Masters of Illusions (2 page)

He relaxed again. “Nothing. No, I was never read to.”

She said, “Me neither. But my father used to tell me bedtime stories.”

“Like Goldilocks?”

“Nope. Like ‘The Fox and the Grapes.’”

He didn’t say anything so she told him it was a fable, an Aesop fable. He said, “Oh.” She didn’t know what to say next, so
she said, “Want me to tell it to you?” Then he laughed at her in a quiet way. She laughed at herself, too, in the same silent
way.

Charlie said, “Let’s swim out to the raft. You can tell it to me out there.”

Margie said, “Okay.” She got up and pulled on a T-shirt. He watched her. Great body, but so damaged. She said, “Scar tissue
gets sunburned bad.” He winced a little, but not a wince of revulsion. A wince of sympathy.

They swam out to the raft and then lay on the warm boards on their stomachs. Margie stared into the sparkle on the chop and
thanked Aesop for fixing her up with Charlie and at the same time cursed the Lord because Charlie was engaged. They spent
all day together, taking walks and swimming and just hanging out till his friends came and got him. One friend was his brother,
who was not a fireman. Charlie introduced Margie to them.

Then he introduced her burns. He said, “Margie got burned at the circus.” All serious, they treated her like a church relic.
Then Charlie said, “See you around, Margie.”

She said, “Okay,” but while she was saying the word
okay
and looking into his eyes, she was thinking: I love you. When she realized she was thinking that, she said to herself, Oh
shit.

They saw each other around that night. They took a walk to the Indian Town jetty. Indian Town was the next beach, where Charlie
and his friends and brother had rented their bachelor cottage. They went out to the end of the jetty and sat down on the rocks
a few feet apart. The southern sky was flaring. Margie said, “What do you suppose that is?”

He said, “Looks like an electrical storm over Long Island.”

“It’s really beautiful.”

He said, “It is. Unless it hits a tree with a few people hiding under it.”

Margie thought: Here I am, one of those famous circus fire victims, and I’m in love with someone who sees lightning and thinks
immediately about people getting hit by it.

Then they didn’t say anything because she was thinking about that and thinking about the fact that Charlie was getting married.
She figured he was thinking the same thing. She was right. He said, “I’m getting married to get my mind off all this.”

“All this?”

“The circus fire.”

“Oh.”

“I’m driving my family crazy.”

“Because you aren’t married?”

“Sort of. Because I don’t care about marriage. All I care about is figuring out who set it.”

“Who set what?”

He paused. “Margie, the fire. But I’m getting discouraged. And my mother kept threatening to call the old country and have
a bride sent from L’Aquila.”

“Where?”

“A town in Italy. Where my grandparents came from.”

“I thought you said your name was O’Neill.”

“My mother’s name was DeNardo.”

“Oh.” Then Margie, looking over to him, said, “The circus fire was an accident.”

Charlie’s gaze didn’t shift from the horizon. “No, it wasn’t.”

She said, “How come I don’t know that?”

He looked at her with his long eyelashes. Italian eyelashes. “You’re too young.”

“So tell me about it.”

“I don’t want to make you feel bad.”

“I was just a baby, Charlie. It’s never really meant anything to me.”

Then he scooted over next to her, put his arm around her shoulders, across the bumps and ridges, and he told her.

Charlie said to Margie that all the firemen knew it had been set, but firemen have lots of other fires to worry about—the
ones that they have to fight every single day. Their job was to put them out, not concern themselves with how they started.
In those days, fire marshalls didn’t have any clout; the police were supposed to figure out who, if anyone, set suspicious
fires, and the police in 1944 had concluded that the fire had been an accident, though a catastrophic one. But that was because
the chief of police had accepted fifty free tickets to the circus in lieu of an inspection. Back then, bribery wasn’t considered
psychopathic any more than obsession was. So out of guilt, the Hartford Police Department had announced within one week of
the rack and ruin, with so many people dead and injured, that the fire had been an accident. They had planned to say it was
an accident even while it was happening, was what Charlie told Margie. They went by the theory that the tent had been lit
by a flipped cigarette butt.

Then he changed the subject. Margie had been somehow cuddling up closer to him. He became sheepish and told Margie that, besides
all the discouragement, Sylvia was a very beautiful girl.

Charlie could see Margie’s chest rise. She asked, “That’s your fiancée? Sylvia?”

“Yeah.”

Margie let out the big breath she’d taken.

W
hen Margie met Charlie it was right after her high school graduation, during the last week of June. She’d given herself a
two-week vacation before she would have to start her job as a clerk in the Records Department at the Travelers. She would
be working at the Travelers even though she was college material.

Not many students in the Hartford High graduating class of ’61 were college material, but Margie got very high grades, and
so was lumped together with that group of luminaries with whom she had nothing in common but report cards. Margie had dreaded
her junior-year counseling appointment when she’d have to go head-to-head with Miss Foss, the girls’ guidance counselor. Miss
Foss was tall and had the same face as the wicked stepmother in Walt Disney’s
Snow White,
except that she didn’t have the skin-tight black snood instead of hair. Miss Foss’s hair was snoodlike, though, pulled back
sleekly into a perfectly round bun. Her bun looked like a baseball made of anthracite. No gentle and carefree tendrils for
Miss Foss. Margie admired her absolute absence of vanity. And Miss Foss admired Margie’s joy of books and was intrigued by
her general persona, as well, since Margie’s background didn’t match Miss Foss’s image of a voracious reader. At the appointment,
Margie told her she didn’t know what she wanted to do after high school, but she did know that she wasn’t interested in attending
college.

Miss Foss said to her, “But you understand
Mah
-jorie, that you are college material.”

Margie’s real name wasn’t Marjorie, it was Martha, but she ignored the error since she was so used to people making it. Also,
there wasn’t any point in correcting the woman, since Margie wouldn’t ever speak with her again. In those days, a high school
student spoke with her counselor once. So Margie just said, “Yeah.”

Miss Foss still felt free to correct Margie, even though she knew, too, that she’d never lay eyes on the girl again. She said,
“
Yes, Mah
-jorie.
Yeah
is a cheap word now, isn’t it?” Her tone when she repeated the word
yeah
was the same as if she were given no choice but to utter something foul, Margie thought, like
boilsucker.

Margie said, “Yes, Miss Foss, it is. Sorry.”

Miss Foss was leaning on her forearms, hands together, fingers laced, staring intently into Margie’s eyes. “Do you intend
to remain ignorant of the possibilities of which a girl of your talent and intelligence might take advantage?”

Margie said, “Only my grades are college material, Miss Foss. But not me.”

Miss Foss’s gaze remained intent. “That is a point well taken. Intelligence does not necessarily result in ambition. To be
ambitious is to be willing to take risks. One such risk is abandoning one’s… one’s background.” Her nostrils narrowed just
before the word
background.

“I don’t want to abandon my background, Miss Foss. I like my background.”

The hands disengaged. Miss Foss leaned back in her office chair, which was not Hartford High issue. It was her own, upholstered,
and it supported the small of her back. Miss Foss slouching was beyond anyone’s imagination. She said to Margie, “I am blunt
with all my
gulls, Mah
-jorie. I am afraid I am compelled to tell you that I see you as the proverbial worm in the jar of horseradish.”

Margie hadn’t ever heard or read of that proverb. And there were no bumper stickers or message T-shirts then. “I’m sorry?”

Miss Foss smiled. She appreciated Margie’s subtle sarcasm. “You find living in horseradish acceptable, lovely, even…” and
now she leaned forward again, forearms back on the desk, hands clasped, “… because you’ve never been out of the jar.”

Miss Foss had never tasted horseradish, Margie thought. Miss Foss had never been out of her jar of tea and crumpets. Margie
didn’t say any of that, though, because she was taught by her father to be respectful. Then Miss Foss retreated and proceeded
instead to let her curiosity get the best of her. She said, “I understand you are the youngest casualty of the circus fire.”

Margie had never thought of it like that, never knew she possessed a unique notoriety. The youngest. Because she was thinking,
she didn’t respond, and so Miss Foss filled in the growing gap.

“And that your mother was killed.”

Now Margie looked straight into Miss Foss’s eyes. “Yes.”

Miss Foss raised her two forefingers and made a steeple. Against her better judgment, knowing that the entire line of the
day’s appointments would now be three minutes behind schedule, she continued, “You do not, as yet, understand your burden.
But on some level you know that any risks you might take will bring you closer to facing that burden. I wish, Mah-jorie, that
you would—”

Margie said, “Leave me alone.” Margie could be forceful when respect didn’t work. She stood up. Miss Foss said nothing, just
continued to gaze at her as she went to the door.

Then the woman said, “I believe in you,
Mah
-jorie,” but Margie didn’t turn back. Miss Foss was lying. Margie was thinking, I’m just a curiosity to her.

Miss Foss couldn’t know that whether she tossed Margie some crumb or whether she didn’t, nothing would have changed the girl’s
mind. The definitive moment—the one that told Margie what she should do when high school ended—had come to her one morning
on the city bus as it traveled down Broad Street toward Hartford High. Margie’s mind had been somewhere in that spacey place
between waking up and the Pledge of Allegiance. But there had been a distraction this day. Two girls who were last year’s
graduates had taken the bus to work because of car problems. They worked at the Travelers in downtown Hartford. They wore
pastel-colored spring suits. Their hair was done up in professional beehives. They had on pale high heels to match their suits.
They didn’t carry lunch bags. They would eat at a downtown cafe. They both had fresh diamonds on their left hands. The two
had stood in the aisle of the bus gripping the chrome poles, chatting merrily. Wide awake. The polish of their fingernails
and the glitter of their diamonds gripped Margie. The girls were grown up. And that was what she wanted to be. Grown up. Margie
didn’t like being a kid. College meant staying a kid for another four years, being dependent on her father, who lived for
a precise kind of freedom he would avail himself of only when Margie became self-sufficient. Margie sensed that about her
father, but besides, she never really enjoyed being a student, which meant being a kid. Which meant making her father wait.

It would have surprised Miss Foss to know that Margie hated studying. She loved to read, and she tended to remember what she’d
read, but Margie knew that was not studying, it was good fortune. Now she wanted a job where she could meet a husband. Then
she could stay at home with the babies that would come and she would be able to read, untroubled. So, as if the Blue Fairy
had intended to grant her wish but happened to be in a bit of a hurry, she flew in, made a quick pass with her magic wand,
and Charlie appeared before Margie even began the job that was supposed to serve as a husband hunt. Of course, within seconds
of meeting her, Charlie wanted to kill himself because of his poor timing. But Margie told him later that if he hadn’t been
engaged, he wouldn’t have been living it up at his bachelor cottage just down the road from her Uncle Pete and Aunt Jane’s
summer cottage and they’d never have met. It was fortuitous; they were star-crossed, Margie assured him. When she told him
that, he knew what she meant by star-crossed, but Margie could tell he’d never heard the word
fortuitous.

Afterward, he used the word in the correct context so Margie realized he’d gone and looked it up. His thoughtfulness filled
her with affection, which helped her get by the hysterical phone calls that soon arrived from Sylvia, and the guilt she felt
for not feeling guilty. She did feel guilty about her role in Charlie’s betrayal of Sylvia; what she didn’t feel guilty about
was having sex the week she met him.

It didn’t hurt at all to lose her virginity. Maybe if it had, she would have felt God’s punishment. She didn’t bleed, either.
Margie figured pain and bleeding must have been just another couple of lies to keep girls from wanting to make love to someone
when it felt natural to do. Charlie’s eyes were locked into hers when Margie lost her virginity and his eyes were stricken.
Margie stopped anticipating pain because she thought Charlie was in pain. Afterwards, the first thing he said was, “I’m sorry”
Then he said, “I love you.”

Margie smiled in empathy. Then she said, “I want to do that again,” so that he’d know nothing hurt. Also because she really
did want to do it again.

He blinked little tears. Margie was overcome with love and kindly feeling toward him. She covered his face with kisses. She
kissed him and kissed him and so they did do it again. Margie couldn’t believe how easy it was to love someone. And the love
Charlie felt from her gave him such a grand relief that while she lay in his arms after the second time, he was able to ask
her what he’d wanted to ask her ever since he saw her reading on the beach. He asked, “Margie. What happened to you?”