel indispensable. It is sad I will not have the distinct pleasure of seeing Mr. O’Connor there, as he has courteously explained to me that frequent family deaths oblige him to journey to Japan for most of the coming year.
Good-bye for now, dear Mr. Wilson! How I look forward to receiving a missive in your own hand, addressed to me in care of my attorneys-at-law, Greenbaum, Wolf & Ernst, in the city of New York, N.Y. Such pleasant men they are, to be sure, but how harsh and unforgiving if a crafty person should attempt to deprive a deserving and quite beautiful woman of what is so rightfully hers.
With all my cordiality,
[Signature undecipherable]

This nonsense was not to be continued, and the break with all the other elements in one’s friendly relations with Ed, the abrupt obliteration of his presence, his personality, was shocking to all who knew him. His death made a terrible vacancy in our little community at Wellfleet. As Mrs. Arthur Schlesinger has written, in an article in the Boston Globe, he had become a kind of center of our life on the beach, where he knocked off to read in the afternoon after doing his work in the morning. One always had with him entertaining conversations, and his sustained imaginative activity was backed by an impressive physique. He three times saved bathers from being swept away. I once saw him swim out and pull in a raft with two girls which was being carried off to sea. I was struck by the fact that many people on the shore who had stood around watching this had immediately disappeared when the raft had been safely brought in, without anyone’s making any move to inquire about or offer anything to revive the two girls and Ed, who were lying on the sand exhausted. He scolded the girls for their recklessness, and the last time he rescued one of these greenhorns, he swore that he had “had it” as a lifeguard and would never rescue anyone again. He had undergone, before his marriage, a serious operation, the removal of a part of his stomach, but he seemed to have recovered so completely that one forgot that his condition might still be precarious.

Since he has gone, I have been constantly reminded that Ed’s death was a serious personal loss by from time to time catching myself still thinking, “I must tell Ed that,” or, “I must ask Ed about this.” I had by that time become interested in what was happening in the Catholic Church, and in talking to Ed about it, I found that he was capable of being just as sardonic about its ministrants as he was about anyone else. I believe that the explanation of his satirical children’s fable Benjy—the story of a horrid little prig who makes trouble for everyone else—is that Ed was always on his guard about letting people be conscious of his virtuous habits because he realized how easy it would be for these to become obnoxious. He neither smoked nor drank; he was considerate and incorruptible. Though he never at all emphasized this and though he reacted very strongly to a badly performed Mass, he remained a practicing Catholic, and he was one of the few educated friends I have had who struck me as sincerely attempting to lead the life of a Christian. It was only when he died that one realized how much he had become in Boston a kind of public figure. His funeral was almost on the scale of that of a respected bishop or cardinal; and it was not merely his literary talents, his enlivening wit, his conspicuous commercial success, and his sympathetic capacity for fellowship with all classes and callings in the city that had made him such a popular personality but, together with all these attractive features, the reassuring sense that came through, from behind his satiric humor, of decency, reliability, and an unwillingness to take ignoble advantage of the failings and misfortunes of other people. In spite of the egoistic old men, the virulent old women of his novels, he never could have allowed Esmeralda to have become such a monster as I was projecting, and I believe that it was partly this divergence of temperaments that brought our Baldini to a standstill.