The Secret of Magic: A Novel - Hardcover

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Regina Mary Robichard noticed the envelope as soon as she
entered her office. Fat and cream-colored, it lay there among

the business letters, newspapers, and circulars on her small desk. It

looked out of place, like an invitation. Not just any invitation, either,

but an opening to something she might actually like to attend. Later,

it was the photograph within that envelope that would capture her

attention, and keep it. But for now the envelope itself was enough.

She had come in on a Saturday with the idea of working for a few

hours and then, since she was downtown, rewarding herself with a

little shopping at Best & Co. or at Peck & Peck. There was a sale on

hats at Gimbels, but she had a lot of hats and didn't really need more.

She'd read about another good deal, this one for better suits, at May

D& F and a new movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, which was playing

at the Rialto in Times Square. She thought about taking that in

as well. If she was lucky, all of this might keep her out of her new

stepfather's house, and her mother-or, rather, her parents-would

be asleep when she came in.

It was a legend in the family how Regina, when she was little,

under six, would go up to a man-any man-who had come to hear

one of her famous mother's famous speeches and say, "Would you

like to marry my mommy? Would you like to be my daddy?" Often

the men she asked did not know how to take this. They'd duck.

They'd turn away. Of course they all knew what had happened to

Oscar Robichard, not that long ago in Omaha, Nebraska. They

wouldn't have been there if they hadn't, and they were all sympathetic.

But nobody wanted to be Regina's daddy. Nobody had wanted

to marry her mother. Until now.

"Monday," Regina said aloud, "I've got to start looking for my

own place." I've got a job now, and my own life. It's time.

Behind her, she left the main door unlocked and opened a crack

in case someone else came in, always a possibility on a Saturday here

at the LDF, or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as it was more

formally known. People worked late; they came in on weekends.

There was always that much to do. Regina shared her space with

three other lawyers, all of them men, one of them white. None of

whom exactly relished having a woman in their midst. They never

said this, not outright, but it was implied in their stories that stopped

in mid-?sentence, in laughter that abruptly died when she came into

the room. She suspected that half the male lawyers thought she was

here because her mother was Ida Jane Robichard, the other half because

of the way that her father had died. They were all wrong. Regina

knew she was here because she was born to be here, born to

value the law and its order. With her history, who wouldn't? But this

didn't stop her from sometimes feeling . . . well, strange.

Especially because she sat directly across from Edgar Morrison

Moseley III ("But my friends call me Skip"), hired as a staff lawyer

three weeks before she'd been, fully as ambitious as she was herself,

and the nemesis of what she liked to call her "legal life." Skip had

never been happy to have a woman in the office, a fact he made

abundantly clear. Invariably, the women lawyers he talked about had

something in common with Regina-"Hey, she looked exactly like

you look. Graduated Columbia, too. I was astounded"-and they all

ended up in either a sad or bad way.

"War's over. Women need to do their duty, go back home and

make babies. A woman working takes a job away from a family

man." This was his continual refrain, called out whenever he thought

Regina might be listening. Once he'd actually lectured her to her

face while they were having sandwiches