The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

  On university stationery the professor types a letter to Amber McPherson, now “Mrs. Prescott Adams” residing at 28 Balmoral Drive, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Receiving no reply diligently the professor writes again a week later, and a third time another week later on university stationery introducing herself as a neuropsychologist who has been working with Elihu Hoopes for several years at the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park: would it be possible for Mrs. Adams to speak with her?

  I will happily drive to your house in Bryn Mawr. Our interview would not take more than an hour.

  Deliberating whether to sign these letters Professor Margot Sharpe or rather, Professor M. J. Sharpe.

  Deciding yes, she had better sign “Margot”—there is no advantage to surprising Amber McPherson in a way that might seem unpleasant, deceptive. Not a good strategy if Professor Sharpe wants to win the woman’s confidence.

  Still, in her precisely worded letter Margot has not informed Amber McPherson that she isn’t a clinician but a research scientist. She may be called “Doctor” in some circumstances but she is not “Doctor of Medicine.” She has not informed Amber McPherson that Elihu Hoopes is not her patient but her research subject. But Margot does not correct Amber McPherson’s assumption that this is so though she feels—oh, just slightly!—a stab of guilt.

  “Dr. Sharpe, how is Eli? Is he—improved at all? I—I’ve felt so—so terrible— I hope that his family doesn’t think that I abandoned him . . .”

  Amber McPherson is literally wringing her hands—her beautiful beringed hands. Amber McPherson speaks in a faint, breathless voice. It is the very voice of exquisite “femininity” of the 1950s which Margot recalls from her girlhood as she recalls, with some reluctance, a mild and annoying envy of such blond beauty, poise.

  Margot indicates with a sympathetic nod of her head no. Amber McPherson can’t know that Margot knows how Eli Hoopes had abandoned her; and no one would harshly judge a fiancée who’d been herself abandoned.

  “It’s so strange to realize that Eli is still—alive . . . And all these years have passed . . . Is he well? I mean—as ‘well’ as can be expected?”

  Margot indicates with a sympathetic nod of her head yes. Eli Hoopes is as well as can be expected.

  “It was like becoming—being—a widow. Except Eli and I were never married.”

  This too, a striking remark, a remark to evoke a pang of sympathy but also envy in Margot Sharpe, provokes Margot Sharpe to incline her head yes. Oh yes.

  It is something of a giddy triumph for Margot, who rarely ventures out of the carefully constructed routines of her professional life, and who begins to feel physical, visceral anxiety if she hasn’t started serious work by midmorning of any day, to have driven, one weekday afternoon, to the leafy suburb of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and to the immense granite house at 28 Balmoral Drive.

  The house, and the prestigious residential neighborhood, remind Margot of Mrs. Mateson’s English Tudor home in Gladwyne. His world, that he tried in vain to leave.

  The former Amber McPherson, now Mrs. Prescott Adams, speaks haltingly but bravely. Clearly she has prepared for this visit. On a glass-topped table are packets of snapshots and photographs she has gathered together for Margot to see, if she wishes. So many! Margot feels a sensation of vertigo.

  It is startling to Margot at such times to perceive how others have lived their lives entwined with the intimate lives of others. How is this possible? Is it still possible, for her?

  Amber McPherson is a gracious woman, just slightly overweight, beautiful still in a wan, fading-blond way. Her pale blond hair is stylishly bouffant, her clothes are expensive—woolen slacks, cashmere sweater. Clearly she has been reluctant to meet with Margot Sharpe whom she calls “Dr. Sharpe” in a way that might be defined as mildly deferential; she is the wife of a wealthy man, Margot surmises, and very likely the daughter of a wealthy family. As she speaks, swiping at her eyes, her expensive rings sparkle and wink as if to undercut the gravity of her sorrow.

  “I’m so sorry! I am truly, truly sorry. I know that I behaved badly—selfishly. I know that people expected me to marry Eli—some, in my own family—and take care of him—there was always the expectation that he would ‘recover’—‘get well’—but I knew that could not be—and I didn’t have the strength, or—courage. The fact was, Eli didn’t love me. He’d more or less left me, at the time of his illness. No one knew, only a few knew, close friends of his, possibly his sister—he’d wanted to marry me for family reasons, his and mine—but when it came to it, he’d have broken off the engagement, he wouldn’t have gone through with the wedding. And if he had—if we’d had a child, or children—he would have left the marriage, eventually. I knew this. I know this. I never stopped loving Eli, but—it was not a love that could come to anything but heartbreak even before he got sick. And so—”

  And so, Margot thinks, the fiancée of Eli Hoopes became matronly Mrs. Prescott Adams of Balmoral Drive, Bryn Mawr: wife of another man, mother of beautiful and beloved children, a fate not freely chosen but one that happened to her, like weather, subsequent to the defection of Eli Hoopes in the summer of 1964.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve talked with anyone about—Eli. Though sometimes I say his name aloud—‘Eli.’ Did you say, Doctor, that he’s ‘doing as well as can be expected’—?” The question is plaintive, the wanly beautiful face tensed in apprehension.

  Margot assures the anxious woman: Eli Hoopes’s condition has not “worsened.”

  Mrs. Adams has welcomed Margot Sharpe into her house—she has answered the doorbell herself, though Margot sees that there is a housekeeper or a maid in the background. Surprised at the sight of Margot—(was she expecting someone who looked older, more authoritarian? More “clinical”?)—nonetheless Mrs. Adams has ushered her into an elegant room that might be described as a “library”—(floor-to-ceiling cherrywood bookshelves, massive very masculine mahogany desk, Oriental carpet, exquisite molded ceiling)—adjacent to an ornately furnished living room the size of a ballroom; nervously she has offered Margot coffee, tea, or fruit juice which Margot has politely declined; she has been showing Margot photographs of her old lost life as a younger woman who’d unwisely fallen in love with Elihu Hoopes. (Margot has determined that Amber McPherson is at least ten years younger than Eli Hoopes, a fact that discomforts her. Margot has wanted to think that, younger than Eli Hoopes by fourteen years, she occupies a unique significance in the amnesiac’s romantic/erotic life.)

  On a mantel is a Chinese vase filled with flowers. Fresh-cut, surely very expensive flowers. (For an ordinary weekday at the Adams’s home? For her?) A beautifully arranged bouquet in which the predominant flowers are gardenias, carnations, and day lilies the heady scent of which pervades the room.

  “Dr. Sharpe, I know that I have behaved badly—unconscion-ably. I tried to remain in Eli’s life after his illness but—it was just so painful. At first I visited him every day—but that didn’t work out well. I visited him with his sister Rosalyn—we were close friends then. Eli ‘remembered’ me of course but it was as if a stranger was ‘remembering’ me—pretending to be Eli Hoopes. Eli was impersonating himself—awkwardly. Almost it seemed mockingly. He would stiffen when I tried to touch him, or kiss him—forced himself to respond ‘naturally.’ He made jokes, he seemed to be always trying to entertain visitors—he wasn’t comfortable with just one visitor at a time. I could recognize this ‘Eli’ but it was like a shrinkage of his soul. He’d had a side to him that could be sarcastic and petty, and say things to wound, but now this was the only Eli we saw. I suppose he was driving us away . . .

  “It was such a tragedy! How small his life had become, how repetitive and routine . . . how depressing for others who’d known him well to see. Eli had always been so concerned with what he called ‘social justice’—he could be hypercritical of others close to him—like his family—(and like me)—who weren’t committed as he was to such ideals. He did well in his family’s bu
siness but scorned his work as contemptible—‘money-grubbing.’ We all thought that he shouldn’t have dropped out of the seminary—he’d have made a wonderful minister. Not a conventional minister with a congregation but someone like the Berrigans who were willing to go to prison for their beliefs. (How Eli would have admired the Berrigans! But they came too late for him.) Though I guess the difference between the Berrigans and other activists is that the Berrigans were Catholic priests and so not encumbered by wives and families . . .”

  Amber McPherson has begun to speak vehemently now. Inside the stolid-bodied middle-aged woman is a girl who has been hurt, her love flung back into her beautiful face, and has never understood why.

  “Eli was always the center of attention. He was always a natural leader. He hadn’t much awareness of or interest in other people, except people he could help—like the poor, and Negroes. He needed to be revered—I think that was Eli’s secret. Of course, it was what made Eli special, too. A person like myself, people like his family—sister, brothers, cousins—he hadn’t much patience with us for being who we were.”

  Waxy-white gardenias—the scent is strong. Margot inhales the fragrance with something like an inward swoon.

  Margot assures Amber McPherson, she understands. Of course.

  Margot is trying not to feel an intense jealousy for this woman whom Eli Hoopes once chose as a lover, at least as a potential wife, at a time in his life before he was incapacitated and diminished. At such a time, Margot has to concede, he’d have hardly chosen her.

  She is not a sexual being at all, is she. Set beside this woman with an opulent body, sweetly vulnerable lined face.

  “Well, Doctor, maybe they’ve told you—the Hoopeses—I stopped seeing Eli after about ten months. I just could not bear it. As soon as he was out of the hospital and his condition was ‘stabilized’—when it was apparent he would never be himself again. I guess I had something like a breakdown of my own—I was very depressed. I was plucking out my hair, and stopped eating . . . Frankly, I didn’t at all care if I lived or died. Even now I dream about that terrible time. It was relayed to me that Eli asked after me often—he did remember me—or some notion of ‘Amber’—and he’d become convinced that I’d died—that I’d had a fever, and died of encephalitis . . .”

  Amber McPherson’s distressed voice trails off. She has been picking at the soft skin about a thumbnail as if to draw blood.

  Margot thinks—She wanted to die, for him. For love.

  And this, too, provokes jealousy in Margot Sharpe. Envy.

  After a respectful interval Margot asks in what ways had Eli Hoopes changed, after his illness? What were the most significant changes? Could Amber describe?

  “In what ways had he changed, Doctor?”

  Amber McPherson stares at Margot Sharpe as if Margot Sharpe has uttered a particularly foolish question.

  “In what ways? Every way.”

  “But you said that he did know you? He recognized, remembered you . . .”

  “Oh yes. Eli ‘knew’ us. His relatives, his friends. Yet, at the same time it was as if he didn’t know us at all—we were strangers to him. He tried to behave as if he knew us—as an actor might. But it was as if every cell in Eli’s body had changed . . . He didn’t even look like himself.”

  Margot has been looking through some of the photographs Amber has spread onto a table. Fascinating to her, this evidence of her amnesiac subject’s earlier life! It is true to a degree that the middle-aged Eli Hoopes no longer quite looks like this young, very fit, vigorous man with thick tufted dark hair, of the 1950s and 1960s; yet a greater change has taken place in Amber McPherson.

  Margot studies Polaroids of the slender young woman with shoulder-length pale-blond hair and her tall handsome male companion, as Amber nervously chatters. If she were a clinical psychologist, Margot thinks, she would have a difficult time attending to a patient who spoke so effusively; far rather would one prefer a reticent patient who spoke tersely, but significantly. Where there is outspokenness, there is no selection; the psychologist must make the selection herself.

  “We were very happy together—I mean, it seemed that we were. At least—I think that I was . . . When something like this happens, when you are rejected, you look back trying to make sense of—whatever it was that happened. But it’s the other person, in this case Eli, who knows what happened—not me.”

  Polaroids, snapshots, photographs of the couple posed together on a lavishly green lawn, in a sumptuous garden, on a riverbank; on a tennis court, each grasping a racket and each dressed in impeccable dazzling white; in a long, heavy-looking canoe, on a hiking trail amid tall pines, on a white-sand beach (in the Caribbean?). In some of the pictures Eli Hoopes is darkly tanned, and wears a sailing cap; in some, his hair has grown long, hippie-length nearly, and he wears a red headband. Both Eli and Amber are wearing shorts, or they are wearing stylish sporty clothes, or they are wearing “dressy” evening clothes. Eli has his arm around Amber’s shoulders, drawing her to him; Amber teeters on high-heeled sandals, perceptibly off balance. They are smiling happily at the camera, and they are demonstrably “in love”—or so the evidence suggests.

  In certain of the photos Eli is gazing off into the distance with a slight, vexed frown, in a way Margot has noticed him do at the Institute. Amid the intensity of testing, the amnesiac subject has a way of fading from view. You glance up at him and he’s gone—like that.

  Eli? Mr. Hoopes? Hello . . .

  In most of the photos he is standing beside the blond fiancée in a way to suggest protectiveness.

  “Yes, you can see—so many pictures . . . What it all adds up to, I’m not sure.” Amber McPherson laughs, sadly.

  But Amber McPherson is proud of these photos, nonetheless. Margot supposes that there is nothing in her present life as Mrs. Prescott Adams that so compels her attention, her guilt and her regret.

  “How beautiful you are in these pictures!”—Margot exclaims naïvely. She is fortunate not to have blundered were.

  Margot sees that, when she was younger, in her twenties, Amber McPherson braided her hair; most strikingly, in several snapshots, Amber has braided a single strand of hair, that falls over the left side of her face beguilingly. It must have been a style of the era—a black influence. Instead of tight, cornrowed hair, a single narrow braid falling from forehead to shoulder. Margot wonders if it was to beguile Eli Hoopes, this appropriation of sexy black hair fashion. Margot wonders if Eli suggested it, and if he did, if Eli found the single narrow braid of pale blond hair sexually alluring.

  There are a number of snapshots presumably set at Lake George—path along a rocky shore, figures in a canoe, vast expanse of water reflecting a gray-tinged sky. At the end of a dock, the white-clad couple poses beside a white-sailed sailboat. Margot asks if Amber McPherson had spent much time at the Hoopeses’ Lake George house? If she knew much about his boyhood summers there? The setting seems to mean a good deal to Eli.

  Amber McPherson wipes at her eyes. Yes, she’d spent some time there, in the summer. The lodge at Lake George was—is—a large, family house with many rooms, many people coming and going—the Hoopeses and their relatives and friends. She’d been Eli’s guest at least a dozen times. Eli had a very special close attachment to Lake George. He hadn’t felt much sentiment for his family home in Gladwyne where he’d grown up, but the beautiful lodge at Lake George, built of treated pine logs and fieldstone, with its several porches and numerous outbuildings, was special to him—“Eli said, he was always ‘there’ in his dreams. Even when the setting wasn’t distinct, Eli knew he was at the lake.”

  “Had anything ever happened to him, at the lake?”

  “‘Happened to him’—? I suppose yes, many things—over the years. He’d been brought to Bolton Landing—that’s the name of the little town—since he was a baby.”

  “Do you think—do you recall—if anything particular might have happened to him there? Or—any family event, incident? A death, a drowning . .
.”

  Reluctantly Amber McPherson says yes, she does remember—something.

  Not clear what it was. A death in the Hoopes family, she thinks.

  “Eli never spoke of it but his sister Rosalyn told me, an older girl cousin had gone missing in the woods, and her body was found in a shallow creek—or maybe wasn’t found . . . Rosalyn had been very young at the time. Or maybe she hadn’t even been born, and had only heard stories, later.”

  “Eli never spoke of it?”

  “No.”

  Amber McPherson frowns. She has not been comfortable with this line of questioning, Margot thinks, because attention is being drawn away from her and Eli, and in another direction. The record of the photographs is all the history she wishes to summon—it is her cherished personal history with Eli Hoopes. Beyond this, an earlier history doesn’t interest her at all.

  Every woman wants to think—His emotional history begins with me.

  Amber McPherson says, with an air of accusation, “Eli was reckless with his life. We all thought he’d be killed—or terribly injured—in a civil rights protest. We almost thought he was expecting to be, himself. But—something else happened to Eli instead, catastrophic in a different way.” Her voice isn’t breathless now but grave, brooding. “Some of us who loved Eli thought it would have been better for him if he’d—died . . .”

  A sun-dappled snapshot of the smiling young couple in T-shirts and shorts, leaning against a porch railing and in the background a shimmering lake—presumably Lake George.

  Margot sees, on the back of the snapshot, the hastily scrawled date—July 1963.

  He’d had only another year of his life as Eli Hoopes, at this time. The dark-tanned handsome youngish man in the picture, face partly obscured by sunglasses, arm around the shoulders of the smiling blond fiancée, has no foreknowledge of this catastrophe, which is why he smiles with such confidence.

  Margot hears, belatedly, Amber McPherson’s shocking remark. Margot hears, but doesn’t want to judge. Better if he’d died.