Instead, people rather accurately captured Annalee Ahlberg’s eccentricities and talents and her creativity: her ingenuity as an architect and her inventiveness as a mom. Her friends would smile at Paige and me and tell us how much she loved being our mother. We had never doubted it: We had worn the Halloween costumes. We had felt firsthand the power of her embrace. And so we nodded at the stories, most of which we had known or had lived, and occasionally we even laughed through our tears. For most of my life, I had only heard Katherine Edwards speak in this church on Christmas and Easter. I decided that I had underestimated the pastor; maybe I had underestimated religion. Katherine made me want to come back on a regular Sunday.
At the end of the service, as I exited the church, I asked Gavin if he would be at the reception back at our home. First, however, my family—and only the family—was going to watch the mahogany box with Annalee Ahlberg’s ashes be placed into its spot in the cemetery. He reassured me that he’d be waiting at the house when we returned in half an hour.
One of my father’s poems compared wedding receptions with funerals. When I first read the poem, I had misunderstood it, assuming it was a predictable (and uncharacteristically puerile) dismissal of marriage. At my mother’s funeral, however, some of the couplets came back to me, and I realized that the poem was actually a rather astute appreciation of the unfair velocity with which time moved at these rituals for the immediate families. There were too many people for too little time. I would have two-and three-minute conversations with guests and mourners that really went nowhere, and we were all saying the same largely meaningless things:
Your mother was amazing.
Yes, she was.
You’re holding up well. She’d be proud of you.
I guess.
I miss her.
Yeah. I do, too.
I kept trying to inch my way across the house to get to my friend Erica, because here was a person I missed and whom I actually wanted to talk to. But it didn’t seem possible. It was too crowded and I was, as Annalee’s older daughter, too in demand.
And then there were the exchanges that were surreal and left me stupefied by the utter strangeness of the world. At one point I saw my elderly magician friend Lindsay McCurdy and Donnie Hempstead chatting like old pals with their backs to the breakfront in the living room, each holding a sweating bottle of beer. Lindsay’s Bengal tiger cravat was as striking as Donnie’s red-and-yellow necktie. I worked my way through the throng to them just in time to overhear Donnie saying, “It was Sonny and Cher, right? I was a kid, but now that you mention it, I know I saw you on TV. I remember it really well!”
Lindsay nodded. “Mostly I was supposed to be a foil for Cher. A lot of jokes, I recall, about making Sonny disappear.”
I was vaguely familiar with the show, associating it in my mind with other programs from before my time, such as The Ed Sullivan Show. “They had magicians on Sonny and Cher?” I asked, inserting myself into the conversation. “I wish you had told me you were on it, Lindsay!”
“I was on it just the one time. It was more of a comedy show than a variety show,” he said. “I did a little magic that night and we all stood around gaping at whatever costume Cher came out in.”
Donnie waved a finger in the air. “Oh, you did much more than that. You were great! You were like a hypnotist. You did some trick you called ‘The Sleepwalker.’?”
Instantly he went silent. He stood there, embarrassed, and then mumbled an apology. Meanwhile, Lindsay looked contrite, as if he had been caught speaking badly of someone behind her back.
“It’s okay,” I said to Donnie. Then, more because I was deeply curious than because I wanted to smooth over an awkward comment, I said to Lindsay, “I never think of you as a hypnotist. What was the illusion?”
“I levitated a woman,” he said slowly and without enthusiasm.
“And then she walked around?”
“She walked around first…like she was asleep.”
“An assistant?”
“Yes. An audience plant.”
“Did you have her do anything else?” I asked.
Donnie and the magician glanced unhappily at each other—Donnie remembered what came next, I could tell—and then down at his impeccably shined black wingtips.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I levitated her above a glass-walled tank of water. You know the trick, I am sure. I covered her with a sheet on a couch, rose her high above it, and then guided her sleeping body—still prone—over the tank. When she awoke, the audience expected she would fall in. The live audience and the TV audience all assumed it would be a little randy because she was pretty and her clothes would be sticking to her, and it would be a little cruel: what a horrible way to wake up! Remember, I was Rowland the Rogue. Instead, however, it was Sonny—who was standing on a trapdoor on the platform above the tank—who got dunked. When I whisked off the sheet, the girl had vanished. I summoned her back on stage from a wing, where she walked—still asleep and under my spell—to my side. Then, at my command, she sent Sonny into the water.”
I could understand why they didn’t want to share the story with me, but I had envisioned my mother sleepwalking or in the Gale River so many times by that afternoon that a magic trick called “The Sleepwalker” and a woman suspended above a water tank was not going to unsettle me. “Can you really hypnotize people?” I asked Lindsay.
“I could. I doubt I can now.”