The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Marcus and his young wife, Muriel, had left the Upper West Side after their marriage. To Sarah their departure was an emigration, a bold venture to a new and foreign land. She seldom visited them, having been south of Fifty-ninth Street only a few times in her life and north of 110th Street never. Only when the Beckers came for her to celebrate a birthday or an anniversary in their apartment did she make the long trek, and then insisted on being brought home immediately after dinner. ‘Before the dark sets in,’ she would say. Her children, as she continued to call them, came regularly, dutifully, in their youth, to see her, bringing her beloved little Liz for Friday night suppers. That, in Sarah’s eyes, was as it should be: the young crossing oceans and continents to be united with their elders in the homeland.

  Many Saturdays in her teens, after the Sabbath suppers had fallen off, Liz went by herself ‘to visit with’ Sarah, using the prepositional form to describe it because Sarah always said, ‘I visit every day that it is good weather with my friends on the benches.’ The benches were a two-block walk to Broadway from her apartment: she made it sound as if they were located in another state. After Saturday morning at the museum Liz would take the crosstown bus to Broadway to look for Sarah on the benches. They occupied the strip of sidewalk between the uptown and the downtown sides of Broadway. There Sarah sat comfortably between the two streams of traffic, talking to Mr. and Mrs. Mendelsohn, old Mrs. Kaminsky and the bachelor Mr. Stern. The five sat always in the same seats filling the bench, in the same relative positions to one another, all facing forward but each knowing, by virtue of their long association, when a remark was addressed to them. Their talk was commonplace, trivial, traditional, repetitive, but a source of pleasure to them all. They brought one another up to date on the activities of their children. ‘Louie goes this week to Lakewood, New Jersey, for the surgeon’s convention—yes, Marcia with him. The children stay with the Laskys in their Park Avenue apartment, very nice, very big, Marcia’s family is now in plastic, a new business.’ ‘My boy who lives in Detroit, Mortie, writes to me his wife is pregnant. Again. I wrote this morning it is time to think of what it costs to send to college so many children. Just their books and clothes …’ Sarah Becker’s son, the apartment house janitor, and unemployed daughter-in-law, Muriel, who marched in parades and picketed at City Hall, were not fitting subjects for these exchanges of parental pride. Sarah talked mostly about her granddaughter. ‘Liz knows all about the painters, from the Middle Ages and so on. A smart girl and good too, always good to me. She goes to Barnard soon.’ On Saturdays her claim to Liz’s affection was demonstrated when she appeared. Each time she would go through the introduction of her granddaughter to her friends, as though Liz were an unexpected, newly risen apparition. ‘Oh, here now is my granddaughter Elizabeth Becker. My friends Mr. and Mrs. Mendelsohn. And here, Mr. Stern and Mrs. Kaminsky.’ Liz always said how do you do politely to them all. Then Sarah allowed Liz to help her up. Together they would wait for the light that permitted them, slowly, Liz’s hand under Sarah’s arm, to cross Broadway to the C&L, the only restaurant Sarah ever patronized. There, Mr. Lyons, the owner and greeter, would seat them in their usual quiet corner, and they would eat hugely—blintzes stuffed with cheese and covered with lavish sour cream and overripe purple berries. Liz would have pie à la mode, and they would drink glasses of tea with lemon wedges floating at the top. Liz loved these lunches. She loved hearing her grandmother’s habitual talk, compounded of memoir and current gossip. Sarah believed Liz was eager to hear about the day-to-day progress of the Mendelsohns’ children, and Mrs. Lasky’s unending hopes for grandchildren. Liz watched her grandmother as she talked, enjoying the play of her agreeable wrinkled face, her faded blue eyes seeming to float in their watery beds, her thin white hair floating off from her pink scalp at the least stir of air created by the ceiling fan. Separated by sixty years, grandmother and granddaughter never tried to communicate their inner lives to each other, but they rested comfortably in the currents of family, of food, and the idle talk they exchanged every week. The bond between them was strong, for they shared a religious history, if not a religion. Liz had been raised to believe that religion was the opiate of the masses, and Sarah went only on the High Holidays to worship at the synagogue. They had an unspoken sense of female alliance rooted in the patristic tradition. Sarah was unquestioning in her admiration of the girl, and Liz admired the old woman’s jaunty independence, her need ‘to do for myself,’ as she said, her staunch determination to be alone but not lonely, her patriotism for Seventy-eighth Street, and her loyalty to her region of the city. It may be that Liz’s decision to go to Barnard College, a little more than forty blocks north of her grandmother’s domain, was made so that there would be no interruptions in her weekly reunions with the beloved old woman.

  When it happened, she was not there to see it. She was forever grateful. It happened at twelve-twenty on a very sunny Monday on one of those rare New York City fall days when the air on Broadway is pellucid and embodies little gusts from the river smelling of honeysuckle and river damp, sweeping around the corner past the C&L to pick up smells of mustard, sauerkraut and dill pickles. The whole sweet-sour odorous meld arrived at the benches to remind the sitters that it was time to think about adjourning for lunch.

  They had indeed decided upon it. Mr. Stern had risen and had offered his hand to Mrs. Moses Becker to make her elevation from the bench easier, when a wine-filled cab driver, Lorenzo Amati, misjudged the turn east into the intersection at Seventy-eighth Street (he claimed the bright sun blinded him), and crashed his yellow Checker cab into the five old inhabitants of the benches, cutting them down like a sharp scythe through high wheat, ending forever their years of conversation, shunting them with one fierce plunge of his blunt-nosed taxi onto the stone benches of the next world.

  PART TWO

  OTTO MILE, A VISITING PROFESSOR, taught poetry at Barnard College. He was a small man with a very large, bony forehead, and wiry red hair that sprang out from his head. His hands and feet were unusually small and well shaped, appendages characteristic of a slender, delicate girl. He seemed proud of them if one could judge by the postures he assumed at the podium. The English department faculty, which had hired him with some trepidation, believed he led the poet’s customarily bohemian life, but it was not so. He was a sedate man of sedate habits. He had been married for many years to a wife who cared for all his needs and was an excellent typist of his letters and manuscripts. The first financial security he had ever known was his year-to-year contract with Barnard. His livelihood had always been precarious.

  Maud Noon took Otto Mile’s poetry seminar twice, against the advice of the chairman of the department, who thought poetry should be studied historically, not written by students. In Maud’s sophomore year, hardly knowing Otto Mile, she had blundered into his office, forgetting to knock. She found him seated at his desk, holding a mirror over his head, and applying red shoe polish to a bald area, nature and age’s imposed tonsure above his halo of rusty hair. ‘Get out! Get out!’ he screamed. She stumbled over the doorsill as she left, feeling guilty to be in possession of the secret of a famous, vain man, and sure she would be made to pay for her knowledge during future sessions of the seminar. And so she did.

  She bore his insults stolidly when she submitted some poems. Every cruel word he said about her poetry was important to her. At seventeen she had come to college on a scholarship, knowing that she would be willing to do anything, bear anything, in order to learn to be a poet. So dedicated and driven was she that she never resented the requirements in science, mathematics, languages and history. She did very well in all of them. Her instructors did not realize that the courses in themselves meant nothing to her. She stored away what she had memorized, planning to use it all, in some transformed way, as poetic material, for metaphors, similes, images, words and phrases with the right referential value.

  Very near the end of the semester, Maud read a notice on the English department bulletin board: ‘Otto Mile
will read his poetry at 8 P.M. on May I in College parlor of Barnard Hall.’ She asked Minna, her roommate, if she wanted to go. But Minna, looking languorous and lovely in her long winter robe, decided she needed to read. Maud studied for her chemistry test until the last moment, and then walked across the narrow strip of campus to the hall. The parlor was almost filled, mostly with sullen-looking Columbia College boys from across Broadway. They sprawled in most of the chairs, signifying their objections to coming to Barnard (which they referred to, by a natural corruption of the name, as Barnyard) from their masculine bastion in order to hear the modern poet they most admired.

  Maud took a seat at the back of the room, near one of the few Barnard girls who could spare time from last-minute cramming to attend a poetry reading. Most of the front chairs, benches and lounges, arranged in a vague semicircle for the occasion, were already taken. Maud had to push by a boy on a couch to reach the other end of it. He smiled at her apologetically—for his long legs, she assumed. But then she decided he was the sort of conceited boy who smiled automatically at girls, even girls as clearly unattractive as she was. He was good-looking and he conveyed an awareness of the fact. ‘I’m Leo Luther, Columbia, junior,’ he said, holding out his hand. He had to push over against his side of the couch to make room for Maud’s bulky hips and considerable backside, but he seemed not to take any notice of the demand her shape made upon him. ‘Call me Luther.’ ‘Maud Mary Noon, Barnard, sophomore. Call me Maud,’ she said and shook his hand. She gave him a long look, cataloguing his curly black hair and the stiff long black eyelashes she decided should have been bestowed upon a girl. His eyes were bright black, like wet marbles. Except for them he resembled the blind-eyed, beautiful head of Brutus she had seen in the Metropolitan. Luther had a box camera in his lap. ‘I hope to get some shots of him as he reads,’ he said, sounding apologetic. ‘But the light in here is terrible.’ She turned away to convey her opinion that this was a mindless thing to do, and fixed her eyes on the lectern set up between the long windows.

  Dressed in a light sharkskin suit, white tie and white silk shirt, the poet climbed to the lectern, walking fast on the balls of his feet. His shoes and socks were white. From Maud’s myopic distance he looked rather like a Christmas decoration on the Rockefeller Center tree. He pushed the lectern aside, and holding all his books under one arm, an open one in his hand, he started to read immediately. Maud forgot Leo Luther’s presence beside her and never once turned toward him during the reading. Almost as intently as she watched the poet, Luther watched her, interested in the way she listened, deeply, like someone feasting after a long fast. She seemed to be satisfying a psychic thirst with Mile’s rolling, musical sounds. Leo Luther, on the other hand, could not make very much of what he heard. To him Mile’s poetry was an incomprehensible mixture of classical references (that much he knew, but not what they meant), foreign phrases and English words whose denotations he understood only vaguely.

  So interested had Luther become in the intensity of the girl beside him that he forgot to take pictures of the poet. Mile’s graceful hands, his hawkish, bushy-haired, supercilious yet somehow troubled and wary look, the way his small mouth seemed to relish every word he said—all that went unrecorded by Leo Luther’s idle camera.

  That first evening, Luther thought Maud homely. (‘Fat nose, little eyes, like beads, close together,’ he was to tell a friend at his dorm at breakfast.) Oddly, she had interested him by her absorption in Otto Mile’s reading. ‘I will conclude by reading a few poems from my recent group of odes,’ Mile said. He never looked at the audience and hardly took time to breathe between one poem and the next. When he closed the book, he clasped the volumes together under his arm and almost ran from the room, not waiting to hear the enthusiastic applause of the standing students. Maud pushed heavily past Luther without a word of apology, her buttocks almost colliding with his face. She wanted to be one of the first out of the door, before the applause started. Later she told Luther she hated the sound of applause, the sharp, mindless, often uncritical and automatic whacking of hands together, inevitable and irritating, disturbing the perfect tower of words erected by the poet’s beautiful voice.

  Maud’s first year with Otto Mile taught her much about creative pain. He spared her no possible agony. He crumpled a sheet of her poetry and threw it across the room at the wastebasket. ‘Trash! Junk! Wastepaper! Pointless. Too long. Terrible!’ he shouted. After he left the room she rescued the paper ball, spread it out on a desk and reread it. Her lips formed the hard-found words with maternal compassion. She loved her own poetry, like a mother doting on a retarded child. She could easily summon up the strength to agree with Otto Mile’s ejaculative condemnations, although she held to her private view that sometimes what she wrote was not so bad. She came to realize that he was often vulgar and harsh when he was discussing the work of others in the class as well. Always, she saved the rescued sheet and reworked the poem. At the end, however, she often gave in to Mile’s judgment and returned the page to the wastebasket in her room.

  Leo Luther sat in the lounge of Hewitt waiting for Maud to come down, wondering, to occupy the time, why he had decided to call her. Twice before, he had met her on Broadway. Once he told her he wished there’d be another reading. The first had been a milestone for him, he joked. She smiled, said, ‘Yes, good-bye,’ and walked on. Was he fascinated by her strange ugliness? By her appearance of sharp, almost intimidating intelligence? Was he sorry for her? Did her ugliness contrast pleasingly with what he well knew to be his own beauty? Was it his vanity that made him prefer women who seemed to admire him? He thought Maud liked him, was flattered when something he said made her smile. A smile, he was to discover, was uncommon to her heavy, almost shapeless mouth.

  That evening they sat in the lounge and talked about their families, their classes, their teachers, their careers. Luther said he might like to be an actor. Maud said, ‘I’m optimistic enough to think I may someday be a poet.’ Luther was taking a course at the New School in documentary photography, for Columbia refused to offer anything so outlandish. He had brought a copy of Life magazine with him. ‘My Bible,’ he said. It contained pictures of the members of the Theatre Guild acting group. Maud told him she had a roommate who was a photographer. He appeared not much interested in that information. Inevitably the conversation turned to Otto Mile.

  ‘He’s a wonderful teacher,’ Maud said. Luther said, ‘I suppose so. But that night at his reading I thought he didn’t seem to like reading much. Or maybe it was the audience he didn’t like.’ Maud stared at him as though he were a boor incapable of appreciating Mile’s genius. ‘He’s different in class.’ ‘Nicer?’ ‘No, not nicer. He’s never nice in the way you mean, not that I have ever heard. Not to anyone. But he’s so amazingly acute and intelligent. With all that hatred in him for the second-rate and the pretentious, he makes you do your damndest. Better than you thought you ever could.’

  Maud’s face reddened. She told Luther about bringing a new poem to Mile’s seminar last week. ‘It was one I hesitated a long time about, because it’s personal. It describes my feelings at the sight of a beautiful Greek boy’s marble head, with lovely, writhing white curls and huge sightless white marble eyes. I thought of you when I wrote it,’ she said and turned her red face away. Two weeks later, when they were having beers together at the Gold Rail, she read the poem to Luther. ‘Do you recognize yourself?’ Embarrassed, he laughed. Then, because he was touched by the excess of warmth in her words, he leaned across the table and kissed her cheek. ‘That was very good. A beautiful poem. Thank you.’ Maud was stunned by his gesture. She wanted to return it but could not figure how, what move to make to reach his beautiful cheek. Instead she said, ‘Do you want to come to class to hear Mile tear it apart?’

  On Friday, Otto Mile spent fifteen minutes hacking away, almost successfully disguising his admiration for Maud’s skill. From his visitor’s seat away from the table at which eight students sat, Luther watched Maud as the poet went
on flaying the word structures, the feeble imagery here, the lack of central, guiding metaphor there, the weak closure. Maud sat, stone-still, taking notes and nodding. When Mile moved on to another student’s work, Maud stared at her poem. Suddenly she reached forward, as if a light had been turned on somewhere behind her forehead. She crossed out a line and wrote, in her small, clear script, another over it.

  In the weeks that followed, Luther usually waited at the door for the class to be over. He had no desire to sit through another painful dissection. Maud was always glum when she came out, chastened but still excited. She accepted Mile’s critical lashings with outward composure, waiting for the occasional ‘not bad’ or, more often, ‘not too terrible.’ Even the customary negative forms of his responses gratified her. Once in a great while a poem of hers survived the balled-up-into-the-wastebasket fate. When this happened, Mile, anticipating the end of the period by ten minutes (‘My hour consists of fifty minutes,’ he had told his students the first day) would place the less-than-offensive uncrumpled poem on the table, bow to it ceremoniously, wave to the students and depart. It was clear to everyone that this backhanded act was Mile’s reluctant way of expressing a favorable opinion of the work. Maud could never look at anyone as she rescued her page and put it into her notebook. She would leave the room right after Mile. On one such occasion she went past Luther without stopping. Her heart was too full, she told him later, for a word from anyone, even him. She went to her room and sat on her bed, savoring in private her small creative triumph.