The Magician's Girl (2 page)

Minna preferred Central Park to any other place on earth, and in particular, the infinite potentialities of The Rocks. ‘Let's please go to The Rocks,' she begged her
Fräulein
when she was very young. Later she coaxed her mother past Columbus Avenue and across Central Park West and into the park at Eighty-sixth Street, where The Rocks loomed up on the right side of the path, grandly striated, elevated here, flattened out there. Out of these rocks Minna created all manner of natural and architectural wonders. Creeping up their sides in her sneakers, she imagined she had reached the peak of an alp, or the tower that imprisoned the English princes, even the Palisades, which, from her safe side of the Hudson River, filled her with awe.

Sometimes other children joined her on The Rocks. Together they would devise games involving storming the accommodating rocks become ramparts or stockades or the Bastille. But Minna much preferred to have The Rocks to herself, to populate their gray surfaces with her own soldiers, wild animals, Druids and Vikings. Once, when she was nine, she had an encounter there with a tatty, ragged, painfully thin gray squirrel. Seated at the top of the highest Himalaya and surveying her base camps, she watched him arrive on the ledge below her. He squatted, turned slightly away from her so that his ugly rodent's profile was toward her. One malevolent eye was fixed upon the first little girl to conquer Mount Everest. He wrapped his paws around his scrawny stomach and cocked his long, slanted head so that now both his evil-looking eyes watched her. Through the transparent skin of his mean ears she could see sunlight that turned them red and sore-looking.

To Minna, the squirrel seemed to be in a state of un-containable fury. His meager tail, like a banner, furled along his haunches, then rose abruptly at the end and appeared to be jerking in convulsions. Stock-still, he was clearly challenging her territorial rights. Was he planning to make the ascent and plant his tail on her peak?

She sat without moving, unrelenting, staring into his eyes. A breeze from the Reservoir moved the fur on his back. Then his frosted tail shook hard in a new spasm of anger. ‘
Ka-ka-ka
,' the squirrel said, as if his teeth were chattering. With every syllable, his tail trembled. Minna considered answering. Instead she said, ‘Scat,' and hammered her feet on The Rocks.

The squirrel remained motionless, undaunted by the sounds of thunder over his head. Minna was now very frightened. She believed he was about to assault her position, like the roving Indians on the Mesa Verde. If he came closer she planned to retreat, surrender, ease herself off the cliff and down the other side. When he did move, after the long quiescent session during which both sides seemed on the brink of a truce or exhaustion, Minna, lulled by the impasse, was not prepared. The squirrel made an arced leap, his ears blazing, his far-apart eyes seeming to have coalesced at the front of his head, his tail aloft like a spinnaker at the rear of his flattened back. He landed on her bare, outstretched leg. Minna screamed at him and brought her knees up to shake him off, but not before he had bitten her knee with his small pointed teeth. Then he flipped backward, ran to cover in the bushes across the pathway and disappeared over the culvert and into the Eighty-sixth Street transverse.

The emergency room. Her mother crying beyond the swinging doors. The doctor holding the needle up to the light, filling its tube with white liquid by pushing with his thumb. The ugly swelling. The hurt. Shot after shot. Nausea. Her mother at her bedside in the dark of early morning to feel her forehead. Worst of all, in her mind's eye, the conquering squirrel squatting in his lair under the transverse, gloating over her defeat, measuring the swelling on her knee with his single detached eye and judging it a more than adequate victory. There he sat, triumphant beast who had usurped her throne, in command of all his wicked eyes could survey, challenging her now to ascend the gray cliffs and meet him in mortal combat. Her mother's hydrophobic terror as well as the memory of the terrible shots stayed with Minna all her life. She never returned to The Rocks, the scene of her ignominious defeat, the loss of her own, true place to the mad, victorious mammal.

Before the service elevator was installed in their apartment house, each kitchen was equipped with a manual means of bringing up their groceries. The delivery boy placed his box into the dumbwaiter and pulled the ropes at its sides, raising it to the second level. Then the boy, usually an elderly Irishman who had worked for Gristede's for most of his life, would walk up the stairs, ring the back-door bell and inform the lady of the house or the maid that the groceries were coming up.

Minna loved to be present when the dumbwaiter doors were opened. She would watch the box of food removed by the maid and think of something appropriate to send back down. Once, near Christmas, she took two shirts from her father's pile of starched and laundered white shirts, thinking that the gray-headed delivery boy could well benefit from her well-to-do Jewish father's abundance. Another time she sent down the remains of a lunch she did not like, still on the Limoges plate on which it had been served to her and covered with a damask napkin, on the theory that Mr. Sudermann, the superintendent, might enjoy her despised tuna fish and rice, her mother's usual choice for Friday fare.

At Easter of her seventh year she packed her two-year-old Christmas doll into an oversize Dobbs hatbox from her mother's closet and sent her down on the dumbwaiter to the lower depths from which, Minna hoped, she would never reappear. Mr. Sudermann brought her back promptly. That was the beginning of many such descents on the part of the hated and feared doll. Once she returned seated atop the washed sheets the laundress had sent up from the basement tubs. Seeing the Christmas doll again, risen from the cellar, made Minna believe that nothing could escape the inevitable order of her mother's household. She was convinced that all servants, delivery boys and elevator boys were her mother's agents, and that her Easter faith in the Resurrection was not only a theological belief but a natural, ordinary, everyday event.

‘
Crystal Lake, to you we sing our praises
.

Crystal Lake, we'll prove that none can faze us,
'

sang the freshman and sophomore campers. Their faces were lit by the dying campfire, their open mouths looked hollow and black, their eyes glowed with pleasure. Only Minna, recovering from a case of the runs, as her counselor, Fritzie, called it, or the trots, as her bunkmates said, looked glum and felt gloomy. She thought the camp songs were silly. Next to Central Park, the woods of the Catskills looked like a jungle. She was certain that killer insects, vicious chameleons, wild cats and poisonous snakes lurked just beyond where she was sitting. She was worried about the walk back to the bungalows through the dark tangle of trees that grew between the lakeshore where the campfires were held, and the clearing where they all slept: ‘Anything could be in there,' she thought. She was afraid of trees in the dark. To her their shapes seemed human, their branches like arms, their leaves like hair. She thought of the lights along Eighty-sixth Street, of the birthday lunch she and her mother would have had at Schrafft's on Broadway if her parents had not insisted she go to camp in July, ‘for the experience,' her father had said. She had hated spending yesterday, her eighth birthday, among strangers, having to go to the bathroom all the time. The camp directors had been told, she guessed, so the camp sang the sappy happy birthday song to her at breakfast and presented her with a white cake (she hated white icing) after dinner. Even her counselor, pretty, plump Fritzie, had been a perfect stranger to her until two weeks ago. She liked Fritzie all right, especially at night, when she seemed to sympathize with Minna's fears and took her hand walking away from the rec hall movie to go back to the freshman bunk.

‘
There is a camp for girls

Close to my heart,
'

sang the whole camp. Minna's heart pounded. The girl next to her reached out. Minna said, ‘I don't feel like it,' and sat stolidly while all the others held hands. She recognized the song as the usual last one of the night, and decided to go in search of Fritzie to make the first claim on her hand. She found her at the other end of the large circle, seated far back from it under a tree with another counselor, a very pale, thin person they called Flynn—a name Minna thought strange for a girl—who taught arts and crafts. As Minna came closer she could hear the two counselors having some kind of an argument. She heard Fritzie's high, sweet voice say, ‘No! No!' She sounded angry but Minna could not make out what Flynn said. She saw Flynn put an arm around Fritzie's shoulders and bend her head forward toward Fritzie. Suddenly Fritzie stood up and pushed Flynn away, making her lose her balance and fall over. Minna caught up to Fritzie as she was walking to the circle, almost falling over the legs of two other campers who also were not holding hands in the circle. ‘Can I walk with you? I have to go to the bathroom,' she said. Fritzie looked unhappy, as though she had not liked the campfire either. But she took Minna's hand and said, ‘Okay. Come on, let's get moving.' ‘Don't you like Flynn?' Minna asked as they walked in advance of the big clumps of campers who were coming away from the fire. ‘I like her,' said Fritzie, ‘all right.' ‘Were you having a fight?' ‘No, not a real fight. It was nothing. Forget about it. What were you doing away from the campfire anyway?' ‘I didn't feel like singing and holding hands.' Fritzie laughed. ‘That was my trouble too.' ‘Are you afraid of the dark? Like me?' Minna asked. ‘No,' said Fritzie. Minna was puzzled by her counselor's replies and even more puzzled when, a few days later, the arts and crafts hours were canceled and the freshmen had to have an extra period of field hockey. Minna hated that sport, with all its fruitless running. If you were a left wing as she was always made to be, it was hard to stay parallel with the ball. She told Fritzie she didn't feel like playing field hockey, she was no good at it because people yelled at her to keep running when she was tired and she wanted to have arts and crafts to finish the snakeskin purse she was making for her mother. Fritzie said, ‘Okay, stay on your bunk and write your letter. This is Wednesday and you need a letter home to get into the mess hall at lunchtime.' Minna stayed behind, for the first time in sole possession of the bungalow. She was there when Flynn came in carrying a suitcase, said hello to her and went into Fritzie's little room off the campers' bunks carrying a letter. She came out, picked up her suitcase, said good-bye and went off down the line of bungalows toward the camp entrance. Minna went into Fritzie's room and found the letter Flynn had left on Fritzie's pillow, but it was sealed, so she couldn't read it.

She went back and sat on her bunk and, without any warning to herself, burst into tears. Only after her tears had worn out and she had begun to block print:
DEAR MOTHER AND DAD
, did she realize what was wrong with her. She was homesick for them, for the dark familiar corners of their apartment and her room on the courtyard, for the park, the gray, friendly cement streets, even for the Saturday marketing.

Minna's mother often said, ‘I'm going to bed with a book.' From her example Minna learned the pleasures of reading. In her eleventh year the librarian on the ground floor of the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library discovered that Minna had read all the books in the children's section. She sent her upstairs with a card that showed she was to be admitted to the adult library, the first significant elevation of her life and the one she was to remember with the greatest sense of accomplishment. But the prospect of all those books appalled her. How did you choose a book? How did you know one book without pictures from another? How could you be sure you would like the one you chose after you had carried it home and settled down in bed with it? She decided on a simple expedient. She took the first book from the fiction shelf, under A, read it that afternoon and evening and returned it the next day on her way home from school. It was almost a year before she realized that the organized logic of the library did not require such rigorous procedures on her part. A sense of vast freedom flooded her. An infinite world of literary possibility and choice opened up before her when she discovered that the laws of one's pleasure were not based upon alphabetical order.

Minna was graduated from the eighth grade of PS 9 in the late spring of her twelfth year. Her career there had been undistinguished. She was bored by readers and textbooks and went on her eccentric way borrowing library books. One teacher, Miss Mulligan, was to remember her with some pride, for she managed to transfer to the attentive Grant girl her own scrupulosity about English grammar. The other teachers thought her a pretty, pleasant and agreeable girl. None of them realized that under her goodness was a large, complex design of fears, transmitted to her by her mother, fears so paralyzing that to her teachers and friends they appeared as admirable manners and model behavior.

At the graduation ceremony Minna was awarded the prize for character. It was regarded as the plum by her classmates. Scholarship was given a medal, but character was rewarded with the munificent sum of twenty-five dollars. ‘Now I can have a bicycle,' Minna told her parents.

Hortense Grant was opposed to this plan, had been against it ever since Minna first asked for one for Christmas two years before. She had visions of her daughter crushed beneath the wheels of a truck or thrown to the ground and run over by a taxicab. Leon Grant did not argue with his wife. He had never been able to surmount her tower of fears, phobias and predictions of catastrophes, and long ago had given up trying.

But if her father would not intercede, Minna was determined to win out nonetheless. To her the possession of a bicycle meant freedom to move, a set of wheels to be used to get to the park and even, the longer and more perilous journey to the Drive. Her courage to oppose her mother was enhanced by the award itself. Did she not, after all, have character? She would have been hard put to define that sonorous word. To her it signified resistance to authority or at least a firm, unwavering stand on matters important to her. Possession of a bicycle, for example.