The Magician's Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

the official greeter for celebrities. For this great occasion she wears her cloche hat over her close-cropped hair, her straight black tie holding together the starched collar of her man’s shirt, her suit jacket buttoned stiffly over the rugged chest and arms that had subdued the Channel. She will spend eight weeks in the company of Hollywood stars making a foolish movie called Swim Girls Swim , in which she will appear as the instructor of champion Gertrude Ederle, played by the beautiful and curvaceous Bebe Daniels. She will sign her name to a paragraph endorsing the virtues of an insect destroyer call Flit. Holding the long metal tube in one hand, the plunger in the other, dressed in her familiar tank suit and still wearing her Channel-conquering white cap, she stands at the edge of a Hollywood pool, ready to assault hordes of large pests, looking strapping, muscular, flat-footed, thick-hipped, the very model of courage and stoutheartedness.
    â€˜What is it with you and Gertrude Ederle?’ Emma asked. ‘I don’t know. I guess I like great swimmers, and success stories. And my mother’s afraid of the water,’ said Minna and laughed.
    Minna was first to drop out of the Gertrude Ederle club. She felt the pressure of approaching graduation. Preparing to take the entrance examination for Barnard College, she had to read the books on the Regents’ required list she had blithely ignored for so long. After two years of illusory aquatic freedom, she returned to the dry ground of Silas Marner, Ethan Frome and The Old Curiosity Shop , to memorize the organization of the government of the State of New York, and to acquire (with a tutor her parents provided for her) some dim idea of what biology and trigonometry were about.
    Unfortunately, it was true. Minna’s psyche was now formed, perhaps deformed. She was destined to be an anxious young woman, filled with inherited and communicated maternal fears, and compounded with some she had herself contributed to her affrighted spirit. Even swimming eventually became a source of dread. Once, in a pool footbath, she believed, she caught a lingering case of athlete’s foot. After that she swam only in fresh water or, as she said she preferred, in the Atlantic Ocean. She plunged into rough waves, white water, voracious breakers, diving without hesitation, it seemed. And every time, without exception, she was terrified, as though the ocean were an enemy, the sum total of her fears, the culminative phobia that canceled out the fading pleasure of her youth and made itself part of the ferocious and threatening world around her.
    T HE ODORS OF ONE ’ S PAST . Maud Mary Noon believed they clung to the inside of the nostrils like snot. It is not true that we do not remember them. Often Maud told Minna and Liz about the cold days of winter in her early childhood in the tiny Hudson River village of New Baltimore. She was made to play outside in the snowy yard after her mother came home from the night shift at the hospital in Albany, seventeen miles north of the village. It was Maud’s belief that her mother sang and rocked the sick and dying to sleep in the hospital. This was what she meant by ‘having the duty.’ ‘Duty’ was the word used by her mother for her work. ‘I have the night duty,’ she would say to Maud and her brother, Spencer. Maud considered duty to be warmth and comfort. It meant to reach out with maternal, antiseptic hands, to hold patients in her starched white arms.
    Maud’s brother was older. In her memory Spencer always seemed to be in the seventh grade in the red-brick grade school up the hill from them. On her mother’s duty nights the two children stayed at home by themselves, locking the door after their mother went to catch the bus to Albany. Maud relished the phrase ‘catch the bus.’ She had a vision of her mother’s flat white hand thrust forward into the road to pull the moving bus