The Magician's Girl (16 page)

Doors closed, the three women slept and dreamed, each sealed into a private somnolent capsule of the past and the future. Maud dreamed a confused mélange of herself and Hedy Lamarr bathing in a blood-colored lake. Liz saw gross reflections of a pituitary giant in a snowbank into which she seemed to be dipping X-ray plates. Minna had a familiar dream: the Eighty-sixth Street station of the Sixth Avenue El formed itself protectively over the panel of Mr. Weisfeld's skull as it lay, abandoned and brittle on the gray sidewalk. She could see spots of chewing gum surrounding it like a black halo, she saw her mother's anxious face watching her watch it, she seemed to be seeing it all through the artificially colored bright blue water of the Salvation Army swimming pool.

I
N THE
S
EPTEMBER AFTER
M
AUD'S DEATH
, Florence decided to take the twins with her to Atlantic City, ignoring the nuns' disapproval of their absence from school. Florence was discovering how difficult it was to keep them amused and happy, now that there was no foreseeable terminus to their care. The funeral had been attended by her and the children, Luther, and two of Florence's friends from the Albany Hospital. Florence could not find the addresses of Maud's roommates at college, and the only address she could find belonged to a man in an insane asylum. Immediately after the funeral Luther disappeared, ‘to go on the road,' he told her, leaving no address. He promised to send monthly support for the children, but it never came. Florence felt the financial burden. But even more difficult for her was the twins' demands for entertainment. She was never to forgive the assiduous Sisters for their intervention in the lives of the Kenneths: they had persuaded the boys to use, on most public occasions, the English language they knew well, to save their private tongue for the endless conversations they continued between themselves. The good Sisters had effected another change in the children's demeanor by insisting that one of them (no one was quite sure if they had designated the right one) be Spencer. Now they both answered to both names but the Sisters were satisfied: there were, on the attendance rolls, two names for two boys. With this schism the boys became less tractable, more demanding, less content with their own company. Conforming obediently to the general rules of the parochial school, they lost their curious self-contained and particular identity, and became ‘normal.'

In Atlantic City Kenneth and Spencer quickly grew bored with the contest that so enthralled their grandmother. They scrapped with each other during the Thursday-evening costume contest at the Music Hall, disturbed the rapt onlookers and had to be taken home. On Friday, in an act of heroism for her, Florence decided to forego the swimsuit preliminaries. She hired a taxi to drive them all to the southern end of the city to see Lucy, she told them. ‘This is Margate. Lucy is here. We're almost up to her.' The twins consulted with each other in a string of syllables she took to be questions by their tone, but she could not think of a way to prepare them for the sight of Lucy. When the taxi deposited them at Lucy's gigantic right rear foor, near a door that led to her interior, they shrieked with terror. Their high screams could not be staunched and they clung to Florence as she tried to move them back to see Lucy from a little distance.

Lucy was a sixty-five-foot tin-covered and painted elephant hollowed out into many rooms and observation posts. Her legs alone stood twenty feet high and were filled, for her support, with ten-foot-thick cement. She loomed into the air like a vulgar colossus and she was topped by a decrepit howdah displaying the remains of once-bright paint. Her seventeen-foot-long ears were plastered to her enormous head, and her trunk extended thirty-six feet into a bucket of cement the size of a small reservoir. At the windows cut into her belly tourists stood looking out. The bulging portholes that were her eyes were filled with whole families staring at Atlantic City to the north, and down at Florence and the twins. Nothing Florence did could stop their screams. ‘Hush. Be quiet,' she told them. ‘You'll scare everyone.' They clutched each other. Their cheeks were fiery red, their beautiful black curls wet with each other's tears. Florence grew increasingly anxious. ‘You'll make yourselves sick. Come on, we'll get a taxi and go back. It's only a make-believe elephant, boys.'

But to the twins, immersed in their mutual and desperate terror, it was not just an elephant. ‘No, no,
no!
' they screamed. It was an incomprehensibly large, thick skyscraper in the shape of a beast, a blowup like a gargantuan balloon but thick and insecurely rooted. At any moment, it would thunder forth, stomping them with its mammoth cement toes, whipping them with its twenty-six-foot tail. It was already in motion, they just had not noticed. Lucy's bulging eyes fixed on them; she lumbered, barging along fast enough to free her trunk from its bucket and then elevating the flat slit at the tip fifty feet into the air. With one move, the twins flattened themselves on the sand, one on top of the other, believing they had been pounded into the ground and combined with the sand like runover squirrels laid out flat and ground into the gray city streets, forever one with the cement. They were Bugs Bunny leveled by an enemy, shadows pressed into the sand by the rampant Margate elephant, Lucy, never to rise again.

After they returned to New Baltimore in mid-September, Miss Alabama (weight, 119; bust, 35; waist, 24; hips, 35) having been crowned Miss America to Florence's entire approval, the twins still seemed disturbed. They both complained of left-ear aches. Florence took them to the doctor in Ravena when she found their temperatures were 102 degrees. ‘Mastoiditis,' Dr. Reiner said. ‘Both. They'll have to be operated on.' Florence had seen many persons with deep scars behind their ears. She was shocked that this might happen to the beautiful boys. She pleaded with the doctor. ‘It's just earache. Can't you give them something?' ‘No. It's more than that. Very serious. There's a lot of pus in their middle ears. Inflammation has spread to behind their middle ears. I have to take out the mastoid bone to get rid of the pus.' Their heads bound in heavy white bandages, their black curls shaved, the twins came home pale and tired from the Albany Hospital. Now there were great cavities marring the perfect shape of their small, lovely heads. They became very quiet, as though the sight of the soaring Margate elephant and the excavations they saw behind each other's ears, combined with the death of their mother and the mysterious disappearance of their father, had cured their childhood pleasure with each other and with the world outside themselves. They grew to undistinguished manhood, wore their hair long at the sides over their cavities, took care of their grandmother until she died peacefully at eighty-three, married Ravena girls from their high school class and lived on the same road in New Baltimore. They worked as foremen for the Atlantic Cement Company near Albany. When a biographer sought them out to ask what they could remember about Maud Noon, the now widely celebrated poet (‘The sonorous voice of her generation,' wrote
The New York Times's
poetry critic), they said they could remember nothing about her, and sent the researcher away.

It was true. Kenneth and Spencer Luther had forgotten the language of their childhood and with it the peculiar person who had been, far back when they were both of the same name, their mother.

Leo Luther played supporting parts in national companies of Broadway shows until he was well into his thirties. He had a few close-to-Broadway roles. But by the time his acting skill had caught up with his fading good looks he had grown too old for leading men's roles. His early handsomeness and his late talent crossed each other too far into his life. He married again, a good-looking girl from Nebraska who worked as an assistant fashion editor on a women's magazine. Inevitably the marriage was doomed by his constant traveling and her cavalier attitude toward fidelity. Alone at forty-eight, Leo Luther was finished in the theater. He had grown heavy, pasty-faced and balding. He drank too much, smoked too much and suffered from constipation and hemorrhoids. Sometimes, around holidays, he thought of looking up Florence and his sons, who he assumed still lived in New Baltimore: his memory had fixed them at seven and Florence at a vigorous fifty years or so. But the natural inertia of the underemployed kept him from making the necessary effort to telephone or travel there. A writer for
Ms
. succeeded in running him down in his undistinguished Forty-fourth Street hotel, where he worked the desk evenings for his room and paid for his food, clothing, liquor and cigarettes by doing delicate errands for other guests. He procured bottles on Sunday, girls on any night, reefers and papers of coke when he could safely find them for visitors from Kansas or Idaho. The writer wanted to know about his first marriage, what he thought about the contemporary poet, Maud Noon, whether she was ‘liberated' in her thinking during the years of their marriage, what their love life had been like, why he thought she had so prematurely taken her life without leaving an explanation. To all such questions he smiled his once-beautiful smile, extinguished now by the loss of four teeth close to the front of his mouth that he never replaced, and said, ‘I'm writing my autobiography. You'll have to wait until I've finished, and then read about all that.' Of course there was no truth to this. Luther never intended to write about Maud, or himself, or their miserably prosaic marriage or her inexplicable death: he understood nothing about anything that had happened to them in his lifetime. He had turned his back on all of it, wiped his memory clean of the vestigial details and lived only in the present. He died at sixty-four of cirrhosis of the liver without having contributed anything of importance to the growing literature surrounding Maud Noon except a sentence or two in her biographies, and the few memorable lines in her poetry celebrating his extraordinary beauty.

T
HEIR LAST PHOTOGRAPHY TRIP TOGETHER
was at Minna's suggestion. In April 1939 she saw that Liz was feeling very low. ‘It's the end-of-the-term blues,' said Liz. Maud was preoccupied with Luther and her final papers, and with trying to come to terms with his suggestion that they be married in the summer and share an apartment while she went to graduate school on the generous fellowship Columbia had offered her, and he took classes at The Actors Group. Minna was going to Cornell to get her master's degree in history. But she was distracted from studying for finals by her parents' generous graduation gift of a trip to Europe. Only Liz was without direction. Nothing of what she had learned at Barnard did she want to know more about. So she applied to a publisher she had been told specialized in art books for an advance to prepare a book of her photographs, together with an essay about her views on the subject. She needed the money to finish what she had already done and to spend a year taking more pictures. She intended, she said, to go on with her photographs of solitary people.

P
ROPOSAL
: I want to do a book about persons who live alone all or most of their lives because of the circumstances of their birth or because they have not found a mate, a friend or a community. Such people cultivate habits to fill the space around them. They smoke, surrounding themselves with warm, dense, insulating air. They have a dog or cat with whom they converse and whose hungers, preferences, illnesses and toilet needs determine the ordering of their own lives. They talk to their potted philodendron and English ivy. Habitually they occupy the same chair in their rooms, although there may be other chairs to choose among. Their daily rituals, their protection against the void, become sacred to them. If they feel themselves close to the edge of despair, if darkness knocks against their legs, they light a cigarette, have a gin, fill the tub with bubble bath, read a romance, or a Western, or treat the cat to calf's liver.

Then there are the solitaries, who live in the exclusive society of their inner selves, often because they are curiosities to the outside world: cripples, dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins and many others. These are most interesting and frightening to me. Of course, I do not understand them. Their outlandish bodies, their frankly-presented-to-the-stare faces, tell me they want someone to know about them. Their rooms, their clothing, all these assist me with the truths I can uncover, perhaps, with a camera. I am trying to understand something about the world they have manufactured for themselves as a safeguard against intrusion by the vast universe of other persons who are not, like them, singular. When I have recorded their special being in their insulated and fragile rooms, then they will know how they look to others, for the camera eye is ordinary and commonplace, harsh and critical, exactly like the world around them. And I will know, and my viewers will understand, all for the first time. I have no interest in familiar types, in celebrities, in public figures. To photograph them is a tedious repetition of accepted and already available views. I want to know about the unknown who, curiously enough, are not invisible. Indeed it is the opposite: they are tragically open to ignorant and prurient inspection because of their abnormalities. The normal are not. My subjects are like the hermit crab before he finds his shell, the snake at the moment of shedding its skin. I want to show, not what
I
see (never enough) but what the camera sees: beyond the public vision to the interior self. I wish to understand the camera's limits when it approaches these mysteries of creation and snaps shut on them. Photography, to paraphrase Franz Kafka, is a form of prayer. I want to perform a liturgy over the unique, deformed, the grotesque, the rare.
Elizabeth Becker

This was written, of course, not by Liz but by Maud, who had listened carefully and then formed what Liz had told her into Maud's own images and expressions. But the result was exactly as Liz expected: No publisher showed any interest in the proposal or offered her any money. So Liz was depressed. The future held no doors open to her, as it seemed to be doing for her roommates, ‘not even crawl spaces, like they make for plumbers,' she said. To cheer her, Minna said, ‘I have an idea. Let's try to find where Gertrude Ederle lives.' ‘The Channel swimmer? Why would I be interested in her? I'd say she's pretty well forgotten now!' ‘That's the pathetic side of fame,' said Minna, who had read the Liz-Maud proposal. ‘It would be interesting to know what she's like now.'