The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  For a long time, the fifth piece of mail lay unopened on the table. ‘The dilatory caboose,’ she said to the solitary rectangle, her last connection to the world before Christmas. She had placed it at the end of the train on purpose: at the lefthand upper corner it read, MILE, ST.E., DC. ‘I’ll save it for tonight, the Eve of the Nativity. For my party,’ she said, orating with a flourish to herself, and then warmed to the subject. ‘All together, we will celebrate the time of His Life at the inn, shunted to the stable, the star ascendant, suspended like tinsel over the sheep-covered hills, the magic kings wrapped in gold, padding along the path in quilted slippers, entering the holy place by celestial navigation, warming their hands in the yellow hay.’

  ‘Bunk,’ she said.

  Maud took a long dress from a pile on the floor beside her bed and went into the bathroom to put it on. Facing away from the bathroom mirror, she dropped her nightgown and the sweater at her feet and stared down at her breasts. ‘Sacks,’ she said. ‘Garbage bags. Bilge bundles.’ Shuddering, she looked away and caught sight of them in the mirror. ‘I look like the Kaffir woman in that anthropology text with breasts so enormous they sink beneath her waist.’ She thought of Luther’s loving hands on her breasts and shook with desire. Always he had enjoyed her, she was sure of that. Then why had he left her? He once said it was queer, the way she wanted to experience everything but without passion, he thought, almost as if she wanted to know how it felt, but not to feel it. ‘Your appetite is impersonal, like a scholar’s. I don’t think you ever get enough material. Sometimes you seem to be taking notes.’ He accused her of using anything, everything, as subject matter. ‘You don’t live, you use life as something to be put in poems. It’s the same for love. The children and I are themes for your poems.’ When she told him she did love him he said he found it hard to believe. ‘Your humanity is first for yourself. And then for your work. Not for us.’ Maybe he was right. Had she used up her deep feelings on Spencer? There were persons, she had heard, who loved once, lost their love and ever after found it impossible to love again. Was she one? So Luther stopped loving her, stopped wanting to be comforted between her breasts, to gambol in their globular fields, as once she described it to him. ‘To be loved for ugliness.’ She thought of her breasts, her self—‘what a perversion!’ she thought beauty almost preceded her into a room. ‘Beautiful women have an unearned command over us all,’ Maud said to herself. ‘Their luck holds: they have straight noses, thin bodies, pure eyes, curly hair. When you are like me, you come to believe at last that your very core is ugly and deformed. You have sinned against beauty by having no neck and not much of a chin. O Florence, did you assume all those Miss Americas to escape your own self, and mine?’

  Looking into the mirror, she said to her reflection, ‘There is a whole part of existence I shall never be able to enter into or to understand: the part that pertains to being beautiful, even pretty. That door is permanently shut to me. Intelligence will never open it, or substitute for it. I am a perfect stranger to that whole world. My fat, indelicate face and trunk and hands and feet—they rule me out, by anatomical decree.’

  All afternoon she sat in the window, watching the feet and legs of passersby, feeling the cold seep in under the door and around the windows, but lacking the energy to move about, stuff the cracks, cause blood to flow in her veins. In her icy hands she held the unopened letter from Otto Mile, thinking about the poet she had not seen since his incarceration. The courts had decided he was senile and crazed, a silent loon who had, in wartime, written poems about his hatred of Jews and diatribes against his native country and its Semitic population. It was said that he stayed to himself at the hospital, was rarely heard to say a word to anyone. ‘Yours is the final negativism, the ultimate denial,’ she had told him in a letter. She had written to him almost every week since she discovered his address. At eccentric interludes his responses had come, once only a single letter in a year, then three in one week. He told her about the poems he was writing and translating, about what he thought of the postwar world, about his desire to be free to return to Greece, which he now considered his spiritual home. He told her what he thought of the poems she sent him. It was strange: as time passed he seemed to mellow in his views. At times he was almost admiring. For three years they had corresponded in this way. Maud saved every letter, including the envelopes in his characteristically small, unreadable handwriting and occasional bits of poetry he sent. She kept them in a three-ring binder with the Columbia University seal on the cover, the one she had bought in her freshman year to carry back and forth on the bus to Albany, when she thought the seal proclaimed her a member of the New York fraternity of the intellect.

  Mile rarely described the place he was kept in, although she often questioned him: ‘Are you comfortable? Warm? Do you have a quiet, private place in which to work?’ He never responded to those questions. Once he wrote about finding curious small droppings in the corner of his room. ‘I cannot identify them. But it is fascinating to speculate. They are not from mice, or rats. Those I would recognize. Could they be spraints, the leavings of an otter? Or fewmets (deer)? Or even fiants, from the fox? These excrements were once of importance, you know. Two centuries ago gamekeepers and huntsmen were greatly interested in the droppings of animals in order to protect—or kill—them. To our loss, we have abandoned our concern for such artifacts. But not me: I watch everywhere for them, like the ones in my corner.’

  He wrote about his rigid New England childhood, an atmosphere not unlike the one in which he now found himself imprisoned. Embedded in the description was a quatrain, which in turn contained a small piece of the Inferno. His letters were always the same length—one side of a single sheet of paper, single-spaced. When he came to the bottom of the page he stopped writing, leaving the sentence incomplete. Often there was no room to sign his name. So he scrawled M-I-L-E in large letters across the whole page, like an erratic artist, his canvas full of paint, who decides to use the entire face of it for his signature.

  In one letter he had confessed, script somewhat smaller and more difficult to decipher than usual (‘As though,’ Maud thought, ‘he were writing in a whisper’) that he was both tone-deaf and color-blind. This disclosure excited her. She felt she was in possession of a secret of great value to future critics and scholars who would some day explicate the poetry of Otto Mile. She filed the letter away in the binder with the others, determined for the moment to keep everything sent to her in confidence for her own instruction. She understood that the extraordinary originality of his effects, the oxymorons and sledgehammer rhythms, the curious and unexpected combinations of simile and place were not always consciously contrived virtues but sometimes the results of natural defects.

  Years before, when she and Luther were still together, Maud thought about writing a respectfully critical article on Mile’s work for the Partisan Review, a quarterly that had published much of his poetry. But it was like everything else she thought she might do. She never wrote it. She could not assemble her chaotic ideas into a single thesis. Then, too, she knew she needed Mile’s permission to quote from his letters, to use the wonderful sestets and occasional heroic couplets with which he decorated his prose. She shrank from asking him, for fear he would stop corresponding with her. But more than that, she doubted her capacity to judge his work. Her awe of his talent was too great and would interfere with any kind of critical posture except an unacceptably worshipful one.

  From other sources she heard rumors and gossip about Mile in St. Elizabeth’s. The poet’s red hair had turned white; he had shaved off his beard, leaving his small, puckered, pope’s nose of a chin weak and feeble-looking. He was silent and would speak to no one except his psychiatrist, whom he later accused of being a Jew and a traitor to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which Mile’s ancestors had been members. He believed the whole staff were, indeed, Semites guilty of holding prisoner one whose natal Protestantism had founded the nation and fostered its growth. He had wordlessly befriended o
ne guard, a large, good-natured black man who wore African shirts and jewelry. To him, it was reported, he had said one word in the last year: ‘No,’ and one sentence: ‘Nothing that is, is true.’

  Maud took the unopened letter and slit the envelope carefully with a kitchen knife. The customary single page fell out, folded in three. She opened it. Nothing. No salutation, no signature and, as they used to call it in high school business English, no body. The sheet was blank. She put it into the oven and watched it go through its dying ritual. ‘The last Mile,’ she said aloud to herself, putting the envelope in his handwriting into her notebook. She laughed at her bad joke. Then, surprising herself, she began to cry.

  It was not until midnight in that long life in the cold day of Maud’s abbreviated existence that she decided to join the ashes of her poems and Otto Mile’s blank communication, placing her head, like a penitential offering, into the red-hot purifying fumes of the gas oven.

  IN DECEMBER 1939, their senior year at Barnard, Liz took Minna to lunch in Greenwich Village. Maud, the third in their Unholy Triumvirate, as they called themselves, didn’t come along. She was going to sneak her friend Luther up for tea in her room. Liz wore her usual woolen pants and seaman’s blue jacket, but Minna, mindful of what her mother would say if she were there, wore a dress, a new pair of Gotham Goldstripe silk stockings with seams that ran straight on the back of her shapely legs, and her fur coat. Liz’s hunger was not for food but for the familiar mews and alleys, one-block-long streets and dim shops of the Village. They went straight to MacDougal Alley and Eighth Street, where the Jumble Shop occupied the corner. ‘Two maiden ladies, Miss Francis Russell and Miss Tucker, run it. I’ll introduce you, if they are there.’ On Eighth Street Minna felt somewhat uncomfortable, but warm, in the showy karakul coat her mother had forced on her last Christmas. People down here looked less dressed up, more like the pictures she had seen of Bolsheviks in Lenin Square in Moscow, more like Liz.

  A waiter appeared at their old tavern oak table in the dark taproom. Liz piled her two Rolleiflex cameras in their black cases on the chair beside her. They ordered sandwiches and ale. Liz, feeling proudly proprietary, pointed out to Minna the Louis Bouche glass paintings on the windows to the dining room. ‘If we were in there,’ Liz said, pointing to the dining room, ‘you would be able to see the Guy Pène du Bois murals. Beautiful stuff.’ Minna nodded without interest. ‘Why is it called the Jumble Shop?’ she asked. ‘I think because the ladies who run it found the sign in an antique shop of that name and decided it would work as well for a restaurant.’ ‘It’s a great place.’ ‘Yes. Although they don’t serve Negroes. One of these days I expect to find my parents picketing outside the place.’ ‘Oh my,’ said Minna. ‘Too bad Maud couldn’t come. This club sandwich is delicious.’ ‘Just as well. This joint is expensive and Maud eats so much. Have you noticed?’ Minna said yes, she had. Liz said, ‘She has a way of chewing that is almost, well, acrobatic. Food drops from the corner of her mouth, and then at the last moment, her tongue, like a net, reaches out to catch it and return it to her mouth. Watching her eat is a spectator sport.’ Minna laughed and said, ‘Yes. I’ve noticed.’ They finished their lunch, figured the division of the bill. Liz, whose invitation it had been, discovered at the last moment that she did not have enough money to pay it all. They walked to the subway, Liz laden down with shoulder bags and cameras.

  ‘Why the Bronx? What’s in the Bronx to photograph?’ Minna asked. Liz laughed. ‘What a true Manhattanite you are! Do you think everything of interest in this world is on Manhattan island?’ Minna said, ‘Sure.’ and then laughed too. ‘I’m better than I used to be. I once thought you needed a visa to go to the Bronx or Queens.’ Liz said, ‘You’ll see. It’s worth the trip. He’s amazing, really amazing.’ ‘Don’t you ever want to photograph ordinary things, you know—landscapes and parties and such?’ Liz said, ‘No. People in groups don’t interest me, or scenery, for that matter. And I don’t want to waste my time on individuals who aren’t interesting to me because there’s nothing interesting about them.’ Minna asked nothing more. Liz liked to make a mystery of the object of her journeys up and down the length of the city. When Minna had no classes that day, and was free to go with her, it was not unusual to travel one hundred blocks south for a sandwich to a place Liz liked only to retrace their steps one hundred and fifty blocks to find the new object of her interest.

  On the subway they studied photographs of the Wall Street secretary and the YWCA swimming instructor who were this week’s Miss Subways. ‘Quelle honneur!’ said Liz. ‘Do you think those two really ride the subways? I bet not. That old woman across from us, in the pink plastic cap and no teeth—she’s a Miss Subways.’ ‘Or you,’ Minna said. She looked at Liz’s grimy wool pants, stadium coat and loafers, thinking how shocked her own mother would be if she knew Liz was not wearing stockings and a skirt under a fur coat. Liz flashed her instant smile and then withdrew it. ‘Wow, you’re right. Am I not.’

  ‘The number of the apartment house is three twenty-six,’ Liz said. They walked some blocks, sometimes going single-file through a narrow passage on the street, their loafers sliding on the beat-down browned-over snow. On the Grand Concourse they passed a Gristede’s grocery, two meat markets, a pork store and a funeral parlor, in front of which stood a line of black-suited and -hatted men, whose eyes were fixed upon the closed doors as though they were intuitively seeing the somber service going on within. ‘I ought to take some shots of them,’ said Liz. She shifted the strap of the camera case to her arm. Minna said, ‘No.’ ‘Why not? They might enjoy a distraction. Those black hats and long overcoats, and the curls over their ears. They’re wonderful, aren’t they?’ ‘No, come on,’ Minna said. ‘It’s not respectful.’

  Three twenty-six is a squat four-story building on the corner of 148th Street. The lobby is dim and cool. An old black man with a musty, beery smell closes the elevator door behind them. They ride to the third floor in a space so close their shoulders touch. To Minna, Liz seems very excited, hardly able to wait for the elevator door to be opened. ‘Third floor,’ the black man in his faded brown uniform says. ‘To the right.’ Liz walks fast down the narrow, odorous hallway, too eager to wait for Minna. Minna says, ‘Thank you,’ to the elevator man and then adds, ‘sir.’ He grunts something and closes the door hard behind her. Liz is already at the door of 3-D, her finger on the bell, her other hand working at the zipper of a camera case. ‘Wait up,’ Minna says. The door is still closed when she catches up to Liz. ‘No answer?’ Liz looks anxious and rings again. ‘What’s the smell here?’ Minna asks. ‘Kosher cooking.’ To Minna the smell is sour, damp, piscine. Liz’s finger goes again to the bell. ‘I hear someone walking in there.’ ‘I wish you’d let me in on what we’re here for,’ Minna says. ‘Shhh. Someone’s coming. You’ll see.’

  The door is opened by a short, very stout, gray-haired woman in a flowered housedress and checkered apron. Her corset can be seen under the thin materials. Only her head is exceptional. It is placed on her neck so crookedly that her nose points up and to the side. Her eyes seem permanently placed on some object above and to the right. A long bow and the ties of her apron protrude from above wide buttocks. Minna sees all this as she shuts the door behind her, because the lady has turned away and starts to walk down the hall without a greeting to either of them. The hall is dark and lined with doors that must be closets or other rooms, Minna reasons. The squat woman stops short and turns. Liz and Minna, unprepared, almost run into her. She seems to bend backward a little to look Liz in the eyes. ‘You are the photographer, no? You said.’ ‘I am,’ Liz says. She shows her the Rolleiflex already stripped of its case and ready in her hand. ‘This is my friend, Minna Grant. Thank you for letting us come, Mrs. Rosen.’ ‘Never mind that. I did not say to come. My son it was, not me.’ ‘How do you do, Mrs. Rosen,’ Minna says, but there is no reply. It is so dark in the hall that Minna cannot see Mrs. Rosen’s eyes clearly. Only later is she able to make out that they are a cloudy
gray or brown, as though she were looking through bouillon. ‘He is in the sitting room. We are doing the tree.’ ‘The tree?’ There is surprise in Liz’s voice when she echoes Mrs. Rosen’s statement. Minna remembers that Liz’s Jewish parents have no religious convictions at all, were indeed hostile to all the trappings of Christianity or of any religion for that matter. Liz told her she had once brought home a Christmas card for her fifth-grade teacher, on whom she had a crush. Her father had made her burn it in the kitchen sink. ‘The Christmas tree. Aaron always likes a tree.’ Mrs. Rosen gestures for them to enter the living room. ‘This is my husband, Mr. Rosen.’

  Mr. Rosen is seated on the sofa. He gets up at once. He is the exact size and shape of his wife. ‘He looks enough like her,’ Minna thinks, ‘to be her twin.’ Minna says, ‘How do you do?’ to him while her eyes are fixed on the corner of the room. There, standing beside the tree and towering over it, his neck and head thrust forward along the ceiling, is Aaron Rosen. Minna finds herself, against her will, staring at him, unable to look away. Mr. Rosen is pumping Minna’s hand, saying, ‘Glad, glad, glad to see you. Come in. Come in. Come in.’ Aaron, hearing his father’s genial repetitions, stomps across the room, his massive feet encased in slabs of leather held together by rawhide ties. The ceiling holds his head in check, pushing it forward so that his hamlike shoulders are parallel to the pole that holds the drapes at the top of the window. The whole room, in Minna’s eyes, suddenly shrinks in dimension, as if a drawstring has been pulled on a purse. Goliath, thinks Minna, a colossus. The Bronx Giant.