The Great Mancini

The first hint of any impropriety was a question Debbie overheard in the kitchen about an hour before the ceremony, posed by the wife of one of Ken’s groomsmen to Margaret Hayes, a friend of Debbie’s since their days together at the old winery. 

“They did it right, didn’t they?” Margaret was saying. “They even have a magician.”

“I saw that. He’s doing tricks for the kids.” 

“He’s very good.”

“He is, he is. But . . . I don’t know. Did you notice anything unusual about him?"

It was the way she drew out the u in unusual, as if she didn’t mean atypical, or not merely atypical, but also not quite right, or even downright disturbing.

Debbie didn’t hear the answer because her soon-to-be brother-in-law strode in from the patio at that moment in search of a broom and paper towels.

“Some chick with blue streaks in her hair knocked over a pitcher of Sangrias.” 

Debbie pointed at the broom. “That’s my cousin,” she said. 

“Don’t worry, I’m all over it. You might want to look in on Ken, though. He’s on his third scotch.”

She recently had begun having second thoughts about her and Ken’s decision to hold the wedding ceremony in their backyard, large as it was, and not just follow it with a reception at an event space a short hay ride away, but start the fun prior to the ceremony, at the house, with a selection of performers and exhibits all largely of her planning. Her mother said it would be too much but Debbie had friends willing to help and, as an event planner by trade, felt up to the challenge.

While looking for her mother, she passed a group of guests surrounding a caricature artist finishing a portrait of Ken’s uncle with a barrel chest and fat hands. She’d hired him previously for a client’s fortieth birthday party and knew he’d be a hit. Out front, she found her mother seated among oddly enrapt teenagers applauding the Great Mancini. 

“I need to start getting dressed,” she said.  

“Just a minute. This guy is really good.”

Her mother’s indifference was not a surprise. “How many weddings are you going to have?” she’d asked when Debbie first told her she was marrying Ken. She should talk, of course. As Debbie reminded her, she’d had two weddings herself. “Yes,” her mom countered, “but not before I turned 30!”

Needless to say, this one was different. Her short marriage to Brad had been folly from the beginning, a result of such narrow male alternatives in their constricted hometown that a girl would have to squint and look sideways to distinguish between them. She was treating this like a first wedding, the whole works, down to the dollar dance and the baron of beef, such a suffocating pall having hung over the wedding to Brad that during the procession she’d caught herself laughing out loud and moving her arms in a mock breaststroke as if to pull herself through it. Applying for the tour guide job at the urban winery eight months later, secretly and in desperation, had been her way of coming up for air. 

She waited for her mother. The magician could stand to lose a few pounds, she noticed. His tuxedo was too tight and had what looked like fresh scuff marks on it, as if he’d walked miles to get there on a dirt road. No bowtie, and instead of a pleated white shirt, a Spanish red one with ruffles. A collapsible table held, in addition to an ashtray with a lit cigarette in it and a bright red drink that might have been a Negroni, a small suitcase and a supply of curious props, the most recognizable of which were walnuts, a waxen skull, a jumbo-sized brassiere, and head lettuce. He opened the suitcase to show it was empty, and after a series of overly dramatic incantations and dance steps resembling some misconceived mash-up of native cultures, closed and opened it several times, each time revealing a new magically materialized object.    

“How does he do it?” her mother said, transfixed as a child.

One by one he handed the objects to his female assistant, barelegged and bedraggled in a lacy black outfit. No traditional rabbits or colorful ribbons emerged. Instead, he pulled out—a zucchini!

“Find a use for that, will you, hon?” he winked, handing it off. “Maybe a nice ratatouille.” Next—a wallet! “Well, how about that. Whose is it, do you think?” he asked, flipping through its contents. “Aha, my brother Phil in New Jersey. He owes me money!” He pocketed the cash before handing the wallet to the assistant. “No money, no honey. Remember that, kids.” Debbie decided his distinctive accent must be Cajun.

“Where did you find this guy?” her mother asked. “He’s amazing.” 

The truth is the magician was the only performer that Debbie hadn’t fully vetted, although she did conduct a brief interview with him at his small, cluttered office. There was a fresh drink on his table that day, too. He offered her a cigarette, which she declined, at first judging him harshly for still smoking in this day and age before remembering that she herself had quit only one year earlier. He said he could work before the ceremony but not after, and when she asked if he had a later engagement scheduled, he laughed, took a deep swallow from the drink, and said no, he just hated to sit through weddings. 

“Someone at Ken’s office,” she said. “Nice legerdemain.”

Her mother stiffened. “Legerdemain? What kind of a word is that?”

“It means sleight-of-hand,” she said, vaguely apologetic.

“Why don’t you just say that?”

The magician, in fact, had been suggested by a colleague of Ken’s, Craig Bronson in the real estate group, who had handled a string of code violations imposed on the magician’s house in one of the seedier parts of town. Debbie should have anticipated issues given the source of the recommendation. Craig had gone to college and law school at Wash U. and was conspicuously proud of that distinction. The one time they’d met, at the firm’s company Christmas party, he asked Debbie what school she’d attended, and when she told him the name of the community college he said, “Oh. Well. That must have been fun for you.” He was also a notorious wolf, who literally had licked his lips as he looked her up and down. Earlier that day, he’d suggested to Ken that they revive the stale wedding tradition of staging a photograph in which the groomsmen hold back the groom while he pretends to flee town before the ceremony—a tableau, she noted with some trepidation at the time, with which Ken had been eager to go along.

“You’ll never guess who made it,” Ken called out, dapper in a tailored tuxedo as he approached from the house.    

“There you are.” 

“Zeke Matthews! He flew in from Des Moines this morning.” 

“I’m glad. Did you remember to bring up the extra chairs?”  

“Done, my doll. Also, the guy with the horses is here. I talked to the minister. Aaa-nd I am dressed and ready to wed my betrothed.” He leaned in, holding the arm with a drink in it dramatically off to one side, and kissed her sloppily on the lips.

“Hmm. Good. Now . . .” She took the drink from his hand.

“Hey!”

“Your brother says you’re getting drunk.”

“Pshhh. Trust Rick at your own pearl.”

“I need you to ask Susan if she needs any help while I get dressed. If I can pry my mother away from the show.”

“Yeez,” her mother said, finally rising. “Where’s the fire?” 

—

Inside, the door to the bedroom was ajar. Her custom-made wedding gown, spread evenly an hour before, lay lightly crumpled on the quilt. 

“The dog must have got up here, dammit.” She held it up by the straps, a smile expanding along with its ivory embroidery and plunging illusion neckline. At Ken’s insistence, she spent more on it than she’d intended, him assuring her with a kiss and a grin that a body like hers deserved to be showcased, and by the way, she’d just have to get used to better now that she’d be marrying him, especially with his recent promotion to partner.

“Goodness,” her mother said. “He didn’t piss on it, I hope.” 

“No, mother. He didn’t piss on it.”

From the first moment she regretted asking her mother, instead of Margaret, to stay with her while she got dressed, a tacit acknowledgment that her mother had been excluded—or, more accurately, had excluded herself—from all previous preparations. “You know, you were welcome to participate,” she told her, once most of the work was complete. “I’m just not sure what you could have done.”

Before closing the curtains, Debbie saw that the magician had moved on to card tricks and was fanning an oversized deck of cards, the backs of which were decorated with burlesque dancers in various stages of disrobing. He affixed individual cards to a stainless-steel, duckbilled object that just might have been a speculum, before covering the whole thing with a lampshade and making each card disappear. 

“Do you think that magician is too crude for the kids?” she wondered out loud.

“Don’t be silly. You’re always judging.” Her mother held up the dress to herself in front of the full-length mirror. “This is beautiful.”

“José did a phenomenal job on it,” Debbie said. “That’s one of the perks of living in a city, you know. You meet people with special talents.” Her mother handed her the dress and she stepped into it.

“Oh. Uh huh. José.”  

“Can you zip?” 

Outside, applause for the magician sounded somehow like a public warning system. As if it had just occurred to her, her mother asked, “I suppose you and Ken are still set on moving to Kansas City?” 

Debbie remained silent. She changed into her shoes. 

“I suppose Ken could drive four hours to work each morning instead,” she said finally. She opened the closet and placed the small veil on the bed. 

“Don’t be smart, you know what I mean.” 

Debbie closed the window and walked out. When her mother followed her into the bathroom, she was touching up her mascara.

“You’re always running away.”

“Close the door,” Debbie said. A laughing girl around seven skipped past, pursued by a young boy. “If you’re referring to Brad again, this is a hell of a time to bring that up.”

“If you say so.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Her mother didn’t answer. She picked up a book from on top of the toilet tank, a frayed copy of 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. “Dink still asks how you’re doing, that’s all.”

“Do you have to call him ‘Dink’?”

“That’s what he likes to be called.” She was pretending to read.

“Six more months with ‘Dink’ and my head would have exploded. Don’t worry, mother, I’ll have plenty to worry about with Ken.” Puckering into the mirror, she added quietly to herself: “He’s been drinking today.”

“You act like I want you to be unhappy.”

“Hmm.”

Her mother set the book down firmly. “And I wouldn’t go pressuring Ken about the drinking if I was you. A little drink now and then is to a man’s liking. A woman has to make compromises if she expects to marry up. There, I said it.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Give a man what he wants is all I’m saying. Not what you think he wants.”

“Great advice. I should have mentioned that to Martine this morning.” 

Her mother deserved that. The magician’s voice could be heard commanding either “Presto, change-o!” or “Pesto, chainsaw!”

“Your father might have stayed put if we didn’t have a child. For some reason, he thought it was necessary to show you the whole goddamn world. Pardon my French.”

“Stay in Marshall? That’s a laugh.”

Debbie’s aunt Jessica, just seven years her senior, was the first one to tell her the story about her father, on a playground two years after she and her mother had moved back. How her parents had met on the Fourth of July. How Martine, an ambitious but unproven journalist, had arrived for a piece about small town parades and Americana, and how her mother, the vivaciously waving high school queen, had caught his eye from the lap of an enormous, inflatable Uncle Sam. Debbie couldn’t have known then what Jessica meant when she said, “And nine months later, you were born.” 

“Well, he wasn’t from there.”

“Neither am I,” said Debbie, dryly. “Hand me that brush.”

“I don’t know what it is you have against Marshall. You grew up there. You went to school there. Ever since you were a little girl—”

“Oh, stop it, mother. You know damn well you couldn’t wait for him to leave.”

Her father had done the honorable thing at first, the proof eternalized in her parents’ wedding video, where his supplicating smiles resembled the blinking Morse code of a tortured hostage. They had moved to California before Debbie was born. By age six, she’d been to four baseball games, two art museums—and Hollywood! While her mother made appointments with analysts and tried out a new church every other Sunday. Debbie understood even then that the day her father called to say he wasn’t coming back from Los Angeles was one of tremendous relief to her mother, who could thereafter in good conscience abandon the sophisticated fast life he was hopelessly grooming her for and collect the promised checks from the Coast from the familiar confines of Marshall, where her own mother would help raise the child.  

“I’ll ignore that.” 

Her father had called to wish her well that morning. The apologies for his absence were unnecessary. After all, he had attended the first wedding, in Marshall—a lot to ask, as she well understood even at the time—although he’d fled immediately afterward with barely so much as a hug. How young must she have been before inventing her own fantasies of escape? Seven? Eight? On the car ride to her grandmother’s dilapidated Queen Anne? Which actions in childhood weren’t part of some secret or subconscious plot to break free? Reading, at twelve, to the dismay of family and friends, the set of Funk and Wagnalls on her grandmother’s shelf from Aardvark to Napoleon? Extra hours of softball practice, not for love of the game, but because she’d been told it would be played in the Olympics in some faraway land? Applications filled out two years too soon to colleges they could never afford? Or what amounted to interviews with each prospective boyfriend about whether their life plans included getting out of Marshall? She’d ended up with the first boy just smart enough to lie. 

“We should be getting close,” Debbie said, rising.  

Her mother trailed her back to the bedroom where from the window Debbie could see the wooden white chairs filling up with guests. From the groom’s side issued a perceptible hum: visitors milling about, leaning in to ask questions or tell jokes with a discernible restlessness, as if they were all descended from the same ancient tribe bound by ambition, yet confident of the rightness of their achievements and their secure place in an evolving world. It was a faith reinforced by an uneasy vigilance—one eye out for the next synergy or the next stock tip or the next winning horse. By contrast, Debbie’s family and their friends from Marshall sat still. When they did talk, they did so only to their immediate neighbors, and then cautiously as if to conceal their purpose, with a reservation born of mistrust.

As the minister found his place, Ken and his brother waited at the end of the aisle where, strangely, the magician was standing at Ken’s side hiking up his pants. Ken’s brother was reaching around Ken and jabbing a finger in the Great Mancini’s direction.

“Something’s going on out there,” Debbie said, noticing from the window.  “Shit.”

Later, Ken told her what was happening. While he waited nervously for his cue with his brother, the magician approached them demanding to be paid. Ken told him to send an invoice or wait until later but the magician persisted, even though it was obviously the wrong time. When Ken’s brother got involved, the magician said, “What are you, the enforcer? I’m a working stiff here, cowboy.” Just when Ken thought there would be a scene, one of his young female cousins walked by. 

“Whoa, did you see that?” the magician asked. He was gawking. “I’d like to get a load of that in a few years, you know what I mean?”

“What the hell?” Debbie murmured, watching the scene unfold.

Her mother interrupted. “You know, there’s something I should maybe tell you. You might not like it.”

Debbie pivoted slowly from the window. 

“Don’t get upset.”

“What is it?”

Her mother pretended to brush crumbs off her dress. “It’s just that I overheard some people talking at Mulch’s.” 

She hesitated. It was a pause that Debbie recognized from her mother’s playbook, midway between passive-aggressive and reflexively coy.  

“What is it, mother?”

She looked up. Debbie’s long silken hair reminded her of her own when she was that age. Finally, with a queer smile she said, “Dink might show up.” 

“What?”

“Brad.”

Debbie turned toward the window. “You are shitting me.” The magician was gone. Ken and his brother had stationed themselves at the altar. 

“I don’t believe this.” She surveyed the guests: no Brad.

“He never understood why you left, that’s all. Neither did I, if you must know.”

Debbie spun around. “No, you never could, could you? Why a woman might want to raise herself up.”

“Don’t get mad at me.” 

“He’ll make a scene. I know he will.” Again, she peered out at the guests.

“Don’t be silly. He’s not some animal, despite what you think.”

“You act like you’re on his side.”

“What sides?”

Debbie took a deep breath. The musicians began to play. Ken’s guests had finally settled into their seats. She faced her mother.

“I don’t suppose you talked to Dink.”

“Of course not.”

“Or had a chance to talk him out of showing up but didn’t.” She pulled shut the closet door with enough force to waver the chandelier.

“You must think I am some low little insect—” 

“Why are we talking about Brad, anyway?”

“The man works at a garage all day long—" 

Debbie stopped her with an involuntary birdlike gesture, flapping her arms once and sputtering like an angry child. “I . . . am getting married . . . in ten minutes!”

“You don’t have to raise your voice about it!”

A rap on the door silenced them both. Margaret peeked her head in carefully. “Knock, knock. Guess what time it is, darling?”

Debbie forced her eyes closed to calm down. She smoothed out her dress. “On my way, Marge,” she said finally, before swiping up her veil. At the door, she turned to her mother and snarked: “If he objects, try not to clap too loudly.”

—

“And did he?”

Her friend passed another photograph, a two-shot of Margaret Hayes walking arm-in-arm with Craig Bronson just before Debbie’s solo entrance to the Bridal Chorus. Debbie had practically forgotten Margaret but knew that she later married, gave birth to a son, and moved to Chicago. Bronson’s arrogant smile seemed like an extension of his proud chin, angled and elevated as if he himself were the bride. 

“Object, I mean.”

Debbie and Shoko had decided to split a bottle of wine while they prepared a budget for the McReynolds concert in the kitchen of Debbie’s new apartment. When the topic of Shoko’s recent engagement came up (You’re too young to marry! was Debbie’s suppressed verdict every time the subject arose), and her plans for the flowers and the venue, Shoko asked, with the rashness of youth, to see pictures of Debbie’s ceremony, if she still had them and the subject wasn’t overly sensitive. 

“Not at all,” Debbie said reflexively, although she hadn’t removed them since the breakup, in part because it was.

In the next picture, you couldn’t tell if it was the photographer’s intention to make Ken, waiting at the altar, the subject, or Debbie, a blurry figure in the foreground shot from behind, approaching the aisle with her head straining right as though searching for someone in particular. Ken appears distracted also, gazing off-frame in the opposite direction, his forehead visibly creased even from a distance. 

“Oh . . . yes. Well, no.”

The joy of her pending nuptials is not what Debbie remembered. She recalled feeling foolish and cheated for having to think about Brad in that instant, about Brad of all people, for having to fake a smile that should have been heartfelt and spontaneous; and rather than soaking in the well-wishes of loved ones, for having to check to see if her ex-husband had shown up to ruin things. And she remembered her relief upon reaching the altar having concluded that Brad wasn’t there, that it was probably just one of her mother’s never-ending games designed to reorient her toward Marshall. The relief reminded her of when she’d finally resolved to leave Brad. A week later, having bided her time, she found a note informing her that he’d be out all night with friends. She packed and departed that very hour, without hesitation or so much as a single regret.

“There might be a shot . . .” Shoko passed her a handful of photographs, their color fading after six years in the closet. When Debbie had first pulled it out, Shoko unintentionally made her feel older than she was by laughing and saying how much she loved that Debbie had made hard copies, not thinking how the wedding must have taken place before the age of universal smart phones. In one photograph, Debbie is leaning in to speak to the minister as he’s about to begin the ceremony.  

“Here’s where I asked him to cut out the part where people can object.”

Shoko held back a grin. “Was that even a thing anymore?”

“No, it turns out. Not with the Unitarians. We’d just started going. Ken’s idea, because I wanted some structure. He looked at me like I had two heads.”

In another picture, of her and Ken from behind the minister, she indicated a man near the back row, the only person standing.

“That’s Brad.” 

Shoko held it close and squinted. The man was stocky with short, stiff hair and had on a flannel shirt and Sunday trousers. He stood partly bent over as though he had just risen, but possibly also because partly bent over was his permanent bearing.

“The minister was about to pronounce us husband and wife when he stood up and said—and I’ll always remember—” Here Debbie exaggerated her ex-husband’s central Missouri twang, a sharper version of her own that she still struggled to suppress: “‘Excuse me, but I did not get my chance to make my objection heard.’”

“Oh no, he didn’t.”

“Yep.”

“So, he did object.”

“Not exactly. Let me see—” She removed the rubber band from another set of photos. 

“This one,” she said. “That’s the Great Mancini.” Taken at almost the same time but from a different angle, the picture revealed the magician standing in the wings, where during the final moments of the procession Ken had been anxiously staring. He was crouched over slightly, legs akimbo, pointing his magic wand.  

“He waited behind that tree. Right when Brad was about to object—and I was about to pass out from embarrassment, by the way—there—” She slid over a picture of herself, Ken, and the minister, all looking oer at Brad—“the magician let out this kind of . . . squawk, I guess you’d call it.” 

Here, maybe the wine had gotten to Debbie, because she tried to imitate the magician’s tone and volume. 

“‘Hoyyyyaaaahhhh,’” she howled, choking a little from the effort. Shoko laughed out loud.

“‘Clamu, Linka, Falgun, Toom,’ he said, waving the wand over his head.” Debbie mimicked the gesture and pushed back the chair. Right there in the kitchen, she tried to recreate the dance he did, hopping first on one foot while circling left before popping up and down on alternating feet and crying, “‘Kela-kuan, Kenti-Amenti.’” 

“Something like that. Jesus.”  She coughed once and began flipping through the photos for more evidence. It all came back to her now: everyone’s attention, first diverted to Brad, then immediately redirected to the seemingly deranged magician. And the guests were not completely certain that it wasn’t all somehow part of the ceremony—the magician’s spell and, for those who didn’t know him, Brad and his awkward introduction to it.  

“He put a curse on the marriage.”

“What? Why? Over his pay?”

“I guess. He said,”—she lowered her voice—“‘This marriage is hereby cursed, in the name of Cali, Attis, Khepera, Ntame’ and some other bullshit—pardon my French—dot, dot, dot. It’s all on the video. We watched it a hundred times for laughs. Total nonsense. He ran away when Ken’s brother made a move. I don’t believe in curses, by the way.”

This last statement was more to reassure herself. She didn’t, of course, believe in them. But she remembered thinking in the moment that the gods, if there are any, must be opposed to the marriage, must sense some underlying flaw in it, sending not one but two interruptions right at the pivotal moment. She wondered while she watched the magician spin and wave his wand like a madman if the marriage might not be, in fact, cursed, doomed, and if her mother hadn’t been right all along about her marrying up—hopelessly up. Just as Brad had married up. Just as her mother had. And if, like the magician, she wasn’t dressing up in fineries a figure more suitable for Goodwill.

After the magician took off, Ken saved the day, saying something clever like, “That concludes our entertainment, everyone!” Nervous laughter was cut short by the minister repeating his blessing and giving them permission to kiss.

The women sat silently, passing photographs, sipping their wine. Finally, Shoko asked what ever happened to Brad. 

The question caught Debbie off guard. For a minute, she couldn’t remember.

“Brad? Well—” 

She reached into the box hoping for a clue . . . but then it came to her, and she looked up. 

“Nothing,” she said dryly, as a scientist might in describing a black hole.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

She tried to put it into words. “He just . . . vanished. He must have gone home. I literally forgot he was there until the next day.”

Which was true. Ken had to bring it up on the plane to Cozumel or else the memory of Brad’s gatecrash might have been lost for days or weeks or years, like a thousand million other memories of who she is and where she comes from: memories of catcalls and cuss words; of frustrated plans; of insular gossip and separation by sexes, and lean, gropey boys with even leaner vocabularies: memories banished to some musty chamber in her mind until the illusion that she is confident or more capable than she pretends is shattered by a creation of her own dreams.  

“How weird,” Shoko said, and Debbie smiled. How solicitous she was about this young woman, her newest and youngest co-worker, about to embark on the seminal experiment at which Debbie had twice failed. 

She wasn’t exactly old herself, and yet old enough to know that abandoning and abandoned can be two sides of the same coin, each an example of severance not so much of oneself from the relevant object—Brad, the abandoned, in her case; Ken, the abandoner—but of irreconcilable aspects of one’s whole nature. Ken had yet to remarry but was still seeing the woman arguably he had left Debbie for, the youngest female shareholder at the firm. In the end, he might have grown tired of Debbie’s attempts to improve herself on his watch, of having to look down and in for fellow feeling, as she disappeared in him and he, wondering where she went, departed.  

“Like the magician was responsible or something,” Shoko said, with a nervous giggle.

Debbie put the photos back in the box. She knew the magician hadn’t made Brad disappear any more than his curse had sabotaged her marriage to Ken, who ultimately proved to be quite the emotional bully and no higher than she on the evolutionary ladder. Both of her ex-husbands were free agents, like her and everyone else, their actions an expression of will, however much a compromise they might be of endlessly warring halves.

“I mean that is just really weird.”

Debbie sat back with her glass of Zinfandel, slid a smile in her friend’s direction, and wondered. Will someone narrowly regarded, or someone she desperately wants to love, disappear from her young friend’s life as they had from her own? Whom will she cast aside to reach higher ground, other than herself?