For the whole of the year that I now look back on as the best of my life, Susanna Miller’s act began twenty-three minutes after mine ended. I went first, to warm up the crowd, followed by the dog trainer, the hypnotist, Susanna, the twin acrobats, the tenor, and lastly Frederic Bowers, the Master of Mystery.
Susanna was the only one among the illusionists I’ve worked with in my career whose illusions ever felt like true magic to me; she alone allowed me to tap into that wonder our audiences pay us to experience. I have long held the theory that to be an expert in a thing is to see it for what it is. Those of us who create magic on the stage can feel the thrill of performance, but we never witness the defiance of physical law, because we know exactly how we have fooled the crowd into thinking we have defied it.
Until Susanna’s arrival, I held the distinction of being the greenest and the youngest in the lineup of Albertini’s Astonishing Traveling Show, so much so that they billed me as “The Boy Wonder.” My name was Lottie for all of my early life, and Julius for the duration of my travels, because when my father put me on the steamship alone he said it would be safest for me to make the ocean journey as a boy.
“And a boy you’ll stay for the show,” declared Uncle Albert on my first day in his care. “Not Julius. Johnny Chess, to get them thinking you’re smart, but not smarter than them. We’ll say you’re twelve, not sixteen. You’re a scrawny sixteen, anyway.”
All of that he decided for me in the space of minutes, with the inspiration I provided when I stepped off the ship in that guise. I was willing to perform as a boy, if that earned me a slot on his roster; he could easily have refused me a place, believing as he did about women in the spotlight, and left me to fend for myself in a new country.
Uncle Albert came up with my stage name, but I’d brought my own act with me. It was taught to me in childhood by my father, who showed me how to read people, and how to guide them to choices they only think are theirs.
In his own performances, my father claimed to speak with the dead, or more specifically, with the dearly departed loved ones of the people who attended his shows. My mother, who never appeared on stage nor with her husband in any public capacity, mingled disguised among the audience members every night, eavesdropping on conversations and determining the marks. When Papa singled someone out of the crowd, he already knew everything he needed to know about them. Both my parents had keen minds for detail and for faces, and parlayed that into a decent career.
From a young age, my parents trained me to observe and report. With my help, they had a tiny inobtrusive spy to send around town before the show began, eavesdropping in plazas and parks, then bringing back information, to which my father listened as intently as any adult has ever listened to any child. Later, in the evening, I watched him transform the gossip I had given him into something impossible. Some children are lucky enough to believe in magic; others are lucky enough to learn early how magic is made. You might call it a lifting of the veil, a literal disillusionment, but that coin has an opposite side as well. The other way to see it is that awe and wonder are gifts some skilled few among us can bestow upon others.
So here, I have already betrayed the secrets of my father’s act, but he is long gone, and would forgive me, I think. I will not explain my own secrets; they remain magic so long as I do not explain. I will tell you that even then, thanks to my father’s training, I could predict which animal an audience member was thinking of, pick their card unerringly from the pack, write their number on a chalkboard and then reveal I had written the same number before anything had been asked. Mentalism is a matter of understanding how people think, which allows me to tell them what I want them to think, and to lead them unconsciously in the direction of my choosing.
My mentalist act does not matter to my story beyond the fact that my placement on the bill allowed me to finish my ten minutes on the stage and then retire to the wing to watch those who followed. I knew I still had a great deal to learn from how the others handled an audience. Knew, too, that in turn they watched my own act to get a sense of what to expect of that night’s crowd. Whether they heckled me, or tried to embarrass or expose me. The spirit in which they participated, the degree to which they allowed themselves to be impressed. The Johnny Chess persona worked on that front as well: I rarely caught trouble from audience members, and I knew I could always get a laugh playing innocent to the more ribald shouts, my naivete reinforcing the miracle of my guesses.
We all came to know each other’s acts, which tended to stay the same night to night and week to week, or mostly the same with allowance for the variances that arise from interaction. We came to know each other’s gimmicks too, or some of them anyway. The view from the stage wing brought a different perspective than the view from the seats. Seen edgewise, the ingenious mechanisms of illusion stood revealed. Here a wire, there a mirror, there a trap door, all invisible to those seated.
I learned early, too, that every trick has a set-up, and the patter is as important as the actual feat of legerdemain. Or, and perhaps this is the better way to put it, the trick is in the way the audience is prepared. The trick is the story; the story is the trick.
A magician starts by showing limits and defining their space. Choose a spectator to approach and testify to the keenness of the blade. Cut an apple with it. Wheel the box around so all sides are revealed; further inspection attests to its solidity. Without such proof, without that pledge, there is no magic. Good magicians do not want the audience to feel like all possibilities are open; they want the audience to think that only the obvious will happen. You must carefully establish the exact expectation you plan to confound.
The first iterations of a new trick are spent honing those expectations. The box functions according to its design; that’s the easy part. More importantly, you practice your interactions with the mechanism, and the distractions that allow you to smoothly operate it; the misdirections of attention, the deployment of smoke and of mirrors and spotlights, the engines that drive the transformation of the mundane. You decide which props should be wheeled onto the stage with fanfare, and which should be there all along, unnoticed, part of the scenery, literally or figuratively.
Susanna Miller has been here in my story all along, though she only joined Uncle Albert’s revue in my second season there; she appeared backstage the afternoon we arrived in Kansas City. My own setup was minimal, so I pitched in by playing with the terriers while their trainer reassembled their props. The terriers’ names were Dot, Dash, and Queen of Sheba. Dash liked to chase a ball, and Dot liked to chase her brother, and Queenie, their mother, attempted to sit in any lap that formed in her vicinity. Normally they were entertainment enough, but while I’d seen dozens of men approach my uncle looking for work, a girl of roughly my age ducking confidently in and out of the bustle as she made her way toward the office door was a new one on me. I tossed Dash’s rubber ball and shifted the pack in that direction, so that I might hear what she said, or at least catch some of it between excited barks.
“We have an illusionist already,” Uncle Albert said. “The Master of Mystery himself. You don’t look like you’re old enough to have had time to master anything.”
“But can he do this?”
She told me later which trick she performed that afternoon, but all I knew in the moment was that I expected a sigh, and then to see her sent packing; instead, he laughed in delight. A moment later, he laughed again. “You’ve got more like that?”
I missed her response, because Dash ran off, forcing me to give chase; by the time I returned she was gone.
That night’s show was not exceptional in any way, but I forgot about her over the course of it, so that the knock on my hotel room door at midnight came as a surprise. I never had visitors; on my uncle’s advice, I had theretofore kept myself separate from the other performers (terriers excepted). I was entirely new to the shores of friendship, and thus with that one knock, my life was upended again.
“Susanna Miller, meet my niece Lottie. On stage she’s ‘Johnny Chess,’ but there’s no Johnny here. You can stay with her until such time as we can afford not to double up.” My uncle snickered and departed, leaving both of us to wonder which part was funny, and to make our own further introduction. I had in fact had my own room on this tour until then, but there had been no other women or girls traveling with us, except for the hypnotist’s assistant, who was also his wife.
Susanna and I stared at each other across the threshold, and I realized she was waiting for me to tell her myself that she was welcome. I beckoned from the chair where I sat darning a hole in my sock. “I don’t mind. Really. It gets dull around here.”
She didn’t respond, but instead turned and hoisted a large suitcase, which she heaved into the room like an athletic tryout, nearly taking out the legs of my chair. It came to rest at the foot of the bed.
“The hotel has bellhops, you know,” I pointed out.
She gave me a blank look. I took in the tilt of her chin, the sweat apparent on her plain dress at close range, and realized she had walked a long distance with her luggage. Maybe she was trying to prove something to my uncle, too, that she could carry her own weight; I pictured her pushing her way through the lobby, determined not to be stopped and told she didn’t belong.
“I’m sure I’ll consider a bellhop once I’ve had my first pay,” she said, rewarding my assessment. “My Da’s show travels in trailers.”
She looked at me as if daring me to make fun of her, but I saw no reason to do so. I’d spent my whole life in hotels, but I knew that was not everyone’s experience. I tried to take in the room as a newcomer might see it, though I’d long since come to the conclusion that, with some exceptions, the main differences between our hotels were in the lobbies, not the accommodations. A bed was a bed, a chair was a chair. “He puts us up in decent places,” I said at last. “Says it adds to our glamour and keeps him from getting fleas.”
“I saw your picture on the poster, speaking of glamour,” she said, flopping onto the bed’s near side as if we were already old friends. “Is Johnny Chess your idea or your uncle’s?”
I couldn’t quite tell which question she was asking, so I answered both. “The name is his, but the act is mine. I don’t really care if I perform it in trousers or a dress. What do you do?”
She grabbed the sock I’d just mended and balled it in her hand, then opened the fist to reveal a small yellow apple, which she offered to me. “How’d you learn to do the mindreading stuff?”
I bit into the apple, then took another bite, trying not to show that it tasted too tart to be pleasant, or that I’d been impressed with her smooth substitution. Gave her my story as true as I’d told it in a while, not the Johnny Chess history my uncle had invented for news copy. I told her about my father, and she told me about hers.
“Maybe you’ve heard of him? Gerard Milford, the Conduit?” I hadn’t. “He once performed for Queen Victoria, or so he’s said long enough that he believes it himself now, even if he didn’t. I suppose if that’s true, he used to live the hotel life too, but he’s been on the carnival circuit since before I was born.”
“What’s his act?” I asked.
“Illusions and vanishings. Same as you, he found ways to make me useful. I spent every show planted in his audience for him to pick me from the crowd for his final trick, which demanded a ‘volunteer’ in on the secret and small enough to work the mechanism. I disappeared on stage for his grand finale every night from my sixth year through my fourteenth.”
“Did anyone ever catch on?” That was my own greatest fear, repeating the same tricks in the same town.
She pulled my disappeared sock from her sleeve and held it under her nose like a mustache. “Disguises.”
So similar to my own experience! “I liked feeling useful.”
“Yes, and the responsibility,” she said, after I explained my role in my parents’ act. “Without my help, my father wouldn’t be able to do what he’s done for all these years—I don’t know who he will find to replace me.” A complicated expression passed across her face. “I loved playing the ignorant child, working the secret mechanism, soaking in the gasps and cheers when I reappeared—and pleasing him in the process—but I came to realize those cheers were for my father, not for me. I wanted to earn my own place on the stage.
“When I tried to explain that I wanted to create my own act, I’d hoped he would take it as a compliment, not a challenge, even if my addition to the show would end my usefulness as a shill in the crowd. I didn’t expect him to dismiss the idea entirely! Worse, he mocked me. ‘What is a woman’s place on the stage? Nobody would take you seriously as an illusionist. A magician’s assistant, as I’ve trained you, holding props and smiling and doing as you’re told. The stage isn’t yours to command.’” That last bit she spoke with bitterness in her voice.
At first she thought him right. She knew how to do only one thing: to disappear. Where would that get her? A woman might play a child, then a lovely assistant, then a bride, then a ghost or a widow; my uncle felt the same way, as evidenced by the invention of Johnny Chess. We were both told we would be laughed off the stage, and that people would willingly believe a man had turned his bride into an insubstantial ghost before their eyes, but would never stand for a woman performing similar feats.
I suppose there are some who would have abided by those restrictions (again, look at Johnny Chess), but Susanna had a sense of her own potential. So she’d waited. Observed. Her father had no use for her until her one task (or two: disappearance, reappearance), so she spent the early part of the show watching from the wing and learning what other performers’ tricks looked like from outside the permitted angle. Her time in her father’s act taught her what to look for when the sleight-of-hand and card magicians and escapologists took the stage: the tug on the thin wire; the quick hand to a secret pocket.
Now, as she slipped into the crowd to await her cue each night, her mind was busy planning. What kind of act could she create on her own? She contrived a performance that was more comedy than magic, the complete opposite of her father’s serious mien, in every way. She developed her tricks and her patter in secret from him, and the carnival’s carpenters helped her build new devices of her own design. And finally, just that afternoon, she had stolen across town and presented herself to the promoter of Albertini’s traveling variety show—the interaction I had spied upon—then returned to the fairgrounds to pack.
“When did you tell your father?” I had climbed into the other side of the bed, my mending forgotten. I had never done anything other than what I was supposed to; her nerve enthralled me.
“Da chose me from the audience as he always did, and I disappeared and reappeared as I always did, noticing for the last time how cramped it had become in the compartment where I hid. He’d never made any accommodation for me to grow. I didn’t want to disturb his performance, so I waited until afterward to tell him I was leaving.”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘You have no idea how to manage on your own. You’ll be back.’” The bitterness had crept back into her voice. “It was almost enough to make me wish I had simply not reappeared. I could have left him thinking he’d vanished me.”
So that was the day she had convinced Uncle Albert that he needed a comedy magic act, and that was the night Uncle Albert brought her to my room. It was a joy to have someone else close to my own age with whom to share meals and train rides, and to talk with late into the night. Here we were, Susanna trying to look older than her fifteen years, and me now seventeen and still playing twelve. Susanna inhabiting the only character she was allowed, and me doing the same. We made instant friends. Or almost-sisters, I guess, with all the complications of those relationships. We often passed as siblings on the street, and new arrivals to the show during that year assumed us to be.
Although I was older, I couldn’t help feeling like I had everything to learn from her; not just her bravery in setting out on her own, but her perception in carving her own Susanna-shaped space in our lineup. Even on her first night, to my eye she betrayed no nervousness, taking the stage as if she’d been performing her act for years, playing into her appearance and the audience’s expectation.
She was awkward-looking in the way of newborn foals that have yet to unfold. People expected her to be clumsy, and she had decided to use that to her advantage. She began with parlor magic, done in her own style. She tripped over her feet and spilled a deck of cards on her way across the stage, then marveled along with the audience that they had all landed edge up. She sneezed a bouquet of flowers into existence, then sneezed them into confetti. She pushed the novelty of it. Flowers! For me? A purse overflowing with coins, a wilting magic wand, a hat filled with other hats. Joke stuff, done jokingly, but she had guessed correctly that she would be allowed to do magic if she didn’t threaten the serious magicians with her existence. Easy to get laughs as a hapless, witless girl. It was genius.
I think I’ve set the stage now, at least the first bit. Our bill was a varied one, but my uncle savvied a night that built from act to act in a way audiences seemed to enjoy. We were well-reviewed and well-received. He’d chosen acts on the respectable side of entertainment, allowing us to play downtown theaters in every town, and travel by train from hotel to hotel rather than to dusty lots on the outskirts, in the manner in which Susanna had grown up.
In the first year after she joined our show I was as happy as I’d ever been; I suppose that’s why it took me a while to notice her growing frustration with the restrictions of the persona she’d created. At first, she had been fine with being the comedy break, having created the comedy act herself. She found it sufficient to have her own billing, to be paid and valued on her own merit. The problem was that nobody but me recognized that she was playing a character. My uncle had made it clear that we were not to be touched, but his protection did not extend to mockery; I noticed a tendency for the others to sneeze whenever she was in their presence, then elbow each other in amusement.
She asked me once if I thought she might be able to step away and return a boy, as I had done, a magic act of its own. By then she had grown less gangly, and I told her I didn’t think anyone would buy it. Anyway, the life I had wasn’t what she wanted; she wanted—needed—to be taken seriously. She went to Uncle Albert to ask permission to develop a new act; he said she could do so only if she worked it into the current one, which he thought perfect for her. “Why would you want to do anything else? You’re born to play a clown. The audience eats it up.”
Back in our room, she recounted the conversation I’d overheard. “Nobody is born to play a single role. Nobody is meant to do the same act forever.”
At my injured expression, she amended that statement. “You work the crowd, so even if you’re doing the same tricks, it changes from night to night. Anyway, I’m not talking about you; I’m talking about me. I have these new ideas, but they aren’t for laughs.”
We stopped talking then, and extinguished the light, drifting off across the gulf of understanding. I knew what she was trying to say, she had said it often enough in recent weeks, had shown me notebooks full of ideas, and yet I took from the conversation an implication that I had grown complacent and lazy. That I still performed—yes, with flair and aplomb—the exact tricks I had been taught as a child, and in that way, I was no different from the terriers. She said none of that.
She was thinking of herself, and I was thinking of me; nonetheless, I began to search for ways to prove to her that, like her, I was capable of developing new material. I spent my earnings at the newsstand, hoping to find a trick in one of the trade magazines to adapt and call my own, and scoured each city’s libraries for obscure magic books that might offer something forgotten that I might revive, and slunk in the corners of magic shops clad in my Johnny Chess armor. In truth, I feared I was no more than a talented mimic who lacked the imagination to move beyond what I’d been taught.
Her own new tricks, which she began to weave into her act between goofs and laughs, were impressive. She developed a levitation bit that it took me a dozen views to understand, and only then after watching from the rafters. Another involved a vase of water and a lit cigarette; the first time she performed that one, I gasped along with the audience, delighting in the feeling that true magic had taken place before my jaded eyes. The second time she performed it, I watched from behind her, and the third time from the wing, with no better understanding. I never found her notes on that one, and still puzzle over it to this day.
Her new work was as good or better than anything the marquee names were delivering. Frederic Bowers, Master of Mystery, had been doing the same ten illusions for the entirety of my time with the show. And yet, our reviews inevitably praised him and dismissed Susanna’s act as a novelty. “The air-headed young Miss Miller delivered ten minutes of nonstop laughs. She’ll make some man a lovely wife, though if he brings her flowers, she’s sure to sneeze them away.” The flower sneeze disappeared from her act the next night, though it had always gone over well.
The Master of Mystery never watched her, since he was usually in his dressing room putting on his own makeup at that time (and performing his own disappearing act on a bottle of cheap brandy). Someone must have told him she’d begun to encroach on his territory, because not long after she changed her repertoire, she came to me in a righteous fury.
“He told me he’s adding a cigarette trick to his act and I need to stop doing mine because there isn’t room for two! He said mine was coarse! Like he’d ever have thought of it. And that I was only on the bill to make people laugh.”
I worry that I was the one who put it in her mind. The big trick. The illusion meant to change her reputation. As I remember it, I said, “You need them to think about you differently once and for all.”
We were sitting in a café in central Texas, drinking lukewarm tea because there was no ice, and in my memory of that afternoon, everything beyond the window was scorched white as bone. “You’re the great mentalist,” she said. “You read people. How do I make this transformation in a way that they’ll accept?”
“What’s the transformation you want to make, exactly? What’s the new act? I can help better if I know the after, not only the moment of change.”
A wind picked up, pelleting the windows with grit. She ignored the distraction. “I’m done with parlor tricks and comedy. I’m an illusionist. I’ve got enough for a real act, see if I don’t.”
“I believe you,” I said. “But who is the character doing the act? How are you going to sell it? You know Uncle Albert won’t go for a woman illusionist without some kind of slant.”
“I’ve been thinking about that too. I’m done playing the klutz, and I’m not a bride or a fortune teller or a widow. I don’t fit any of those roles. I know I’m not beautiful but I think I could—”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
She laughed. “I was going to say I’m not beautiful but I think I can pull off elegant and mysterious. I’ll call myself something else, and people can forget Susanna Miller existed.”
“It all sounds great. But how are you going to convince him?” My uncle, I meant.
“I won’t need to.” She swirled her hands in front of her face. “I make the transformation on stage. I toss her out and make it clear that only my new self exists. He’ll see.”
She had obviously made up her mind. I didn’t point out that he rarely watched the show. Only one night’s audience would experience her grand transformation, and the next would know nothing of it if he didn’t alter the poster and his own introduction. Even if she did it every night, without his approval it would be a transformation without permanent change, reverting back the instant she was done. I figured the most likely thing to happen was that he’d tell her nothing doing and make her return to her regular act. Or he might dock her pay. At worst, fire her, but I think he liked having her around to keep me company as much as I did.
That night, she did the cigarette trick again, even though the Master of Mystery had told her not to. And the next night, and the next. The conversation had been between her and the headliner, and she was either gambling that he would not bother watching her again to find out she hadn’t listened, or that he wouldn’t escalate his complaint to my uncle. But someone told or else he watched again. I listened through the open door when Uncle Albert called her to his makeshift office in that week’s venue, a commandeered dressing room, the vanity piled high with ledgers.
“What do you mean I stole his trick? I developed it myself!”
“You can’t have done. That’s beyond your skills and we both know it.”
“We know nothing of the sort. It’s mine. I can set it up now and do it for you in ten minutes’ time. Ask him to perform it. He won’t be able to.”
“Not if you stole his gadget, he won’t. Look, Suzie. We’ve got two options here. You can give him his stuff back, or you can leave the show. I won’t have theft among my performers.”
“But he’s the one stealing from me! I’ve been doing that trick for weeks longer than he has. He’s stealing from me right in front of you and using you to do it!”
My uncle said nothing. The choice was clear, and it was equally clear to me that to her there was no choice at all.
I think she might have stuck around through the indignity of being asked to stop doing the illusion as long as everyone knew it was hers, but the idea that she might have stolen it was too much for her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so angry in my entire life, before or since. Her expression blazed through me as she passed out of that office, though I was not the target. She moved past me into the corridor as if I wasn’t even there.
I raced after her toward the hotel, but didn’t dare call out, lest she turn that look on me for real. I couldn’t have borne it, to be looked at in that way directly. I followed her to the hotel, where she flung open our room door and let it slam into the wall, either because she didn’t care anymore or because she knew I had trailed in behind her.
“You can still stay,” I said, though it was obvious she was leaving. “Come up with other new illusions. I could help.”
“Yes, you were so helpful back there.”
I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t realized she was aware I’d been outside the door, though she knew I often eavesdropped. Besides, I deserved her scorn. She was right; I could have stepped in, stood up to my uncle, said I’d watched her develop that illusion herself. Why hadn’t I?
She answered for me. “You’re afraid of him, afraid of leaving this show, afraid you aren’t good enough to do what you do elsewhere. You’re going to hide behind Johnny Chess forever, and if the day ever comes that you can’t, you have no other plan. I’m not like you. I can do this, and I will.”
And that was that. She stuffed her costumes into her battered suitcase, rang for a porter, and left. I don’t know where she went that night or the nights that followed. It was unclear to me whether she’d left her props at the theater deliberately or accidentally, so I packed her trunk and transported it with my own for several months, until my uncle told me it was taking up too much room. I abandoned it in a dusty backstage corner of our theater in Buffalo, with her name on the tag and a note from me inside.
In every town we passed through, I scoured the newspaper ads looking for her name on another show’s bill, but she seemed to have disappeared. I went back to my own act and my solitary existence. There’s no lonely as lonely as having known companionship only to be deprived of it.
My uncle found no comedy act like hers to fill her place in our bill. I remained the opening act, the warm up. Entertaining but not enough so to overshadow anyone who came after me. I had a home, a family of sorts; it seemed silly to waste that kind of security in uncertain times, so I stayed on.
To hear my uncle tell it, good times didn’t exist, anyway, only times where you wear your shoes until the leather gives out and times when you have money enough to patch one while waiting for the other to drop. I’ll put in a word for him here, since he’s not around to defend himself: Albert took me in when I needed a place to go. He made room for me on his stage, and approached my appearance in his life as a logistical problem to be overcome. He treated his performers well for the most part, paid well enough and booked tours that made sense. We never had to deal with the theater owners or irate patrons; he shielded us from such worries.
I was inclined to think kindly of my uncle; to make excuses, I guess I could now say. I had always thought of him as fair-minded, and I’d never had to confront him about anything myself. That was why I didn’t stand up for her. I was shocked that he didn’t believe her, and afraid I would lose his favor if I argued against him, and everything would come crashing down for me as well.
And so three years passed. I continued to tread water, playing a child savant to increasingly dubious crowds. Susanna’s spot on the lineup went to a second dog act, a collie named Mozart who could count, choose between items, climb a ladder, and play the xylophone with a mallet clenched between his teeth. The Master of Mystery died in his dressing room in Des Moines, and we went through a series of illusionists built on the same chassis. Over the hill, middling talent. Susanna’s father even did a stint, an old gray man who smelled like Pond’s cold cream and pomade. I watched his show on his first night expecting his finale to be an impressive disappearing act of the sort Susanna had described, but he did little more than pull rabbits from hats and stuff them back in again.
I approached his dressing room afterward and knocked on the open door. Rather than turning, he caught my eye in his bulb-ringed mirror.
“Come in,” he said, without trace of the imperious accent he’d used on stage. “You’re the mentalist. Less of a child up close.”
Less of a boy, too, in my own clothes. “Your daughter Susanna traveled with us for a while a few years back. I was wondering if you’d heard from her.”
He looked at me as if I had raised the dead, then proceeded to swipe at his pancaked makeup with a handkerchief while I told him about her comedy act and her ambitions. As I finished explaining her abrupt departure, he turned in his chair to look at me directly for the first time, pride and sadness dueling in his expression.
“Susanna will always want more than this world will give her.”
I refrained from telling him that from her perspective, he had been part of the world’s withholding. After that night, he often chose the seat beside me on the train, as if spending time in my presence might somehow substitute for time in hers. He left our show after only a few months, and in parting asked me to write to him if I ever crossed paths with Susanna again.
When at last I caught a glimpse of her, it was in an issue of Conjuring Monthly. A female magician named “The Magnificent Millay” had a whole paragraph in the New Faces in Magic column, and I remembered she’d once said she might call herself by a different name when she reinvented her act. The picture was grainy and indistinct, but the description sounded like her. “Miss Millay’s origins are shrouded in mystery, and her stagecraft puts her on a par with the most storied illusionists of our time. In fact, her detractors say she’s too good. If she keeps with it, she will be a talent to watch.”
From then on, I kept an eye out for the name Millay instead of Miller. She spent some time on a show on a similar circuit to our own, so that I found echoes of her wherever I went: posters advertising her recent appearances or her upcoming ones. She had made it as high as second billing on some. Reviews, sometimes, though most dismissed her with some variation on “surprisingly good.” They agreed with my uncle that women couldn’t be illusionists, but if one could give it a go, well, maybe it was her. I clipped every mention I came across over the subsequent four years.
And then one November morning as our train pulled into New York, my uncle received a telegram saying our venue had been rented out for a private function and would not be available for the first night of our run. Uncle Albert fumed and carried on that it was unethical and unbusinesslike and we would be taking our show to other theaters in the future, but there was nothing to be done. We went straight to the Royalton instead of to the theater, pelted by a cold and slanting rain that added to the indignity, defeating our umbrellas and drenching our legs.
An envelope waited for my uncle at the hotel desk.
“What do you make of this?” He passed it to me and I read it. It requested his attendance at a show billed as “The Illusion to End All Illusions.” One night only. The invitation was signed “The Magnificent Millay.”
I was delighted for her. “That’s Susanna! She did it!” I waved the card at Uncle Albert, then turned to address the desk clerk. “Is there another?”
The clerk looked through the mail. “There’s one for Frederic Bowers, Master of Mystery. Is that you?” He clearly did not think so, even though I wore my Johnny Chess traveling outfit.
“Lottie,” my uncle said, since nobody but the clerk was close enough to hear what he called me. He tapped the card in my hand and I examined it more closely. I noticed the location, and realized it was our canceled venue, that night. Her show was the private event that had booted us.
Beneath the print and the signature, a handwritten line: “You owe me your attention after letting the Manservant of Misery steal my cigarette bit. Don’t bring the kid. —SM”
I was hurt, far more than I would have expected, perhaps because the slide started at the height of excitement, and thus had further to plunge. “The kid,” so dismissive, after all the time we had spent together. She knew I wasn’t a child, even if I played one. I didn’t even merit an invitation? Worse, unbearably worse, I was specifically uninvited.
I went, of course. I told the desk clerk I would bring the other letter to my colleague, The Master of Mystery; he, being dead, would not be using his ticket, so it wasn’t a terrible lie. I could never be mistaken for him—putting aside his demise, he had been voluminous in all directions—and so I borrowed a brocaded silver dress from the hypnotist’s wife in hope of blending in with a well-heeled crowd.
The Majestad’s storied marquee dazzled with the light of six hundred bulbs, and below the venue name in changeable letters, “The Magnificent Millay—SOLD OUT.” Posters on either side of the doors showed a shapely tuxedoed figure, arms raised like a maestro, framed by red curtains; I recognized something of Suzanne in the face. The copy said, “Prepare to be AMAZED and ASTOUNDED.”
In the lobby, I recognized many faces from my magazines. It was a Monday night in New York, and some of them may have been in the city already, but they couldn’t all have been in town by coincidence; they must have traveled specifically to attend. The mentalist Hermann de Villiers chatted with illusionist Maxim Thibodaux and the escape artist known as the Turk, who wore an ordinary tuxedo instead of the tunic and loose pants he performed in. There were newspapermen as well, but I edged past them to hover behind the great magicians and listen in on their conversation.
“I’ve been told she’s been doing my Attenuated Man illusion,” said Thibodaux. “If that’s ‘the illusion to end all illusions’ I’m going to end her career before it’s barely begun.”
“She sent me an invitation thanking me for letting her use my Open Book. I would never have! Word is her entire act is stolen. At least we’ll all be here to see it once and for all.”
I wandered the lobby, catching fragments of similar stories from other luminaries of the field. She’d stolen her whole act, she had specifically stolen his trick or his or his, and it was about time someone exposed her as a fraud. She could not be as good as people said without having taken from other, better performers. Send her back to wherever she came from, she didn’t belong on a stage. I hoped for her sake that whatever she planned to do was more original than what they all thought she was doing.
We showed invitations again at the inner door, and I was directed to a seat in the front row. How strange walking down the aisle from the lobby; I’d played the Majestad before, but only ever experienced it from a performer’s perspective. All theaters look the same from the stage, the lights obliviating everything that exists beyond their dark edge. I sank into a red velveteen chair, taking in for the first time the enormous crystal chandeliers, the frescoed ceiling and walls, the heavy curtains obscuring all hint of the show we were about to watch.
A moment later, an usher approached me. “I’m sorry, madam, you’ll have to leave. I’m told that seat was reserved for someone else.”
I showed my invitation again and promised that I was the person in question. The usher looked dubious but walked away. A moment later he returned, this time with the house manager, who scowled at me from behind heavy eyebrows and a heavier mustache. “I saw the Master of Mystery many times. You’re not him.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “What’s the harm?”
“Even so, that’s his seat.” The manager pointed toward the lobby. I slunk up the aisle followed by a two-man escort.
She clearly knew I was there and didn’t want me, which added to my determination to attend the show. Even if we hadn’t played the Majestad before, a lifetime in theaters didn’t go unwasted. The stage door in the alley had been left unlocked, and I slipped in through there.
Backstage was quieter than I was used to. A one-woman show meant nobody milled about waiting for their cue. I found my way through the shadowy maze, past the dressing rooms and around to the right wing, piled high with unused sets and props.
I would have liked to have watched from my (his) front row seat, to experience Susanna’s show as it was meant to be experienced. I would have liked to have cheered my friend on as she performed an act that I presumed she’d designed to show her detractors once and for all that she was capable of commanding a stage despite her membership in the lesser sex. That had to be the reason she’d made these specific invitations, and for taunting them with fake admissions that she’d stolen their tricks. The performers who had mocked her work, the promoters and producers who had allowed that to happen, and kept her to lower billing. The reporters who had belittled her. Whatever illusion she had created, she planned to prove herself to them all. I desperately wanted to see it, even if from where I stood in the right wing, I would take in the performance and the trick of it simultaneously. Not ideal, but I’d been left no other option.
In the moment before Susanna took the stage, I caught her peeking out at the crowd through a hole in the curtain. She observed her audience, and I observed her. She wore a tailored black tailcoat over a silver dress, and her hair held a soft curl. She looked elegant; I had never seen her look elegant before.
She stepped back then, and looked directly across at me, then strode across the stage, still hidden by the closed curtain. The clumsiness had always been an act, but nonetheless, I had never seen her walk with such command. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You can’t be here.”
“I want to watch,” I said, sounding like a petulant child, exactly what I didn’t want. “Why can’t I use Bowers’s seat? He’s dead.”
There was no surprise on her face at that announcement; no disappointment, no glee. She acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “You’re not supposed to be here. Please, go.”
She couldn’t make me. I knew that, and she did too. Oh, she could call the house manager again, throw me out on my ear, have me arrested, but all of that would take time she didn’t have. The thing was, I didn’t think I deserved her hatred, or worse, her disdain, but I also didn’t want to make it worse. The others out in the darkened auditorium were there because they had disrespected her and stolen from her. If I stayed, I would be stealing her moment and her attention. This was a special night for her, and she didn’t want me there; maybe the gift I could give her, despite my hurt, was to respect her wishes and leave.
“I just wanted to tell you I believe in you,” I said. “Break a leg.” I kissed her cheek—she smelled like lilacs—and ducked back into the darkness, intending to find my way back out the way I had come in. The pulleys creaked as the curtains opened, and polite applause filtered back to me. Spotlit, she wouldn’t be able to see the skeptics that composed her audience, but she would feel their dour energy. She’d deliberately invited a hostile crowd.
In the backstage maze, I came to an open dressing room. The light was on, and I recognized her trunks and suitcases against the wall, her coat on a peg. I would have walked on past, if I hadn’t spotted a notebook on the vanity table, among the cosmetics and wigs.
On the notebook’s pages, in her looping handwriting, she had recorded her illusions. Drafts, second drafts, descriptions crossed out and rewritten in new and better forms. The pledge, the turn, the prestige, all documented alongside technical diagrams. Anyone with this book would know she had developed all of these herself, and she’d meant me to find it, I was as sure of that as if she’d put my name on the cover. Had she planned to come to the hotel and give this to me after the show? She had expressly uninvited me; kicked me out, even. But then, she knew me, knew my penchant for lingering by doors I hadn’t been invited through.
I don’t know which illusions she performed leading up to the finale. I only know what the reviewers said the next day: that no words would do it justice, so they would never write again. The magicians in the audience never performed again either, leaving gaps filled by our Ladies’ Wave in the ensuing years. My uncle never spoke of what he saw. There is a hole in the world, a hole in my knowledge, exactly the size and shape of that theater on that evening. After reading her notebook, I’d barely made it back to the wing when she introduced her finale.
If I’ve explained well, you will now be asking which props were already on the stage. (She was surrounded by iconic items that I recognized from other magicians’ shows: an enormous tome on a pedestal, a twisted metal tower, a wardrobe draped in chains. And flowers. Flowers everywhere despite the late season, roses and peonies and orchids and lilacs and foxgloves and dahlias, in bouquets of every hue and strewn on every surface.)
You will be asking why she would have gone to the expense and effort of arranging this event. (What I think: She wanted to be known on her own merits, and she wanted to be respected, to demonstrate once and for all that her act was her own. She wanted her name, her chosen name, to be associated with her skill and ingenuity; I still can’t understand why or how she walked away.)
I don’t know what became of Susanna. I never saw her again. Ever after, on any night I wasn’t performing, I haunted the other shows in town, hoping perhaps she would appear under another pseudonym, to no avail. She’d spent her entire childhood disappearing and reappearing, though, and some nights I leave my door unlocked, hoping she will slip in to whisper with me as we did in the brief time when we were friends.
She had to have known I would be there; she had to have planned it all. That I would attend specifically because I was uninvited, that I would be kicked out and make my way backstage, and find her there, and promise to go, and from there come to her dressing room, and the notebook meant for me, and her wigs and costumes. I think about how in my time as Johnny Chess I guided my mark toward the choice I wanted them to make. She wanted me to agree to leave, and then to stay, to force me to live with the fact that I was just like the others, and to carry that with me always. Though not quite like the others, because again, she made sure I wound up backstage, not in the crowd; a category of one. Because I arrived at the wing in time to catch only her grand finale, from outside the angle of illusion. Because of this, I was changed, but not in the same way the others were.
I was by then experienced in my trade. I knew where to look when attention was being directed elsewhere. But—and this is the truth, I swear it—as she began to speak, I was so caught up in her words, in the way she captured attention, in the spell of her voice, that I forgot to follow her hands. I looked out into the darkness beyond the spotlight, and as my eyes adjusted, I began to discern individuals within the crowd, the upturned faces moving from skepticism to wonder to despair, then the white blaze of nothingness that overtook them. I missed entirely the trick itself, seeing it only second-hand: a warped reflection, a flickering too-bright flame, an explosion of flowers, a racing shadow that made a sound like clashing teeth and smelled like lilacs, then valerian. Everything that had been on the stage was gone except the flowers.
I stumbled back toward the dressing room as the curtain fell on silence. My eyes hurt, and it took several minutes before the afterimage of Susanna, standing tall and sure, arms raised, chin high, began to fade. When eventually my eyes worked properly again, I flipped through more of her notebook, looking for some explanation of what I had just witnessed, waiting for her to take her curtain call and then return to this room. She’d described nothing like that final trick anywhere in the book, and when I came to the final page, it said simply, “Take it all.”
So that’s what I did, in that moment when I knew with a strange certainty that she wasn’t coming back. I fastened one of her wigs on my head, put one of her black tailcoats over my dress, and stepped out into the sea of flowers to take her bow. The audience should have been gone by then, the show clearly long over, and yet they were still there waiting for her reappearance. Some of them wept as they applauded. Some were still in their seats when I left the building, unable or unwilling to stand.
I returned to her dressing room a third time. When I put her coat over her costume, I discovered a key in the pocket for a room at the Ekphrastic, across the street from the Royalton. At the hotel—no Susanna of course—more notebooks, with a detailed itinerary for a spring tour, and repertoire laid out from opener to finale. Not the same finale she had just performed, but the kind of mundane but impressive thing a talented mimic might be able to manage, given a few months’ practice. This transformation, too, I privately credit to the real Magnificent Millay, as I do my entire subsequent career.
Here’s the thing: It’s only called an illusion if you are around afterward to shake hands and listen to others gab and guess how you did it. If you aren’t there, it’s a trick gone wrong. An incident, unreplicable. In my own notes, this is the one and only Millay Illusion, and it did exactly what she wanted it to do; I just haven’t come to understand it yet.
Some days, I believe my distraction is what saved me; some days I think it was the angle at which I stood to the stage. Some days I believe she orchestrated every move I made that day, from the Bowers invitation to the open dressing room to the curtain call. It was a gift to me, or a punishment, or something more complicated. I was her witness and her legacy. She could have asked and I would have offered freely, I think, but maybe it had to be this way.
Most of the others are dead now, Hermann de Villiers and Maxim Thibodaux, my uncle Albert, and the rest, but I think they were actually dead already when they walked out of the Majestad, even if they didn’t know it; that they walked out of there dead men, and if I’d been in front I’d be dead too.
Over the years I talked to them, asked them questions, and none ever had any clue what they lost. What disappeared. The ones who are left don’t even remember that night, can’t keep it in their minds long enough to share a memory, except that to a man they all light up when I speak her name to identify myself. Millay, now there was a magician, they say, looking past me as if I were not standing there. As if they had each experienced a moment of wonder, and none of them had felt anything at all since.
(Editors’ Note: “The Millay Illusion” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 67A.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
© 2025 Sarah Pinsker
