"I'd like to meet someone, you know," Sammy said at last. "I mean, I've been thinking. Just recently. Meet someone nice."

His mother shut off the tap and pulled the stopper from the drain. Her hands were bright red from the scalding water.

"I'd like that, too," she said. She opened another drawer and took out the box of waxed paper. She tore off a piece, spread it on the zinc counter, and took a dish from the rack.

"So how was he?" she asked him, setting the dish upside down on the sheet of waxed paper.

"Who's that?"

She nodded toward the dining room. "That one." She folded the ends of the sheet of paper up over the dish and smoothed them down. "At the rehearsal today."

"He was all right," Sammy said. "He was good. Yeah, I think he'll do fine."

"Will he?" she said, and, lifting the wrapped dish, she looked him in the eye for the first time all evening.

Though it would recur often enough in his memory in later years, he would never know exactly what she had meant by that look.

The following day, a wealthy young New Yorker named Leon Douglas Saks followed in the footsteps of his grandfathers and was called before the Torah to become a bar mitzvah. He was a second cousin of Rosa's, and although she had never met the boy, she managed without too much trouble to wangle an invitation to the reception at the Pierre as the date of one of the entertainers on the bill, the performing magician known as the Amazing Cavalieri.

When she woke from a post-coital nap that Saturday afternoon, in her bedroom under the eaves, the Amazing Cavalieri was standing in front of her scarf-draped mirror, looking with remarkable interest at his own naked reflection. Rosa pulled a pillow over her head and lay very still so that she could watch him watching himself. She could smell the trace of his breath in her own exhalations, the indeterminate but distinctive flavor of his lips, somewhere between maple and smoke. At first, as she watched him, she thought that he was engaging in rank self-admiration, and since she considered his lack of vanity about his appearance-his ink-stained shirtfronts, rumpled jackets, and ragged trouser cuffs-to be itself a kind of vanity, one for which she loved him, she was amused. She wondered if he could see how much weight he had added to his long, spare frame over the last several months. When they had first started going out, he was so absorbed by his work that he rarely took time for meals, existing quite mysteriously on coffee and bananas, but as Rosa herself, to her considerable satisfaction, had begun to absorb Joe more and more, he had become a regular guest at her father's dinner table, where there were never fewer than five courses and three different varieties of wine. His ribs no longer stuck out, and his skinny little-boy's behind had taken on a manlier heft. It was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and every day there was more of him on this side of the ocean. She wondered if this could be what he was looking at now-this evidence of his irrefutable existence here, on this shore, in this bedroom, as her Joe. For a while she lay staring at the gloved knuckles of his spine, the stippled pale stone of his shoulders. Presently, however, she became aware of the way he kept narrowing and widening his blue eyes, tightening them at the corners and then opening them into a pop-eyed stare, over and over again. As he did so he moved his lips constantly, engaging in some kind of patter or incantation. From time to time he gestured broadly, flourishing his fingers around a handful of empty air, pointing proudly at some invisible wonderful thing.

Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and threw off the pillow.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He jumped and knocked his cigarette from the ashtray on her dressing table. He retrieved it, brushing ash from the carpet, then came over and sat on the bed. "How long were you watching?"

"An hour," she lied.

He nodded. Had he really been standing there like that for an hour, giving himself the evil eye and marveling at nothing?

"You looked like you were trying to hypnotize yourself or something."

"I guess I was. I guess I'm a little nervous," he said. As he spent night after night in the company of inveterate and literate talkers, his English had improved considerably. "Performing in front of your family. Your father." Rosa 's father had not appeared at a Saks family event in years, but he was attending the reception tonight just to see Joe perform. He had been invited to the religious portion of the proceedings that morning, too, at B'nai Jeshurun, but God forbid. He hadn't been inside a synagogue, he calculated, since 1899. "Right now he thinks I'm the best magician in New York," Joe continued. "Because he's never seen me. After tonight, maybe he'll think I'm a palooka."

"He'll love you," she said. She was touched to see that her father's opinion meant so much to him. She interpreted it as further evidence of his belonging to her. "Don't worry."

"Mm-hmm," he said. "You already think I'm a palooka."

"Not me," she said, running a hand up his thigh and taking hold of his penis, which at once began to show renewed interest in her. "I know you're magic."

She had seen his act twice now. The truth was that Joe was a talented but careless performer, liable to bite off more than he could chew. He had renewed his career, as promised, with the Hoffman reception at the Hotel Trevi the previous November, and had gotten off to a rather shaky start when-forgetting the disdain in which his teacher Bernard Kornblum had held such "mechanisms," and succumbing to his fatal weakness, from which he suffered all his life, for acts of daring and the beau geste-he became hopelessly entangled in the Emperor's Dragon, an elaborate set-piece trick that he had purchased, on credit, from Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. It was a hoary bit of mock-Chinese flummery from the heyday of Ching Ling Foo, in which a silk "dragon" in a brass cage was made to breathe fire, then lay a number of colored eggs, each presented to the inspection of a witness for signs of seams or apertures before it was cracked with a silver wand, disgorging some personal item belonging to a member of the audience who, up to this point, had not been aware of his watch's or lighter's disappearance from his or her person. Picking pockets had never been Joe's great strength, however, and he was long out of practice. In the Trevi's lobby, before the show, there was an unpleasant incident with the bar mitzvah boy's aunt Ida, involving her beaded handbag, which had to be hastily smoothed over by Hermann Hoffman; and, during the performance, Joe singed off his own right eyebrow. He had moved quickly into cards and coins after that, and here his renewed training and the native gifts of his fingers served him well. He caused half-dollars and queens to behave in bizarre ways, endowed them with sentience and emotions, transformed them into kinds of weather, raising storms of aces and calling down nickel lightning from the sky. After Joe finished his act, young Maurice Hoffman brought over a friend who was having his own bar mitzvah in two weeks and had determined to impel his parents to hire Joe for the affair. More bookings followed: all at once Joe discovered that he had become the fashionable entertainer among the wealthy, male Jewish adolescents of the Upper West Side, many of them, of course, loyal readers of Empire comic books. They didn't seem to care that from time to time an ace dropped from his watchband or that he misread their minds. They adored him, and he accepted their adoration. In fact, he seemed actively to seek out the company of thirteen-year-old boys, not so much because it gratified his ego, Rosa thought, as because he longed to see his brother again so badly. And because their company- respectful, sardonic, willing to be awed, stubborn in their desire to get to the bottom of each trick-seemed to promise good things for Thomas on his arrival: friends of raucous intelligence, at once innocent and hard-edged, homely or handsome but uniformly well dressed, their faces free of all shadow save those of acne or an incipient beard. These were boys who lived free of the fear of invasion, occupation, cruel and arbitrary laws. With Rosa 's encouragement, Joe began, tentatively at first and then with great ardor, to envision the transformation of his brother into an American boy.