The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Often, if her luck did not hold, Maud would resort to the battered, coverless and spineless book she had bought years before for ten cents at a Ravena library sale of damaged and discarded books. She liked owning such a third-class elderly citizen of the publishing world, a book expelled from the shelves and offered for sale, like a slave, unjacketed and bare. More than the vast word-horde of its pages, she loved the preface that told how the Thesaurus came to be. The original compiler, Peter Mark Roget, had died before he was able to finish the revision of his 1852 work. His son took over the work, continuing the offering of suggested pools of word choice to writers. In her edition there was an introduction by John Lewis Roget, who wrote, ‘It is necessary for the compiler to steer a mean course between the dangers of being too concise on the one hand, and too diffuse on the other.’

  ‘A mean course. Lovely.’ In Maud’s quest for exactitude she would come upon absorbing contradictions: ‘To propugn,’ wrote the grandson of Roget, ‘sometimes expresses to attack, at other times to defend.’

  ‘To propugn.’ How pretty. The plucked music of the last syllable. A useful iamb with meanings so diverse it suggested within itself a world of opposites, an occasion on which the poet would be utterly puzzled yet delighted with the ambiguity.

  How full. How fine to have a word that can mean its own antonym, a word to confuse the reader by its numerous possibilities, too many even to be categorized by the grandson of the first great verbal organizer, Peter Mark Roget.

  ‘Think of the critic,’ Maud said. ‘Propugn, he writes in his knowledgeable exegesis of the poet’s work. Propugn is the emblem of the poet’s genius, the layers of connotation embodied in his word choice. Her? Will the critic ever have occasion,’ she wondered, ‘to say “her” and mean poets in general? A cello word, a pungent, crafty word. A word singled out by John Mark from the millions of other words in his grandfather’s word piles for special notice so that she, by pure chance, was able to find the dactylic ambiguity she was searching for, the word for something like protection. Sanctuary.’

  This morning she searched the Book, as she always capitalized it in her mind, the way the Holy Books were signified, in vain. Nothing would serve her line, her intent. When she looked up, the little boys had gone away into the thin, high, cold air of the room. ‘O Kenneth,’ she said. Her sense of loss, crytallized now, made her suddenly begin to cry. She closed her eyes upon the sight of the missing twins and stopped her ears to the silence of nonsense syllables that used to race between them in an aura of complete, exclusive meaning.

  In June, Florence had come down to the city on a Greyhound bus to visit them for a day or two. By evening she was thoroughly frightened by her daughter’s long silences, she said, by the way Maud sat for hours without moving, her fat legs wide apart, her skirt spread between her knees like a hammock, her elbows on her knees, her eyes fixed on the floor or on a piece of white paper and an opened fountain pen. Once in a while Maud looked up at the chattering twins, whom she did not seem to see or hear.

  ‘Maud. Listen. I’ll take the kids up home for a while. It’ll be nice for the summer up there. You remember. The air is better upriver. And in the fall, St. Patrick’s has gotten to be a better school, I hear, at least better than the public schools. Now that I’m not working they’ll be company for me.’ Maud looked at her without responding. At the moment Florence made her offer Maud had been hearing a three-note melody that she was now trying to provide with syllabic content. Florence took Maud’s silence to mean she was resisting the idea. ‘You’ll be able to work, write what it is you do, better without the worry of them.’

  With her pension from the hospital and her Social Security, having just completed the necessary forty quarters ‘by a hair,’ as she put it, Florence had settled into her old house on the river with few regrets for the rushed, astringent world of the ward room and the barked instructions at the nurses’ station. She took her customary vacation in Atlantic City with the money she saved from small economies: she patched sheets with her old uniforms, saved wrappings and string, envelopes and aluminum foil. Her diet was planned carefully so that nothing was left over too long, unused or spoiled. True, she often missed Joseph. There was no one to care for, so she served a day a week with hot lunch delivery from the Ravena Methodist Church, and carried out little errands of mercy her minister suggested to her. The Stromberg-Carlson with voluptuous shoulders, the largest piece of furniture in her living room, gave content to her evenings, but still she was often lonely. She hoped her grandchildren could come to fill the emptiness of her house. She would even be willing to forego her Atlantic City trip next year.

  Now she was alarmed about Maud’s state. ‘There’s so little food in the house, Maud. What do you all eat? What do you feed these kids? And if I lived here I would complain to the landlord about the garbage in the hall. About the water being cold all the time. The wallpaper.’ Maud did not respond to Florence’s litany of grievances. She was absorbed in working out the logistics of the sixth line in a tricky French meter she had decided on for a poem about Otto Mile, who was now an inhabitant of St. Elizabeth’s in Washington.

  Florence felt anger, for her an unusual sentiment, rising in her throat. She decided to continue the attack, as a strategy to get her way with the children. ‘You’re too fat. Your heart will never carry all that weight around. You’re a young girl. You don’t move around enough. All that sitting you do is bad. Why don’t you—’ ‘Take them,’ Maud said. ‘When I’ve finished this group of poems I want to write, I’ll come for them.’ Then she added, all she could bring herself to say, ‘It’s very good of you.’

  ‘O Kenneth. O Spencer.’ The boys, full of seven-year-old glee at a change, at being able to go off on a visit, helped Grandma Noon pack their clothes, two of everything in one valise, as Florence called it, kissed their motionless mother good-bye, one kiss on each cheek in well-timed unison. ‘We’ll go to see the caverns,’ Florence told them, ‘And to the Capitol, where the governor is. And now there’s a submarine at the docks.’ The twins looked at each other, and then responded, one after the other, with a series of scrambled syllables, what Maud, in a letter to Otto Mile, was to term, ‘glib, gibbous, gorgeous glossolalia.’ What they said to Maud sounded like ‘Bru Thosh Mog,’ and then they went out the door with their grandmother, walking in lockstep like little soldiers, speaking their private gibberish to themselves and to their grandmother.

  ‘O Kenneth.’ Maud was excluded from their close union, their incomprehensible lingua franca. Exactly alike in form and face, meiotic versions of their beautiful father, they seemed to Maud to be formed by a single sensibility and held together by the thread of their exclusive communications. Christened Kenneth James and Spencer John, they had reached a silent concord some time after their fourth birthday. They decided they would be called by one name, Kenneth. Both shook their heads at Spencer and warded off any further debate about their decision by refusing to answer to any other name than Kenneth. Luther accepted their decision with kindly condescension, the mild amusement of the half-day-a-week parent soon to be moving on to other amusements but at the moment enjoying his children’s colorful vagaries. With the meager child and wife support he was able to provide from his acting jobs, he had bought his freedom from the insoluble problems of a strange wife and loony children. Nor did Maud ever question their choice of a common name. She had now lived alone with them for four years and had borne stolidly their lofty expulsion of her from their union since they were able to crawl toward one another.

  ‘O Kenneth.’ After a while she did not bother to keep them apart in her mind. Fortunately they were rarely sick and rarely unhappy, so practical differentiation was not necessary. But if something happened to disturb them—thunder and lightning, a bee bite, a broken toy or a lost ball, they displayed remarkably fused misery. Separate names would have not served—were, indeed, not necessary. They rarely required even the one that they held in common, for comfort or praise, for admonishment or instructi
on. ‘O Kenneth.’

  Immediately after that cold January night when Luther left to go on the road with his acting company (the twins hardly noticed his absence, and he never returned except to visit), they began to talk. Not to Maud and not the ma-ma syllables she was waiting to hear, although they were almost two years old, but to each other in the rich, joint gibberish they developed until they were seven and went away with Florence. Maud believed it had become a fully developed, inflected language, full of idiomatic phrases and colloquialisms. Once in a while she thought she had caught their meaning, the way that long residence in a foreign country will allow the visitor to apprehend without effort what is being said in general. But they looked blank when she questioned them, although clearly they understood everything said to them. There was, she decided, no key to their mutual, exclusive language. The best she could do was to eavesdrop on their conversations at moments when her own linguistic resources failed her, to allow the music and unlimited choices of their invented utterances to suggest possibilities to her limited English.

  Maud wrote to Otto Mile: ‘They may be speaking poetry. They may be the first children to start with versification and rhyme. I wager they understand syntax and the rules of rhetoric better than I. They are natural poets while I am unnatural, or at least strained and aberrant. When school has had its destructive way with them, perhaps then they will begin to speak prose. Poor kids.’

  After Florence took them to New Baltimore, Maud missed them badly at first, and then buried her need for them. Finally, she began to wonder if, like Luther, they had ever been necessary to her at all, indeed (this frightened but did not surprise her) if they had ever been there at all.

  ‘Eleven. It must be.’ Maud heard the sound of paper dropping into the metal mailboxes in the hall and the mailman’s slam as he clumped up the three ice-encrusted steps to the street. If she strained she could see his legs passing her nailed-down front window. She watched until she knew she would miss meeting him. She waited until all the sounds told her the other occupants of the building who were home at this hour—the unemployed teacher, the wife of a recently discharged soldier who relished the idea of a housewife, the mother of a tiny postwar baby—had come for their mail, and gone. Still in her sacklike sweater over her nightgown and wearing an old pair of Luther’s socks because she had no slippers, she unlatched her door. The lock was broken, and only the chain and round gold bar that slid into the little hole remained. She looked down the narrow hallway to be sure no one was there, and then clumped to the boxes, taking her letters from the one on which was printed LEOPOLD LUTHER—MAUD NOON. Luther’s name above hers had been crossed out a long time ago.

  The phone was ringing when she returned. ‘Maud,’ Florence said, ‘The presents haven’t come. The last mail just arrived.’ Maud was silent. Florence said, ‘What shall I tell the kids tomorrow?’ ‘Tell them the package must have been delayed in the mail. It’ll come soon.’ ‘They’ll be disappointed. Luther’s came last week, and I’ve had mine for everybody since September. I bought them all in Atlantic City.’ ‘Yes, your package is here. I’m planning to have a party tonight and I’ll open my presents then.’ ‘Oh, good. But I wonder what happened to the one for the kids?’ ‘No idea. But with all the others, they’ll have enough. How are they?’ ‘Fine, just fine. They love it at Saint Patrick’s. They’re the nuns’ pets. My neighbor’s daughter works there and she says the sisters think the boys speak in tongues.’ ‘Meaning what?’ ‘Well, I don’t know exactly. Something like a gift of the Holy Ghost, she says.’ ‘Judas Priest. Well, Merry Christmas. Are they around now?’ ‘No, they’re outside playing.’ ‘Well, tell them Merry Christmas for me, and their presents will be coming soon. In time for the Feast of the Epiphany.’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘Nothing. Just a joke.’

  Maud hung up, hoisted herself out of her chair and went to the highboy. Two unwrapped boxes from the Parker Company lay there, ribbons and wrappings piled on top of them. ‘Merry Christmas, Kenneths,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m one great example of motherhood.’ In the kitchen she filled the kettle and turned on the gas under it. While she waited for it to boil, she explored the open shelves overhead. Near the sugar bin she found the brown paper-wrapped package from her mother. When she had made her tea with a shriveled bag she had used before, she took her cup and the package to the table. ‘As good a time as any,’ she said aloud, and then she laughed and said, ‘Welcome to the manger.’

  Under the mailing paper were red-and-white Christmas paper and a tag decorated with a reindeer. It read, ‘To Maud from her loving mother.’ Maud tore the Christmas paper roughly, recognizing from its wrinkles that it had been used before. ‘There’s no need to hurry,’ she told herself. ‘There’s no mystery about its contents.’ It was the shape and weight of last year’s present, the same one she had received every Christmas since her mother had become enamored of Miss America. Freilinger’s Salt Water Taffy, each gummy piece wrapped in its own white waxed paper, the white box embossed with a garish picture of the Boardwalk, the ocean and the storefront of Freilinger’s itself. Every year she had eaten the entire contents in a single, gorging day. Today she closed the box without taking a piece and put it back on the shelf.

  Maybe now: the fountain pen lay opened on the table, the pad of paper beside it. She tried the pen, but the ink had dried up and it would make no mark on the paper. ‘So much for that,’ she said aloud to the pad. She decided to sit in Luther’s place, the only upholstered chair in the apartment. She lowered herself onto what she felt to be an obstruction. ‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ she asked herself aloud, and pulled out from under her a brown cloth-covered book. George Herbert, it said on the spine. She pulled at the ribbon some nineteenth-century publisher had inserted into the binding to help keep the place. It opened to a poem entitled The Quidditie. ‘“Quidditie,”’ Maud read. ‘Quiddity from quidditus? Quid, what. Quid est, what is it.’ Twice she read the poem, the second time aloud in a ranting tone. Then she thought she might give the pitted oilcloth a lecture: ‘The poet addresses his God, hoping for an explanation of his gift. Some justification of him as the recipient of it, by instructing Him in what it was not. “My God,”’ she read, ‘“a verse is not a crown.” The next lines are filled with what else it is not.’

  Suddenly the poem failed to interest her. She took a gulp of hot tea, burning the roof of her mouth, her tongue, the skin inside her cheeks. ‘God,’ she said aloud. ‘What next?’

  She spread the five pieces of mail over the table. As she used to do for the Kenneths’ amusement, she made a skyscraper profile of them and then rearranged them in the form of a train. She decided to read them in order, to stretch out the pain of contact with the rest of the human race without the added pressures of its actual presence. ‘I’ll start with the engine letter,’ she said, ‘and work my way through the train to the caboose.’ The first piece of mail was without envelope, a threefold sheet of paper held together with a piece of tape. She opened it carefully, taking her time so as not to tear the sheet. It was a leaflet announcing the opening of a new gallery on Eighth Street called Ars Longa. Its first exhibit was to be a collection of photographs by Elizabeth Becker. Maud smiled at the pointlessness of sending the announcement to her: she never went to galleries and rarely left the apartment anymore. The name of the place, Liz’s name connected with such a place, pained her throat. She put the sheet into the oven.

  The second and third cars (‘no, letters’) she could tell were bills. MRS. LEOPOLD LUTHER and her address were covered with yellow glassine. One was a department store’s stern demand for payment for a skirt she had bought last summer and never worn. Across the bottom was stamped THIRD REMINDER! Another bill was from Wanamaker’s for the games she had bought as Christmas presents for the twins in November. The fourth letter was heavy. She recognized its provenance at once. It belonged to a category with which she was all too familiar. Her name was written on the envelope in her own writing, and it was her hand, she remembered, that h
ad affixed the two three-cent stamps. Inside were used-looking sheets of paper on which were typed her poems, folded so often the creases had darkened. They had gone forth bravely in late summer and were now returned to her with the customary typed slip of rejection, come home to her from their long stay at Poetry. Prodigals they were, returned for mother comfort. Now they required a new envelope, a new covering letter, fresh six-cent postage. Then they would be ready for the return journey, in another direction, into another part of the publishing world. ‘Tomorrow. Always tomorrow, the gallant little warriors will go forth again,’ she said, and laughed aloud.

  Maud riffled through the worn sheets. ‘No. Not tomorrow. I’ll let them rest and recuperate for a while. Anyway, there’ll be no mail tomorrow. No clinks against metal. No rejected children of the pen demanding the world’s attention returned with regret for lack of space or absence of talent.’ For a moment she lingered over the sixth poem, the lyric she had worked on for weeks after the twins had gone. She thought of something that might … In a rush of sharp feeling, like a chill, she reached for her open fountain pen and tried to strike out a word and insert another. The pen was dry. ‘Bunk,’ she said to the page and to the arid pen. Then, as though she were obeying the instructions of a jealous and critical god, she pushed the sheets into the oven and watched them burn. They followed the usual path toward death for paper that she was familiar with: browning curling, blackening and then a descent to the bottom of the lethal space, culminating in airy gray pieces of light ash. ‘Very good, Maud,’ she said. ‘That’s the way.’ Her voice sounded dry and odd. ‘The way to what?’ she asked herself. She could find nothing to reply.