The Magician's Girl (7 page)

Always, she spoke of the candidates with familial reverence usually reserved for novices in a convent. ‘You see,' she said to Maud, ‘you need to start with a promising girl, working with her for a year, maybe two, before she's ready to enter. You're with her all the time while she's still in high school. Work on her, with her, teach her how to groom herself, every part, head to body, how to improve her best features and play down her less good ones, stand straight but not too straight, like military men.' She glanced at her husband, who sat still in his chair, not listening, it seemed, his mind on his tin soldiers guarding their paper terrain. ‘Poise, it's called. You teach them how to be poised.'

‘I thought poise was balance or equilibrium, like being poised on the edge of a cliff, like the Charlie Chaplin cabin in
The Gold Rush
, or something,' Maud said. ‘Well, I suppose that too. But it also means she holds herself, her shoulders and hips and legs and arms, standing just right every time she stops moving. Stopping in just the right pose, graceful-like, all together. What the judges give points for is called “grace of bearing.”'

Maud felt her own round shoulders curve in further, so that her sternum ached with pressure, a living model, she hoped, of what Miss America was not, the ugliest of ugly Miss New Baltimores, fat, short, half blind, unpoised. ‘Then her clothes. It matters a lot how the swimsuit is cut for her particular figger, the color, the materials, the neckline. Then you need to worry about what your girl wears for talent night, so it shows her off well no matter what things she does, something awkward like, you know, like tap dancing or reciting Kipling's
If
. Then the most important—the evening gown. That counts for an awful lot. And the gloves …'

‘Gloves? They wear gloves? When?' Maud asked. ‘Oh my yes. With the evening gown, always. When did you think?'

Maud's fingers were so fat that they fit best into the mittens she wore until it grew warm enough to go without them. The thought of jamming her beefy hands into long white kid gloves wrinkled only at the elbow made her arms and hands ache. ‘And her hair. That's probably the thing I could be best at. I've watched it being done on girls a lot. I know how to do it different every time, for every event and appearance, all week. The trainers say they “build the hair” or “construct a style.” Not like I have it done, set, you know,' she said, glancing at Maud's chopped-off black hair, which tended to arrange itself into disunited strands. ‘They think of it as a structure to be built on the girl's head. That's very, very important.'

Maud nodded, and pushed her oily bangs out of her eyes with the eraser end of her pencil. ‘So much for structure,' she thought, and went on appearing to listen to her mother. Florence had come to think of herself as a necessary and integral part of the pageant family. It was true that she was well known at the headquarters on Tennessee Avenue and the Boardwalk. More than merely an ardent fan, she was helpful, ready at any moment to sew a strap that broke just before appearance time, to deliver a message outside the walls of the hotel where the contestants were sequestered.

Florence lectured her family about the high morality that attended the pageant. To prevent the kinds of scandals of which the hotel owners had been so fearful, the girls were not allowed to see any man, neither brother nor father, let alone a male acquaintance, during the entire week they were competing in Atlantic City. ‘No talking to any man, relative or not, in case the onlookers or the judges might think they were their boyfriends, so they would begin to wonder if the girls were pure.' Florence's best moments came when she was asked by a lovesick contestant to place a telephone call out of earshot of her trainer, her chaperon or a hostess. Such a service was not against the rules. Florence carefully wrote down the message and delivered it on a Boardwalk telephone to Harvey, or Billy-Lee or Derwin, who was staying nearby in an inexpensive rooming house. Then she wrote on the back of the note the boyfriend's response, always full of tenderness, good wishes and avid mention of reunion. She enjoyed the game of reporting what he said to Miss Idaho or Miss New Mexico, at a rare moment when no one else was around.

Florence had no gift for evocative narrative. Of course, her failure mattered not at all to Joseph, who hardly listened. But Maud had to settle for statistics and the special nomenclature she was treated to: ‘evening gown' always, never ‘dress'; ‘swimsuit' for ‘bathing suit.' ‘Talent' for what were performances that showed very little evidence of competence. She wished her mother had been endowed with more understanding, more insight. She wanted to understand why the girls submitted themselves to the terrible rigors of the display, why the helpers devoted their lives to the enterprise. What brought thousands of spectators to Atlantic City to see the week of events? Most of all, Maud needed to know why, compulsively and totally absorbed, Florence Noon went year and year after year to witness every step of the process that led to the crowning of a Miss America.

T
HERE ARE NO REMOTE PLACES
left on this planet. Visitors, tourists, explorers, crowd into every faraway corner, creating spoilage or ‘restoration,' like imitators copying old masters in museums. The old place is ‘improved,' so that it becomes common, even comic. The last frontier, the only remote place, is the interior of the self. The final privacy.

Elizabeth Becker, called Liz almost from the day she was born, grew up in Greenwich Village, a cozy, narrow-streeted and alleyed area of New York City, in a small apartment on Christopher Street. She bicycled in Washington Square Park around the greened-over statue of Garibaldi, shooting marbles in the slutch around the trees with Italian kids whose fathers played checkers on the benches nearby. She jumped rope with skillful barefoot Chinese kids from Bleecker Street. When she was older, she wandered the short streets and mews that pushed off from the Square in every direction. To her satisfaction her life was perfectly haphazard, a happy characteristic she was always to attribute to never seeing anything odd about West Fourth Street and West Eleventh Street crossing each other in the Village's comfortable illogic. To most New Yorkers, in those days, the Village was a puzzle, remote and almost unknown.

Liz's parents had once been Village bohemians, had known Maxwell Bodenheim to say hello to on Eighth Street, had hobnobbed with artists whose studios faced compulsively north as though only the light from that direction could illuminate their privileged canvases. Once, just before they were married, while they were still very good young friends, bedmates and classmates at college, Liz's parents had been invited to Friday-afternoon tea at the Bank Street apartment of Edith Lewis and Willa Cather. ‘What was she like?' Liz asked, meaning the novelist whose Nebraska novels of the twenties she had read in high school. ‘Very stolid. Very silent. Not interesting to me,' her father said. ‘No interest at all in politics, or people, for that matter, that I could see. And that was in nineteen twenty-seven that we went, the year Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died.'

Liz admired her parents. Muriel and Marcus Becker were good-humored, gentle people who accepted the early decline in their fortunes with a stoic grace. After graduation from college—he had been a much commended political science student at City College of New York and she a history major, Phi Beta Kappa, at Hunter—they were almost instant successes. They earned their doctorates at Columbia while they taught beginning classes at New York University, he at the Heights, she at the Square. Neither of them had spent a day of their lives in a classroom beyond the environs of the city. They married at City Hall, quietly confident of their fortunes, in love with each other, their scholarly subjects, Manhattan island.

As teachers the Beckers made valiant efforts to hide their deep and growing radicalism, their belief that college teachers, like machinists and coal miners, should form unions, their convictions that Marx and Lenin were relevant to the injustices of the United States. Except for class preparations and scholarly journals in their fields, their reading matter was confined to the
New Masses
, which arrived at Two Christopher Street in plain brown wrapper, and the
Daily Worker
, which they bought on Union Square and took home wrapped in the more acceptable
New York Times
. Their admiration for Joseph Stalin and Earl Browder was undeviating. Liz, during her early, untroubled, park-green and sidewalk-gray childhood, lived with rallies, leaflets and demonstrations while her parents took her everywhere with them in the evening: to meetings where she played games with herself on a camp chair at the back of rooms in which, far up front, hung a red banner with a yellow hammer and sickle imprinted on it and beside it the American flag. While she did her homework she often looked up at the faces of martyred Tom Mooney, Earl Browder, William Foster and the Scottsboro boys. A thin, neurasthenic-looking boy named Wendell Cohen sometimes played with Liz, until Muriel said he had to go to the Saranac Lake sanitorium to be cured of his cough.

The two instructors were dismissed from their institutions in the same year, while Liz was still in grade school. It was ‘the end of the term,' a phrase Liz was always to use for a catastrophic conclusion to anything in her life, although at the time it seemed bland enough. For four months they were unable to pay the rent, until Marcus at last got employment as a janitor (‘maintenance worker,' he said, smiling, when anyone asked him what he did) at the tall Metropolitan Life Insurance building uptown from where they lived. Very quickly he was elected union representative. Nothing changed for Liz during that rough time. The rooted happiness of her childhood spent with two dedicated and single-minded parents who loved her went on. Their hard times were a proper part of the country's widespread depression. For a long time her unemployed mother stayed at home with her. Muriel taught her labor history, a part of American history PS 64 did not offer its students. Liz learned about the Russian Revolution, about Nikolai Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Aleksandr Kerenski, heroes and villains omitted from the public school curriculum.

Liz and Muriel walked the streets of the Village together, looking into the windows of shops that sold peasant blouses and skirts, stretched canvases and tubes of paint surrounding wood-block heads and jointed arms and hands for use as painters' models, and prints by Village artists with scenes of dark-faced longshoremen unloading immense Cunard liners, and black sharecroppers picking cotton under burning suns. At home Liz and her mother listened to records. Liz's childhood rang with workers' songs played on their wind-up Victrola. She knew who Joe Hill was before she heard about Thomas Jefferson, the Southern national hero who was never given high marks by her parents, because he was known to have owned slaves. She loved the sonorous bass of Paul Robeson, the harmonies and elevated sentiments of the Weavers, Leadbelly's gruff prison chants. To her, music was the Movement and the Party, the brave, optimistic words and pounding rhythms to which the Beckers marched on May Day. By the time she was twelve she knew all the verses of the Internationale (‘Arise, you prisoners of starvation/Arise, you wretched of the earth') and most of Woody Guthrie's lyrics.

When she was very young, Liz admired her zealous parents because she thought there was no one they were afraid of. The police, pushing them away from the doors of buildings they were picketing, held no official terrors for them. They clasped arms confidently with locked-out workers and stood their ground against scabs and institutional guards. Both were often arrested. Once, when they were taken out of Washington Square Park for helping to raise a banner on the pole for the American flag saying
ARMS FOR DEMOCRATIC SPAIN
, a comrade (that was how he introduced himself to her and she understood at once: ‘I am Marcus's friend, Comrade Earl') came to her and took her to his apartment, where, with his family, she was fed stew and milk and home-baked bread.

As she grew older, Liz discovered to her surprise that her parents' fearlessness did not extend to their own bodies. Small flaws appeared in the brave tapestry of their mutual valor. Their fears were fixed on Muriel's childbirth and Marcus's teeth. ‘I will never go through it again,' Liz grew up hearing. ‘They were the worst hours you could ever imagine. A breech birth, feet first. Terrible tearing. Pain, volcanic eruptions, it seemed like, for thirty-seven hours. Blood. Never again. Not for anything.' Each time Liz heard the story, a new butchery was added: ‘Holes in my palms from my nails,' until Liz came to look upon giving birth as a kind of extinction, a catastrophic, long drawn out murder of the mother by the bombarding passage of the baby out of a place that ripped and bled mightily and could, with bad luck, lead to maternal death.

As for Marcus, he lived in mortal fear of the dentist. He was a private man, whose façade was brazenly, openly public. He showed his face willingly to the owners, the police, the fascist National Guard, the Klan, the Legion. But his true self was hidden. He hated to be touched by anyone he did not know and could not bear the idea of anyone examining his teeth. To him, his mouth, like other secret places in his body, was intimate and forbidden to scrutiny. ‘I cannot bear to have him look into my mouth,' he told Liz. From that holy place should emerge only the sacred vocabulary of political truth, the maxims of Marx and Lenin, the saintly sayings of Stalin, and a vague, unpleasant odor of tobacco, vodka and unclean teeth. Into it went all the godly choices of his sustenance: the bread of life, and ‘the wine of astonishment,' as the Psalms say. ‘The soup du jour,' he would joke to his wife, ‘and nothing else. No probes, no picks and axes and drills, no brushes. They all disturb the balance of nature.' Marcus never went to the dentist. His teeth turned yellow and then brown from tobacco and accumulated tartar and plaque. He believed the disturbing action of a toothpick or a brush would only activate the solid wastes that had gathered to protect his gums against infection from the outside, and the valleys and peaks of his teeth against invasion and decay. While Liz was growing up and taken to the dentist every year by her attentive mother, she watched the slow disappearance of her father's teeth. As he sat reading one of his pamphlets from International Publishers, she saw him poke into his mouth with his index finger, holding it in one place for long periods of time, moving it slightly, back and forth. He was open about what he was doing. ‘I make no bones about it' was his way of transforming his dentulous act into a joke. A tooth having offended him by its weakness in its socket, he was engaged in wiggling it, in and out, around and around, one week accomplishing a small root crack, the next causing a piece to give way entirely. Then the crack, another long week of probe and shake, push and propel, until the final snap, and the tooth was out, spit into his hand, saved in an envelope marked ‘Marcus's canines, bicuspids, molars and incisors.' At each extraction he would exult to Muriel and Liz, ‘No expense. No pain. Even some pleasure in the process. Do-it-yourself patience and instinctive skill. That's the secret.' ‘No teeth is the secret,' said Muriel. ‘Well, yes. But when they're all gone, I will buy some fine, shapely, Sanforized new ones that I will clean in baking soda.'