Masters of Illusions (18 page)

Charlie said, “I’ll do anything for you, Margie. But I will have peace. I deserve to find out who set that fire. I deserve
it!”

“I deserve peace, too.”

“Yes, you do. I love you.”

He loved her. And he loved lying next to her naked, tracing her scars with his fingertips. Or with his tongue.

T
his July 6, Uncle Chick and a few thousand others went to Little Miss 1565’s new grave. Her real name was on the clean white
marble headstone. There had been some discussion as to whether the headstone should also say Little Miss 1565, but her mother
and brother were adamant. They wanted her to have a normal rest. Next to her stone was a little marker for her brother, Timmy—his
name, his birthdate, and the date of his death, the same day as his sister’s. Chick, together with Rhoda Banks, put white
roses on the boy’s grave and yellow roses on Louise’s. Yellow, her mother told the reporters, had been Louise’s favorite color.
The headline in the Hartford
Courant
read
NO MORE FORGET-ME-NOTS FOR LOUISE
.

Charlie was not there. Every year, on the anniversary of the fire, Charlie worked a double shift. He’d told Margie a long
time ago that on that particular day, he wanted to make sure any fires that started in Hartford got put out before anyone
died.

Martha had come home for the ceremony. That was because the Little Miss seemed like part of her own family. Martha wanted
to be there for her Great-uncle Chick when he buried his other little girl. She and Margie held hands during the prayers,
and Margie wondered if Martha might just be grieving for brothers and sisters she’d never had. Then she also wondered if she
herself wasn’t grieving for other little girls she could have had. Little Pete’s kids were lined up all in a row. When the
crowd broke up, chatting and drifting off to their cars, Margie just stood, taking in the gently rolling hills of Saint Bartholemew’s
cemetery in Hartford’s North End, just half a mile from where the circus had burned.

Martha said, “Mom, you ready to go?”

Margie said, “When I was little, Aunt Jane used to drive me here and we’d put flowers on my mother’s grave.”

“What?”

“We used to come here.”

“My
grandmother
is buried here?”

“Yes.”

“But you never told me that. You never brought me here.”

“I know. That’s because I didn’t feel anything. I’d stand there with Jane and Little Pete wishing I were at the playground
instead, on the seesaw or the swings. I couldn’t wait to get back to the car and read my book.”

Martha said, “Then it did mean something, Mom. Wishing you were flying through the air on a swing sounds like a great escape
to me. ’Course we all know about reading.”

“Reading?”

“As an escape. But, shoot, Mom, let’s go see her.”

Margie said, “I have no idea where she is.”

“Then we’ll find out.”

They drove along the narrow gravel drive and came to the caretaker’s cottage. He gave them a map and pointed out
BE891
. Margie asked, “My mother’s name isn’t on the gravestone?”

He said, “Times were tough then.”

She turned to Martha, “I guess I’d forgotten that there was no name.”

Margie and Martha found her in a part of the cemetery with no tombstones, just long rows of rectangular bricks of granite.
They walked the B row until they came to BE891. Martha said, “I think we should get her something better.”

Margie started to say yeah, but nothing came out.

Martha said, “Mom, I don’t know who this woman is.”

“No one does, really. She came from the Midwest. Her family disowned her.”

Martha looked into her mother’s eyes. “Disowned her? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Margie said, “I don’t know, honey. That’s what Grandpa told me.”

“Jesus, Mom. The Midwest? That’s a fairly big area. What state? And who the hell disowns people these days?” Martha folded
her arms across her chest. “I mean, besides the wackos in your Jackie Collins books.”

“Martha, what is the matter with you? You’re shouting at me.

Martha sagged. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know why I never asked about those things.”

“Mom, how about we go visit Grandpa?”

Margie looked down at her mother’s grave. “Yes. I think we should.”

Margie followed her daughter, who stepped briskly, toward the one-year-old Coupe de Ville, which was ready to be traded in.

Jack Potter said, “We were students. She was very young. We had three weeks until I had to go overseas.”

Margie didn’t hear him after the word
students.
“Students?”

Martha said, “Students at college, Grandpa?”

Her grandfather said to her, “Of course, Martha.”

Margie excused herself, said she’d be right back. She went out into the corridor and leaned on the wall. After a few moments,
Martha came out for air, too. “Mom?”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Mom, he just told me he was at Columbia. And get ready for this—she was at Barnard.”

“My God.”

“I can’t believe we never knew this. He never said anything?”

Margie didn’t answer because she was thinking. Why didn’t her father tell her she should go to college? Her mother had. Martha
didn’t notice her mother not responding to her.

“Jesus, he never even said anything when I went to Yale. C’mon, Mom, let’s go back in and get the rest.”

Margie followed her. “Here’s Mom, Grandpa. I told her you went to Columbia. She can’t believe you never told her that.”

He said, “I’m sorry, Margie.”

Margie thought of all those nights at dinner. Reading. Columbia, to Margie, sounded a lot like
suttee.

Martha was excited. “Tell us, now, Grandpa. I really want to know—I mean, I have a right to know who my grandmother was.”

“She was very young.” Jack Potter closed his eyes. “The second we found each other we breathed the same air.”

Martha turned to gape at her mother.

“We got married by a justice of the peace. The first letter that reached me, she told me we were having a child. It was what
we both hoped for.”

Martha said, “That’s when her family disowned her?”

“No. That happened when she told them she was marrying me.”

“Why would they do that? Because you were going overseas?”

“Because they were Orthodox Jews.”

Jack Potter’s room became still. The stir of the window fan was the only sound, the only movement. Then Jack Potter picked
up his newspaper and started to read. He squinted. His eyes were finally going. Last.

Outside, back in the car, Martha said, “Maybe he made all that up.”

Margie said. “Then what would the real story be?”

“Do you mind if I find out?”

Margie started to cry. Martha held her in her arms. She said to her mother, “I wish I could think of what I should say. But
I just can’t imagine what it would be like to be a child whose mother died so tragically. Especially when the child knows
that the mother died because she was trying to save her. That’s why you don’t know about her. You had to distance yourself.
Now it’s just all coming down on you at once, Mom. Take it easy.”

Margie said, “If she’d had been in Europe instead of here, she’d have died practically the same way.”

“Jesus, Mom.”

“This is all so awful, Martha. I don’t know what horrible things happened to Grandpa in the war. He was ‘captured.’ What the
hell is ‘captured’ supposed to mean?”

“Listen, at least we know why he is the way he is. Whatever he saw he’s still seeing.”

“He looks very old, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go.”

When Martha visited Barnard to learn about her grandmother, and while Margie was arranging for a stone for her mother, Jack
Potter died. His daughter didn’t need him anymore. Margie and her Aunt Jane and her uncle, Big Pete, decided it would be best
to move his wife so that the two of them could be together. There was no room in the row of granite blocks for another grave.
The children of Martha Potter’s brothers and sisters, most of them still living in the Jewish neighborhood in Omaha where
their long-dead aunt grew up, offered their sympathies to Margie through her daughter.

Charlie, when he learned all this, whispered to Margie, “This is the year we’re going to get him.”

Martha escaped back to school.

Charlie had started up a new notebook listing what he planned to do each day during his last six months. “I’m consolidating,”
he told Margie, who was too numb to notice his excitement. This new determination brought on by Margie’s hard-line ultimatum
had inspired him. While his family mourned the loss of his father-in-law, he began taking on new energy. He intended to do
in six months what he’d been trying to do since he joined the fire department as a very young man. And then a phone call came.
Early even for a fireman’s phone, and it brought Margie out of what everyone was calling her “doldrums.” It was Chick telling
Charlie that an inmate at the Brampton Penitentiary for the Criminally Insane had confessed to setting the fire. “Brampton,”
Chick said, “is in Canada.”

The inmate’s name was Henry Maxson. He was serving a murder conviction for the torture-slaying of two people. He’d forced
a young couple at gunpoint into a gardening shed, locked it, and set it on fire. That was all Chick knew right then. Chick
immediately went about fixing things up between the Hartford Police Department and the Canadian warden in order to get Charlie
the information on the guy. Then Chick called back. All Margie heard of the phone conversation was Charlie saying either,
“Yep,” or “I know that.” Then he hung up and told her what Chick had said, but she already knew that all the “Yep”s were Charlie
taking in the facts, and all the “I know that”s had to do with Chick reminding him that the guy had made the confession three
days after the anniversary of the fire when national newspapers and TV newscasts were full of the accounts of Little Miss
1565’s final resting place.

“Louise,” Margie said. Charlie said, “Yeah, Louise.”

Chick called back a third time. Charlie listened for a moment and then passed the receiver to Margie. Chick dictated a plan,
which Margie transcribed into the appropriate folder. Once again, Margie was smack in the middle of a Robert Ludlum/Ken Follett
action thriller. She was indispensable. The adventure was back on. Margie felt released.

She coordinated the plan. Charlie would fly up to Canada accompanied by a Hartford fire marshal whose job was investigating
arson, along with a detective from the police department who was an old friend of Chick’s. This particular detective had gotten
a big promotion the day before Chick retired. Chick had spent the last week before he retired making sure he’d paid back all
the favors he owed, and adding a few new favors just for insurance. Chick had insurance policies in a lot of places. Now he’d
put in a claim. Too much red tape to try to do it directly through the police department, Charlie told Margie.

Margie would go, too, compliments of the Cadillac Seville she wouldn’t be getting, after all. She was a little disappointed.
She’d heard that next year’s Seville would look like an upside-down bathtub just like all the other cars on the road, and
the one she’d be turning in for cash looked like a British roadster. She’d felt like Harriet Vane when she’d taken it out
for a test drive, off to rendezvous with Lord Peter.

Chick fixed things up so well that the warden of the penitentiary agreed to meet with their contingent right away, and, depending
on how Henry was feeling, Charlie might be able to interview him. “Depending on how Henry was feeling…” struck delicious
terror into Margie’s heart. How do people feel who set fire to other people? They would fly out at the end of the week, early
Thursday morning, so on Wednesday, the fire marshal, the detective, and Chick got together at the O’Neills’ to discuss strategy
and, mostly, to get a handle on one another.

There was no question that, upon meeting the fire marshal, Margie knew he was one especially annoyed young man. He was black
and tough and he was disgusted. His name was Martin Luther King Junior Hightower. Margie said to him, “Nice to meet you, Marshal.”
He said, “Call me Hightower, ma’am.” Even as they sat at the kitchen table organizing who wanted what in their coffee, Hightower
immediately made clear exactly what was annoying him: “That circus fire is a dead horse, and I’m not into beating dead horses.”

They all looked at him. Actually, they were watching him; he dumped several mounds of sugar into his coffee and a lot of cream.
Then he stirred. They kept waiting for his coffee to slosh over the edge of the cup, it was so full. But it didn’t. He looked
up at them gaping at him. He put down the spoon and he leaned back in his chair. He pointed his finger at the detective. “You’re
a figurehead here, Mac.” The detective’s name was not Mac. “Your role is to make this all legal, which it is not. City of
Hartford’s paying you to waste your time and waste the taxpayers’ money.” The accusing finger moved in a level line toward
Chick, “You…” it moved on to Charlie. “… and you, are a couple of nutcases. A good cop, a good fireman, but you’re both playing
with half a deck.” He picked up the spoon again, stirred his coffee some more, put the spoon back down, and looked at Margie.
He didn’t point. “And you, ma’am, you’ve got an ax to grind.”

Margie could understand him thinking that about her, though it wasn’t true. Then he said, “And me…” (he jabbed his thumb
into his chest) “… I got better things to do, I’ll tell ya. You people are wasting my
valuable
time. But I’m here so let’s get it over with.”

Though the group had acquiesced to Hightower’s stage presence, he couldn’t hide his intrigue once Charlie led him into the
war room. He took in the blown-up photos and the diagrams and the pictures and the floor-to-ceiling shelves of notebooks,
and of course, the wall-sized, bird’s-eye view of the tent. In fact, like so many others, he couldn’t help but get up and
walk over to it. He took the same walk, coffee cup in hand, and made the same gestures as so many of Charlie’s witnesses had.
But instead of pointing and saying, “I was sitting about here,” he pointed and said, “This is where I grew up.” He jammed
that finger of his into the Map. “Uh, let’s see. Grew up in Grandstand B.”