The Reluctant Fortune-Teller Page 3

  A week after the strange meeting at his house, the book still rested, untouched, on Norbert’s coffee table.

  * * *

  One breezy summer day, Norbert and Ivy were digging in the backyard. Norbert was working in his vegetable garden, and Ivy was digging a few feet away, in solidarity. Every once in a while they stopped their labor and contemplated the joyous industry of squirrels, rabbits and birds in the small, lush, green world of their picket-fenced yard. Norbert had always loved the outdoors, and during his youthful years in Boy Scouts he had learned how to identify birds by their songs. He stopped and listened to a robin’s repertoire, and it made his heart lighter. Norbert’s aunt Pearl had been a gardener, and he thought of her as he tended his plants.

  Aunt Pearl’s garden had been a pleasure for everyone to behold. No one would have imagined the mess and clutter inside the gardener’s house. No one was ever let in.

  The kids used to make fun of Norbert’s aunt Pearl. They said she was “weird.” That hurt him, because he loved her, and she was his.

  Norbert had been an only child. He had no memory of his father. His mother died when he was four years old. It was her sister, his aunt Pearl, who had raised him, and it was with her he had his sense of belonging. Toward her, he felt a mixture of love, loyalty, gratitude and shame. Shame because she was different, and brought him unwanted attention.

  Aunt Pearl was a tall old lady. In Norbert’s memory, she was always old. Her foursquare home in Buffalo was crowded with piles—piles of clothes, piles of papers, piles of books, and in the kitchen, piles of dishes. She could never sort things out. She was an anxious woman, and she tried to work out the snarls and confusion in her mind through repetitive monologues that Norbert listened to with patience. She was always overwhelmed by life. Yet she was kind to him, and made him feel helpful and smart and indispensable. He loved her. He knew that she loved him, too. She was generous to Norbert and regarded him as an astonishing little boy; she was glad to have charge of him. Yet she often seemed to lose sight of him in the unmanageable details of her life.

  When she remembered his presence, she would sit him down and talk with him, as if he were her own age. He liked that. He sensed that she had a great need to be listened to, and he felt a sense of importance when she spoke to him. She told him family stories, her own childhood memories, and about the books she read.

  She also told him many times that he was “born with the caul,” or as she sometimes said, “the veil.” As a child, Norbert had pictured an actual veil over a baby’s face, something like the white netting that a bride wears. This bewildered him. Aunt Pearl laughingly cleared up his childish confusion by clarifying that, no, it wasn’t a real veil; it was in fact “just remnants of the amniotic sac.” When she instructed him on what that meant, he was even further disturbed: “It means you’re very special, Norbert. It means you have second sight.”

  Norbert had taken his glasses off and squinted his eyes. What could she possibly mean? He could hardly see at all, without his glasses.

  “It means you can see into the future.”

  Norbert put his glasses back on and turned away, sensing instinctively that this was another form of strangeness, for a boy who felt excluded and strange already. He didn’t want this gift.

  He was the boy not chosen for teams. He was the boy who didn’t have a pal to sit with at lunch. He didn’t know why. He felt he was unpardonably different from the others, and he wanted so much to be just like the rest. It would be an answer to his prayers to have a gift like extraordinary strength, or sports ability. But the “gift of second sight”? No, thank you.

  Norbert loved his aunt Pearl, but he hated that she told him about the caul, and that she expected him to perceive things that were hidden from others. Because the fact was: he could. He did sometimes seem to guess things about people and even predict some things that would happen in the future. He would often have a sense of foreboding just before Aunt Pearl would discover she didn’t have enough money to pay the utility bills. He always knew who his teacher would call on just before the student’s name was called. But such things could always be explained with a rational understanding of intuition, or even coincidence.

  Instead of pursuing the paranormal, he pursued math. Norbert loved math because everyone gets the same answer. Math is rational. Math is not weird. To pursue a career in accounting, reasoned the young Norbert, is to be conventional and realistic, like other people.

  Aunt Pearl, often in moments of crisis, would wring her bony hands and croon, “Oh, Norbert, you have the gift. Tell me—what’s going to happen?”

  But he had only looked at her sadly, offering no predictions to calm her anxious heart.

  * * *

  Norbert rested the shovel in the dirt and wiped his brow. It was restful for him to work in the yard with Ivy, his only living link to Aunt Pearl, and to watch the hyperactive squirrels doing acrobatics high above in the trees. The teeming rabbits leaped and stopped, leaped and stopped, apparently under the impression that they were camouflaged. Watching them made him happy. Using his muscles and working with the earth made him happy. The world of nature and animals, where he could blend in and be a part of things, gave him peace.

  The Club, bursting into his home and telling him he could be a fortune-teller, gave him the opposite of peace. Had they seen this strangeness—this intuition—in him? And why were they interested in solving his money worries? Of course, he would love to relieve his financial stress...

  But...fortune-telling?

  * * *

  Norbert and Ivy sat together after gardening, Ivy waiting patiently for a tiny lunch and Norbert sorting the pile of bills he could not pay. He tried to get a sense of mastery over his situation by organizing the pile according to due dates. They were all past due. He noticed that his breath was shallow, and tried to breathe more deeply, because he had read in Reader’s Digest that this would reduce stress. Should he pay the electric bill, or the sanitation? His dentist had been waiting the longest, and Norbert most wanted to pay that bill because it was more embarrassing to owe money to a person than to a utility. Norbert looked at Ivy, as if she might have a perspective to offer. Her trustful eyes met his, and he was stricken with guilt: he had no way to pay for a dental cleaning for her. He knew that Aunt Pearl, even in her disorganization, had had Ivy’s teeth cleaned annually. Norbert had never been totally responsible for another being before, and his financial inadequacy weighed on his heart.

  Seeking escape from anxious thoughts, Norbert reached for the book on his coffee table—the one left by Carlotta and her Club.

  The Cards Don’t Lie by H. M. King

  This is a guide to cartomancy, a traditional and revered method of divination, or fortune-telling, dating back to the fourteenth century in Europe.

  In this book you will find all that you need to begin telling fortunes using ordinary playing cards. As your skill develops, you may do card readings for amusement and even profit. Read on to learn the meanings of all the cards and the spreads you may use for various purposes, depending on the needs of the person having the cards read—to whom we shall refer as “the querent.”

  Begin by committing to memory the card meanings, and by practicing on your own to gain confidence.

  Everyone has psychic ability, otherwise known as intuition, however latent it may be. You will see as you read the cards for yourself and your friends that your intuition will gather strength quickly, and you will recognize its particular voice within you and be better able to work with it. Keep in mind that the card meanings given here are to be used only as a general guideline. Most often, your intuition may “whisper in your ear” in a figurative sense, and you will follow your own prompting as you tell your querents what is “in the cards” for them.

  Always remember that your querent is depending on your reading for clarity and guidance, and that the reader who approaches the deck with an
awareness of the sacredness of this work will have the most accurate results and the most loyal following.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Four of Clubs:

  Popularity. You may not be aware of others’ regard for you. You are liked more than you suspect.

  Norbert looked forward to Carlotta’s oil-painting class every Tuesday night. He got a little bit of notice and even occasional praise for works he created from photographs out of old National Geographic magazines: bears, wolves, owls and Southwestern landscapes.

  The studio was on the second floor of the Art League, a large space with north light and a paint-speckled wood floor. Norbert, Birdie and Margaret attended Carlotta’s class session after session, and were sometimes joined by others in the community. Birdie’s watercolor class was Wednesday afternoons, but her class did not have the draw of Carlotta’s. That was because Carlotta was actually a very good painting teacher.

  On this night, three weeks after the Club’s visit to his house, Norbert offered advice to the adolescent Liam, who was painting a giant bloodshot eyeball. He observed as Liam frowned, raised his brush to the canvas and drew it back uncertainly. He knew what Liam wanted to do, and that he didn’t know how to do it.

  “Believe it or not, the realism is all in the shadow. Now, what you need to do is paint a line of shadow just under that upper eyelid—”

  “Mrs. Moon,” whined the ginger-haired fifteen-year-old, “I have a question.”

  “Yes, Liam,” said Carlotta, coming to the boy’s canvas.

  “This eyeball doesn’t look real.”

  “Ah,” said Carlotta, “that’s because you’ve forgotten the shadow. See, that will give you that bit of dimension that you need. Just a line. Here, look at my eye and see if you can see the shadow—or better yet, go to the mirror, and look into your own eye. You’ll see. These are the things we don’t notice, until we become painters.”

  Liam, standing before the wall mirror, exclaimed, “I see it!”

  Norbert smiled and turned his attention to the young mother, who was painting “The Snow Child” to hang in her daughter’s fairy-tale-themed bedroom. He saw how she could make the painting better, how she could intensify the winter sparkle of it.

  “You know,” said Norbert, “to give the scene some dimension, you could have a branch just in front, with icicles hanging from it. Or even a giant snowflake showing that microscopic pattern that snowflakes have, you know?”

  The young mother smiled, the way she probably smiled at her child when she was too busy to listen.

  Norbert felt himself being watched and turned to see Carlotta looking at him thoughtfully. It gave him a shock. It was not a kind look, but a piercing one. Sometimes he wondered how deeply she could see into people.

  “Who was it who said,” proclaimed Carlotta, “‘Distrust unsolicited advice’? I believe it was Aesop. Yes, I’m sure it was Aesop.”

  Norbert knew that remark was directed at him. He took no offense. Smiling, he turned his attention back to his own canvas. He was used to having his comments disregarded. People tended to look right past him. When he spoke, people spoke over him. When he made a suggestion, he was ignored, only to hear someone else make the same suggestion and be cheered for it. Many times in his life, Norbert had been led to wonder if he existed at all.

  Norbert cleaned his brushes and carefully stashed his wet canvas, and returned to the framing area downstairs to finish an order. He was straightening the mats and putting away blades and Windex as Carlotta, Margaret and Birdie came down, admonishing each other to be careful on the stairs and snapping back at each other, “Be careful yourself!”

  They stopped to pet Ivy and say good-night to Norbert.

  “Penny for your thoughts, Norbert,” said Margaret. “You seem pensive, eh?”

  Norbert, surprised, looked up. The Club had not been inquiring into his inner workings since that morning at his house. He had been feeling less invisible among them, but it seemed they had lost interest in his economic hardship.

  “Actually, I was thinking about snowflakes.”

  “Snowflakes?” Margaret turned toward the window. “It’s almost June! Well, it’s New York. Anything is possible!”

  “Something they taught us in school,” Norbert remembered. “Mrs. Applegate, in fifth grade. I remember it was the last day before Christmas vacation, and Mrs. Applegate let us cut snowflakes out of paper, you know, like kids do, and she said that if you look at them under a microscope, no two snowflakes are alike. Each one is unique.”

  Birdie and Margaret listened with soft expressions as Norbert recalled his childhood memory. Norbert could see himself in that classroom at Central School in 1953, struggling to get the glitter and glue off of his fingers, and he could see Mrs. Applegate with that improbably blue-white hair that older ladies of that time seemed to have, and he felt her kindness and her wonder. The silver glitter, before he’d touched it, had been so lovely; it made him happy just to look at it. But as he’d applied the glitter to his snowflake, things went sadly wrong. The girls all seemed to have the knack of it. The teacher would want to hang theirs up on the window. Even the boys were all doing better than he was. But Norbert’s snowflake had been a misery to behold. The glue and glitter had gummed up on his fingers and formed little gray blobs that stuck sullenly to his snowflake, his desk and his sleeves. Mrs. Applegate had said, “Well, snowflakes are just like you in that way, boys and girls. Each one is unique. There isn’t anyone else in this entire world like you, with your special gifts. Each one of you can do something that is just yours alone, something that you will do better than anyone else. Your job in life is to find that thing. Find your snowflake nature!”

  Norbert had felt excited to think that he had something special about him, and he wondered what it could be. As he’d rubbed his fingers together and watched the dried glue drop on to his pants, he knew that his special thing wasn’t making snowflakes.

  “I guess it was looking at that snowy painting just now that made me think about snowflakes. And whenever I think about snowflakes, I think, I have to find my calling. My teacher all those years ago, telling us we all had something special in us... I believed her. I didn’t know that the uniqueness of snowflakes is a cliché. I didn’t know that it was later proved to be untrue. Now we know that snowflake patterns actually do repeat. At the time, I wondered what unique gift I had hidden away, that I would find in time. But now I look back on my life and realize, I never did find my special thing. I guess maybe we don’t all have a snowflake nature.” Norbert’s nervous smile widened, and he laughed a little, to let them know he didn’t mean to be taken seriously.

  “Oh, but you do!” said Birdie, in her smooth, breathy voice. “Your teacher was talking about the Daimon that Socrates wrote about. There is a voice, or a leading, or a prompting. As you listen to it, it gets stronger. It tells you, go here now, try this next, talk to that person today. And as you follow it, you grow into who you really are. And that’s why we are here!” Birdie seemed elated to impart this philosophy. “We are here to grow into who we are!”

  Norbert waited for Birdie to finish, but apparently she already had.

  Margaret said, “This whole conversation is a little too deep for me, if you want to know the truth. ‘Find your snowflake nature. We are here to grow into who we are.’ What the heck! My late ex-husband had a saying—‘Don’t think too much.’ That’s the one I live by. Well, ta-ta!” Before leaving, she grabbed the last kolaczki out of the bakery box on the counter. “One for the road, as they say!”

  Norbert watched his dinner rise toward Margaret’s lips.

  Margaret took a few steps, and then turned back and replaced it in the white box.

  “Oh, please take it!” urged Norbert. “It will just go to waste.”

  “Oh, no,” said Margaret, widening her blue eyes. “I’ve got to watch my girlish figure.”

  Norb
ert chuckled to cover his relief.

  Birdie began walking to the door after Margaret, but stopped and hesitated, in the attitude of one listening intently. Norbert didn’t hear anything. She turned back to him and said, “You will get a sign, Norbert.” Her eyes crinkled as she smiled.

  As the door closed and the chime sounded, Norbert said into the empty gallery, “A sign?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Three of Spades:

  Health concerns. You may need to see a doctor.

  Norbert did receive a sign, sooner than he expected.

  It had happened on a simple walk that lovely morning. It was the same walk that he and Ivy took every fine day. He’d attached her wee harness (Aunt Pearl had always emphasized how delicate Chihuahuas’ necks are, and that they must only ever be walked with harnesses, and not collars). From their little white stucco house, they strolled one block south to the downtown area, where Ivy attracted attention like a celebrity, and Norbert, as her escort, basked in her reflected glory. People would ask him questions about her (“Is that a Chihuahua? How much does she weigh? What’s her name?”), and Norbert would feel proud to have such an interesting friend.

  But this walk was to prove disastrous. They were meandering down Ontario Boulevard, approaching Main Street, when a mother and child came out of the bank.

  The little girl, blinking in the bright sunlight, shouted, “Oh, look! A puppy!” and had come skipping toward Norbert and Ivy.

  The mother called after her, “Wait, Angelina, wait!” But Angelina did not heed. Her mother came running, calling with some anxiety, “Ask first, Angelina, ask first!”

  Angelina disregarded her mother’s ravings, as if accustomed to dealing with such lunatics. Without so much as a how-do-you-do to Norbert, the child squatted and reached for Ivy. Ivy danced and wiggled, welcoming the little girl. Norbert was quick to explain the Doggie Rules, which he always had on the ready for children.