Free The Magician's Girl by Doris Grumbach Page B

clerestory of unexpected design that embellished the utilitarian walls. On each side of the doors hung glass-globed kerosene lamps, their wicks white and ready. Liz had never seen them lit. From her spot at the stove she listened for the train in a state of high excitement, every time, every train. She could hear it before she saw it, through the gigantic rumble of the floorboards. Then she rushed through the doors to watch its square-faced front come toward her, a lighted great eye in the center of its forehead, approaching so fast it seemed to be rammed from behind. Its tail coach was on fire, Liz used to imagine. She waited on the wooden platform, which shook as if it were afraid for its life at every approach of a train. She stood among the black-overcoated men in fedora hats, their collars turned up, their gloved hands pushed down into their pockets, and women in cloche hats over their bobbed hair, looking pin-headed after the large-hatted styles of her mother’s generation.
    The train paused, twitching like some malevolent bird, just long enough to take on passengers. Liz sat down and turned at once to the window as the El train began its wonderful journey uptown. Carried forward in such upraised splendor, Liz was given a view of a new level of humanity, the late-night workers climbing out of their bedclothes and their iron beds, their bare skin wrinkled from sleep. Children, leaning on pillows gray from train soot on windowsills lining the El’s tracks, watched with shining eyes the passage of the train. Old men, stout, white-haired women, and slim young black men looked out, watching, Liz was sure, until the train passed them. The magnificent monster left in its wake clouds of exhaust as thick as soup, spreading over the whole of Third Avenue like an ebony seine. In the Sixties, where it made a stop, Liz often saw the same man, his face reddened with drink and sleep, the alcohol, Liz imagined, having been provided by McManus Bar and Grill handily situated below the window where he stood, pulling on his shirt to prepare for his importunate descent. In the Seventies, women were drying their clean hair in the inky air, and others, made lazy by fat, taking up their stations for the day on folded blankets, were leaning against the black grates over the bottom of their window, wires put there to protect their children from falling to the sidewalk below. In her shutter-quick glimpses of the possible comedy and drama of these lives, Liz found meat and drink for her imagination, sustenance for her growing life of amazement.
    The ride uptown was a revelation for her, an epiphany, a stage on which another world existed, a lesson on how people escaped the turmoil of their rooms and themselves to look out at any view offered them for deliverance from the inside, turning away from the chatter, protestations and domestic keening, she imagined, to listen to the anonymous roaring arrivals and departures of the El. She pushed her face as close as possible to the dirty window and retreated, drawing into the privacy of her interior self the second-story level of humanity.
    Because Julia Richmond High offered no art courses, Muriel had introduced Liz to the marvels of museums, and to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street. Liz came to prefer them to the sedate and dusty rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, one opening upon the other like an endless budding organism. On Fifty-seventh Street the paintings hung in the bright rooms seemed recent, still wet, like newly hatched birds, unheralded in their shining paint, announcing unheard-of visions and uncatalogued trends. No reputations stood between Liz and the pictures she looked at. She did not need to know the painters’ histories, and was therefore required to hold no opinion about what she was looking at. Her sense of freedom was immense.
    One day, in the last gallery she had planned to visit, Liz came upon two rooms of non-art, as she first thought of it: photographs, mounted