By early April, the sun had started to warm the frozen earth, but winter still gripped them in the mornings and evenings. On Sunday, when Mrs. Grundy had her day off, she went down to the basement boiler herself to shovel in coal and heat the pipes that had frozen overnight. Lord, but Tamara’d be glad for spring. She’d never passed a winter so damn cold in her life. She’d go to Paris when the war was over. Every club was integrated over there, they said, none of this crass American business of sitting in the back or beneath the stairs when she was allowed in at all. When she came back, she’d teach Pea all the new post-war dances, show off all her post-war French. She wanted Pea to be at her wedding, she wanted to show her Lawrenceville, for their babies to grow up together, for them to grow old together. What did she care what Phyllis had done in Victor’s service? She’d never been her angel—
Tamara’s heart seized so convincingly that she cried out and collapsed against the stairs. “Oh Jesus,” she whispered, and then, for a time, could do no more than wheeze. She waited to see if she would die, but her vision cleared and her heart kept beating and the cards, they were waiting.
They had known she would give in. She laid them out right there on the basement stairs with trembling hands, while Phyllis slumbered in what Tamara hoped was peaceful ignorance two floors above.
The cards sighed onto the wood. She laid them out in a pentagram with the head at the bottom and the heart marked at the center. This pattern was for listening, feeling the cards out. It had taken her years to learn to read so many numbers at once with their multiple inversions. But with Aunt Winnie’s sharp voice guiding her, Tamara had learned to take in the pattern, to let the cards hold her, to feel the lines supporting the numbers at each point and cohering in its center.
Left foot, three of diamonds, neutral; right foot, three of hearts, upright; left hand, ten of spades, reversed; right hand, ace of spades, reversed; head, queen of hearts, upright; and heart, the suicide king himself, axe and diamond above his blue-black visage, reversed.
The oracle stared down at the numbers with soft, glassy eyes. If anyone were around to watch her (and there was, she knew that, if you were generous with your definition of “anyone”), they would have seen her hands relax their unconscious grip on her terrycloth robe, her lips part, her eyes take on a dreamy concentration particular to opium eaters and oracles. Slowly, the pattern came clear.
Threes were neutral numbers, half six, which was the number of death. But two times three made six, which meant life and danger. The diamonds represented untold wealth, the hearts unspeakable grief. They were upright, but in the head-down pentagram, what was upright was also reversed. Life and death, then, a cycle that had the potential for both great rewards and brutal heartbreak. And in the position at the feet, it meant that they wanted to move, but something hadn’t quite let them yet. The hands and heart made a line of reversed cards. These were Pea’s hands, full of spades that were falling to the earth. From the ace to the ten, she had been given great power and it was slowly falling away. The direction, the purpose of those blades, had been twisted. And now that corruption had reached her heart. But that suicide king didn’t have to kill himself for the corruption to be reversed. Someone could take it from him: the queen of diamonds, the monarch at the head and yet behind them all, the voice of the cards that moved through the oracle who was Tamara, the voices of the ancestors clamoring in her head, The corruption shall be burned from this earth and the way made clean! We are in the earth, we are in the trees, we are in the sky. We see! Beware us!
The oracle shook and trembled. The cards, the luck, they roared beneath her fingers, but the oracle was gone, lost in the frozen earth, in the slow-moving sap of sleeping trees, in the feathered clouds of a dawn sky.
Above her body, a woman called her name.
Tamara opened her eyes as though peeling back an orange. She opened them as she had been, facing the closed door at the top of the basement stairs. It was open now, and Phyllis was in it, backlit by the yellow dawn light streaming from the French windows in the parlor. Beside her was Victor staring murder at the both of them. Phyllis’s hands were twisted behind her back but they surged sideways now, flailing toward Victor’s chest. Phyllis cursed and threw herself back against the doorframe. Tamara pushed the cards aside and scrambled up the stairs. She ran straight through Victor and she could swear the air he occupied smelled unclean, like the butcher’s shop at the height of summer. Phyllis was on her knees, one shoulder hitched against the far wall, sweat pouring down her face as she wrestled with the ends of her own arms. Tamara wanted to scream herself, at the sight of it. But she took a shaky breath and grabbed Phyllis around the waist.
“Pea, calm down! Pea!”
Pea relaxed against her, but the hands twisted and smacked
