Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  Not only did the judges consider the condition of each claimant, they also took into account the age of the claimant. Margie’s settlement would be a new Cadillac every year for the rest of her life, to be received on her birthday rather than on the anniversary of the fire, which was initially suggested before the judges suddenly looked at one another, chagrined. One of them said, “We’re going off the deep end, here, fellas.” The youngest victims all got cars. That way, the judges felt, the children’s guardians wouldn’t be able to abscond with large lump sums of money. The Ringlings made deals with several automobile companies. Margie’s getting Cadillacs instead of Fords was the luck of the draw.

  As Margie grew up, and came to understand all that had happened, her executor, her father, told her she could have the cars once she graduated from high school and got a job. So at the beach, in the summer of ’61, she was driving her first one, dazzling the boys with a pink-and-black Eldorado convertible. But Charlie was dazzled by her scars.

  When he made love to her in her bed at Aunt Jane’s one night when her aunt and uncle had gone to the movies, Charlie felt the thumbprint.

  She was lying on top of him, looking down into his eyes while his fingers were tracing the ridges of scars on her back.

  Then he felt the oval thumbprint in the small of her back, and stopped what he was doing even though he was inside her. His erection went away and he slid out from under her, kept her on her stomach under the lamplight, and from behind her he said, “Margie, you’ve got a fingerprint down here.”

  Margie said, “Thumbprint.”

  He rolled her over. She felt embarrassed lying on her back, naked in the light because her breasts fell into her armpits, not like the centerfolds in Playboy theirs stayed straight up, pointed.

  Charlie got all concerned. He said, “Margie, I’m sorry! Please don’t be ashamed.”

  So she told him the thumbprint scar wasn’t the problem. She told him she was embarrassed by suddenly being flat-chested and made reference to the magazine. He rolled his eyes. He said, “Silly girl. Centerfold breasts are taped to stay upright and then the tape gets airbrushed out.” Firemen had determined that because they were surrounded by centerfolds adorning their walls. Back then, at least. So he kissed her flat chest where her breasts would have come together if she was standing, and he said, “This is a nice place when you’re on your back, Margie. I get closer to your heart.” Then he laid his head on the middle of her chest, listening to her heartbeat, and said, “Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.” Then, trusting that it wouldn’t take any more effort to get Margie by that bit of insecurity, he asked, “Whose thumbprint is it?”

  Margie said, “Everyone’s told me it was probably one of the soldiers,” and she described the people-brigade, which was nothing new to him.

  “I’ve met some of those fellas,” he said. “Jesus Christ, Margie.”

  Margie said, “Could you get back inside me?”

  Charlie said, “I’d better get on the phone is where I’d better get. I’ve decided I’m not going to wait till I get home to tell Sylvia. She doesn’t deserve this.”

  Yeah, Margie thought. It was true. She didn’t.

  Chapter Three

  Margie and Charlie went out on the fishing boat again on Charlie’s last day at the beach. Usually, in the summer, the horizon was obscured by a humid haze, but now the air had been dried out by a Canadian front. Margie said, “When it’s this clear, Long Island seems so close that I feel like I could swim there in ten minutes.”

  Charlie said, “The guys cornered me last night.”

  “They did?”

  “Yeah. They wanted to know what the hell was going on.”

  So did Margie. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them that Sylvia and I had broken up.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They just sat around wondering what they should say, but then my brother Michael—he’s kind of a comedian—he said, ‘Is it too late to change the cake?’”

  “What cake?”

  “The cake that says ’Charlie and Sylvia on it. For the party. Half the department’s coming down from Hartford tonight.”

  “Oh.” She waited, but he didn’t say any more. “Charlie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What did Sylvia say?”

  He leaned back into the wood bench, put his head back, and looked up at the drifting clouds. “She just started crying. She tried to say something but she was crying too hard to talk. Then her father got on the phone so I told him, too.”

  “Pretty hard, I guess.”

  “Not really. I mean, well, it was. He kept saying, ‘These things happen.’ But then he started crying, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  “I know.”

  He hugged Margie to him. She put her hand under his shirt and rubbed his chest. “What about the cake?”

  “Well, Michael has this kind of protective attitude toward me so he said to the guys, ‘When the cake comes, just scrape off Sylvia and write in Margie.’”

  “Making a joke of things isn’t especially protective, I don’t think.”

  “I guess that isn’t what I meant, then. He tried to get our minds off it.”

  Margie would not make a joke to ease Charlie’s responsibilities. But, like his brother, she would divert him. It seemed like a good time to satisfy her own curiosity.

  “Charlie?”

  “What, honey?”

  “Why do you not believe that maybe—just maybe—a lit cigarette butt started the fire?”

  “Margie, the cigarette theory is bullshit.”

  Then he took his arm down from around her shoulders, touched her chin, and she turned her face to his. He tried to tell her a story. She watched his expression change from deliberation, to frustration, to sadness. A great story was going on in his head. She said, “Go ahead, Charlie, tell me.”

  He said, “Someone tried to murder you. Murder you and all those other people who went to the circus just to have fun.”

  She began to protest, but his finger slid up from her chin to her lips.

  “See, it wasn’t just the worst fire in Connecticut’s history. It was the worst crime in Connecticut’s history. A hundred and sixty-nine people murdered. Over a thousand maimed.”

  Maimed? That was Margie he was talking about. She said, “I don’t feel maimed.”

  When she said that, Charlie grabbed her into his arms and hugged her so tightly she thought he’d break her ribs. But she let him hug. Once he’d calmed, Charlie gave her more details, just like all of Aesop’s details in “The Fox and the Grapes.” He told her he’d spoken to a few firemen who had been involved with the Hartford circus fire. One of them had been a rookie at the time and for some reason had gotten in on the experiment. They’d set up a sawhorse on a day that had the same weather conditions as the day of the circus. They had coated a piece of canvas with the paraffin-and-gasoline mix and had thrown the canvas over the sawhorse. They couldn’t get it to light until they used matches, and not only did they need matches, they had to hold a match to the canvas for a good while before it caught. And the flame needed a tiny breeze to get it going, too, the same tiny breeze there had been on the day of the fire. The firemen said they all had to blow on it. Inside the circus tent, the air had been stagnant. Charlie said, “No way that tent would have caught from a flipped cigarette. Not from inside the tent. The guilty party here wasn’t a careless person flipping a lit butt, Margie. It was an arsonist.”

  And Margie imagined a cruel and evil man whistling far and wee, with a name like Uriah Heep, slinking along the tent, finding a quiet spot to torch it, while inside, the children laughed. She said, “I don’t want to believe that.”

  “Of course you don’t. No one wanted to believe it, and they still don’t.”

  “Why not? If it’s the truth.”

  Charlie thought for a minute. He tried to explain. “If the Ringlings went ahead and proved it was arson, people might think twice ab
out going to the circus. People love the circus because there’s danger, but the danger isn’t to them; they just get to watch it. A fire, that’s another story. So the circus guys said, ‘Yes, isn’t this awful? We’re so sorry.’ They proved to everyone how sorry they were by going off to jail. They were negligent so they would take their punishment.”

  “Who exactly went to jail?” Margie had visions of clowns and aerialists being carted off to jail in costume.

  “The four officers of the circus. Connecticut never needed to file extradition papers. The men didn’t appeal the decision. They went to jail for six months. Not because they wanted to—I mean they weren’t jerks—they did it to save the circus.”

  Margie said, “The power of positive thinking.” That was an actual title of a book by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale that everyone was reading. Not Margie. She didn’t like real books.

  “Yeah. Exactly. The war was going on. Full steam. That was enough to take in. Forget about nutcases going around burning down a circus in the middle of the matinee performance.”

  Margie asked, “So where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The arsonist?”

  Charlie gazed out across the lovely sound, at the bumps of Long Island. “Out there.”

  The second member of Charlie’s family Margie met, after his brother Michael, was his Uncle Chick, who drove down to Old Saybrook when Michael called him. Charlie was his namesake. His godfather. Margie had heard of Chick DeNardo. A lot of people had. He’d been a detective with the Hartford Police Department; he’d just retired. Every year on the anniversary of the circus fire, Chick and his old partner from 1944 would place a nosegay of forget-me-nots on the grave of Little Miss 1565, an unidentified victim of the fire—a child who had been the 1,565th casualty to arrive at the Hartford Hospital catastrophe triage. Every year, photographs of Chick and his partner laying the nosegay on the granite marker would flash around the world via the AP.

  The doctors guessed Little Miss 1565 to be around seven years old. She had lived just long enough for a nurse at the hospital to start an IV. Then the nurse noticed that she had died. And nobody claimed her. Day after day, the newspapers called for her family to come forward, but no family did. Were all her relatives lost in the fire? Or was she from an itinerant family who couldn’t afford to bury her and just left town in their grief?

  Or was she left behind, deliberately, hopefully, alive, her down-and-out family knowing that the grieving community would be able to take better care of her than they? There were lots of guesses, but in the end, no conclusions.

  In the attempt to identify her, the police decided to take a photo of her—her face had been left practically untouched by the flames. Her left cheek was blackened, and so the camera was positioned to her right. The nurses washed the soot from her and combed her beautiful blond curls into a soft halo, each curl delicately laid out against a white pillow under her head. She had long eyelashes that touched softly upon her cheeks. The photo came out looking more like a professional portrait than a police shot. Yes, she looked like a doll, a delicate bisque doll. Yes, a Botticelli angel, as people would say. But she also looked unmistakably dead.

  So all across the country, American families came to feel a kinship toward the Little Miss because of that extraordinarily beautiful photo taken at Hartford Hospital just before she was taken away to be buried in a grave donated by a local cemetery. Later, the grave was marked by a block of granite that read: LITTLE MISS 1565—GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

  The unidentified child hadn’t died of her burns, and she hadn’t suffocated, either, as Margie Potter’s mother had. She had died of compression injuries, the way almost all of the victims had died, crushed up against the bars of the wild animal chute: hairline skull fractures, internal abdominal trauma, broken ribs puncturing her lungs. She had been pulled, still alive, from the very bottom of the pile of bodies.

  Margie had wondered if her own saviors, who had handed her to Hermes Wallenda, had been standing on Little Miss 1565. She never wondered that aloud until she met Charlie, and he said, “Probably,” without skipping a beat. He meant yes.

  Chick was obsessed with who that little girl was, just as Charlie was obsessed with who set the fire. “Yeah,” Charlie would say, “we’re both obsessed. My uncle is obsessed with who she is and I’m obsessed with who killed her.” Killed her brought Uriah Heep back again into Margie’s mind. At the time of the fire, Chick’s own two little girls—Charlie’s cousins—had been around the age of the Little Miss, so Chick had been beside himself with wanting to know how people could have lost such a lovely child and not claimed her. Chick always felt that if there had been an arsonist, he’d have been killed by the fire too, just like Little Miss 1565. It was Chick’s Italian roots that convinced him that justice must have been rendered. That belief allowed him to carry out his particular sad search instead of the search his nephew was to take up years later.

  Charlie kept on explaining things to Margie. None of the policemen believed that the fire was an accident, either, he said, even though the chief said it was. However, what they did believe was that the arsonist had miscalculated, never imagining the holocaust that would erupt because of the lethal makeup of the tent. And so he must have died, too, like Chick said, unable to escape the hell he’d ignited.

  At first, Chick tried to convince Charlie of this theory, but Charlie couldn’t be convinced. He said to Margie, “Arsonists are never careless. They aren’t suicidal, either. He set the fire, deliberately, outside the tent, behind Grandstand A.”

  Margie said, “But the fire started ten feet off the ground.”

  Charlie said, “More like twelve. And you’re forgetting the wind.”

  Margie didn’t say it to Charlie, or to Chick, or to anyone else that she really didn’t believe someone set the fire. The cigarette theory made perfect sense to her. She figured, maybe when the firemen tried to re-create the start of the fire, they didn’t actually flip a cigarette into a piece of canvas. Maybe the force of the actual flip caused the butt to lodge into the side of the tent, into the sticky paraffin. She was so sure that no one would deliberately do such a thing as terrible as setting fire to a circus tent full of people that she felt free to humor Charlie.

  In fact, she couldn’t resist. His obsession was irresistible to her. It was like living an adventure book, a grand novel of suspense, a spy thriller, a detective mystery, a perfect crime. And besides that, if Charlie was right and there was an arsonist after all, and if Charlie found him, that arsonist would have hell to pay. She could sense Charlie’s anger just sitting and waiting for its chance. What he might be capable of gave her tingles.

  Finally, when all that could be said about the fire had been said, and Margie and Charlie were back in Hartford, they met and talked, instead, about what all new lovers talk about—themselves. Actually, Margie did most of the talking. Charlie wanted every single tiny detail of her—of all that she was. It took hours just getting by Charter Oak Terrace.

  “You lived in Charter Oak Terrace? You lived there?” It was more a shocked response than a question.

  The Hartford Fire Department spent a lot of time in Charter Oak Terrace. Today you hear about low-cost housing projects—projects, in the plural. But for a long time Charter Oak Terrace, named for the famous tree where the patriots hid the country’s first document claiming independence, was the only low-income housing project in Hartford, the first one in Connecticut, and it came to be known as “the Project,” singular. When Margie was a child, she didn’t tell people she lived in the Project. Instead, she’d say, “I live in Charter Oak Terrace.” The name was very spirited to her, and beautiful, too. Magnificent tales of revolutionary heroes lived in those words. But then people would look at her sadly, or disdainfully, and say, “Oh. The Project.”

  Charter Oak Terrace had been a forty-acre tract of land on either side of a small polluted river, a branch of the main river flowing through Hartford called the Hog, which is a branch of the Connecticut
River. Nowadays, the Hog River flows through pipes, underground, under Interstate 84, and Margie thought it was buried because of its name. Charter Oak Terrace, however, was as pastoral as its lovely name, and the branch of the Hog was cleaned up for the opening of the Project. She recalled fondly the stream as being quite clear with little pools to catch Bunnies in. Even though there was row after row of two-story, cinder-block buildings, they were laid out in wide grids with plenty of green grass to play on between, and with oak trees everywhere, planted in honor of the famous one. The narrow roads within the Project were only traveled by the cars of people who lived there, and there weren’t many of those because in those days, people took the city buses everywhere and didn’t need cars. If you were poor, like the women living in the Project whose husbands had gone off to war, you couldn’t afford a car anyway.

  A little school, kindergarten through second grade, was built for the Project children. Once the kids hit third grade, the planners figured they were old enough to walk the mile and a half to the nearest full-fledged elementary school. The little Charter Oak Terrace school had a wonderful playground that the children could use whenever they wanted, not just during school hours. One day when Margie was five, she’d bet her friend that she could pump her swing so hard that she would go all the way up and over the bar and around again. She pumped and pumped till she was perpendicular with the bar, and then the laws of gravity took over. She remembered this so well because of her frustration, and because later, when she got home, she had two huge blisters on the backs of her knees. Her Aunt Jane got all teary-eyed. Margie’s blisters recalled burns. Aunt Jane told her she couldn’t swing again till the blisters went away.

  When Margie recalled her childhood in Charter Oak Terrace for Charlie, she described paradise: The ice-cream man in summer; tobogganing down the frozen streets in winter; getting her picture taken in a donkey cart; having to make several runs trick-or-treating because with all those families, the Project kids got lots of treats. There was just one thing missing—a mother. It wasn’t unusual not to have a father since they were all overseas, but Margie was motherless, as well, and lived with her Aunt Jane and her cousin, Little Pete, until their fathers came home from the war.