The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Later in the semester Luther asked her if she wanted to go to the movies with him the next afternoon. She was surprised. ‘The Thalia is playing Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy,’ Maud said. ‘I’ve never seen her. I’d like to go.’ Luther blushed and said he was in love with Hedy Lamarr. ‘I’ve decided she is the most beautiful woman in the world. I’ve seen her twice in this picture already.’ Maud shrugged, as though being in love, let alone in love with a movie star, were ridiculous.

  They had lunch in their separate dining rooms and met afterward on the downtown corner of 116th Street. During the walk to the movie theater Luther was quiet. Maud said, ‘Are you preparing to enter the presence of your beloved, like a medieval knight purifying himself for battle?’ Luther walked faster, as if jokingly to demonstrate his eagerness to arrive at Ninety-fifth Street. Then he saw that it was hard for Maud to keep up. She had on the long gypsy skirt she habitually wore when she was going out. It disguised her thick, columnar legs. In it she felt both feminine and hidden. This evening she apologized for holding him up in his romantic dash to the Thalia. ‘I put it on because it is almost evening and I thought it would be suitable.’

  Maud wore a white puffy frilled blouse in the largest size carried in the women’s section of Klein’s. She wanted to look festive and ‘dressy,’ her mother’s word for whatever was not useful and uniform. In her voluminous blouse, Maud felt her large self obscured. At a curb, when they stepped down at the same time and brushed against each other, Luther’s arm touched her, and he learned that she indeed filled the blouse. Within it he sensed an enormous flood of breasts, to which, he realized, he felt oddly attracted.

  In the lobby they waited for the feature to begin. The air was stale and warm. When they entered the theater they felt as if they were driving into black water. They clutched each other, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, stumbling along until their eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the dark. They happened upon two empty seats on the side. Luther liked the feel of her dependent hand on his arm. ‘In the dark there is no shape, nothing but warm flesh,’ he thought. Settled down close together, behind the section cordoned off for children where the white-dressed matron sat on the aisle watching over the comings and goings of her charges, they both felt a vague content. To feel, not always to see, was a source of happiness.

  For the next two hours Luther was oblivious to everything but the wondrous beauty of the woman in the movie. Hedy Lamarr floated nude in a pond, her white body enhanced by veils of hazy water clinging to it. Luther leaned forward in his seat during this scene, like the other men in the theater, as though to get closer, to be able to see her better. Then, ashamed, he sat back and reached for Maud’s hand. He never took his eyes from the screen. Holding her willing hand, he watched the screen fill with the pure line of Lamarr’s profile. Lamarr smiles: the even ridges at the side of her mouth look like fine lines etched on copper. Unsmilingly now, her skin returns to its unmarked, poreless perfection. Once Luther looked aside at Maud. There was no way of telling what she was thinking. He saw only her thick glasses resting heavily on the broad bridge of her nose. Was she awed at the sight of such incredible beauty, was she appalled at the comparison to her own impoverished endowments? He could not tell.

  Maud thought, ‘I’ll never introduce him to Minna.’

  Neither of them paid attention to the story. Luther knew how silly it was, and Maud was engrossed in understanding the elements of absolute feminine beauty. Years later they would, separately, remember every turn of that elegant head, every floating motion of her body in the pool, but they would have no idea of what the movie was about. When it was over they did not wait for Selected Short Subjects or Pathé News. They walked up to the Gold Rail, ordered two beers, and talked about the foolish movie, the exquisite Hedy, and photography. Luther said, ‘In my aesthetics course, a fellow who likes to think he is terribly modern talks about “the cinema.” He says it is a pretense at art, that “movies are vehicles, carriages, in which stars ride, not things in themselves.”’ Maud said, ‘That’s what I dislike about movies and about photography too. They both pretend to be an art. In photographs, people, families, “sights,” relatives, are so often the subjects, poised in front of vacation places and houses. Or stars say absurd things to their leading men in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, like Uncle Abe in front of his new car or Cousin Lou in her communion dress in front of St. Joseph’s Church in Cohoes or some such place. All of them perpetuating the unmemorable. The camera, moving or not, is too particular. It repeats the cliché with changing personnel. Art is not like that. It’s general, ambiguous, suggestive, and then, if you’re lucky, universal.’

  Luther had no answers. He was always lost in a theoretical discussion and secretly could not see why Hedy Lamarr’s ineffable presence up there needed any abstract bolstering. They went back to their dormitories. Luther’s head was still filled with the movie goddess he lusted after. Yet he felt some pleasure thinking about the time he had spent beside the smart, ugly girl. Maud had said, ‘I’m going to work on an idea I have for a poem.’ ‘About Lamarr?’ ‘Jesus, no. I can’t say what it’s about. I’ll use up the idea telling you about it.’

  The poem was finished in time for Mile’s final seminar meeting for the year. Maud put a carbon copy of it in Luther’s mailbox. On the bottom she wrote, ‘Thank you for a fertile evening.’ The poem was called ‘The Face Within.’ Maud told Luther that Otto Mile had read it aloud, not once but twice, to the eight sturdy souls who had survived his sarcasm for a year. Only at the end did she have the courage to look at the poet as he read her poem. She hated to be in the room; she knew how red and blotched her skin must be. After class she discovered she had pulled the skin from around her thumbnail so violently that blood appeared at the cuticle. Mile had said, looking at her, she thought, but was not sure, perhaps with his grudging smile, ‘Well, you know, that’s not too bad at all. I rather don’t mind the idea of assuming that true beauty may always lie in the shallow layer under surface ugliness, the disguise, as you say, that beauty sometimes assumes to protect its fragility. Yes. I assume that’s what you’re suggesting here, Miss Noon?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Maud mumbled.

  ‘I don’t object to “found alive in the porous dark” and “breathing within the secret skein.”’

  Maud thought she would collapse in embarrassment if he did not stop quoting her words to the class. It was even possible she might fall dead on the wooden table before her, the first Barnard junior to expire in a poetry class. Looking down at her fat feet in their stretched sandals she imagined it all, and later reported it to Luther: headlines in the Daily News, the confusion in the autopsy room at Saint Luke’s Hospital, where her body would be sent for examination to determine the cause of death. The Columbia Spectator would publish the results: Barnard Girl Dead from Classroom Exposure.

  The day before they were to leave the dorm for summer vacation, the three friends decided to celebrate the end of exams with a dinner party. ‘It’s a good time for it,’ Liz said, ‘before we have to clean up these filthy digs.’ They put together a purse of change, and Minna was sent to do the shopping. Maud volunteered to cook on the illegal hot plate, but it turned out not to be necessary. Minna came back with chop suey in three cardboard containers from the Chinese Palace on Broadway and a cake from Horn and Hardart. Liz lit candles in two fat Chianti bottles. They put their bed pillows on the floor and sat there, eating slowly, a pace dictated by their unfamiliarity with the chopsticks that came with the food. Very hungry, they ate at first in silence, looking toward each other now and then, suggesting with meaningful glances their appreciation of the food and the company.

  Maud looked at Minna, thinking how elegant were her classic features and perfect skin, how gracefully she sat, her shapely legs folded without strain in front of her, her long, sleek hair pulled back and tied with a silk scarf. Minna looked over at Liz, whose fingers were stained with some chemical she’d been using. Her hair was cut unevenly and short;
she confessed she’d just given herself her summer cut. Liz watched Maud try to get her legs and large feet into a comfortable position. She herself was able to cross hers into the lotus position with ease.

  Maud ate most of the chop suey. Minna picked at the crisp noodles, Liz hogged the rice, after urging it upon the others. ‘Enough for everyone,’ she said. ‘Who says?’ said Maud. ‘If I’d had twice the money I’d have bought twice as much,’ said Minna, affecting an aggrieved tone. ‘Girls, girls,’ said Liz. She cut the square orange cake into four large pieces and plopped them down on the paper plates, which were stained with mustard and soy sauce. No one seemed to mind. Minna sipped her tea and ignored the cake. Maud ate hers quickly and then inquired politely of Minna’s intentions. ‘You will get fat, dear,’ Minna said, handing her the cake. ‘I am fat,’ said Maud, consuming the piece in three large bites. Liz ate half of hers and decided to save the rest for after the mammoth clean-up chore.

  Full of food, they went on sitting, but now uncomfortably, on the floor, watching the candles sputter and melt down the sides of the wine bottles. They were enjoying the occasion. It was unusual for all three of them to be together. Maud stretched her legs out before her, barely missing a bottle. Already they were moving out and away from one another, from the messy, comfortable rooms. ‘The thing about going home,’ Maud said, ‘is that there are enough chairs there to sit on.’ ‘That is a consideration,’ said Minna. She was leaving early the next morning for a month in New Bedford, where her aunt and uncle had a summer house. She would ride horseback with her cousin, swim in the pond, read and laze in the porch swing.

  Maud’s spirits fell. It always happened at the thought of the long bus ride back to New Baltimore, and the end of the classes she loved. ‘The house up there is too big for my mother and me. My brother and father seem still to be in it, but they don’t take up any space. And I can’t think of much to say to my mother. I suppose I’m lucky that I have to get a job in Ravena, so it won’t be too bad.’ Liz said, ‘It is strange, isn’t it, how it feels going home, even if I’ve only been ninety blocks away from the place. You feel you don’t fit in the space anymore. Either it’s too small, and you feel as if you’d swelled up like a sponge, or it’s too big, as you say, and you can’t get comfortable anywhere.’ Minna said, ‘You’ve outgrown it all, like a hermit crab with its shell, or something. People there resent that, no matter how much you try to hide it.’ Liz said, ‘Not a hermit crab. You’re thinking of the chambered nautilus. It’s an organism that grows out of one room in its shell and moves on to a larger one.’ ‘So,’ said Maud. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘From a poem, by Whittier or Emerson or Lowell, or one of those fellows.’ Maud said, ‘It’s true. You grow up, and away. People in New Baltimore think I talk oddly now, affected, the man I worked for last summer said.’

  At that moment, going home seemed a greater task for the three women than cleaning their rooms. Liz gathered up the cardboard cartons, Minna said she would wash the chopsticks and save them for next year. Maud went on sitting, reluctant to make the effort to get to her feet. With her fingers she put out the candles, enjoying the small pain the flame caused her. ‘We’ve had a good year, all told,’ she said, thinking of Otto Mile. ‘So we have,’ said Minna absently, already seated in her bathing suit at the edge of the sunny pond with her cousin Eleanor and the Wesleyan boys who lived down the road. Liz was quiet. She reached down to Maud and pulled hard to bring her to her feet. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Maud, red in the face from the effort. They all stood close, looking at one another. Then Liz put her arms around Minna and Maud. ‘Let’s clean up the joint, as my grandmother Becker used to say, “before the dark sets in.”’ The others raised their arms. They stood for a moment, locked together in an affectionate, celebratory embrace. ‘As my mother would say,’ said Maud, ‘let’s do our duty.’ Minna said, ‘Yes, I suppose so. I don’t know what my mother would say. Yes, I do. She would probably call the maid.’ ‘Tough,’ said Liz, handing Minna the broom. The three set about their final task of the college year, removing all traces of their lives from the colorless dormitory rooms.

  In Maud’s senior year, after a long, hot, dull summer in New Baltimore, where she worked nights in the mushroom plant and spent her days writing, she came back to college with four long poems she thought might have some merit. She could not wait to show them to Mile in his seminar, for which she had preregistered once again in the late spring. At the first meeting he was not present. She was told he had decided he did not want to teach, and had left the faculty. A woman professor with three names and a considerable reputation in the poetics of Milton had taken his place. Most of his former students felt no sorrow at Otto Mile’s departure. The brilliant poet-lecturer had insulted them, told them they lacked the grain and warp and woof for full-blooded poetry. He said they were too ignorant to use words properly, let alone originally, to create meaningful or memorable images. He had roared at them, ‘What do you know about? Anything?’ He had told them that sentimentality and the weak, easy cliché ran in their veins. They rejoiced to hear he had left, they made up rumors about the reasons for his absence, all of them insulting to his morals and the state of his mental health. But Maud was desolate. She knew he was a great poet. She knew he had been right about her, and about the would-be poets in his seminar.

  Joseph Noon’s career in the army, which began in World War I, when he served bravely as a young sergeant at Verdun and had been decorated twice, was ended abruptly by the disease that appeared in Maud’s senior year. He had stayed in the army all his adult life because he felt comfortable in it. He liked all things military, the loose, free feel of obeying orders without recourse to the limiting exercise of free will. It was never his own choice that had taken him to installations all over the country on tours of duty. He was entirely comfortable with his bachelor’s life and came home on furloughs and leaves to his wife, whose nurse’s career made her the ideal wife for so solitary a man. In a way satisfactory to them both, for many years, they lived together on occasion and apart most of the time. Florence was grateful. Their infrequent sexual encounters reduced the possibility of pregnancy, she believed, after the two difficult ones she had gone through. Joseph, for his part, relished the cozy, undemanding warmth of NCO clubs and the comradeship of the dayrooms in the barracks.

  Joseph’s discharge came, much against his will (for once, he resented ‘orders’) when it was discovered that he had a progressively wasting muscular disease. He was discharged, given a full disability pension and sent home to New Baltimore and to his family. Florence became his commanding officer, leading him slowly across the floor of his bedroom to his chair. He sat in the bay window watching the parade of tankers on the busy river. Their hulls rode low in the water because of the heavy load of oil they were bringing to the port of Albany. He waited, remembering their names, for them to come back down the river on their long, slow journey to New York, now seeming to skim the water with relieved grace. The burdensome cargo had been removed from their bellies. Joseph kept a tally of passing ships. He welcomed the return of the ones whose names he recognized, fantasizing that he was a lock commander, permitting their passage in the waters in front of his window, ordering their approaches, their progression through his section of river, their departure.

  His deep interest, however, was in the history of the military campaigns of the Civil War. On the card table beside him he plotted the battles of Petersburg and Gettysburg, Richmond and Manassas. A contour map was draped over the table, like a limp cloth, so he was able to move only one battalion at a time, a unit symbolically represented by a single tin soldier in appropriate uniform. Studying histories, accounts, biographies that Florence brought home for him from the Albany Public Library, plotting the advances and retreats of his divisions, he was able to engage in what he had always considered the most interesting of all human activities: war. To him, peace was the lazy condition of cowardly men and now, to his great regret, invalids. In a loose-leaf notebook he to
ok careful notes on the reasons for certain leadership decisions, the strategic causes of defeat and victory. Until the muscles in his fingers and wrists ‘went back on me,’ as he explained to occasional visitors, he placed his little soldiers, minute, honorable representatives of armies, in their proper stations until such time as it was historically accurate for them to advance nobly or retreat in infamy. Joseph loved the little tin men painted over with gray or blue paint and an occasional red scarf. To him they were obedient and unafraid, brave and invulnerable. Often he was tempted by their grave demeanor to have a battle go other than history had recorded, just this once, to allow the soldier in Confederate gray to survive and return to his gallant, suffering family.

  In the summer before the United States entered the war, and while she was finishing her master’s thesis on Yeats, Maud spent time sitting with her father, writing feverishly in a copybook on her lap. ‘Why are you so anxious?’ Joseph asked her once, without looking up from the hills of Richmond. ‘Right now I’m working on a poem to send to my teacher, a famous poet, Otto Mile. And I’m making some notes for a thesis on another poet named Yeats.’

  Her father turned to look at his daughter. ‘What will you do with poetry?’ As he spoke the word Maud pictured lines of rifle-bearing men, bayonets pointed forward. Suddenly they laid down their rifles and fell to the ground, wounded, defeated, and in despair in the face of such an ephemeral and countryless vacation. ‘Publish it, if I’m lucky.’ Joseph said nothing. Maud watched him move a colonel around the outskirts of the city of Petersburg to outflank a general, her father explained, in order to cut off his supply lines. His silence was understandable. A man of action, he had been forced by a malignant fate into immobility and contemplation. His daughter’s choice of so sedentary, so cerebral, a profession must be incomprehensible to him, Maud thought. She understood this and loved him, admiring the way he had silently consented to make do under the drastic conditions imposed upon him by his useless legs. He had delegated all activity to his tin soldiers, becoming their strategist. They moved under his stern order, demonstrating, Maud believed, how fully he had accepted the higher instructions of some divine command.