Extreme Magic (11 page)

“I picked it up and read the fine print on the label:
Antidote: Drink teaspoon or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or simple wall plaster—or small pieces of soap softened in water—in milk, or raw egg.
Quite a rhythm the first phrases had, each with its feminine ending, then that nice little dactyl:
or raw egg.
Neat, but not gaudy. I went back for the envelope I’d addressed to myself, carefully used an old toothbrush to paint some of the stuff from the bottle onto the underside of the flap, carried the envelope back to my room, and set it on the blotter to dry. I never once thought of using the poison on myself. Indeed, I had never felt more surgingly alive, and for the first time in days I fell asleep like a lamb.

“And the next morning I discovered I wasn’t going to have Banjo after all. The world immediately lost that intent, outlined look and went back to being its usual astigmatic blur; I’d never before felt how glorious the ordinary was. Ben had a nine-o’clock in philosophy; I raced over there to tell him.

“The elevator in Philosophy Hall was one of those old-fashioned wire-cage ones that held only about six people. I’d squeezed in and faced the door before I saw that Professor Tyng was one of the six, his height looming over us all. I must have looked wild. My hair was tousled, and I’d just remembered the envelope on my blotter in my room.

“‘Ah, good morning, Miss—er,’ he said. He had a very commanding voice. And you know that conscious stillness people have in elevators. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Have you quite deserted poetry?’

“The elevator girl, an old university hand, closed the door softly and waited; she knew as well as I did that he hadn’t finished. I lowered my eyes, but I could feel the mass smile all around me.

“‘Ah, well,’ said Tyng, ‘I always say that one’s poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one’s friends.’

“That elevator must have been the slowest in the city; it rose in exact time with the blood in my ears. I didn’t answer Tyng and I didn’t look him in the face. I just stared at the cords in his neck. Someday I’ll murder you, I thought, but not with poison. No, I’ll remember what you taught me, that only irony is safe. Just you go on talking, and someday I’ll murder you—with words. Some day I’ll hang you by the neck with them, until you are
alive.

“Classes were already on, but I got Ben out of his; he was an awful color and kept saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ out of the side of his mouth as we went down the hall. When we got outside on the steps, I told him. At that moment, all I felt was a horrible, female embarrassment at having to tell him.

“‘It’s Banjo,’ I said. ‘He isn’t.’

“The most peculiar expression crossed his face. There was relief there first, of course, but then something else took its place. Regret after catharsis is the only way I can describe it—the way people’s faces sometimes look when they come out of the theater after a wonderfully harrowing play.

“I didn’t understand it until later that afternoon, when we were sitting quietly together over a Coke, in the rear of the soda parlor.

“‘You know,’ Ben said, ‘when we were so worried, back there…Nevertheless that was
living,
though, wasn’t it? That was real.’

“I knew what he meant, of course; I’d seen the world shift that morning too. But to
say
it, to put it into…maybe even while it was all going on…or even before! Poor footnoter, I thought, poor self-murderer. At the same time I shrank back from the table, from him—the way one leans away from someone with a bad cold.

“
‘I’m
alive!’ I said. ‘I’m
still
alive.’ I stood up. ‘Afraid I’ve got to run,’ I said. And I ran.

“The minute I got back to my room I sat down and wrote him a letter saying I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t understand quite why yet myself, so I lied and said I was in love with another man.

“Two weeks later, Ben came to see me; I suppose he thought it just another dodge to bring him to his knees. Anyway, that’s just what he did—went down on his knees again, without even saying hello first, and asked me to marry him. Later he told a friend of mine that from the way I’d refused him—I
knew
I hadn’t been sad enough—it was clear I’d never be a woman of the world. I haven’t seen him since, but now and then I hear he’s around somewhere, technically alive. I sure don’t want to see him. Little does he know the very particular way he could crow over me—fainting on my doorstep or not, with or without his feet in those burlap bags…”

An intensity of silence reigned now, a contest of quiet in which the speaker herself must have been wondering if she was to be allowed to get away with it like that—or whether the girl across from her was going to let her know that she was not.

We can be quiet too, the silence said now. People like us…

“What?” Was the voice relieved at not being let off? “Don’t mumble so…Ah, you want to know what it was—what both my husbands said when they left. Now, really! The listener ought to do some of the work. I’ve been telling you, actually, all the way along. OK, guess, then. Don’t be shy; go on, try.

“Oh. You think it was more or less what I said to Ben—just before I ran? That’s very clever of you; you’re a very clever girl. That would be a twist, wouldn’t it? You’ve
got
talent, no doubt about it. Well, I shan’t say, but you listen now. You listen very carefully.

“After I’d sealed that letter to Ben and put it into the mail slot in the hall, I came back to my room. The envelope for Tyng, stained brown and shriveled, was lying where I’d left it. I picked it up, rolled it in some tissue from an old stocking box, and threw it into the basket. Then I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was the holy time, a beautiful evening. A dusky wind was blowing, and the west was the color of a peach. I could feel the cold touch of the pearls at my throat, the warm cuddle of the jersey I’d just thrust my arms into; I thought I could even feel the lovely tickle of the blood running in my veins. It was spring, and my whole future was opening up again, full of oysters, music, lovers. A few foghorns were sounding on the river, and I wondered idly whether I would ever be able to set down exactly the emotion that sound always called up in me—as I had tried and failed to do so many times before.

“And after a while, as I leaned there, the words came, began to shimmer and hang in the air about me. There they were, armies of them, ready to be made into ropes for necks, ready for lovers to be put into, husbands, life. They danced in my mind like wild ponies that moved only to my command, with hooves sharp enough to kill, but forelocks meek enough to me.

“It had been a day. All in one day I’d found out I wasn’t going to have Banjo, marry Ben, poison Tyng. It had been a day full enough for anyone. Except me—and perhaps you…”

Was she leaning forward? The voice was low now, farther back in its own mists than it had ever been, yet near enough for the quick of any ear.

“So I sat down at the desk again—what I wrote was published the next year. The world stretched all before me that evening, in profuse strains of unpremeditated—life. But I left the window, and began to write about it…”

No, it was the girl, leaning back, away, now stealthily rising. For a moment the figure stayed, a series of soft, dark ellipses lapsing to that poised, no longer tentative shoe. Then it ran. On the edge of the promenade it halted; then the wind, or a gesture of its own, tossed back the free-swinging hair and it was gone.

Did the voice know it was alone now? Had it planned it that way—to be left addressing that perfect, illimitable audience of one? For it was still speaking.

“So I left the window,” it said, “and began to write about it. Beginning with the word ‘I.’”

T
URNING THEIR BACKS ON
the last fanfare of sunset over the river, Hester and Kinny Elkin, side by side, skated laboriously up the hill, toward Broadway. Ordinarily, they would have kept a more cynical distance between elder sister, gone past twelve, and younger brother, but today, in the sprawling ten-room apartment which had always been their home, the shape of things was being dismantled for removal to a sunless five rooms in the rear of the building, on the same floor. Neither was anxious to return to the uneasy place now revealing itself as no longer theirs.

For Hester, it was hard to believe that things back there would not be the same as they always had been at this hour, full of the settled ease of women from both sides of the family, dropped in for their afternoon coffee—white tablecloth, the cake plates with angels painted in their centers, cocoa for the children; to think of all this as not there to return to was like trying to hold in the ear two separate chords. Surely, when Josie, the maid, opened the door, her hectic look, both shaky and starched, would advise that the usual assortment of aunts and cousins was already sitting within, the two clans politely opposed as always, joined only on such topics as their common opinion of the Elkin maid. Silent on the things that mattered, they would be exchanging crumbs of agreement on whatever didn’t, across a little neutral sea where innuendo slid like eels; this was what adult “politeness” was. For the half-grown like herself, its counterpart was: to say, and appear to see—nothing. To rest on the yet safer swells of a bottom dark was what it had been to be a child.

Meanwhile, in the exchanges that had gone on above, the women of her father’s family, no longer rich or beautiful, older than her mother by the same some twenty years as her father, had always held the upper hand. Allied closest to the household by their dependence on Mr. Elkin, on a business just large enough to be sometimes in important difficulties—and until recently, by their deference to her grandmother, the six-months-dead monarch of them all—something they owned had nevertheless kept them always the winners over her mother, and the family on her mother’s side.

Her mother’s people, when momentarily left to themselves, to the thriftier gossip of their own smaller businesses, households, smaller everything, could often be heard to cluck a “T-t-t”ing disapproval of this quality, whatever it was, and—in the dead waits between those murmurs—to admire. As later comers to the country from a rural part of Bavaria, after fifty years here the men of her mother’s people still had fingers thick at the root, the women a strong village-sense of disaster. The Elkin lot, born in the laziest part of America, sometimes wasted time, and, on occasion, fortune—they knew how to waste. Her mother’s people were drawn daily to the comfort of it. Yet, if on those slow afternoons the Elkin women still triumphed, it was by the others’ subservience to what could be seen most clearly in the two lots of unframed family pictures, enemies tumbled together in an old breakfront’s drawer. For while her mother’s aunts and cousins were always taken at their rigid best, in full-length, marble-finish studies by Sarony—within the faultless drape of ballgown or teagown, perhaps gazing at a long dinner-ring on a forefinger, or all unconscious of a highlighted necklace—the Elkin women (by her mother’s comment and Hester’s own admission
“foolish
dressers”) were invariably shown to the waist only, emerging from that photographer’s mist which gave predominance to the face, these upheld proudly, as if something within, flowering from neck to brain, to hair wild or confined but always luxuriant, said, “We are more than we
have.
We
are.”

Ordinarily, Hester held both sides under advisement, and knew too well their estimate of her—on her case, as on Josie’s, they were joined. Today, however, she wished against hope that she might find them all there taking their comfort, however divided, as a sign to her that it was still there to take.

“Race you down the new sidewalk,” said Kinny.

On Fort Washington Avenue, the top of the hill, they wheeled sideways and rested, wheezing for breath. Before them, seen through the sidestreet, the blinding bronze of the high windows on Broadway flashed like cymbals turning away from light, faded floor by floor, and went out. Here, the pebbly tan stone of the pavement changed to a smooth concrete, more dangerous to skate on, of a kind which slid under wheel silkily with a high, singing sound.

“Ah no. Let’s not race.” Mostly, she let him win, not minding. It was the contest she minded. “Want to go down holding on, no knee-bend?” This was more dangerous, but a trial against the hill, not between themselves. But Kinny whizzed ahead, crouched over, shouting low insults to that imaginary combatant boys always carried with them, and disappeared around the corner.

Knees straight, Hester, insolently balanced, clasped her hands in front of her and rolled down the hill after him, almost persuading herself that while she was immovable, the houses were being pulled past her on an endless tape. As she flew around the corner, another change in the sidewalk threw her forward, almost on her face, but she saved herself with a few hacking steps and slid down on the stoop of the corner house, pulling at her skate-straps with fingers numbed by the darkening air. During the moment in which she had turned the corner, the dusk had become palpable, in that gradual surge she could never arrest with her eyes.

“Got the key?” Kinny swooped down beside her. She dug in her pocket and handed him the skate-key. From the curls of its broken, grayish string, a nickel fell out and rang on pavement speckled here with particles which would prickle into silver when the streetlights went on.

“Buy us a chocolate bar?” said Kinny.

“Let’s get a frank, and divvy.” Recently, her greediness had shifted away from the sweet to the sour. Herder’s frankfurters were served with a gamboge daub of mustard and a fringe of kraut. She picked up the nickel and spun it on the stone.

“It’ll go down the grating,” he said.

“We could fish for it with a magnet.” Between the dim edges of a pervading sadness, she saw herself looking for the magnet in the topsy-turviness of her room as she had left it this noon, bureaus emptied, bed stacked against the wall. Over her protests, the rattan toy chest had had its contents dumped into a carton, and had been packed with linen.

She kicked off her skates and stood up. Swinging them by the thongs, she walked with him back up the hill on the Broadway side, feeling deflated and set down, her legs wobbling oddly on the suddenly still ground. All the interstices of the city were deepening with a chill color and people were passing quietly, their faces softened and reminiscent. She had a feeling that if she wet her finger and drew it through the air it would return stained with the dye of dusk. Even Mr. Mishnun, the old stationer, emerging from his stunted store to shoo out a small boy who had been snitching candy, paused for a minute, looking upward, abashed by the dumb, violet passage of the city into evening.