The Magician's Girl (6 page)

Spencer said, ‘I won't go.' ‘Why not?' ‘Because it's for crippled kids and I'm not a cripple. I'm getting better by myself.'

Maud understood that Spencer saw himself as he used to be. That was how she sometimes saw him too. He was afraid he would be reminded of his true state by the other children in the Home. In spite of his protests, Florence took him to Atlantic City. She stayed in a rooming house on Kentucky Avenue while he was bathed and massaged and exercised in the Home. ‘He is having therapy,' she wrote to Maud. ‘Therapy' was the word for treatment, a new and lovely word to Maud, one she was to use several times in the poem about her college teacher, Otto Mile, in lines like ‘Tendered his eye as therapy/To her crippled poems.'

Once while Spencer was being treated, Florence wandered over to the Boardwalk. It was a warm September day and the Boardwalk was clogged with people. Rolling chairs were lined up along the rail facing the sea. In them sat well-dressed elderly couples, their knees covered with bear rugs despite the heat of the day. Florence inched her way through the crowds until she was just behind the chairs. On the sand below she could see a number of young women in bathing dresses and black stockings posing for a photographer. The women held one hand behind their heads, the other seductively on their hips. The photographer's head was lost under the black drape that covered the back of the camera. All Florence could see of him was his bent body, his white-clad legs behind the three poles of the camera stand.

Florence watched for a time. Then she turned to a stick-thin man beside her. He was wearing a bathing suit and a policeman's cap. ‘What is happening down there?' ‘A pageant. They're getting ready. To crown the most beautiful girl in the country.'

Florence was too timid to ask anything else. She gazed at a small dark-haired girl who was turning slowly in her place, lifting her feet delicately now and then as though the sand were very hot. As the girl came to face her, Florence saw she wore a white satin ribbon diagonally across her chest from her shoulder to her hip. On it was printed
MISS TULSA
. Miss Tulsa was, Florence later told Maud, the most beautiful person she had ever seen. Maud imagined Florence felt her own flat, gray and almost formless shape expand into her vision of the dark, shapely beauty. That night on the Million Dollar Pier, in a lavish coronation scene, Florence saw Miss Tulsa crowned Miss America.

Spencer came back from the Home dispirited and not visibly improved. Florence claimed his arm and leg were ‘more supple.' But, watching him try to walk, Maud agreed with Spencer: his leg was growing stiffer, having lost entirely the shape of its muscles. Weekly, the straps within the steel brace needed to be tightened around his white, broomstick leg. But it was true that his arm seemed to be somewhat better despite his resentful inertia. ‘And it would be better still if you would exercise,' Florence said.

Maud understood Spencer's resistance to doing anything to improve his state of health. His fine, useful body had been dealt a terrible blow, his view of himself as helpful older brother and beloved son was destroyed, and he wanted nothing to do with partial restoration, especially not through his own efforts, which he believed were doomed to disappointment. He refused to walk anywhere except around the downstairs of the house. He gave up his room, the books he had so carefully collected, his half-restored Lionel trains, the mock-up of the Globe Theater he had made in junior high school. Florence was told to bring down only his necessary toilet articles and some of his clothes he called his ‘things' and leave them in a corner of the dining room, where his bed was now set up. He refused to go outdoors.

A teacher from the Ravena school district came to see him three times a week and scolded him for never doing his homework or the reading she had assigned him. When Maud came home from school he was always in his special steel chair staring at the little water glass of wildflowers she had picked for him the day before. He took a melancholy pleasure in their moribund state. ‘You can't pick them fast enough to stop their dying. Even I know that. They're like people. If they're picked by God or fate, they die before they have a chance to live,' he told Maud, who already knew the truth of this. She saw it clearly illustrated in this brother she loved so much that her throat and chest ached for him. Her weak eyes were now covered with very heavy glasses she called spectacles, having found that word in
David Copperfield
. ‘These are my new spectacles,' she told her classmates. ‘Am I not a spectacle in my new spectacles?' she would say, having learned that laughing aloud at herself made her bear the laughter of others with better grace. Had she not laughed first? She was grateful to the heavy glasses. Looking at Spencer made her cry, but he could not see it, she believed, and she could blink away the tears. She hated to watch him struggle to the dinner table, gripping his two canes angrily, dragging his leg. With him, she resented the incomprehensible unfairness of the universe.

But her love for him, now a burden in the face of what had happened, did not have to endure her growing up. When Spencer was almost nineteen, and he and Florence had made the September pilgrimage to Atlantic City for the third time, and the therapy was once again of no apparent use, Spencer seemed to take matters into his own hands, or so Maud was always to think. He caught cold, the cold turned to bronchitis and then, so fast that it was hard to believe, into pneumonia. Joseph was home on leave when it happened. He and Florence took Spencer into Albany in the old Ford station wagon. He was admitted into the hospital, and Florence stayed with him at night, sleeping fitfully in the chair in his room. Joseph spent his days there. In four days, they both returned to New Baltimore, without him.

‘Dead? How
could
he be dead?' Maud demanded of Florence. She insisted, ‘He cannot be. It cannot be. There is no
way
he can be dead.' Florence was too upset to answer. Joseph, in his removed, stoical, reasonable way, tried to comfort her. ‘It might be just as well. He hated being the way he was. A cripple.' Maud cried for so many days that her eyes swelled almost shut. The phrases her father chose to allay her grief infuriated her. ‘Maybe he's better out of it.' ‘What do you mean,
it
?' ‘His misery, you know, his life, the way he was, his arm, his leg, the braces and all,' said Joseph softly, half to the stony Florence, half to his irritating daughter, trying not to look at her swollen, red face.

‘It cannot be,' Maud said again and again to no one. Spencer was her childhood, her hope for beauty in the world, her faith in her inner self. She carried around with her a photograph of them together, his hand on her head. The white spaces on the picture turned tan. Across the cracked back he had written, ‘To Beastie from her loving brother Spencer Noon.' In that snapshot she is standing stolidly at his side, a square child in a cotton dress with a large bow at the back and another white bow in her hair just above the barrette. Her fists are clenched at her sides and she is scowling into the camera, her eyes slits, the tip of her tongue showing at the side of her mouth. Liz, her college roommate, said she resembled one of the mongoloid children she liked to photograph. Spencer looks sleek and handsome. His white collar is open at his slender neck, his smile is easy and warm. In this way Maud remembered her brother, frozen into that graceful stance, his hand forever on her ugly, angry head, his beautiful eyes fixed eternally into the lens of the photographer.

In the year after Spencer died, and before Joseph was invalided out of the army, Florence chose a scorching day in August to announce her new plan. ‘Next month I'm taking my vacation. Aunt Louise will come to look after Maud.'

Joseph did not look surprised. ‘Good for you, your furlough. How long?' ‘About a week, I think.' ‘Oh, fine, fine,' said Joseph. ‘The mountains are nice. I once went to a place called Roscoe in the Catskills. It was very nice.'

Maud was thirteen. Since Spencer's death she was often lonely, and she hardly knew Aunt Louise. She said, ‘All by yourself?' Maud expected her to say, ‘I need a rest,' as she always said to her daughter when she had locked her out of the house after her night duty, but she did not. ‘Where are you going?' asked Maud. ‘To Atlantic City.' There was silence. Joseph was thinking about the next day, when he was scheduled to go back to Fort Dix. Maud wondered if her mother was going to Atlantic City because Spencer had been taken there so often for his ‘cure.' In some strange way, perhaps, Maud thought, Florence hoped to encounter his spirit on the expansive Boardwalk.

The announced vacation never came off. Maud remembered it, even better than Florence's subsequent trips to Atlantic City. That year, her mother's fury knew no bounds. Again and again she heard her tell about the malevolent hotel owners in Atlantic City who wanted to discourage the pageant. They said that the women who had been coming to the city were not good types. They cited affairs that developed and subsequent unsavory divorces among attendants at the pageant. ‘Not the contestants, of course, but the men who come to see the pageant and are seduced, you know. Good family men who stay at the big hotels. That's what the owners claim. And the contestants—they say some are vile and obscene.' Maud hung on every word, wanting more details but afraid to ask. ‘Ridiculous,' said Florence. ‘I've been there once and I've never seen anything like that. The girls are beautiful and innocent, every one of them. Not one of them is even married. All good girls.'

Florence's defense to her family of the morality accompanying the Miss America Pageant was to no avail. For five years the hotel men's determined organization won out. The pageant was suspended, the occupants of the rolling wicker chairs traversed the Boardwalk undisturbed by the sight of girls on the sand revealing their charms in their swimsuits, and Florence took no vacation.

In August 1933 Florence said, ‘There's going to be the pageant this year. I'm going.' From then on, she went every year, religiously, as if she were a mendicant on pilgrimage. Each year her life formed a determined parabola. The height of the curve was reached in the early fall with her visit to Atlantic City; the decline occurred after her vacation, when she knew she had eleven months to wait until her return. She became a passionate scholar of the event, avid for all its statistics, much like the lover of sports. She was interested in the given names of the contestants and often regretted not having bestowed one of the more popular ones (Mary, Patricia, Barbara, Carole) upon her daughter. She admired Fay, Lois, Rose, names that more than once had graced the winners. Maud later suspected Florence thought she might have prevented the unfortunate development of her little girl's anatomy if she had bestowed upon her a more auspicious name.

In the winter, Florence's talk was full of such matters as the unusual height of the tallest Miss America, who was five feet eight. Florence herself preferred the smallest winner, five feet one, ‘before my time, so I never actually saw her.' Florence informed Maud that the tiny winner of the very first contest in 1921 had been Miss Washington, D.C. (5′1″), named at a time when the contestants represented cities, not states. Maud early learned to listen, to nod understandingly at Florence's parade of facts and statistics, and to try to remember them, for her mother's sake.

At a time when Maud's own skin was suffering the outrages of pimples and purulent sores (and when she had begun another, hidden, indignity—this one bloody and inflicted on all young girls, her mother told her), Florence railed against the judges of the contest for allowing the contestants to describe their complexions as peachy, or creamy, instead of fair. Maud decided Florence thought these poeticisms a violation of the classic beauty of language she thought fitting for members of the pageant. So intensely did Florence believe in the validity of every aspect of the event that euphemisms offended her sense of propriety. To her the pageant was akin to church processions: holy, blessed, and full of divine grace.

During the years that Florence took her week of rest in Atlantic City, Maud stayed at home with her grouchy, silent Aunt Louise, who was afraid of young girls and therefore imposed rigid discipline upon her. When Aunt Louise died, and Maud was older, she stayed alone with her ailing father. But her knowledge of what went on in the resort city was encyclopedic. She knew how the weather had been last year for the swimsuit competition, who had won the talent show but lost out in the evening gown match. One year Florence had returned in a rage. The winner, the former Miss Connecticut, had, to her eyes, inexcusably wide hips—37½ inches—‘larger than her bust, can you believe that?' To Florence, who believed that absolute symmetry was essential to beauty, it was a scandal. She wrote an indignant letter to the editor of the
Albany Times-Union
, but it was never published, an oversight that angered her even more. ‘Indifference, lack of standards, that's what's the matter with the people in this country.' Three years later, Miss America, formerly Miss Philadelphia, was close to the ideal, with only one half-inch difference between her hips and bust. Her picture was tacked up over the mantel of the Noon house in New Baltimore until August of the year when it was removed in anticipation of September's new queen.

Florence's ambition was to serve a New York State pageant winner as a trainer, or even as a chaperon. She did not aspire to be a hostess. She knew she was ruled out because these were always local Atlantic City women whose favored positions raised them almost to nobility during the magic week of the pageant. Florence was consoled by knowing that, after years of devoted attendance, she was more than qualified to be a chaperon. Only reluctantly did she come to realize that such a responsibility, serving a candidate, utilized three months or more of the lucky lady's year. She would have to give up her job at the hospital, which she could not afford to do.