The Magician's Girl Read online

  At thirteen Minna developed a stammer. An elocution teacher to whom the English teacher sent her said it was nerves. She added that girls almost never stammered, which made Minna’s affliction even more mysterious. ‘I try … n-n-not to,’ she said, but effort made it worse. The harder she struggled the more difficult it was to talk. When she volunteered to answer a question in class, her attempts produced visible grimaces of annoyance on the faces of her classmates, and terrible embarrassment for Minna. Finally, Michael Casey, the principal, intervened. Hortense was asked to visit the school. ‘She is not doing well in academic subjects, and her speech is, well … very bad,’ Michael Casey told Mrs. Grant. Hortense found this impossible to believe. She knew about the stammer, to a small extent, but since Minna had grown quite silent in her adolescence, it had not seemed important to her. But academic subjects! Hortense believed Minna was close to being a genius, a wonderfully endowed, intellectual girl. Principal Casey went on, ‘The home arts department here is very good.’ Mrs. Grant would hear no more. With only five years of formal schooling herself (before her tenant-farmer father shipped her, his first of ten children, to America), Hortense had an inordinate respect for academic subjects. She argued with the principal and at last was able to persuade him to retest Minna with the new Binet-Otis test she had read about, designed to establish her intelligence quotient. In this way Minna convinced him she could be readmitted into Civics, World History, and Regents English. Saved from tutelage in the arts of cooking and sewing, Minna knew she had to settle her attention on academics, as Principal Casey referred to the subjects she had been neglecting.

  One of the reasons for her failures in the past was clear: Minna had developed a passion for swimming. Her high school did not have a pool, but after school there was one within walking distance, in a Salvation Army building. There, every afternoon, the club to which she belonged met. They named themselves the Gertrude Ederle Swim Club eight years after their idol became the first woman to swim the English Channel. The club worshipped the conqueror of those brutal waters; they had memorized every detail of her life and great effort. Hortense had been nervous about swimming, for she feared water and had spent her entire passage to America under the covers in her bunk in the room on the Mauritania she shared with three other girls going to be maids in New York households. But Hortense saw Minna swim in a meet in the last days of summer camp. She allowed her to join the club, believing there was safety in numbers: twelve girls trained together every afternoon and long hours on the weekend, practicing their Australian crawl, their resting tread, their flips and turns. Their ambition was to swim the Channel.

  Minna’s relationship to water was loving. Moving in it, she felt alive, clean, respected and clever. Her body had developed and was now slender and well shaped, although she was not very tall. Her shoulders broadening with the crawl, her hips remained narrow under the exercise of her rhythmic kicking. Her body was suited to movement in the element she found preferable to any other. Looking at her friend and swimming partner, Emma Lifson, by far the best swimmer among the dozen, Minna enjoyed the changes that came about in her own person since she had fallen in love with the water. Emma was a solid, husky, thickset girl, like Minna a single piece of well-integrated machinery but a log to Minna’s twig.

  Minna was exhilarated by the perfect, mindless movements of her arms and legs. Her small, blond, handsome head (she had to concede her own good looks, looking at Emma in the dressing room) stretched in a straight line with her body as she pulled along the surface of the water, making a smooth, thoughtful progress without once breaking her stroke, always thinking about Gertrude Ederle. (From Cape Griz-Nez to Dover on August sixth, nineteen hundred and twenty-six, in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, through choppy two-foot waves, the waters of the Channel inhospitable to the twenty-year-old swimmer.) She turned by flipping over neatly, pushing away from the green side of the pool and pressing on with her inexorable Australian crawl. (The daughter of a German butcher with a store on Amsterdam Avenue, a member of the Women’s Swimming Association at thirteen, an Olympic gold medal hung on her broad chest at eighteen for her heroic part in the free-style relay team’s efforts, tangled with two bronze medals for the one hundred meter and the four hundred meter races.) Minna rehearsed all the details as she swam, trusting example to spur her on. Stroking hard, she pictured seven black-framed certificates hanging in the Ederle family house in Queens awarded for Gertrude’s amateur triumphs, one for each of her world records before she was nineteen.

  Minna swam beside Emma Lifson. Stroke for stroke they matched each other, pushing for five miles. Minna pounded relentlessly against the low-choppy pool water. (Against the cutting sea for almost thirty interminable miles, close to the boat operated by her trainer Thomas Burgess, near and yet far enough away from it not to be tempted by the prospect of relief by holding, even briefly, to the side for warm tea in her frozen esophagus, for soup she knew he carried with him in the hold, unable to hear anything because the slashing sea slammed against her ears, she was almost blinded by the wall of water every time she turned her head and raised it to breathe.)

  All Minna’s resources were required for her to finish her prescribed miles. From some hidden spring she brought up Gertrude’s example, re-creating her unsuccessful first swim, when the appalling sea had conquered Gertrude two miles from the harbor of Dover. Her frozen mouth gasping for air, instead had sucked in saltwater. She gagged and threw up into the spume that crashed over her head. Minna felt herself sinking with Gertrude when Thomas Burgess reached out to grab her. Even then Gertrude tried to shake herself free of his rescuing hands. ‘Come out,’ Burgess said. She spit water at his hand and said, ‘What for?’ But at last she had to surrender to the rejection of the hostile sea.

  Pushing the water against its will, it seemed to Minna, she reached and kicked to travel the last laps. (Twelve months later Ederle had returned to the same malignant waters, her spirits bolstered by small sums of money given her by the Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, to whom she promised ‘the jump’ over the other papers for her personal story when she made it. In the boat this time was a famous journalist named Westbrook Pegler, accompanied by his wife. He was there as a ghost, the man the Chicago Tribune had hired to put words to her every stroke, her every hard breath, to the moment that she felt the bottom under her at Dover and changed from fish to woman, erect and triumphant.)

  Minna and Emma Lifson finish their stint in the pool at almost the same moment as Minna sees Gertrude step ashore, rejecting Thomas’s offered support, weary but still strong. ‘What now?’ Gertrude is wondering. She falls heavily upon the pier, scraping her thigh, and sees her body is black with the Channel’s fishy wastes. A man in a blue uniform (yes, this is history) steps up to her as she lies gasping on the dock, and bends down. ‘May I see your passport?’ he says. ‘What else?’ she says to herself.

  While Minna dresses she turns her reverie to talk and tells Emma about Gertrude Ederle. She will visit her German forebears in the Black Forest for a few weeks, see the village that bred her extraordinary physique. Bushels of wastepaper and ticker tape will rain down on her as she rides up Broadway in an open car between Mayor Jimmy Walker and Grover Whalen, the official greeter for celebrities. For this great occasion she wears her cloche hat over her close-cropped hair, her straight black tie holding together the starched collar of her man’s shirt, her suit jacket buttoned stiffly over the rugged chest and arms that had subdued the Channel. She will spend eight weeks in the company of Hollywood stars making a foolish movie called Swim Girls Swim, in which she will appear as the instructor of champion Gertrude Ederle, played by the beautiful and curvaceous Bebe Daniels. She will sign her name to a paragraph endorsing the virtues of an insect destroyer call Flit. Holding the long metal tube in one hand, the plunger in the other, dressed in her familiar tank suit and still wearing her Channel-conquering white cap, she stands at the edge of a Hollywood pool, ready to assault hordes of large pests, looking strapping,
muscular, flat-footed, thick-hipped, the very model of courage and stoutheartedness.

  ‘What is it with you and Gertrude Ederle?’ Emma asked. ‘I don’t know. I guess I like great swimmers, and success stories. And my mother’s afraid of the water,’ said Minna and laughed.

  Minna was first to drop out of the Gertrude Ederle club. She felt the pressure of approaching graduation. Preparing to take the entrance examination for Barnard College, she had to read the books on the Regents’ required list she had blithely ignored for so long. After two years of illusory aquatic freedom, she returned to the dry ground of Silas Marner, Ethan Frome and The Old Curiosity Shop, to memorize the organization of the government of the State of New York, and to acquire (with a tutor her parents provided for her) some dim idea of what biology and trigonometry were about.

  Unfortunately, it was true. Minna’s psyche was now formed, perhaps deformed. She was destined to be an anxious young woman, filled with inherited and communicated maternal fears, and compounded with some she had herself contributed to her affrighted spirit. Even swimming eventually became a source of dread. Once, in a pool footbath, she believed, she caught a lingering case of athlete’s foot. After that she swam only in fresh water or, as she said she preferred, in the Atlantic Ocean. She plunged into rough waves, white water, voracious breakers, diving without hesitation, it seemed. And every time, without exception, she was terrified, as though the ocean were an enemy, the sum total of her fears, the culminative phobia that canceled out the fading pleasure of her youth and made itself part of the ferocious and threatening world around her.

  THE ODORS OF ONE’S PAST. Maud Mary Noon believed they clung to the inside of the nostrils like snot. It is not true that we do not remember them. Often Maud told Minna and Liz about the cold days of winter in her early childhood in the tiny Hudson River village of New Baltimore. She was made to play outside in the snowy yard after her mother came home from the night shift at the hospital in Albany, seventeen miles north of the village. It was Maud’s belief that her mother sang and rocked the sick and dying to sleep in the hospital. This was what she meant by ‘having the duty.’ ‘Duty’ was the word used by her mother for her work. ‘I have the night duty,’ she would say to Maud and her brother, Spencer. Maud considered duty to be warmth and comfort. It meant to reach out with maternal, antiseptic hands, to hold patients in her starched white arms.

  Maud’s brother was older. In her memory Spencer always seemed to be in the seventh grade in the red-brick grade school up the hill from them. On her mother’s duty nights the two children stayed at home by themselves, locking the door after their mother went to catch the bus to Albany. Maud relished the phrase ‘catch the bus.’ She had a vision of her mother’s flat white hand thrust forward into the road to pull the moving bus toward her, like the gold ring on a merry-go-round. ‘Gone away to catch the bus, away, away to catch the bus,’ she would sing to Spencer during the long evenings they were left together.

  Maud was five and liked being left home with Spencer who was old, twelve. He was offhand with her but kind, like a preoccupied hunter with his admiring dog. The house was very quiet. From the parlor windows she watched boats on the river, the moving string of lights over black water, tankers mostly, and some small shadowy white yachts and tugs working their way noisily to the port of Albany.

  Maud told Spencer the boats were going to their night duty. He listened to her fancies absently, for he was usually intent on his homework or on an old train set he was repairing. It had been given to him by Mr. Rossi, who raised mushrooms in dark sheds in Ravena, the next town to theirs, and had belonged to Rossi’s son Angelo, now grown up and become a priest. So intent was Spencer on restoring the caboose that Maud had to make her river-traffic observations over and over again. Finally he would grin at her. He never answered, but she knew he had heard and was satisfied. If he said anything at all to her queer ideas it would be to call her by the pet name he had given her: ‘O Beastie!’ She never minded it, because she could discern the affection in his voice. She loved Spencer dearly in return, and she knew, even then, that she was indeed an ugly little girl.

  Spencer and Maud had adjoining bedrooms. When she was very little, the solid sliding door between their rooms was kept open. But later Spencer began to have secret projects, plans he wrote down on the left-hand blank pages of discarded ledgers from the mushroom plant, notes he didn’t want anyone to see, things he was planning to build out of his father’s stores of wire and silver paper. Later still, he had other occupations that took him to his bed in late afternoon. Maud could hear the springs of his bed making tinny, tuneless sounds. Once he pulled the door shut, he told her never to try to open it, and she never did. She listened to the sounds behind the door, the dropping of tools, Spencer talking to himself, his contented sighs accompanying the rasps of the bedsprings. From her exclusion she learned valuable lessons: she knew more about the nature of reality when it was hidden from her or merely suggested to her, lessons, her roommate Liz told her, that were well known to photographers.

  Maud never minded Spencer’s shutting himself away. So great was her fondness for him that she felt protected from behind the door, knowing that he was there. She felt safe going to sleep, and happy when she woke in the morning to hear the thumping, rushing, banging sounds of Spencer dressing for school. Sometimes Maud knelt on her bed and crooked her neck so she could watch him from her window walking up the road from their house to the school she knew was there but had not yet been to. She could see his back covered by the heavy plaid coat with a belt which he wore all the time he was growing up until it became small enough to be made into a jacket. His books swung from his bare hand by a strap and his other hand was always in his pocket, pockets being their mother’s suggested substitute for gloves. Their cat, a narrow brindled tomcat named Flo (for their mother, Florence, who in turn had been named, providentially, for Florence Nightingale) would follow him to the top of the hill and then come back to wait for Maud to come out later on. Flo was not allowed in the house, ever. Their mother thought cats stole the breath from babies and made older children sneeze.

  The air left behind in the house by Spencer seemed protective, friendly, patient, to Maud. Close to nine o’clock, a little later in the winter when the roads were bad, her mother walked down the hill from where the bus had dropped her off. ‘Drop me off here,’ Maud once heard her say to a bus driver in Albany. The command became part of her childhood litany. ‘Drop me off, drop me off, drop me off at the river,’ she sang, standing on their veranda. Maud watched her mother come toward the house, her face a puffy canvas of weariness, the white strip of her uniform showing from the bottom of her coat. She took her fingers out of her mouth to wait for the sound of the key in the door. The house atmosphere felt less cosy once her mother was home. The air grew crisp and taut, strung tight by the knowledge Maud had that she was not part of her mother’s duty. In a rush Maud put on her union suit and then tried to press over its stiffened legs the cotton stockings that were still damp and yellow from yesterday. Still wearing her heavy coat and the crocheted hat that covered her ears and tied under her chin, her mother came upstairs. ‘Hi there, little Beastie,’ she said, and helped her on with her middy blouse and black tie, two sweaters and the leggings that buttoned up the sides of her legs, covering the instep of her shoes. Always her mother asked her if she had washed, and often Maud lied and said, ‘Yes, I did.’

  They went downstairs together to a breakfast of rolled oats left in the double boiler by Spencer and the remains of the dinner biscuits spread with colorless margarine. Maud tried to swallow some of the icy, almost crystallized milk her mother kept in a cold box on the back porch. She loved to watch her mother undress in the kitchen, standing over the floor outlet to the gas furnace. Florence hung her uniform behind the dining room curtains above her white shoes, putting wooden sticks, like small curved arrows, into them.

  ‘Now I need my sleep,’ Florence told Maud as she pulled and pushed her galoshes on for he
r, locking the metal fasteners all the way up over the leggings and clipping her mittens to her coat sleeves. For years Maud could feel the nasty pinch under her chin of the elastic band on her felt hat. Maud took her sled from the back porch, where Florence waited for her, loaded on it her tin pail and shovel, a set of assorted chipped dishes, burned pots and old baking pans. From the snow piles she made pies and cakes, ice soup and granular alabaster roasts with potatoes. She listened for her mother to snap the door lock behind her, trying hard not to cry; she hated to be put out every morning in this way. Outside, the air turned hostile and inhospitable. She played alone out there, with only the elusive Flo to talk to until Spencer came home for lunch and pounded on the back door to wake their mother.

  Often, before he came, Maud wanted to be let in, to show her mother the culinary snow marvels she had concocted, or to go to the bathroom. She grew hungry and wanted some biscuits, even a drink of frosty milk. But there was no way to be let in, she understood that. Upstairs, until noon, her mother slept heavily, her rest after the duty guaranteed by the locked door. Maud stayed on the porch, her snow cuisine finished, pestering Flo when she could catch her, sometimes crying to herself, watching for Spencer’s plaid coat. Every day, as rescue from the opened door drew close, she breathed in the spiced fumes of pee that rose up from her woolen underwear. She felt its warmth in the soles of her galoshes, and watched small dollops of it soak into the bare porch boards.