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Hotel. Laughter from a tavern door as it opened, smell of beer and cigarettes. Women with cheap fur collars held on to their men.
    â€œWhy do you have to go to New York?” I said, not quite understanding my envy.
    â€œYou can’t be a real singer in this town. Here they like the Andrews Sisters. Bing Crosby. All that smooth stuff. This is a cowtown.”
    â€œIt isn’t.”
    â€œWhere’s your coloured section? Where’s your Cotton Club? It isn’t a big city without Negro people.”
    We stopped in front of Heintzman Hall and looked through the plate glass at the shining black pianos. I wondered whether she was right. In truth, the farthest I’d managed to imagine was leaving the house of my parents. It had never before that moment occurred to me that I might go somewhere else, and I felt almost as if the wind had been knocked out of me.
    A sailor stumbled into me and kept going.
    â€œAnyway,” I said. “You can’t be a famous singer. You’ve got a voice like a washing machine.”
    â€œTake that back.”
    She grabbed my arm and bent it behind my back. Grimacing, I tried to pull myself free, but she had me good. I squinted through the tears and saw the marquee for Brant’s Vaudeville. All Live! Shows Running Continuously Till Midnight.
    â€œI’ll let you go if you come in with me,” she said.
    â€œBut . . . we don’t have . . . any . . . money.”
    â€œSo? We’ll sneak in. The doorman isn’t even there. Probably on a piss break.”
    â€œWe might get caught.”
    â€œWill you come with me or do I twist your arm a bit more?”
    â€œOkay, okay.”
    Corinne let go, only to grab my sleeve. She pulled me down to sneak under the ticket booth and then rushed me through the door and across the red lobby carpet. She yanked open the inside door and then we were in the dark of the theatre. We stood letting our eyes adjust. A man with a dog act was on. Every time he bent over to pick something up, one of the dogs jumped on his back.
    â€œThose dogs are smarter than you,” she whispered. “Come on.”
    She skipped down the aisle and slid into a seat three rows from the front. I took the seat beside her. The man and the dogs took their bows and the curtain came down. Three girls came on and did a fake cancan.
    â€œThose women are all so ugly they must be sisters.”
    True, but I looked at their frilly underpants anyway. After them came a violinist and an Irish singer, followed by a husband-and-wife comedy act. I was thinking about putting my hand onto Corinne’s knobby knee, whether I’d get a slap to the head, when the curtain came up on a man in tails and top hat. He was drunk, or seemed it anyway, trying to keep himself upright as he patted his pockets in search of a cigarette. When he came up empty, he shrugged, but when he put his hand to his lips, a burning cigarette appeared. Surprised, he dropped it onto the stage and stamped it out. But another appeared in the same hand, and then a third in his other hand. He threw them down too, but more cigarettes replaced them and then one seemed to jump into his mouth. He staggered about in increasing dismay, burning cigarettes appearing faster than he could drop them.
    The audience laughed, but I leaned forward, riveted. How did the cigarettes just appear? I hated the drunk act, the slurred voice, the cheap humour, but none of that mattered. Anyone could learn to dance, or tell a joke, but this man broke the laws of nature. He made a tear in the world and put his hand through it. I didn’t know that he was one of a hundred imitators of Cardini, one of the greatest sleight-of-hand magicians of the time. I only knew that I too wanted to pull objects out of the air.
    When we left the theatre, I couldn’t talk. Corinne gabbed on about this or that act, but I had no words. Instead, I made her walk quickly up to College Street then past the market, up to