Masters of Illusions

I would like to acknowledge the enthusiastic assistance of the reference departments of the Hartford and Danbury Public Libraries,
and the boundless support of the staff of the Ridgefield Library.

Chapter One

M
argie Potter had a scar on her back, the thumbprint of a soldier on liberty who had passed her along the line of a bucket
brigade. A bucket brigade of sorts. The actual bucket brigade—a dozen roustabouts plus Emmett Kelly the clown and two neighborhood
women—passed their buckets of water from hand to hand just to give themselves something to do. But it was almost all military
men in Margie Potter’s bucket brigade, soldiers waiting with their orders at Brainard Field in Hartford for the transport
that would take them to Europe. Those furloughed on July 6 took a bus over from the field to enjoy the matinee performance
of the Greatest Show on Earth. They were young, and so they’d chosen to come into town to the circus rather than head out
for the nearest gin mills. Other than the soldiers, there were few men in the tent, instead, only women and children and a
few grandfathers who’d already served in the first war.

Six thousand people fled the burning tent, and now they stood in the lot, stock-still, horrified. And what was so strange
was that, in the news photos, all those people standing stock-still were facing
away
from the tent. Fires were supposed to have something to do with thrills and sex; people’s eyes are irresistibly drawn to
flames, but not this day. The fire that consumed the biggest circus tent in the world (three city blocks long) in less than
six minutes meant only death and destruction. Unspeakable, just like that the war, but without hope of victory. Also unspeakable
was that the war, in a way, was responsible for the fire. When the Ringling brothers constructed their new tent, they had
had no access to waterproof canvas. The War Department needed all there was. So the clever roustabouts figured out how to
waterproof the tent themselves: They mixed up a solution of one part softened paraffin to two parts gasoline, and when they
got it to the consistency of mayonnaise, they painted their canvas with it.

The soldiers formed a line leading from the wild animal chute running parallel to the main entrance to a place beyond the
titanic heat where the ambulances would arrive, eventually. It was a “short” lot, the circus term for inadequate, and so the
ambulances couldn’t get past the sideshow and food stands and all the trailers for many hair-raising minutes.

After the men had managed to save about two dozen people, the first man in the line (the only one who wasn’t military) had
to make a wretched decision—when to quit. He was Hermes Wallenda, the youngest of the Flying Wallendas, the troupe of tightrope
performers whose lives were full of wretched decisions. Twenty years after the circus fire, when the seven-man pyramid collapsed
under the big top in Detroit, it was Hermes who announced at a press conference that the survivors would go on with the show
the next evening, though two of the family were dead and one severely injured.

The men passed along burned, mostly unconscious, or shocked children, handed to them by their mothers up and over the metal
rungs of the chute that barred their intended route to the wide entrance where they’d poured in just twenty minutes earlier,
babbling with anticipation.

There was no way to save the mothers.

After Hermes made his decision, the men ran for their lives.

People had spread blankets for the injured children to lie on while waiting for the ambulances to come. Those people bent
over the victims, arms outstretched, trying to shade the seared bodies from the hot afternoon sun. They waited and waited,
and then they became impatient, so they carried the maimed bodies down Barbour Street, which ran alongside the north edge
of the lot to an old Italian woman’s house. She had a reputation for making fennel tea that cured colic, and parsley paste
that halted balding, and garlic mash for stomach ulcer. She placed sliced raw potatoes all over Margie Potter’s melted back.

The child was only six months old on the day of the circus fire, and her little overalls were a homespun cotton that protected
her legs, but the back of her shirt had caught fire. One of the many doctors who came to treat her in the proceeding years
said to his nurse as the two worked above the little girl, sitting before them in her underpants, “I’m going to have to do
some research. But I suspect raw potatoes only served to cool the skin, which was, I guess, better than doing nothing.” Then,
continuing to ponder, he said, “I wonder if a raw potato is a sterile medium… if the juice got rid of the bacteria on the
woman’s hands…“ Margie blocked out his words at that point and thought about the people who had carried her down Barbour
Street. She imagined them saying those words, “Anything is better than doing nothing.” Then she blocked out the image, too,
and went back to the storybook in her lap. The story of Bambi.

Since Margie’s scars were only on her back, she had been able to ignore them pretty much. In fact, she never had any qualms
about wearing bathing suits or even strapless gowns, because what she couldn’t see, couldn’t hurt her, she’d scoff. She was
wearing a bathing suit when she met her husband at the beach when she was seventeen.

In point of fact, she’d made his acquaintance the day before when she’d gone out on a fishing boat with her cousin, Little
Pete, and his friends, and her two girlfriends. She was the kind of teenager who always went out in groups. Boys were friends,
not romantic interests. That was because she was “the girl with the scars,” which put her off-limits for romance. She did
evoke kindness in boys because they all knew about her being in the fire, but when she wore a sleeveless blouse in warm weather,
the recoil was there. All the same, the intimacy of group friendships offered her the kind of freedom she appreciated, saving
her from having to act adorable, or dumb; and she didn’t have to let the boy win when they all went bowling. She found that
she did fall into such a pattern when new members joined the group, when she was covered up. But she hated herself when she
was acting coy. She found herself thinking, what am I doing?

On the fishing boat there were six guys from the next beach who had rented a cottage for a week to celebrate the coming wedding
of one of their gang. An extended bachelor party. They were a little older than Margie and her cousin and friends. A bunch
of Hartford cops, someone said. She and her girlfriends flirted with them. They flirted back. Margie had on a windbreaker
because it was chilly out on the sound. If it hadn’t been chilly, she wouldn’t have had it on, and they wouldn’t have flirted
back at her. But then, with her scars showing, she wouldn’t have flirted in the first place.

The one getting married was Charlie O’Neill. He seemed to her to be uneasy about the attention he was getting. His friends
kept saying things to him, like, “Your fishing days are about over, old buddy” She caught his eye and smiled. He shrugged.
He was embarrassed. He fit in with his group in a lot of ways—same age, same clothes—but was somehow removed. He’s uncomfortable,
Margie thought. Just the way she was when people tried to act as if she didn’t have the scars.

When the captain gave the call to reel in, Charlie was watching her. He came by and said, “Hard to catch anything with no
bait.”

She said, “Yeah. I like to watch, not fish. I mean, I don’t like to watch people fishing, either. I mean… I love it out here.”

He said, “Yeah,” too.

The next day, she was sitting on a blanket on the beach facing into the sun reading a book,
To Kill a Mockingbird.
She was reading it for the second time. Margie had read it in school a few months earlier, and she couldn’t bear to leave
it, so it was the first in her stack of summer books. Her friends were back at their cottages, sleeping late. She spotted
the guys from the boat walking along the beach looking at girls. Charlie O’Neill was about ten feet from her blanket when
he noticed her and squinted. He came closer, and he didn’t look away when he noticed the trails of scar tissue reaching up
and across her shoulders. Not only did he not look away, he actually stared, and then he came right over to her blanket, squatted
down, and said, “Where’d you get that?”

He was right level with her. His long eyelashes fluttered. He was pretty nondescript looking, but he had long, dark eyelashes.
She said, “The library.”

He was confused for just an instant. Then he smiled a tiny bit, and he said, “No. The burns.”

She said, “The circus fire.”

He said, “Yeah.”

Since the circus fire had become an integral component of the city of Hartford’s character, there really wasn’t much more
for him to say than “Yeah.” If he’d just come from California, he might have said, “What circus fire?” But there wasn’t anyone
from California who went to Chalker Beach in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1961.

He said, “Your name’s Margie, right?” The eyelashes drew her in.

“How’d you know that?”

“I heard your friends on the boat.”

They talked. Charlie and his friends were not cops, they were firemen. Charlie was just a little kid the day the Barnum &
Bailey tent went up like a marshmallow on a stick, the ashes blown away by the hot summer breeze until there was nothing left
where the tent had been except the twisted animal chute and the stack of black lumps piled up against it. He apologized to
Margie for his forward attitude by explaining that it must have been a really formative year for him when the circus burned
because he could remember how no one could speak of anything else, day in and day out. He said that’s why he’d become a fireman.
When everyone else finally stopped talking about the fire, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Charlie had become obsessed by the Hartford circus fire and was still obsessed now, even though it had happened more than
fifteen years before. That was why he was such a dedicated fireman. And when he saw Margie Potter that day at the beach, he
became obsessed with her, too. Obsession was a mere romantic notion in those days, not the form of psychopathy it’s seen as
today. There was a wonderful book then,
Magnificent Obsession,
which was made into a movie with Jane Wyman. To be the object of all the love and desire one man could muster Margie found
rather appealing. Romantic. More than romantic. Erotic.

Margie smirked at Charlie. Charlie found that the smirk in combination with Margie’s clear, gray eyes was irresistible. As
irresistible as the scars. There was that problem, though, his being engaged. The day Charlie saw Margie on the beach he was
two weeks away from getting married. Because of that, he and Margie tried to act as though the connection happening between
them as they sat on her blanket wasn’t really happening. He asked her about her book, for example. He told her he wasn’t a
good reader. So Margie relayed to him the whole plot of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
He lay back on his elbows and listened. She read him the scenes with Boo Radley aloud. When she finished, she said, “You
may not be a good reader, but you sure are a good listener.” He was one of those people whose expression changed in reflection
of what someone was telling him. Margie found it endearing rather than comical. She said, “Were you read to a lot when you
were little?” And then his expression became blank. The kind of blank when you anticipate something big is going to happen.
Margie said, “Hey. What’d I say?”

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