The Infinite Plan Read Free Page B

worn furniture in their living room. Another four dollars bought them an Indian or a cowboy, and the result might be a war-bonneted redskin on the icy peaks of Tibet or a pair of cowboys in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots shooting it out on the pearly sands of a Polynesian beach. Olga could quickly copy the landscape from the magazine, then, in only a few minutes, Reeves would draw the human figures from memory and the clients would pay their bill and leave, carrying a canvas whose paint was still wet.
    Gregory Reeves would have sworn that Olga had been with them always. Much later he would ask what her role in the family had been, but no one could answer, because by that time his father was dead and she was a forbidden subject. Nora and Olga had met on a boatload of refugees from Odessa crossing the Atlantic to North America. They had lost touch with each other for many years but were reunited by chance after Nora was married and Olga’s career as a midwife, healer, and fortune-teller was well established. When the two of them were together they always spoke in Russian. They were totally different, one as introverted and shy as the other was exuberant. Nora, long-boned and deliberate of gesture, had a face like a cat and combed her long, colorless hair back in a bun; she never used makeup or wore jewelry, but always looked freshly groomed. On dusty travels where water for bathing was scarce and it was impossible to iron a dress, she was somehow able to keep herself as neat and tidy as the starched white cloth on her table. Her natural reserve increased with the years; little by little she became detached from the earth and ascended to a dimension no one could reach. Olga, several years younger, was a short, sturdy brunette with full bust and hips, a narrow waist, and short but shapely legs. A wild head of henna-dyed hair, in shades of vermilion, fell over her shoulders like an outlandish wig. She was draped in so many strands of beads that she might have been an idol loaded down with baubles, a look that lent authority when it came time to tell fortunes; the crystal ball and the tarot cards budded like natural extensions of her beringed fingers. She hadn’t a trace of intellectual curiosity; she read nothing but the crime reports in the sensationalist press and an occasional romantic novel. She had never cultivated her gift of clairvoyance through any systemized course of study, because she believed it was a visceral talent. You either have it or you don’t, she always said, it’s no use to try to acquire it from books. She knew nothing about magic, astrology, cabala, or other facets of her calling. She barely knew the names of the signs of the zodiac, but when the moment came to peer into her crystal-gazer’s ball or lay out her marked cards, a prediction was always forthcoming. Hers was not an occult science but an art of fantasy composed principally of intuition and shrewdness. She was genuinely convinced of her supernatural powers; she would have bet her life in defense of one of her predictions, and if they sometimes failed she always had a reasonable explanation on the tip of her tongue—usually that what she had said had been misinterpreted. She charged a dollar to divine the sex of a child in its mother’s womb. She would lay the woman on the floor with her head pointing north, place a coin on her navel, and dangle a lead weight tied to a length of fishing line above her belly. If the improvised pendulum swung clockwise the child would be a boy; if the reverse, it was a girl. The same system could be applied to cows and pregnant mares by swinging the weight above the animal’s hindquarters. She gave her verdict, wrote it on a piece of paper, and kept it as irrefutable proof. Once, they returned to a hamlet they had visited several months before and a woman accompanied by an ill-tempered parade of curious onlookers came out to demand her dollar back.
    â€œYou told me I was going to