The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I have abased myself before two men. My shame can go no further.

  Someone should kill him. Yes!

  Yet she is smiling. Her mouth has twisted into a strange loose smile as of mockery, or despair.

  Another shot of whiskey, enough to get her through the night.

  FIRE IN HIS brain!—slow-smoldering at first then bursting into flame.

  He is sick for a long time then. He is told.

  What he is, is what others tell him. What he “is” has vanished like rising fading smoke.

  Except: feverishly drawing in a sketchbook provided to him—(by his aunt who is his father’s younger sister, recognizes her face but can’t recall her name)—figures of drowning children, young girls, and a boy with affrighted hair (like little snakes lifting from his head) and a long brooding face. Animal-faced, with hooved feet. What is this? Who is this, Eli?—he is asked.

  Can’t reply, can only shake his head vehemently.

  You know who this is. This is Elihu Hoopes, who died.

  HERE IS A surprise: E.H. on the tennis court!

  Margot Sharpe has several times observed the amnesiac playing tennis on a court attached to the Institute. He will play with staff members, most of them much younger than he, and he will nearly always defeat them despite poor vision in one eye.

  “Great serve, Eli!”

  “Jesus, Eli! How’d you do that!”

  At such times E.H. is suffused with happiness, and with certainty. He is a canny tennis player—he has been playing tennis (Margot has learned) since childhood. He’d been a champion in his prep school league and as an Amherst undergraduate he’d had a national ranking.

  By instinct his strong-muscled legs carry him deftly about the court. By instinct his strong right hand swings the racket. His backhands are dynamite. His serves are terrifically fast. Unconsciously he compensates for his diminished vision. Only between sets when E.H. has to pause, to think, to reflect—you can see the confusion in his face as in the face of one who has been rudely wakened from a dream.

  Where is this? Who is my opponent?

  What is the score?

  THE BLUNDER. MARGOT has arranged to play tennis with E.H. In emulation of E.H. she is wearing proper, pristine white: T-shirt, shorts, tennis shoes.

  They are smiling at each other across the net. Gentlemanly E.H. expects Margot to serve first but Margot calls to E.H., “Please begin. Please serve first.”

  She is a “promising” tennis player. She has been told.

  In high school in Orion Falls, Michigan, Margot Sharpe was rarely better than average in any sport. Her high grades, her precocious seriousness, protected her like body armor from the sneers of her classmates.

  As her quick sharp brilliant intelligence shielded her from the sexual sneers of her classmates, or rather from an acknowledgment of these sneers.

  E.H. serves rapidly, unhesitatingly. Margot fails to return the first serve.

  And of course, Margot fails to return the second serve that flies past her like a missile.

  E.H. is laughing at her, not unkindly. (Margot knows: he has forgotten her name by now, and who she is, but she is certain that he has not forgotten her. Since their embrace the previous week, he has certainly not forgotten her.) When Margot serves, E.H. does not slam the ball back at her but relents and allows a volley of sorts, in a way that might be called gentlemanly and bemused. And when she begins to play with more assurance, if often wildly, E.H. steps up the intensity of the game as if by instinct. His fierce concentration on the ball, his deft movements about the court, the ease of his backhand—E.H. is so practiced a player, he doesn’t have to think. He forces Margot to stumble backward, nearly falling as she flails at the ball; he forces Margot to rush forward, nearly falling into the net. E.H.’s tennis skills, internalized decades before, are as deep-imprinted in his brain as running, bicycling, swimming, driving a vehicle are deep-imprinted; but it has been observed that, if E.H. practices serves, though strictly speaking he will not be able to “remember” the practice sessions, his playing will improve.

  Non-declarative memory—Margot thinks. She has written on non-declarative memory in amnesia and has ideas for further experiments with E.H.

  She is beginning to sweat, unbecomingly. Rivulets of oily sweat run down her back, her sides. Her dark hair, pulled back into a ponytail, is loosening and erupts in wispy tendrils around her heated face. She is distracted recalling how tenderly Elihu Hoopes held her not long before, how sympathetically he’d listened to her halting words, how his heart beat against the side of her face . . .

  They had not kissed. Margot had felt the man’s sexual arousal, and her own, and had eased away from him deeply embarrassed.

  If anyone had seen! One of the Institute staff!

  Far worse, one of her lab colleagues who would report back to the university!

  Worst of all, if Milton Ferris learned of her behavior . . .

  Margot is distracted by such thoughts circling her head like gnats attracted to her damp face and hair.

  “Point!”—E.H. calls, triumphant.

  There is something hurtful in the man’s belligerence on the court, that is not evident elsewhere.

  Margot decides to laugh at herself, too. Calls out gaily to the white-clad male figure on the other side of the net, crouching, gripping his racket in both hands, gaze fixed coolly upon her—“You’re a savage tennis player, Eli! Just as everyone says—you take no prisoners.”

  Take no prisoners. Margot’s heart pumps in chagrin, why has she said something so foolish?

  Like one who hasn’t quite heard another’s words, or doesn’t quite understand another’s joke, E.H. laughs thinly in response. He is still standing in a slight crouch, knees bent and feet apart. Margot sees him now staring at her as an individual, not as an opponent. He is trying to determine—Who is this person? What is her connection to me?

  When Margot serves, E.H. makes no effort to slam the ball back over the net but returns it in mimicry of Margot’s serve: the ball seems to drift over the net like a balloon. A volley then, as if in slow motion. And finally E.H. fails to return the ball at all—he stands blinking after it as it rolls out of bounds at the side of the court.

  “Is something wrong, Eli?”—Margot calls out anxiously.

  In his dazzling white T-shirt, white shorts, white tennis shoes E.H. stands in a fugue of confusion. As if a haze has settled upon him. She has broken the spell, Margot thinks. Foolishly speaking to him, distracting him, Margot has caused the amnesiac to lose his concentration on the game because he has been forced to consider her.

  And who is she, this panting anxious-eyed woman facing him across the net, whom he has never seen before?

  MARGOT SHARPE DOESN’T enter this incident in her log. In her lab notebook for the day there is no indication of a tennis game with the amnesiac subject, not even in code.

  Margot hopes that no one on the Institute staff noticed. Or if noticing, had a second thought about it.

  Thinking—It will not happen again. Must not.

  MARGOT DRINKS A shot glass of whiskey.

  Oh!—the kick in her chest, as the flamey liquid eases down.

  Delicious burning sensation in her throat. Slithering flames of a sexual fire. I love this.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Eli, what a beautiful necktie! You are always so well dressed.”

  Each day he is brought to the Institute for testing Elihu Hoopes dresses with the care of one who anticipates good news.

  Over a period of more than three decades this will be! And Margot Sharpe will have been a witness through these years.

  E.H. is usually fresh-shaven, and his hair that thins and recedes over the years is neatly combed, and trimmed—a haircut every three weeks. His fingernails are clean and neatly filed and so, Margot has assumed, his toenails are as well.

  To assure that he remains well groomed, in public at least, E.H. assiduously keeps a calendar. It is a large calendar hung on a wall beside his bed on wh
ich he marks dates for haircuts, dental and medical appointments, “test-days” at the Institute; when he goes to bed each night, carefully he crosses out the date.

  In this way moving forward, a day at a time.

  (And if the amnesiac chooses to look back at previous months, solemn weeks of X’d-out dates, the experience replicates the experience of any stranger to a life, curious about that life now past tense.)

  E.H.’s clothes are equally calibrated. With Post-its in widely varying hues he keeps a record of the clothes he wears so that he doesn’t too frequently repeat them. How handsome you look today, Eli! What a beautiful necktie! Though E.H. doesn’t know it perhaps he can sense that the Institute is his only “public” place now.

  Shoes, of which he has many pairs, E.H. rotates on the floor of his walk-in cedar closet. At the Institute he alternates between sporty wear, casual wear, and (occasionally) dressy wear.

  And he likes to be taken shopping, always to the same men’s stores in Gladwyne where “Elihu Hoopes” is known by name, and his guardian-aunt, Mrs. Lucinda Mateson, is known. Mrs. Mateson has to be vigilant to prevent her nephew from eagerly purchasing shirts, sport coats, footwear identical to what he already owns.

  It is from Mrs. Mateson that Margot learns these intimate facts, fascinating to her. Any information about Elihu Hoopes is fascinating to her.

  Before his illness, Mrs. Mateson tells Margot Sharpe, Eli wasn’t so fussy about his appearance—“He had so much more to think about, you see.”

  Margot asks Mrs. Mateson what Eli had to think about and Mrs. Mateson says, bemused, “What would a man like my nephew Eli Hoopes have had to think about? You would have to ask him.”

  A stupid question on Margot’s part. Sometimes her brain feels like her hands in oven mitts.

  Or, Margot is playing a role, not unlike the role (she suspects) the amnesiac subject often plays.

  The dumber we are, the less threatening. No risk in being kind to us. Telling us your secrets, we won’t remember anyway.

  To Margot’s (disguised) disappointment, another time E.H. declines to have tea with his aunt and Margot in Mrs. Mateson’s drawing room. Courteously he has excused himself—he disappears upstairs clutching his sketchbook.

  So frustrating! It is like a variant of the experiment known as The Cruel Handshake except in this case, Margot Sharpe is the unwitting subject, and Eli Hoopes the perpetrator.

  For each time Margot drives E.H. home, though they have chatted companionably on the eighteen-mile drive, mostly about subjects that drift into E.H.’s mind from out of his pre-amnesiac past—(E.H. has riveting stories of civil rights rallies and marches, in Philadelphia and in the South, to which Margot listens fascinated; he is very entertaining reciting the whole of the film he calls Battleship Potemkin, with an impassioned outcry of “Brothers!” at a melodramatic moment)—as soon as he sees where Margot has brought him, to the dignified old English Tudor house at 466 Parkside, Gladwyne, he loses the thread of their conversation first in wonderment, and then in his eagerness to get inside.

  (Does E.H. think that it’s strange, he is being brought “home” to his aunt’s house, and not to Rittenhouse Square? He never speaks of this. And so Margot has to wonder if he “knows”—in some intuitive way—how his life has been altered.)

  Yet, E.H. is always courteous, and invites Margot inside to meet his aunt Lucinda—though Margot and Mrs. Mateson have been introduced to each other numerous times.

  “Hello, my dear! Very nice to meet you.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Mateson. Very nice to meet you.”

  For the amnesiac’s sake the women give no indication that they have ever met. How easy it is, Margot thinks, to slip into such a role—one humors the afflicted, if one hopes to shield them from distress.

  And how easy, as a strategy for one’s life—to humor others. Margot is not ever sure that she is not, in some unexamined way, humoring herself as well.

  Mrs. Mateson is a woman of some “presence”—Margot has seen that at once. She is the younger sister of Eli’s now-deceased father, Byron Hoopes, of whom Margot knows only that Byron Hoopes was a highly successful businessman, and a supporter of such conservative politicians as Taft, Dewey, Goldwater, and Nixon; he’d liked to “tease and infuriate” his activist son, Mrs. Mateson said, by reminding him that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Republican, and not a Democrat.

  (Is this true? Margot herself is surprised. Poor Eli!)

  Lucinda Mateson is in her late fifties, perhaps: not old, though old-seeming, and thin in the way of someone who has lost weight recently, whose skin is slightly loose, flaccid. Her face is powdered, her cheeks discreetly rouged, her thinning-blond hair has been brushed back and fastened at the nape of her neck with a tortoiseshell comb. She speaks in a way Margot can’t help but associate, perhaps unfairly, with wealth: a hoarse, husky, whispery voice to which Margot must stoop (like a servant?) to hear.

  From a remark of Eli’s, Margot has gathered that his aunt had married a very wealthy, older man when she’d been quite young. She has the petulant air of a faded beauty. Even on a weekday evening at home she wears expensive-looking clothes—dresses with long skirts, cashmere sweater sets, fine-woolen trousers in cool weather, linen in warm weather—that fit her loosely. She never fails to invite Margot to stay for “tea”—as if “tea” were a custom in the household and not rather a makeshift snack-meal precipitated by a stranger’s arrival. Each time Lucinda Mateson tries to coax E.H. into having tea with them he lingers in the drawing room for only a few minutes before muttering Well—sorry! with an apologetic grin and slipping away.

  Lanky, long-legged on the stairs, like a teenager escaping his elders. Margot wonders if, at such moments, E.H. has forgotten that he is supposed to be thirty-seven years old.

  She supposes that, once E.H. is alone, he looks through his sketchbook and the little notebook he keeps in his pocket to see what he has recorded that day—to see what has happened to him, and around him, that day.

  Margot too is not always certain what has happened to her, and around her, until she checks her logbook for the day. Often she is surprised. Sometimes, she is touched. The rapport she feels with Eli Hoopes seems to deepen upon reflection.

  In her throaty voice Mrs. Mateson is declaring:

  “Miss Sharpe, you’re very kind to drive Eli home. Everyone at the Institute we’ve met has been so very kind to us. The family will never give up hope, you know, that—well, not a ‘cure’—but some sort of—‘restoration’—of poor Eli’s memory—might be possible . . . Dr. Ferris has said Eli is a special case, and experiments are being done to find a way to help him . . . Of course, it has been a long time he has had his ‘injury’: at least eight years.” Mrs. Mateson speaks wistfully and yet with an air of subtle reproach. Margot wonders if she should tell the woman that it has been ten years since her nephew’s illness, and not eight? Tactfully, she says nothing.

  Margot feels a stab of guilt: the Hoopes family continues to believe that research into E.H.’s amnesia is clinically directed, and for E.H.’s benefit.

  Margot tells Mrs. Mateson that Eli Hoopes is indeed receiving the very best neurological care in the world at the Institute at Darven Park.

  At the same time, as she has told Mrs. Mateson in the past, she tells her how crucial it is that Eli’s identity be kept confidential.

  “Everyone would want to work with him. All sorts of unqualified people would apply. His life would become too public—it could become a media circus. That can’t be allowed to happen.”

  “‘Media circus’—what is that?”

  “Too much exposure. Newspapers, radio, TV—wanting interviews with Elihu Hoopes.”

  Mrs. Mateson shivers with distaste. Certainly, the Hoopes family would not want that.

  The drawing room in which they are having tea is fussily furnished with heavy, stolid Victorian relics: faded cushioned sofas and chairs, lamps with fringed shades, Oriental carpets, crimson velvet drapes covering much of
the high, leaded windows. There is an enormous, beautifully proportioned grand piano, a Steinway, in a bay window; on the piano are Czerny lesson books, very likely decades old. There is even a crystal chandelier with bare, transparent bulbs in mimicry of candles. And on the walls stiff but idealized portraits of individuals presumably relatives and ancestors of the household, since the portraits’ value otherwise, as works of art, is minimal. Margot has the idea that, if she were to draw her finger across any smooth surface in the drawing room, it would come away filmed with dust.

  The teacups and saucers Mrs. Mateson has set are lightly coated with a film of dust also. Very beautiful, exquisite pieces of Wedgwood china which Margot examines with admiration.

  “Thank you, dear! Is it—Margaret?—Margot. These are all family things of course. My family, and my dear husband’s family—Mateson. This residence is my parents’ former home, however—it has belonged to Hoopses for nearly two hundred years. I moved back, after my husband died in 1961. And of course poor Eli has lived with me since—whenever it was he got sick.”

  Margot listens fascinated as the woman speaks in her throaty, whispery voice about herself, and her family—the name “Hoopes” is frequently enunciated, with an innocent sort of pleasure and vanity. Mrs. Mateson explains that it wasn’t any longer possible for her nephew to live alone in his Rittenhouse Square place and so what better residence for him than this house in which his grandparents had lived for decades and which Eli had so often visited—“Eli has absolutely no problem remembering this house. Most of the upstairs rooms are shut up, in any case. And we never use the living room, or my father’s old study. Eli is very good with spatial things—which direction to take for ‘downtown’—how to get back home, walks in the park—he never gets lost. He can drive a car, you know—he still has his license—but the doctors don’t think it’s a good idea, and Eli has had to agree. If there was an accident, even if Eli was blameless the insurance company would probably not pay—they can be scoundrels, you know! New things confuse and upset him terribly but almost anything he’d done often, before he was ill, he can recall without seeming to think about it—except his work at Hoopes and Associates. They tried to take him back, but—evidently—it didn’t work out.”