Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  So then they would tell about their amazement at the size of the tent; their trepidation as they passed the cage of the giant gorilla; their unease at the sideshow with the bearded lady, the mermaid, and the Elephant Boy; then about standing impatiently in line and getting inside and looking for their seats. Now Charlie would ask them to show him on the Map exactly where those seats were. They’d get up, walk across the room, and touch their seats on the Map with a very tentative index finger. Margie always felt relieved when they’d point to a place far away from Grandstand A. Then Charlie wrote their names on the Map, and the date of the interview, directly on squares representing the seats.

  After all that, they’d give their versions of the wild animal act, the chill they felt as the big spot flashed on, capturing the Wallendas towering high above them about to walk out onto the tightrope, and then, the little spot of fire, a circle—as if someone had flipped a cigarette into the side of the tent. Charlie would slow them down at this point, asking them the route they had taken to get out of the burning tent because if he didn’t, their next sentence would be, “We ran.” So the route they described was always combined with descriptions of terrible panic: massive hysteria; wooden chairs crashing down the grandstands; pieces of burning canvas falling everywhere, falling on them; their clothes catching on fire; their hair sizzling; their skin burning; the unspeakable smell. And through it all, the resounding “Stars and Stripes.”

  When his witnesses finished speaking (they usually finished with the line, “I made it out”), Charlie would have them show on the Map their route and where they were positioned once outside the tent. They’d stand at the Map trying to explain to Charlie that there was a lot of chaos and that it was a long time ago, but this was the route, “… and this looks about where I ended up. Yes. Right here.”

  Then Charlie would ask, “Did you see anything you thought was peculiar? Once you were safely outside?”

  That question usually got a variation on the answer “Yeah, man, I saw something peculiar. I saw a circus tent the size of the state capitol all on fire—going up like a pile of dry straw Real peculiar.”

  Then Charlie would ask them to think past the horrible thing they’d witnessed, in hopes of hearing something that was Charlie’s brand of peculiar. But there was never anything more to hear. Yet. That’s what Charlie would say to Margie when she’d bring up that hurdle. “Yet.”

  He plodded on, year after year, while Margie sequestered herself, read books, and while their daughter Martha came into herself. Charlie and Margie named their baby after her dead grandmother. Charlie insisted, just as Jack Potter had insisted to his young wife in a letter. Give the baby your own name. I’ll have two Marthas. I’ll be doubly happy.

  It wasn’t until Margie came to have a baby that she understood as her father did why her mother took her to that sprawling tent jammed with people on such a hot day. It was because babies are boring. They do nothing. Good mothers take their babies to sit in the park or to be pushed in baby swings or out for strolls. Those things were incredibly tedious to Margie, and she imagined they had been tedious to her mother. She felt a real connection to her own mother for the first time when she had a baby of her own. Margie held her daughter and dreamed of the original Martha holding her—loving her—but not willing to give up what was fun for her, all alone, without her husband. As if my mother, thought Margie, could stand to push a baby around in a stroller, day in and day out, or talk to a baby who couldn’t understand what she was saying and wouldn’t be able to hold up her end of the conversation even if she could understand it.

  In the sixties, when people had pet rocks, Margie didn’t think that was so wild and crazy. “Pet rock” pretty much described a baby, except a rock lets you sleep at night. Because of that attitude, and because Charlie wanted only two things in life—finding out who set the fire and pleasing Margie—they took their baby everywhere they wanted to go, just the way Margie’s mother had done. To a baby, Fenway Park is no less boring than any other park. Sitting in the stands, Margie and Charlie would take turns holding Martha and giving her a bottle. At one game, there was a ceremony retiring number 9. They joined in the standing ovation, juggling the baby, and Charlie lifted his child up over the crowd and told her that she was seeing the greatest hitter in baseball. The baby didn’t hold up her end of that conversation, either, but so what? Margie and Charlie were having a grand time, and subsequently, so was she. Margie wondered if babies really had any fun when their activities put their parents in a pall.

  They took her to play golf, too. Charlie pulled the cart with the clubs and Margie pulled the cart with the baby. Of course, Margie was only nineteen years old, and energetic and fun-loving, perhaps not an age to expect a girl to have the frame of mind to be a responsible mother, but she made the baby fun. And Charlie was not a teenager, and recognized that raising a baby took at least two people, so he made the job as easy as he could for Margie, in addition to the fun.

  Margie would have taken her daughter to the circus, too, if there had been one. But the circus didn’t come back to Hartford for a long time, and when it did it was the Shrine Circus, not Barnum & Bailey, and the show was held in the state armory, not in a tent. There’s nothing more fireproof than a building made of blocks of New Hampshire granite with nothing in it—no need to store arms once the war had ended. But whoever made that decision to hold the first returning circus at the state armory didn’t know that the building had been the site of a temporary morgue for the Barnum & Bailey Circus fire victims. When Charlie’s family learned there’d be a circus at the armory, Chick said, “Whenever I go by that place, I see bodies.” The best books Margie read, she felt, were the ones that had the greatest amount of irony. She couldn’t think of a match for the irony in holding the first circus to come to Hartford in twenty years at the armory.

  Charlie didn’t want any more babies after Martha. That was okay with Margie. Martha interfered with her reading quite a bit. Her plan, to have babies so she could just sit around and read, had been unrealistic. With the baby, she found, all her activities, and her train of thought, too, were continually interrupted. But she was an only child and she figured she’d been very happy, so why shouldn’t Martha be a happy only child, too? Margie’s cousin, Little Pete, was an only child, and he was very happy. Although when he grew up and got married, he had a great slew of babies one after the other. He shared them with Margie because they continued to do a lot of things together, Little Pete and her and all those kids. Charlie’s hours were often very long. Martha was three years older than Little Pete’s first, and Martha would later say, “The reason I’m so successful is because I’m the eldest of seven children.” Margie would think that she and all these pop psychologists around were probably right. But she would also think that maybe watching Ted Williams at Fenway Park instead of ducks ratting around a pond may have helped, too.

  Chapter Five

  Most of the people who came to the war room had scars—a seared arm or a streak across a cheek—left by the burning pieces of canvas, which not only rained down upon them, but had also stuck to them as they fled the tent. When the weapon napalm gained a reputation, Charlie said, “That’s what we had at the circus.” These people with the scars seldom took the money. They were grateful finally to be able to talk, and they wanted to help Charlie find the person who did this to them. Sometimes they said that: I want to know who did this to me! The ones with the burns believed, without reservation, that the fire was the work of an arsonist. Margie said, “They know so many little details.” Charlie answered, “Yeah.” And then she said to him, “You know, they really seem to need to blame someone.” He gave her a look, as if she were speaking a foreign language.

  “Margie, of course they want to blame someone. Some bastard ruined their lives. Someone is at fault. They blame him. Why wouldn’t they?”

  Margie tried to point out that these people’s lives weren’t actually ruined, but he didn’t seem to want to hear that. The thought of ru
ined lives served as more impetus to him. So she didn’t press it though she felt uneasy.

  Margie tape-recorded Charlie’s witnesses, but sometimes she had to leave the room when the scarred people talked. They talked of the feelings of getting torn from their mothers, getting crushed, getting smothered, getting burned. They described the smell of the noxious burning canvas and their charred skin. It made Margie queasy to have to think that this was what her mother experienced before she suffocated.

  One of Charlie’s questions was, “What did you hear?”

  “Screaming and the band playing,” they’d say. It was the circus music that prodded their struggle to get out of the tent, and what calmed them as well, once they’d made it out. But beyond the screams they described, and the racket of folding chairs clattering down the bandstand, they never went on to describe the sounds a fire makes, the ones Charlie and his firemen friends talked about all the time: the cracking and popping, crunching and sizzling; the whoosh of sucked-up oxygen; the wheeze of the trailing wind left behind. Just like the survivors of the Titanic, they heard music. At the circus, the Merle Evans Circus Band, the best there ever was, didn’t go down with the ship, but they waited until the last possible moment before they got the hell out—when the center pole began to fall. The musicians held their instruments under their arms, ran as hard and as fast as they could, and set up again just past the line of killing heat, and kept on playing. A new song now. Some people would actually hum “The Pennsylvania Polka” for Charlie because they didn’t know the title. “The Pennsylvania Polka” held no special circus meaning; Merle Evans chose it because he always felt it was the most cheerful tune ever written.

  A few of the circus fire survivors were especially memorable, their visits cause for excitement. And so, the excitement Charlie felt after getting a call from Alfred Court’s assistant so saturated the air of their house that little Martha, who was five at the time, acted the way she would if a big snowstorm had been predicted. On the day the famous animal trainer’s underling was to arrive, Margie couldn’t drag Martha away from the window where she waited and watched. And Margie herself felt the same way she did when she was getting near the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. She’d actually missed the plane to a firefighters’ convention when she had been on her way to meet Charlie in Los Angeles. She had been sitting right by the gate at La Guardia and she missed every call, including the last one. She had finished the book, closed it with a great sigh, looked at her watch and rushed over to the little podium where an American Airlines clerk was putting together papers, and asked, “Did the plane leave?”

  He said, “You’ve got an hour, ma’am.”

  She was so relieved. She said, “The flight’s really late then.”

  He said, “Nope. On time.” Then he flashed her an airline-personnel smile. Margie looked behind his head at the departures board. He had been talking about a flight to Chicago. Her flight to California was long gone.

  Alfred Court’s assistant wore a red cape. She sashayed in the door, threw off the cape, and Charlie rushed to catch it. The woman was a knockout until she was up close; Margie could see the face-lift places and the wrinkles that weren’t lifted under her tan-colored makeup. Her platinum hair was a mountainous wig, and the smile—the same bright red as the cape—was dazzling. She was a voluptuous showgirl, past middle age, whose complexion was stiff with makeup and rosy rouge, her curled eyelashes heavy with thick layers of black mascara. She was one of those nameless assistants whose job might be to parade across a stage with a headdress of feathers, or to let her body be sawed in half, or, in the case of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, to strike a pose while Alfred Court put his head in a lion’s mouth. She had the look that Dolly Parton later said she aspired to as a child. The woman’s name was Dixie. That’s how she introduced herself. She stuck out her hand and said, “The name’s Dixie. That’s all there is. Like Cher.”

  Margie was afraid Martha might end up aspiring to the same ideal, she was so mesmerized. Before Martha had to go off to her afternoon kindergarten, she got to shake Dixie’s hand. She said, “Pleased to meet you.” And Dixie said, “Likewise.” Then Martha said, wearing her longest face, “I have to go to school now” And so Dixie whipped out from her big bag an eight-by-ten glossy of herself wearing sequins and spangles, entwined in the trunk of an elephant rearing back on his hind legs. She signed it for Martha, and said to her, “You can show this to your little pals.”

  The preliminary excitement of having a person come to the O’Neills’ who was not only a celebrity—well, kind of a celebrity—but who also had been in and out of the burning tent while remaining in complete control was nothing compared to the tension that grew and grew as Dixie spoke. Dixie turned out to be Charlie’s first concrete evidence that there might have been a firebug. Concrete, yet flimsy, Margie thought. Though Margie was always willing to suspend her disbelief for Charlie just the way she did for John Le Carré, she was pretty cynical.

  Besides her success at posing in such a way as to dramatize Alfred Court’s feats, Dixie also proved to be equally competent in an emergency. In the first moments of the fire she was the one who got the last of the big cats through the chute and into their string of wagons lined up outside the tent before they could panic and run back to where they came from, as frightened animals are apt to do—as frightened humans are apt to do, too. Margie, married to a fireman, had learned that dead people in burning houses were always found in their closets or under their beds. Charlie came home on those nights and would head straight to the war room, where his circus arsonist represented all arsonists, represented negligent landlords, kids playing with matches, old people with twelve electric cords plugged into one outlet. Margie couldn’t console him on those nights, only his search could. If she tried, she would only end up feeling frustrated. And annoyed.

  Dixie said, “I had half the animals out when I looked up and saw it starting. Up above me. Up the side of the tent. I sped ’em along. I said, ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry you pretty boys and girls.’ I called ’em that.” She sighed and smiled. “My cats.” The smile dissolved. “So Vickie and her two babies were the last ones out. Found I had to hose the three of ’em down. Singed.”

  Charlie said, “And they were?”

  “Leopards. Took a month before their spots looked normal again. Wish I could have done more, mister. More than just that.”

  “You prevented a bigger catastrophe, ma’am.”

  “Dixie.”

  “Dixie.”

  She sighed again. “Don’t know about that. People get off thinking about what it’d been like if the animals were loose. Just would’ve been sadder is all. Cats would’ve slunk together in a huddle and burned. But what I do know is I was hosing down Vickie and her babies while the people up against the chute were dying. ’Course I know I shouldn’t feel as bad as I do—my little bitty hose couldn’t have done a thing for that tent. See, it was attached to the animals’ drinking tank. Couple of gallons is all.” She looked to Charlie.

  “I understand.”

  “But I still feel bad. Keep on thinking that if the act ended just a minute sooner, I’d have spotted that fire right when it started—maybe could’ve gotten it out.”

  “You couldn’t have,” Charlie said. “The canvas was coated with gasoline.”

  “I know” She pushed up the sleeve of her dress and there was a skin graft peeking out. “Anywho, I didn’t even think to hose myself down. Piece of canvas blew into me. Stuck right on to my shoulder.” She dropped the sleeve and patted the spot. She looked up, “The paraffin.”

  Charlie asked, “What did you do after you hosed down the leopards, Miss… ?”

  “I told ya, honey. Just Dixie.”

  “Sorry.”

  “S’okay. I went and stood by Gargantua. Knew he’d be upset. We had him over in his sideshow cage not too far from the main entrance so’s everyone could get a gander at him on the way into the big top. I just kept talking and talking to him while everyone
was running from the tent. The heat of it was fierce. I never stopped talking till the tent finished burning. Took about five minutes, no more. That tent was a big sucker. Twice the size of our tent today. Five minutes and it was gone.” She snapped her fingers. Her fingernails were long and painted. Margie hadn’t ever seen a red as red as that.

  Something began to form in Charlie’s eyes. Up till now he hadn’t spoken to anyone who’d actually stood watching the whole thing. Up till now everyone had been running away or they were being burned or crushed, or they were busy helping the hysterical children separated from their mothers, and the just-as-hysterical mothers who were searching for their children.

  Charlie asked, “Did you see anything unusual?”

  Now Dixie squinted at Charlie. “Well… ’course I was concentrating on Gargantua… but everyone was doing the same thing which I guess you’d call unusual. They were all running away from the burning tent, afraid to so much as take a quick glance back. Even when they stopped running, they didn’t look back. Lot of ’em just put their faces in their hands.

  “The screaming was what made Gargantua crazy. He stood there gripping the bars of the cage like there was no tomorrow—shaking them till I thought he’d rip ’em out. In the papers, reporters said he was trying to escape from the fire. Horsetrash! He knew he was safe. He’d always trusted me. Some jackass even said the gorilla was laughing, getting his revenge. But no sir, not Gargantua. What he was doing was begging me to let him out so he could save those screamin’ kids. He loved children.”

  Dixie stopped talking and Charlie remained silent. Margie closed her eyes. For a moment, their minds were off dead children while they felt sorry for a gorilla. Then Charlie asked, “And what did you do next… Dixie?”