The Magician's Girl (15 page)

‘Why the Bronx? What's in the Bronx to photograph?' Minna asked. Liz laughed. ‘What a true Manhattanite you are! Do you think everything of interest in this world is on Manhattan island?' Minna said, ‘Sure.' and then laughed too. ‘I'm better than I used to be. I once thought you needed a visa to go to the Bronx or Queens.' Liz said, ‘You'll see. It's worth the trip. He's amazing, really amazing.' ‘Don't you ever want to photograph ordinary things, you know—landscapes and parties and such?' Liz said, ‘No. People in groups don't interest me, or scenery, for that matter. And I don't want to waste my time on individuals who aren't interesting to me because there's nothing interesting about them.' Minna asked nothing more. Liz liked to make a mystery of the object of her journeys up and down the length of the city. When Minna had no classes that day, and was free to go with her, it was not unusual to travel one hundred blocks south for a sandwich to a place Liz liked only to retrace their steps one hundred and fifty blocks to find the new object of her interest.

On the subway they studied photographs of the Wall Street secretary and the YWCA swimming instructor who were this week's Miss Subways. ‘
Quelle honneur!
' said Liz. ‘Do you think those two really ride the subways? I bet not. That old woman across from us, in the pink plastic cap and no teeth—
she's
a Miss Subways.' ‘Or you,' Minna said. She looked at Liz's grimy wool pants, stadium coat and loafers, thinking how shocked her own mother would be if she knew Liz was not wearing stockings and a skirt under a fur coat. Liz flashed her instant smile and then withdrew it. ‘Wow, you're right. Am I not.'

‘The number of the apartment house is three twenty-six,' Liz said. They walked some blocks, sometimes going single-file through a narrow passage on the street, their loafers sliding on the beat-down browned-over snow. On the Grand Concourse they passed a Gristede's grocery, two meat markets, a pork store and a funeral parlor, in front of which stood a line of black-suited and -hatted men, whose eyes were fixed upon the closed doors as though they were intuitively seeing the somber service going on within. ‘I ought to take some shots of them,' said Liz. She shifted the strap of the camera case to her arm. Minna said, ‘No.' ‘Why not? They might enjoy a distraction. Those black hats and long overcoats, and the curls over their ears. They're wonderful, aren't they?' ‘No, come on,' Minna said. ‘It's not respectful.'

Three twenty-six is a squat four-story building on the corner of 148th Street. The lobby is dim and cool. An old black man with a musty, beery smell closes the elevator door behind them. They ride to the third floor in a space so close their shoulders touch. To Minna, Liz seems very excited, hardly able to wait for the elevator door to be opened. ‘Third floor,' the black man in his faded brown uniform says. ‘To the right.' Liz walks fast down the narrow, odorous hallway, too eager to wait for Minna. Minna says, ‘Thank you,' to the elevator man and then adds, ‘sir.' He grunts something and closes the door hard behind her. Liz is already at the door of 3-D, her finger on the bell, her other hand working at the zipper of a camera case. ‘Wait up,' Minna says. The door is still closed when she catches up to Liz. ‘No answer?' Liz looks anxious and rings again. ‘What's the smell here?' Minna asks. ‘Kosher cooking.' To Minna the smell is sour, damp, piscine. Liz's finger goes again to the bell. ‘I hear someone walking in there.' ‘I wish you'd let me in on what we're here for,' Minna says. ‘Shhh. Someone's coming. You'll see.'

The door is opened by a short, very stout, gray-haired woman in a flowered housedress and checkered apron. Her corset can be seen under the thin materials. Only her head is exceptional. It is placed on her neck so crookedly that her nose points up and to the side. Her eyes seem permanently placed on some object above and to the right. A long bow and the ties of her apron protrude from above wide buttocks. Minna sees all this as she shuts the door behind her, because the lady has turned away and starts to walk down the hall without a greeting to either of them. The hall is dark and lined with doors that must be closets or other rooms, Minna reasons. The squat woman stops short and turns. Liz and Minna, unprepared, almost run into her. She seems to bend backward a little to look Liz in the eyes. ‘You are the photographer, no? You said.' ‘I am,' Liz says. She shows her the Rolleiflex already stripped of its case and ready in her hand. ‘This is my friend, Minna Grant. Thank you for letting us come, Mrs. Rosen.' ‘Never mind that. I did not say to come. My son it was, not me.' ‘How do you do, Mrs. Rosen,' Minna says, but there is no reply. It is so dark in the hall that Minna cannot see Mrs. Rosen's eyes clearly. Only later is she able to make out that they are a cloudy gray or brown, as though she were looking through bouillon. ‘He is in the sitting room. We are doing the tree.' ‘The tree?' There is surprise in Liz's voice when she echoes Mrs. Rosen's statement. Minna remembers that Liz's Jewish parents have no religious convictions at all, were indeed hostile to all the trappings of Christianity or of any religion for that matter. Liz told her she had once brought home a Christmas card for her fifth-grade teacher, on whom she had a crush. Her father had made her burn it in the kitchen sink. ‘The Christmas tree. Aaron always likes a tree.' Mrs. Rosen gestures for them to enter the living room. ‘This is my husband, Mr. Rosen.'

Mr. Rosen is seated on the sofa. He gets up at once. He is the exact size and shape of his wife. ‘He looks enough like her,' Minna thinks, ‘to be her twin.' Minna says, ‘How do you do?' to him while her eyes are fixed on the corner of the room. There, standing beside the tree and towering over it, his neck and head thrust forward along the ceiling, is Aaron Rosen. Minna finds herself, against her will, staring at him, unable to look away. Mr. Rosen is pumping Minna's hand, saying, ‘Glad, glad, glad to see you. Come in. Come in. Come in.' Aaron, hearing his father's genial repetitions, stomps across the room, his massive feet encased in slabs of leather held together by rawhide ties. The ceiling holds his head in check, pushing it forward so that his hamlike shoulders are parallel to the pole that holds the drapes at the top of the window. The whole room, in Minna's eyes, suddenly shrinks in dimension, as if a drawstring has been pulled on a purse. Goliath, thinks Minna, a colossus. The Bronx Giant.

Liz uses flash bulbs, taking pictures of Aaron from every angle, focusing on his enormous and weak-looking hands, his knees bent a little as though to reduce the strain on his neck as it crooks at the ceiling, his overgrown nose and lower lip. The lower part of his face seems blown up to twice the normal size. It is as if his giantism had eccentrically decided to expand parts of him beyond even what might be expected of a giant. Liz asks his parents to stand beside him. Instantly they take on the look of dwarfs, his mother bending backward to look up at him at her painful cocked angle, his father staring stonily ahead at Aaron's belt. His gaze is fixed so that he seems to be wishing to cut his son down to size, for once to be able to look him in the eye at his level, to blot out the spectacle of this misbegotten mammoth.

Minna still stares at the giant. Unlike most of Liz's subjects who look into her camera with a kind of placid pride in themselves, the giant turns his head toward his parents and away from Liz, as though to indicate the blamable source of his anomalous being. His eyes, deep-set and pale, are fixed on his mother, who looks back at him, her head uplifted, her eyes full of admiration and affection. Liz holds the eye of her camera level, focusing it on Aaron's rough catcher's mitt of a hand wrapped around his cane. Mrs. Rosen notices the aim of the camera and says quickly, ‘It is just for now. His feet are sore. It helps him walk. The cane is for that.' ‘He can walk okay,' her husband growls, in a voice that is so low and coarse it seems made of cobblestones and ground glass. ‘It steadies him, is all.' Aaron turns farther away from Liz as if to show the camera's fallibility in understanding what it sees.

Clearly still perturbed, Mrs. Rosen breaks away from the tableau. ‘What are these pictures for, Miss? Not a newspaper, I am hoping.' ‘Oh no, nothing like that. For myself, mostly. I'm studying photography. Still just learning, really. But if I get one that's good, I'll come back and show it to you. Give you a copy, if you want it. But I'll ask your permission to put it in a book or a show of my work someday.' ‘A show?' Mrs. Rosen says, uneasily. ‘I don't know about that.' ‘Don't worry. They might not come out well at all. The light is not very good. But I'll let you know.'

Mr. Rosen says, ‘Are you finished now?' He tells his wife to bring out the coffee and coffee cake. While Liz packs away her equipment and Minna sits on the couch with Aaron, unable to think of anything to say to him, Mr. Rosen gives what appears to Liz to be a prepared talk: ‘Aaron was a fine, normal baby when he was born. He weighed seven pounds. But when he was a little boy this tumor on his gland began to grow. So he got big for a little boy and then bigger and now, like this. Maybe he is still growing.' ‘How tall are you?' Liz asks Aaron. ‘He is eight feet eleven inches,' says Mrs. Rosen. To Minna's discomfort, Liz goes on with her questioning, reminding Minna of Maud's relentless pursuit of information. Was she the only incurious and thus mannerly one of the three? Minna wonders. ‘How much do you weigh?' Liz asks, looking up at Aaron. He speaks for the first time. His voice is high and odd, a falsetto pitch straining, it seems, out of his stump-thick neck. ‘A lot,' he says. His mother adds the figures with what sounds to Minna like pride. She is demonstrating her son's excess of everything. ‘Four hundred and seventy-five pounds.' The coffee cups are handed around by Mr. Rosen, who gives his son a large mug. Balanced dangerously on the edge of the saucers are thin slices of a cake that looks old to Minna. Liz gulps down her coffee in a few quick mouthfuls, and follows Mrs. Rosen into the kitchen, carrying her cup and Minna's half-filled one. ‘Could you tell me how old Aaron is?' ‘Twenty,' Mrs. Rosen whispers, and then she begins to cry. Tears run from the corners of her eyes and redden the lobes of her nose and her cheeks. Liz stands there helplessly, wondering what maternal spring she has touched to provoke such sadness in the giant's mother. ‘The doctor says something, anything, will take him away from us soon. An infection can go all through him, maybe two years, not much more.' Mrs. Rosen runs water over the cups she takes from Liz while she cries. Liz puts a consoling hand on her shoulder. ‘I'll work on the pictures quickly so you'll have one if—anything happens,' she says. Her offering feels lame and insufficient to her. She is about to say something more comforting when Mrs. Rosen turns to her suddenly, the tears stopped, and says, ‘You won't show it in public, yes? He doesn't go out anymore since he got so big, so the people around don't know.' Liz hesitates for a moment and then she says, ‘All right. I won't show it. I promise.'

And so the picture was fixed forever, as Liz wanted it after many trials, and as it appeared in her show at the Ars Longa a few years later, and in her book that was to make her famous. Aaron, the giant, crumpled like an accordion in order to stand in the parlor, is looking down at his parents, who reach to his waist, his face disfigured and enlarged by his acromegalic affliction, looking away from the camera as if to hide what Liz saw and caught in profile: the psychic isolation of the freak, his terrible, despairing elephantiasis of spirit. A man bigger than a Christmas tree, his cane and special shoes and bent knees and weak hands early signs of his mortality (for he died two years after Liz immortalized him).

‘Thank you very much for letting us come,' Liz says to Mrs. Rosen, who accompanies them to the door. ‘And thank you for the cake and coffee,' says Minna. ‘You're welcome,' says Mrs. Rosen. ‘Pardon Aaron for not coming to the door. He gets up hard,' she says, and closes the door behind them.

On the way home Minna was stiff and silent with resentment, although she was not sure why she felt as she did. ‘Perhaps I don't believe in her promises,' she thought. Liz believed a photograph was a holy image offered to the gods of creation as evidence of the trials they had inflicted on humanity, of the wrongs these vengeful deities had done to their creatures. But Minna disliked Liz's notion that the photograph superseded the person it depicted. To Liz, the picture was better, somehow. She claimed it displayed more than the photographer had intended. It was as though the camera had a way and a will of its own and told more about the subject than the photographer could know, more than the subject wished to reveal. Her Rolleiflex was a mechanical psychologist, Freud in a small black cycloptic box. The photograph was part of human history, more important than the human being, an artifact of great value to the anthropologist, the psychologist, the archivist, the theologian.

When they got home, Liz went to her room, threw herself on her bed and was asleep at once. Minna hesitated in the doorway to Maud's room. Maud was stretched out on her bed looking at the ceiling, her face blank, the blankets pulled up to her chin. Minna asked, ‘What have you been doing all afternoon?' ‘Having sex,' Maud said. ‘How was it?' ‘It was … interesting.' ‘That all?' ‘Well, interesting and a little disturbing, like a low-grade fever, or an unexpected fall from a horse, or a short but painful tooth extraction. And you?' ‘We went to see a giant in the Bronx. Liz took hundreds of pictures,' said Minna. ‘Better than one word,' said Maud. ‘Is he another one of her curiosities?' ‘Well, I wonder. At times I thought his parents were the freaks, letting her do all that and then feeding us coffee and cake as though we were benefactors. The giant seemed a column of silent sanity and normalcy. And now I think Liz is the freak, for going there laden with cameras and lenses at the ready, firing at him. I think she was trying to make him look at her so he would know what it was she was seeing when she looked at him. Maybe not, I don't know. She promised his parents no one would see the results but then … who knows? It all seemed—terrible, worse than it usually is when I tag along. I've decided
I'm
the curiosity. I'm going to sleep.'