Free Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock Page B

Vice Corps, 14 but you had other plans for your wealth.”
    “I did.”
    “And how’s that going for you? Your charity?”
    Fern decided to ignore West’s sneer. She looked directly at him, and answered the question as if it were honest. “I think we’re doing well. I haven’t been down to see the girls since the cancer took this turn. But I get letters.”
    “They write?”
    “There’s a school at the compound. Most of them are still school-aged when we get them off the street, West. They get used up pretty quickly.”
    West was done with the conversation. “So, can I have it or not?”
    “When have I ever denied you?”
    “You denied me the time I refused to ask.”
    “There you go.”

    As West walked toward the park, he relaxed. He’d gotten the money. He would send Byrne down to meet Lark. He had a feeling they would work. What he needed now was to sit and think about next. Something bigger?—always a temptation. Maybe technology.
    He was at Alice. He always ended up at Alice. Her, big and bronze on her big bronze mushroom, arms outstretched. Him—having run away from Fern at nine, ten, twelve, because she’d been making him listen about his father, or about practicing, or because there was another one of her women in the apartment. The summers in Boston while Fern taught at the academy had been worse. She’d tried to make him rehearse with the other students there—the best from small towns all over the country. Most of them female. And when he’d gotten frustrated by his inadequacies, when he’d thrown down his architectures or tripped over someone else’s—there was no Alice to run to. No big bronze girl blithely holding court among others’ absurd expectations.
    West watched as a little boy climbed onto her lap with the help of his father. West’s father still lived and worked downtown, he assumed. It had been over a decade. The few times his father had been to see West, the three of them—Fern, West, West’s father—had gone to eat at a place with dark green walls where waiters refolded his napkin every time he went to the bathroom. He’d always gone to the bathroom at least once during those dinners. Because the soap there smelled like other countries.
    Fern had made West keep a daily journal since he’d turned ten. In it, there was a page-long entry about soap. Soap that didn’t smell like his grandmother. She told him each night what to write in his journal, and that night he disobeyed. When they came back from the restaurant and his father took off—again—Fern said West should write about how he felt, and he wrote about soap. Musky soap. Soap that didn’t smell like clean. Stolen soap he’d hidden under his bed in a small leather suitcase with buckles.
    In his late teens, West discovered that the journal was a sleight tradition. He read around in several of the diaries kept in the academy book room. Sleight’s founder had made her protégées take notes on every performance: imperfections, serendipities, suggestions. 15 Before they attempted their first tour, Antonia had her sleightists research the towns through which they would caravan, including chief industries, average per capita income, ethnic makeup, and weather. The performers became fixtures at the newly opened Free Library of Philadelphia. Their journals were dry, full of statistics and numbers—and for the most part, absent the authors themselves.
    West supposed he was fortunate. His grandmother had only had him take notes on people: what they said, how they said it, how they moved, what they looked like, what they wore, what they didn’t say. No research required, only a sound eye. When, as an adolescent, he’d toured East Asia as a roadie/techie/usher with Kepler, she’d quizzed him nightly on the composition of the audience and the demeanor of the critics. West, lacking the finer motor skills, lacking hand-eye coordination, gained a knowledge of humanity both indispensable and dreadful. And unlike