The Magician's Girl Page 13

  PROPOSAL: I want to do a book about persons who live alone all or most of their lives because of the circumstances of their birth or because they have not found a mate, a friend or a community. Such people cultivate habits to fill the space around them. They smoke, surrounding themselves with warm, dense, insulating air. They have a dog or cat with whom they converse and whose hungers, preferences, illnesses and toilet needs determine the ordering of their own lives. They talk to their potted philodendron and English ivy. Habitually they occupy the same chair in their rooms, although there may be other chairs to choose among. Their daily rituals, their protection against the void, become sacred to them. If they feel themselves close to the edge of despair, if darkness knocks against their legs, they light a cigarette, have a gin, fill the tub with bubble bath, read a romance, or a Western, or treat the cat to calf’s liver.

  Then there are the solitaries, who live in the exclusive society of their inner selves, often because they are curiosities to the outside world: cripples, dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins and many others. These are most interesting and frightening to me. Of course, I do not understand them. Their outlandish bodies, their frankly-presented-to-the-stare faces, tell me they want someone to know about them. Their rooms, their clothing, all these assist me with the truths I can uncover, perhaps, with a camera. I am trying to understand something about the world they have manufactured for themselves as a safeguard against intrusion by the vast universe of other persons who are not, like them, singular. When I have recorded their special being in their insulated and fragile rooms, then they will know how they look to others, for the camera eye is ordinary and commonplace, harsh and critical, exactly like the world around them. And I will know, and my viewers will understand, all for the first time. I have no interest in familiar types, in celebrities, in public figures. To photograph them is a tedious repetition of accepted and already available views. I want to know about the unknown who, curiously enough, are not invisible. Indeed it is the opposite: they are tragically open to ignorant and prurient inspection because of their abnormalities. The normal are not. My subjects are like the hermit crab before he finds his shell, the snake at the moment of shedding its skin. I want to show, not what I see (never enough) but what the camera sees: beyond the public vision to the interior self. I wish to understand the camera’s limits when it approaches these mysteries of creation and snaps shut on them. Photography, to paraphrase Franz Kafka, is a form of prayer. I want to perform a liturgy over the unique, deformed, the grotesque, the rare. Elizabeth Becker

  This was written, of course, not by Liz but by Maud, who had listened carefully and then formed what Liz had told her into Maud’s own images and expressions. But the result was exactly as Liz expected: No publisher showed any interest in the proposal or offered her any money. So Liz was depressed. The future held no doors open to her, as it seemed to be doing for her roommates, ‘not even crawl spaces, like they make for plumbers,’ she said. To cheer her, Minna said, ‘I have an idea. Let’s try to find where Gertrude Ederle lives.’ ‘The Channel swimmer? Why would I be interested in her? I’d say she’s pretty well forgotten now!’ ‘That’s the pathetic side of fame,’ said Minna, who had read the Liz-Maud proposal. ‘It would be interesting to know what she’s like now.’

  Liz found the address through a friend of her father’s who worked in the morgue of the Evening Sun. Late one morning at the end of April, Minna and Liz took the subway to Flushing, in Queens. On the way, shouting over the clangor of the train, Minna told Liz all she knew about her girlhood idol. They found the place easily on Sixtieth Road and Rego Park, a small frame house long ago painted white. Its first floor had two small windows separated by a door and was extended by a narrow wooden porch whose railing seemed frail. A low picket fence enclosed the little front yard, which was paved over with green cement. They rang the bell, and waited. ‘No one seems to be home. Do you think you should have telephoned or written first?’ ‘No phone. I tried. But yes, maybe I should have written.’

  Finally the door was opened by a slender, almost miniature woman, who said in a light voice, ‘Can I help you?’ Liz said, foolishly, it seemed to Minna, ‘Miss Ederle?’ For surely nothing short of an anatomical miracle could have reduced the powerful Channel swimmer of thirteen years before to this slip of a person. She looked at Minna and Liz and then at Liz’s camera hanging from her shoulder. ‘No. Miss Ederle is not available. I’m Miss Ederle’s friend. I live with her and take her calls.’ Liz said, ‘I’m sorry to intrude. I’m Liz Becker. This is my friend, Minna Grant. We’re students.’ A long silence followed. Miss Ederle’s friend made no move to give her name or to invite them in. This embarrassed Minna. She said lamely, ‘I used to be a long-distance swimmer. In high school. We formed a Gertrude Ederle Swim Club.’ The friend of Miss Ederle smiled—a sweet, small-girl’s smile—at that. ‘I will tell her you called to see her,’ she said, and started to move from the door. She looked at Liz’s camera. ‘She allows no pictures.’ ‘Could we just meet her and tell her of our admiration?’ Minna asked, now determined that Liz, in her bad mood, should not be turned away. ‘Well, I will see, but I doubt …’

  As her friend turned away, Gertrude Ederle appeared in the doorway. She was a tall, heavy woman, built like a Wagnerian soprano. Her hair was cropped close to her head like a man’s. She smiled at the girls, a broad, agreeable smile that revealed perfect false teeth. ‘She has not changed much,’ Minna thought. She resembled the advertisements for her vaudeville appearances that Minna remembered. They introduced themselves to her and she shook their hands vigorously. They all went into a tiny living room. Gertrude Ederle sat down and indicated chairs to them. Her friend sat down beside her on the sofa. Minna waited for Liz to begin but when she said nothing, she explained about the club. The nuncupative narrative sounded silly, she thought, but Gertrude Ederle looked closely at her as she rambled on. Minna said she used to visit Ederle’s father in his butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue when she and her mother went marketing. When she stopped talking, Ederle nodded and turned to Liz, who started off, having had time to prepare her defense of her craft. She talked about why she took pictures—she made them sound like valuable natural history—and she expanded upon her hopes for her book. Gertrude Ederle transferred her close attention to Liz and, when she had finished, nodded. Encouraged, believing that she had persuaded her subject to be photographed, Liz reached for her camera and began to adjust the lens. At that moment Gertrude Ederle stood up, turned with the military precision of an about-face and, without a word, left the room. ‘What’s the matter? What did I say?’ Liz asked Miss Ederle’s friend. ‘Nothing. I told you. Miss Ederle dislikes having her picture taken.’ ‘But she said yes when I asked her.’ ‘No. She said nothing. She just nodded. She didn’t hear anything you said. She always nods at the end of conversations.’ ‘She heard nothing either of us said?’ said Liz. ‘Nothing. Ever since the swim, when the Channel waves beat against her head for all those hours, she has been stone-deaf.’

  Numbed into silence, Liz put her camera into its case, Minna said their good-byes and thank-yous to Miss Ederle’s friend and they left. ‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t that woman tell us? Why did she let us go on and on?’ Liz was angry. Rarely was she frustrated in her pursuit of a subject. Minna said, ‘She came into the room before her friend could explain, I guess. But I was glad to have seen her. She still has that powerful swimmer’s body, that sweet smile. Those shoulders. But deaf. How awful.’ Minna shook her head. ‘She has her friend,’ said Liz, wistfully. ‘Yes,’ said Minna, surprised. ‘She has that. But it’s a woman.’ ‘So?’ ‘Well, it’s not the same, is it?’ Liz was silent a long time, and then she said, ‘Well, now you’ve become a widely traveled Manhattanite. You’ve been to two other boroughs.’

  Alone in the city during the summer of 1939, while Hitler was preparing to march into Poland, when Maud had settled into a Columbia-owned apartment with Luther and Minna had left for Ithaca to begin her graduate studies, Liz oc
cupied her parents’ flat. They had gone to visit comrades in Mamaroneck. In those months she taught herself to smoke cigarettes and developed a fondness for Murads. She looked about for subjects and found them everywhere in the city. In her parents’ bathroom she developed her film until her money for supplies was almost gone. With her last rolls of film, very early one morning at the end of August, she went downtown to the Bowery, to a flophouse named the Cage Hotel she had seen once from the El. The manager, still in his pajamas, waved her away. ‘Only men,’ he said. ‘You can’t go in there.’ ‘Are there places for women?’ ‘Nope. Not that I know about.’

  Liz decided to hang around outside the door over which the sign, in large block letters, said ROOMS—25¢. She watched a number of men come out, but none caught her interest until a one-legged man appeared, making his way toward the hotel. He rested on his crutches in front of Liz, grinned at her and tipped his battered fedora. ‘Would you like your picture taken in front of this door?’ she asked him, on an impluse. ‘Why me?’ ‘You have a nice face,’ she said. ‘And great legs,’ he said, and grinned again. Then he looked hard at her camera as Liz moved around him, centering his off-kilter body and lined, genial face in the doorway and then not centering it, taking it all as it came, the harsh, bedraggled, cynical-looking half leg, because he struck out the stump before him as a gesture of comedy. ‘Good,’ she said, when she had taken all the shots she had film for. ‘Thank you very much. Can I buy you some breakfast? I haven’t had any yet.’ ‘Thank you, ma’am. That’d be swell.’

  They went into the diner a few doors down from the Cage Hotel and sat at the counter near the front. ‘I’m Liz Becker,’ she said, and he said, ‘I’m Benny. Just Benny. I promised my ol’ lady when I became a travelin’ man that I would forget our name, ya know? I think I almost did.’ ‘A traveling man?’ asked Liz. ‘I knew a friend of my father’s who traveled in ladies’ hosiery.’ ‘Well, us stiffs use the word different. I mean, I’m no tramp or no bum. I was more a hobo, a travelin’ man, until the train I was hopping took off my leg. Now I can’t move on easy like I used to. Know about bindle stiffs?’ ‘No. What are they?’ ‘Bindle stiff is a travelin’ man with a bindle—a bundle, like—who makes the hobo camps, stays a couple, three days, then moves on, like a passenger stiff who is always on the cars. I was one. I got to be real good at making mulligan stew and leaving the roots for the next stiffs. For a while back there I was called Benny Mulligan. But then a car took my leg.’

  Liz ordered coffee and a roll for 5¢, the sign said. Benny apologized for his appetite and asked for bean soup, rolled oats with milk, bread on which he spread a luxurious coat of mustard (‘Gives it a taste,’ he told Liz) and coffee. ‘I used to need three squares, but now a good one before I flop in the morning is enough.’ ‘Are you going to bed now?’ ‘Yup. I sleep days at the Cage. I like the city at night. Less crowded. Don’t get pushed down so easy. Cheap, real cheap that way, half price at the Cage. Days there’s no one else in there.’ ‘What’s it like in there?’ ‘They got cubbyholes like, about as big as you are an’ not much wider. On top they got chicken wire so guys don’t climb over and steal ya stuff. They got an iron coal stove for winter. So then it’s good to sleep days when you can bunk close to it. I don’t like nights, because there ain’t no lights in there, only in the hall at the end. Some guys stay day and night, weeks sometimes, pay the two bits then the dime for the day. They play cards an’ read the paper in the hall an’ drink. They don’t allow no niggers in this place, so it’s clean, only for the crumbs.’ ‘What crumbs?’ ‘Crumbs is, er, lice. Every place on the Bowery got them. Some flophouses give meals, they got the most. Three squares they call it but it ain’t nothin’ but soup and bread and coffee in paper cups and such. I like to get out, move my stump around, eat at different places, the Army down the way, the shelter, the worker place on Christie Street. No air upstairs there ’cept what’s used already, you know how it is? I like the outside more. Fella tole me once it was a firetrap in there. You get someone fergets he’s lit a fag, falls asleep, you’re a goner. No way down but them wooden stairs. And four floors they got in that joint.

  ‘You live by yourself, lady?’ Benny asked. ‘No. I live with my parents. For the time being. But I am alone, you know how, no brothers or sisters, my friends gone off to other places.’ ‘No boyfriend, or mate?’ ‘No, nothing like that.’ ‘Too bad. I know how that goes. Since my wife I ain’t had much company ’cept for the road kids you pick up.’ ‘What are road kids?’ ‘You know, the kids … the kids the jockers have for foolin’ with. Pretty young kids to make you think about ya wife some. I come to like ’em, even the punks, the leftover road kids. But now with the stump they don’t cotton to me. So I’m by myself now again, like before.’

  Liz decided to pay and leave before she gave in to the desire to cry. She said good-bye to Benny and watched him hobble toward the hotel, his crutches making a groaning noise as he went. He turned at the door and waved. She waved back. Walking to the El she was overcome by an unnamable grief. She mourned the loneliness of everyone in the world, of all people, beginning with Benny in the Cage Hotel on the Bowery, and spreading in widening circles through the city to the people on the benches on Broadway, to the trains carrying lonely people out of the city to the suburbs, to the lonely cities of the Gulf and the plains and the other coast and the lakes. The buses and Els and subways were crowded with people trying to escape the heart of solitude to other places in which to be alone. ‘And the punks, the road kids,’ she thought, ‘helping out for a few sweet, warm minutes the loneliest of the bindle stiffs.’ Walking through the Bowery’s elderly, forgotten streets, Liz thought of the book she wanted to put together, a monument, a memorial to the infinite outcasts, the birth-defected, the ones-of-a-kind, the lovers, the murderers.

  For some reason, she thought of a photograph she had taken in her freshman year, a Columbia University student asleep on the steps of Butler Library, his arms outstretched in cruciform shape, his chest obscured by a yellow legal pad half-covered with writing. She waited until he woke to get his name on a permission slip. Twelve months later she saw in the Columbia Spectator that he had published his first novel. She telephoned him to ask if he wanted to see the picture she had taken of him. He said no. He told her there were now a lot of pictures of him, one by George Platt Lynes on his book jacket. ‘You must be happy, now that you’ve had a great success and all.’ ‘I was happy, the first few weeks. Everybody was around here and calling me up. But now, I don’t know. I feel pretty much alone now. I’ve started the next book, for which I got a lot of money, at least a lot for me. Now I’m scared pissless. I don’t think I can do it again. I’m sure I won’t be able to do it again.’ Liz remembered murmuring something reassuring, during which he hung up. Six months later, she saw in the Times that he had died, by suffocation. He had put his head into a plastic bag and pulled the strings tight. His second crucifixion, Liz thought, the frightened, lonely writer who had withdrawn into the diminishing oxygen of a garment bag to avoid writing his second novel.

  At the El she climbed the black metal steps slowly, noticing how specked they were with chewing gum. Tomorrow she had a date to photograph a woman she had been told about who was studying to be an opera singer. She was sixty-six years old, had recently assumed a new operatic name, Marie Napoli, and had been taking singing lessons since her husband died ten years before. When Liz called, the woman sounded delighted. ‘By all means,’ she said. ‘I need a picture for my recital announcement.’ ‘When will that be?’ ‘In the spring. I have rented Carnegie Hall for my debut. You are, of course, welcome to attend. I’m sure I will be able to save you a pair of tickets.’ Under the cover of the El station where she waited for her train, Liz thought of the wife of an American writer of popular short stories she’d heard about who decided when she was twenty-seven that she was going to be a ballerina, ‘as good as Pavlova,’ she said. To that end she strained every muscle in her too-old body to dance on pointe, training endlessly,
two decades too late. Like Marie Napoli, bracing her aged, coarsened vocal cords against the impossibilities of an E after high C. This must be the final loneliness before death, Liz thought, the tardiness of ambition, too late for realization, just in time to harbor the delusions of talent, but too late for recognition.

  At the end of the summer session in Ithaca Minna met Richard Roman in Willard Straight cafeteria. By accident they sat at the same table for hamburgers and coffee at dinnertime. Roman was heavyset and broad-shouldered. He wore a tweed suit, smoked a pipe and had capable-looking hands. His brown eyes and close-cut hair matched exactly. Horn-rimmed glasses gave him a serious, professional look. He was a premed student who had decided to spend the summer strengthening his grasp on the mysteries of neuroanatomy.

  A week after their first encounter they decided to marry, feeling they could sustain each other through Richard’s year of training when he was drafted: he had a very low number. Minna wanted to be married, she was not quite certain why, unless it was that it was the next sensible step in a life that her parents had taught her should be led along acceptable and logical lines: it was expected of her. She was fearful of being left, of being alone. Richard worried that the war in Europe would soon involve the United States, so he reached out desperately for an alliance that would give him a security he was sure the army would threaten. It was extraordinary that a marriage conceived out of expedience and need should work so well. It lasted thirty-nine years and provided each of them with precisely what it was they entered into the union to obtain.