The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  In her office mailbox when she first arrived was an invitation from someone in the department of English, asking her to talk to a class in contemporary poetry. ‘You are welcome to come to any class that is convenient for you. We meet Mondays and Thursdays at one. The students are reading Poems Returned from Saint Elizabeth’s now. Anything you could tell them about Maud Noon would be most welcome. Perhaps you may know that I did my doctoral thesis on Noon, so of course I shall be delighted.…’

  The assistant professor, a thin, energetic, loquacious woman named Janice Sinatra (‘Before you ask, let me assure you, I’m no relation’) hustled her into the classroom and sat beside her behind a table. She began an elaborate introduction, in which Minna’s academic past was quickly reduced to her college and her title. A long peroration followed. Minna appeared in it as the friend and confidante of the celebrated American poet who died tragically so young. The introduction took a long time and was designed to demonstrate Professor Sinatra’s knowledge of Maud’s life and work. ‘Tell us first, Dr. Roman, how you came to know Noon.’ ‘We had rooms next to each other in Hewitt, at Barnard College.’ Minna hesitated, looking at a redheaded blue-eyed child in a T-shirt that read HARVARD. ‘It was, um, in 1939.’ ‘Tell us what she was like then,’ said Professor Sinatra. ‘Well, first let me say that although we lived close together, I never got to know her as well as … as I might have. She studied hard, and went out very little. I was closer to the photographer Liz Becker, who lived on the other side of Maud in our senior year—’ Professor Sinatra broke in to say to the class, ‘Elizabeth Becker, you remember, took that wonderful picture of Otto Mile when he was dying in a mental hospital. It was she—I’m right, am I not, Dr. Roman?—who rescued the poems that form the body of this book we’re now studying.’ ‘Yes,’ said Minna. There was a long silence brought about by the curtness of Minna’s response. Then a boy in the back of the room said, ‘Did she think about death a lot, the way she does in all these poems?’ Minna said, ‘No. I don’t think so. I never heard her talk about death. But I knew her years before she … died, and saw her very little after we graduated. I went away to graduate school, she stayed in New York and went to Columbia. We married, but you know, different sorts of men who did different sorts of things. So we only met a few times, when Elizabeth Becker instigated a sort of reunion now and then.’ ‘What was she like when you all got together?’ asked Professor Sinatra, seeming avid for anything that Minna might say. ‘The same. The same as she had been in college. Quiet and rather secretive about herself, but always very interested in what everyone else was doing. She asked a lot of questions about my area of research, she always wanted to know everything about what shows Liz was having, in what magazines she was publishing her photographs. The last time I saw her, was, I think after the children had gone to live with her mother. We had lunch together up near Columbia. She seemed sad. I asked to read some of her poems and she gave me a large sheaf of carbon copies of them and said not to bother returning them. I took them home and read them and thought them quite wonderful. After she … was dead I realized she had burned a lot of her work and that I had the only copies of some things.’ ‘So you are responsible for having them published, like Max Brod with Franz Kafka’s work, and Robert Bridges for Gerard Manley Hopkins?’ ‘No, nothing so elevated as all that. I knew a man in publishing, Jay Laughlin, who was a patient of my husband’s. He came to dinner one night, and I showed them to him. That’s the only part I had in it all.’ A girl sitting at the side of the room said, ‘Did you like her? As a person, I mean.’ Minna hesitated. Poor Maud, she thought, did I like her, her with her vast, unattractive person and self-absorbed brilliant self? ‘Yes, I think I liked her. Why do you ask?’ The girl twisted her long hair in one hand and looked embarrassed. ‘Because, well, she seems, from all the biographies, a person it would be hard to like. Now that she’s dead, and the way she died, well, it might be easier to like her now.’ The class laughed. Professor Sinatra looked stern and disapproving of the note of levity in the question. Minna said, ‘She is, was and is, a very good poet. But I didn’t know it then. Now I do. And the older I get, the more I think about her, the more present and real she seems to me, more than she was when we lived next door to each other in Hewitt Hall. That,’ she added lamely, ‘says something about the force of art.’

  The class proceeded to look at the poems in the books they all had before them. Minna listened to their weak interpretations and to Professor Sinatra’s confident, sharp corrections and comments. When she was appealed to, Minna said only, ‘I’m a historian. I know very little about poetry.’ Then she laughed. ‘But I know what I like, and I like Maud’s stuff.’ The class applauded her sophomoric response, and stood up to leave. ‘Thank you very much, Dr. Roman,’ said Professor Sinatra. She sounded disappointed. ‘That was … illuminating.’ Minna nodded, clutched the paperback copy of Maud’s poems that had been presented to her, and vowed silently that never, never again in her life would she say anything in public—or private, for that matter—about poor famous Maud Noon.

  A few congenial members of the history department separated themselves from the others and left the late October faculty meeting together. The department had made its way through the first half of the agenda, and everyone was thirsty, hungry, disgruntled and uncomfortable on the camp chairs they had been occupying since three o’clock. The chairman declared an adjournment for dinner. Minna started to walk over to the Universal Joint (‘The what?’ she had asked Rob Altmann, when the vote was taken among the friends for an acceptable eating place, the single unanimous vote of the afternoon). As they left Schaeffer Hall, she chose Rob Altmann to walk beside. He was a tall, bearded fellow who wore a cossack blouse buttoned at the neck and at the ends of the wide sleeves. He taught Russian history. His eyes were blue-black and set far back into his head under bushy black eyebrows. Habitually, he tucked worsted peasant’s pants into his high black suede boots. A curly black cuff of hair remained on his head. Otherwise he was bald and covered his bare head with a visored workman’s cap. Minna told him when they met he resembled a youthful Tolstoy. Rob approved of her comparison, approved even more of her attention to his clothing.

  ‘That was one dull gathering,’ Rob said to Minna, holding her elbow with a show of gallantry as they crossed Washington Street. ‘There wasn’t one single topic I had any interest in whatsoever.’ Minna nodded. Her boredom had been so great she now felt the need to dwell on some subject far from curriculum reform, scheduling, adjunct hiring, some restorative topic. She asked Rob about his summer visit to southern Siberia she had heard mentioned by a woman in her research group. Minna said to Rob, ‘Why there?’ and then smiled. ‘Second time I’ve questioned a destination in the last half hour.’ ‘Yes. Well, I went because I’m interested in schism in old Russia, small groups of people who broke away from the state religion, particularly the Old Believers. They resisted the changes in the Russian Orthodox ritual in the seventeenth century and left not only the church but also the region. Seems the Patriarch Nikon “renewed” the liturgy and changed the prayer book. So the Old Believers, perhaps three or four hundred persons, broke away from the church.’ ‘Interesting, isn’t it? That’s what happened in recent years to the reformed Catholic Church, isn’t it?’ ‘Oh yes. But the fascinating thing about the Old Believers is the extent to which they went to preserve their faith. Peter the Great decided he would tax the schismatics.…’ At the entrance to the Universal Joint, Rob pulled the wooden door toward them and pushed Minna gently into the dark restaurant. The others followed as Rob held the door for them. ‘And, rather amazing for that time, declared that his regime henceforth would be entirely secular. So the Old Believers were probably the first group to rebel against Czarist rule, though of course not for political reasons.’

  The six historians who had cut away from the department to have supper together took a large round table in a corner. Minna was the only woman (‘probably because I am only a visiting professor,’ she thought). S
he said hello to Allan Olcott, on her left. He wore a Yale tie, a stiffly starched shirt and a beautifully tailored suit. Then she made a point of smiling and nodding across the table to Bill Oleson, about to retire, she’d heard; to Leonard Reiss, the celebrated Civil War expert; and to Jamie Mirston, who, she thought she remembered from the introduction when first she arrived, was ‘in’ English history. The women in her pioneer-history group must have gone off together to another restaurant, probably because they hadn’t been invited here. The women were instructors and assistant professors, so naturally (Minna smiled to herself at her use of the word) they were excluded from this elevated circle of friends. She could hear Rob Altmann’s loud voice coming from her right and realized that her conversation with him, under the influence of the round table perhaps, had become a lecture. ‘Vasily Peskov, a friend of mine in Moscow who is a journalist, had read about one family of Old Believers who still survived. He wanted to interview them. So we drove to within a day of where he had heard they were and then walked the rest of the way into wilderness and by luck came upon two old huts built against a hillside.’ ‘What do you all want to drink?’ asked a tall blond waiter, clearly a student, who wore a white apron wound around him at the waist and reaching below his knees. ‘I’ll have an ale, and nachos right away. I hate to drink without eating,’ said Leonard Reiss to the waiter. ‘For me too,’ called Rob. The waiter wrote rapidly on a green pad. ‘What’s the soup?’ asked Bill Oleson, winking at the waiter, indicating, Minna thought, that he was an habitue who knew there was always ‘the soup.’ ‘The usual, cream-something-or-other. I’m not quite sure what,’ said the waiter and smiled an enchanting little-boy smile at Oleson, whom he seemed to know. Minna, watching the waiter, turned pale. She had seen a smile like that before, on Grant in his adolescence, when he was still trying to please her, before the name Lois began to appear in every sentence. The others decided they would settle for tacos or cheeseburgers. Minna had trouble deciding. Her composure had been shaken. She felt suddenly sunk into the past, captivated by the present, unhungry. She disliked Mexican food, clearly the Universal Joint’s specialty, and distrusted the meat in burgers. The blond waiter came around the table and stood behind her. ‘What’ll you have, ma’am?’ Against her will she turned around in her chair to look at him. ‘The soup?’ he asked. His voice was soft and high. Surprised, Minna stared at him. He looked down at her, waiting patiently for her order. His nose was thin and long, his lips were unexpectedly red for a boy (A boy, is he, or a man? Minna wondered). His cheeks were rough-red and looked as if they had never been shaved. ‘An Iowa farm boy,’ Minna thought. ‘I’ll bet.’ She went on looking at him, unable to think of anything she wanted to eat, unable to think of anything but how beautiful, how much like her poor son. ‘A beer?’ he said, trying to be helpful, but getting tired of standing there, Minna thought. ‘We have Bud on draft.’ ‘No, no, thank you, no beer. I’ll have the soup. Whatever kind it is.’ He laughed. ‘You’ll take your chances?’ he said and flashed again his wondrous smile. At the corners of his mouth, small virgules appeared. Further back in his cheeks were two deep, disarming dimples. ‘Want anything with that?’ ‘Coffee,’ she managed to say, engrossed as she was in his beautiful face. ‘That’ll be fine.’ ‘Soup and coffee?’ he asked, continuing to smile at the absurdity of the order. Minna looked at him hard, and nodded.

  ‘He was in his nineties, I guess, this bedraggled fellow that came out of the hut. He said his name was Karl Osipovich Lykov and that he lived there with his two sons and two daughters. His wife had been dead ten years. In the next two days we learned that his family had been out of touch with the rest of the world for almost sixty years. They left their first hideout after the Revolution because of the Reds’ views on religion. Things were getting worse for them in 1919, so Lykov took his family and a few other Old Believers and moved on to the rugged, unpopulated hills near the headwaters of the Abakan River—’ ‘Where would that be, in relation to Moscow, for example?’ asked Bill Irwin, trying, Minna thought, to break into the monologue. ‘In the Sayan Mountains in southern Siberia. At least two hundred miles from any other human settlement in any direction. His sons and daughters, now in their late forties, had never seen another person until we arrived. One daughter cried every time she looked at me. She kept saying, “It is the curse of the devil. It has arrived,” or some such thing, Peskov said. They were all terrified to have been found. One son said we must be the Kaiser’s soldiers in disguise.’

  The waiter put nachos and ale in front of Rob, temporarily blocking Rob’s narrative while he inspected the dish and the drink. Then he started again. ‘But the amazing thing was, they all survived, all but the wife, living in a soot-filled blackened log hut for sixty years. They used no matches or soap. Washing was apparently anathema, so their clothes and their bodies were never washed, and man, I tell you, they stank. That hut was smelly and filthy. But there was no question of our contact with them. They thought we were carrying infections, bodily and spiritual ones, I guess, so they would not touch us, even to shake hands. God, they were foul, and yet …’ The waiter finished distributing the plates and steins and bottles at the right places without asking any questions. As he came around to Minna she thought, ‘God, I hope he doesn’t smile at me like that again.’ ‘They live on onions, potatoes, turnips and the fish the sons catch and rabbits and birds they trap. And yet …’ ‘Very good, this stuff,’ said Jamie Mirston to Allan Olcott. ‘Just enough food for us prisoners who have to get back to the institution by seven.’ ‘Yes, indeed, quite good,’ said Allan, but not loud enough to stop Rob’s discourse. ‘It’s their absolute faith, their pure belief, amid all that isolation and stench. The two nights we stayed they prayed together every few hours all through the night. We could hear them in there from the sleeping bags we had put down near their cooking fire. And then, at any moment during the day—we could never figure out what brought it on—they would stop what they were doing, fall on their knees and were absolutely still, praying, calling aloud to God, or listening to the old man read from the Scriptures.’ ‘This beer is all right,’ said Leonard to Allan. ‘Anyone listening to all of this?’ Rob said. ‘All of us,’ said Irwin, ‘with what is called bated breath.’ ‘We want to know how it all comes out,’ said Allan. ‘Especially how it ends,’ said Leonard. Rob laughed with everyone, and began to drink his ale, which was now flat and warm. For a while there could be heard the sound of tacos breaking against their teeth, the restrained slurp of soup, and the laughter of students at the bar and townspeople at nearby tables. ‘They must have had a very strong family bond,’ said Minna in a low voice to Rob, feeling sorry about the way everyone had turned off the Russian historian. ‘That’s the strange thing. Dmitri, one of the sons, was sick. They had moved him out of the hut. He lay some distance from the hut, under a tree, covered with sacking, the same kind of material everyone in the family wore for pants and shirts and skirts. Peskov examined him and thought he must be suffering from some sort of stomach trouble. We asked the old man about him, but he would say nothing. No member of the family ever came near him or brought him food that we could see. Peskov thought they were afraid of catching whatever he had, so they would not touch him. The daughter, the one who cried all the time, said once of Dmitri, “It is of the devil,” so it may be they thought that to touch him was to catch his evil.’ ‘How odd,’ said Minna. The others sat still, thinking about the lessons of the Old Believers’ lives. ‘And terrible,’ she added.

  ‘Terrible,’ said Rob. ‘We decided that anything that got in the way of their prayer life, their incessant reading of the Scriptures, was evil. When Peskov told the old man there had been another world war since they left civilization, he got very angry and said it was all Peter the Great’s fault, him and his cursed plotting with Germans. All evil was centered in Peter, he was the devil, along with Nikon.’ ‘How much do we leave for a tip?’ Leonard, to whom the waiter had presented the check, asked of the table at large. ‘Multiply the total by
fifteen percent and divide by six,’ said Minna. ‘Fine,’ said Leonard. ‘You do all that,’ and passed the check to her. After a good deal of change making, addition and subtraction, the matter was settled. Minna waited for the waiter to come to her place and pick up the motley collection of bills and coins. She handed him the money. He smiled and thanked her. She found herself having trouble standing up, but she managed by looking away from the waiter and starting precipitately for the door. ‘You left your purse,’ said the waiter, behind her. ‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘How stupid. Thank you.’ ‘Not at all,’ he said, and smiled. Minna, believing she was going to suffocate, reached for the door and pushed it open. On the street, the little group of historians was waiting. ‘Ready?’ they asked her. ‘Yes.’ Rob, Allan and Minna walked together toward Schaeffer Hall. ‘Did you find yourself liking the family? As people?’ she asked. ‘I suppose so, although I could not stand being near them, they stank so. At the end of our days there, Peskov asked them if they would like him to look into the possibility of their resettling. At that suggestion, the whole family stared at us. The son and daughters said nothing. Their father pushed them hastily into the hut. They refused to come out again or maybe it was that the father would not let them come out. We could hear him in there praying. We took our packs and started out of the little clearing, walking, it seemed forever, until we came upon our car. But you asked me if I liked them. Well, I admired their devotion, their perfect obedience to what they believed was the will of God.’ ‘Are you planning to write about them?’ ‘Some day. Meanwhile in the middle of a futile meeting like the one this afternoon, with all those little academic egos fighting for Lebensraum and recognition, I like to remember Lykov. His simplicity. His otherworldliness. His extraordinary piety.’