The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  Minna said, ‘When I was in college I used to go with a friend to a place in New York, a Forty-second Street basement under a penny arcade. Hubert’s, it was called. Downstairs there were sideshow freaks. I thought they were wonderful, monarchs in a kingdom of one—proud, aloof people who would never talk to us, or even look at us. They allowed my friend to photograph them because it was proper, fitting, for the special people they were, to have a photograph taken. They must have led bleak lives, but there was a kind of childlike cheerfulness about all of them.’

  The pizza and beers arrived. They began to eat quickly. Lester said, between bites, ‘You seem to like Iowa City. You look wonderful in those student clothes. Are you as happy as you look?’ ‘Yes, I’m foolishly happy, in a way I can’t believe. Like an adolescent girl.’ And then, as she wiped her fingers and finished her beer, she said, surprising herself as she spoke, ‘I’m in love. Isn’t that absurd?’ ‘Well,’ said Lester, offering her another napkin from the container on the table, and taking a handful himself. ‘That’s something. I haven’t fallen in love since I was almost thirty and met my wife-to-be in art school. How did you manage to do that?’ Minna, confounded by what she had revealed, laughed and said, ‘It’s an illusion, I’m sure. Like the girl who is sawed in two by a magician onstage. Nothing more. Self-delusion and audience deception. Forget I said that, will you, please?’ ‘Okay. But how I envy you. Even if it is an illusion. Some valuable things are invented by belief. I haven’t even had the illusion I was in love for so long. You look at if you—felt fine about it.’ ‘I do. But that’s all there is to it.’ ‘Yes, I’ll remember.’ They figured their checks, gathered up their belongings. From the pile of soiled napkins, Lester pulled one out. ‘Is this your usual doodle?’ he asked. Minna looked at it. ‘Yes, I guess so. I always draw stairs. It’s about all I know how to do.’ ‘Do you start from the bottom and draw up, or from the top?’ ‘I start from the top. What does that mean?’ ‘No idea,’ said Lester. He took the checks and their money and pushed Minna through the line of waiting students. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said as they stood on College Avenue, buttoning their jackets. Minna wound her scarf around her neck, and agreed. ‘We’ll do it again,’ he said. ‘Indeed we will. And, Lester, add me to your list of interesting freaks.’ ‘I will. I’ll put you in a painting if you like.’ They both laughed, at nothing in particular, and went their separate ways on the street.

  In the middle of December the weather turned hostile. Wind from the river tore through the wide streets. Snow fell sporadically, freezing like treacherous piecrust along the edges of the streets. At once, new, clean snow fell to cover it. Ice frosted the top of the snow. Minna had not moved Maud since the night she had left it in the parking lot across from the Joint. She worried about denting the shining new fenders or being collided with on the hazardous streets. Lowell suggested he meet her wherever she was in the evening and drive her home. He knew she was afraid of the ice on the streets. Minna had never known such cold, such unremitting snow and ice. With very little warning, the kitten had turned tiger. The gentle, humane landscape of southern Iowa had become threatening, frightening, untamed and wild. Minna’s every move, day or evening, was ruled by the weather.

  One Friday evening, under cover of the early dark and cloud-burdened black skies, Minna and Lowell went on foot through heavy snow to the Hamburg Inn. At the door of Schaeffer Hall she had taken his arm. He responded to her concern about the footing by holding her hand firmly in his. Because of the bad weather, the popular place was almost empty. They found a booth, shed their layers of jackets and sweaters and ordered chicken, biscuits and gravy, ‘the house specialty,’ Lowell advised her. In the booth he found a dog-eared copy of Friday’s Des Moines Register. While they waited for their food, Lowell read the funnies to her. He was good at accents and dialects. Minna laughed at and with him. He was a boy, she thought, with a boy’s fondness for Peanuts and Pogo. When he had fully explored the page for his favorite strips and their political and social implications, which he explained to Minna, he moved on to the sports page. He lectured to her on the scores of last Sunday’s professional games and Saturday’s college football, especially the excellence of the Iowa Hawkeyes, to whom he was devoted. With his usual humor he commented on quarterbacks’ skill or lack of it and the proficiency of the ‘wide receivers’ and the ‘tight ends.’ These were terms Minna had never heard before. To her mind, emptied of everything these days but the enormous love for him that flooded it, the unfamiliar vocabulary of the funnies and football rang with the music of lyric poetry. Her standards of intellectual conversation, raised and strengthened in her years as an academic wife of a doctor, relaxed and sank contentedly into Lowell’s preferred areas of thought. During the weeks she had known him, she found herself directing her attention down instead of the usual straining upward. This lack of intellectual effort, the wit with which he infused all his popular interests, made her feel, for the first time in her adult life, easy and comfortable. She was Lowell’s peer, no more. She enjoyed every moment of his smiling dissertation on the merits of the Green Bay Packers, his favorite team. Especially did she enjoy his smile.

  When the chicken dinner arrived, Lowell grew silent. They ate without speaking, looking occasionally at each other and smiling when their eyes met. Minna surmised that Lowell was gathering his courage to ask her something. She waited, trying to take small bites of the gravy-covered mashed potatoes she had always disliked. When it came, it was not a question but a demand: ‘Tell me something about your life. You know about mine, almost day by day.’ ‘There’s less of yours to know. Mine might take all night.’ ‘What questions does he want answered,’ she wondered, by his indirection. This is what Yeats meant when he said, “Love is the crooked thing.” When were you in grade school? When was your son born? How long have you been married? How long have you taught? Nothing in autobiography was without its calendar milestones.’ When she was silent, Lowell scraped a piece of roll into the remains of gravy and cleaned his plate. ‘This is very good. Don’t you think so?’ ‘I do, but I’m not very hungry. Have mine.’ ‘Thanks, I will.’ He asked the waitress for another glass of milk and Minna ordered black coffee. Lowell said, ‘It’s nice to be waited on for a change, and then he asked, ‘Minna, what was your college year?’ Minna looked at him stonily. Here it was, at last, his curiosity breaking through his blinded, unquestioning myopia, in the form of a direct question. She said, ‘What you are really asking is how old I am. Isn’t that right, Lowell?’ He blushed and stared down at his milk. ‘I guess I am curious, yes. But I know it’s none of my damned business.’ ‘How old do you think I am?’ Lowell appeared to be making elaborate, silent calculations as he looked at her. He said, ‘Somewhere around forty, maybe.’ Minna smiled. She saw that forty to this boy was old. Adding twenty years to his vague figure would not make her, in his eyes, much older than that. How old was Grant really when he died? Somewhere around fourteen psychically, no more. But she found she could not bear to philosophize or lie to this boy she loved. ‘Somewhere around there,’ she said, ‘but higher rather than lower.’ He looked troubled, as though he was angry at himself for having questioned her. He pushed the check toward her. ‘I don’t get paid until tomorrow. I’ll pay you back.’ ‘No problem,’ she said, picking it up. ‘Are you coming back with me?’ ‘Sure. Of course I’m coming back. What did you think?’

  That night, because of the snow, and because the next day was Saturday, Lowell did not get up afterward and go back to his apartment. They slept together tenderly, like orphans of the storm who curled into each other for warmth, comfort and sympathy. In the morning, they woke late and felt refreshed. They went downstairs to the cafeteria for breakfast. Lowell ate an enormous meal while Minna, too content to eat, drank orange juice and black coffee. It was still snowing. They sat near the window and watched the black Iowa River make its way through pure white banks. A pair of mallard ducks hunkered down connubially near the edge, bleakly eyeing the inhospitable landscape.
‘It’s not even good weather for ducks,’ Lowell said. ‘I’m working lunch today. I’d better get going. I hope the car starts and the brakes don’t freeze up on me.’ ‘Do you work tonight?’ ‘Usually. But I’ve got to go to the library to work on my term paper.’ ‘I’m meeting my students at the Joint for a farewell end-of-term party. The Joint of all places, but they chose it. Do you want to come by and pick me up when it’s over?’ ‘I do. What time?’ ‘About ten? I’ll wait for you at the door.’ ‘Fine. I’ll be there.’ He smiled his sweet smile, swallowed so hard that his Adam’s apple moved in his thin neck, and whispered, ‘My love.’ They were both silent. Lowell said, to change the subject and break the heavy silence, ‘They say the snow will stop this afternoon.’ They smiled at each other, he leaned over and whispered, ‘I love you.’ She said, in a whisper, ‘I love you, too.’ He stood up, reached over to the next table and picked up an abandoned Register. ‘Got to see what Pogo did today,’ he said. He turned back and waved to Minna at the door. She sat finishing her coffee and watching the cold mallards try to pick their way along the bank in the high snow. ‘Around forty,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps even younger. I feel immortal. It might be that I am.’

  Minna said good night and good-bye to her students. With some effort she pushed open the door of the Joint, against the wind she could feel blowing hard. It was a quarter to ten, but sitting there with her beer she suddenly decided she wanted to start her car in the parking lot across the street. If Maud responded, she would follow Lowell in her car to Iowa House. She had found she felt less confined by the weather when her car was not too far away. As the door shut behind her she could hear the laughter of students at the tables, and the townies at the bar. The snow still fell, soft and heavy, heaped into airy shapes. She was surrounded by dwarfed presences: bushes, fences, bicycles, whitened and almost unrecognizable. ‘Pray Maud will not be frozen stiff,’ Minna thought as she came to the curb, picking her way with care. ‘And that I can find her.’

  She pushed herself against the wind, her eyes almost shut by the blowing wind and snow. She stepped over the humpbacked ice barrier into the street; her head was down. Her eyes were fixed on her perilous footing. She never saw the snow-whitened car coming fast into the entrance to the parking lot. In one brilliant flash that illuminated mounds of sparkling snow, she felt the mortal impact of steel against bone. At once, she was freed, from pain and loss, from the heat and contagion of love. She descended through the inverted cellar doors and struck off across the Channel that ran through the dark. Fearless, blind, then deaf, she entered the infinite blackness where all passions are extinguished. For Minna it was the final irony.

  RICHARD ROMAN TELEPHONED LIZ to tell her about Minna’s death. Liz offered him the stock condolences. He said there would be a memorial service for Minna at the Ethical Culture Society in two weeks. He hoped she would come. She said she would, and put the receiver down quietly on its hook. She sat on the small stool they kept near the telephone for extended calls, thinking she ought to go upstairs to tell Helene. Then she decided not to interrupt her sleep: she had been awake with pain most of the night.

  Liz slipped off the stool onto the braided rug. For a long moment she made no move, and then she bent her legs into the lotus position. ‘Minna, so perfectly made, so well suited, it seemed, to the demands of the world, so socially successful. Professor of manners, history, love. I thought she was destined to go on forever, from one graceful, ageless accommodation to the next. Unlike that unsightly genius Maud, who left the party early.’ Staring at the rug’s circular pattern, Liz thought of the evening the three of them, putting off the cleaning chore, had stood with their arms around each other.

  ‘I’m here,’ Liz thought. ‘The one left. Odd woman out. Or in. Still afloat, still kicking. Minna would like that image. Endurance is like effort, I suppose. It counts for something.’ Suddenly she stood up and raised her arms to put them around the long-gone Maud and the newly dead Minna. She felt them press their unsubstantial arms across her back. ‘All right,’ she said aloud. ‘Let’s get on with it, before the dark sets in,’ and started upstairs.

  About the Author

  Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Doris Grumbach

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-7671-8

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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