The Man Without a Shadow

by Joyce Carol Oates

  This is not true. Margot wants to protest, it is not true.

  The rejected fiancée is still in love with Eli Hoopes. With the man she’d known. That is her secret.

  Amber is saying, anxiously: “You must think I’m a terrible person, Doctor. To say such things. But if you’d known Eli . . .”

  “Of course. I understand.”

  Margot is grateful for Amber McPherson’s generosity, and is not here to judge. Even as she is faintly appalled—Better for him if he’d died? Better for you and for his family, perhaps. But not for Eli—and not for me.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Adams. You’ve been very kind, and very helpful.”

  “Have I, Doctor? I’m not sure how . . .”

  “It’s always helpful to meet with people who’ve known a patient before.”

  Half-consciously Margot has used the word patient. In this way she has allowed Amber McPherson to think that indeed, Margot Sharpe is Eli Hoopes’s “doctor.”

  Is this deceptive? Is this unethical? Would her colleagues be surprised, and questioning of her motives? Margot doesn’t want to think.

  Amber McPherson can’t leave Margot Sharpe with a memory of her blunt, despairing words, and so the last several minutes of the visit are taken up with Amber’s assurance to Margot that her life as a wife and a mother is “very rich, full”—her work as co-chair of the Bryn Mawr Historical Society is “very challenging, and rewarding.” To offset the photos of her younger self with Eli Hoopes she shows Margot photos of her several children—“Todd, Emily, and Stuart. Aren’t they beautiful!” She laughs, showing her pearly, perfect teeth for the first time.

  Margot agrees, yes the children are beautiful. Studying the features of the eldest, the boy Todd, Margot would like to imagine that she can discern a ghostly glimmer of Eli Hoopes—but no, there is none.

  Departing the house, led to the massive front door, Margot sees in the foyer a seven-foot grandfather clock, made of an old, polished, exquisite wood. Behind the stenciled glass, a gravely-moving brass pendulum like an exposed heart.

  Amber McPherson is so gracious by both instinct and training, she can’t allow her “doctor”-visitor to leave without murmuring to Margot, with apparent sincerity, and a sudden startling embrace, that she hopes they will see each other again—“Sometime soon.”

  Margot returns to her car mildly dazed. Margot drives away feeling the soft imprint of the other woman’s body against her own, and smelling still the rich, intoxicating odor of gardenias. She is halfway home before she realizes that Amber McPherson didn’t ask her to “say hello” to Elihu Hoopes for her.

  She thinks he is dead. Whoever lives now is not him.

  He has fallen, he has been thrown onto his back. So hard, the wind is knocked out of him.

  Rough fingers grip his ankle and drag him in the dirt. He is panting, whimpering. (Where are his brothers? Why don’t they come to help him?) High-pitched jeering laughter as a cushion from one of the porch chairs is pressed against his face, hard.

  Can’t draw breath to scream. Can’t draw breath. The cushion is pressed harder, his assailant is leaning his weight on the cushion, on Eli’s face.

  Later it will be said—Oh Axel doesn’t mean to hurt, he just teases too hard.

  Later it will be said—Eli is such a timid boy. He has got to be encouraged to play with the others, and to swim. He has got to learn to swim this summer.

  Beneath the porch where he is hiding he sees the girls’ legs, their slender bodies in shorts and halter tops. One of them is his cousin Gretchen.

  Gretchen cups her hands to her lips and calls—Eli? Where are you? E-li . . .

  He will hear her voice—Eli? E-li . . . —like an echo inside his head.

  Eli? Oh, E-li . . .

  TRYING TO EXPLAIN. It is an effort like that of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill again, again, again.

  At first he has thought that the young woman is a relative of his, for she looks familiar. Then, he has thought that the young woman is a girl he’d known in grade school. Or, later in high school.

  She is not his fiancée. Not the blond fiancée, or the other.

  She appears to be one of the medical staff. Though not a doctor, for she isn’t wearing a white lab coat, and there is no plastic ID on the lapel of her black jacket.

  She has introduced herself to him, and he has clasped her hand. He remembers the warmth of the hand-clasp but he has forgotten her name.

  “I have some trouble with my memory, I think.”

  “Do you, Eli? What trouble?”

  “I just—it’s—I don’t know . . . It’s like a fog or a swamp, and if I walk into it, it just—dissolves . . .” He laughs, embarrassed. He would like the young woman to know that it is not at all characteristic of Eli Hoopes to dwell upon his health. Not at all characteristic of Eli Hoopes to speak much about himself as if there are not myriad other, far more crucial subjects about which to speak.

  “I think it has been like this for a while—this memory ‘deficit.’”

  “How long do you think it has been, Eli?”

  “Well—six months, at least. It seems that I may have had an accident and hit my head—or, someone hit my head deliberately—and then when I was hospitalized I got an infection, and my brain was ‘on fire’ . . .”

  “About six months ago?”

  “It could be longer. I’m not sure.” E.H. laughs dryly, but his eyes are pained. “I think that must be why I’m in this hospital. Or—is this a clinic? I see people in lab coats and I see nurses but I don’t see any beds—maybe I’m an outpatient?”

  “Yes, you are an ‘outpatient.’ Which means you arrived here this morning and you’ll be going home in a few hours. You are only brought here, Mr. Hoopes—you are not hospitalized.”

  “Well, that’s good news! For a while there, I’d begun to think not only was I hospitalized, I was dead.”

  Margot Sharpe laughs, weakly. She is socially conditioned to respond to remarks meant to elicit laughter; it is very difficult to resist.

  Margot would like to tell E.H. that he isn’t “ill”—rather, he has a “chronic neurological condition.” But she doesn’t want to perplex him further, since he seems less affable and relaxed than usual. He has just finished a battery of tests that are repetitions of tests he’d taken several years ago, so that their scores might be compared, and a graph of changes plotted; of course, E.H. doesn’t recall these tests, nor does his performance today suggest that he has incorporated any residual memory of the tests. A quick glance at the previous scores indicates to Margot that, uncannily, E.H. has performed almost identically today as he had in past years.

  “Is it like that with you, too—‘Mar-g’ret’?”

  (Margot is touched, E.H. has remembered her name—almost.)

  “That I’m an ‘outpatient’?”

  “‘I’m Nobody! / Who are you? / Are you — Nobody— Too?’”

  E.H. recites these lines with a chilling sort of merriment. Margot believes that this is poetry, and possibly it is poetry by Emily Dickinson . . .

  “I’m not exactly an ‘outpatient,’ Eli. I’m a professor at the university.”

  Pointless to refer to the “university,” since E.H. has not the faintest idea which “university” this might be, no more than he knows that they are at the Institute at Darven Park.

  “You are a ‘normal’ person, eh Professor?”

  “‘Normal’—I suppose so.”

  “Yet not ‘average’—eh?”

  Margot smiles, considering. This is flirtatious banter that leaves her breathless. E.H. often stands close to her, as if inhaling her scent—(she is sure that this is an acquired, unconscious way of his to help identify her); in turn, Margot can’t help but inhale his scent, discernible beneath the more abrasive clinical odors as a distinctly masculine aroma, astringent, possibly cologne, shaving cream, hair oil, good soap . . . And E.H. wears the very best leather belts, shoes; supple Italian calfskin, as Margot has learned from E.H.’s
aunt Lucinda who is (Margot wants to think) her friend.

  Alone among outpatients at the Institute, at least those whom Margot sees in Neuropsychology, Eli Hoopes dresses with care and taste; today, he is wearing a mauve cashmere sweater over a white cotton shirt, dark corduroy trousers, “loafers.” On his left wrist, a handsome watch. (Not a digital watch of course. E.H. is appalled by the “ugly look” of digital watches and clocks, and it is a kindness to him to shield him from such.) His graying hair has been recently trimmed. His teeth look unusually white. He is—how old?—Margot can’t seem to calculate for such a calculation would involve her own age as well, of which she doesn’t want to think.

  Soon! It will come about, soon.

  What I have been waiting for.

  Effort is required to recall that E.H. is a subject of scientific inquiry, and not quite an equal.

  “Everyone has memory problems, Eli.”

  “Do we! Or I mean—you.” E.H. laughs, obscurely.

  This is a strange remark. It’s as if E.H. knows about an incident in Margot Sharpe’s life of the other day—a disagreeable incident involving memory.

  Margot isn’t sure she wants to share the incident with E.H., for it may cause the man to judge her harshly. It is clear from E.H.’s manner that, for all his good-natured joking, and air of naïveté, he has a strong moral sense; perhaps even, given his Quaker and activist background, deeply imprinted in his memory below the more recent layers of ruins, a puritanical righteousness. Even if E.H. will forget what Margot tells him she is afraid that some residue of memory, some smudge of memory, will remain, and color his feelings for her. Badly she wants the man to approve of her.

  Carefully she says, “Eventually, if we all live long enough, Eli, we will have deficits in short-term memory, but we may remember our earliest childhood until the very end of our lives. That’s a good thing, I think.”

  “But why is it a ‘good thing,’ Professor? Do you think that all our childhood memories are ‘happy’?”

  Margot is taken aback, for E.H. has spoken just slightly sharply.

  And why does he call her “Professor”?—he knows her name.

  Seeing the look in her face, of which Margot herself is unaware, E.H. says, relenting, “Of course—I think it is a ‘good thing.’ We want to think so, of our earliest memories.”

  E.H. speaks with a measure of stoicism like one at the edge of a precipice.

  He has fumbled for Margot’s hand, and clasps it firmly in his as if to secure her in place.

  Margot thinks—His hand remembers another hand. My hand can become that hand.

  Amber McPherson’s hand? She doesn’t think so.

  Amber McPherson could not have been a strong enough presence in Eli Hoopes’s life. No wonder he’d abandoned that young woman!

  “Dear Eli! I am always happy when I’m with you.”

  Prudently then, quick before anyone can see, Margot eases her hand from E.H.’s hand.

  HERE IS WHAT happened. It is so unfair!

  Margot knows herself cruelly and stupidly judged—mis-judged.

  She will not tell E.H. She has not wished to tell anyone—though, apart from E.H., there is really no one in Margot Sharpe’s life she might tell.

  Returning home from the university, and in the twilit kitchen of her house listening appalled to a rambling and accusatory phone message from her older brother Ned—Margot God damn why the hell haven’t you called back, called you and left God-damn messages five, six times since Monday, aren’t you fucking there?—so shocked by her brother’s furious voice she isn’t sure exactly what he has said, and quickly deletes the message.

  Discovers then that there have been previous messages from Ned, and from other relatives—Margot, where are you? We’ve been waiting for you—your mother is waiting for you—is something wrong? Has something gone wrong? Please call back, we are having a terrible time here your poor mother has tried to call you too, and you never call back—Margot?

  Trembling badly Margot doesn’t call her brother Ned—(whom she has always feared and disliked, he is such a bully)—but instead calls her aunt Edie, her mother’s younger sister who is Margot’s favorite aunt, and she is hoping that Edie won’t pick up the phone so that she can leave a message but Edie picks up the phone on practically the first ring—“Margot! Thank God.”

  Upset to hear that her mother is not “doing so well”—her mother has been asking where Margot is, she has been expecting Margot to visit her in the hospital—“Margot, you’d said you’d try to come last week. You told us, and we were expecting you.”

  Margot is astonished as well as upset—tries to explain that she certainly has not promised anyone in Orion Falls that she was coming home last week or anytime soon—hasn’t received any calls from them at all or if she had it was weeks ago, and Mom was “doing well” then—after the surgery. It is utterly untrue whatever Ned has been saying, accusing. Utterly untrue and unfair.

  Margot’s voice is shaking, her eyes have filled with tears of alarm and indignation.

  “I—told him? Told you? That isn’t possible, Aunt Edie, there must be some terrible miscommunication, I couldn’t have told anyone there that I could fly back home right now because I’m too busy—I am far too busy to take even a few days off for a personal matter—maybe I didn’t explain to you that I’m now the director of a very important project at the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park—it’s something of an emergency situation here also, we are working with a severely brain-damaged individual and my—my presence is—is mandated . . .”

  Margot repeats, denies she’d promised a visit. Can’t recall any such promise nor even any conversation with her brother Ned—in months. Vaguely she recalls—yes, but very vaguely—a conversation with her aunt about her mother’s tests, and her mother’s diagnosis, and her mother’s surgery, and her mother’s schedule of chemotherapy and radiation—she remembers being told that Mom was “doing well”—“as well as can be expected at this point”—but she does not remember subsequent conversations, and she certainly does not remember promising she will return home anytime soon—“That is just not possible, Aunt Edie. Please explain to Mom, will you? Please.”

  Such an unpleasant exchange! Margot is astonished that her aunt doesn’t relent, doesn’t concede she is mistaken, or that anyone there is mistaken—clearly, the Sharpes have closed rank against her, and have turned against her. The exchange is particularly painful since Margot knows that she is correct: she did not make any such promise to anyone in Orion Falls, not even half-consciously, for she would remember if she had, and she does not remember.

  The conversation is painful also because Margot Sharpe isn’t a girl any longer, she isn’t an adolescent to be lectured, scolded and willfully misunderstood; she is an adult woman of nearly forty, a professional woman who has become accustomed to being agreed-with, placated; she is not often challenged any longer, for she has become professor of neuropsychology at the university, and she has been named (by the distinguished Milton Ferris himself) principal investigator of Project E.H.—one of the great research projects in neuroscience history. Margot Sharpe is respected at both the university and the Institute. Her undergraduate and graduate students, her laboratory assistants, her departmental colleagues, the Institute staff are all respectful of her, and admiring of her, and so it is stunning—it is outrageous—that her own relatives, back in Orion Falls, Michigan, have so little idea of her accomplishments, and so little respect for her. Almost, Margot can’t speak coherently, unfairly pressed to defend herself. “Whatever you’re accusing me of, you are paraphrasing Ned’s stupid accusations, Aunt Edie—there is just too much happening at Darven Park right now, I can’t take time out. I wish I could—of course—but you say that Mom is in the hospital, and not in a hospice—you’ve said—so it isn’t an emergency situation, in fact. Mom will understand, just explain. You know how serious I am about my work—I don’t take it lightly. There is Christmas break . . .”

  “
You haven’t been back since Christmas two years ago. And you don’t call or write.”

  “Actually, I do. I do call Mom, and I do write.”

  “Margot, what are you saying? That simply isn’t true. Your mother is heartbroken, and we are all bewildered. We all helped with your college expenses, you must remember—don’t you?”

  “You’re paraphrasing Ned. You and Ned—you are saying the identical untrue stupid things. You are accusing me of something I did not do, I don’t have to listen to any of this, I am hanging up.” Margot is breathless, half-sobbing in hurt, indignation, resentment. They have always been jealous of her success, they’d never wanted her to go to the University of Michigan originally, it’s an old, bitter issue between Margot and the Sharpes.

  And so Margot does hang up, slamming the receiver down. Vastly relieved when no one calls back.

  NOR WILL MARGOT tell E.H. of another, yet more shocking and unexpected call, which she receives months later in the first week of January 1984.

  Margot, I need to talk to you confidentially.

  The subject is related to Project E.H.

  It is the Psychology Department chair who has called Margot. She is being asked to meet with him “confidentially.”

  Calmly Professor Sharpe enters the chairman’s inner office, and sits facing the man across his desk. Like Milton Ferris, the chairman is a distinguished scientist; but he is not a close associate of Margot Sharpe, since his field isn’t neuropsychology but clinical psychology.

  Margot is very frightened. Margot thinks—Someone has reported me, driving E.H. home. Someone has reported my spending time with E.H. alone. Someone who is jealous, and who hates me.

  Through a panicked buzzing in her ears Margot can barely hear the chairman tell her, in a lowered voice, the most astonishing and unexpected news: several persons have made formal written complaints sent by certified mail to him as the departmental chair, to the dean of the faculty, and to the chancellor of the university not concerning Professor Sharpe’s unconscionable behavior with her amnesiac subject but—Professor Milton Ferris’s “protracted and repeated scientific misconduct as the principal investigator of the memory laboratory.”