Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  She was on the extension. “Yes.”

  He said, “Captain Bart can’t wait to meet you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Margie thought: And wouldn’t Miss Foss be disappointed to hear me still saying yeah, instead of yes. Miss Foss, there are times when all you can get out is a yeah, and the reason is that you can’t bring yourself to agree. Yeah is not the same as yes.

  Margie’s Aunt Jane planned a big family gathering so everybody could meet Clayton T. Bart and thank him. Margie’s family: Aunt Jane, Uncle Pete, Little Pete, and the kids; and Charlie’s family, more than two dozen aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., filled the O’Neill house. They were all excited and thrilled that Margie was going to be meeting the man who saved her life, and they’d get to look on and share the thrill. Martha said to her mother, “You don’t want to do this, right, Mom?”

  Margie said, “I don’t want to spoil everybody’s fun.”

  Then Martha tried out some newly acquired advanced placement psychology. “Not even at the cost it will exact upon you?”

  Since that was the kind of question a kid felt free to ask in those new times of expressing themselves, Margie wasn’t taken aback. She’d been getting those kinds of questions from Martha quite a lot lately. She said, “I have a responsibility to be nice to people who love me, even if it’s a sacrifice. Besides, the cost isn’t so great. I’m just feeling a little uneasy, that’s all.”

  The other thing that Margie was feeling—that she didn’t really think of as a being a great cost—was worry. She was very worried about her father. But she was always worried about him, anyway, so what was the difference? Martha, who could hear her mother think, it seemed, said, “You don’t need any more worry about Grandpa than you already have.”

  So Margie called her Aunt Jane to tell her she was worried about her father, and her aunt told her that her father was going along with the idea, and was in fact, planning to come to the party. Come to the party? He hadn’t left his room in the veterans’ home since 1963. Margie was good and uneasy now. And if she was uneasy, what was he? She decided to visit him.

  Jack Potter was physically able to care for himself, but he chose not to. Once he no longer needed to care for Margie, he decided not to bother with himself, either. Once he saw his duty to his daughter as finished, he just sat back and began his wait to die. He would have died, too, if Margie and Charlie and Jane and Big Pete and Little Pete had left him alone. In fact, that was why they’d initially insisted he go to the home. Margie told him letting him die would be an awful thing for her to have on her shoulders. She didn’t tell him about his granddaughter’s thoughts. Once Martha had gotten out of the horseradish, she’d become bitter about her beloved grandfather. She told Margie he should have just committed suicide and been done with it. She said, “Mom, you have just as much of a burden with him being in the home.” Martha, the haughty high schooler, accused her mother of taking a terrible punishment without questioning it, and she said, “What about me, Mom? He has a duty to me to be a regular Grandpa. Or do you think only women should have duties?” Margie told her just to drop it. Martha said, “You don’t protect people by letting them be stubborn, Mom.” Margie knew Martha was right, but told her that it was everybody’s duty—men and women—to respect a father’s wishes. Martha said, “Bullshit.”

  So Margie decided to fight back. “He did think of suicide once.”

  Martha said, “What?” and listened to Margie say those words again, then looked into Margie’s wretched eyes. Martha started to cry. Margie was still the parent, and so she hugged Martha while she cried, even though she knew that she should be the one who was crying, who was getting hugged. Then Martha said, “You know, this is one fucked-up family.”

  Margie said, “I really can’t handle that language coming from you.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  Margie was beginning to know what Martha pointed out was true even if she did choose to express it in such a vulgar way. Martha made sense to her, as did her father’s psychiatrist, who attributed Jack Potter’s behavior to the trauma of his war experience. Margie told the psychiatrist that her father had really loved her mother to the point of obsession. But the psychiatrist said, “We blame love for a lot of things. Actually, it’s an easy way out. It protects us from having to deal with the real injuries.”

  Margie nodded at him, understanding. When she was in the sixth grade and her class was studying the three paragraphs in their social studies book devoted to World War II, she’d gone home and asked Jack Potter about his war experience. Her father’s response was, “In June of 1944, New England lost fewer men on the beaches of France than Connecticut did at the circus a month later.”

  He had really said it to the wall across from his chair at the kitchen table. He’d heard Margie’s question, but had forgotten where it was coming from. They were having dinner at the time. He’d cooked chicken wings. He and Margie didn’t like vegetables. They were eating and reading. He was reading his papers and Margie was reading her comic books. She didn’t read her library books at the kitchen table because she might drip chicken grease on them, and in those days the librarians would flip through the pages searching for damage before accepting returns.

  When Margie got married and visited her father at his new residence, she’d sit across from him at the little table in his room where he was reading. She always brought a book so she could read while he went through his newspapers and magazines just the way they’d done every night at home until Margie left their apartment to marry. She’d sit for an hour or so and then when she’d get up to go, he’d say, “Thanks for visiting with me, Margie.” On occasion, he’d speak to the wall while she was visiting, the way he had at home. Once he said, “I hope my eyes go last.” He didn’t say that because he cared so much about his reading, but because the hospital staff tended not to bother him while he read. If he wasn’t reading they’d try to start a conversation.

  Even though he was carrying on a wall monologue, Margie still said, “Now they have books on tape, Dad, in case your ears are the last to go.”

  He said, “You listen to stories that people tell—you read stories that people write. What is the sense in it?”

  Yeah. What’s the sense in anything, Dad? Margie wondered. He saw no sense in living the life he might have led. He just wanted to get life by him. Early on, Margie believed that without his wife, life was not life for her father, just like tapes were not books. Margie used to look at him and think: This man has a broken heart and there’s no mending it. But as she came to know his new psychiatrist, she began to change her mind. Once, just after he’d been confined to a wheelchair—he wouldn’t walk—the doctor had come in for the first time, introduced himself, and started chatting. While the doctor was in the middle of his third sentence—something like, “The view isn’t bad from…“—Jack Potter interrupted. He said, “What are you talking about?”

  The doctor said, “Actually, I’ll be visiting you like this once a week. I’m treating your depression.”

  Margie’s father said, “I’m not depressed. I’m happy.”

  The doctor said, “You’re happy with merely existing?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “The war, Mr. Potter, changed your definition of happiness.”

  Jack Potter went back to his newspaper and ignored the man. The doctor had been like an oracle to Margie. He was right. Her father was depressed. But he refused to be treated.

  Now Margie stood next to his bed in his room, without a book in her hands, and said, “Aunt Jane told me you’re coming to this party.”

  He said, “Yes, I am.”

  She said, “You don’t have to feel that you’re expected.”

  “I know I’m not expected. I’m coming because you’ll need me.” He didn’t say that to the wall, he said it to Margie. His eyes were gray. So were hers. The rest of Margie, supposedly, was her mother.

  Margie said, “Thanks, Dad.”

  She thought: Talk about sac
rifices, Martha, my girl. He loves me so much even if he is depressed. He didn’t kill himself entirely just on the chance that I might need him—his interpretation of need, not yours, Martha. When Margie drove off from the veterans’ home, she wished Martha could only know that he loved her, too. When she was small, Margie would bring her to visit and he’d laugh at her baby nonsense. Once he said to Margie, “Your mother used to write so many letters, Margie. She’d tell me how you reminded her of a drunken sailor—babbling and tumbling all over the place. Now I see what she meant.” His eyes were harkening back. For a moment he had a wife again. For a moment he remembered life before he’d been imprisoned. Margie broke the spell, though. She said, “Letters?” His old eyes came back.

  “I’m sorry, Margie. I lost them.”

  “They were lost?”

  “No. I lost them.”

  Margie felt her heart sink.

  Jack Potter had, in fact, taught Martha to read. When she was older, she’d come with her mother to visit him once in a while when she was in the mood to sit and read, which wasn’t often because she was always so busy. But then she came to feel that life was cheating her out of something—having a normal grandfather. Martha’s other grandfather, Denny O’Neill, had died before she was old enough to remember him. Now there was abnormal. Be grateful you were cheated out of him, Margie thought as she drove home.

  Clayton T. Bart was in uniform. He had a lot of ribbons, the ones everyone’s heard of, and then some others: The Air Force Commendation Medal, the Air Force Achievement Medal, and the Combat Crew Award. Chick had filled him in on more than just Margie; the first thing he did when he walked into Margie’s living room was salute Jack Potter sitting in his wheelchair in the corner. Margie’s father returned the salute. Then the captain shook Margie’s hand, and said, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He was very uneasy.

  So Margie said, “Want to see my scar?” She was smirking when she said it to put him at his ease. He went to say something, but instead his body began to shake. Margie put her arms around him and he hugged her hard and just broke down. He tried to apologize for losing his composure, and that was what made everyone else at the party cry, too, especially Charlie’s family, since they had those Italian genes where emotions came out in a flood, but only on special occasions.

  So out came all the food, too, and the bottles and bottles of wine, and everybody started digging in because people can really eat voraciously when in an emotional crisis. That’s what Martha told Little Pete’s smallest children, who didn’t understand what the party was all about and how people could go from happy to sad to happy so fast. Captain Bart didn’t really start to talk until they were on the cannoli and the coffee. Oh, to be a worm in a cannoli, Margie said to herself. They sipped their coffee and listened while Charlie took notes off in the corner like he was a monk chronicling some event in the Middle Ages. Before, Margie had said to Charlie, “No tapes.” And Charlie said, “But I need to capture this.” And then he had looked at Margie’s set face and said, “Okay, honey.”

  Captain Bart poured out every detail of July 6, 1944. But they were the usual details: the wild animals; the apparition-like moment of the Wallendas’ appearance; the fire; the panic to get out. He said he grabbed two kids around their waists, tucked each one under his arm like they were footballs, and crawled out under the tent. Captain Bart was from Arkansas, where they were used to tents. City folk aren’t, so the citizens of Hartford headed for the entrance they’d come in, no matter that it was blocked by iron bars. That you could go under the walls of a tent had never occurred to them.

  He told them that the brigade passing the bodies from over the chute to the blankets laid out on the grass lasted just a minute or so—just a dozen or so children were all that Hermes Wallenda could manage to pull up and over the chute before the heat forced him back. Charlie would have given plenty for Hermes Wallenda’s testimony but Margie could well imagine why the youngest Wallenda had refused. The last thing he must have seen before he jumped down off the chute would have been the choking mothers holding their children up to him. All the witnesses from inside the tent said there was no smoke. They could see it all just like they were watching a movie. The smoke didn’t come until everyone was either out or forsaken.

  Captain Bart had stood on the ground on the other side of the chute and caught the children Hermes Wallenda dropped down to him and then passed them on to an army private behind him. He said a big surge of heat suddenly came through the bars, pushing at him like a great invisible burning hand. Then Hermes Wallenda jumped down and faced him, their eyes inches apart. Captain Bart said that it was the same as looking into hell. “I saw hell in his eyes,” he said. The twang was almost entirely gone, not quite, but his Bible-thumping roots lingered. Then they ran, Captain Bart off to see where he could be of more help, Hermes Wallenda to his trailer.

  Captain Bart paused for just a second before he said, “Thank God for that wall of heat, though. There is just no question in my mind that those people up against the chute died in an instant.” He knew that was what must have happened because even though no fire touched him, his uniform had been burned black, and the hair of his arms was singed off. He’d been leaning against the chute, and when he took off his pants that night there were the beet red imprints of the vertical bars against his thighs. Margie looked over at Chick. Little Miss 1565 had been barely touched by the hand of heat Captain Bart spoke of; she had been protected from it by the crazed people climbing on top of her, fatally crushing her. Captain Bart looked at Margie sitting next to him and said, “You were just a tiny baby. A piece of burning canvas must have fallen on your back. I remember.…”

  Then he started crying again. Jack Potter from his wheelchair said to him, “Now, son, you just take it easy. Everything’s fine now” Martha caught Margie’s eye.

  Captain Bart, a career air force officer but still a farm boy from the Bible Belt, wiped his nose on his immaculate khaki sleeve and said, “Thank you, sir. I thought… the baby…“ He raised his hands, palms up, and looked at them, and then at Margie. He said, “I thought you were dead.”

  Jack Potter said, “No, son, she was unconscious.”

  Margie put down her coffee cup. “Well wouldn’t you know it wasn’t one of those famous Wallendas who’d left a thumbprint in my back? Just some kid from Arkansas.” Margie smiled at him.

  She saw Charlie roll his eyes.

  Captain Bart managed a smile back at her. She said, “You know, Captain, the thing you have to tell yourself is that I don’t remember any of it. It’s like you’re telling me a story of someone else.” What she always said.

  Her father said, “That’s true, Captain.”

  Then Jack Potter went back to sipping his coffee. He’d pulled himself out of wherever he was to keep an eye out for Margie, the way he’d always done until she met Charlie. Jack Potter’s devotion to his daughter allowed him to be where he wanted to be—nowhere—while he waited to get back to his wife. Before the war. At the party, his words, “That’s true, Captain,” were the last he spoke for the rest of the day.

  Martha said to her mother later, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t help but wonder what he was feeling when he dropped napalm on all those other babies.”

  Margie said, “God help him.”

  Martha said, “Right.”

  Sometimes, Margie just wanted to smack her, just the way kids her age wanted to smack the world.

  The day after the party, Margie took a ride back to Charter Oak Terrace. Seeing her Aunt Jane and Big Pete and Little Pete together with her father made her want to reach back to another time, when she was a little girl, before anything began to seem terribly wrong. Just the way her father wanted to reach back to some time before the war but couldn’t. She knew the cherry tree wouldn’t be there anymore after so many years, and it wasn’t. There was a washing machine under the window instead. A new one. The Puerto Ricans put it outside because there was no room inside, same way they did back in San Juan. T
hey didn’t know about water lines freezing in the winter yet. Someone would tell them, and they’d make a place for it. She asked the Puerto Rican family who lived in her old apartment if she could come in and see where she had been raised till she was six years old. The Puerto Rican family agreed immediately because they had a strong empathy for homesickness.

  Margie was absolutely appalled at the thought that a father and a child, let alone a huge Puerto Rican family could live in such a small space. Downstairs, a minuscule kitchen butted up against a tiny living room, and upstairs there were two bedrooms with barely enough space for a bed and a bureau each, and a bathroom. The rooms were filled with furniture—mostly cots—and kids. There were curtains dividing the bedrooms and the living room, too, so that there were three extra bedrooms. But the clearest memory Margie had brought with her was of the coal furnace in a little alcove by the back door. She remembered watching her father shovel coal into the red insides. And Margie remembered what she’d been thinking then; she’d watch her father and try to imagine what the circus fire had been like. When she was little—when no one would speak to her of it. But she’d heard the whispers and began to put it together with why she had no mother.

  Now there was an oil burner, and next to it, an oval basket lined with a pink-checked blanket holding a sleeping baby. Things began to melt down for Margie when she saw the little baby so close to the oil burner with fire hidden somewhere inside it in the same place where that big black coal furnace used to be. Margie heard herself mumbling something to the Puerto Ricans, saying good-bye and thanking them, and then getting out of there so she could breathe again. And once outside in her car, she heard the question she’d heard over and over again that would turn her father to steel: “How could she have taken such a tiny baby to the circus?”