The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Liz uses flash bulbs, taking pictures of Aaron from every angle, focusing on his enormous and weak-looking hands, his knees bent a little as though to reduce the strain on his neck as it crooks at the ceiling, his overgrown nose and lower lip. The lower part of his face seems blown up to twice the normal size. It is as if his giantism had eccentrically decided to expand parts of him beyond even what might be expected of a giant. Liz asks his parents to stand beside him. Instantly they take on the look of dwarfs, his mother bending backward to look up at him at her painful cocked angle, his father staring stonily ahead at Aaron’s belt. His gaze is fixed so that he seems to be wishing to cut his son down to size, for once to be able to look him in the eye at his level, to blot out the spectacle of this misbegotten mammoth.

  Minna still stares at the giant. Unlike most of Liz’s subjects who look into her camera with a kind of placid pride in themselves, the giant turns his head toward his parents and away from Liz, as though to indicate the blamable source of his anomalous being. His eyes, deep-set and pale, are fixed on his mother, who looks back at him, her head uplifted, her eyes full of admiration and affection. Liz holds the eye of her camera level, focusing it on Aaron’s rough catcher’s mitt of a hand wrapped around his cane. Mrs. Rosen notices the aim of the camera and says quickly, ‘It is just for now. His feet are sore. It helps him walk. The cane is for that.’ ‘He can walk okay,’ her husband growls, in a voice that is so low and coarse it seems made of cobblestones and ground glass. ‘It steadies him, is all.’ Aaron turns farther away from Liz as if to show the camera’s fallibility in understanding what it sees.

  Clearly still perturbed, Mrs. Rosen breaks away from the tableau. ‘What are these pictures for, Miss? Not a newspaper, I am hoping.’ ‘Oh no, nothing like that. For myself, mostly. I’m studying photography. Still just learning, really. But if I get one that’s good, I’ll come back and show it to you. Give you a copy, if you want it. But I’ll ask your permission to put it in a book or a show of my work someday.’ ‘A show?’ Mrs. Rosen says, uneasily. ‘I don’t know about that.’ ‘Don’t worry. They might not come out well at all. The light is not very good. But I’ll let you know.’

  Mr. Rosen says, ‘Are you finished now?’ He tells his wife to bring out the coffee and coffee cake. While Liz packs away her equipment and Minna sits on the couch with Aaron, unable to think of anything to say to him, Mr. Rosen gives what appears to Liz to be a prepared talk: ‘Aaron was a fine, normal baby when he was born. He weighed seven pounds. But when he was a little boy this tumor on his gland began to grow. So he got big for a little boy and then bigger and now, like this. Maybe he is still growing.’ ‘How tall are you?’ Liz asks Aaron. ‘He is eight feet eleven inches,’ says Mrs. Rosen. To Minna’s discomfort, Liz goes on with her questioning, reminding Minna of Maud’s relentless pursuit of information. Was she the only incurious and thus mannerly one of the three? Minna wonders. ‘How much do you weigh?’ Liz asks, looking up at Aaron. He speaks for the first time. His voice is high and odd, a falsetto pitch straining, it seems, out of his stump-thick neck. ‘A lot,’ he says. His mother adds the figures with what sounds to Minna like pride. She is demonstrating her son’s excess of everything. ‘Four hundred and seventy-five pounds.’ The coffee cups are handed around by Mr. Rosen, who gives his son a large mug. Balanced dangerously on the edge of the saucers are thin slices of a cake that looks old to Minna. Liz gulps down her coffee in a few quick mouthfuls, and follows Mrs. Rosen into the kitchen, carrying her cup and Minna’s half-filled one. ‘Could you tell me how old Aaron is?’ ‘Twenty,’ Mrs. Rosen whispers, and then she begins to cry. Tears run from the corners of her eyes and redden the lobes of her nose and her cheeks. Liz stands there helplessly, wondering what maternal spring she has touched to provoke such sadness in the giant’s mother. ‘The doctor says something, anything, will take him away from us soon. An infection can go all through him, maybe two years, not much more.’ Mrs. Rosen runs water over the cups she takes from Liz while she cries. Liz puts a consoling hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll work on the pictures quickly so you’ll have one if—anything happens,’ she says. Her offering feels lame and insufficient to her. She is about to say something more comforting when Mrs. Rosen turns to her suddenly, the tears stopped, and says, ‘You won’t show it in public, yes? He doesn’t go out anymore since he got so big, so the people around don’t know.’ Liz hesitates for a moment and then she says, ‘All right. I won’t show it. I promise.’

  And so the picture was fixed forever, as Liz wanted it after many trials, and as it appeared in her show at the Ars Longa a few years later, and in her book that was to make her famous. Aaron, the giant, crumpled like an accordion in order to stand in the parlor, is looking down at his parents, who reach to his waist, his face disfigured and enlarged by his acromegalic affliction, looking away from the camera as if to hide what Liz saw and caught in profile: the psychic isolation of the freak, his terrible, despairing elephantiasis of spirit. A man bigger than a Christmas tree, his cane and special shoes and bent knees and weak hands early signs of his mortality (for he died two years after Liz immortalized him).

  ‘Thank you very much for letting us come,’ Liz says to Mrs. Rosen, who accompanies them to the door. ‘And thank you for the cake and coffee,’ says Minna. ‘You’re welcome,’ says Mrs. Rosen. ‘Pardon Aaron for not coming to the door. He gets up hard,’ she says, and closes the door behind them.

  On the way home Minna was stiff and silent with resentment, although she was not sure why she felt as she did. ‘Perhaps I don’t believe in her promises,’ she thought. Liz believed a photograph was a holy image offered to the gods of creation as evidence of the trials they had inflicted on humanity, of the wrongs these vengeful deities had done to their creatures. But Minna disliked Liz’s notion that the photograph superseded the person it depicted. To Liz, the picture was better, somehow. She claimed it displayed more than the photographer had intended. It was as though the camera had a way and a will of its own and told more about the subject than the photographer could know, more than the subject wished to reveal. Her Rolleiflex was a mechanical psychologist, Freud in a small black cycloptic box. The photograph was part of human history, more important than the human being, an artifact of great value to the anthropologist, the psychologist, the archivist, the theologian.

  When they got home, Liz went to her room, threw herself on her bed and was asleep at once. Minna hesitated in the doorway to Maud’s room. Maud was stretched out on her bed looking at the ceiling, her face blank, the blankets pulled up to her chin. Minna asked, ‘What have you been doing all afternoon?’ ‘Having sex,’ Maud said. ‘How was it?’ ‘It was … interesting.’ ‘That all?’ ‘Well, interesting and a little disturbing, like a low-grade fever, or an unexpected fall from a horse, or a short but painful tooth extraction. And you?’ ‘We went to see a giant in the Bronx. Liz took hundreds of pictures,’ said Minna. ‘Better than one word,’ said Maud. ‘Is he another one of her curiosities?’ ‘Well, I wonder. At times I thought his parents were the freaks, letting her do all that and then feeding us coffee and cake as though we were benefactors. The giant seemed a column of silent sanity and normalcy. And now I think Liz is the freak, for going there laden with cameras and lenses at the ready, firing at him. I think she was trying to make him look at her so he would know what it was she was seeing when she looked at him. Maybe not, I don’t know. She promised his parents no one would see the results but then … who knows? It all seemed—terrible, worse than it usually is when I tag along. I’ve decided I’m the curiosity. I’m going to sleep.’

  Doors closed, the three women slept and dreamed, each sealed into a private somnolent capsule of the past and the future. Maud dreamed a confused mélange of herself and Hedy Lamarr bathing in a blood-colored lake. Liz saw gross reflections of a pituitary giant in a snowbank into which she seemed to be dipping X-ray plates. Minna had a familiar dream: the Eighty-sixth Street station of the Sixth Avenue El formed itself protectively over the panel
of Mr. Weisfeld’s skull as it lay, abandoned and brittle on the gray sidewalk. She could see spots of chewing gum surrounding it like a black halo, she saw her mother’s anxious face watching her watch it, she seemed to be seeing it all through the artificially colored bright blue water of the Salvation Army swimming pool.

  IN THE SEPTEMBER AFTER MAUD’S DEATH, Florence decided to take the twins with her to Atlantic City, ignoring the nuns’ disapproval of their absence from school. Florence was discovering how difficult it was to keep them amused and happy, now that there was no foreseeable terminus to their care. The funeral had been attended by her and the children, Luther, and two of Florence’s friends from the Albany Hospital. Florence could not find the addresses of Maud’s roommates at college, and the only address she could find belonged to a man in an insane asylum. Immediately after the funeral Luther disappeared, ‘to go on the road,’ he told her, leaving no address. He promised to send monthly support for the children, but it never came. Florence felt the financial burden. But even more difficult for her was the twins’ demands for entertainment. She was never to forgive the assiduous Sisters for their intervention in the lives of the Kenneths: they had persuaded the boys to use, on most public occasions, the English language they knew well, to save their private tongue for the endless conversations they continued between themselves. The good Sisters had effected another change in the children’s demeanor by insisting that one of them (no one was quite sure if they had designated the right one) be Spencer. Now they both answered to both names but the Sisters were satisfied: there were, on the attendance rolls, two names for two boys. With this schism the boys became less tractable, more demanding, less content with their own company. Conforming obediently to the general rules of the parochial school, they lost their curious self-contained and particular identity, and became ‘normal.’

  In Atlantic City Kenneth and Spencer quickly grew bored with the contest that so enthralled their grandmother. They scrapped with each other during the Thursday-evening costume contest at the Music Hall, disturbed the rapt onlookers and had to be taken home. On Friday, in an act of heroism for her, Florence decided to forego the swimsuit preliminaries. She hired a taxi to drive them all to the southern end of the city to see Lucy, she told them. ‘This is Margate. Lucy is here. We’re almost up to her.’ The twins consulted with each other in a string of syllables she took to be questions by their tone, but she could not think of a way to prepare them for the sight of Lucy. When the taxi deposited them at Lucy’s gigantic right rear foor, near a door that led to her interior, they shrieked with terror. Their high screams could not be staunched and they clung to Florence as she tried to move them back to see Lucy from a little distance.

  Lucy was a sixty-five-foot tin-covered and painted elephant hollowed out into many rooms and observation posts. Her legs alone stood twenty feet high and were filled, for her support, with ten-foot-thick cement. She loomed into the air like a vulgar colossus and she was topped by a decrepit howdah displaying the remains of once-bright paint. Her seventeen-foot-long ears were plastered to her enormous head, and her trunk extended thirty-six feet into a bucket of cement the size of a small reservoir. At the windows cut into her belly tourists stood looking out. The bulging portholes that were her eyes were filled with whole families staring at Atlantic City to the north, and down at Florence and the twins. Nothing Florence did could stop their screams. ‘Hush. Be quiet,’ she told them. ‘You’ll scare everyone.’ They clutched each other. Their cheeks were fiery red, their beautiful black curls wet with each other’s tears. Florence grew increasingly anxious. ‘You’ll make yourselves sick. Come on, we’ll get a taxi and go back. It’s only a make-believe elephant, boys.’

  But to the twins, immersed in their mutual and desperate terror, it was not just an elephant. ‘No, no, no!’ they screamed. It was an incomprehensibly large, thick skyscraper in the shape of a beast, a blowup like a gargantuan balloon but thick and insecurely rooted. At any moment, it would thunder forth, stomping them with its mammoth cement toes, whipping them with its twenty-six-foot tail. It was already in motion, they just had not noticed. Lucy’s bulging eyes fixed on them; she lumbered, barging along fast enough to free her trunk from its bucket and then elevating the flat slit at the tip fifty feet into the air. With one move, the twins flattened themselves on the sand, one on top of the other, believing they had been pounded into the ground and combined with the sand like runover squirrels laid out flat and ground into the gray city streets, forever one with the cement. They were Bugs Bunny leveled by an enemy, shadows pressed into the sand by the rampant Margate elephant, Lucy, never to rise again.

  After they returned to New Baltimore in mid-September, Miss Alabama (weight, 119; bust, 35; waist, 24; hips, 35) having been crowned Miss America to Florence’s entire approval, the twins still seemed disturbed. They both complained of left-ear aches. Florence took them to the doctor in Ravena when she found their temperatures were 102 degrees. ‘Mastoiditis,’ Dr. Reiner said. ‘Both. They’ll have to be operated on.’ Florence had seen many persons with deep scars behind their ears. She was shocked that this might happen to the beautiful boys. She pleaded with the doctor. ‘It’s just earache. Can’t you give them something?’ ‘No. It’s more than that. Very serious. There’s a lot of pus in their middle ears. Inflammation has spread to behind their middle ears. I have to take out the mastoid bone to get rid of the pus.’ Their heads bound in heavy white bandages, their black curls shaved, the twins came home pale and tired from the Albany Hospital. Now there were great cavities marring the perfect shape of their small, lovely heads. They became very quiet, as though the sight of the soaring Margate elephant and the excavations they saw behind each other’s ears, combined with the death of their mother and the mysterious disappearance of their father, had cured their childhood pleasure with each other and with the world outside themselves. They grew to undistinguished manhood, wore their hair long at the sides over their cavities, took care of their grandmother until she died peacefully at eighty-three, married Ravena girls from their high school class and lived on the same road in New Baltimore. They worked as foremen for the Atlantic Cement Company near Albany. When a biographer sought them out to ask what they could remember about Maud Noon, the now widely celebrated poet (‘The sonorous voice of her generation,’ wrote The New York Times’s poetry critic), they said they could remember nothing about her, and sent the researcher away.

  It was true. Kenneth and Spencer Luther had forgotten the language of their childhood and with it the peculiar person who had been, far back when they were both of the same name, their mother.

  Leo Luther played supporting parts in national companies of Broadway shows until he was well into his thirties. He had a few close-to-Broadway roles. But by the time his acting skill had caught up with his fading good looks he had grown too old for leading men’s roles. His early handsomeness and his late talent crossed each other too far into his life. He married again, a good-looking girl from Nebraska who worked as an assistant fashion editor on a women’s magazine. Inevitably the marriage was doomed by his constant traveling and her cavalier attitude toward fidelity. Alone at forty-eight, Leo Luther was finished in the theater. He had grown heavy, pasty-faced and balding. He drank too much, smoked too much and suffered from constipation and hemorrhoids. Sometimes, around holidays, he thought of looking up Florence and his sons, who he assumed still lived in New Baltimore: his memory had fixed them at seven and Florence at a vigorous fifty years or so. But the natural inertia of the underemployed kept him from making the necessary effort to telephone or travel there. A writer for Ms. succeeded in running him down in his undistinguished Forty-fourth Street hotel, where he worked the desk evenings for his room and paid for his food, clothing, liquor and cigarettes by doing delicate errands for other guests. He procured bottles on Sunday, girls on any night, reefers and papers of coke when he could safely find them for visitors from Kansas or Idaho. The writer wanted to know about his first marriage, what he thought about t
he contemporary poet, Maud Noon, whether she was ‘liberated’ in her thinking during the years of their marriage, what their love life had been like, why he thought she had so prematurely taken her life without leaving an explanation. To all such questions he smiled his once-beautiful smile, extinguished now by the loss of four teeth close to the front of his mouth that he never replaced, and said, ‘I’m writing my autobiography. You’ll have to wait until I’ve finished, and then read about all that.’ Of course there was no truth to this. Luther never intended to write about Maud, or himself, or their miserably prosaic marriage or her inexplicable death: he understood nothing about anything that had happened to them in his lifetime. He had turned his back on all of it, wiped his memory clean of the vestigial details and lived only in the present. He died at sixty-four of cirrhosis of the liver without having contributed anything of importance to the growing literature surrounding Maud Noon except a sentence or two in her biographies, and the few memorable lines in her poetry celebrating his extraordinary beauty.

  THEIR LAST PHOTOGRAPHY TRIP TOGETHER was at Minna’s suggestion. In April 1939 she saw that Liz was feeling very low. ‘It’s the end-of-the-term blues,’ said Liz. Maud was preoccupied with Luther and her final papers, and with trying to come to terms with his suggestion that they be married in the summer and share an apartment while she went to graduate school on the generous fellowship Columbia had offered her, and he took classes at The Actors Group. Minna was going to Cornell to get her master’s degree in history. But she was distracted from studying for finals by her parents’ generous graduation gift of a trip to Europe. Only Liz was without direction. Nothing of what she had learned at Barnard did she want to know more about. So she applied to a publisher she had been told specialized in art books for an advance to prepare a book of her photographs, together with an essay about her views on the subject. She needed the money to finish what she had already done and to spend a year taking more pictures. She intended, she said, to go on with her photographs of solitary people.