The Isle of Youth Stories by Laura van den Berg

Author:Laura van den Berg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE GREATEST ESCAPE

My father leaving was his last act of magic. He had locked himself in a glass aquarium filled with water. The idea was to disappear from the aquarium and reappear onstage. At the time, my mother was pregnant with me. She saw what happened at the rehearsal, saw it with her own eyes: he vanished but never returned. No one could explain it. It was supposed to have been an illusion, after all. The stage was searched. Even the real police looked for him, but he was gone. Gone where? I asked her, and she said nobody knew, not even the world’s greatest magicians. She once told me there was a cruelty to magic because it takes a thing, transforms it, and then turns it back into what it was. My father had forgotten the turning-back part.

* * *

That wasn’t the only story my mother told me. In 1910, Harry Houdini escaped from a straitjacket while suspended from a crane. Two years later, he freed himself from a nailed-shut packing crate that had been dropped into the East River. That was the kind of magic I dreamed about. I wanted us to make each other levitate and disappear, to perform in Las Vegas and Times Square. And where was I instead? Standing beneath the red lights of a dinner theater stage in Hollywood, Florida, watching my mother balance a globe of fire in her hand.

Of course, the fire wasn’t real. It was a Level 1 illusion, the best she could manage these days, despite having trained at a world-famous magic school in the real Hollywood, out in California. At the school, she had been working her way to Level 3, which was the Houdini stuff—the harrowing escapes, the ability to manipulate reality and time. She claimed her skills had weakened when my father disappeared, and left her almost entirely after I was born.

My parents had met at magic school. In their first class, my father could make a cockatoo vanish from its cage better than anyone. He became the headmaster’s protégé. His stage name was the Great Heraldo. Once I looked up the school online, in the dinner theater owner’s office. The building resembled a castle, with a stone wall and spires. In the photos, the windows glowed with gold light. I spent a long time staring at them and wondering what was happening inside.

After my father disappeared, my mother needed a change of scenery. She’d thought Hollywood, Florida, might be better than the one in California, but here it was swampy and flat and there were hurricanes instead of earthquakes and fires. I’d been part of her act since childhood. We used to have more families in the audience, but now the men who wandered over from nearby hotels and drank during the shows were the only ones who came to watch. According to the owner, there was stiffer competition from new venues in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. He was a slight, stooped man with a thin black mustache, and he’d been pleading with my mother to shake things up.

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