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

that direction could illuminate their privileged canvases. Once, just before they were married, while they were still very good young friends, bedmates and classmates at college, Liz’s parents had been invited to Friday-afternoon tea at the Bank Street apartment of Edith Lewis and Willa Cather. ‘What was she like?’ Liz asked, meaning the novelist whose Nebraska novels of the twenties she had read in high school. ‘Very stolid. Very silent. Not interesting to me,’ her father said. ‘No interest at all in politics, or people, for that matter, that I could see. And that was in nineteen twenty-seven that we went, the year Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died.’
    Liz admired her parents. Muriel and Marcus Becker were good-humored, gentle people who accepted the early decline in their fortunes with a stoic grace. After graduation from college—he had been a much commended political science student at City College of New York and she a history major, Phi Beta Kappa, at Hunter—they were almost instant successes. They earned their doctorates at Columbia while they taught beginning classes at New York University, he at the Heights, she at the Square. Neither of them had spent a day of their lives in a classroom beyond the environs of the city. They married at City Hall, quietly confident of their fortunes, in love with each other, their scholarly subjects, Manhattan island.
    As teachers the Beckers made valiant efforts to hide their deep and growing radicalism, their belief that college teachers, like machinists and coal miners, should form unions, their convictions that Marx and Lenin were relevant to the injustices of the United States. Except for class preparations and scholarly journals in their fields, their reading matter was confined to the New Masses , which arrived at Two Christopher Street in plain brown wrapper, and the Daily Worker , which they bought on Union Square and took home wrapped in the more acceptable New York Times . Their admiration for Joseph Stalin and Earl Browder was undeviating. Liz, during her early, untroubled, park-green and sidewalk-gray childhood, lived with rallies, leaflets and demonstrations while her parents took her everywhere with them in the evening: to meetings where she played games with herself on a camp chair at the back of rooms in which, far up front, hung a red banner with a yellow hammer and sickle imprinted on it and beside it the American flag. While she did her homework she often looked up at the faces of martyred Tom Mooney, Earl Browder, William Foster and the Scottsboro boys. A thin, neurasthenic-looking boy named Wendell Cohen sometimes played with Liz, until Muriel said he had to go to the Saranac Lake sanitorium to be cured of his cough.
    The two instructors were dismissed from their institutions in the same year, while Liz was still in grade school. It was ‘the end of the term,’ a phrase Liz was always to use for a catastrophic conclusion to anything in her life, although at the time it seemed bland enough. For four months they were unable to pay the rent, until Marcus at last got employment as a janitor (‘maintenance worker,’ he said, smiling, when anyone asked him what he did) at the tall Metropolitan Life Insurance building uptown from where they lived. Very quickly he was elected union representative. Nothing changed for Liz during that rough time. The rooted happiness of her childhood spent with two dedicated and single-minded parents who loved her went on. Their hard times were a proper part of the country’s widespread depression. For a long time her unemployed mother stayed at home with her. Muriel taught her labor history, a part of American history PS 64 did not offer its students. Liz learned about the Russian Revolution, about Nikolai Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Aleksandr Kerenski, heroes and villains omitted from the public school curriculum.
    Liz and Muriel walked the streets of the Village together,