Masters of Illusions (12 page)

“After…?”

After I was with you for a while.”

“Well, you had become a serious baby. And then you were a serious child. Your father came back and the two of you were the
same. It wasn’t until you were eleven or twelve years old that you got back that merry disposition you inherited from your
mother.”

Margie didn’t tell her aunt that “merry” had just been adolescent nerves.

“And your father… well… I guess I haven’t seen that man laugh since before he left for overseas.”

Margie had a good wit and she made people laugh, but she didn’t find many things funny. She had to think about laughing in
order to do it. Charlie was the same way. Some people just naturally burst into laughter. That didn’t happen to Margie and
she’d never seen Charlie do it, either. Martha made up for them. She’d always laughed and giggled and chuckled enough for
the three of them. Four. Margie added her father to the list.

When Margie was back in her car, she wondered: Why Charlie? She wondered that because she was feeling bitter about what happened
to her. What the hell did Charlie ever lose?

T
hat evening, Margie said to Charlie, “My first memory had to do with fire.”

He looked up at her from his dinner. He said, “You were too young to remember.”

“Not with the circus fire. Another fire.”

And Margie lapsed into another tale, all her own this time, describing the recollection to her attentive husband.

It was when she was a small child. She was sitting across from her father at dinner, reading
Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Margie looked up from the comic book and watched him for a few moments. Then she asked, “Daddy, what if I died in the fire,
too?”

He glanced over the top of his paper at her, and without taking any time to think, he gave her his answer. Since he answered
so quickly Margie knew he’d already asked himself that question too. He said, “I would have committed
suttee.
”

Then he put his paper back up between them again. It was a very ugly word he’d said; she didn’t know what it meant and felt
glad that she didn’t know. Margie was too young to read a dictionary so she couldn’t find out, but that didn’t really matter.
What mattered was that he’d given her an answer.

Margie paused from her story and said to Charlie, “You know, that’s all children ever want—answers, not necessarily meanings.”

“I guess.”

“I remember Little Pete’s son asking something at the dinner table when we were over there for one of the kids’ birthdays.
You had to work. Baby Pete asked, ‘How does the sperm get to the egg?’”

Charlie smiled. “Kids always wait till they’re at the dinner table to ask about the birds and the bees, don’t they?”

“They do.” Margie smiled, too. “Well, Little Pete took Baby Pete into the living room, broke out the medical encyclopedia,
and explained the mechanics. When they came back to the table, they sat down and Baby Pete looked over at Little Pete and
asked, ‘But, Daddy, how does the sperm
get
to the egg?’ So Martha looked down the table and told him, ‘
Swim,
Baby Pete. They
swim
.’“

Charlie said, ’And Baby Pete was happy and went back to his meat loaf.”

“Exactly. Charlie, the one-word answer my father gave me—
suttee
—was all I needed. So I went back to
Casper the Friendly Ghost.

“But that word kept sticking with me until I was old enough to think about meaning.
Suttee
would come back in dreams, or I’d see something in a book at school, or once when I saw a dead, stiff cat on the road.”

“What—”

“And about that time, Charlie, I had a big rubber ball, almost the size of a basketball; it had red and white stripes around
the middle, and white stars on blue everywhere else. One day, it was run over by the bread truck. The ball got cut into six
or seven pieces. Kids played with the pieces and kept them, and passed them around. Every so often, months later—and months
is a long time to a kid—I’d be in the car and we’d pass by a strange kid I didn’t know playing with a piece of my ball, and
terrible images of dead, stiff cats, and nightmares, and the word
suttee
would come into my head.”

Charlie didn’t try to interrupt, to find out what
suttee
meant. Instead, he listened to Margie’s story, waiting for the denouement that would eventually come.

“The older I got, the more curious I became about the word and about my father, too, as a matter of fact. I wondered more
and more about what he’d told me, the thing he’d have done if I’d died in the fire. Whatever it was must have been more shocking
than suicide to have such an ugly name. He would have committed that other thing—the strange
suttee
thing.

“Then when I was around seven, I asked my Aunt Jane what
suttee
meant. She told me she’d never heard of a
suttee.
Dictionaries aren’t exactly in my aunt’s frame of reference. After that, when I realized that even Aunt Jane didn’t know
what my father was talking about—that it most definitely must have meant something even worse than suicide—the word went away
for a long while.” Margie looked over at Charlie from the window where she’d been gazing. “Or as Martha would say, I suppressed
it.

“Then when I was around ten, I spotted the word in the newspaper.”

Margie’s father read two newspapers every day: The
Hartford Courant
in the morning, and in the evening, the
New York Times,
which arrived in the mail. She came to be a newspaper reader herself, what with that influence. She loved both those newspapers,
too, the
Courant
because she learned all about her home, and the
New York Times
because it was an international newspaper and she was curious about what was going on in the world.

“You know what Martha told me one time, Charlie?”

“What, honey?”

“She said I treat the articles in the
Times
like my novels. Good stories, but make-believe.”

“Was she right?”

“Well, it’s no fun to imagine that the perils of the world are real perils.” He didn’t say anything, “Anyway, every day, I’d
come home from school and get the mail, which was bills and the
New York Times.
First I’d go to the bathroom, then change into my play clothes, and I’d get some cookies and sit at the kitchen table with
the newspaper. I’d say I was a fifth-grader when the front page of the
Times
had this picture of a funeral pyre in India. A dead man’s body was burning-his body was a long lump but you could see his
face. His widow had just hurled herself across him. Her hair was on fire. The article was about a humanitarian group exposing
the rite of
suttee,
saying that the widow didn’t volunteer to die out of love. She’d been drugged and tossed onto the fire so that the man’s
family wouldn’t be financially responsible for her.”

Charlie’s eyes were narrower.

“My father meant to volunteer, Charlie. Out of love. And I was a little girl, so I didn’t realize he’d been speaking, urn,
metaphorically. I thought he would have lit a bonfire on her grave and mine, and lay down on it.”

“I’m sorry, Margie.” Charlie covered her hand with his.

“So then I got up from the table and went out, and buried the newspaper in the backyard. That night, my father came home from
work with cream puffs from the bakery for our dessert. My father fried lamb chops. When the lamb chops were cooked, we read
and ate. I read my comic books at dinner instead of my books in case I spilled anything.”

By the time Margie was nine she had had a stack of several hundred comic books in a box on the floor of her closet. She’d
read the new one her father bought her on Saturday night, and then she’d put it face down in a pile next to the box. When
the box was empty, she’d turn the other pile over and put it in the box, and start reading from the top again. Margie looked
forward most to
Uncle Scrooge, Casper, Blackhawk,
and a one-time issue of
Cinderella.
Every time she got to
Cinderella
it was a victory that her father hadn’t married a wicked stepmother. And she looked forward to finding out who Prince Charming
would be, never thinking for a minute that because there wasn’t a wicked stepmother in her life there might not be a Prince
Charming, either. But of course, there was. He was holding her hand right now.

“So he read and ate while I waited, making believe I was engrossed. I tried to eat my cream puff, but I kept gagging. Then
he folded up the paper, the
Courant,
and he said, ‘Where’s the
Tlimes,
Margie?’

“I lied. I told him it hadn’t come.”

Charlie rubbed the back of her wrist. “Poor kid.”

“Yeah.”

“Want some coffee? I’ll grind some special.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

While Charlie puttered, Margie thought about the rest. Her lie hadn’t been a hard one to say because sometimes the
Times
wouldn’t come, and then they’d get two the next day in the mail. After the lie, her father sighed, got up, and went and found
the book he was reading. The next evening, Margie realized how her father’s daily habits sustained him. When yesterday’s
Times
still hadn’t come it was as if a drug had been withdrawn. He was unable to read the new one without reading the old one.
Obsessive. Not romantically obsessive—neurotically. “Compulsive,” Martha once explained. “Like Lady Macbeth. Like Dad.”

Jack Potter paced around after dinner and then said, “I’m going to take a walk to the library, Margie.”

She said, “Okay. I’ll be in my room.” She knew he’d read the missing
Times
at the library.

He had come home very late. She heard him stumble. Two doors down from the library was the Brookside Tavern. Her father went
there on the anniversary of the circus fire and on her mother’s birthday. He just couldn’t concentrate on reading on those
days. The next day he’d be fine, though. He’d take aspirins with his orange juice before heading off to Fuller Brush.

Margie had been consumed by pity for her father. She tended to feel sorry for him all the time, but she had been desolate
on that night. She lay awake listening to the stumbling. She had prayed for him. The she had set her alarm early and gone
downstairs and set the table and put two aspirin next to his glass, her offering as a way of apologizing. They had sat down
and he’d taken them. He hadn’t said anything. The relief they’d felt that neither spoke was enormous. And oh, what Martha
would have to say about that, Margie thought.

Charlie sat back down while the coffee dripped through the filter.

“People always felt so sorry for me, Charlie. But I’d tell them not to bother. I’d keep telling them I was just a baby when
my mother died like I told Captain Bart. Like I’ve always told you. I couldn’t have really missed her. And growing up without
a mother wasn’t so bad since I had no idea what it was like to have one—I had nothing to compare not having a mother with.
Sort of like asking a twin what it’s like to be a twin.

“My father took good care of me. When I felt envy toward my friends and my cousins because they had mothers and I didn’t,
I felt so disloyal.”

“I know.”

They drank their coffee. He always said that to Margie. I know. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know about the day on the sofa
with baby Martha and the bubbles of resentment, and how more and more sprang up every day.

I
n all the years she was married to Charlie, Margie had liked to think that something momentous would happen. Captain Bart’s
visit wasn’t as momentous to her as it was to her family, but she finally came to realize that his appearance was as momentous
as things were going to get. She realized that the night she told Charlie about her first fire memory,
suttee.
She continued to humor Charlie, though, while she figured out how she might go about not humoring him without hurting him.
How do you betray a person gently? And then, right when she was in the middle of her frustration, something momentous did
happen, in the persona of a Bob Corcoran, who arrived at the front door unexpectedly.

He was a man around Charlie’s age who had been to the circus. He had escaped the flames unhurt. Physically unhurt. He’d flown
in from his home in Seattle, a home that was about as far away as he could get from Hartford, Connecticut. Margie took to
him right away because he had an earnest look about him, the kind Charlie had had when she’d met him. The kind of earnestness
Charlie had had when he’d asked her where her scars came from and she thought he was asking her where she’d gotten
To Kill a Mockingbird.
But that look was gone from Charlie now. With each passing year, Charlie’s look had become less earnest and more flinty.
More a fireman’s look than a searcher’s. Margie felt alienated from that look, but Charlie didn’t notice because she hid her
alienation from him behind a book.

After Bob Corcoran had answered Charlie’s initial questions, Charlie didn’t ask any more. He didn’t have to. Corcoran was
a gusher, and he didn’t start with happy memories like most did. None of that nervous hesitation in describing how exciting
it was to be going to the circus. He didn’t speak of the heat of the day mixed with the thrill. The nervousness that was absent
in him had always been immediately obvious in the other witnesses; it arose from the guilt they felt about their anticipation.
With great pain and struggle they’d try to smile and they’d say: “I couldn’t wait for the circus to start… couldn’t wait.”

Bob Corcoran placed himself on the Map—in the deadly area of Grandstand A, just a few yards from the main entrance, with the
chute running between. Then he said that his eight-year-old sister and four-year-old brother had been killed by the circus
fire. That was how he put it. They were killed “
by
the fire.” Charlie took note. Corcoran went on to say that his mother had been taken to the hospital, but her face was so
badly burned that she couldn’t talk. “Which,” he said, “was why there was all that confusion about my sister.” Then he stopped,
and then he whispered a name. “Louise.”