The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Maud’s father, Joseph Noon, was a middle-aged noncommissioned officer in the supply corps of the United States Army. Proudly sewn to his left sleeve were seven slanted gold dashes representing his many years of service. Maud liked the name for this embroidery, ‘hash marks.’ She made a poem: ‘Hash marks on the sleeve/Khaki cloth and yellow weave/Father’s time is called a leave.’

  Sergeant Noon came home on holidays and one weekend every month. When Maud was older he took his annual leave in September to give his wife time off for her vacation. Most of his pay was committed to his family. But while he was away in Fort Dix, New Jersey, he told his family he led a contented male existence. He refrained from the familiar indulgences of pool and poker because of the money they involved, instead going to twenty-five-cent movies on the post. He watched card games and smoked with a buddy at the noncommissioned officers club: his limit was two beers a night. Maud always had a clear view of her father’s life in camp.

  He hardly missed his family, it seemed to her. Florence was his second wife, his first having died of influenza. His two sons from his first family were now raised and ‘on their own,’ as he often said proudly. One was a toolmaker in Detroit, the other a machinist’s mate in the navy. It seemed to Maud, as she grew up, that her father had used his short store of domestic affection on his first family. When he was home now he was silent and withdrawn. His time with Florence and the children was spent doing repairs on the house and waiting for his meals to be served. His interest in the repetition involved in a second family was minimal. Sometimes he had trouble remembering Maud’s ‘fancy’ real name, as he called it. He too called her Beastie.

  Maud’s father was an absentminded man, always, Maud believed, thinking about the place he had just come from or was due to return to, never really entirely at home. He ignored his handsome son Spencer because he failed to show any interest in guns and things military. He patted Maud on the head now and then because, she thought, he felt sorry for his ugly little girl. But even with these gestures he was not entirely there. In later years, when Maud read Paul Valéry in Otto Mile’s class at college, she found that Valéry described a blank piece of paper as ‘the absence of presence.’ That, in retrospect, described her father.

  Joseph Noon’s content with his fatherhood was so silent, so reserved, that his children took him to be the model of a patient parent. When Florence went to visit her elderly parents in Gloversville or on her yearly vacation alone, Joseph kept house well, picking up after the children, teaching them to make spare, tight beds with squared corners and unwrinkled sides and tops. He fixed efficient, quick, army-type meals. Everything was accomplished, as he said, ‘in lickety-spit.’ Until she was older and wanted to use the word in a poem about her father she thought it meant cleaned by means of a saliva-coated tongue.

  In her childhood she considered her father’s withdrawn forbearance an adequate substitute for tempestuous love, an emotion she understood superficially from reading the novels of Warwick Deeping, her mother’s favorite author. When Maud had difficulty getting into her tight bed in the still-warm nights of September, her father would allow her to sleep on top, smiling at her feebleness before the rigidly tucked sheets.

  To the small Maud the words ‘leave’ and ‘post’ were synonymous with ‘duty.’ They were what her parents did. They stood for places and actions in the world beyond New Baltimore in which she played no part. Sometimes her father would turn up unexpectedly in his natty uniform saying he had been given a three-day pass. She extracted the word ‘pass’ from his arrival and stored it among her cherished collection of poetic words. Standing outside the back door before her sixth birthday, before the first grade rescued her from frozen mornings and the snow she had yellowed, she would recite her incantation: ‘duty,’ ‘leave,’ ‘pass,’ ‘post,’ a litany directed primarily at the scrawny cat Flo. Later, she came to believe those magical syllables initiated her into the vocation of poet. They taught her a respect for the force of fine, tough, short, Anglo-Saxon words. Her mature style was to hang upon them, solid, simple words, building to the last line of the quatrain. There, in a burst of expansive embrasure, a large, bumbling Latin abstraction appeared, contrasting sharply with the spare materials of the first three lines. Hers was a construction starting on cement footings and rising ethereally into a poetic cosmos.

  Summers were dull for Spencer and Maud. Their mother spent her free time fall housecleaning in advance. Fixed in Maud’s memory was the summer she was seven. Her parents decided to paint the rough-hewn rafters and walls of her room and Spencer’s plaster ceiling. It was the hottest summer on record for upstate New York. Many days the temperature reached one hundred degrees. The pump in the side yard refused to work, the cistern became low, revealing to Maud’s horror its usually submerged collection of dead weasels, rats, mice and chipmunks. But still Florence drew water from the cistern while they waited for their father to come home on leave to fix the well. Once Spencer rescued a struggling woodchuck from the water and set him loose near his hole.

  During the painting and whitewashing of their rooms, Maud and Spencer were sent to swim in the river. ‘The only cool place in the whole northeast,’ their father said. In those days the Hudson was clear and clean, a fast-moving river, with its own eccentric current, and very cold. Village kids played and swam there on hot summer days, plunging into the river from wooden boards, a frame for the banks that had been installed when New Baltimore was a supplier of ice to New York City.

  At fourteen Spencer was a good swimmer. That summer, when they spent so many hours at the river, he taught Maud to swim. It was easy. She was a little tub of a girl who could float almost at once on her stomach. Quickly she acquired a serviceable dog paddle. When she grew tired she sat on the splintered boards and watched Spencer dive in, over and over again, with the town boys, their brown legs flopping wildly into the blue river. Some less skillful boys took great jumps holding their noses, bending their legs like frogs beneath them. While still airborne they screamed defiance at the passing boatmen, who waved to them from their tugs. Maud ignored the other children her age because their splashings frightened her. She paddled happily in the shallow whorls made by the jumping boys and imagined they were creating little pools for her pleasure.

  Always she was aware of Spencer, of his lithe body, his long hands and feet still a little out of proportion to his thin trunk and narrow, blond head. She thought him the most beautiful boy in the world, and told her mother her opinion. ‘Boys are handsome, girls are beautiful,’ her mother told her. But Maud knew she could not be right. For was she not an ugly girl?

  While Joseph Noon was still on leave, and halfway through the work on Spencer’s room, Spencer got sick. It was a Saturday, Maud was to remember. Maud and Spencer had come back from a long day on the river, Maud holding on as always to his cold hand as they walked up the steep hill, pleased to be allowed to do so. Three times during the long trudge she felt him shudder. At dinner his face flushed and he had no appetite for the Saturday-night lamb stew. Florence sent him to bed and came up later to put an extra blanket over him.

  Maud and Spencer called their mother by her first name, at her request, as soon as they were old enough to know what it was. ‘Mother’ seemed to them a word for all such persons and did not apply to one particular instance, whereas Florence was the word given to their mother alone. Florence went upstairs again early in the evening to see to him. After Maud had gone to bed, she heard Spencer call, ‘Mother,’ and so she knew he was sick. She heard him call again a few times during the night, each call sounding more urgent, before Florence was roused from her heavy sleep and came to him. The next morning Spencer had a high fever and pain in his arms and legs. When Maud brought him a glass of milk in the afternoon his eyes were red, as if he had been crying. He told her he could not move his neck. The Ravena doctor was away for the weekend, so Florence relied on her nurse’s skills, washing him down, as she said, with cool water and feeding him liquids, which he threw up alm
ost at once.

  Maud had understood separation before sickness struck Spencer. Her father exemplified it to her, but she had rarely felt pain at his systematic absences. Separation because of Spencer’s illness turned into the terrible anguish of constant loneliness and loss. On the third day of his sickness (Maud remembered that day because it was her seventh birthday but there was no one home to celebrate it with her), her father and Florence took Spencer to the emergency room at the Albany Hospital.

  The months of separation from him that followed were like a deep cut on her knee that festered and scabbed over and then opened whenever she bent it. In September she had to go up the hill to school without him. On Sundays she was allowed to accompany her parents to the hospital during visiting hours. While her parents went in, Maud waited in the parking lot, her eyes fixed on the third-floor windows where, Florence had pointed out to her, the polio ward was. There Spencer lay, breathing in and out with the help of a machine.

  Maud could not remember when the word became part of her secret chants. Polio. Polio. Rolio-polio, from roly-poly, the descriptive word her father used to describe her. ‘Roly-poly polio.’ She whispered the words sadly to herself, feeling in this way that she was part of Spencer’s sickness, and close to him. At seven she wrote another couplet: ‘Spencer sleeps in an iron lung/Why just one? Why just one?’ Maud could not remember how she knew that people had two lungs and never understood why the doctors had chosen to apply the machine to only one. As for her poem, she was surprised at how perfect it was, and amazed that she was able to make up a rhyme almost as good as the poem she was made to learn in first grade: ‘I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree.’ While she much admired the famous poem she did not understand the sentiment. How could anyone think an old tree (there were many of them in New Baltimore) was as good as a poem?

  Staring up at the blank windows of the polio ward, Maud felt her chest contract. She beat her fists against her sides in fury and gritted her teeth. She wept for loneliness and for her beloved brother: ‘Why just one?/Why just one?’ she repeated again and again, the question addressed to the brick hospital walls and to God.

  In the winter of 1925 Spencer was back at home, always in his bed or a chair, the rafters of his room only half whitened. Maud was now afraid of him and cried when Florence made her bring him something. She always hoped he would be in his bed, not propped up in his chair where she could see his useless leg and arm. He had given up reading because his head often ached, and his projects were abandoned after the strength had gone out of his right arm. Maud believed he had given up talking too, or at least he never said anything to her or called Florence. His silence meant to Maud that he was angry at what had happened to him, angry at the abrupt end to his private life in his room with the door shut.

  ‘Can I get you some water?’ ‘Are you cold?’ ‘Do you want the blanket?’ ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Do you know tonight is Halloween?’ Every sentence Maud directed to him was a question. But he would not answer except to look at her with his beautiful, low-sunken blue eyes, as though her standing there on her two feet was a reproach to him. He was offended, she believed, by her desire and ability to serve him.

  Florence did not work that winter. The family lived very carefully on Joseph Noon’s monthly army check. Maud was made to wear Spencer’s old plaid jacket to school. In it she felt confused. She felt she had lost herself, the ugly, roly-poly little girl with the fancy, dumb name. Her classmates laughed at her name, and at everything about her, the awkward fat way she had to turn over on her hands and knees before she could get up from the floor during exercises, the way the tip of her fat nose whitened when she drank milk. They thought her thick lips very funny and her heavy glasses a kind of vast joke. Once she wondered whether it was possible that, having fit into Spencer’s coat so early, she might metamorphose into her beautiful (no, handsome) brother. She imagined all his old grace flowing into her through the torn lining and yellow-and-green squares of his coat. She was afraid to look at the new, sick, withered Spencer. But she took pleasure in using his old jacket. Her mother had offered it to her at about the same time she was allowed to take four books at a time from the school library. The rest of that long winter of Spencer’s slow convalescence was lost to her except for one monumental discovery, that writing words and poems in composition books was as good as saying them over and over to herself, and more permanent.

  In June, Florence heard about the Children’s Seashore Home in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and told Maud and Spencer about it at dinner. Spencer now had a steel brace on his leg and could move slowly and jerkily with two canes. Florence said she was going to take him to Atlantic City for training and exercise as soon as Joseph came home on leave. She showed Spencer pictures of a long, rambling gray building with wooden ramps instead of steps to every door. ‘The Atlantic Ocean is just beyond the edge of the picture,’ she said, ‘and there is a boardwalk running along it where you can be pushed in wicker chairs by darkies.’

  Spencer said, ‘I won’t go.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because it’s for crippled kids and I’m not a cripple. I’m getting better by myself.’

  Maud understood that Spencer saw himself as he used to be. That was how she sometimes saw him too. He was afraid he would be reminded of his true state by the other children in the Home. In spite of his protests, Florence took him to Atlantic City. She stayed in a rooming house on Kentucky Avenue while he was bathed and massaged and exercised in the Home. ‘He is having therapy,’ she wrote to Maud. ‘Therapy’ was the word for treatment, a new and lovely word to Maud, one she was to use several times in the poem about her college teacher, Otto Mile, in lines like ‘Tendered his eye as therapy/To her crippled poems.’

  Once while Spencer was being treated, Florence wandered over to the Boardwalk. It was a warm September day and the Boardwalk was clogged with people. Rolling chairs were lined up along the rail facing the sea. In them sat well-dressed elderly couples, their knees covered with bear rugs despite the heat of the day. Florence inched her way through the crowds until she was just behind the chairs. On the sand below she could see a number of young women in bathing dresses and black stockings posing for a photographer. The women held one hand behind their heads, the other seductively on their hips. The photographer’s head was lost under the black drape that covered the back of the camera. All Florence could see of him was his bent body, his white-clad legs behind the three poles of the camera stand.

  Florence watched for a time. Then she turned to a stick-thin man beside her. He was wearing a bathing suit and a policeman’s cap. ‘What is happening down there?’ ‘A pageant. They’re getting ready. To crown the most beautiful girl in the country.’

  Florence was too timid to ask anything else. She gazed at a small dark-haired girl who was turning slowly in her place, lifting her feet delicately now and then as though the sand were very hot. As the girl came to face her, Florence saw she wore a white satin ribbon diagonally across her chest from her shoulder to her hip. On it was printed MISS TULSA. Miss Tulsa was, Florence later told Maud, the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Maud imagined Florence felt her own flat, gray and almost formless shape expand into her vision of the dark, shapely beauty. That night on the Million Dollar Pier, in a lavish coronation scene, Florence saw Miss Tulsa crowned Miss America.

  Spencer came back from the Home dispirited and not visibly improved. Florence claimed his arm and leg were ‘more supple.’ But, watching him try to walk, Maud agreed with Spencer: his leg was growing stiffer, having lost entirely the shape of its muscles. Weekly, the straps within the steel brace needed to be tightened around his white, broomstick leg. But it was true that his arm seemed to be somewhat better despite his resentful inertia. ‘And it would be better still if you would exercise,’ Florence said.

  Maud understood Spencer’s resistance to doing anything to improve his state of health. His fine, useful body had been dealt a terrible blow, his view of himself as helpful older brother and beloved son was
destroyed, and he wanted nothing to do with partial restoration, especially not through his own efforts, which he believed were doomed to disappointment. He refused to walk anywhere except around the downstairs of the house. He gave up his room, the books he had so carefully collected, his half-restored Lionel trains, the mock-up of the Globe Theater he had made in junior high school. Florence was told to bring down only his necessary toilet articles and some of his clothes he called his ‘things’ and leave them in a corner of the dining room, where his bed was now set up. He refused to go outdoors.

  A teacher from the Ravena school district came to see him three times a week and scolded him for never doing his homework or the reading she had assigned him. When Maud came home from school he was always in his special steel chair staring at the little water glass of wildflowers she had picked for him the day before. He took a melancholy pleasure in their moribund state. ‘You can’t pick them fast enough to stop their dying. Even I know that. They’re like people. If they’re picked by God or fate, they die before they have a chance to live,’ he told Maud, who already knew the truth of this. She saw it clearly illustrated in this brother she loved so much that her throat and chest ached for him. Her weak eyes were now covered with very heavy glasses she called spectacles, having found that word in David Copperfield. ‘These are my new spectacles,’ she told her classmates. ‘Am I not a spectacle in my new spectacles?’ she would say, having learned that laughing aloud at herself made her bear the laughter of others with better grace. Had she not laughed first? She was grateful to the heavy glasses. Looking at Spencer made her cry, but he could not see it, she believed, and she could blink away the tears. She hated to watch him struggle to the dinner table, gripping his two canes angrily, dragging his leg. With him, she resented the incomprehensible unfairness of the universe.