“Hatless an’ rootless an’ at the bottom a the world.”
I’d like to think about how the unsolved/unresolved “mysteries” mentioned below function for Lutes and his characters. I suppose there are two kinds of mysteries in the text. The first, are mysteries for both reader and character…the nature of the relationship between Esther and Ernie’s brother, and the circumstances surrounding his death and the recovery of the straight jacket. The reader however, is left wondering about these explicit mysteries and about another sort of overarching mystery—what the world of these characters looked like before the fall, and what it looks like after the last page of the book. These are mysteries only for the reader. We never get to see the magicians showered, shaved and onstage, but presume they were once successful. As Al says on page 93, “As you an’ I both know it ain’t a magicians world anymore. Unless you’re fucking David Copperfield, making the Eiffel Tower disappear on T.V.” One wonders what things looked like when it was a magician’s world. We glimpse this world through the antique shell deck, the shine of the top hat, the poster of Ernie’s brother on the back of the door. Likewise, we aren’t provided a resolution. We never learn the provenance of the straight jacket in which Ernie’s brother purportedly drowned. We don’t know whether Ernie and Esther are reunited, or whether Claire joins her mother in the south. Somehow I appreciate this. There is room for imagining what is left unsettled. Lutes seems to be a bit of a magician himself. His decision to conceal the circumstances that lead to current circumstances is a bit like a magician’s vow never to reveal his tricks.
It isn’t the “trick” that ought to do it for us anyway, as Ernie explains to Claire. “They know. They give in. It’s a little surrender. A moment of belief.” “In what,” Claire asks. “I don’t know, anything. Anything other than what they know, or what they think they know. That’s the magic. Not the trick itself, but what it makes possible in people. Or what it used to make possible anyway.” Despite what Ernie says about the breakdown in the world’s tolerance for or appreciation of “magic,” magic still functions in their world, perhaps in less predictable ways. Esther, who was conned by Nathan, reappears in the middle of the night, and they reconcile. A little girl is able to con a con man, to make the Queen of hearts appear and her dad proud. An old man is able to escape the metaphorical straight jacket of an institution. For the reader, these moments function as “moments of belief.” The difference, perhaps, between the magician’s world and the world of the story, is that the magicians aren’t always in on the trick; sometimes they are the brunt of the trick. The magic is there, but somehow unbridled. We can’t simply walk into a theater to get our fix of magic. We have to seek it in the world, to work to find it. Instead of a handkerchief really being a dove, a swindler is really a father, trying to support a little girl; a cash register becomes a decoy to allow for the escape of a ragtag group of friends.
There is some kind of calm in the misery and mystery. As Ernie talks into the tape recorder he says, “Looking out at the gray and brick, the darkened windows and empty streets…It started to rain and you know, it seemed so miserable, the picture of misery, but it wasn’t so bad. The birds, the sky, the moist and crumbling cement…I understood them better, I think. Or if I didn’t, at least I felt more at peace with my lack of understanding.” Similarly Al recognizes the end of the road as the beginning. When the two are left alone after the departure of Nathan, Claire and Esther Al says, “This is how it begins.” “Begins?” asks Ernie.” “You, me, everything. Hatless an’ rootless an’ at the bottom of the world. Let’s get out from under this permanent shadow we been livin’ in once an’ for all.” Like the queen, their humanity, their resilience reappears and reappears despite all odds.
