The Magician's Girl Read Online Free PDF

(From Cape Griz-Nez to Dover on August sixth, nineteen hundred and twenty-six, in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, through choppy two-foot waves, the waters of the Channel inhospitable to the twenty-year-old swimmer.) She turned by flipping over neatly, pushing away from the green side of the pool and pressing on with her inexorable Australian crawl. (The daughter of a German butcher with a store on Amsterdam Avenue, a member of the Women’s Swimming Association at thirteen, an Olympic gold medal hung on her broad chest at eighteen for her heroic part in the free-style relay team’s efforts, tangled with two bronze medals for the one hundred meter and the four hundred meter races.) Minna rehearsed all the details as she swam, trusting example to spur her on. Stroking hard, she pictured seven black-framed certificates hanging in the Ederle family house in Queens awarded for Gertrude’s amateur triumphs, one for each of her world records before she was nineteen.
    Minna swam beside Emma Lifson. Stroke for stroke they matched each other, pushing for five miles. Minna pounded relentlessly against the low-choppy pool water. (Against the cutting sea for almost thirty interminable miles, close to the boat operated by her trainer Thomas Burgess, near and yet far enough away from it not to be tempted by the prospect of relief by holding, even briefly, to the side for warm tea in her frozen esophagus, for soup she knew he carried with him in the hold, unable to hear anything because the slashing sea slammed against her ears, she was almost blinded by the wall of water every time she turned her head and raised it to breathe.)
    All Minna’s resources were required for her to finish her prescribed miles. From some hidden spring she brought up Gertrude’s example, re-creating her unsuccessful first swim, when the appalling sea had conquered Gertrude two miles from the harbor of Dover. Her frozen mouth gasping for air, instead had sucked in saltwater. She gagged and threw up into the spume that crashed over her head. Minna felt herself sinking with Gertrude when Thomas Burgess reached out to grab her. Even then Gertrude tried to shake herself free of his rescuing hands. ‘Come out,’ Burgess said. She spit water at his hand and said, ‘What for?’ But at last she had to surrender to the rejection of the hostile sea.
    Pushing the water against its will, it seemed to Minna, she reached and kicked to travel the last laps. (Twelve months later Ederle had returned to the same malignant waters, her spirits bolstered by small sums of money given her by the Daily News and the Chicago Tribune , to whom she promised ‘the jump’ over the other papers for her personal story when she made it. In the boat this time was a famous journalist named Westbrook Pegler, accompanied by his wife. He was there as a ghost, the man the Chicago Tribune had hired to put words to her every stroke, her every hard breath, to the moment that she felt the bottom under her at Dover and changed from fish to woman, erect and triumphant.)
    Minna and Emma Lifson finish their stint in the pool at almost the same moment as Minna sees Gertrude step ashore, rejecting Thomas’s offered support, weary but still strong. ‘What now?’ Gertrude is wondering. She falls heavily upon the pier, scraping her thigh, and sees her body is black with the Channel’s fishy wastes. A man in a blue uniform (yes, this is history) steps up to her as she lies gasping on the dock, and bends down. ‘May I see your passport?’ he says. ‘What else?’ she says to herself.
    While Minna dresses she turns her reverie to talk and tells Emma about Gertrude Ederle. She will visit her German forebears in the Black Forest for a few weeks, see the village that bred her extraordinary physique. Bushels of wastepaper and ticker tape will rain down on her as she rides up Broadway in an open car between Mayor Jimmy Walker and Grover Whalen,