“You mean miracles?”
“Miracles don’t exist. I mean real magic.” He frowned. “Growing up, I watched my father pace uselessly around the room when the rent came due, saying, ‘The Lord will provide, the Lord will provide.’ But it wasn’t the Lord who found ways to pay our rent. It was me.”
Bess was taken aback. “I have to say I disagree with you. Miracles do exist.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“No, but—”
“So how would you know?”
“It depends on how you look at it. A baby being born—that’s a miracle, don’t you think?” She felt her cheeks flush. It was becoming clear how young she was, how little experience she had outside the few blocks she grew up on. She knew the priests did not have all the answers; in fact, one of the ones she’d encountered in a church near the Gut had tried to run his hand along her leg. But it was difficult to admit that, to some extent, life was one great pool of floundering souls, everyone clutching for something to believe in. Church had always set her at ease—when her father died, when her mother remarried, and the house was full of screaming children—she could sit for an hour among the trembling brightness of the candles, the windows the colors of jewels, and all that breathless beauty, and be still.
“Listen,” Harry said. “The only miracle I’ve seen yet is the one that led me to meeting you tonight.”
Bess blinked at him. She wondered if he was making fun of her. She had insulted him, perhaps even humiliated him, and now he was proclaiming some kind of tenderness toward her? He hadn’t even touched her hand, but she felt as if he’d run his fingers down her back. She wrapped her arms instinctively around her waist. “You’re—you’re quite straightforward.”
Harry reached toward her. “Are you cold?”
She shook her head and changed the subject. “Are you saying you don’t believe in religion then?”
“Of course I do. My father was a Jewish scholar.”
“Oh,” she stammered, confused. “You’re . . . Jewish then?” She wasn’t quite sure which was worse—that he was Jewish, or that he seemed to have mocked her own beliefs. Or that neither of these changed the fact that she couldn’t quite bring herself to step away from him.
“I suppose.”
“Do you still practice it?”
“No.” He looked her up and down. “And you’re Catholic, then?”
“Why would you suppose that?”
He smiled. “You said Jewish with such forced politeness.”
She blushed. “I did not. And it’s not that. My mother’s very strict about her faith.”
“So you became a dancer. How very Catholic of you.” He frowned. “You seem to put a lot of stock in what you’ve learned from other people—teachers, parents, priests. But what about what you’ve learned for yourself?”
She felt, in a way, that, by standing here alone with Harry, she had made a decision without intending to. His breath was so warm she felt as if it might scald her. She realized now that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—go back. What she had once considered sinful did not seem wrong anymore. The routines of her new life—the wide-eyed stares of the men in the audience; the giggling late-night confessions of Anna and Doll in the bunk across from her—seemed not only harmless but honest and real. She had been looking for something during those hours she spent in the solitude of a church pew, but she had found it here instead, in Harry’s smooth, unblemished face, and in the way he seemed to want her not for being smooth or unblemished but for being wonderfully complicated, emerging from the banality of her past life to something enthralling.
They had reached the beach now, and the ocean, black as cloth in the distance, the froth of the waves cascading like plumage, was less than a hundred feet away. There was something spectacular about the sea at night—it was dangerous, unexplored; and if there was such a thing as magic, then it was certainly somewhere out there, in all that humid darkness.
They stood with their feet buried in the sand, looking out at the water. Dash and Doll were nowhere to be seen, but she could hear the unmistakable chirp of Doll’s laughter, somewhere down the beach. “You believe in miracles. But don’t you believe in magic?” Harry asked her, his dark eyes suddenly serious.
Bess blinked. “I—I don’t think so. You mean like flying carpets? No.”
“I’m going to tell you a secret, then. And it is essential that you know this.” He took both her hands and looked at her. A current of electricity shot through her. “There is no such thing as magic.”
Bess felt herself shiver, but she didn’t pull away. “Why do you say that?”
“Because if it was real, I’d know it.”
“That’s a ridiculous answer.”