The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Liz and Muriel walked the streets of the Village together, looking into the windows of shops that sold peasant blouses and skirts, stretched canvases and tubes of paint surrounding wood-block heads and jointed arms and hands for use as painters’ models, and prints by Village artists with scenes of dark-faced longshoremen unloading immense Cunard liners, and black sharecroppers picking cotton under burning suns. At home Liz and her mother listened to records. Liz’s childhood rang with workers’ songs played on their wind-up Victrola. She knew who Joe Hill was before she heard about Thomas Jefferson, the Southern national hero who was never given high marks by her parents, because he was known to have owned slaves. She loved the sonorous bass of Paul Robeson, the harmonies and elevated sentiments of the Weavers, Leadbelly’s gruff prison chants. To her, music was the Movement and the Party, the brave, optimistic words and pounding rhythms to which the Beckers marched on May Day. By the time she was twelve she knew all the verses of the Internationale (‘Arise, you prisoners of starvation/Arise, you wretched of the earth’) and most of Woody Guthrie’s lyrics.

  When she was very young, Liz admired her zealous parents because she thought there was no one they were afraid of. The police, pushing them away from the doors of buildings they were picketing, held no official terrors for them. They clasped arms confidently with locked-out workers and stood their ground against scabs and institutional guards. Both were often arrested. Once, when they were taken out of Washington Square Park for helping to raise a banner on the pole for the American flag saying ARMS FOR DEMOCRATIC SPAIN, a comrade (that was how he introduced himself to her and she understood at once: ‘I am Marcus’s friend, Comrade Earl’) came to her and took her to his apartment, where, with his family, she was fed stew and milk and home-baked bread.

  As she grew older, Liz discovered to her surprise that her parents’ fearlessness did not extend to their own bodies. Small flaws appeared in the brave tapestry of their mutual valor. Their fears were fixed on Muriel’s childbirth and Marcus’s teeth. ‘I will never go through it again,’ Liz grew up hearing. ‘They were the worst hours you could ever imagine. A breech birth, feet first. Terrible tearing. Pain, volcanic eruptions, it seemed like, for thirty-seven hours. Blood. Never again. Not for anything.’ Each time Liz heard the story, a new butchery was added: ‘Holes in my palms from my nails,’ until Liz came to look upon giving birth as a kind of extinction, a catastrophic, long drawn out murder of the mother by the bombarding passage of the baby out of a place that ripped and bled mightily and could, with bad luck, lead to maternal death.

  As for Marcus, he lived in mortal fear of the dentist. He was a private man, whose façade was brazenly, openly public. He showed his face willingly to the owners, the police, the fascist National Guard, the Klan, the Legion. But his true self was hidden. He hated to be touched by anyone he did not know and could not bear the idea of anyone examining his teeth. To him, his mouth, like other secret places in his body, was intimate and forbidden to scrutiny. ‘I cannot bear to have him look into my mouth,’ he told Liz. From that holy place should emerge only the sacred vocabulary of political truth, the maxims of Marx and Lenin, the saintly sayings of Stalin, and a vague, unpleasant odor of tobacco, vodka and unclean teeth. Into it went all the godly choices of his sustenance: the bread of life, and ‘the wine of astonishment,’ as the Psalms say. ‘The soup du jour,’ he would joke to his wife, ‘and nothing else. No probes, no picks and axes and drills, no brushes. They all disturb the balance of nature.’ Marcus never went to the dentist. His teeth turned yellow and then brown from tobacco and accumulated tartar and plaque. He believed the disturbing action of a toothpick or a brush would only activate the solid wastes that had gathered to protect his gums against infection from the outside, and the valleys and peaks of his teeth against invasion and decay. While Liz was growing up and taken to the dentist every year by her attentive mother, she watched the slow disappearance of her father’s teeth. As he sat reading one of his pamphlets from International Publishers, she saw him poke into his mouth with his index finger, holding it in one place for long periods of time, moving it slightly, back and forth. He was open about what he was doing. ‘I make no bones about it’ was his way of transforming his dentulous act into a joke. A tooth having offended him by its weakness in its socket, he was engaged in wiggling it, in and out, around and around, one week accomplishing a small root crack, the next causing a piece to give way entirely. Then the crack, another long week of probe and shake, push and propel, until the final snap, and the tooth was out, spit into his hand, saved in an envelope marked ‘Marcus’s canines, bicuspids, molars and incisors.’ At each extraction he would exult to Muriel and Liz, ‘No expense. No pain. Even some pleasure in the process. Do-it-yourself patience and instinctive skill. That’s the secret.’ ‘No teeth is the secret,’ said Muriel. ‘Well, yes. But when they’re all gone, I will buy some fine, shapely, Sanforized new ones that I will clean in baking soda.’

  Liz came to regard Marcus’s dental cowardice as the highest form of bravery: a sacrifice of natural parts of the body in the interest of oral privacy. What could be more admirable? The ultimate defense, the preservation of one’s amateur rights over one’s provenance, against the professionals who are charged to do it, against the invaders. Both parents, she saw, had vowed eternal vigilance for their fears. They preserved their corporeal privacy, and had been courageous, altogether admirable and faithful, in the eyes of their child, to their intrepid tradition. Just once had her parents submitted themselves to violent extractions. Ever after, they erected effective barriers against any recurrence.

  When she traveled away from the well-known and trusted environs of Christopher Street, Liz went by subway or, preferably, on the El. At fourteen she was able to move around the caverns and the air of the city as easily as a farm child in his father’s barns. She knew all the subterranean passages of the IRT. Her usual journey was to Fifty-ninth Street, on the local from Sheridan Square to Fourteenth Street, then the express, which cut through the triple uptown aisles like a bullet to Forty-second Street, and then across the platform again to the local that took her to the street of the galleries. She made all these train changes without thought, her eyes often on a book she was reading.

  Or she took the El. She would walk across the Village to the Third Avenue station on the uptown side, for the excitement of riding the great, rumbling uplifted iron horse of a train, on her way, via a crosstown bus, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Depositing her nickel into the slot, she would push, on the side marked ENTRANCE, against one of the four heavy black arms of the even-sided metal cross, and gain entry, as hard going as if she had forced the door of a vault. No sliding under the turnstile, as she had done when she was younger; it was illegal to enter so, though she was still small at fourteen and could easily have avoided the eye of the man in his cage. Once through the turnstile, especially in winter, Liz often stood at the potbellied stove the change maker kept stoked with coal. It sat just inside the swinging doors to the platform, its long, crook-neck pipe reaching to the corrugated ceiling. Her hands on the small doors to the stove, she always studied the etched glass windows, a clerestory of unexpected design that embellished the utilitarian walls. On each side of the doors hung glass-globed kerosene lamps, their wicks white and ready. Liz had never seen them lit. From her spot at the stove she listened for the train in a state of high excitement, every time, every train. She could hear it before she saw it, through the gigantic rumble of the floorboards. Then she rushed through the doors to watch its square-faced front come toward her, a lighted great eye in the center of its forehead, approaching so fast it seemed to be rammed from behind. Its tail coach was on fire, Liz used to imagine. She waited on the wooden platform, which shook as if it were afraid for its life at every approach of a train. She stood among the black-overcoated men in fedora hats, their collars turned up, their gloved hands pushed down into their pockets, and women in cloche hats over their bobbed hair, looking pin-headed after the large-hatted s
tyles of her mother’s generation.

  The train paused, twitching like some malevolent bird, just long enough to take on passengers. Liz sat down and turned at once to the window as the El train began its wonderful journey uptown. Carried forward in such upraised splendor, Liz was given a view of a new level of humanity, the late-night workers climbing out of their bedclothes and their iron beds, their bare skin wrinkled from sleep. Children, leaning on pillows gray from train soot on windowsills lining the El’s tracks, watched with shining eyes the passage of the train. Old men, stout, white-haired women, and slim young black men looked out, watching, Liz was sure, until the train passed them. The magnificent monster left in its wake clouds of exhaust as thick as soup, spreading over the whole of Third Avenue like an ebony seine. In the Sixties, where it made a stop, Liz often saw the same man, his face reddened with drink and sleep, the alcohol, Liz imagined, having been provided by McManus Bar and Grill handily situated below the window where he stood, pulling on his shirt to prepare for his importunate descent. In the Seventies, women were drying their clean hair in the inky air, and others, made lazy by fat, taking up their stations for the day on folded blankets, were leaning against the black grates over the bottom of their window, wires put there to protect their children from falling to the sidewalk below. In her shutter-quick glimpses of the possible comedy and drama of these lives, Liz found meat and drink for her imagination, sustenance for her growing life of amazement.

  The ride uptown was a revelation for her, an epiphany, a stage on which another world existed, a lesson on how people escaped the turmoil of their rooms and themselves to look out at any view offered them for deliverance from the inside, turning away from the chatter, protestations and domestic keening, she imagined, to listen to the anonymous roaring arrivals and departures of the El. She pushed her face as close as possible to the dirty window and retreated, drawing into the privacy of her interior self the second-story level of humanity.

  Because Julia Richmond High offered no art courses, Muriel had introduced Liz to the marvels of museums, and to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street. Liz came to prefer them to the sedate and dusty rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, one opening upon the other like an endless budding organism. On Fifty-seventh Street the paintings hung in the bright rooms seemed recent, still wet, like newly hatched birds, unheralded in their shining paint, announcing unheard-of visions and uncatalogued trends. No reputations stood between Liz and the pictures she looked at. She did not need to know the painters’ histories, and was therefore required to hold no opinion about what she was looking at. Her sense of freedom was immense.

  One day, in the last gallery she had planned to visit, Liz came upon two rooms of non-art, as she first thought of it: photographs, mounted between unframed sheets of glass, some by a woman named Berenice Abbott she had once met at a gathering at the union hall where Abbott was photographing some old Wobblies. Her pictures were of New York City scenes, some of them in the Village. Beside them were photographs, by a man named Evans, of the dust storms then devastating the Middle West. There were gaunt midwestern faces looking out over ruined fields by a woman named Lange. As she studied the photographs, Liz felt her eyes and heart expanding at what these people had been able to see and record. ‘This is an art, like painting,’ she said to herself. ‘Even better. Because there’s no sentimentality to them, like the sweet trees of Manet or the soft Paris streets by the Impressionist painters.’ All the way home she thought about the wonder of what she had seen. ‘To know where to stop, what to put in and what to leave out, the right light, the proper grain of paper. How extraordinary, to be able to make these choices, with a camera.’ Liz was struck, astonished, captivated for life.

  Once, riding back down to the Village on the El, she had a sudden look into a window that flashed away behind her. But not before she saw the silhouette of a nude white man with an oversize belly ballooning out beyond his white sticklike legs and chest, his white hands on the shoulders of a black boy kneeling in front of him, the boy’s mouth open to the bulbous man’s pendant, as Liz had once heard it called. How was she able to see it all in that single glimpse, the high drama of a carnal moment, two actors in an exchange? Was it free? compelled? tender? violent? It became immortalized in her memory. She wished she had a record of it better than memory. How could she report to her parents exactly what she had seen, exactly as it had been, without changing it, without moral judgment, without additions or subtractions due to faulty or inadequate language, without gain or loss through the failure of her power of observation? At that moment she decided she wanted to buy a camera, and this decision changed her life.

  As they grew older, Muriel and Marcus Becker began to suffer under their sense of failure. Muriel never was able to get another teaching job. When money was hard to come by, she tried for other positions without success. Marcus went to work at a second job, doing repairs on small electrical appliances, which he worked on in the kitchen at odd moments. Liz felt, when she was well into her teens, that she was no longer as important to her beloved parents. But she saw their withdrawal from her in the right light. Their inadequacy to the demands of providing for a growing girl made them cling together, consoling each other for their failings. Her response to this was a certain calculated coolness toward them masked by her understanding of their plight. After all, they had been in the world before her and probably had used up the supply of affection available to a small family. They kissed her dutifully when she said good night, but with none of the passion they seemed to reserve for each other. In her eyes they were like solitaries adrift in a world of more fortunate families. When she was younger she had wished for a brother or sister. Later she was glad she had neither, for she had come to think that the very climate of their apartment (the windows always closed against soot and head colds) would not have sustained another breathing person. Affection, like oxygen in a sick room, was meted out among the Beckers in very small doses. What there was of it, to Liz’s mind, was reserved to her parents, for each other.

  They were her instructors; they gave her introductions to the world of music, art, literature. They had withdrawn their early love from her in order to restock the dwindling stores of their affection for each other. So, needing warmth and creature comfort as an adolescent, Liz turned to her grandmother.

  Marcus Becker’s mother, Sarah, lived on the Upper West Side. To Liz that meant delicatessen odors, the vigorless steps of the elderly, the dark, promising air of movie theater lobbies and the fine, warm sweetness of Horn and Hardart, where she purchased two cupcakes—one chocolate, one orange—before she went to the Saturday matinee at the Loew’s Eighty-third with her grandmother.

  Sarah Becker had survived her six sisters and brothers. Now, at seventy-eight, she lived almost ninety blocks from the family of her only son, because to her the West Side of the city was a consoling and familiar element. She could not imagine leaving its boundaries to set up residence elsewhere. She never went away for a vacation; New York for her was vacation enough. The change of seasons refreshed her, the newness of bringing out, after a summer’s absence, her fur coats from their hangers in the hall closet. To change her wardrobe, to uncover chairs and sofa in fall, to take up rugs and put them down again, to unhinge the drapes and then, as the gray winter blew up from the Drive making Seventy-eighth Street a tunnel of frigid air, to rehang them, pleated and pristine, taffeta and velvet protection against the coming of winter: all these rituals were vacation enough for her.

  But there was more to it. Sarah Becker had always resented and feared travel. She was afraid of displacement, of losing her situation in the small area on the island of Manhattan she had taken for her own. Her parents were immigrants, bringing with them and communicating to their children dire tales of losing their goods and their houses when the cossacks put them out and burned their street down to its cobblestones. They had fled across Europe, ‘never again a place to lay our heads,’ Sarah remembered their telling her. They had arrived separately in Ne
w York. New York, New York: always they spoke of it as if it were an echo, a country or even a continent, and so it was to them and their many children. Not one ever moved from the borough of Manhattan. Their small business enterprises (Sarah’s husband sold secondhand furniture on Columbus Avenue and died young of influenza when Marcus was a boy) and their lives stayed within walking distance of stores, movie theaters, delicatessens and the synagogue. When they prospered, as all the children seem to have done in Sarah’s narratives, they moved to West End Avenue from the lesser streets near Amsterdam Avenue, as though they were crossing hemispheres, and into apartment buildings close to one another. With them came all the rich ingredients of their family lives: fervent worship limited to two days a year, horror of alcoholic drinks, profound love of food and good company in which to consume it, an unquestioning respect for education and its subsequent accomplishments, and reverence for decorous behavior, a general decency that was more immigrant and familial pride than religious morality.

  Mrs. Moses Becker, as Sarah liked to be called, had been widowed for more than thirty years and was, perhaps in consequence, deeply attached to her ‘widespread’ family, as she called her children when she spoke of them to her friends on the benches—‘widespread’ because the grandchildren had moved daringly away from the hub to the south, Seventy-second Street, or north to 106th. Her deepest affection was for her son Marcus, who had against her wishes violated all the family’s unwritten laws of residency and moved to Greenwich Village. Despite his nonconformity and political rebelliousness she loved his gentle spirit and way of including all humanity in his embrace. Her family was exclusive. They believed, as her husband, Moses, had always contended, that ‘charity begins at home.’ They gave generously to one another; they thought the rest of the world’s families should do the same. Sarah never saw that Marcus was an exception to the rule. His world-hug did not include the particular, the child with the children of the world. Liz’s exclusion from his universal embrace was not known to Sarah.