The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

Crystal Lake, we’ll prove that none can faze us,’

  sang the freshman and sophomore campers. Their faces were lit by the dying campfire, their open mouths looked hollow and black, their eyes glowed with pleasure. Only Minna, recovering from a case of the runs, as her counselor, Fritzie, called it, or the trots, as her bunkmates said, looked glum and felt gloomy. She thought the camp songs were silly. Next to Central Park, the woods of the Catskills looked like a jungle. She was certain that killer insects, vicious chameleons, wild cats and poisonous snakes lurked just beyond where she was sitting. She was worried about the walk back to the bungalows through the dark tangle of trees that grew between the lakeshore where the campfires were held, and the clearing where they all slept: ‘Anything could be in there,’ she thought. She was afraid of trees in the dark. To her their shapes seemed human, their branches like arms, their leaves like hair. She thought of the lights along Eighty-sixth Street, of the birthday lunch she and her mother would have had at Schrafft’s on Broadway if her parents had not insisted she go to camp in July, ‘for the experience,’ her father had said. She had hated spending yesterday, her eighth birthday, among strangers, having to go to the bathroom all the time. The camp directors had been told, she guessed, so the camp sang the sappy happy birthday song to her at breakfast and presented her with a white cake (she hated white icing) after dinner. Even her counselor, pretty, plump Fritzie, had been a perfect stranger to her until two weeks ago. She liked Fritzie all right, especially at night, when she seemed to sympathize with Minna’s fears and took her hand walking away from the rec hall movie to go back to the freshman bunk.

  ‘There is a camp for girls

  Close to my heart,’

  sang the whole camp. Minna’s heart pounded. The girl next to her reached out. Minna said, ‘I don’t feel like it,’ and sat stolidly while all the others held hands. She recognized the song as the usual last one of the night, and decided to go in search of Fritzie to make the first claim on her hand. She found her at the other end of the large circle, seated far back from it under a tree with another counselor, a very pale, thin person they called Flynn—a name Minna thought strange for a girl—who taught arts and crafts. As Minna came closer she could hear the two counselors having some kind of an argument. She heard Fritzie’s high, sweet voice say, ‘No! No!’ She sounded angry but Minna could not make out what Flynn said. She saw Flynn put an arm around Fritzie’s shoulders and bend her head forward toward Fritzie. Suddenly Fritzie stood up and pushed Flynn away, making her lose her balance and fall over. Minna caught up to Fritzie as she was walking to the circle, almost falling over the legs of two other campers who also were not holding hands in the circle. ‘Can I walk with you? I have to go to the bathroom,’ she said. Fritzie looked unhappy, as though she had not liked the campfire either. But she took Minna’s hand and said, ‘Okay. Come on, let’s get moving.’ ‘Don’t you like Flynn?’ Minna asked as they walked in advance of the big clumps of campers who were coming away from the fire. ‘I like her,’ said Fritzie, ‘all right.’ ‘Were you having a fight?’ ‘No, not a real fight. It was nothing. Forget about it. What were you doing away from the campfire anyway?’ ‘I didn’t feel like singing and holding hands.’ Fritzie laughed. ‘That was my trouble too.’ ‘Are you afraid of the dark? Like me?’ Minna asked. ‘No,’ said Fritzie. Minna was puzzled by her counselor’s replies and even more puzzled when, a few days later, the arts and crafts hours were canceled and the freshmen had to have an extra period of field hockey. Minna hated that sport, with all its fruitless running. If you were a left wing as she was always made to be, it was hard to stay parallel with the ball. She told Fritzie she didn’t feel like playing field hockey, she was no good at it because people yelled at her to keep running when she was tired and she wanted to have arts and crafts to finish the snakeskin purse she was making for her mother. Fritzie said, ‘Okay, stay on your bunk and write your letter. This is Wednesday and you need a letter home to get into the mess hall at lunchtime.’ Minna stayed behind, for the first time in sole possession of the bungalow. She was there when Flynn came in carrying a suitcase, said hello to her and went into Fritzie’s little room off the campers’ bunks carrying a letter. She came out, picked up her suitcase, said good-bye and went off down the line of bungalows toward the camp entrance. Minna went into Fritzie’s room and found the letter Flynn had left on Fritzie’s pillow, but it was sealed, so she couldn’t read it.

  She went back and sat on her bunk and, without any warning to herself, burst into tears. Only after her tears had worn out and she had begun to block print: DEAR MOTHER AND DAD, did she realize what was wrong with her. She was homesick for them, for the dark familiar corners of their apartment and her room on the courtyard, for the park, the gray, friendly cement streets, even for the Saturday marketing.

  Minna’s mother often said, ‘I’m going to bed with a book.’ From her example Minna learned the pleasures of reading. In her eleventh year the librarian on the ground floor of the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library discovered that Minna had read all the books in the children’s section. She sent her upstairs with a card that showed she was to be admitted to the adult library, the first significant elevation of her life and the one she was to remember with the greatest sense of accomplishment. But the prospect of all those books appalled her. How did you choose a book? How did you know one book without pictures from another? How could you be sure you would like the one you chose after you had carried it home and settled down in bed with it? She decided on a simple expedient. She took the first book from the fiction shelf, under A, read it that afternoon and evening and returned it the next day on her way home from school. It was almost a year before she realized that the organized logic of the library did not require such rigorous procedures on her part. A sense of vast freedom flooded her. An infinite world of literary possibility and choice opened up before her when she discovered that the laws of one’s pleasure were not based upon alphabetical order.

  Minna was graduated from the eighth grade of PS 9 in the late spring of her twelfth year. Her career there had been undistinguished. She was bored by readers and textbooks and went on her eccentric way borrowing library books. One teacher, Miss Mulligan, was to remember her with some pride, for she managed to transfer to the attentive Grant girl her own scrupulosity about English grammar. The other teachers thought her a pretty, pleasant and agreeable girl. None of them realized that under her goodness was a large, complex design of fears, transmitted to her by her mother, fears so paralyzing that to her teachers and friends they appeared as admirable manners and model behavior.

  At the graduation ceremony Minna was awarded the prize for character. It was regarded as the plum by her classmates. Scholarship was given a medal, but character was rewarded with the munificent sum of twenty-five dollars. ‘Now I can have a bicycle,’ Minna told her parents.

  Hortense Grant was opposed to this plan, had been against it ever since Minna first asked for one for Christmas two years before. She had visions of her daughter crushed beneath the wheels of a truck or thrown to the ground and run over by a taxicab. Leon Grant did not argue with his wife. He had never been able to surmount her tower of fears, phobias and predictions of catastrophes, and long ago had given up trying.

  But if her father would not intercede, Minna was determined to win out nonetheless. To her the possession of a bicycle meant freedom to move, a set of wheels to be used to get to the park and even, the longer and more perilous journey to the Drive. Her courage to oppose her mother was enhanced by the award itself. Did she not, after all, have character? She would have been hard put to define that sonorous word. To her it signified resistance to authority or at least a firm, unwavering stand on matters important to her. Possession of a bicycle, for example.

  She would trust no one to hold her prize check until her father brought home the cash for it from his haberdashery store on the Bowery. Minna said, ‘Tomorrow is the day I go for my bike.’ Her father smiled. ‘Remember, you keep it in
the basement and walk it on the sidewalk to the park. Eighty-sixth Street is too busy to ride on.’ Her mother, who seemed to have surrendered wordlessly to the fated purchase, said nothing more.

  To Minna the new bicycle was the most beautiful object in the world. Its fenders were painted white, the metal tubes of the framework were red, the handlebars cuffed in ridged black rubber, comfortable and reassuring to the hand. When she reversed the pedals the brakes instantly responded, like magic. The wheel spokes shone and flashed as they turned, and the saddlelike seat, which could be raised or lowered, felt strong and supportive when she rode. Dolly Sudermann also had a bike, an elderly remnant of her father’s Oslo boyhood. The two girls kept their bicycles together in the washroom in the basement, near the dumbwaiter.

  In the early days of June, when New York throws off its old age of winter and becomes, in the bright sun and clear air, young and new again, and before summer camp in the Catskills was imposed upon the reluctant Minna, the two girls met every day in the basement and helped each other bring their bicycles up the steps. On the day of the great neighborhood excitement, they started to walk to the park, their bikes pushed along at their sides. They were discussing their favorite subject, their beloved machines. Dolly’s was sturdier and had a more interesting history. Minna’s, they agreed, was fancier and technologically more advanced. At the corner of Columbus Avenue they saw a little clutch of police cars. ‘An accident,’ said Dolly. They could see no broken glass in the gutter, no remains of tires or cars with battered fenders. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in a thick circle. The girls came closer but were unable to enter the circle to see what everyone was looking at. A policeman called, ‘Stand back. Stand back.’ They heard then the high whine of an approaching ambulance. The crowd, almost as one, turned toward the gutter, where, in a moment, an ambulance backed between the police cars. Two men carrying a stretcher leaped out of the rear of the ambulance. The girls put the stands down over the rear wheels of their bicycles and followed the attendants into the midst of the crowd.

  ‘Mr. Weisfeld,’ said Dolly. Minna recognized the old man who ran the cigar store on the corner, a pie-shaped little place where her father bought Camels and newspapers and where she and Dolly purchased penny candy to sustain them on their way to the park every afternoon. Mr. Weisfeld lay on his back, his eyes fixed on the sky as if he were searching for birds and planes. The gray sidewalk under his head was now stained red, so red that the blood looked false, like the tomato sauce Minna had seen a character shed in a stage play. ‘Is he dead?’ whispered Minna. ‘I can’t tell,’ Dolly said. ‘He looks dead.’

  Minna’s heart beat so loud and fast that she found it difficult to breathe. She gulped and lowered her head to stare instead at her brown oxfords. ‘O God, make him alive,’ she said to herself. She prayed for Mr. Weisfeld because he was an old man and very nice to them always with his licorice and Maryjanes and did not deserve to die this way, stretched out on the dirty cement full of blackened gum pieces and dog stuff, his blood coloring the cracks in the cement.

  ‘Who shot him?’ she whispered to a man beside her wearing a yarmulke. ‘I don’t know. Someone said he wouldn’t pay protection. The mob, someone like that.’ ‘What does that mean, protection?’ she asked Dolly, but Dolly whispered, ‘I don’t know.’ The man in the yarmulke had moved away toward the outer rim of the circle. White-coated attendants lifted Mr. Weisfeld onto the stretcher, taking great care, as if he were alive, so Minna took heart. They raised him from the sidewalk and walked with short steps to the ambulance. The policemen were pushing everyone away. ‘Disperse,’ said one of them to Minna and Dolly. At once, obediently, they started toward their bicycles. As Minna turned away she saw it: what remained on the gray sidewalk of Mr. Weisfeld, a curved, almost transparent piece of skull, like an eggshell, thin and red-tinted, lying where his head had been. A few gray hairs protruded from it. ‘O God, did you see that?’ Minna asked Dolly. ‘What?’ ‘That—that piece of Mr. Weisfeld they left there?’ ‘No, I didn’t. Where?’

  But Minna had seen it, and would see it many times in black dreams, in her morose fantasies, for the rest of her life. Her vision had fallen upon the residue of a life she had known briefly and a death she had almost witnessed, a minute piece of a person left behind to meld into the anonymous walk.

  Oh yes, the bicycle. A month to the day after Minna spent her character money on her heart’s desire, the bicycle was stolen from the basement and never recovered. Mr. Sudermann suspected one of the delivery boys, who had been dazzled by the newness and beauty of the machine. Dolly’s bike beside it remained untouched. But it could not be proven—the bicycle was gone forever. Hortense sympathized with Minna; inwardly she rejoiced. Leon, who controlled the family purse strings, doling out allowances to both Hortense and Minna, made no offer to replace it. Minna wept and was angry after her mother suggested that the loss may well have saved her life. But when her sadness passed, Minna, accustomed to small shocks to her bland and protected existence, became philosophical and accepted her loss as a fitting test. Still, the price was high, and she resolved never to have character, whatever that meant, again.

  For those who were adolescents in the early thirties the high tor of drama was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. For Minna it was her first taste of suspense. She was to weigh other great events always against the state of heightened emotion and tension in which she lived for the seventy-two days of the search. Gabriel Heatter, a radio commentator, called the missing child Little Lindy. When he spoke these words, his voice rang with unctuous sympathy. Over and over, night after night at the supper hour, Heatter rehearsed the heartrending details of the taking of the child from the famous family’s house in New Jersey. The whole nation hung upon each subsequent development. Minna never missed his reports, so that Heatter’s voice, rolling and damp with anxiety, became the vehicle of her memory. From it she learned the names of the places: Sourland for the Lindbergh estate, and Hopewell, the nearest town. They fell into a Dickensian pattern of significant meaning for her remembered version of the story. Minna thought the names were bestowed on the shocking drama by a higher power with literary pretensions. The whole maternal population of the country, especially in the cities close to the affected area, was filled with apprehension. Mothers accompanied their young children to school and waited for them outside the buildings at three o’clock, under the conviction that kidnapping, like cholera and diphtheria, was catching and would now reach epidemic proportions to threaten their own offspring. Students and teachers at Minna’s high school took the cause of the lost baby to themselves. Everyone prayed in assembly for his safety. Newspapers sold out every edition whether they had anything to add to the saga or not, while the Daily News and the Mirror made certain that black headlines of small import covered their front pages daily. Sales of radios rose dramatically all over the country.

  When a small body was found barely two miles from the Lindbergh compound and identified by Little Lindy’s weary father (still referred to as Lucky Lindy in the news reports), the story reached every home, every business place and the streets in a matter of minutes. Theater managers interrupted motion-picture performances to inform the patrons, just as the Pathé News was about to start. At Hunter College High School, Minna and her friends heard the grisly news from their history teacher, who had turned on the radio in the teachers’ room during the lunch hour. The girls cried, holding one another’s hands. Afterward they vowed retribution upon the kidnappers if they should be caught. Nothing would be too awful for punishment, they all decided, wiping their tears and grimly determining the nature of the torture to be inflicted. Outside, many of the city’s church bells rang out in a constant tintinnabulation, the rectors, priests and rabbis of the city’s religious institutions having decided in advance that God and His vengeful legions should not be left out of current events.

  The drama went on and on. Minna stopped reading her daily book and sat close to the Stromberg-Carlson every evening while the se
arch for the kidnappers continued. When a rough-looking carpenter who was unfortunate enough to be German passed along one of the ransom bills, Hortense sighed with relief. Her daughter, her sole concern, was safe, and the guilty Hun, as the tabloid newspapers referred to him, was surely to be executed almost at once. The trial, to everyone’s way of thinking, was a mere formality. Minna hung on every word communicated to her by Gabriel Heatter, about the evidence, the cross-examinations, the unlikely story told by the guilty man, the incriminating ladder, the family’s unassuaged grief. She held her breath until the conviction was announced, and in unison with her friends expressed the fervent belief that execution in the electric chair should take place immediately.

  On the day of the execution, Minna was home from college for spring recess. Hortense and Leon ate their dinner while the radio was playing, eager to know all the details of the monster’s death. By dessert they had heard it all. But Minna could eat nothing after Heatter told of the attached wires and the moment of the three jolts that ran through the body of the convicted man, burning the skin of his hands and feet, avenging in a few seconds the vicious murder of a child who had not been permitted to live until its second birthday. Leon Grant left the table, announcing he was going back downtown to work, Hortense took Minna in her arms and held her tight for a minute. Then they went to their rooms, as if the event just concluded required some kind of sacramental separation.

  Minna lay on her bed, looking out of the window at which the first great terror of her life had appeared, thinking of the Christmas doll still wrapped up on the floor of her closet, and the remains of Little Lindy decayed beyond recognition but safely laid in the family plot. The whole frightful drama was over. Minna resisted going back to her bland existence, to the everyday world of collegiate good behavior and obedient citizenship. What would now provide color and tension in her life? She realized that she had been living for four years in a great piece of national theater, experiencing a heightened sense of what the spectacle of death could provide to the ordinary private life. She was disappointed that it was over, reluctant to return to the letdown realities of Hortense’s smothering love, Leon’s cheerful businessman’s dishonesties and the dull rituals of college. Now for the first time, she understood the power of an historic event, which surely what they heard about the Lindbergh case was, and the growing importance it had to her life.