The Magician’s Girl
A Novel
Doris Grumbach
For Gustave Flaubert, who wrote to his mistress in 1853: ‘Everything one invents is true, you may be sure.’
And for William Kennedy, who taught me, through Francis Phelan in Ironweed, that ‘every stinkin’ damn thing you can think of is true.’
PART ONE
I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
—SYLVIA PLATH
In these pages I have put down what I know for certain about Minna Grant’s placid and only occasionally traumatic early life, her edenic college years, the cool ellipsis between the beginning of her marriage and its curiously uneventful end, and the sweet conclusion to the few climactic months she spent in the heartland. There remains much I can only guess at. Every life is a mystery, a ‘real’ one even more than a fictional one, one’s own perhaps the greatest mystery. With all the solid evidence provided by diaries, letters, testimonies, confessions and memories, there is, at the core of a life history, an inscrutable enigma no biographer, friend or novelist can solve. We are left with the facts, softened and made more acceptable (and yes, believable) by charitable conjecture and the application of the imagination. So we make inspired guesses. That is all we have. That is what you will read here.
MINNA GRANT’S FIRST MEMORY, at five, was of terror. At two o’clock Christmas morning she woke to see, in the gray-black light of a New York City apartment-house courtyard that defined her bedroom window, a great human shadow. The figure’s hair seemed to spring out of its head; its face was blank in the darkness. Minna saw only the torso with sloping shoulders and enormous hips. There were no legs. She sat up rigid in bed and screamed. The sleeping warmth of her beloved bed, a crib mattress now mounted on a frame ‘for a big girl,’ her mother told her, had turned to ice at her legs. Her eyes, ears and nose felt as if they had been blown out, like tires, as if they had exploded while she screamed again and again. She thought her fear of the penumbral person in the window was emptying her head through all its holes.
‘Wake up, wake up,’ her mother said, shaking her. Minna was awake, had been awake all along, she believed, when the person appeared in the window, she wanted to tell her mother. But her mouth felt stuffed with her wet, swollen tongue. Her mother turned on the light: in the chandelier the five bare bulbs in their tulip holders lit up.
Her mother wrapped her in her arms. In the dissolving warmth of her mother’s milk-dough breasts, Minna abandoned her terror. She breathed in the fragrance of her mother’s bed-warm skin. ‘I saw someone,’ she said into the envelope of her mother’s sheltering bosom. ‘Not a soul is here,’ her mother said, ‘but me.’ Minna lifted her head and pointed. ‘In the window.’ But now in the light she saw a doll seated there, huge and curly-haired, its frilled dress filling the frame, its painted china face smiling maliciously as if it were in on the deception. The blue eyes looked amused at Minna’s terror.
‘It’s your present. We put it in your room so you would find it first thing when you woke up. It’s not a person. It’s a present. Don’t be frightened, dear. I’ll take it away and put it under the tree. We made a mistake. Go to sleep, my love. Everything will be all right now.’ She kissed Minna, turned out the light and left her wrapped in her quilt and covered with her mother’s perfume and powder. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Minna said to herself. When she was able to look again she saw the person doll was gone, the window space restored to blank gray. Her mother had taken the Christmas present with her to the dining room, she thought. Minna slipped into comforting sleep.
To her parent’s disappointment, she never played with her Christmas doll. She kept her wrapped in an old diaper-dusting cloth at the back of her closet, ‘to keep her clean,’ she told her mother.
It was spring. Minna was six, in the first grade of Public School 9. To her, the city of New York was still a high gray fortress bound together inexplicably by strips of colorless sky. On one side of the fortress ran a long, shining river she could only see sections of, the part between streets that seemed to jut into it. It was Saturday. Her mother, a beautiful woman with a mouth so tight and small it looked disappointed and stern, and blue eyes like tidewater pools, always took her to the stores on Saturday. ‘Let’s go marketing,’ her mother would say. ‘I don’t feel like it,’ Minna usually replied. She had heard the sentence somewhere and thought of it as a proper grown-up response to all suggestions made to her.
Her mother said nothing but took her hand and held it while they waited in the hall for the elevator. The elevator ‘boy’ in his faded brown uniform, in service to 130 West Eighty-sixth Street for twenty-five years, always said, ‘Morning to you, ma’am,’ whatever time it was that he brought the clattering cage to the second floor and opened the wire door. ‘Morning,’ her mother said. They went down in silence. Still held by her mother’s hand, resenting having to go marketing, Minna watched while her mother looked down at the sorted mail on the wide scarred table in the lobby. Rarely did her mother take one to open and read while they stood there. Even then, Minna knew her mother hoped for a letter with an odd stamp on it. Such a soft, thin letter came only, she believed, at Christmas and Easter.
They walked to Amsterdam Avenue, where her mother did most of her marketing. Sometimes Minna would ask to wait outside the store next to the carriages and their burdens of doll-babies asleep under satin and lace spreads. If her mother found she had to wait to be served, she came out to say, ‘Come in with me,’ but Minna always said, ‘I don’t feel like it,’ and stayed outside with the dogs leashed to the fire hydrant or near the grates protecting the spindly trees.
This Saturday her mother went to Ederle’s for the weekend meat. Minna felt like going into the butcher store now and then. She enjoyed sliding her feet slowly in the sawdust, she liked watching Mr. Ederle scrape the bloody innards of chickens from his convex block into a barrel. She liked his straw hat and bloodstained apron, and the piece of liverwurst he cut from the fat roll and gave her on occasion. ‘It tasted of flesh and blood,’ she thought, ‘it was soft and spiced her mouth, it was loving on her tongue and teeth. It needed no chewing to be swallowed.’
Mr. Ederle’s older brother, the Other Mr. Ederle, sat inert, wearing his white coat and straw hat in his glass cage. ‘He is partly paralyzed,’ her mother once explained to her in a whisper, ‘and can no longer cut meat.’ Minna watched him reach out with his stiff left hand to sweep the change and the dollar bills toward him and into a box on his lap. He could not smile or speak. Once his hat had fallen down to his nose, so that his eyes disappeared from view. This drumble of a man Minna thought of as part of herself; he entered into her being. While she waited for her mother to inspect Mr. Ederle’s offerings, make her choice and leave her order, Minna stood rigidly, emulating a paralyzed person, her eyes fixed on the motionless man, finding out in this way what it was like to be the Other Mr. Ederle.
The butcher Mr. Ederle said, ‘That all for today, Mrs. Grant?’ ‘That’s all, thank you. Send it.’ ‘Alvayss. Alvayss,’ said Mr. Ederle in his thick German accent. ‘Ve alvayss deliver.’ Minna broke her trance and took her mother’s hand. When they were back in the dappled sun of Amsterdam Avenue she said, remembering the beheaded chickens, ‘I know something everyone is afraid of.’ ‘What, dear?’ ‘The dark.’ Her mother said, ‘I was, when I was little.’ ‘Are you now?’ Her mother hesitated. Then she said, ‘Sometimes I am.’
In front of Gristede’s grocery store they met a stout lady in a rumpled white dress cinched in tight at her waist. She wore a decorated khaki soldier’s cap. ‘Buy a poppy? Made by veterans.’ When her mother stopped, the lady said, ‘I sell them for the American Legion Auxiliary, not for myself,’ as though she were accusing Minna a
nd her mother of misunderstanding her motives. Her mother took a nickel from her coin purse and put it into the slot in the lady’s tin can. The American Legion lady twisted the green stem of a red poppy to Minna’s jumper strap and turned away to stop another person. ‘Who is she?’ ‘She sells poppies to make us remember the men who died in the war.’ ‘Did you know those men?’ Her mother paused for a long time and then said, ‘I don’t think I did.’ She moved her stern lips so that they appeared to Minna to be crooked with sadness.
Gristede’s grocery man took down the things her mother had on her list and put them into a box. A few he could not reach on the top shelves. To Minna’s pleasure he removed these with a long stick topped with what looked to be thin steel fingers. They curled around the can of Babo and the box of Corn Flakes and then opened obediently to drop the object into the Gristede man’s hand. ‘Deliver?’ he always asked, although Minna knew this was foolish. Her mother never carried home the meat or groceries. ‘Yes, please,’ her mother told him. ‘Before twelve.’
They walked on toward the bakery. Her mother’s comforting warmth turned harsh when they were on the streets. ‘Don’t step on those places,’ her mother warned her. She pulled her violently away from the double-doored metal plates level with the sidewalk cement. Every store had them; it was the way the storekeepers got to the basement spaces under their businesses. An almost invisible handle lifted the doors and raised them up to reveal metal stairs that went down to the dark, smelly pit of the cellar floor. The cavity was often filled with terrible, odorous water that had collected there since the last rain. Minna’s mother was certain that sometimes the doors reversed themselves and dropped down, catapulting the unwary walker to the black hole beneath. ‘Stand back. Stay away. Jump over. Come here,’ her mother called to Minna if she strayed from the safe pavement to the threatening space. ‘Will I drown if I fall in?’ Minna asked, panicked by the fear in her mother’s voice. Minna had never seen the metal doors turn inside, but she was willing to believe, with her mother, that the old city of New York was full of menace, in need of repair, on the point of swallowing careless inhabitants into the bowels of its infernal underground.
Minna’s mother, Hortense, was ridden by other great fears. When she was a child in Mallow, County Cork, two of her older brothers and a young sister had died of what she called ‘the white plague.’ If Minna was found to have lost half a pound during her semiannual visit to the doctor, her mother was sure the high color on Minna’s fair cheeks and her childishly thin arms and legs were indicative of the tubercular taint. When no night sweats or gory cough developed in her daughter, she abandoned her belief that she had brought the phthisic pestilence from the old country (which she had left at sixteen, a hostage to a Jewish-American family who brought her over to be a maid in their household). Instead she centered on a greater dread: polio. She made Minna lie down every afternoon to ensure that she would not become overtired. No tearful ‘I don’t feel like it’ availed. During the heat of the summer, Minna was put to bed, even at the age of ten, with the shade of her room pulled down and left with the stern injunction that she shut her eyes and rest. She tried hard to obey, for by now the fear of polio was almost as strong in her as in her perturbed mother. Minna rehearsed the stories she had been told to make herself more submissive in that hour: about the girl at the summer camp in the Catskills who had been brought home in an ambulance. About the boy who lived in an iron lung that pumped his chest so that he could breathe. About the brothers who lived upstairs in the Grants’ apartment house and had been removed to Florida by a frantic mother at the first sign of a head cold. Hortense never ran short of such tales. Always there was a new one to preface each hour of required rest. Minna lay there, longing to read the book she had just brought home from the public library but afraid that the very act of opening its cover might precipitate a crooked leg, a ruined arm.
Minna preferred Central Park to any other place on earth, and in particular, the infinite potentialities of The Rocks. ‘Let’s please go to The Rocks,’ she begged her Fräulein when she was very young. Later she coaxed her mother past Columbus Avenue and across Central Park West and into the park at Eighty-sixth Street, where The Rocks loomed up on the right side of the path, grandly striated, elevated here, flattened out there. Out of these rocks Minna created all manner of natural and architectural wonders. Creeping up their sides in her sneakers, she imagined she had reached the peak of an alp, or the tower that imprisoned the English princes, even the Palisades, which, from her safe side of the Hudson River, filled her with awe.
Sometimes other children joined her on The Rocks. Together they would devise games involving storming the accommodating rocks become ramparts or stockades or the Bastille. But Minna much preferred to have The Rocks to herself, to populate their gray surfaces with her own soldiers, wild animals, Druids and Vikings. Once, when she was nine, she had an encounter there with a tatty, ragged, painfully thin gray squirrel. Seated at the top of the highest Himalaya and surveying her base camps, she watched him arrive on the ledge below her. He squatted, turned slightly away from her so that his ugly rodent’s profile was toward her. One malevolent eye was fixed upon the first little girl to conquer Mount Everest. He wrapped his paws around his scrawny stomach and cocked his long, slanted head so that now both his evil-looking eyes watched her. Through the transparent skin of his mean ears she could see sunlight that turned them red and sore-looking.
To Minna, the squirrel seemed to be in a state of un-containable fury. His meager tail, like a banner, furled along his haunches, then rose abruptly at the end and appeared to be jerking in convulsions. Stock-still, he was clearly challenging her territorial rights. Was he planning to make the ascent and plant his tail on her peak?
She sat without moving, unrelenting, staring into his eyes. A breeze from the Reservoir moved the fur on his back. Then his frosted tail shook hard in a new spasm of anger. ‘Ka-ka-ka,’ the squirrel said, as if his teeth were chattering. With every syllable, his tail trembled. Minna considered answering. Instead she said, ‘Scat,’ and hammered her feet on The Rocks.
The squirrel remained motionless, undaunted by the sounds of thunder over his head. Minna was now very frightened. She believed he was about to assault her position, like the roving Indians on the Mesa Verde. If he came closer she planned to retreat, surrender, ease herself off the cliff and down the other side. When he did move, after the long quiescent session during which both sides seemed on the brink of a truce or exhaustion, Minna, lulled by the impasse, was not prepared. The squirrel made an arced leap, his ears blazing, his far-apart eyes seeming to have coalesced at the front of his head, his tail aloft like a spinnaker at the rear of his flattened back. He landed on her bare, outstretched leg. Minna screamed at him and brought her knees up to shake him off, but not before he had bitten her knee with his small pointed teeth. Then he flipped backward, ran to cover in the bushes across the pathway and disappeared over the culvert and into the Eighty-sixth Street transverse.
The emergency room. Her mother crying beyond the swinging doors. The doctor holding the needle up to the light, filling its tube with white liquid by pushing with his thumb. The ugly swelling. The hurt. Shot after shot. Nausea. Her mother at her bedside in the dark of early morning to feel her forehead. Worst of all, in her mind’s eye, the conquering squirrel squatting in his lair under the transverse, gloating over her defeat, measuring the swelling on her knee with his single detached eye and judging it a more than adequate victory. There he sat, triumphant beast who had usurped her throne, in command of all his wicked eyes could survey, challenging her now to ascend the gray cliffs and meet him in mortal combat. Her mother’s hydrophobic terror as well as the memory of the terrible shots stayed with Minna all her life. She never returned to The Rocks, the scene of her ignominious defeat, the loss of her own, true place to the mad, victorious mammal.
Before the service elevator was installed in their apartment house, each kitchen was equipped with a manual means of bringing
up their groceries. The delivery boy placed his box into the dumbwaiter and pulled the ropes at its sides, raising it to the second level. Then the boy, usually an elderly Irishman who had worked for Gristede’s for most of his life, would walk up the stairs, ring the back-door bell and inform the lady of the house or the maid that the groceries were coming up.
Minna loved to be present when the dumbwaiter doors were opened. She would watch the box of food removed by the maid and think of something appropriate to send back down. Once, near Christmas, she took two shirts from her father’s pile of starched and laundered white shirts, thinking that the gray-headed delivery boy could well benefit from her well-to-do Jewish father’s abundance. Another time she sent down the remains of a lunch she did not like, still on the Limoges plate on which it had been served to her and covered with a damask napkin, on the theory that Mr. Sudermann, the superintendent, might enjoy her despised tuna fish and rice, her mother’s usual choice for Friday fare.
At Easter of her seventh year she packed her two-year-old Christmas doll into an oversize Dobbs hatbox from her mother’s closet and sent her down on the dumbwaiter to the lower depths from which, Minna hoped, she would never reappear. Mr. Sudermann brought her back promptly. That was the beginning of many such descents on the part of the hated and feared doll. Once she returned seated atop the washed sheets the laundress had sent up from the basement tubs. Seeing the Christmas doll again, risen from the cellar, made Minna believe that nothing could escape the inevitable order of her mother’s household. She was convinced that all servants, delivery boys and elevator boys were her mother’s agents, and that her Easter faith in the Resurrection was not only a theological belief but a natural, ordinary, everyday event.
‘Crystal Lake, to you we sing our praises.
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