The Magician's Girl (11 page)

At that moment, going home seemed a greater task for the three women than cleaning their rooms. Liz gathered up the cardboard cartons, Minna said she would wash the chopsticks and save them for next year. Maud went on sitting, reluctant to make the effort to get to her feet. With her fingers she put out the candles, enjoying the small pain the flame caused her. ‘We've had a good year, all told,' she said, thinking of Otto Mile. ‘So we have,' said Minna absently, already seated in her bathing suit at the edge of the sunny pond with her cousin Eleanor and the Wesleyan boys who lived down the road. Liz was quiet. She reached down to Maud and pulled hard to bring her to her feet. ‘Thank you, ma'am,' said Maud, red in the face from the effort. They all stood close, looking at one another. Then Liz put her arms around Minna and Maud. ‘Let's clean up the joint, as my grandmother Becker used to say, “before the dark sets in.”' The others raised their arms. They stood for a moment, locked together in an affectionate, celebratory embrace. ‘As my mother would say,' said Maud, ‘let's do our duty.' Minna said, ‘Yes, I suppose so. I don't know what
my
mother would say. Yes, I do. She would probably call the maid.' ‘Tough,' said Liz, handing Minna the broom. The three set about their final task of the college year, removing all traces of their lives from the colorless dormitory rooms.

In Maud's senior year, after a long, hot, dull summer in New Baltimore, where she worked nights in the mushroom plant and spent her days writing, she came back to college with four long poems she thought might have some merit. She could not wait to show them to Mile in his seminar, for which she had preregistered once again in the late spring. At the first meeting he was not present. She was told he had decided he did not want to teach, and had left the faculty. A woman professor with three names and a considerable reputation in the poetics of Milton had taken his place. Most of his former students felt no sorrow at Otto Mile's departure. The brilliant poet-lecturer had insulted them, told them they lacked the grain and warp and woof for full-blooded poetry. He said they were too ignorant to use words properly, let alone originally, to create meaningful or memorable images. He had roared at them, ‘What do you
know
about? Anything?' He had told them that sentimentality and the weak, easy cliché ran in their veins. They rejoiced to hear he had left, they made up rumors about the reasons for his absence, all of them insulting to his morals and the state of his mental health. But Maud was desolate. She knew he was a great poet. She knew he had been right about her, and about the would-be poets in his seminar.

Joseph Noon's career in the army, which began in World War I, when he served bravely as a young sergeant at Verdun and had been decorated twice, was ended abruptly by the disease that appeared in Maud's senior year. He had stayed in the army all his adult life because he felt comfortable in it. He liked all things military, the loose, free feel of obeying orders without recourse to the limiting exercise of free will. It was never his own choice that had taken him to installations all over the country on tours of duty. He was entirely comfortable with his bachelor's life and came home on furloughs and leaves to his wife, whose nurse's career made her the ideal wife for so solitary a man. In a way satisfactory to them both, for many years, they lived together on occasion and apart most of the time. Florence was grateful. Their infrequent sexual encounters reduced the possibility of pregnancy, she believed, after the two difficult ones she had gone through. Joseph, for his part, relished the cozy, undemanding warmth of NCO clubs and the comradeship of the dayrooms in the barracks.

Joseph's discharge came, much against his will (for once, he resented ‘orders') when it was discovered that he had a progressively wasting muscular disease. He was discharged, given a full disability pension and sent home to New Baltimore and to his family. Florence became his commanding officer, leading him slowly across the floor of his bedroom to his chair. He sat in the bay window watching the parade of tankers on the busy river. Their hulls rode low in the water because of the heavy load of oil they were bringing to the port of Albany. He waited, remembering their names, for them to come back down the river on their long, slow journey to New York, now seeming to skim the water with relieved grace. The burdensome cargo had been removed from their bellies. Joseph kept a tally of passing ships. He welcomed the return of the ones whose names he recognized, fantasizing that he was a lock commander, permitting their passage in the waters in front of his window, ordering their approaches, their progression through his section of river, their departure.

His deep interest, however, was in the history of the military campaigns of the Civil War. On the card table beside him he plotted the battles of Petersburg and Gettysburg, Richmond and Manassas. A contour map was draped over the table, like a limp cloth, so he was able to move only one battalion at a time, a unit symbolically represented by a single tin soldier in appropriate uniform. Studying histories, accounts, biographies that Florence brought home for him from the Albany Public Library, plotting the advances and retreats of his divisions, he was able to engage in what he had always considered the most interesting of all human activities: war. To him, peace was the lazy condition of cowardly men and now, to his great regret, invalids. In a loose-leaf notebook he took careful notes on the reasons for certain leadership decisions, the strategic causes of defeat and victory. Until the muscles in his fingers and wrists ‘went back on me,' as he explained to occasional visitors, he placed his little soldiers, minute, honorable representatives of armies, in their proper stations until such time as it was historically accurate for them to advance nobly or retreat in infamy. Joseph loved the little tin men painted over with gray or blue paint and an occasional red scarf. To him they were obedient and unafraid, brave and invulnerable. Often he was tempted by their grave demeanor to have a battle go other than history had recorded, just this once, to allow the soldier in Confederate gray to survive and return to his gallant, suffering family.

In the summer before the United States entered the war, and while she was finishing her master's thesis on Yeats, Maud spent time sitting with her father, writing feverishly in a copybook on her lap. ‘Why are you so anxious?' Joseph asked her once, without looking up from the hills of Richmond. ‘Right now I'm working on a poem to send to my teacher, a famous poet, Otto Mile. And I'm making some notes for a thesis on another poet named Yeats.'

Her father turned to look at his daughter. ‘What will you do with poetry?' As he spoke the word Maud pictured lines of rifle-bearing men, bayonets pointed forward. Suddenly they laid down their rifles and fell to the ground, wounded, defeated, and in despair in the face of such an ephemeral and countryless vacation. ‘Publish it, if I'm lucky.' Joseph said nothing. Maud watched him move a colonel around the outskirts of the city of Petersburg to outflank a general, her father explained, in order to cut off his supply lines. His silence was understandable. A man of action, he had been forced by a malignant fate into immobility and contemplation. His daughter's choice of so sedentary, so cerebral, a profession must be incomprehensible to him, Maud thought. She understood this and loved him, admiring the way he had silently consented to make do under the drastic conditions imposed upon him by his useless legs. He had delegated all activity to his tin soldiers, becoming their strategist. They moved under his stern order, demonstrating, Maud believed, how fully he had accepted the higher instructions of some divine command.

It was early evening. Maud had helped her mother prepare supper in the kitchen. While it cooked, her mother standing guardian over the erratic gas burners, Maud leaned against the arch to the living room watching her father. Even now, in his reduced state he was a fine, soldierly looking man. She moved over to his chair and stood behind him, watching him settle his men into their evening encampment at Valley Forge, his slim head, so like Spencer's, bent toward them as though to overhear their army talk. Maud wondered about his contribution to her heredity: there seemed to be an incredible chasm, a genetic misunderstanding, or perhaps a satiric contradiction between his flat, military figure and her massive, shapeless form, with breasts that reached almost to her waist and, when restrained with specially made contraptions, buttressed against her front in a ridiculous way. Bent now over his land forces, his vision was still good at sixty, while Maud's young eyes, small and myopic, were further reduced in size by her thick glasses. Wearing her glasses and looking in the mirror, she told Luther, her eyes looked like raisins. She was as short as her mother and father, but in early adolescence she had expanded far beyond Florence's tight, trim, serviceable figure and Joseph's military spareness. She could not figure out (literally, she said to Luther, making, for her, an unaccustomed, weak joke) how she had come from them. By an uncharitable Creator she had been deprived of a proper neck. Her backside took on a compensatory capaciousness to her breasts, as though some humorous god had decided to create a vertical human seesaw. In a course in anthropology that Ruth Benedict taught at Columbia, Maud learned the anatomical name for the shape of her buttocks: steatopygia. By nature, Hottentot women had the same shape. In their tribe it was no curse but a sign of female beauty. Great buttocks elongated and stretched out behind them to extraordinary lengths were regarded as highly desirable, a valuable dowry, by their suitors.

Short, nearsighted and overflowing the normal bounds of sightly flesh, Maud hated the body to which she had been assigned. Even her mouth with its broad lips was bad. ‘Poor mouth,' she often called herself. Florence believed it was the result of her insistence, until she was almost six, upon keeping both her thumb and her first finger in her mouth, so long that they became sodden and bore down heavily on her lower lip. When she finally removed the water-logged thumb and finger, shamed in the presence of her first-grade classmates, Maud's lips were permanently broadened and swollen. ‘It must have been habit,' she thought. ‘It was clearly not heredity.'

Her room in the New Baltimore house had no mirror, a lack for which she felt gratitude as she grew up. Rarely did she look into the one in the bathroom. But in the laughing eyes and sly mouths of her high school classmates she saw some indication of what she had grown to look like. Her hair was straight and coarse; she had her mother cut it short. She combed it using only her fingers, achieving some degree of accuracy, needing no help from a mirror. Closeted and protected from her self, she forgot for long periods of time the outlandish shape that encased the poet in her.

At the end of the summer, with one excruciating bolt, Joseph Noon's heart gave out. In his useless state, needing them for everything, he had been like a slowly dying child. Seated in his chair late in the day, he dropped a soldier onto the map, gripped his chest with both weak hands, called ‘
Florence
' and died. Maud was upstairs packing, Florence was cooking supper: it was an off-duty night. The rush of frantic events that always follows a death in the family obliterated for them both the sorrow they felt at the sudden absence from their lives of the gentle man they had cared for and loved.

Florence was to live out her life in New Baltimore, always aware of his lingering presence in the house, her memory of him sharp, clear and painful. She came to forget his long-absent army career and believed that every day of their lives had been spent together. Maud returned to New York and relegated her beloved father to the useful fabric out of which she would make poetry.

Just before Christmas vacation, 1939, the weekend before the recess, Maud, defying all the house rules, invited Luther up to her room to see their tree. He came up when the housemother wasn't looking, sneaking up the stairs. The tree turned out to be one full branch of Northern pine stuck upright into a bed of modeling clay in a large flowerpot. It was lavishly decorated with tinsel, strung popcorn and cranberries. Luther had rushed over after class at three, pleased to be asked up. He expressed admiration for the tree. He took a snapshot of it, a shadowy Maud behind it, for she refused to allow him to come closer or to turn on extra lights. That afternoon the light outside was gray, the window frosted over after a morning ice storm. Luther was hardly able to see through the lens.

After the picture taking, Maud made coffee on Minna's illegal hot plate. They drank it in silence. Luther's head filled with the restorative fumes from the strong coffee made in a flaking, battered pot. He gathered his courage. This was the day, the time, he thought, to try. Maud had closed the door to the room, since his presence there could well get her expelled. But the act made Luther wonder if her closing the door indicated she too wanted ‘to do it.' ‘I have nothing else to offer you,' she said. She seemed uneasy. ‘Unless you drink tea on top of coffee. I have lemon.' ‘Oh no, next time maybe. Anyway, I take my tea straight.' Maud smiled. ‘In these rooms, which I share with a beautiful upper-class girl, my other roommate, Liz Becker, and I are not allowed to be so casual about tea. It's not a drink with Minna, it's a ceremony. If you don't see it through from the beginning to end you seriously affect the quality of the … of the “potation,” I think is the word.' ‘What's a potation?' ‘An elaborate drink, I believe.'

They were fencing for time, not caring about what they said. ‘Simple as that? Then why not say drink?'

It was a foolish question. Luther wondered why he had asked. He supposed he was feeling irritable because he didn't know how to start what he had in mind to do. Waiting for the right moment, he wondered, ‘Why do I want to go to bed with her? Do I want to see her undressed, without her weird, cover-all clothes?' He decided it must be a desire to see those great breasts unbound. He was curious about how a girl so bountifully endowed with both brains and flesh would behave during the act of sex. He felt no stirrings of love for her. ‘How
could
I?' he asked himself. But his curiosity suspended all logic.