The Magician's Girl by Doris Grumbach Read Free Book Online

the quatrain. There, in a burst of expansive embrasure, a large, bumbling Latin abstraction appeared, contrasting sharply with the spare materials of the first three lines. Hers was a construction starting on cement footings and rising ethereally into a poetic cosmos.
    Summers were dull for Spencer and Maud. Their mother spent her free time fall housecleaning in advance. Fixed in Maud’s memory was the summer she was seven. Her parents decided to paint the rough-hewn rafters and walls of her room and Spencer’s plaster ceiling. It was the hottest summer on record for upstate New York. Many days the temperature reached one hundred degrees. The pump in the side yard refused to work, the cistern became low, revealing to Maud’s horror its usually submerged collection of dead weasels, rats, mice and chipmunks. But still Florence drew water from the cistern while they waited for their father to come home on leave to fix the well. Once Spencer rescued a struggling woodchuck from the water and set him loose near his hole.
    During the painting and whitewashing of their rooms, Maud and Spencer were sent to swim in the river. ‘The only cool place in the whole northeast,’ their father said. In those days the Hudson was clear and clean, a fast-moving river, with its own eccentric current, and very cold. Village kids played and swam there on hot summer days, plunging into the river from wooden boards, a frame for the banks that had been installed when New Baltimore was a supplier of ice to New York City.
    At fourteen Spencer was a good swimmer. That summer, when they spent so many hours at the river, he taught Maud to swim. It was easy. She was a little tub of a girl who could float almost at once on her stomach. Quickly she acquired a serviceable dog paddle. When she grew tired she sat on the splintered boards and watched Spencer dive in, over and over again, with the town boys, their brown legs flopping wildly into the blue river. Some less skillful boys took great jumps holding their noses, bending their legs like frogs beneath them. While still airborne they screamed defiance at the passing boatmen, who waved to them from their tugs. Maud ignored the other children her age because their splashings frightened her. She paddled happily in the shallow whorls made by the jumping boys and imagined they were creating little pools for her pleasure.
    Always she was aware of Spencer, of his lithe body, his long hands and feet still a little out of proportion to his thin trunk and narrow, blond head. She thought him the most beautiful boy in the world, and told her mother her opinion. ‘Boys are handsome, girls are beautiful,’ her mother told her. But Maud knew she could not be right. For was she not an ugly girl?
    While Joseph Noon was still on leave, and halfway through the work on Spencer’s room, Spencer got sick. It was a Saturday, Maud was to remember. Maud and Spencer had come back from a long day on the river, Maud holding on as always to his cold hand as they walked up the steep hill, pleased to be allowed to do so. Three times during the long trudge she felt him shudder. At dinner his face flushed and he had no appetite for the Saturday-night lamb stew. Florence sent him to bed and came up later to put an extra blanket over him.
    Maud and Spencer called their mother by her first name, at her request, as soon as they were old enough to know what it was. ‘Mother’ seemed to them a word for all such persons and did not apply to one particular instance, whereas Florence was the word given to their mother alone. Florence went upstairs again early in the evening to see to him. After Maud had gone to bed, she heard Spencer call, ‘Mother,’ and so she knew he was sick. She heard him call again a few times during the night, each call sounding more urgent, before Florence was roused from her heavy sleep and came to him. The next morning Spencer had a high fever and pain in his arms and legs.