The Magician's Girl Page 5

  But her love for him, now a burden in the face of what had happened, did not have to endure her growing up. When Spencer was almost nineteen, and he and Florence had made the September pilgrimage to Atlantic City for the third time, and the therapy was once again of no apparent use, Spencer seemed to take matters into his own hands, or so Maud was always to think. He caught cold, the cold turned to bronchitis and then, so fast that it was hard to believe, into pneumonia. Joseph was home on leave when it happened. He and Florence took Spencer into Albany in the old Ford station wagon. He was admitted into the hospital, and Florence stayed with him at night, sleeping fitfully in the chair in his room. Joseph spent his days there. In four days, they both returned to New Baltimore, without him.

  ‘Dead? How could he be dead?’ Maud demanded of Florence. She insisted, ‘He cannot be. It cannot be. There is no way he can be dead.’ Florence was too upset to answer. Joseph, in his removed, stoical, reasonable way, tried to comfort her. ‘It might be just as well. He hated being the way he was. A cripple.’ Maud cried for so many days that her eyes swelled almost shut. The phrases her father chose to allay her grief infuriated her. ‘Maybe he’s better out of it.’ ‘What do you mean, it?’ ‘His misery, you know, his life, the way he was, his arm, his leg, the braces and all,’ said Joseph softly, half to the stony Florence, half to his irritating daughter, trying not to look at her swollen, red face.

  ‘It cannot be,’ Maud said again and again to no one. Spencer was her childhood, her hope for beauty in the world, her faith in her inner self. She carried around with her a photograph of them together, his hand on her head. The white spaces on the picture turned tan. Across the cracked back he had written, ‘To Beastie from her loving brother Spencer Noon.’ In that snapshot she is standing stolidly at his side, a square child in a cotton dress with a large bow at the back and another white bow in her hair just above the barrette. Her fists are clenched at her sides and she is scowling into the camera, her eyes slits, the tip of her tongue showing at the side of her mouth. Liz, her college roommate, said she resembled one of the mongoloid children she liked to photograph. Spencer looks sleek and handsome. His white collar is open at his slender neck, his smile is easy and warm. In this way Maud remembered her brother, frozen into that graceful stance, his hand forever on her ugly, angry head, his beautiful eyes fixed eternally into the lens of the photographer.

  In the year after Spencer died, and before Joseph was invalided out of the army, Florence chose a scorching day in August to announce her new plan. ‘Next month I’m taking my vacation. Aunt Louise will come to look after Maud.’

  Joseph did not look surprised. ‘Good for you, your furlough. How long?’ ‘About a week, I think.’ ‘Oh, fine, fine,’ said Joseph. ‘The mountains are nice. I once went to a place called Roscoe in the Catskills. It was very nice.’

  Maud was thirteen. Since Spencer’s death she was often lonely, and she hardly knew Aunt Louise. She said, ‘All by yourself?’ Maud expected her to say, ‘I need a rest,’ as she always said to her daughter when she had locked her out of the house after her night duty, but she did not. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Maud. ‘To Atlantic City.’ There was silence. Joseph was thinking about the next day, when he was scheduled to go back to Fort Dix. Maud wondered if her mother was going to Atlantic City because Spencer had been taken there so often for his ‘cure.’ In some strange way, perhaps, Maud thought, Florence hoped to encounter his spirit on the expansive Boardwalk.

  The announced vacation never came off. Maud remembered it, even better than Florence’s subsequent trips to Atlantic City. That year, her mother’s fury knew no bounds. Again and again she heard her tell about the malevolent hotel owners in Atlantic City who wanted to discourage the pageant. They said that the women who had been coming to the city were not good types. They cited affairs that developed and subsequent unsavory divorces among attendants at the pageant. ‘Not the contestants, of course, but the men who come to see the pageant and are seduced, you know. Good family men who stay at the big hotels. That’s what the owners claim. And the contestants—they say some are vile and obscene.’ Maud hung on every word, wanting more details but afraid to ask. ‘Ridiculous,’ said Florence. ‘I’ve been there once and I’ve never seen anything like that. The girls are beautiful and innocent, every one of them. Not one of them is even married. All good girls.’

  Florence’s defense to her family of the morality accompanying the Miss America Pageant was to no avail. For five years the hotel men’s determined organization won out. The pageant was suspended, the occupants of the rolling wicker chairs traversed the Boardwalk undisturbed by the sight of girls on the sand revealing their charms in their swimsuits, and Florence took no vacation.

  In August 1933 Florence said, ‘There’s going to be the pageant this year. I’m going.’ From then on, she went every year, religiously, as if she were a mendicant on pilgrimage. Each year her life formed a determined parabola. The height of the curve was reached in the early fall with her visit to Atlantic City; the decline occurred after her vacation, when she knew she had eleven months to wait until her return. She became a passionate scholar of the event, avid for all its statistics, much like the lover of sports. She was interested in the given names of the contestants and often regretted not having bestowed one of the more popular ones (Mary, Patricia, Barbara, Carole) upon her daughter. She admired Fay, Lois, Rose, names that more than once had graced the winners. Maud later suspected Florence thought she might have prevented the unfortunate development of her little girl’s anatomy if she had bestowed upon her a more auspicious name.

  In the winter, Florence’s talk was full of such matters as the unusual height of the tallest Miss America, who was five feet eight. Florence herself preferred the smallest winner, five feet one, ‘before my time, so I never actually saw her.’ Florence informed Maud that the tiny winner of the very first contest in 1921 had been Miss Washington, D.C. (5′1″), named at a time when the contestants represented cities, not states. Maud early learned to listen, to nod understandingly at Florence’s parade of facts and statistics, and to try to remember them, for her mother’s sake.

  At a time when Maud’s own skin was suffering the outrages of pimples and purulent sores (and when she had begun another, hidden, indignity—this one bloody and inflicted on all young girls, her mother told her), Florence railed against the judges of the contest for allowing the contestants to describe their complexions as peachy, or creamy, instead of fair. Maud decided Florence thought these poeticisms a violation of the classic beauty of language she thought fitting for members of the pageant. So intensely did Florence believe in the validity of every aspect of the event that euphemisms offended her sense of propriety. To her the pageant was akin to church processions: holy, blessed, and full of divine grace.

  During the years that Florence took her week of rest in Atlantic City, Maud stayed at home with her grouchy, silent Aunt Louise, who was afraid of young girls and therefore imposed rigid discipline upon her. When Aunt Louise died, and Maud was older, she stayed alone with her ailing father. But her knowledge of what went on in the resort city was encyclopedic. She knew how the weather had been last year for the swimsuit competition, who had won the talent show but lost out in the evening gown match. One year Florence had returned in a rage. The winner, the former Miss Connecticut, had, to her eyes, inexcusably wide hips—37½ inches—‘larger than her bust, can you believe that?’ To Florence, who believed that absolute symmetry was essential to beauty, it was a scandal. She wrote an indignant letter to the editor of the Albany Times-Union, but it was never published, an oversight that angered her even more. ‘Indifference, lack of standards, that’s what’s the matter with the people in this country.’ Three years later, Miss America, formerly Miss Philadelphia, was close to the ideal, with only one half-inch difference between her hips and bust. Her picture was tacked up over the mantel of the Noon house in New Baltimore until August of the year when it was removed in anticipation of September’s new q
ueen.

  Florence’s ambition was to serve a New York State pageant winner as a trainer, or even as a chaperon. She did not aspire to be a hostess. She knew she was ruled out because these were always local Atlantic City women whose favored positions raised them almost to nobility during the magic week of the pageant. Florence was consoled by knowing that, after years of devoted attendance, she was more than qualified to be a chaperon. Only reluctantly did she come to realize that such a responsibility, serving a candidate, utilized three months or more of the lucky lady’s year. She would have to give up her job at the hospital, which she could not afford to do.

  Always, she spoke of the candidates with familial reverence usually reserved for novices in a convent. ‘You see,’ she said to Maud, ‘you need to start with a promising girl, working with her for a year, maybe two, before she’s ready to enter. You’re with her all the time while she’s still in high school. Work on her, with her, teach her how to groom herself, every part, head to body, how to improve her best features and play down her less good ones, stand straight but not too straight, like military men.’ She glanced at her husband, who sat still in his chair, not listening, it seemed, his mind on his tin soldiers guarding their paper terrain. ‘Poise, it’s called. You teach them how to be poised.’

  ‘I thought poise was balance or equilibrium, like being poised on the edge of a cliff, like the Charlie Chaplin cabin in The Gold Rush, or something,’ Maud said. ‘Well, I suppose that too. But it also means she holds herself, her shoulders and hips and legs and arms, standing just right every time she stops moving. Stopping in just the right pose, graceful-like, all together. What the judges give points for is called “grace of bearing.”’

  Maud felt her own round shoulders curve in further, so that her sternum ached with pressure, a living model, she hoped, of what Miss America was not, the ugliest of ugly Miss New Baltimores, fat, short, half blind, unpoised. ‘Then her clothes. It matters a lot how the swimsuit is cut for her particular figger, the color, the materials, the neckline. Then you need to worry about what your girl wears for talent night, so it shows her off well no matter what things she does, something awkward like, you know, like tap dancing or reciting Kipling’s If. Then the most important—the evening gown. That counts for an awful lot. And the gloves …’

  ‘Gloves? They wear gloves? When?’ Maud asked. ‘Oh my yes. With the evening gown, always. When did you think?’

  Maud’s fingers were so fat that they fit best into the mittens she wore until it grew warm enough to go without them. The thought of jamming her beefy hands into long white kid gloves wrinkled only at the elbow made her arms and hands ache. ‘And her hair. That’s probably the thing I could be best at. I’ve watched it being done on girls a lot. I know how to do it different every time, for every event and appearance, all week. The trainers say they “build the hair” or “construct a style.” Not like I have it done, set, you know,’ she said, glancing at Maud’s chopped-off black hair, which tended to arrange itself into disunited strands. ‘They think of it as a structure to be built on the girl’s head. That’s very, very important.’

  Maud nodded, and pushed her oily bangs out of her eyes with the eraser end of her pencil. ‘So much for structure,’ she thought, and went on appearing to listen to her mother. Florence had come to think of herself as a necessary and integral part of the pageant family. It was true that she was well known at the headquarters on Tennessee Avenue and the Boardwalk. More than merely an ardent fan, she was helpful, ready at any moment to sew a strap that broke just before appearance time, to deliver a message outside the walls of the hotel where the contestants were sequestered.

  Florence lectured her family about the high morality that attended the pageant. To prevent the kinds of scandals of which the hotel owners had been so fearful, the girls were not allowed to see any man, neither brother nor father, let alone a male acquaintance, during the entire week they were competing in Atlantic City. ‘No talking to any man, relative or not, in case the onlookers or the judges might think they were their boyfriends, so they would begin to wonder if the girls were pure.’ Florence’s best moments came when she was asked by a lovesick contestant to place a telephone call out of earshot of her trainer, her chaperon or a hostess. Such a service was not against the rules. Florence carefully wrote down the message and delivered it on a Boardwalk telephone to Harvey, or Billy-Lee or Derwin, who was staying nearby in an inexpensive rooming house. Then she wrote on the back of the note the boyfriend’s response, always full of tenderness, good wishes and avid mention of reunion. She enjoyed the game of reporting what he said to Miss Idaho or Miss New Mexico, at a rare moment when no one else was around.

  Florence had no gift for evocative narrative. Of course, her failure mattered not at all to Joseph, who hardly listened. But Maud had to settle for statistics and the special nomenclature she was treated to: ‘evening gown’ always, never ‘dress’; ‘swimsuit’ for ‘bathing suit.’ ‘Talent’ for what were performances that showed very little evidence of competence. She wished her mother had been endowed with more understanding, more insight. She wanted to understand why the girls submitted themselves to the terrible rigors of the display, why the helpers devoted their lives to the enterprise. What brought thousands of spectators to Atlantic City to see the week of events? Most of all, Maud needed to know why, compulsively and totally absorbed, Florence Noon went year and year after year to witness every step of the process that led to the crowning of a Miss America.

  THERE ARE NO REMOTE PLACES left on this planet. Visitors, tourists, explorers, crowd into every faraway corner, creating spoilage or ‘restoration,’ like imitators copying old masters in museums. The old place is ‘improved,’ so that it becomes common, even comic. The last frontier, the only remote place, is the interior of the self. The final privacy.

  Elizabeth Becker, called Liz almost from the day she was born, grew up in Greenwich Village, a cozy, narrow-streeted and alleyed area of New York City, in a small apartment on Christopher Street. She bicycled in Washington Square Park around the greened-over statue of Garibaldi, shooting marbles in the slutch around the trees with Italian kids whose fathers played checkers on the benches nearby. She jumped rope with skillful barefoot Chinese kids from Bleecker Street. When she was older, she wandered the short streets and mews that pushed off from the Square in every direction. To her satisfaction her life was perfectly haphazard, a happy characteristic she was always to attribute to never seeing anything odd about West Fourth Street and West Eleventh Street crossing each other in the Village’s comfortable illogic. To most New Yorkers, in those days, the Village was a puzzle, remote and almost unknown.

  Liz’s parents had once been Village bohemians, had known Maxwell Bodenheim to say hello to on Eighth Street, had hobnobbed with artists whose studios faced compulsively north as though only the light from that direction could illuminate their privileged canvases. Once, just before they were married, while they were still very good young friends, bedmates and classmates at college, Liz’s parents had been invited to Friday-afternoon tea at the Bank Street apartment of Edith Lewis and Willa Cather. ‘What was she like?’ Liz asked, meaning the novelist whose Nebraska novels of the twenties she had read in high school. ‘Very stolid. Very silent. Not interesting to me,’ her father said. ‘No interest at all in politics, or people, for that matter, that I could see. And that was in nineteen twenty-seven that we went, the year Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died.’

  Liz admired her parents. Muriel and Marcus Becker were good-humored, gentle people who accepted the early decline in their fortunes with a stoic grace. After graduation from college—he had been a much commended political science student at City College of New York and she a history major, Phi Beta Kappa, at Hunter—they were almost instant successes. They earned their doctorates at Columbia while they taught beginning classes at New York University, he at the Heights, she at the Square. Neither of them had spent a day of their lives in a classroom beyond the environs of the
city. They married at City Hall, quietly confident of their fortunes, in love with each other, their scholarly subjects, Manhattan island.

  As teachers the Beckers made valiant efforts to hide their deep and growing radicalism, their belief that college teachers, like machinists and coal miners, should form unions, their convictions that Marx and Lenin were relevant to the injustices of the United States. Except for class preparations and scholarly journals in their fields, their reading matter was confined to the New Masses, which arrived at Two Christopher Street in plain brown wrapper, and the Daily Worker, which they bought on Union Square and took home wrapped in the more acceptable New York Times. Their admiration for Joseph Stalin and Earl Browder was undeviating. Liz, during her early, untroubled, park-green and sidewalk-gray childhood, lived with rallies, leaflets and demonstrations while her parents took her everywhere with them in the evening: to meetings where she played games with herself on a camp chair at the back of rooms in which, far up front, hung a red banner with a yellow hammer and sickle imprinted on it and beside it the American flag. While she did her homework she often looked up at the faces of martyred Tom Mooney, Earl Browder, William Foster and the Scottsboro boys. A thin, neurasthenic-looking boy named Wendell Cohen sometimes played with Liz, until Muriel said he had to go to the Saranac Lake sanitorium to be cured of his cough.

  The two instructors were dismissed from their institutions in the same year, while Liz was still in grade school. It was ‘the end of the term,’ a phrase Liz was always to use for a catastrophic conclusion to anything in her life, although at the time it seemed bland enough. For four months they were unable to pay the rent, until Marcus at last got employment as a janitor (‘maintenance worker,’ he said, smiling, when anyone asked him what he did) at the tall Metropolitan Life Insurance building uptown from where they lived. Very quickly he was elected union representative. Nothing changed for Liz during that rough time. The rooted happiness of her childhood spent with two dedicated and single-minded parents who loved her went on. Their hard times were a proper part of the country’s widespread depression. For a long time her unemployed mother stayed at home with her. Muriel taught her labor history, a part of American history PS 64 did not offer its students. Liz learned about the Russian Revolution, about Nikolai Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Aleksandr Kerenski, heroes and villains omitted from the public school curriculum.