The Magician's Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Minna was exhilarated by the perfect, mindless movements of her arms and legs. Her small, blond, handsome head (she had to concede her own good looks, looking at Emma in the dressing room) stretched in a straight line with her body as she pulled along the surface of the water, making a smooth, thoughtful progress without once breaking her stroke, always thinking about Gertrude Ederle.