The Magician's Girl (14 page)

The second and third cars (‘no,
letters
') she could tell were bills. M
RS
. L
EOPOLD
L
UTHER
and her address were covered with yellow glassine. One was a department store's stern demand for payment for a skirt she had bought last summer and never worn. Across the bottom was stamped
THIRD REMINDER
! Another bill was from Wanamaker's for the games she had bought as Christmas presents for the twins in November. The fourth letter was heavy. She recognized its provenance at once. It belonged to a category with which she was all too familiar. Her name was written on the envelope in her own writing, and it was her hand, she remembered, that had affixed the two three-cent stamps. Inside were used-looking sheets of paper on which were typed her poems, folded so often the creases had darkened. They had gone forth bravely in late summer and were now returned to her with the customary typed slip of rejection, come home to her from their long stay at
Poetry
. Prodigals they were, returned for mother comfort. Now they required a new envelope, a new covering letter, fresh six-cent postage. Then they would be ready for the return journey, in another direction, into another part of the publishing world. ‘Tomorrow. Always tomorrow, the gallant little warriors will go forth again,' she said, and laughed aloud.

Maud riffled through the worn sheets. ‘No. Not tomorrow. I'll let them rest and recuperate for a while. Anyway, there'll be no mail tomorrow. No clinks against metal. No rejected children of the pen demanding the world's attention returned with regret for lack of space or absence of talent.' For a moment she lingered over the sixth poem, the lyric she had worked on for weeks after the twins had gone. She thought of something that might … In a rush of sharp feeling, like a chill, she reached for her open fountain pen and tried to strike out a word and insert another. The pen was dry. ‘Bunk,' she said to the page and to the arid pen. Then, as though she were obeying the instructions of a jealous and critical god, she pushed the sheets into the oven and watched them burn. They followed the usual path toward death for paper that she was familiar with: browning curling, blackening and then a descent to the bottom of the lethal space, culminating in airy gray pieces of light ash. ‘Very good, Maud,' she said. ‘That's the way.' Her voice sounded dry and odd. ‘The way to what?' she asked herself. She could find nothing to reply.

For a long time, the fifth piece of mail lay unopened on the table. ‘The dilatory caboose,' she said to the solitary rectangle, her last connection to the world before Christmas. She had placed it at the end of the train on purpose: at the lefthand upper corner it read,
MILE, ST.E., DC
. ‘I'll save it for tonight, the Eve of the Nativity. For my party,' she said, orating with a flourish to herself, and then warmed to the subject. ‘All together, we will celebrate the time of His Life at the inn, shunted to the stable, the star ascendant, suspended like tinsel over the sheep-covered hills, the magic kings wrapped in gold, padding along the path in quilted slippers, entering the holy place by celestial navigation, warming their hands in the yellow hay.'

‘Bunk,' she said.

Maud took a long dress from a pile on the floor beside her bed and went into the bathroom to put it on. Facing away from the bathroom mirror, she dropped her nightgown and the sweater at her feet and stared down at her breasts. ‘Sacks,' she said. ‘Garbage bags. Bilge bundles.' Shuddering, she looked away and caught sight of them in the mirror. ‘I look like the Kaffir woman in that anthropology text with breasts so enormous they sink beneath her waist.' She thought of Luther's loving hands on her breasts and shook with desire. Always he had enjoyed her, she was sure of that. Then why had he left her? He once said it was queer, the way she wanted to experience everything but without passion, he thought, almost as if she wanted to know how it felt, but not to feel it. ‘Your appetite is impersonal, like a scholar's. I don't think you ever get enough material. Sometimes you seem to be taking notes.' He accused her of using anything, everything, as subject matter. ‘You don't live, you use life as something to be put in poems. It's the same for love. The children and I are themes for your poems.' When she told him she did love him he said he found it hard to believe. ‘Your humanity is first for yourself. And then for your work. Not for us.' Maybe he was right. Had she used up her deep feelings on Spencer? There were persons, she had heard, who loved once, lost their love and ever after found it impossible to love again. Was she one? So Luther stopped loving her, stopped wanting to be comforted between her breasts, to gambol in their globular fields, as once she described it to him. ‘To be loved for ugliness.' She thought of her breasts, her self—‘what a perversion!' she thought beauty almost preceded her into a room. ‘Beautiful women have an unearned command over us all,' Maud said to herself. ‘Their luck holds: they have straight noses, thin bodies, pure eyes, curly hair. When you are like me, you come to believe at last that your very core is ugly and deformed. You have sinned against beauty by having no neck and not much of a chin. O Florence, did you assume all those Miss Americas to escape your own self, and mine?'

Looking into the mirror, she said to her reflection, ‘There is a whole part of existence I shall never be able to enter into or to understand: the part that pertains to being beautiful, even pretty. That door is permanently shut to me. Intelligence will never open it, or substitute for it. I am a perfect stranger to that whole world. My fat, indelicate face and trunk and hands and feet—they rule me out, by anatomical decree.'

All afternoon she sat in the window, watching the feet and legs of passersby, feeling the cold seep in under the door and around the windows, but lacking the energy to move about, stuff the cracks, cause blood to flow in her veins. In her icy hands she held the unopened letter from Otto Mile, thinking about the poet she had not seen since his incarceration. The courts had decided he was senile and crazed, a silent loon who had, in wartime, written poems about his hatred of Jews and diatribes against his native country and its Semitic population. It was said that he stayed to himself at the hospital, was rarely heard to say a word to anyone. ‘Yours is the final negativism, the ultimate denial,' she had told him in a letter. She had written to him almost every week since she discovered his address. At eccentric interludes his responses had come, once only a single letter in a year, then three in one week. He told her about the poems he was writing and translating, about what he thought of the postwar world, about his desire to be free to return to Greece, which he now considered his spiritual home. He told her what he thought of the poems she sent him. It was strange: as time passed he seemed to mellow in his views. At times he was almost admiring. For three years they had corresponded in this way. Maud saved every letter, including the envelopes in his characteristically small, unreadable handwriting and occasional bits of poetry he sent. She kept them in a three-ring binder with the Columbia University seal on the cover, the one she had bought in her freshman year to carry back and forth on the bus to Albany, when she thought the seal proclaimed her a member of the New York fraternity of the intellect.

Mile rarely described the place he was kept in, although she often questioned him: ‘Are you comfortable? Warm? Do you have a quiet, private place in which to work?' He never responded to those questions. Once he wrote about finding curious small droppings in the corner of his room. ‘I cannot identify them. But it is fascinating to speculate. They are not from mice, or rats. Those I would recognize. Could they be
spraints
, the leavings of an otter? Or
fewmets
(deer)? Or even
fiants
, from the fox? These excrements were once of importance, you know. Two centuries ago gamekeepers and huntsmen were greatly interested in the droppings of animals in order to protect—or kill—them. To our loss, we have abandoned our concern for such artifacts. But not me: I watch everywhere for them, like the ones in my corner.'

He wrote about his rigid New England childhood, an atmosphere not unlike the one in which he now found himself imprisoned. Embedded in the description was a quatrain, which in turn contained a small piece of the
Inferno
. His letters were always the same length—one side of a single sheet of paper, single-spaced. When he came to the bottom of the page he stopped writing, leaving the sentence incomplete. Often there was no room to sign his name. So he scrawled M-I-L-E in large letters across the whole page, like an erratic artist, his canvas full of paint, who decides to use the entire face of it for his signature.

In one letter he had confessed, script somewhat smaller and more difficult to decipher than usual (‘As though,' Maud thought, ‘he were writing in a whisper') that he was both tone-deaf and color-blind. This disclosure excited her. She felt she was in possession of a secret of great value to future critics and scholars who would some day explicate the poetry of Otto Mile. She filed the letter away in the binder with the others, determined for the moment to keep everything sent to her in confidence for her own instruction. She understood that the extraordinary originality of his effects, the oxymorons and sledgehammer rhythms, the curious and unexpected combinations of simile and place were not always consciously contrived virtues but sometimes the results of natural defects.

Years before, when she and Luther were still together, Maud thought about writing a respectfully critical article on Mile's work for the
Partisan Review
, a quarterly that had published much of his poetry. But it was like everything else she thought she might do. She never wrote it. She could not assemble her chaotic ideas into a single thesis. Then, too, she knew she needed Mile's permission to quote from his letters, to use the wonderful sestets and occasional heroic couplets with which he decorated his prose. She shrank from asking him, for fear he would stop corresponding with her. But more than that, she doubted her capacity to judge his work. Her awe of his talent was too great and would interfere with any kind of critical posture except an unacceptably worshipful one.

From other sources she heard rumors and gossip about Mile in St. Elizabeth's. The poet's red hair had turned white; he had shaved off his beard, leaving his small, puckered, pope's nose of a chin weak and feeble-looking. He was silent and would speak to no one except his psychiatrist, whom he later accused of being a Jew and a traitor to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which Mile's ancestors had been members. He believed the whole staff were, indeed, Semites guilty of holding prisoner one whose natal Protestantism had founded the nation and fostered its growth. He had wordlessly befriended one guard, a large, good-natured black man who wore African shirts and jewelry. To him, it was reported, he had said one word in the last year: ‘No,' and one sentence: ‘Nothing that is, is true.'

Maud took the unopened letter and slit the envelope carefully with a kitchen knife. The customary single page fell out, folded in three. She opened it. Nothing. No salutation, no signature and, as they used to call it in high school business English, no body. The sheet was blank. She put it into the oven and watched it go through its dying ritual. ‘The last Mile,' she said aloud to herself, putting the envelope in his handwriting into her notebook. She laughed at her bad joke. Then, surprising herself, she began to cry.

It was not until midnight in that long life in the cold day of Maud's abbreviated existence that she decided to join the ashes of her poems and Otto Mile's blank communication, placing her head, like a penitential offering, into the red-hot purifying fumes of the gas oven.

I
N
D
ECEMBER
1939, their senior year at Barnard, Liz took Minna to lunch in Greenwich Village. Maud, the third in their Unholy Triumvirate, as they called themselves, didn't come along. She was going to sneak her friend Luther up for tea in her room. Liz wore her usual woolen pants and seaman's blue jacket, but Minna, mindful of what her mother would say if she were there, wore a dress, a new pair of Gotham Goldstripe silk stockings with seams that ran straight on the back of her shapely legs, and her fur coat. Liz's hunger was not for food but for the familiar mews and alleys, one-block-long streets and dim shops of the Village. They went straight to MacDougal Alley and Eighth Street, where the Jumble Shop occupied the corner. ‘Two maiden ladies, Miss Francis Russell and Miss Tucker, run it. I'll introduce you, if they are there.' On Eighth Street Minna felt somewhat uncomfortable, but warm, in the showy karakul coat her mother had forced on her last Christmas. People down here looked less dressed up, more like the pictures she had seen of Bolsheviks in Lenin Square in Moscow, more like Liz.

A waiter appeared at their old tavern oak table in the dark taproom. Liz piled her two Rolleiflex cameras in their black cases on the chair beside her. They ordered sandwiches and ale. Liz, feeling proudly proprietary, pointed out to Minna the Louis Bouche glass paintings on the windows to the dining room. ‘If we were in there,' Liz said, pointing to the dining room, ‘you would be able to see the Guy Pène du Bois murals. Beautiful stuff.' Minna nodded without interest. ‘Why is it called the Jumble Shop?' she asked. ‘I think because the ladies who run it found the sign in an antique shop of that name and decided it would work as well for a restaurant.' ‘It's a great place.' ‘Yes. Although they don't serve Negroes. One of these days I expect to find my parents picketing outside the place.' ‘Oh my,' said Minna. ‘Too bad Maud couldn't come. This club sandwich is delicious.' ‘Just as well. This joint is expensive and Maud eats so much. Have you noticed?' Minna said yes, she had. Liz said, ‘She has a way of chewing that is almost, well,
acrobatic
. Food drops from the corner of her mouth, and then at the last moment, her tongue, like a net, reaches out to catch it and return it to her mouth. Watching her eat is a spectator sport.' Minna laughed and said, ‘Yes. I've noticed.' They finished their lunch, figured the division of the bill. Liz, whose invitation it had been, discovered at the last moment that she did not have enough money to pay it all. They walked to the subway, Liz laden down with shoulder bags and cameras.