Masters of Illusions (6 page)

“Not the Wallendas.” He settled Margie into the crook of his arm. “It’s their theory that relying on a net makes the act foolhardy.
The balancing poles weigh forty pounds. With this seven-man pyramid they’re trying, they figure the poles and chairs will
kill them in a fall. And they’re so high up they’d bounce off the net anyway.”

“Still, it seems like they’d have a better chance if they fell.”

“But they don’t fall. They practice on a rope ten feet off the ground and they don’t try a stunt in a performance till they
know they won’t fall. If they can go a thousand times without falling, they know they’re okay. Without that crutch—a net—they
can’t take anything for granted. Without a net, they won’t fall. That’s what they say, anyway.”

He poured more wine. He explained to Margie that John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” was a circus signal that
meant clear the tent. He said, “The only time the ‘Stars and Stripes’ is ever played at the circus is when the audience is
in danger. If a tiger escapes from a performance cage, the trainer pretends it’s part of the act. Capturing the tiger becomes
part of the act. When an animal gets out, circus people don’t consider the audience to be in danger—only themselves, as always,
so the march doesn’t sound. But when there’s a fire…”

Charlie and Margie sipped the wine, and they cuddled each other, and then they went to bed. The next day, the Wallendas fell.
And no troupe of tightrope walkers would ever try the seven-man again.

*    *    *

Every year, on the anniversary of the fire, Charlie would put an ad in the Hartford
Courant
asking people who’d been to the circus to call him. He saw to it that the ad was placed next to the picture of Little Miss
1565 and the photo of Chick and his partner putting their latest bunch of flowers on her grave. AP would pick up the story,
and often, in newspapers all over the country, little articles would appear about her, as well as mention of Charlie’s search
and the O’Neills’s phone number. And every year more people would call, particularly the children who had been at the circus.
As they grew up and came to see the ad, they wanted to talk. Margie became convinced that a repressed memory—a memory repressed
for twenty or thirty years—could be recalled even more vividly than the memory of what you had for breakfast an hour ago.
These people revealed their day at the circus when they were children in a way that made her think of floodwater gushing up
out of a drain.

At first, Charlie paid his witnesses fifty dollars plus expenses, an amount that increased over the years, but did not mention
the payment in the ad. He didn’t want any more fakers than could be avoided.

The 1944 Hartford firemen figured that of all the people who tried to climb over the animal chute in order to get out of the
main entrance, only a dozen or so made it, Margie included. Mostly children who were passed up by their mothers—mothers whom
they would never see again. Also, an elderly couple dragged over by Hermes as he scaled the chute himself. But none of that
dozen answered Charlie’s ad. He said that was okay, since they wouldn’t remember much of anything as they’d been the worst
injured. That was not what he meant, though. Charlie had feelings of great compassion. He knew how impossibly painful it would
be for that group of people to act as witnesses.

But many others came, and Charlie would introduce himself and Margie, and in the years to come, their girl, Martha, if she
was underfoot. Then he’d ask them to describe the day as it began. The day as it began was no good to Charlie, but it warmed
them up. They seemed to love talking about how excited they’d been, and how much they had anticipated going to the circus.
Then they’d stop, look at Charlie, and wait. Not wait to be cued, Margie didn’t think, but rather they’d wait as if in hope
that something would now come along to interrupt them; they wanted the Archangel Gabriel to appear and say, “The rest is all
a dream-it didn’t really happen.” But, alas, no Gabriel. Instead, they got Charlie, who said, “And when you got to the circus,
what happened?”

So then they would tell about their amazement at the size of the tent; their trepidation as they passed the cage of the giant
gorilla; their unease at the sideshow with the bearded lady, the mermaid, and the Elephant Boy; then about standing impatiently
in line and getting inside and looking for their seats. Now Charlie would ask them to show him on the Map exactly where those
seats were. They’d get up, walk across the room, and touch their seats on the Map with a very tentative index finger. Margie
always felt relieved when they’d point to a place far away from Grandstand A. Then Charlie wrote their names on the Map, and
the date of the interview, directly on squares representing the seats.

After all that, they’d give their versions of the wild animal act, the chill they felt as the big spot flashed on, capturing
the Wallendas towering high above them about to walk out onto the tightrope, and then, the little spot of fire, a circle—as
if someone had flipped a cigarette into the side of the tent. Charlie would slow them down at this point, asking them the
route they had taken to get out of the burning tent because if he didn’t, their next sentence would be, “We ran.” So the route
they described was always combined with descriptions of terrible panic: massive hysteria; wooden chairs crashing down the
grandstands; pieces of burning canvas falling everywhere, falling on them; their clothes catching on fire; their hair sizzling;
their skin burning; the unspeakable smell. And through it all, the resounding “Stars and Stripes.”

When his witnesses finished speaking (they usually finished with the line, “I made it out”), Charlie would have them show
on the Map their route and where they were positioned once outside the tent. They’d stand at the Map trying to explain to
Charlie that there was a lot of chaos and that it was a long time ago, but this was the route, “… and this looks about where
I ended up. Yes. Right here.”

Then Charlie would ask, “Did you see anything you thought was peculiar? Once you were safely outside?”

That question usually got a variation on the answer “Yeah, man, I saw something peculiar. I saw a circus tent the size of
the state capitol all on fire—going up like a pile of dry straw Real peculiar.”

Then Charlie would ask them to think past the horrible thing they’d witnessed, in hopes of hearing something that was Charlie’s
brand of peculiar. But there was never anything more to hear. Yet. That’s what Charlie would say to Margie when she’d bring
up that hurdle. “Yet.”

He plodded on, year after year, while Margie sequestered herself, read books, and while their daughter Martha came into herself.
Charlie and Margie named their baby after her dead grandmother. Charlie insisted, just as Jack Potter had insisted to his
young wife in a letter.
Give the baby your own name. I’ll have two Marthas. I’ll be doubly happy.

It wasn’t until Margie came to have a baby that she understood as her father did why her mother took her to that sprawling
tent jammed with people on such a hot day. It was because babies are boring. They do nothing. Good mothers take their babies
to sit in the park or to be pushed in baby swings or out for strolls. Those things were incredibly tedious to Margie, and
she imagined they had been tedious to her mother. She felt a real connection to her own mother for the first time when she
had a baby of her own. Margie held her daughter and dreamed of the original Martha holding her—loving her—but not willing
to give up what was fun for her, all alone, without her husband. As if my mother, thought Margie, could stand to push a baby
around in a stroller, day in and day out, or talk to a baby who couldn’t understand what she was saying and wouldn’t be able
to hold up her end of the conversation even if she could understand it.

In the sixties, when people had pet rocks, Margie didn’t think that was so wild and crazy. “Pet rock” pretty much described
a baby, except a rock lets you sleep at night. Because of that attitude, and because Charlie wanted only two things in life—finding
out who set the fire and pleasing Margie—they took their baby everywhere they wanted to go, just the way Margie’s mother had
done. To a baby, Fenway Park is no less boring than any other park. Sitting in the stands, Margie and Charlie would take turns
holding Martha and giving her a bottle. At one game, there was a ceremony retiring number 9. They joined in the standing ovation,
juggling the baby, and Charlie lifted his child up over the crowd and told her that she was seeing the greatest hitter in
baseball. The baby didn’t hold up her end of that conversation, either, but so what? Margie and Charlie were having a grand
time, and subsequently, so was she. Margie wondered if babies really had any fun when their activities put their parents in
a pall.

They took her to play golf, too. Charlie pulled the cart with the clubs and Margie pulled the cart with the baby. Of course,
Margie was only nineteen years old, and energetic and fun-loving, perhaps not an age to expect a girl to have the frame of
mind to be a responsible mother, but she made the baby fun. And Charlie was not a teenager, and recognized that raising a
baby took at least two people, so he made the job as easy as he could for Margie, in addition to the fun.

Margie would have taken her daughter to the circus, too, if there had been one. But the circus didn’t come back to Hartford
for a long time, and when it did it was the Shrine Circus, not Barnum & Bailey, and the show was held in the state armory,
not in a tent. There’s nothing more fireproof than a building made of blocks of New Hampshire granite with nothing in it—no
need to store arms once the war had ended. But whoever made that decision to hold the first returning circus at the state
armory didn’t know that the building had been the site of a temporary morgue for the Barnum & Bailey Circus fire victims.
When Charlie’s family learned there’d be a circus at the armory, Chick said, “Whenever I go by that place, I see bodies.”
The best books Margie read, she felt, were the ones that had the greatest amount of irony. She couldn’t think of a match for
the irony in holding the first circus to come to Hartford in twenty years at the armory.

Charlie didn’t want any more babies after Martha. That was okay with Margie. Martha interfered with her reading quite a bit.
Her plan, to have babies so she could just sit around and read, had been unrealistic. With the baby, she found, all her activities,
and her train of thought, too, were continually interrupted. But she was an only child and she figured she’d been very happy,
so why shouldn’t Martha be a happy only child, too? Margie’s cousin, Little Pete, was an only child, and he was very happy.
Although when he grew up and got married, he had a great slew of babies one after the other. He shared them with Margie because
they continued to do a lot of things together, Little Pete and her and all those kids. Charlie’s hours were often very long.
Martha was three years older than Little Pete’s first, and Martha would later say, “The reason I’m so successful is because
I’m the eldest of seven children.” Margie would think that she and all these pop psychologists around were probably right.
But she would also think that maybe watching Ted Williams at Fenway Park instead of ducks ratting around a pond may have helped,
too.

M
ost of the people who came to the war room had scars—a seared arm or a streak across a cheek—left by the burning pieces of
canvas, which not only rained down upon them, but had also stuck to them as they fled the tent. When the weapon napalm gained
a reputation, Charlie said, “That’s what we had at the circus.” These people with the scars seldom took the money. They were
grateful finally to be able to talk, and they wanted to help Charlie find the person who did this to them. Sometimes they
said that: I want to know who did this to me! The ones with the burns believed, without reservation, that the fire was the
work of an arsonist. Margie said, “They know so many little details.” Charlie answered, “Yeah.” And then she said to him,
“You know, they really seem to need to blame someone.” He gave her a look, as if she were speaking a foreign language.

“Margie, of course they want to blame someone. Some bastard ruined their lives. Someone is at fault. They blame him. Why wouldn’t
they?”

Margie tried to point out that these people’s lives weren’t actually ruined, but he didn’t seem to want to hear that. The
thought of ruined lives served as more impetus to him. So she didn’t press it though she felt uneasy.

Margie tape-recorded Charlie’s witnesses, but sometimes she had to leave the room when the scarred people talked. They talked
of the feelings of getting torn from their mothers, getting crushed, getting smothered, getting burned. They described the
smell of the noxious burning canvas and their charred skin. It made Margie queasy to have to think that this was what her
mother experienced before she suffocated.

One of Charlie’s questions was, “What did you hear?”

“Screaming and the band playing,” they’d say. It was the circus music that prodded their struggle to get out of the tent,
and what calmed them as well, once they’d made it out. But beyond the screams they described, and the racket of folding chairs
clattering down the bandstand, they never went on to describe the sounds a fire makes, the ones Charlie and his firemen friends
talked about all the time: the cracking and popping, crunching and sizzling; the whoosh of sucked-up oxygen; the wheeze of
the trailing wind left behind. Just like the survivors of the
Titanic,
they heard music. At the circus, the Merle Evans Circus Band, the best there ever was, didn’t go down with the ship, but
they waited until the last possible moment before they got the hell out—when the center pole began to fall. The musicians
held their instruments under their arms, ran as hard and as fast as they could, and set up again just past the line of killing
heat, and kept on playing. A new song now. Some people would actually hum “The Pennsylvania Polka” for Charlie because they
didn’t know the title. “The Pennsylvania Polka” held no special circus meaning; Merle Evans chose it because he always felt
it was the most cheerful tune ever written.