He looked so serious.
“No,” Frank thought, “I will not be taken in by it. No. It is all a ploy, capitalizing on my human instinct to respect the portentous. There is that in the ordering of his features which apes the solemn and momentous. So it is natural I would pay homage to it with still concentration.
“All the same, I know that it’s a ploy and, all the while, his hands are busy while his eyes are still.”
Frank lowered his eyes the minutest amount in, as he thought, a respectable counterfeit of attention or respect. And he saw the other man’s hands were, as he had seen them last, folded, still, plump, one over the other, and both over the red deck of cards.
“But of course he moved them,” Frank thought. “He moved them in the instant in which he said ‘Now!’—when I lifted my eyes to his. I could observe him now forever and what difference would it make? The trick has been done.”
Morris cleared his throat and Frank raised his eyes. He saw Morris’s wife out of the corner of his eye—smiling, excited, and proud of the man holding the group’s attention.
Behind them, by the door to the dining room, a black waiter stood, a tray of drinks on his palm. Frank saw the attitude of both respect and non-being in the man’s demeanor. “I am here only when and as you desire me to be,” it said.
And “Poor man,” Frank thought. “It must grow tiring. To heft the tray, immobile on his palm, like that; though, perhaps, they grow used to it.”
“I ask you now,” Morris said.
“Perhaps it is just a question of balance,” Frank thought.
“… to tell me the name of the card you had chosen.”
Frank looked back, behind him.
“The three of spades,” Molly said. Morris nodded.
There were ten or twelve people on the porch, gathered before Morris, at his table. The men smoked cigars. The night wind took the smoke off the porch. Now and then the wind shifted, bringing back the scent of the trees and, once, the sound of paddles and high laughter on the lake.
“So still …,” Frank thought.
“Three of hearts. Here is the three of hearts!” Morris said.
He lifted his hands from the pack and fanned the cards over the table. They were facedown, save the one card, the three of hearts, which he drew from the pack, displayed, delighted, to the crowd, and threw, facedown, on the tabletop.
“No,” Frank thought.
Morris looked at the faces on the porch. Two of the men coughed.
“Yes. What … what?” Morris said.
“I … Nothing,” Molly said.
“What is it?”
“My card was the three of spades,” Molly said. “Three of spades. Not the three of hearts.”
Morris, then the rest, looked down at the solitary card, facedown, to the side of the spread pack.
“… Your card was the three of spades …,” Morris said.
“Oh, yes,” Frank thought, relieved. “Oh, yes. Now she will turn over the card, and it will have metamorphosed from the three of hearts to the three of spades. We will feel happy and relieved. Will we feel angry?
“What if it is not the case, and he has truly chosen the wrong card? How humiliating: to spend the hours one must need in practice—practice to gain the approval of the crowd—and then to disappoint them. How terrible: to have one’s inner soul’s longings revealed—‘I burn to tantalize you. To manipulate you, to control and delight you. To lead you in my ways and at my leisure’—and then to fail. For what would obscure that personal revelation? Nothing but success.”
He heard the crowd draw in its breath, and break out in laughter and exclamations.
For, of course, the card had transposed. And Morris sat there, happy, confident, controlled, portraying the least—but a discernible—measure of humility withal.
“Happy to please. Sorry to’ve taxed (if I did) your patience. Sorry to’ve manipulated you. I hope that you will find—as I found, for I did not act so without due deliberation—that the misdirection was worth the result; and that, finally, I have pleased.” That is what he projected, sitting there.
Frank looked away and saw the waiter, who, similarly, had reconfigured himself, and whose posture now announced that he knew the trick was concluded; that though he did not wish to, and would not, appropriate any of the group’s enjoyment of the performance, he was quite cognizant—to the limits of the intelligence authorized to him—of its excellence. The waiter let the laughter and the semi-ironic applause begin to wane and, like an actor playing the laugh, came forward with the drinks.
The evening passed.
Morris and Frank sat by the rail of the veranda.
“It is not cold,” Frank thought, “but it will soon be cold.”
There was a mist on the lake. The lights behind them in the hotel were dimmed. They heard the clatter, once, for an instant, of the last cleanings-up in the hotel kitchen, then stillness.
The breeze came through in one burst, across the porch. Then it was gone.
“Yeaauh,” Morris said. He sucked at his teeth. “‘Waal, Jedge,’” he said, repeating the punch line, “‘if you was oncet a nigger on a Saady night, you’d never wan’ to be a white man ev’again.’”