The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

  There were supposed to be three people, she answered, but the regular assistant had called in sick that morning, and the stockboy had been fired last week for pilfering baseball gloves and selling them at half price to kids in his neighborhood. The truth was that she was feeling a little lost, she said. It had been ages since she’d helped out at the store, and she couldn’t tell the difference between a putter and a wood, could barely even use the cash register without pushing nine wrong buttons and bollixing the sale.

  It was all very friendly and direct. She didn’t seem to think twice about sharing these confidences with him, and as the conversation continued, Hector learned that she had been away for the past four years, studying to become a teacher at something she called State, which turned out to be the State College of Washington in Pullman. She had graduated in June, and now she was back home living with her father, about to begin her career as a fourth-grade teacher at the Horace Greeley Elementary School. She couldn’t believe her luck, she told him. That was the same school she had attended as a girl, and she and her two older sisters had all had Mrs. Neergaard in the fourth grade. Mrs. N. had taught there for forty-two years, and it struck her as something of a miracle that her old teacher had retired just when she herself had started looking for a job. In less than six weeks, she would be standing in front of the same classroom where she had sat every day as a ten-year-old pupil, and wasn’t it strange, she said, wasn’t it funny how life worked out sometimes?

  Yes, very funny, Hector said, very strange. He knew now that he was talking to Nora, the youngest of the O’Fallon girls, and not to Deirdre, the one who had married at nineteen and gone off to live in San Francisco. After three minutes in her company, Hector decided that Nora was nothing like her dead sister. She might have resembled Brigid, but she had none of her tense, smart-aleck energy, none of her ambition, none of her high-strung, darting intelligence. This one was softer, more comfortable in her own flesh, more naive. He remembered that Brigid had once described herself as the only one of the O’Fallon sisters with real blood running in her veins. Deirdre was made of vinegar, she said, and Nora was composed entirely of warm milk. She was the one who should have been named Brigid, she said, after Saint Brigid, the patron saint of Ireland, for if there was ever a person destined to devote herself to a life of self-sacrifice and good works, it was her baby sister, Nora.

  Again, Hector was about to turn around and leave, and once again something held him there. A new idea had entered his head—the maddest of impulses, a thing so risky and self-destructive that it amazed him that he had even thought of it, let alone that he felt he had the nerve to carry it out.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he said to Nora, smiling apologetically and shrugging his shoulders, but the reason why he’d come in this morning was to ask Mr. O’Fallon for a job. He’d heard about that business with the stockboy and wondered if the position was still open. That’s odd, Nora said. It happened just the other day, and they hadn’t gotten around to placing a notice in the want ads yet. They weren’t planning to do that until after her father returned from his trip. Well, word gets around, Hector said. Yes, that was probably true, Nora answered, but why would he want to be a stockboy anyway? That was a job for nobodies, for strong-backed men with dull minds and no ambitions; surely he could do better than that. Not necessarily, Hector said. Times were tough, and any job that paid money these days was a good job. Why not give him a chance? She was all alone in the store, and he knew that she could use some help. If she liked his work, maybe she would put in a good word for him with her father. What did Miss O’Fallon say? Did they have a deal?

  He had been in Spokane for less than an hour, and already Herman Loesser was employed again. Nora shook his hand, laughing at the audacity of his proposal, and then Hector removed his jacket (the one decent article of clothing he owned), and started to work. He had turned himself into a moth, and he spent the rest of the day fluttering around a hot, burning candle. He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.

  Against all the odds, Hector held on for close to a year. First as stockboy in the back room, then as chief clerk and assistant manager, working directly under O’Fallon himself. Nora said her father was fifty-three, but when Hector was introduced to him the following Monday, he felt he looked older than that, perhaps as old as sixty, perhaps as old as a hundred. The exathlete’s hair was no longer red, the once lithe torso was no longer trim, and he limped sporadically from the effects of an arthritic knee. O’Fallon showed up at the store every morning at nine sharp, but the work clearly had no interest to him, and he was generally gone again by eleven or eleven-thirty. If his leg was feeling up to it, he would drive out to the country club and shoot a round of golf with two or three of his cronies. If it wasn’t, he would eat a long early lunch at the Bluebell Inn, the restaurant directly across the street, and then go home and spend the afternoon in his bedroom, reading the papers and drinking from the bottles of Jameson’s Irish whiskey he had smuggled in from Canada every month.

  He never criticized Hector or complained about his work. Nor did he ever compliment him. O’Fallon expressed his satisfaction by saying nothing, and every so often, when he was in one of his more expansive moods, he would greet Hector with a minuscule nod of the head. For several months, there was little more contact between them than that. Hector found it jarring at first, but as time went on he learned not to take it personally. The man lived in a domain of mute inwardness, of unending resistance against the world, and he seemed to float through his days with no other purpose than to use up the hours as painlessly as possible. He never lost his temper, he seldom cracked a smile. He was fair-minded and detached, absent even when present, and he showed no more compassion or sympathy for himself than he did for anyone else.

  To the degree that O’Fallon was closed off and indifferent to him, Nora was open and involved. She was the one who had hired Hector, after all, and she continued to feel responsible for him, treating him alternately as her friend, her protégé, and her human reclamation project. After her father returned from Los Angeles and the chief clerk recovered from his bout with the shingles, Nora’s services were no longer required at the store. She was busy preparing for the upcoming school year, busy visiting old classmates, busy juggling the attentions of several young men, but for the rest of the summer she always managed to find time to swing by Red’s in the early afternoon to see how Hector was getting on. They had worked together for only four days, but in that time they had established a tradition of sharing cheese sandwiches in the stockroom during their half-hour lunch break. Now she continued to show up with the cheese sandwiches, and they continued to spend those half hours talking about books. For Hector, the budding autodidact, it was a chance to learn something. For Nora, fresh out of college and committed to a life of instructing others, it was a chance to impart knowledge to a bright and hungry student. Hector was plowing through Shakespeare that summer, and Nora read the plays along with him, helping him out with the words he didn’t understand, explaining this or that point of history or theatrical convention, exploring the psychology and motivations of the characters. During one of their back-room sessions, as Hector stumbled over the pronunciation of the words Thou ow’st in the third act of Lear, he confessed to her how much his accent embarrassed him. He couldn’t learn to speak this bloody language, he said, and he would always sound like a fool when he talked in front of people like her. Nora refused to listen to such pessimism. She had minored in speech therapy at State, she said, and there were concrete remedies, practical exercises, and techniques for improvement. If he was willing to take on the challenge, she promised to get rid of the accent for him, to remove all traces of Spanish from his tongue. Hector reminded her that he was in no position to pay for such lessons. Who said anything about mon
ey? Nora answered. If he was willing to work, she was willing to help.

  After school opened in September, the new fourth-grade teacher was no longer available for lunch. She and her pupil worked in the evenings instead, getting together every Tuesday and Thursday from seven to nine in the parlor of the O’Fallon house. Hector struggled mightily with the short i and e, the lisping th, the toothless r. Silent vowels, interdental plosives, labial inflections, fricatives, palatal occlusions, phonemes. Much of the time, he had no idea what Nora was talking about, but the exercises seemed to have an effect. His tongue began to produce sounds it had never made before, and eventually, after nine months of strain and repetition, he had advanced to the point where it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell where he had been born. He didn’t sound like an American, perhaps, but neither did he sound like a raw, uneducated immigrant. Coming to Spokane might have been one of the worst blunders Hector ever made, but of all the things that happened to him there, Nora’s pronunciation lessons probably had the deepest and most lasting effect. Every word he spoke for the next fifty years was influenced by them, and they remained in his body for the rest of his life.

  O’Fallon tended to stay upstairs in his room on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or else to be out for the evening, playing poker with friends. One night in early October, the telephone rang in the middle of a lesson, and Nora went into the front hall to answer it. She talked to the operator for a few moments, and then, in a tense and excited voice, called up to her father and told him that Stegman was on the line. He was in Los Angeles, she said, and wanted to reverse the charges. Should she accept or not? O’Fallon said that he would be right down. Nora closed the sliding doors between the parlor and the front hall to give her father privacy, but O’Fallon was slightly drunk by then, and he talked in a loud enough voice for Hector to make out some of the things he said. Not every thing, but enough of them to know that the call had not brought good news.

  Ten minutes later, the sliding doors opened again, and O’Fallon shuffled into the parlor. He was wearing a pair of worn-out leather slippers, and his suspenders were off his shoulders, hanging down around his knees. Both his tie and collar were gone, and he had to grip the edge of the walnut end table to steady his balance. For the next little while, he talked directly to Nora, who was sitting beside Hector on the davenport in the middle of the room. For all the attention he paid to Hector, his daughter’s student might have been invisible. It wasn’t that O’Fallon ignored him, and it wasn’t that he pretended he wasn’t there. He simply didn’t notice him. And Hector, who understood every nuance of the conversation that followed, didn’t dare get up and leave.

  Stegman was throwing in the towel, O’Fallon said. He’d been working on the case for months, and he hadn’t turned up a single promising lead. It was getting to him, he said. He didn’t want to take any more of their money.

  Nora asked her father how he’d responded to that, and O’Fallon said he’d told him that if he felt so bad about taking their money, why the hell did he keep reversing the charges when he called? And then he’d told him he was lousy at his job. If Stegman didn’t want the work, he’d look for someone else.

  No, Dad, Nora replied, you’re wrong. If Stegman couldn’t find her, that meant no one could. He was the best private operative on the West Coast. Reynolds said so, and Reynolds was a man they could trust.

  To hell with Reynolds, O’Fallon said. To hell with Stegman. They could say whatever they goddamn liked, but he wasn’t going to give up.

  Nora shook her head back and forth, her eyes filling with tears. It was time to face facts, she said. If Brigid was alive somewhere, she would have written a letter. She would have called. She would have let them know where she was.

  The balls she would have, O’Fallon said. She hadn’t written a letter in over four years. She’d broken with the family, and that was the fact they had to face.

  Not with the family, Nora said. With him. Brigid had been writing to her all along. When she was at school in Pullman, there’d been a letter every three or four weeks.

  But O’Fallon didn’t want to hear about that. He didn’t want to discuss it anymore, and if she wasn’t going to stand behind him, then he’d push on alone and damn her and her goddamn opinions. And with those words, O’Fallon let go of the table, wobbled precariously for an instant or two as he tried to regain his footing, and then staggered out of the room.

  Hector wasn’t supposed to have witnessed this scene. He was just the stockboy, not an intimate friend, and he had no business listening in on private conversations between father and daughter, no right to be sitting in the room as his boss staggered around in a drunken, disheveled state. If Nora had asked him to leave at that moment, the matter would have been closed forever. He wouldn’t have heard what he had heard, he wouldn’t have seen what he had seen, and the subject never would have been mentioned again. All she had to do was speak one sentence, make one feeble excuse, and Hector would have risen from the davenport and said good night. But Nora had no talent for dissembling. The tears were still in her eyes when O’Fallon left the room, and now that the forbidden subject was finally out in the open, why hold anything back?

  Her father hadn’t always been like that, she said. When she and her sisters were young, he had been a different person, and it was hard to recognize him now, hard to remember what he’d been like back in the old days. Red O’Fallon, the Northwest Flash. Patrick O’Fallon, the husband of Mary Day. Dad O’Fallon, the emperor of little girls. But think of the past six years, Nora said, think of what he’d been through, and maybe it wasn’t so strange that his best friend was a man named Jameson—that grim silent fellow who lived upstairs with him, trapped in all those bottles of amber liquid. The first blow came with the death of her mother, killed by cancer at age forty-four. That had been rough enough, she said, but then bad things kept happening, one family upheaval followed by another, a punch to the stomach and then one to the face, and little by little the stuffing had been knocked out of him. Less than a year after the funeral, Deirdre got herself pregnant, and when she refused to go through with the shotgun wedding O’Fallon had arranged for her, he kicked her out of the house. That turned Brigid against him, too, Nora said. Her oldest sister was in her last year of Smith, living all the way across the country, but when she heard about what happened, she wrote to her father and said that she would never talk to him again unless he welcomed Deirdre back into the house. O’Fallon wouldn’t do that. He was paying for Brigid’s education, and who did she think she was telling him what to do? She paid her own tuition for the final semester, and then, after her graduation, headed straight out to California to become a writer. She didn’t even stop off in Spokane for a visit. She was as stubborn as her father, Nora said, and Deirdre was twice as stubborn as both of them together. It didn’t matter that Deirdre was married now and had given birth to another baby. She still wouldn’t talk to her father, and neither would Brigid. Meanwhile, Nora went off to attend college in Pullman. She kept in regular contact with both her sisters, but Brigid was the better correspondent, and it was the rare month when Nora didn’t receive at least one letter from her. Then, some time at the beginning of Nora’s junior year, Brigid stopped writing. At first, it didn’t seem like anything to get alarmed about, but after three or four months of continuing silence, Nora wrote to Deirdre and asked if she had had any recent news from Brigid. When Deirdre answered that she hadn’t heard from her in six months, Nora began to worry. She talked to her father about it, and poor O’Fallon, desperate to make amends, crushed by guilt over what he had done to his two oldest daughters, immediately contacted the Los Angeles Police Department. A detective named Reynolds was assigned to the case. The investigation took off rapidly, and within several days many of the crucial facts had already been established: that Brigid had quit her job at the magazine, that she had attempted suicide and wound up in the hospital, that she had been pregnant, that she had moved out of her apartment without leaving a forwarding addres
s, that she was indeed missing. Dark as this news was, shattering as it was to contemplate what these facts implied, it looked as though Reynolds was on the brink of discovering what had happened to her. Then, little by little, the trail went cold. A month went by, then three months, then eight months, and Reynolds had nothing new to report. They were talking to everyone who had known her, he said, doing everything they possibly could, but once they’d traced her to the Fitzwilliam Arms, they had run into a brick wall. Frustrated by this lack of progress, O’Fallon decided to push things along by engaging the services of a private detective. Reynolds recommended a man named Frank Stegman, and for a time O’Fallon was filled with new hope. The case was all he lived for, Nora said, and whenever Stegman reported the smallest bit of new information, the tiniest hint of a lead, her father would be on the first train to Los Angeles, traveling through the night if necessary, and then knocking on the door of Stegman’s office first thing the next morning. But Stegman had run out of ideas now, and he was ready to give up. Hector had heard it himself. That’s what the telephone call had been about, she said, and she couldn’t really fault him for wanting to quit. Brigid was dead. She knew that, Reynolds and Stegman knew that, but her father still refused to accept it. He blamed himself for everything, and unless he had some reason to hope, unless he could delude himself into believing that Brigid was going to be found, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. It was that simple, Nora said. Her father would die. The pain would be too much for him, and he would just crumple up and die.