by R.J. Ellory
“There are ways and means,” Greene said quietly. “For everything, there are ways and means. Some we understand, some we don’t. Some make sense, and some seem to possess no sense at all. Sometimes people tell you that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but it’s the other way around, folks. If you know something, well, you can do something about it, right? If you understand something, well, you can work it out, rationalize it, fix it good and proper so it’s not a problem anymore. Seems to me that the thing we should all fear the most is ignorance. Most of the troubles we see in the world are born out of ignorance. Ignorance leads to impatience and intolerance and hatred. Just look at the way the colored folks get treated sometimes. Look at the way the Jewish people were persecuted in the war. All out of ignorance.”
Greene leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his fingers steepled together. “So, I always say it’s better to know than to not know. Better to see than to be blind. Better to find out than leave it all covered up and hidden. If you hide a light under a bushel, well, it doesn’t change the fact that the light is still there.”
There was a murmur of consent in the crowd. All of a sudden it started to feel more like a revivalist meeting than a carnival act. Greene had their attention, no question about it, and for a moment Travis wondered whether this monologue was the precursor to some further sort of collective hypnosis. Was he—even now—lulling them all into some false sense of security?
Trust me, people. Listen to my voice. It is calming, it is soothing, and you can believe every word I say. Look at me now. Do I look like the kind of guy who would sell you a bill of goods?
Wasn’t this the point of such a pretense, to make people feel that Chester Greene—the funny Jewish dwarf—was incapable of anything but the truth?
Travis felt that sense of instinctive suspicion, as if to build a wall around his mind, refusing to allow himself to be duped into seeing or hearing something that was anything but real and tangible.
“Erasmus once said that man’s mind was formed in such a way as to be far more susceptible to falsehood than truth. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we shall try to redress the balance a little. We shall try to return a little truth into the grander scheme of things. However, there are some things that are more easily done than said, so I am not going to try to explain what happens here tonight.”
Greene smiled at the audience, and then he took a deep breath.
“And so… we begin with the small matter of a broken promise.”
Greene scanned the audience, and then his attention appeared to be fixed somewhere over to Travis’s left. The stage was lit, the audience in semidarkness, and Travis could not see who Greene might have been looking at.
“She made a vow,” Greene continued, “and she made it with the best intention in the world, and—in all honesty—it wasn’t even possible to keep that vow. Not really. Not if she had been truthful to herself and to her mother. But she made the vow, as we often do, and then the time came when the vow was broken, and ever since that time, she’s been holding on to it like she did the very worst thing in the world, and for all the world to see, she is unhappy and burdened and will never find a way to smile again.”
There was a breathless silence in that tent.
Greene echoed that silence for a moment, and then he shook his head. “Promises to those who are dying are sometimes the best way to kill those who are left behind, my dear.”
There was a stifled sob from somewhere within the audience.
People moved, and right before Travis’s eyes, the crowd parted, and a man and a woman came into view. The woman was crying, no doubt about it, and the man beside her held her as if she were deadweight.
Greene was good. Travis had to grant him that. What could have been more likely than someone in the audience burdened beneath a promise to a dying person that they then failed to keep?
“When someone you love dies,” Greene said, “it feels like a little of you dies as well. The more you loved them, the more it feels like your life will never be the same. They went, that’s understood, but you are left behind, and you still have to live your own life the best you can.”
The woman held the handkerchief to her face. The man beside her looked at Greene as if he were administering some kind of emotional resuscitation.
“You are Alice, aren’t you?” Greene said, no absence of certainty in his voice.
The woman stifled a painful sob and nodded in the affirmative.
The plant, Travis thought. He would bet his life on the fact that this woman was not from Seneca Falls. This was an outsider, brought in to play the part, to get the audience going.
The impulse was to call out, to make some comment, to at least make his protest and disagreement heard. This kind of thing was outrageous, not only from the viewpoint of tricking the public out of their money, but also the fact that it was tantamount to fraud. Lord only knew what would be going on in the minds of the others present. Watching this kind of thing, believing this kind of thing, gave people false hope. It gave them ideas that things could be understood that could and would never be understood.
Greene shook his head sagely. “It’s time now, Alice,” he said. “It’s time to let her go, to let her be. The longer you hold on to it, the longer you will stay upset, and that’s doing nobody any good.”
Greene looked up at the roof of the tent. “She holds on for you, Alice. You know that? She’s right here.”
The audience gasped in collective wonder.
“She’s held on for you all this time. She loves you so very much, and she can’t bear to see you unhappy, and if you’ll just let her go now, if you’ll just wish her well and let her go, then she can move on. Until you do that, well, she is just caught here in our world, and she cannot move on to where she needs to be.”
“Alice” started sobbing more pronouncedly. Whoever she was, she was also good. The “husband” played his part with stoicism.
“So, that’s what you need to do, Alice, and though this is more for her than for you, I am sure you will feel an awful lot better.”
Chester Greene leaned forward. “Let go, my dear. Just let go. You won’t drown; you won’t die. It will all come out right in the end. I promise.”
The “husband” started toward the stage with “Alice,” and when they reached it, he held out his hand.
The crowd held their breath.
Greene reached back, and for a moment their fingers touched.
“Thank you,” the “husband” said, his voice cracking with emotion. “Thank you so much, Mr. Greene.”
The couple turned, and then applause started. People touched them as they walked, hands to their shoulders as if acknowledging them for some commitment to faith.
There was a sense of fervor and enthusiasm surrounding the whole performance that just seemed so very wrong to Travis.
He felt at first contemptuous of Greene, of Doyle, of all of them, and then a growing sense of disgust invaded his thoughts. What would happen now? “Alice” and her “husband” would be seen to offer some financial contribution as they left? Was that how it worked? Would they hand over five bucks, and thus prompt others to start emptying their pockets?
Travis swallowed his sense of shame at what he was witnessing, and then he wondered whether the dead Hungarian had been here too, whether he had seen what was happening, whether he’d started to make noises about the kind of confidence trick that was being perpetrated. Was that why he had been killed, for suggesting that he would expose their scams and have them investigated by the authorities? Was this nothing more than a simple case of murder for profit? Murder committed to prevent the exposure of a lucrative scheme founded in lies?
The applause died down.
Greene rose from the chair and walked back and forth across the front of the stage.
“My mind is filled with happiness,” he said. “Where are
you? The ones with the child?”
There was a brief exclamation of surprise from somewhere in the shadows. People stepped away, and a young couple came forward.
“You learned today?” Greene asked the woman.
The woman nodded, smiling from ear to ear.
“They are going to have a baby!” Greene said.
The crowd applauded.
“Congratulations to you both,” Greene went on. “A truly wondrous and wonderful thing!” He winked, smiled at them both. “And don’t worry,” he added. “When your mother finds out, she’ll stop nagging at your husband about finding a better job!”
The woman looked stunned, the husband started laughing, and then the crowd was laughing too. The earlier sense of despondency and sadness had been completely dispelled. The crowd were animated, wholly engaged by Greene’s performance, and he was milking it for all it was worth.
“The boxes are there, folks,” Greene said. “Sometimes you just gotta face that fact and take a look. As has been said so many times before, many of life’s problems can be solved with just twenty seconds of courage. And you know what else? Time doesn’t heal. No, sirree. Old Man Time is the Great Pretender, you know?”
Greene took a seat. He lit a cigarette, and the smoke rose above his head in hieroglyphics. There were shapes and faces among those arabesques and garlands, hanging there like ghosts, and then they folded away into nothing.
“Time doesn’t mend a broken heart. Time doesn’t bring back those we have lost. Time merely dulls the sharp edge of memory, but those memories can often return sharper than ever and cut you just as deep.” He shook his head and smiled sardonically. “And if anyone would know the truth of that, then it’s me.”
Greene dropped the half-smoked cigarette and extinguished it. He rose from the chair and walked to the edge of the low stage. He raised his right hand and held it with his palm facing the crowd. He closed his eyes, and then he started to breathe more heavily.
The crowd fell quiet.
“Sometimes people decide to die,” Greene said. “And it doesn’t matter what you say or do; they are going to die. This is not fate or destiny. This is the power of the mind over the body.”
Greene leaned forward. “Do you know that there are certain Native American Indians who possess the capability of stopping their own hearts? They can do that, you know? When they get old and they believe it is time to move on to the happy hunting ground, they can simply sit down, lean against a tree, close their eyes, and stop their own heart. Someone will come by later and find them, and there is such an air of peace and tranquillity about them. Remarkable, you might think, but all of us possess such capabilities. There is nothing one human being can do that another can’t. All that we were once capable of doing, we can do again. All that we have forgotten, we can once again remember. We can see the past, the present, the future. We can learn from history but remain unaffected by it. There are answers there, the answers to every question you might ever have asked, and yet we are afraid to open our eyes and ears to those answers.” Greene paused. He scanned the crowd, and then he seemed to identify someone in the shadows to the right.
“The truth, my dear, is that there was nothing you could have done. That is what I am saying. Some people make a decision to die. Some people have grown tired of the game, and they want a new game, a better game, and the unknown future presents a possibility so much more appealing than the present. And when it comes to suicide… well, this person has simply reached a point where even they themselves believe that the world would be better off without them. That is the truth they see. A sad truth, granted, but nevertheless a truth they believe. And it is all too easy to ask yourself what you could have done or said that would have made it different. The fact of the matter is that there was nothing you could have done or said that would have made the slightest bit of difference. He decided it was time, and that was that.”
Travis looked closely, and—just as before—the people around Greene’s target seemed to step away.
A woman came forward, perhaps late thirties or early forties, and yet Travis suspected she might have been younger. She carried age before her time, it seemed. Why he felt this to be the case, he did not know. It was just something he sensed.
“Your brother was a good man,” Greene said.
The woman looked visibly shaken. She took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and clutched it as if it were a lifeline somehow capable of rescuing her from the emotional tidal wave there on the horizon of her thoughts.
“He was a good man, but he carried his ghosts well, Miss Petersen.”
The woman gasped audibly.
“Ron Petersen carried his ghosts through childhood, through his teenage years, all the way into adulthood, you see, and there was no one who could have alleviated him of that burden. Sometimes we are born with ghosts, bringing them into our current life from some past existence perhaps. Sometimes those ghosts are just waiting for us when we arrive, and they attach themselves to us, they become part of us, and unless you learn where they come from, they will always haunt you. This is why the truth of life is so important. This is why we have to look in order to see, to listen in order to hear. This is why we have to ask questions, and we have to keep on asking those questions until we find an answer that makes us feel better. The truth might hurt, but the truth will always heal. It is not time that will heal, but the truth over time. That is the difference, friends and neighbors.”
Miss Petersen stepped forward. She was now just a few feet from the edge of the stage.
“I—I lo-loved him,” she said, her voice frail but clearly audible.
“I know you loved him, Miss Petersen,” Greene said, “and he knows that you loved him, and he also knows that you would have done anything for him. However, the truth is that there really was nothing you could have done. Your brother had a rendezvous with death, and there was nothing that was going to prevent him from meeting it.”
Miss Petersen started crying, but it was not some overwhelming display of grief. There was a sense of unburdening about her, as if some weight was being lifted from her shoulders.
“And so,” Greene continued, “it is time for you to forgive yourself, my dear. It is time for you to stop the endless questions about whether you could have done this or that or the other. He has been dead for six years, and you have been dead as well. At least some part of you went with him, and it is time to take it back. There is a man who loves you, and he needs you to be well and happy. He wants to spend his whole life with you, but he does not want to live with your dead brother as well. Your brother has gone, and yet you keep trying to get him back. Let him go. The past is the past. Do not hide from it, of course. It will always be right where it is. You can see it, but you do not need to keep pulling it up into the present, and it certainly has no place in the future.”
Miss Petersen took a further step forward, and she held out her hand toward Chester Greene.
What was this? Travis wondered. Was this now where she led the field, the first to hand over money, and the crowd would follow? But there was no money. There was just Miss Petersen’s hand reaching out toward Chester Greene, and Chester came forward himself and took her hand, and she held on to him for just a second. Their eyes were level, for Chester was standing on the stage, and for a moment it seemed as if there were no one else in the tent.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice all but a whisper, but it was heard by everyone in that tent.
“Live,” Greene said. “Stop dying, my dear. It’s not your time, and it won’t be your time for a great many years to come.”
Miss Petersen gripped Chester Greene’s hand once more, and then she turned and disappeared into the crowd.
“And now… now it is perhaps time for a little housecleaning, eh?” Greene said. He returned to the chair and sat down. He leaned back and crossed his legs. The audience seemed to edge close
r, as if he was going to share something of a more personal nature with them.
“The mind,” Greene said, “is like an attic. It is up here…” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “It is up here, and we know it’s there, but we sort of ignore it. It goes about its business on a day-to-day basis, and while we take the time to tidy up and clean every other room in our lives, we often forget this one altogether.” Greene smiled knowingly. “But this, dear friends and neighbors, is where we find the past. Of course, there are good times and bad times. That is life. That is what being human is all about. And I’m not talking about the good things, people, I am talking about the stuff that hurts. The good stuff we keep, you see? The good stuff doesn’t go in the attic. That’s what we put on display. That’s what we carry around with us that we want our friends and family to see. However…” Greene uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. The audience seemed to lean right on back at him. “And this is a big however… the things we don’t want, the things we hide away from the world, well, this is where we find the trouble. These things are like little weights, like little anchors, and we find ourselves slowing down. Every day we get older, and every day we add a little more weight, a little more unnecessary baggage, and life becomes harder, and we become more bitter, and after a while we find ourselves resenting the youth and happiness of others. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s true. We are alone, and we see a young couple so in love, and we hate them just a little bit. We have no job, we are struggling, and we see someone heading off to work, and we hate them just a little bit. Of course, we don’t hate them really, but we hate the idea of how they make us feel. Because we should know better, and we know we’re not bad people, but then why do we react in such a way?”
The crowd murmured.
Even Travis felt that there was little of what Greene was saying with which he could find disagreement. How many times had he seen couples together and thought of times he’d spent with Esther? Hadn’t that even happened, albeit subconsciously, when he’d first met Edgar Doyle and Valeria Mironescu? Hadn’t that happened when he’d taken time to comment—even if only to himself—regarding how attractive Laura McCaffrey was?