Searching for Caleb

Then she frowned and stabbed a card with her forefinger. "But pay attention! These cards are not read like books, you know. They have meanings assigned that you can memorize in half an hour, but ambiguous meanings. The death card, for instance. So called. But whose death? The client's, or someone's close to him? And when? Is it real or metaphorical? No, you must think of these cards as tags."

"Tags," Justine said blankly.

"Tags with strings attached, like those surprise boxes at parties. The strings lead into your mind. These cards will pull out what you already know, but have failed to admit or recognize. Which is why palmistry works as well, or tea leaves or the Tarot or crystal balls, although I myself have yet to see a thing in a crystal ball. They all have validity, yes, but only when coupled with your own intuitions. You could take up astrology, even, but I already know: you haven't the scholarly mind for it."

"I prefer cards," said Justine.

"Yes, yes, I know. But pay attention to everything. Watch your clients carefully. There will only be two kinds. Most are bored and merely hope to be told that something will happen. A very few lead eventful lives but cannot make decisions, which may be why they lead eventful lives; they will ask you to decide."

"Which am I?" said Justine.

"Hmm? I don't know. Maybe neither. You have never asked me to read your fortune, after all."

"Oh. I guess not," Justine said.

"You're still looking backward, anyway," Madame Olita told her.

"No, I'm not!"

"Suit yourself."

After her lessons Justine drove straight home, but threads, strings, ropes pulled her in the direction of Roland Park and although she never gave in she had the feeling she was bleeding somewhere inside. "Well, you could go over for lunch," Duncan said, but she thought from the way he spoke that he dreaded her agreeing to it. And she knew that her family would be distressed if they heard about Madame Olita. Then her new accomplishment, which was still as thin and fragile as a freshly hatched egg, would never seem right to her again; that was the way her mind worked. She didn't go.

Did she believe in fortune telling herself? At Madame Olita's she did.

She was drawn in, impressed and fascinated by those no-nonsense hands dealing out the future. But then at home she felt compelled to test her faith with Duncan. She laid out her Bicycle playing cards selfconsciously in front of him. "Today," she told him, "I learned the formation used by Mademoiselle Le Normand, back in Napoleon's time."

"Le Normand," he said, interested, cataloguing the name in his mind.

"We practiced on Madame Olita's landlady, who is eighty-four years old. I predicted she was going to get married."

He grinned.

"But!" said Justine. "She is! She told me afterward."

"Good for you. Good for her."

"Madame Olita says just a little longer and I can set up in business."

"We'll retire and live on your earnings," he said.

She was relieved that he didn't laugh. This was the only special skill she had ever possessed, the only thing she knew that he did not. Once he started memorizing her list of significations, but he got sidetracked while shuffling the cards and worked out a proof for Bernoulli's Law of Averages instead.

There were days when Madame Olita was sharp-tempered and nothing would satisfy her. "Really, Justine, I despair of you!" she said. "Your mind!

You have every qualification to be a good fortune teller but you will never be great, you're mentally lazy. You coast along in intuition."

"You said intuition was everything."

"Never! I never said it was everything. You have to know a few facts as well, after all. These cards are like a doctor's instruments. A good doctor has intuition too but he would never throw his instruments away on the strength of it."

"But you said they were just tags, you said-"

"Enough!" And Madame Olita would fling up her hands and then slump in her chair. "You'll spend your life doing readings for housewives and lovesick schoolgirls," she said. "I don't know why I bother."

But other days she was as mild as milk. Then she would tell stories about her clients. "Will I ever forget that first year? All the Negroes came for clues on how to play the numbers. 'Madame Olita I dreamed of handcuffs last night, which is number five nine eight in my Eye of Egypt Dream Book, but also razors, there was a cutting, eight seven three. So which do I play?' 'My dear,' I told them, 'you leave those numbers alone/ and after a while they gave up on me and never came back.

But how I tried! I wanted to have some influence, you see, on their lives. I would give them demonstrations of my psychic ability. I would have them choose a card and sight unseen I would tell them what it was."

"I can't do that," Justine said sadly. Duncan had tested her once after reading an article on J. B. Rhine.

"No, I doubt very much that you would be psychic."

"Then how come I can tell the future?"

"People who have led very still lives can often sense change before others can," Madame Olita said.