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Hypothesis
The purest mystery, of course, but maybe she had a secret lover. Marriages come unraveled. Pressures accumulate. There was precedent in their lives.
In the kitchen that morning, when her eyes traveled away, maybe Kathy Wade was imagining a hotel room in Minneapolis, or in Seattle or Milwaukee, a large clean room with air-conditioning and fresh flowers and no politics and no defeat. Maybe she saw someone waiting for her. Or someone driving north toward Lake of the Woods, moving fast, coming to her rescue. An honest, quiet man. A man without guile or hidden history. Maybe she had grown tired of tricks and trapdoors, a husband she had never known, and later that night, when she said “Dream time,” maybe it was this she meant—an escape dream, a dream she would now enter.
Among the missing, as among the dead, there is only the flux of possibility.
Maybe a heaven, maybe not.
Maybe she couldn’t bear to tell him. Maybe she staged it. Not likely, but not implausible either. The motives were plentiful—fed up, afraid, exhausted by unhappiness. Maybe she woke early the next morning and slipped out of bed and got dressed and moved out to the porch and quietly closed the door behind her and walked up the narrow dirt road to where a car was waiting.
We called him Sorcerer. It was a nickname.
—Richard Thinbill
Exhibit Seven: Photograph of John Wade, age 12
Smiling
Husky, not fat
Holding a magician’s wand over four white mice
He used to practice down in the basement, just stand in front of that old mirror of his and do tricks for hours and hours. His father didn’t think it was healthy. Always alone, always shut up by himself. A very secretive boy, I think I mentioned that.
—Eleanor K. Wade
Exhibit Eight: John Wade’s Box of Tricks, Partial List
Miser’s Dream
Horn of Plenty
Spirit of the Dark
The Egg Bag
Guillotine of Death
Silks
Pulls
Wands
Wires
Duplicates (6) of father’s necktie
My sister seemed almost scared of him sometimes. I remember this one time when Kathy … Look, I don’t think it’s something we should talk about.
—Patricia S. Hood
What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.
Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its line of force, she may fall back on superstition or take up a useless hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?12
—Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature.13
—Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)
There is no such thing as “getting used to combat” … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.14
—J. W. Appel and G. W. Beebe (Professors of Psychiatry)
It wasn’t just the war that made him what he was. That’s too easy. It was everything—his whole nature… But I can’t stress enough that he was always very well behaved, always thoughtful toward others, a nice boy. At the funeral he just couldn’t help it. I wanted to yell, too. Even now I’ll go out to my husband’s grave and stare at that stupid stone and yell Why, why, why!
—Eleanor K. Wade
You know, I think politics and magic were almost the same thing for him. Transformations—that’s part of it—trying to change things. When you think about it, magicians and politicians are basically control freaks. [Laughter] I should know, right?
—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo
The capacity to appear to do what is manifestly impossible will give you a considerable feeling of personal power and can help make you a fascinating and amusing personality.15
—Robert Parrish (The Magician’s Handbook)
Pouring out affection, [Lyndon Johnson] asked—over and over, in every letter, in fact, that survives—that the affection be reciprocated.16
—Robert A. Caro (The Years of Lyndon Johnson)
There surely never lived a man with whom love was a more critical matter than it is with me.17
—Woodrow Wilson
When his father died, John hardly even cried, but he seemed very, very angry. I can’t blame him. I was angry, too. I mean—you know—I kept asking myself, Why? It didn’t make sense. His father had problems with alcohol, that’s true, but there was something else beneath it, like this huge sadness I never understood. The sadness caused the drinking, not the other way around. I think that’s why his father ended up going into the garage that day … Anyway, John didn’t cry much. He threw a few tantrums, I remember that. Yelling and so on. At the funeral. Awfully loud yelling.
—Eleanor K. Wade
After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems
