Masters of Illusions (16 page)

Margie, being a Catholic, accepted the whole thing as some kind of stigmata, which the nuns told the children in catechism
class was an especially wonderful gift of God bestowed on the very, very few Margie’s nun, at the time, had looked down at
her own unblessed palms soulfully.

Margie ran across the street to her friend Julie’s house and shoved the pamphlet under her nose. But Julie knew all about
it already, and proceeded to set Margie straight on where the blood actually came out. The place she told Margie the blood
came out seemed far more outrageous than Margie’s pores idea. Margie told her friend that she had to use the bathroom, and
she went in, pulled down her pants, put Julie’s mother’s magnified makeup mirror on the floor, and squatted over it. Then
she ran back out and said, “Julie! Why didn’t you tell me?”

Julie said, “My mother told me she’d kill me if I told any of my friends because it’s up to their mothers to tell them.”

Margie said, “I don’t have a mother.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

Julie didn’t have a father. He had died of a heart attack when she was five. But she could remember him, at least. Now Margie
looked back at the kids on her street where she grew up. Every one of them came from what would now be labeled a dysfunctional
family, but no one knew the word
functional,
let alone
dysfunctional,
so no one felt deprived. There was Margie whose mother was dead, and Julie whose father was dead. And Margie would never
forget the thrilling day she was down the street at her friend Barbara’s house and the police came to the kitchen door.

They banged on the door so hard Margie couldn’t imagine why they didn’t break through—something so easily accomplished by
Mickey Spillane. She and Barbara were at the kitchen table writing to their pen pals in Egypt, and Barbara’s dad sat across
from them and it looked to Margie like he was writing to a pen pal, too. Barbara’s mother was at the stove slicing carrots
into a pot. After those initial shouts of, “Open up! Police!” there was an instant when Barbara’s kitchen became a tableau.
Margie could picture exactly when she and Barbara and Barbara’s parents all looked into each other’s eyes at the same time.
Then Barbara’s mother ran to the door and pretended she couldn’t open it while Barbara’s father started ripping up the pieces
of paper he’d been writing on. Then he started eating the pieces. Barbara grabbed more of his papers, handed Margie a bunch,
and said, “C’mon, Margie. C’mon, c’mon.” Margie ran with her, following her to the bathroom, tearing up papers the whole while.
Margie did the same to the letter to her pen pal, which she had in her hand. In the bathroom, Barbara flushed away all the
little pieces of paper. Then she grabbed Margie’s arm and dragged her back to the kitchen table and said, “Write.”

Margie could hear Barbara’s father charging down the cellar stairs. Then Barbara’s mother wiped off her hands on her apron,
smiled, and said cheerfully, “Well, here we go,” and she opened the door. Two policemen fell through, looked around, ran in
and out of every room in the house, down and back up the cellar stairs, and then they ran back out. Barbara’s mother shut
the door behind them and said to Barbara and Margie, “Now that the stew’s out of the way, would you girls like to make a nice
refrigerator cake?”

When Margie got home, carrying a piece of cake Barbara’s mother insisted she bring to her father, she told him what happened.
He put down his magazine and said, “Well, I guess I won’t hit the double today. Not that I ever have it, anyway.” Then he
described to Margie the profession of booking horses. Definitely dysfunctional, Margie now knew.

Her friend Pidgie, whose house was a little farther down the street from Barbara’s, lived with her aunt and uncle, who were
from Sweden. They didn’t call her Pidgie, though. The kids in the neighborhood made up that name because they couldn’t pronounce
her real name and because she tamed a pigeon that would land on her shoulder when she called him. Then there was Carol, who
was adopted and whose parents were very old. And next to Carol, Barry, who had a sister who was a mongoloid who also had a
hole in her heart and was addicted to Cokes. She sucked at the Cokes through a big nipple that her mother would pull onto
the bottles for her. And Artie’s parents were divorced at a time when only movie stars were divorced, and Johnny’s grandmother
had a nervous breakdown so she had to sleep in his room on a cot while she got better. Then there was Poor Barry. Never just
“Barry” He wasn’t allowed out to play. He could only study and practice his violin. Once Margie and her friends went en masse
to his house and told his mother they were desperate for one more ballplayer. She gave in to their pleas and her son’s tears
but she told Poor Barry that he couldn’t use the children’s bats. He’d have to use the one she’d gotten him. It was a souvenir
bat from the Statue of Liberty, twelve inches long.

All of the kids in the neighborhood were not terribly concerned about any of this. They’d tease each other once in a while,
and say things like: “Hey, Johnny, does your grandmother snore?” Or, “Pidgie, you ever get sick of Swedish meatballs?” But
nobody seemed to ask why Johnny’s grandmother had a nervous breakdown or where Pidgie’s parents were. Like Jack Potter said,
children were isolated from the truth. They were not encouraged to think. In fact, after explaining why the cops broke down
Barbara’s door, Jack Potter said, “Best to forget about the whole thing. Just keep on being Barbara’s friend.” So Margie never
said anything to Barbara about the incident, and Barbara never said anything to Margie.

But then when kids start to get a little older, they get surprises more far-reaching than a friend’s father being a bookie.
Like Anne Frank. She was from a dysfunctional country. She was my childhood trauma, Margie told herself, not my mother being
dead, not my father being a hermit. So Margie had promised herself that when she had children, they would know the truth.
Now she had one and she did know everything. Margie had told Martha about sex from the time she was little. Martha at ten
had been nothing like Margie at ten. Give her an answer, you’d get another question. At ten, she’d said, “So how does a baby
fit through this hole?”

Margie told her the hole stretched. Martha said, “Oh, yeah. Right.”

When Vietnam came along, Martha and her fellows were up to the challenge.

Once Margie was watching a sports talk show. Dick Schaap and Joe Namath were talking about the Franco Zeffirelli film
Romeo and Juliet.
Joe found the plot very upsetting and said he didn’t like such depressing movies. Dick Schaap kind of looked out at the audience
and then back at Joe. Then he said, “You didn’t know how it would end, did you, Joe?” And Joe said, “How could I know how
it’d end? I just seen it.” That was about the only time ever that Margie figured it was advantageous to not know what life
was all about. Lucky Joe. Shakespeare as thriller seemed a good idea to her. Margie wished she didn’t know what happened to
Anne Frank.

D
uring the time Martha was away at school, Margie got another one of those Anne Frank kind of surprises. From Charlie. Charlie
told her that Chick’s wife, Aunt Annette, had finally brought herself to the point where she was able to talk about the fire.

Margie asked, “What does she want to talk about?”

“About what it was like for her. Aunt Annette was there.”

Margie repeated the words, though they came out a question. “Aunt Annette was there?”

Charlie said, “Yes. She’s finally able to discuss her experience. After all these years.”

Now Margie said words of her own, but they were framed in another question. “Aunt Annette was at the circus?” “Yes. And Cindy
and Ruth-Ann.”

“Cindy and Ruth-Ann?” She was back to repeating.

Charlie said, “Jesus, what’s the matter with you?”

Margie actually began to say: What’s the matter with
me
? But she didn’t. She just stared at him. His face was concerned, as always, but his eyes were innocent. Innocent, goddamn
it. She said, “Charlie, it’s the same as lying.”

“What’s the same as lying?”

“Not being frank. Deliberately not being frank. It’s worse than lying.”

He went into a spiel. A planned-out spiel, Margie could tell. Prepared, like Martha’s briefs. He had known she would be hurt
when he told her about Annette. Hurt, but according to Charlie’s definition. Hurt feelings, like when a child learns a secret
has been kept from her. Betrayed, according to Margie—like Anne Frank. So he began to talk to her as if she were a child,
filling her in on the details she knew nothing about. All the while, Margie kept thinking, What is happening here? Why did
he hide this from me? She tried to listen to him.

“See, Margie, Uncle Chick was in a patrol car on the day of the fire. The dispatcher called every cop on patrol to tell them
something was going on at the circus and to get over there. So while he was heading toward Barbour Street, the dispatcher
said, ‘The tent’s on fire.’ Chick got there five minutes later. The fire had began ten minutes before that so by the time
he got there, the tent was gone.”

He looked at Margie and waited for her to ask a question. She didn’t. He answered the question he’d expected her to ask. “It
didn’t take him very long to find them, thank God.”

He waited. He said, “Uncle Chick didn’t find Little Miss 1565’s mother, though. Not for a long time.”

Margie’s despair at Charlie was mixed with thoughts of Chick walking amidst the fire equipment, ambulances, and the cars driving
up, and all the jeeps sent over from Brainard Field full of soldiers coming to help out. She knew that he probably spent a
lot of time, himself, helping out, not knowing if Annette and his little girls were under the smoking ashes, as Louise Banks
was. Then he found them. So that explained Uncle Chick. But that didn’t explain Charlie. Margie’s instinct was to jump up
and call Martha and say, “Aunt Annette and Cindy and Ruth-Ann were at the circus!” But she didn’t. Because Martha wouldn’t
comment on what those words were all about, or why her father never mentioned to her mother that piece of the fire puzzle.
Instead, Martha would address the wound of betrayal in her mother’s voice. And Margie couldn’t face that.

“Margie, honey,” Charlie asked, “is anything wrong?”

“No.”

Aunt Annette and Cindy and Ruth-Ann arrived with a pan of lasagna from Palma. Aunt Annette said, “A little something to heat
up after, Margie.”

Margie thanked her. “Stay and have some with us when we finish.”

Ruth-Ann said, “Yeah, let’s, Ma. Daddy’ll be okay. He’ll make a salami sandwich.” To Margie, she said, “When your father’s
a policeman it seems normal when he’s not at dinner.” Then to her mother, “He’ll have his sandwich and a beer and listen to
the Sox.”

Cindy didn’t say a thing. She never did. She was an introvert, the only introvert in Charlie’s family.

Aunt Annette agreed. Margie put the lasagna in the oven and went up to the war room after the rest of them. Before she could
even click on the tape recorder, Aunt Annette was saying, “The Chief got fifty free tickets. He gave four to Chick. But he
was on duty that day. You—”

Charlie said, “I need you to show me a few things first, Aunt Annette.” He’d interrupted her. He’d never interrupted his witnesses.
Margie guessed he felt he could since this was his aunt.

But then Ruth-Ann interrupted. She was looking around, “You’ve expanded since last time I was here, huh, Charlie?”

“Yeah.”

She rolled her eyes. Ruth-Ann was not sensitive to humoring Charlie—she just did it. Family loyalty.

Right away, Annette started to say again, “Chick was on duty that day, so he couldn’t come with us. That’s why you…”

She took a Kleenex and looked down on it. Then she looked up at Charlie. She started wringing the Kleenex in her hands. She
wanted him to interrupt her.

Charlie said, “Go ahead, Aunt Annette. It’s okay.”

She said, “Our extra ticket. We gave it to a little boy on Barbour Street. You…”

“It really is all right. You can tell me.”

“Charlie, I’m sure that boy didn’t…”

Margie said, “What little boy?”

Ruth-Ann said, “You want me do this, Charlie? Maybe I’ll remember something else.”

Charlie said, “I remember everything you told me on that day. Everything.” Charlie turned to Margie. “The girls and Aunt Annette
came to stay with us that night. Ma didn’t want them to be alone since Chick couldn’t come home. Ruth-Ann talked half the
night. Cindy was only four.”

Cindy’s eyes darted about. She didn’t like this.

Annette said, “Charlie, I came here to say something. I have to tell you the truth. I came, not because I thought I could
help you find out who set the fire. I came to try to help you in… in other ways.”

Now she brought the Kleenex up to her eyes. Ruth-Ann snatched another Kleenex from the pop-up box and gave it to her mother
so she’d have a Kleenex for her other hand. Charlie started to speak. Annette waved her new Kleenex at him.

“No, no. I have something to say. Something to explain to you. I was so angry, Charlie. I was so angry by the time we got
to the circus, I couldn’t see straight. I wanted to kill your father. And I was even angrier at your mother for not standing
up to him. But that boy we gave your ticket to… Charlie, after all these years, I went and looked at the names of the boys
who died. I was always so afraid to know if he’d died. But I had to know before I could come to you.

“None of the dead were from the neighborhood. And that boy definitely was. I saw him come out of his house on Barbour Street.
He didn’t die. And… I felt so much better to know… he’d been so happy to get the ticket. So happy. The way you’d been, too.
He kept saying, ‘Oh, thank you, lady, thank you, lady.’ He was not killed by the fire, thank God.”

The day Margie met Charlie, he told her he’d had a ticket to the circus but didn’t go. Now she was finding out that he hadn’t
been joking after all. He really had had a ticket. But he’d told Margie the truth back then in such a tone that he knew she
would think he was joking.