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

When Maud brought him a glass of milk in the afternoon his eyes were red, as if he had been crying. He told her he could not move his neck. The Ravena doctor was away for the weekend, so Florence relied on her nurse’s skills, washing him down, as she said, with cool water and feeding him liquids, which he threw up almost at once.
    Maud had understood separation before sickness struck Spencer. Her father exemplified it to her, but she had rarely felt pain at his systematic absences. Separation because of Spencer’s illness turned into the terrible anguish of constant loneliness and loss. On the third day of his sickness (Maud remembered that day because it was her seventh birthday but there was no one home to celebrate it with her), her father and Florence took Spencer to the emergency room at the Albany Hospital.
    The months of separation from him that followed were like a deep cut on her knee that festered and scabbed over and then opened whenever she bent it. In September she had to go up the hill to school without him. On Sundays she was allowed to accompany her parents to the hospital during visiting hours. While her parents went in, Maud waited in the parking lot, her eyes fixed on the third-floor windows where, Florence had pointed out to her, the polio ward was. There Spencer lay, breathing in and out with the help of a machine.
    Maud could not remember when the word became part of her secret chants. Polio. Polio. Rolio-polio, from roly-poly, the descriptive word her father used to describe her. ‘Roly-poly polio.’ She whispered the words sadly to herself, feeling in this way that she was part of Spencer’s sickness, and close to him. At seven she wrote another couplet: ‘Spencer sleeps in an iron lung/Why just one? Why just one?’ Maud could not remember how she knew that people had two lungs and never understood why the doctors had chosen to apply the machine to only one. As for her poem, she was surprised at how perfect it was, and amazed that she was able to make up a rhyme almost as good as the poem she was made to learn in first grade: ‘I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree.’ While she much admired the famous poem she did not understand the sentiment. How could anyone think an old tree (there were many of them in New Baltimore) was as good as a poem?
    Staring up at the blank windows of the polio ward, Maud felt her chest contract. She beat her fists against her sides in fury and gritted her teeth. She wept for loneliness and for her beloved brother: ‘Why just one?/Why just one?’ she repeated again and again, the question addressed to the brick hospital walls and to God.
    In the winter of 1925 Spencer was back at home, always in his bed or a chair, the rafters of his room only half whitened. Maud was now afraid of him and cried when Florence made her bring him something. She always hoped he would be in his bed, not propped up in his chair where she could see his useless leg and arm. He had given up reading because his head often ached, and his projects were abandoned after the strength had gone out of his right arm. Maud believed he had given up talking too, or at least he never said anything to her or called Florence. His silence meant to Maud that he was angry at what had happened to him, angry at the abrupt end to his private life in his room with the door shut.
    â€˜Can I get you some water?’ ‘Are you cold?’ ‘Do you want the blanket?’ ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Do you know tonight is Halloween?’ Every sentence Maud directed to him was a question. But he would not answer except to look at her with his beautiful, low-sunken blue eyes, as though her standing there on her two feet was a reproach to him. He was offended, she believed, by her desire and ability to serve him.
    Florence did not work that winter. The family lived very carefully on Joseph Noon’s monthly army check. Maud was made to wear