Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

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

  “Yeah.”

  Margie let out the big breath she’d taken.

  Chapter Two

  When 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 pai
n 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?”

  She wondered if he was asking her if she experienced orgasm so she said, “Nothing. But I bet it will happen next time.” His expression told her she’d misinterpreted the question so she explained what she’d thought he meant. He just stared at her for the longest time, and he said, “Oh, God.” Then he said, “Next time, I promise you. If it takes all day.” Margie started to ask him what that meant—if what took all day?—but he was already explaining what he’d meant in the first place. “What I want to know is, what happened to you the day of the fire?”

  “Oh.” So Margie told him that she really didn’t know what happened to her. She was, after all, the youngest casualty. A baby. She said, “I can only tell you what other people told me.” And he said, “Please tell me what they told you.”

  So she told him in bits and pieces, starting with the bucket brigade and the lady with the potatoes. He said, “Emilia Pasqucci.”

  He knew the Italian woman’s name. He said that was because his mother had been born and brought up in the once Italian stronghold at the north end of the city. Everyone there knew everyone else. That was a half-truth. He knew the name of Emilia Pasqucci not because of his mother, who undoubtedly did know the woman, but because of his obsession. He knew every single fact, every name, every particular connected with the circus fire. Margie would come to find that out soon.

  While they talked, Margie could see how happy he was to have found her—how happy not to have to relinquish his obsession, even though there was this huge complication he’d have to face, relinquishing the beautiful Sylvia and calling off his wedding. Margie went on with her story, still in bits and pieces because they kept breaking up the narrative with passionate kissing. They were making love down by the creek at the end of the beach where there was privacy. Mosquitoes were why no one went to the creek. Margie and Charlie never felt the mosquitoes feasting on them. All that week, Charlie kept running out of condoms and finally thought to buy a bottle of insect repellent during his many trips to the drugstore.

  After they finally reached the point where they could control themselves somewhat, Margie was able just to sit placidly in Charlie’s arms and tell him her story without interruptions. She did it the same way she had described the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird, the way she described any good book she recommended to a friend. Dramatically. In fact, she blurted out the words, “My mother died in the fire trying to save me,” knowing Charlie would take them very hard. In fact, his eyes became big love-crumbs, Margie thought, as e.e. cummings put it so sublimely. Charlie said, “Your mother died? In the fire?”

  “Yes.”

  He was completely overcome, his face filled with dreadful grief. She went on, telling Charlie that the surge of the thousands of hysterical people must have wrenched her from her mother’s arms. She told him that even though almost all of the dead were crushed up against the animal chute, her mother wasn’t because she wasn’t trying to get out; she was trying to find her baby.

  Charlie swallowed. She watched his Adam’s apple go up and down. “And your father?” he asked.

  “He was overseas. Actually, he was in a prisoner-of-war camp. He didn’t find out my mother had died till he was liberated.”

  “Jesus.” Charlie hugged her closer. “Where did they find her?”

  “Under the grandstand. Under the Grandstand C seats is what I heard. What was left of the Grandstand C seats.”

  Charlie crushed her to him and kissed her. He said, “Someone—whoever it was—saved you. Saved you for me. God bless him.”

  Margie thought, Yeah. She decided it wasn’t the moment to mention that the blessed person left his thumbprint in her back. Then Charlie pulled off Margie’s bathing suit and made love to her again. What he’d promised her earlier didn’t take all day.

  When Margie emerged from the magical tunnel Charlie created that led to her having an orgasm, she lay in his arms thinking how interesting it was that the one thing Charlie didn’t say, which everyone else said to her when they asked her about the fire, was, “Well, at least the animal act was over. A merciful thing.” Margie couldn’t believe how morbid people were. As if the fire alone hadn’t been bad enough, people liked to imagine the big cats eating people as the flames burned all around. Charlie obviously understood that things were morbid enough without such black flights of fancy.

  But Charlie did know it was a merciful thing, not because the animals would have eaten anyone—they were very well fed—but because the circus was not just any circus, it was the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s, the Greatest Show on Earth, and in those days, the wild animal act was not a tame Siberian tiger and a few tired-looking lions. The Ringlings had the best. The Alfred Court Wild Animal Act had forty lions, thirty tigers, thirty leopards, twenty bears, and forty elephants. It was some show.

  The line, “The animals had just cleared the chute,” came up over and over in stories about the circus fire. No one could quite visualize the animals clearing the chute, even people who had been to the circus several times, but Charlie could. He’d studied the catastrophe from beginning- to end. He knew that the reason the people couldn’t picture the scene was because it happened so swiftly. The illusion was that it didn’t happen at all. At the Hartford circus, the chute ran from the enormous cage in the ring nearest the main entrance and on out of a slit in the tent a few feet from the main entrance where it met up with the circus-train cages. The chute was an arch of metal bars. As soon as the animal act ended, the lights would go out and a spot would come on, aimed at the saddest of all sad clowns, Emmett Kelly, who would wring such poignant feelings out of the hearts of the crowd that all eyes would remain riveted on him. And then, after his act of diversion, he’d slip out of the spot and the beam of light would swing up to the peak of the tent. And there, as if by a miracle, perched on a tiny wood platform, were the Flying Wallendas about to walk the tightrope. In the moment before the first Wallenda stepped out onto the rope, the circus hands would have already dismantled the cage and chute. But not on the day of the fire.

  Emmett Kelly had missed his cue. The Ringmaster counted to three, and when the clown still hadn’t appeared, signaled for the spot to go out. So the audience, that afternoon, watched the animals trot through the chute, the roustabouts take down the cage, and the Wallendas climb their ladder. The roustabouts were just turning their attention to the chute when they saw the beginnings of the fire. The men scrambled off to safety, leaving the chute where it stood. Consequently, anyone who tried to get to the main entrance from Grandstand A in the southwest corner of the tent had to climb over the chute in order to escape. Hundreds of people did try, but only the Wallendas were able to do it, and, of course, do it with ease, as they were acrobats.

  But Margie’s mother was found under the ashes of the wooden seats in Grandstand C. She had died of smoke inhalation while she searched, was what Margie’s father told her and what she told Charlie. People would say to her father—nasty, stupid people—why would anyone take an infant to a circus? Her father would tell them in his
beaten voice, “The baby was her closest friend.” He never got over the ridiculous irony that he survived a prisoner-of-war camp while his wife couldn’t make it through a circus.

  When Margie told Charlie about the nasty, stupid people, he said, “Stop, stop,” and hugged her and petted her and told her he adored her. His face reflected the pain she insisted she didn’t feel. It was just a story. “Charlie, I have no memory of any of this!”

  During their conspiratorial meetings at the creek, it finally came to be Margie’s turn to ask Charlie what happened to him at the circus. What with the obsession, she’d assumed he’d been there. He told her he hadn’t been, but that he’d had a ticket. She smiled, of course, and then he smiled, too. The circus fire had become such a legend in Hartford that anyone in the city who wasn’t at the circus claimed they’d had a ticket but were saved because they missed the last bus, or because they chose not to go as it was just too hot that day, or whatever. As if people throw away a ticket to the circus because it’s hot.

  Charlie asked, “So what’d you get?”

  He meant her settlement. They hadn’t had class-action suits back then. They hardly had any lawsuits at all. But the Ringlings wanted to do right by the victims. They paid the families, and the injured survivors, an amount deemed appropriate by a volunteer panel of Connecticut probate judges who determined each casualty’s level of loss or injury. They awarded a cash amount to the next of kin of the dead and more complicated settlements to the physically injured. Uninjured survivors didn’t expect to be recompensed for their emotional trauma—that you escaped the fire untouched was recompense enough. To complain about the damage to your psyche was to trivialize those who were really hurt. There wasn’t such a thing as post-traumatic stress syndrome till Vietnam. Margie’s father’s condition would, today, have been considered post-traumatic stress. In World War II, people who had nervous breakdowns were pretty much thought of as cowards.