The Magician's Girl (3 page)

She would trust no one to hold her prize check until her father brought home the cash for it from his haberdashery store on the Bowery. Minna said, ‘Tomorrow is the day I go for my bike.' Her father smiled. ‘Remember, you keep it in the basement and walk it on the sidewalk to the park. Eighty-sixth Street is too busy to ride on.' Her mother, who seemed to have surrendered wordlessly to the fated purchase, said nothing more.

To Minna the new bicycle was the most beautiful object in the world. Its fenders were painted white, the metal tubes of the framework were red, the handlebars cuffed in ridged black rubber, comfortable and reassuring to the hand. When she reversed the pedals the brakes instantly responded, like magic. The wheel spokes shone and flashed as they turned, and the saddlelike seat, which could be raised or lowered, felt strong and supportive when she rode. Dolly Sudermann also had a bike, an elderly remnant of her father's Oslo boyhood. The two girls kept their bicycles together in the washroom in the basement, near the dumbwaiter.

In the early days of June, when New York throws off its old age of winter and becomes, in the bright sun and clear air, young and new again, and before summer camp in the Catskills was imposed upon the reluctant Minna, the two girls met every day in the basement and helped each other bring their bicycles up the steps. On the day of the great neighborhood excitement, they started to walk to the park, their bikes pushed along at their sides. They were discussing their favorite subject, their beloved machines. Dolly's was sturdier and had a more interesting history. Minna's, they agreed, was fancier and technologically more advanced. At the corner of Columbus Avenue they saw a little clutch of police cars. ‘An accident,' said Dolly. They could see no broken glass in the gutter, no remains of tires or cars with battered fenders. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in a thick circle. The girls came closer but were unable to enter the circle to see what everyone was looking at. A policeman called, ‘Stand back. Stand back.' They heard then the high whine of an approaching ambulance. The crowd, almost as one, turned toward the gutter, where, in a moment, an ambulance backed between the police cars. Two men carrying a stretcher leaped out of the rear of the ambulance. The girls put the stands down over the rear wheels of their bicycles and followed the attendants into the midst of the crowd.

‘Mr. Weisfeld,' said Dolly. Minna recognized the old man who ran the cigar store on the corner, a pie-shaped little place where her father bought Camels and newspapers and where she and Dolly purchased penny candy to sustain them on their way to the park every afternoon. Mr. Weisfeld lay on his back, his eyes fixed on the sky as if he were searching for birds and planes. The gray sidewalk under his head was now stained red, so red that the blood looked false, like the tomato sauce Minna had seen a character shed in a stage play. ‘Is he dead?' whispered Minna. ‘I can't tell,' Dolly said. ‘He looks dead.'

Minna's heart beat so loud and fast that she found it difficult to breathe. She gulped and lowered her head to stare instead at her brown oxfords. ‘O God, make him alive,' she said to herself. She prayed for Mr. Weisfeld because he was an old man and very nice to them always with his licorice and Maryjanes and did not deserve to die this way, stretched out on the dirty cement full of blackened gum pieces and dog stuff, his blood coloring the cracks in the cement.

‘Who shot him?' she whispered to a man beside her wearing a yarmulke. ‘I don't know. Someone said he wouldn't pay protection. The mob, someone like that.' ‘What does that mean, protection?' she asked Dolly, but Dolly whispered, ‘I don't know.' The man in the yarmulke had moved away toward the outer rim of the circle. White-coated attendants lifted Mr. Weisfeld onto the stretcher, taking great care, as if he were alive, so Minna took heart. They raised him from the sidewalk and walked with short steps to the ambulance. The policemen were pushing everyone away. ‘Disperse,' said one of them to Minna and Dolly. At once, obediently, they started toward their bicycles. As Minna turned away she saw it: what remained on the gray sidewalk of Mr. Weisfeld, a curved, almost transparent piece of skull, like an eggshell, thin and red-tinted, lying where his head had been. A few gray hairs protruded from it. ‘O God, did you see that?' Minna asked Dolly. ‘What?' ‘That—that piece of Mr. Weisfeld they left there?' ‘No, I didn't. Where?'

But Minna had seen it, and would see it many times in black dreams, in her morose fantasies, for the rest of her life. Her vision had fallen upon the residue of a life she had known briefly and a death she had almost witnessed, a minute piece of a person left behind to meld into the anonymous walk.

Oh yes, the bicycle. A month to the day after Minna spent her character money on her heart's desire, the bicycle was stolen from the basement and never recovered. Mr. Sudermann suspected one of the delivery boys, who had been dazzled by the newness and beauty of the machine. Dolly's bike beside it remained untouched. But it could not be proven—the bicycle was gone forever. Hortense sympathized with Minna; inwardly she rejoiced. Leon, who controlled the family purse strings, doling out allowances to both Hortense and Minna, made no offer to replace it. Minna wept and was angry after her mother suggested that the loss may well have saved her life. But when her sadness passed, Minna, accustomed to small shocks to her bland and protected existence, became philosophical and accepted her loss as a fitting test. Still, the price was high, and she resolved never to have character, whatever that meant, again.

For those who were adolescents in the early thirties the high tor of drama was the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. For Minna it was her first taste of suspense. She was to weigh other great events always against the state of heightened emotion and tension in which she lived for the seventy-two days of the search. Gabriel Heatter, a radio commentator, called the missing child Little Lindy. When he spoke these words, his voice rang with unctuous sympathy. Over and over, night after night at the supper hour, Heatter rehearsed the heartrending details of the taking of the child from the famous family's house in New Jersey. The whole nation hung upon each subsequent development. Minna never missed his reports, so that Heatter's voice, rolling and damp with anxiety, became the vehicle of her memory. From it she learned the names of the places: Sourland for the Lindbergh estate, and Hopewell, the nearest town. They fell into a Dickensian pattern of significant meaning for her remembered version of the story. Minna thought the names were bestowed on the shocking drama by a higher power with literary pretensions. The whole maternal population of the country, especially in the cities close to the affected area, was filled with apprehension. Mothers accompanied their young children to school and waited for them outside the buildings at three o'clock, under the conviction that kidnapping, like cholera and diphtheria, was catching and would now reach epidemic proportions to threaten their own offspring. Students and teachers at Minna's high school took the cause of the lost baby to themselves. Everyone prayed in assembly for his safety. Newspapers sold out every edition whether they had anything to add to the saga or not, while the
Daily News
and the
Mirror
made certain that black headlines of small import covered their front pages daily. Sales of radios rose dramatically all over the country.

When a small body was found barely two miles from the Lindbergh compound and identified by Little Lindy's weary father (still referred to as Lucky Lindy in the news reports), the story reached every home, every business place and the streets in a matter of minutes. Theater managers interrupted motion-picture performances to inform the patrons, just as the Pathé News was about to start. At Hunter College High School, Minna and her friends heard the grisly news from their history teacher, who had turned on the radio in the teachers' room during the lunch hour. The girls cried, holding one another's hands. Afterward they vowed retribution upon the kidnappers if they should be caught. Nothing would be too awful for punishment, they all decided, wiping their tears and grimly determining the nature of the torture to be inflicted. Outside, many of the city's church bells rang out in a constant tintinnabulation, the rectors, priests and rabbis of the city's religious institutions having decided in advance that God and His vengeful legions should not be left out of current events.

The drama went on and on. Minna stopped reading her daily book and sat close to the Stromberg-Carlson every evening while the search for the kidnappers continued. When a rough-looking carpenter who was unfortunate enough to be German passed along one of the ransom bills, Hortense sighed with relief. Her daughter, her sole concern, was safe, and the guilty Hun, as the tabloid newspapers referred to him, was surely to be executed almost at once. The trial, to everyone's way of thinking, was a mere formality. Minna hung on every word communicated to her by Gabriel Heatter, about the evidence, the cross-examinations, the unlikely story told by the guilty man, the incriminating ladder, the family's unassuaged grief. She held her breath until the conviction was announced, and in unison with her friends expressed the fervent belief that execution in the electric chair should take place immediately.

On the day of the execution, Minna was home from college for spring recess. Hortense and Leon ate their dinner while the radio was playing, eager to know all the details of the monster's death. By dessert they had heard it all. But Minna could eat nothing after Heatter told of the attached wires and the moment of the three jolts that ran through the body of the convicted man, burning the skin of his hands and feet, avenging in a few seconds the vicious murder of a child who had not been permitted to live until its second birthday. Leon Grant left the table, announcing he was going back downtown to work, Hortense took Minna in her arms and held her tight for a minute. Then they went to their rooms, as if the event just concluded required some kind of sacramental separation.

Minna lay on her bed, looking out of the window at which the first great terror of her life had appeared, thinking of the Christmas doll still wrapped up on the floor of her closet, and the remains of Little Lindy decayed beyond recognition but safely laid in the family plot. The whole frightful drama was over. Minna resisted going back to her bland existence, to the everyday world of collegiate good behavior and obedient citizenship. What would now provide color and tension in her life? She realized that she had been living for four years in a great piece of national theater, experiencing a heightened sense of what the spectacle of death could provide to the ordinary private life. She was disappointed that it was over, reluctant to return to the letdown realities of Hortense's smothering love, Leon's cheerful businessman's dishonesties and the dull rituals of college. Now for the first time, she understood the power of an historic event, which surely what they heard about the Lindbergh case was, and the growing importance it had to her life.

At thirteen Minna developed a stammer. An elocution teacher to whom the English teacher sent her said it was nerves. She added that girls almost never stammered, which made Minna's affliction even more mysterious. ‘I try … n-n-not to,' she said, but effort made it worse. The harder she struggled the more difficult it was to talk. When she volunteered to answer a question in class, her attempts produced visible grimaces of annoyance on the faces of her classmates, and terrible embarrassment for Minna. Finally, Michael Casey, the principal, intervened. Hortense was asked to visit the school. ‘She is not doing well in academic subjects, and her speech is, well … very bad,' Michael Casey told Mrs. Grant. Hortense found this impossible to believe. She knew about the stammer, to a small extent, but since Minna had grown quite silent in her adolescence, it had not seemed important to her. But academic subjects! Hortense believed Minna was close to being a genius, a wonderfully endowed, intellectual girl. Principal Casey went on, ‘The home arts department here is very good.' Mrs. Grant would hear no more. With only five years of formal schooling herself (before her tenant-farmer father shipped her, his first of ten children, to America), Hortense had an inordinate respect for academic subjects. She argued with the principal and at last was able to persuade him to retest Minna with the new Binet-Otis test she had read about, designed to establish her intelligence quotient. In this way Minna convinced him she could be readmitted into Civics, World History, and Regents English. Saved from tutelage in the arts of cooking and sewing, Minna knew she had to settle her attention on academics, as Principal Casey referred to the subjects she had been neglecting.

One of the reasons for her failures in the past was clear: Minna had developed a passion for swimming. Her high school did not have a pool, but after school there was one within walking distance, in a Salvation Army building. There, every afternoon, the club to which she belonged met. They named themselves the Gertrude Ederle Swim Club eight years after their idol became the first woman to swim the English Channel. The club worshipped the conqueror of those brutal waters; they had memorized every detail of her life and great effort. Hortense had been nervous about swimming, for she feared water and had spent her entire passage to America under the covers in her bunk in the room on the
Mauritania
she shared with three other girls going to be maids in New York households. But Hortense saw Minna swim in a meet in the last days of summer camp. She allowed her to join the club, believing there was safety in numbers: twelve girls trained together every afternoon and long hours on the weekend, practicing their Australian crawl, their resting tread, their flips and turns. Their ambition was to swim the Channel.

Minna's relationship to water was loving. Moving in it, she felt alive, clean, respected and clever. Her body had developed and was now slender and well shaped, although she was not very tall. Her shoulders broadening with the crawl, her hips remained narrow under the exercise of her rhythmic kicking. Her body was suited to movement in the element she found preferable to any other. Looking at her friend and swimming partner, Emma Lifson, by far the best swimmer among the dozen, Minna enjoyed the changes that came about in her own person since she had fallen in love with the water. Emma was a solid, husky, thickset girl, like Minna a single piece of well-integrated machinery but a log to Minna's twig.