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A Novel
by Chloe Benjamin
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All the while, something loomed larger, closer, until Simon was forced to see it in all its terrible majesty: his future. Daniel had always planned to be a doctor, which left one son—Simon, impatient and uncomfortable in his skin, let alone in a double-breasted suit. By the time he was a teenager, the women's clothing bored him and the wools made him itch. He resented the tenuousness of Saul's attention, which he sensed would not last his departure from the business, if such a thing were even possible. He bristled at Arthur, who was always at his father's side, and who treated Simon like a helpful little dog. Most of all, he felt something far more confusing: that the shop was Saul's true home, and that his employees knew him better than his children ever did.
Today, Arthur brings three deli platters and a tray of smoked fish. He bends his long, swanlike neck to kiss Gertie's cheek.
"What will we do, Arthur?" she asks, her mouth in his coat.
"It's terrible," he says. "It's horrific."
Tiny droplets of spring rain perch on Arthur's shoulders and on the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, but his eyes are sharp.
"Thank God for you. And for Simon," Gertie says.
On the last night of shiva, while Gertie sleeps, the siblings take to the attic. They're worn down, washed out, with bleary, baggy eyes and curdled stomachs. The shock hasn't faded; Simon cannot imagine it ever fading. Daniel and Varya sit on an orange velvet couch, stuffing spurting from the armrests. Klara takes the patchwork ottoman that once belonged to now-dead Mrs. Blumenstein. She pours bourbon into four chipped teacups. Simon hunches cross-legged on the floor, swirling the amber liquid with his finger.
"So, what's the plan?" he asks, glancing at Daniel and Varya. "You're heading out tomorrow?"
Daniel nods. He and Varya will catch early trains back to school. They've already said goodbye to Gertie and promised to return in a month, when their exams are finished.
"I can't take any more time off if I'm going to pass," Daniel says. "Some of us"—he nudges Klara with his foot—"worry about that sort of thing."
Klara's senior year ends in two weeks, but she's already told her family she won't walk at graduation. ("All those penguins, shuffling around in unison? It's not me.") Varya is studying biology and Daniel hopes to be a military doctor, but Klara doesn't want to go to college. She wants to do magic.
She's spent the past nine years under the tutelage of Ilya Hlavacek, an aging vaudevillian and sleight-of-hand magician who is also her boss at Ilya's Magic & Co. Klara first learned of the shop at the age of nine, when she purchased The Book of Divination from Ilya; now, he is as much a father to her as Saul was. A Czech immigrant who came of age between the World Wars, Ilya—seventy-nine, stooped and arthritic, with a troll's tuft of white hair—tells fantastic tales of his stage years: one he spent touring the Midwest's grimiest dime museums, his card table mere feet from rows of pickled human heads; the Pennsylvania circus tent in which he successfully vanished a brown Sicilian donkey named Antonio as one thousand onlookers burst with applause.
But over a century has passed since the Davenport brothers invoked spirits in the salons of the wealthy and John Nevil Maskelyne made a woman levitate in London's Egyptian Theatre. Today, the luckiest of America's magicians manage theatrical special effects or work elaborate shows in Las Vegas. Almost all of them are men. When Klara visited Marinka's, the oldest magic shop in the country, the young man at the register glanced up with disdain before directing her to a bookshelf marked Witchcraft. ("Bastard," Klara muttered, though she did buy Demonology: The Blood Summonings just to watch him squirm.)
Excerpted from The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. Copyright © 2018 by Chloe Benjamin. Excerpted by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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