The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  At a village bar named The Old Colon (originally Colony, but the supply of neon had burned out at the last letter), Liz met Helene Flynn, a maker of silver jewelry, an artist in miniature whose slender fingers produced earrings, bracelets and brooches. She was ten years older than Liz, a thin, pale, fragile-looking woman, quiet, self-contained and a singularly devoted lover of women. Helene asked Liz home for a nightcap at two in the morning when the proprietor of The Old Colon warned the patrons he was closing. They went to Helene’s East Second Street fifth-floor cold-water flat. Liz stayed on for seven years. Into a room at the back she moved her cameras, enlarger and developing equipment. She and Helene shared a closet for their clothes. Liz supplied a sofa that her parents thought was too large for their living room. Later they bought a narrow Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. They shared an enormous canopied bed, where they unburdened to each other the chronicles of their lonely searches for love. In Helene, Liz found a passion she had sensed before only in freaks.

  Maud and Luther married at City Hall after Luther was declared unfit for the draft (4F: suspicion of sexual deviation, a tribute to Luther’s developing acting talent, his long hair, his unusual beauty). Their apartment was furnished from the Harlem Salvation Army, but it was so small that they moved again when Maud became, by accident, pregnant and was told she would have twins. The three roommates, survivors of their separate girlhood lonelinesses, solitaries living together under the gabled Hewitt Hall roof, were now, like circus performers, partnered. They stood, precariously balanced on barebacked horses as the steeds plunged ahead into the perilous circles of the main arena.

  PART THREE

  THE TRIP FROM EAST TO MIDDLE WEST would take two days, more or less, Minna had figured. She expected to take her time, to stop along Route 70 when she was tired, at some place with a pool so she could swim, rest in a deck chair, eat the expectedly poor but filling meal in a motel restaurant and sleep deeply until light appeared. Then she would head west again. In the sixty years of her life she had never crossed the Mississippi River except to fly over it at thirty-three thousand feet. She had looked down at the thin ribbon of historic mud at St. Louis, on her way to meetings of the American Historical Society on the other coast. She knew the whole country only from the air, viewing from a great height cities of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, all separated by thousands of miles of aerial plains and mountain ranges, deserts and farms. For the first time she would see the continent from the ground, the trunks of trees, the tassels that decorated cornstalks, the little towns that had been mere dots in her airborne trips, the human and animal populations of farms and ranches. The prairie, she knew, was gone, cut away by deep-tongued plows to reach the farmer’s topsoil. She expected to see cities rising up from the plains, shining in profile against the big sky, and lakes, rivers, ponds and silver silos she knew only from photographs in Life and paintings by Grant Wood.

  She decided it would be good to make a very early start out of the city. At five she walked to the all-night garage, paid her bill and drove the sound little Volkswagen to the side door of her apartment house. Her suitcases, book boxes, garment bags, stereo equipment and typewriter were piled just inside the door, guarded by the sleepy super, who for a ten-dollar tip had agreed to stay with the stuff until she got back with the car. ‘Take care, Mrs. Roman. That’s a long trip you’ve got. To Ohio, is it?’ ‘No, Iowa,’ Minna said, noting the common confusion of New Yorkers about states any distance from their own. The fellow at the gas station who had filled her tank and checked the Bug for filters, belts and the other mysterious parts of the little car had said, ‘Idaho, did you say you were going?’

  The farewell to Richard last night was strained but not unpleasant. She thought about it as she drove down Ninth Avenue to the Lincoln Tunnel. She had tried to suggest nothing final. It was to be a semester of new pursuits, she said, a variation on her usual enterprises, a time-being away for renewal purposes after thirty-nine years of always being together. Richard had early-morning surgery today. His habit was to rise at six, prepare his own breakfast, smoke a pipe and leave silently, his whole attention fixed on the case of the patient waiting for him in the operating room. They kissed and said good night and good-bye. She said she would call on the weekend. He said, ‘Not until then? How about when you arrive?’ She said she had no idea when that would be. He said, ‘Okay. I’ll wait to hear from you on the weekend then.’ The patience in his voice made Minna realize he had no idea of her intentions. He went to his room, she to hers; she settled down to an almost sleepless night. The excitement she felt, the curious absence of her lifelong anxiety about new places, the longing to be gone, the restlessness that made her arms and legs ache, kept her awake until her alarm went off, unnecessarily, at a quarter to five. Trying to make no noise, she went hastily through her usual morning ritual. Then, carrying her purse and shoes in one hand, her keys and clutch of Triple A maps in the other, she went out of 4-D, locked the door behind her and, for a reason she never after was able to understand, walked carefully down the three flights to the lobby. Was there something surreptitious and therefore illegal in that exit? Was she starting to introduce irregularity into a life of fears and habit, this early in the morning, this early in the trip, this early in her new life? The Beresford apartment house, her gray fortress for seventeen years, looked solid and ineluctable in the small light of dawn. The sun was still anchored at the East River and had only suggested itself to Central Park. She thought she ought to make an obeisance to the Reservoir, to the transverse at Eighty-sixth Street. And yes, in the direction of The Rocks. A ceremony, a ritual of departure was suitable at this moment, now that she felt certain that she was never coming back.

  The city seemed somnolent, as if the current to all its usual activity had been turned off and a heavy gray skin pulled down over its sharp towers and lumpy brownstones. She left Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel. She had the tiled, damp passageway almost to herself. The heavily laden Bug moved along at a good pace, a spry, always youthful-seeming machine unchallenged at this early hour by heavier traffic. ‘Such a car is a miracle of the imagination, the perfect escape vehicle, matching in size and intention the act I am performing. Another miracle is this tunnel,’ she said aloud to herself. ‘Think of being able to cross a river’s bottom and still remain untouched by water. It is the twentieth century’s version of the biblical miracle, Moses providing the Israelites with dry passage through the Red Sea.’

  On the Jersey side she followed the signs to the turnpike. Over her shoulder she caught quick takes of a pure light rising over the towers of Manhattan, rendering the now-distant city shadowy, legendary, ephemeral. It was fading from her life, the city that had conceived, formed, bred, raised her and educated her in the sharp pleasures of metropolitan existence. Minna found it hard to bid New York farewell, harder than it was last night with Richard … somehow. To believe that, after a lifetime of close association with its graceless grandeur, its fitful terrors and constant excitements, she would be gone from it, for who knows how long. The offer to teach at the university in Iowa City, to help with the establishment of a section in the history department devoted to exploring the lives of pioneer women, came to her at a time when the bonds of her marriage, her motherhood, her long-tenured teaching, as if loosened by some fortuitous hand of fate, had suddenly given way. Driving down the long, uninteresting Jersey terrain, she thought about her marriage, smiling at the similarity of the two landscapes. Marriage had not so much failed after thirty-nine years as it had dwindled in force, its fibers slackened by the wasting disease of time. One after the other, the sinews had softened until, after Grant’s death, everything slid away, unnoticed, into domestic oblivion. It seemed to her now to be over.

  ‘I will not go back over all that now,’ she told herself, ‘until I’ve got all this toll stuff in hand.’ She commended herself for having enough singles and change on the seat beside her. ‘Housewifely,’ she thought. For more th
an an hour, she drove almost mindlessly. Then she pulled into the Walt Whitman rest area, and fought couples and families for a seat at the counter. ‘Coffee and an English muffin,’ she told the waitress, whose hair was swept upward, defying gravity, to form a lyre-shaped structure. ‘Wired?’ Minna wondered. ‘That all? No juice?’ said the waitress, who was chewing gum hard. ‘No, no juice, thank you.’ The waitress slapped the check down in front of Minna and went to get the coffee. The English muffin turned out to be a kind Minna had never before encountered, flat, half-cooked and tasteless, but, because she felt she had annoyed the waitress with the smallness of her order, she ate it dutifully to avoid further offense. ‘There is no easy peace between strangers,’ she thought, ‘even on the Jersey Turnpike.’

  Minna made the turns and descent into the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a road much disparaged by her advisors in the history department when she was planning her trip. It was indeed, she found, narrow, rumbling with trucks and semitrailers, a threat at every moment to her puny Bug. By now weariness had settled on her shoulders, in the bones of her hands that gripped the wheel as the great trucks bore down behind her and beside her, in her foot on the accelerator. But she determined to go on, to get there fast, or perhaps, it was that she was determined to leave the past behind quickly. She practiced pushing back the mortal scenes of recent months, stuffing them behind the memories of Grant’s golden childhood, Richard’s rise to medical success, her own minor but steady journey up through the ranks to full professor and tenure at Brooklyn College. Why could she not keep her mind on all the achievements that had punctuated their lives? But no: inexorably, the events of the terrible weekend intruded themselves upon her determined concentration on the road.

  A semitrailer, three car lengths long, passed her, occupying, she thought, more than its share of the lanes, forcing the Bug close to the rail, just as she began her compulsive, unavoidable rehearsal. It had been a Thursday … no, Friday, it must have been, when Grant called to say he was coming down from Millwood for a short visit. ‘I won’t stay long, don’t worry.’ ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Will Lois and the children be coming with you?’ ‘No, just me.’ He sounded odd, she thought, as if the idea of a visit to the city he had always disliked and to his parents, whom he had only tolerated in his growing years, was more complex than the mere announcement of it to her.

  The dinner with Grant on Friday night had been unsettling. Richard did not get home until she and Grant had finished eating and after Grant had said, slowly and almost reluctantly, ‘My news is, Lois has left me. She’s taken the kids and gone to live with John Lawrence on his island in Maine.’ ‘John Lawrence, that friend of yours from Brown, the fellow who plays in rock bands?’ ‘That’s the one.’ ‘How long has she known him?’ ‘Oh, a long time. When I got back from Vietnam he was always around the house. But Lois told me it was all over between them, and he disappeared, went on tour with Don McLean. John was at our wedding. He’s Johnny’s godfather.’ Grant blushed, remembering, she thought, that his parents had not been invited to their wedding at Cornell because it took place so fast—and of necessity. ‘I see. I gather it wasn’t all over.’ Grant shook his head. ‘Poor boy,’ Minna thought. Lois was his high school classmate at Horace Mann. He had loved one girl in his life, Lois Lehmann. His devotion to her was absolute, undeviating, eternal, in the way that modern love rarely is, a kind of medieval devotion that took its impetus from Petrarch and Dante. All through his college years he had gone on loving her, never allowing the drive between Brown and Connecticut College to deter him. He traveled to her college for every function to which men were invited. He asked her to Brown for parties, weekends, games, plays. In summers he applied for jobs at the camps in which she was the swimming counselor. One summer, unable to get anything else, he worked in the camp kitchen, cleaning up the mess hall after the campers so he could be near her. That summer, Minna remembered, Lois was head of the waterfront, much admired by everyone. It almost drove Grant crazy, hanging around at the edge of her circle of followers. It broke his heart when she would not marry him before he knew he was to be sent to Vietnam. Lois was always a hard girl to pin down. He wrote her daily. Minna knew this because she called Lois now and then in Boston, where she was teaching public school, to find out how Grant was. Rarely did he write to them. Lois was a golden girl: small, lean, blue-eyed, charming, with a low, suggestive voice and a high, delicate giggle. It was not with money, like Daisy Buchanan’s, that Lois’s voice rang, but with sexual promise. Grant had been hearing that laugh and laughing with it and longing for that girl since he was fourteen years old.

  ‘What will you do now?’ ‘I don’t know. I can’t think about anything but getting her back. I haven’t been to work in three days.’ ‘What about the children?’ ‘The children—well, I don’t want them without her.’ Minna, who hardly knew the boy and his three-year-old sister, whom they had named, to her horror, Lolita, was appalled at his indifference to the children. He seemed to sense her feeling. ‘What I mean is, nothing matters to me but her. If I can’t have her, I don’t want anything.’ Grant went to bed early. With no practice in communication in the last years, they had nothing more they could think of to say to one another. He slept on the daybed in his old room, which was now Richard’s study. Minna told Richard the news when he came home, weary but immediately concerned about Grant, the boy he had loved so intensely and watched over with such overinformed care. Every small illness had been a matter of professional concern. Every psychological latitude had been granted him for fear of repression or introversion. Every toy and record and book he had wanted had been given him on some occasion or other, sometimes even on the pretext of an occasion. Richard was proud of Grant. It had hurt him when Grant turned away from them so early to gaze at Lois Lehmann, to join the chorus of boys who followed her around. He found it hard to accept that his Grant—with the cheerful, independent, little-boy face, the red, unruly curls and the wide, innocent eyes—was among her captives. He saw nothing in Lois, except simpering sexual lure and a radiant body. He saw everything in Grant: Minna’s good looks, his own curious and efficient mind, agile fingers and, he had thought, their love of good living.

  Grant was asleep next morning when Richard left early for the hospital. Friday? Saturday morning, was it? It was raining that morning, that she was sure of. She had an appointment to have her hair cut at ten, so she left a note for Grant saying she’d be home at twelve and would make breakfast for him when she got back. Waiting in the rain for the bus at her corner of Central Park West, she saw Grant’s motorcycle, its plastic cover weighed down with water, chained to the rail beside the delivery entrance to the apartment house. ‘My God. All the way down the Saw Mill River Parkway on that?’ she thought. Before noon she was back at the apartment. Grant was gone. He’d written a postscript to her note: ‘Thanks for the use of the hall. Grant.’ Except for that sentence there was no sign that he’d been there at all. The bed was made, he had not used the towel she had left for him in the bathroom.

  Minna pulled off the highway and decided to have some coffee and something to eat. No sign that he had been there at all. Perhaps it had all been a fantasy: his coming, his story, his departure on his Harley Davidson, which, the police told them the next night, Sunday it was … Sunday, yes, was found completely wrecked—‘totaled’ was their word—beside the abutment into which he had crashed head on. His cracked helmet was returned to them, the straps inside heavily coated with blood. His wallet, containing fifty dollars; his old draft card; his driver’s license and a worn, browned photo of Lois when she was sixteen years old were given to Richard after the inquest. ‘Accidental death,’ the certificate read. No pictures of Johnny or Lolita in the wallet, only Lois, the fatally golden girl who was his one love, the unfaithful wife of an eternally faithful lover and husband. ‘Accidental death? Oh no,’ she thought. ‘No death was ever less accidental.’

  Minna stretched her tired back and stiff legs, leaning against the car. She locked it carefully and
went into the fast-food restaurant, the first place she came to after the exit from the turnpike. Over the door the sign said GOURMET FAST FOOD. She grimaced and thought she would record the lovely name in her notebook when she had had some coffee. It was five o’clock; the sun was already low. She decided she would not waste much time on this stop but push on until all the light was gone. It was Richard’s belief (he always did the driving, feeling insecure, he said, with someone else at the wheel) that trips accomplished in one long push seemed shorter and less onerous. Reversing her earlier plan, she decided to test the theory. ‘Keep going,’ she commanded herself. At the counter she ordered a plain doughnut and coffee. The doughnut was clearly a survivor from breakfast, sturdy, solid, tough. She dipped it into the coffee and told herself, ‘I’ve got to leave Grant behind. From the Pennsylvania Turnpike to this point, he’s been in the car with me. I’ve got to put him out, along with the Beresford, The Rocks, everything that defines the old life I want to inter, to consign to the past.’ She stirred her coffee dregs, in which swam the remnants of the doughnut. ‘No further! You come along with me no further,’ she said to her son. She repeated the injunction to Mrs. Grant Roman, who stood beside him looking up at her husband’s red hair and gentle face. To her grandchildren, who were playing somewhere nearby, she was silent, not knowing them at all well, hardly believing in their existence. They were certainly no threat to the space in the Volkswagen. Now they had become Monhegan Island children, property of a bass player and a stony-hearted girl who could not be reached in time for Grant’s funeral and did not cry when she heard of his death.