Passing Strange Read online

  “How will that help?”

  “By creating a temporary rearrangement of the available space. A short cut.” She put it into the pocket of her trousers. “It’s a—hobby—of mine.”

  They walked to the end of the alley and turned right into a shaded lane. Houses lined one side, facing a high rock-walled garden.

  “What the hell just happened?” Helen asked, her voice loud with surprise. “That wasn’t a mile. And there was no hill at all.”

  “Oh, there was. Is.” Franny said vaguely. “San Francisco is a city well-suited to magic.” She unfolded the paper and placed it in a soot-tarnished brass bowl on her doorstep. Striking a match, she lit one corner and watched it crumble to ash. “There. All back in place again.”

  “What the—?”

  “It’s complicated.” Franny held the door open. “Let’s have a drink, shall we?

  “Sure.” Helen looked back at the street with a bewildered expression. “I think I need one.”

  The house had irregular brickwork and a bay window below a copper-domed cupola. They stepped into a hallway, white walls full of colorful art, a staircase rising on the right.

  Helen smiled when they reached the archway that opened onto the second floor, one large, airy space with a kitchen and small table at the near end, and low green armchairs and a couch grouped around a rug at the other. Between them a spiral staircase helixed up next to a library table covered with books and maps. Paper sculptures in bright colors dotted the overflowing bookshelves.

  “I love this room,” she said. “Is that new ori-kami?”

  Franny raised an eyebrow. “It’s not a well-known art in this country.”

  “My grandmother folded animals for me when I was little.”

  “Ah.”

  Facing north, a wall of atelier windows, reminiscent of Paris, angled in to the ceiling. Seven wide panes spanned the width of the room, thin dividers painted the green of young spinach. Beyond the glass lay the city. Ziggurats of stone walls and white houses cascaded vertically down to the bay and Alcatraz and the blue-distant hills.

  Two walls were covered, floor-to-ceiling, with a hodgepodge of books: crumbling leather-bound tomes—many of them in languages Helen did not recognize; technical books and treatises on cartography, mathematics, and alchemy; a scattering of modern best sellers; and heavy, illustrated volumes on art from antiquity to Bauhaus.

  Franny laid out the drinks cart while Helen perused the shelves and, as always, admired the view. The front door opened, followed by the soft tread of footsteps. A woman with short, honey-colored hair and tortoiseshell spectacles appeared, wearing a skirt and sweater and carrying two flat cardboard boxes, envelopes and magazines stacked on top of them.

  “You got your mail, Babs?” Franny kissed the woman on the cheek.

  “I stopped by Terry’s after class.” She set the boxes down on the kitchen table. “And picked up two pies from Lupo’s. I’ll slide them into the oven to keep warm. Hello, Helen. You look quite spiffy today.”

  “Thanks,” Helen replied. “Why don’t they just drop your mail through the slot?”

  “I use my sister’s house as my ‘official’ address. If the university found out about Franny and me, I’d be out on my ear.”

  “The risks of being a professor.”

  “I wish. I’m still just a mathematics lecturer. Seems my Ph.D. is less significant than my ovaries. This semester I have one class of bonehead algebra, and I’m training some aspiring computers to use slide rules and logarithmic tables.”

  “Fun stuff.”

  “It has its moments.” Babs removed lettuce, green onions, a carrot, and an alligator pear from the refrigerator. “Pop a bottle of the Chianti, Fran?”

  “Just did. And opened the bourbon. Haskel will want a cocktail.”

  “Truer words.” She turned to Helen. “Name your poison.”

  “Beer, please.” She draped her suit jacket over the back of a chair. “Mind if I kick these heels off? My dogs are killing me.”

  “Make yourself comfortable.” Franny set about clearing the library table, laying out five woven mats and matching napkins. Babs added a cruet of oil and vinegar and a wooden bowl brimming with greens and chopped vegetables.

  “It’s open,” Franny called at the sound of a knock.

  “I see,” said a voice from below. This woman was close to six feet in flat shoes, broad-shouldered and long-legged. Her hair was a deep blond, pulled back and fastened with a silvery clip at the nape of her neck. She wore khaki slacks, a white shirt dusted with smudges of color, and a simple blue pendant. She brushed at a smear of crimson on her rolled-up sleeve. “Sorry,” she said in a low, throaty voice. “I was working on a painting and didn’t have time to change.” She set a paper sack on the table.

  Franny smiled. “You know the Circle is come as you are, Haskel. Drink?”

  “Please. Hi, Helen.” She accepted a squat tumbler of amber whiskey, and lit a cigarette, the first of many. “Do I smell Lupo’s?”

  “You do. One cheese and olives, one prosciutto and peppers.”

  “My family is baffled that I eat pie for dinner,” Helen said. “I tell them it’s a neighborhood specialty, but they still think it’s queer.”

  “It certainly is tonight.” Franny laughed. She turned toward the kitchen. “In ten minutes I’m going to take the pizzas out before they turn into roof tiles. I hope our last guest can find the place.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A delightful young thing I found at Mona’s.”

  Everyone was helping herself to a second drink when another knock sounded.

  “It’s open.”

  A moment later, a slender, athletic woman bounded up the stairs, two at a time, and stood in the archway, slightly breathless. She had short, curly auburn hair, freckles, and a crooked grin. Dressed in dungarees and a plaid cotton shirt, she could easily have been mistaken for a boy.

  “Sorry if I’m late. I got rather lost,” she said with the plummy, slightly clipped intonation of a New England blue blood. “Something smells delicious.”

  Franny slid the flat, fragrant tomato pies onto a platter and began cutting each of them into eight wedges. “It does. You’re just in time to eat.” She gestured around the room. “First, let me make introductions. Emily Netterfield, meet my partner-in-crime, Barbara Weiss. Babs. Helen Young, my attorney. And my dear friend, Loretta Haskel.”

  “Just Haskel is fine.”

  “We met years ago in the library at the Art Institute,” Franny said. “I was researching pigments—”

  “—and I was looking at naughty pictures.”

  “For fun or profit?” Emily asked. She accepted a glass of wine and sat in the nearest chair.

  “Both. I’m a painter. And I like naked women.”

  Babs smiled. “Don’t we all?” She took a seat at the end of the table.

  “Have I seen your work?” Emily asked.

  “It depends. Do you read Weird Menace?”

  “That penny dreadful? No, can’t say as I do.”

  “Then probably not.” Haskel stubbed out her cigarette and sat down with the others.

  They ate and conversed, passing the salad and the slices of pie. They were all old friends, and Emily felt a little out of place. They weren’t excluding her, but she knew none of the people or events they discussed. She’d been surprised at the invitation to this dinner party, unsure why she’d accepted. Perhaps because Franny had seemed like a cultured, educated—and like-minded—woman, and she longed for that connection. She’d been in the city more than a year, but had found it hard to make new friends.

  She’d gone to girls’ schools, assumed she’d be a spinster English teacher like Miss Schaefer. That changed in her junior year at Wellesley, when she’d met Jilly. Fast friends, and then more, and then true love. Capital T, capital L. They planned to get an apartment together after graduation, live like Bohemians, gloriously free.

  But a nosy proctor sent their lives down the rabbit h
ole. They shared a room, as girls do, and a bed, as nice girls do not. Both were expelled. No time to say goodbye. She was packing when Jilly’s parents came to drive her to the country “for a rest.” A lovely place with green lawns and locked doors and treatments to help Jilly become a suitable wife for the understanding husband they would provide.

  Typewriter in one hand, suitcase in the other, Emily boarded a westbound train before her own parents had the chance to decide her future. She stared without seeing as the country rolled by, no life, no plans. Three days later, she was in San Francisco.

  “—don’t you?”

  Emily started. Franny was looking at her. “Sorry,” she said. “Woolgathering. It’s the wine. Goes straight to my head.” She felt herself redden and changed the subject. “That’s a lovely necklace,” she said to Haskel, across the table. “What sort of stone is it?” It was an irregular, pale blue oval that flashed a deep indigo in the right light.

  “I don’t know. It’s from the old country. When I graduated from high school, my bubbe gave it to me, along with her recipe for tundérpör and a bus ticket out of Pittsburgh. Told me it will help me escape trouble if I always wear it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Why tempt fate?”

  Emily helped herself to another slice of pie. “I’m afraid I don’t believe in that kind of supernatural baloney.”

  “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” Franny fitted a cigarette into her jade holder. “Do you believe in luck?”

  “Well, I—”

  “There. You see. Rabbit’s foot, four-leaf clover. Everyone makes some exceptions.” She patted Babs’s hand. “Even my logical, pragmatic friend here put a mezuzah on the front door.”

  Helen looked up. “That’s religion, not magic.”

  “Is there a difference?” Franny asked. “Don’t science, magic, and religion all claim to reveal worlds of mystery and unexpected possibilities?”

  “Here we go,” Babs said with a smile. “Franny’s hobbyhorse.”

  “What if the ‘supernatural’ is just—” Franny continued, “—the odds and ends we don’t yet know how to label?”

  “Franny’s certainly got talents I can’t explain,” said Helen. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think she’s a, a—” she stammered, groping for a word. “A witch.”

  “That is an ugly, prejudicial term.” Franny made a face. “Like dike.”

  Helen nodded. “Or Chink. Sorry. I get it. But you must be some kind of—?”

  “In essence, yes.” Franny sighed and turned to Emily, who was chuckling. “You’re a skeptic. You don’t believe in powerful, invisible forces?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Radio waves? Magnetism?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Is it? How about mysteriously glowing deadly rocks?” Franny smiled. “Oh, right. Radium is science.”

  Emily shook her head. “Now you’re confusing apples and oranges.”

  “Really? I find apples often turn out to be oranges.” She stubbed out her cigarette and produced a hand-rolled one in a second holder of black jet. “The green one is only for tobacco,” she explained. She lit the end, drew the smoke in, and handed it to Helen.

  “Think about, oh—germs,” Franny said, exhaling slowly. “That’s proper science now, but in the past, sickness was linked to witchcraft, the devil. Woo-oo-ooo.” She made a spooky noise. “Even fifty years ago—modern times—the very idea that tiny, tiny animals were the cause of disease got some doctors laughed out of the academy.”

  Helen turned to Babs. “You’re the scientific sort. What do you think of all this?”

  “I have to admit, I’ve seen Franny do things that can’t be understood logically.” She took a drag on the reefer, passed it on to Haskel. “Although I’m making headway. My dissertation was on topology, rubber-sheet geometry—the properties of a surface that don’t change when it’s stretched or twisted.”

  “Or folded,” Franny added.

  “Yes.” She thought for a moment. “I’ll give you a demonstration.” She got up, carrying a pile of plates to the kitchen, and returned with a second bottle of wine and a long strip of paper. She made a dot on one side, labeling it A, turned the paper over and made another dot, B. “Two points, one on the front, one on the back, right? No way to connect them.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Okay.” She twisted the strip and fastened the loose ends with a paper clip. “How about now?”

  “Still one dot on each side,” Emily said with confidence. This was a very odd party.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve dealt with paper before. Always has two sides.”

  “Okay. Let’s test that hypothesis. Haskel, you’re good with a pencil. See if you can connect the dots.”

  “My hand’s a little wobbly at the moment, but I’ll try,” Haskel said. She laid the paper on the table and touched the pencil to the A. She slowly drew a line down the narrow strip, pulling the paper along, the pencil never leaving the surface, until its tip touched the B. “Like that?”

  Emily stared. “How on earth—?”

  “It’s called a Mobius strip,” Babs said. “After the twist, it only has one side.”

  Helen whistled. “Pretty slick. Is that how Franny’s little short cuts work?”

  “What short cuts?” Emily asked.

  “I’m a cartographer. Under the right circumstances, I can create maps that, when folded precisely, form unexpected pathways.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “She’s not,” Babs said. “And yes, Helen, I think it is, at least in theory. I’ve seen those short cuts. Since anything observable can be described mathematically, they should be reproducible.”

  “How’s that going?” Haskel said.

  “I’m stuck in some fairly key places.”

  Franny patted her hand. “It’s magic, darling. Some bits are beyond the laws of logic.” She stopped for a moment. “Hmm. No—magic does—must—obey its own laws, they just can’t be expressed in your terms.”

  “Yet,” Babs said. “The ori-kami folding is mathematically elegant and topologically fascinating. So is cartographic theory. But merely combining the two has no effect. That’s where I’m flummoxed. Franny does something—else—that transforms space and time.”

  “Time?” Franny looked startled. “Oh. I hadn’t—I suppose so, which means—” she put down her napkin and got up. “Forgive my rudeness, but I must make a few notes. Carry on. This is a most scintillating group.”

  Babs twiddled the paper loop. “Trying to quantify Franny’s work may be a wild goose chase, but that’s how mathematical breakthroughs happen—trying to describe the indescribable. Finding the pattern no one else has noticed.”

  “I’d call that creativity,” Haskel said, nodding. “It’s not rational either, not—pin-down-able.”

  “Yep. There’s as much art to science as there is science to art.”

  “I’ll buy that. Light and shadow, perspective. I don’t pretend to understand the physics or geometry, but I couldn’t paint without them.”

  “Don’t forget the magic words,” Emily said, a note of mockery in her voice. She felt very peculiar. She didn’t smoke, but the air was quite fragrant, and she was no longer sure what she believed.

  “I can’t forget them,” Haskel said. “When I said, ‘I do’ ten years ago, it certainly changed my world.”

  “You’re married?” Emily had assumed everyone at the table was, well—like her. She felt an odd surge of disappointment, which was ridiculous. She had no interest at all in this calm, gray-eyed painter. None. She poured herself more wine.

  “Me too,” said Helen. “It’s convenient. Eddie—my dance partner—is a nance. He needed the respectability, and marrying a white girl is illegal so—” She shrugged. “Besides, I like his last name. Mine was too long to fit on a marquee.”

  “What was it?” Babs asked.

  “Yamaguchi.”

  “You’r
e Japanese?”

  “No, just American. Born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. So was my dad, and my grandfather. I don’t speak the language, I don’t know much about the culture. I just look foreign.” She patted her own cheek. “Other than this mug of mine, I’m as much Japanese as you are, what—German? Everyone has ancestors.”

  “My mother’s people came over on the Mayflower,” Emily said. Conversation stopped. The others looked at her. Flustered, she said quickly, “Why pretend to be Chinese?”

  “I don’t. Well, except at work, but so do half the other performers—Korean, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese—the tourists can’t tell the difference. To them we’re all just mysterious Orientals.”

  “Ah. Speaking of which,” Haskel said. “I have something for you.” She opened the paper sack and took out two magazines, their unbound edges ragged, rough as slices of raw tree. The vivid cover of Weird Menace showed a naked woman, her breasts barely concealed by a spill of blond hair, fleeing from a swarm of tiny winged demons. Diabolical Dr. Wu Yang featured another scantily clad woman in peril, this one threatened on one side by a lobsterish creature and on the other by a sinister-looking man in Chinese robes, his talon-like nails reaching for her throat. CLAWS OF THE YELLOW LEGION was printed beneath the image.

  “Ugh,” Emily said. “Those are almost—pornographic.”

  “I didn’t even know Haskel owned a pornograph,” Helen said, reaching for the second magazine. “I turned out pretty good.” She laughed when Babs raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t I mention that I model for Haskel from time to time?”

  “When I need an Oriental villain.”

  “Aren’t they all, in your line of work?” Babs asked.

  “Yes. And all scientists are evil, busy inventing death rays or breeding monsters.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby. Fran, have you seen my death ray?”

  “It’s in the cupboard, with the clean linens,” Franny said, returning to the table. “Now, who’s ready for dessert?”

  Forbidden Love