Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  Margie’s Aunt Jane had been very close to her mother, and used to say to her—in fact still said to her—“Your mother and I were best buddies.” Her mother and her Aunt Jane were married to brothers. Once Margie’s father and her Uncle Pete came home from the war, they all stayed on in Charter Oak Terrace for a few years until they got established in new jobs.

  Negro people from the South looking for work were moving in after the war, and then when her father and uncle found employment with Fuller Brush, they became disqualified for low-income housing. How Margie hated to go. That was because the Negro people who moved in had more kids than the white families. Margie and Little Pete could just go outside, throw down a hat, call it home plate, and in a minute there were enough kids for two teams.

  Now, Charter Oak Terrace was a slum. The black families were replaced by poor Hispanics. Margie and Charlie went to Puerto Rico on their honeymoon and the housing projects in San Juan looked just like Charter Oak Terrace. Except there was no turquoise sea at the end of the narrow streets, only the Hog. And it wasn’t a clean little stream anymore, it was a death trap. Latino kids from the Project drowned in the stream made deep with garbage, and junk, and bedsprings, and tires.

  After they’d moved, Margie’s Aunt Jane learned to drive because she and Uncle Pete moved to a Hartford suburb, and she’d take Little Pete and Margie for a ride to the old neighborhood so they could see where they’d lived before their fathers got back on their feet. The true reason she did this was to check on the weeping cherry tree Margie’s mother had planted in front of Aunt Jane’s kitchen window as a birthday present. It was always there and it was always bigger. Aunt Jane said to Margie, “Your mother loved beautiful things. She wanted me to see something beautiful while I did the dishes.”

  After Margie told Charlie that, she buried her head in his chest, and he thought she was crying. But she wasn’t. She was willing away crying.

  Chapter Four

  Margie’s formal introduction to the O’Neill clan was at Sunday dinner. Charlie’s mother, Palma (she was born on Palm Sunday), held Sunday dinner every week for her brothers and their wives and their kids and her sons, and her sons’ wives and kids. Around two dozen people, give or take a couple of newborns, were there to greet Margie. Charlie had warned her about one thing before they arrived; he warned her about her future father-in-law, who would most likely be too hungover to come to the table. Sometimes he was still drunk from Saturday night. Sometimes even still drinking. He was served his dinner in the living room where he’d be parked in front of the TV. If he made it to the dining room, he would sit, eat, and leave. “Best to just ignore him,” Charlie told Margie.

  Margie had grown up having a father who cooked her meals and cleaned up until she was old enough to take turns with him. Once, she and her father considered the advantages and disadvantages of helping each other every night, as opposed to alternating shifts, where one would do everything one night, and nothing the next. They decided on the latter so that at least one of them could spend the dinner hour undisturbed, reading. They were both terrible cooks and they both hated to clean dirty dishes, so having one night to do none of those things gave them the fortitude to do it on alternating nights. Margie and her father weren’t interested in food. Meals just gave them something to do while they read.

  At her first Sunday dinner at Palma’s (once the calamitous trauma of Charlie’s disengagement from Sylvia and subsequent engagement to her had subsided), Margie was steered toward the kitchen, where all the women were breading veal cutlets, or stirring marinara sauce, or boiling great pots of gnocchi, and, at the same time, getting all the serving dishes, and china, and glasses, and silver organized to set the table. The kitchen was just off the living room. Through the open doorway, Margie watched as the men sat in the living room drinking wine or beer and nibbling on munchies. The patriarch, Denny O’Neill, had an area set off to himself, and to Margie it seemed as if one of those invisible electric fences surrounded him—even the kids knew just how close they could get without risking a shock. Margie was not introduced to him. The point was not to disturb the man so that he wouldn’t, in turn, disturb Sunday dinner. So Margie stood in the doorway watching the two scenes: the men talking about the football game they were watching, and the women talking about politics, menopause, religion, books, movies, education, breast cancer, and each other’s personal lives.

  Then, from upstairs, came the unmistakable sound of kids fighting. Serious fight, Margie could tell, not just a tiff. Mike’s wife said to her, “Here, Margie, work on the antipasto while I see what’s up.” She handed Margie a bunch of radishes and an instrument that would turn them into starbursts. Margie said to her, “Mike isn’t doing anything. Can’t he break up the fight?” But Mike’s wife had already dried her hands and had darted out of the kitchen. So Margie sat down and destroyed the radishes.

  Later, when the food was all cooked, the women served the men and children, ate with them, and then cleaned up everything while the men continued to sit and eat pie and drink cups of coffee. The women would grab dessert later, on the run, between getting kids into pajamas and cleaning out or packaging all the debris and leftovers.

  In the car, when Charlie drove her home, she told him how shocked she was by the dinner scene. He had no idea why. She told him why. He said, “Well, that’s the way my mother wants it.”

  Margie said, “Lots of slaves thought they liked being slaves.” (She didn’t say, A lot of worms think horseradish is pheasant under glass.) “I was humiliated for your mother, Charlie.”

  He said, “It’s the way it is.”

  She said, “I’m going to have to call your mother and explain why I can’t come to Sunday dinner anymore. You made it sound like a nice little weekly party, Charlie. But it isn’t.”

  “Jesus, Margie, you’ll really hurt my mother’s feelings.”

  “But my feelings were hurt.”

  Charlie, from day one at the beach in Old Saybrook, did what Margie asked. That’s because she was not a demanding person; she asked for very little. And Charlie was an insightful person. He understood her feelings once she expressed them. In fact, a year later, when they were at a firemen’s picnic, everyone was talking about what a dog Betty Friedan was and Charlie said, “All she wants is a fair shake.” That day, Margie had looked over at Charlie and loved him all the more. Everyone else looked down at their hamburgers, confused.

  Charlie said to her, “Margie, don’t call my mother. Let me do it.”

  Charlie’s compromises always worked with her. But she did ask, “What are you going to tell her?”

  “About how you feel. And how I’m going to have to help out next Sunday or you won’t come.”

  He looked over at her from behind the wheel and smirked.

  The most erotic thing for a woman is a man who tries to please her, Margie decided. An erotic thing for a man is to watch a woman take off her shoes, unhook her garters, and roll down her stockings, which is what Margie did. He pulled the car into the back of a church parking lot and they climbed over each other into the backseat, kissing and undressing and trying not to suffocate each other.

  The next Sunday, Charlie came into the kitchen and started stirring the sauce. At first, everyone laughed and then they all got uncomfortable when they realized it wasn’t a joke. The kids heard the silence and came peeking through the kitchen doorway where Chick was standing, staring at Charlie. The scene made Margie think of a diorama in a wax museum. Chick said, “Charlie, what the hell are you doing?”

  Charlie said, “Stirring the sauce. You want a taste?”

  No one said a word. Then Charlie made his announcement. “Margie thinks it’s rude behavior for all the men to sit while all the women cook.” He tried to explain further. “Since cooking is hard work.” He gave up on explaining and shrugged. “So I offered to help. If I didn’t Margie would have stayed home.”

  Chick looked at his sister. “Is that all right with you?”

  Palma said, �
��All I want is for Charlie and Margie to be happy” One broken engagement for Charlie was plenty for her.

  Chick said, “Okay then.”

  The tension settled, and the kids dispersed, gazing over their shoulders at Margie, awed.

  A little while later when Margie was in the dining room trying to set up a high chair, Denny O’Neill came in carrying two beers—one in each hand. Both beers were his. Margie smiled at him. She figured he was going to offer to help her with the high chair. She had no idea how to open it. He brushed by her and said into her ear, “I wonder what it’ll be like—married to a faggot.”

  His face was an inch from hers. She didn’t look away. She said, “Lush.”

  He left the dining room.

  The next Sunday, Denny wasn’t in his chair. He was upstairs, supposedly sleeping off a good one. Charlie called out from the kitchen into the living room, “Conversation’s a lot raunchier in here.” Palma rolled her eyes and then said to Charlie, sternly, something that sounded like “a spat.”

  Margie asked Mike’s wife, “What’s that mean?”

  She said, “It means ‘knock it off’ in her dialect.”

  “What dialect?”

  “Bruzzese.”

  “Broots-Aze?”

  “It’s a place in Italy.”

  “Oh.”

  When dinner was ready, Charlie’s oldest brother, Frank, came into the kitchen and took an enormous platter of chicken out of Palma’s hands. There were twelve cut-up chickens on it. He said, “I got that, Ma.” He headed for the dining room and dropped the platter. It didn’t break because it was aluminum. It made quite a noise, though, and the children all crammed into the kitchen to gape. Margie leaped up to do something. Frank said, “Well, I guess you kids better help Margie pick up the chicken.”

  Margie said, “Can we rinse it all off?”

  It turned out to be Palma who laughed first. Now the kids gaped at the adults, who were all laughing instead of being angry. Then the thrilled children got to put the chicken pieces into the sink and run water over them. Palma dipped the pieces into the tomato sauce and put them back on the platter. She waved the back of her hand at her guests and said, “I’ll carry this.” That got another big laugh, and Margie said, “I’m really sorry, Mrs. O’Neill.”

  Then Chick said, “That’s what happens, kid, when you get yourself engaged to a faggot.”

  Palma said, “Aspat!”

  Then they all tried not to laugh, but couldn’t. Now Margie was in awe. They all knew what Denny O’Neill had said to her. She didn’t know how they could have, but they did. Margie didn’t understand the psychodynamics of a big extended family. At the table, sitting next to Chick, she said to him, “Faggot is not a very nice word. There are children here.” She said it with a smirk.

  Chick said, “Jesus H. Christ, kiddo, one cause at a time.”

  Then he gave her a mighty bear hug. Over his shoulder, at the corner of the table next to the high chair, Margie watched Palma spooning a bowl of pastina into a baby’s mouth. But Palma’s eyes kept wandering to the ceiling. Denny O’Neill did not abide crashing aluminum platters.

  Besides reading, Margie spent her marriage acting as Charlie’s secretary, keeping all the records that represented his obsessed journey toward finding the person who torched the Barnum & Bailey big top in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944, killing 169 people, injuring 2,000 more, and leaving an angel-child unclaimed. Margie’s short-lived job at the Travelers had proven expedient. With Margie by his side, Charlie’s search became such a thorough one that eventually they would find Clayton T Bart, whose thumbprint was in Margie’s back. For Charlie to have come up with Clayton T Bart left no doubt in anyone’s mind that Charlie was scouring the ends of the earth for his arsonist.

  Before Margie had come on the scene, he had already interviewed hundreds of witnesses to the fire—survivors, circus people, the Barbour Street neighborhood folks, firemen, psychiatrists, prisoners. Once married to Margie, he was able to hunt more efficiently, not only because of the secretarial skills she’d picked up at the Travelers, but also because of the Cadillacs. Every other year, she’d sell a Cadillac and they’d have the money to pay for the hundreds of telephone calls and the payments to various private detectives all over the country tracking down witnesses.

  When they bought a house, one of the upstairs bedrooms became the war room. At least, Margie called it the war room. Charlie called it the den. In his “den,” Charlie had an entire wall of loose-leaf binders labeled by date, starting with the first one, July 7, 1944, which represented the day after the fire. There were over a dozen books for July 6 itself. Charlie knew what was in each book by looking up the date in a little black guide he’d created. If computers had been available back then, Charlie would still have had to have all the space in his den. That’s because the longest wall with no windows was papered with a blown-up, bird’s-eye photo of the circus tent without the top that was referred to as “the Map.” The view was accurately scaled. It was the view the Flying Wallendas had had from their little perch high above the center ring at the top of the tent, where they were standing when they first caught sight of the spot of flame.

  After he had papered the photo onto the wall, Charlie surveyed it while he and Margie shared a bottle of wine. As he gazed upon his handiwork, he told her a story. “Margie, honey, in that moment, the first moment of the fire, Karl Wallenda thought of trying to save their bike. He’d designed it himself. He was the first tightrope walker to ride a bike across the tightrope. The bike cost a lot of money to have built. But then his next thought was that he wouldn’t be able to save himself if he tried to hold the bike while he slid down the ladder. It weighed over a hundred pounds. He’d already ordered his family down the ladder even before the band broke into the ‘Stars and Stripes.’ He left the bike.”

  Margie asked, “Why didn’t they just jump into the net?”

  “No net.”

  “God. They didn’t have a net?”

  “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?”