Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  Puerto Ricans take their babies everywhere, even to circuses. They put them to sleep next to the oil burner. How can you put a baby to sleep next to an oil burner? Because it’s warm there, and the motor has a nice hum and besides, there isn’t any room for her anywhere else. Margie hadn’t asked them the question she hoped no one else would ever ask, and they didn’t ask her about her mother. In the car, later, she smelled a sweet fragrance. She was holding a half-empty plastic cup of tamarinda juice the Puerto Ricans must have given her. The juice helped her to gain control so that she wouldn’t crack up her new Seville. Also, to help herself gain control, she thought about the complicated plot of a book she’d read recently, The Tamarind Seed. She thought: They don’t make thrillers like that one anymore. With irony. She would go home and recommend it to Martha.

  But the image of Martha that came to her just then was of Martha in her crib. An infant like the baby in the basket, maybe six months old. Margie saw herself lifting a hungry, squalling Martha from her crib. She watched herself go downstairs to the living room and sit on the sofa to breast-feed the baby while she got back to the book she was almost finished with. But Martha distracted her from the book. Six months is a comical age. Since babies begin sitting up at that stage, they gain a new perspective on life. Margie would prop her in a high chair and Martha would eat cubes of bananas or pieces of ziti. She especially loved to pick up a big steak bone and chew on it. Margie thought that all her chewing probably soothed her aching gums. But mostly, Martha loved Cheerios. She had such long, fine fingers, and Margie loved watching her pick up a single Cheerios between finger and thumb and bring it slowly to her mouth, watching it the whole time until her eyes crossed. Then she’d push it into her mouth and while she gummed it around she’d stare at her empty finger and thumb and Margie would say, “Martha, you ate it.” Her voice would distract the baby, and Martha would give her a big smile and move on to the next Cheerios. Eating as a concept, Margie could see, was yet to be fathomed.

  The day Margie was remembering became clearer. Martha was sucking away at her mother’s breast, and once the initial hunger pangs were assuaged, she then peeked up at Margie. She smiled and Margie’s nipple slipped out of her mouth. Martha pulled her head back and looked at it, and then her gaze drifted back up to Margie, and then back to the nipple. Up came Martha’s hand and she caught Margie’s nipple between her thumb and finger and pulled it into her mouth, looking into her mother’s eyes all the while. She repeated this procedure several times, and then Margie couldn’t help but smile; one of her body parts was being treated like Cheerios. She said, “Martha, you silly goose.” But Martha was serious. There was an expression of wonder that had come over her as she realized that not only did her mother always hold her and keep her cozy when she ate, it was her mother she was eating.

  When she dozed off, Margie lay her on a blanket on the sofa beside her. And Margie knew that if she walked out of Martha’s life right then, when she was six months old, Martha would suffer a horrible loss. Of course, she’d at least have a daddy to hug and hold her. Margie hadn’t had that. Her daddy had been a prisoner of war. Whatever that meant. Margie didn’t know as he would never speak of it.

  Margie cried and cried. She was not the crying type. So she didn’t know how to stop. All she could think of was that poor, poor baby, burned so badly, in such pain, and without her mother to help her. Deserted by her mother was what it must have certainly felt like. To associate Martha with utter despair was impossible for Margie. But that was what it must have been. The hard thing was not talking to Charlie about this. He’d get crazed, and he was crazed enough, bound and determined to figure out who set that fire.

  Now she steered the Seville into a U-turn, and Margie headed away from Charter Oak Terrace to her Aunt Jane’s house. She sped along, thinking she had mourned her mother after all. She had grieved in some terrible baby way and she wanted to find out about it. She thought: My Aunt Jane who had a baby of her own to take care of stepped in and raised me while I must have been in one wretched state. Margie had always shown her aunt appreciation—buying her special presents and inviting her places—but she had never really come out and thanked her. She’d never thought to. And not only that, she wanted to find out exactly what else there was to thank her for.

  She pulled into her aunt’s driveway, ran up the walk, and rang the bell. Her aunt opened the door and Margie said, “I came to thank you for raising me and helping my father when he came home.” Her aunt got her into the house and said, “Now you just calm yourself, Margie. You know your happiness has always been thanks enough.”

  Over coffee, Margie did calm down. She asked, “What was I like, Aunt Jane, when I was a baby? After my mother died.”

  Jane said, “Well, you were very, very sick.”

  Margie didn’t let her stop there. She said, “Was I in a lot of physical pain?” hoping she was so that she wouldn’t picture herself as a baby like Martha, wondering why her mother wouldn’t come to her. Aunt Jane told Margie that the doctors at Hartford Hospital had seen to it that she had a lot morphine. She told her that the hospital had been just two years old and by some miracle was chosen as the site of an experimental burn unit exclusively designed for a civilian disaster—in case the Jerries bombed New York the way the Japs had Pearl Harbor. And since the doctors at Pearl Harbor had learned that there was no substitute for blood plasma in treating burn patients, Hartford Hospital had had gallons of frozen blood plasma. Jane said, “You know, Margie, it was a gift from God that Hartford Hospital was five minutes away from the circus. We’d have lost a thousand people, if not. We’d have lost you.”

  “How did I act?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, how was I? Besides the pain.”

  At first, her aunt didn’t speak. But then she forced herself back because she could see Margie needed her to. “Even with the morphine, you were constantly looking for your mother. When you started to get some of your strength back, you would search. With just your eyes. You’d try not to fall asleep so you could find her. Every time the door to your hospital room opened, you’d get all alert and at first, smile. Then when it wasn’t your mother, you’d cry. All over again.” Margie’s aunt picked up her napkin and blew her nose. “It got so that the nurses would call out who they were before they’d come into your room.”

  Jane went on to say that, fortunately for her, Little Pete was a very outgoing baby and loved to have other people take care of him, so she’d leave him with different neighbors so she could spend a lot of time in the hospital with her best buddy’s daughter.

  Then she said, “It took about three months.”

  Margie said, “Three months?”

  “Before you stopped looking for your mother.” She sighed. “When your burns were finally healing, you still weren’t getting better. I mean, you acted sick. So I asked the doctor to please let me take you home and he said it would be okay” Now she smiled at Margie. She said, “You were so glad to see Little Pete again. The two of you recognized each other right away. He kept piling all his little toys around you. Giving them to you so you’d stay. He loved you, Little Pete did. Loved you from the first day he saw you. Guess that’s why I’m blessed with so many grandchildren.”

  Margie asked, “How was I after that?”

  “After…?”

  After I was with you for a while.”

  “Well, you had become a serious baby. And then you were a serious child. Your father came back and the two of you were the same. It wasn’t until you were eleven or twelve years old that you got back that merry disposition you inherited from your mother.”

  Margie didn’t tell her aunt that “merry” had just been adolescent nerves.

  “And your father… well… I guess I haven’t seen that man laugh since before he left for overseas.”

  Margie had a good wit and she made people laugh, but she didn’t find many things funny. She had to think about laughing in order to do it. Charlie was the same way. Some peop
le just naturally burst into laughter. That didn’t happen to Margie and she’d never seen Charlie do it, either. Martha made up for them. She’d always laughed and giggled and chuckled enough for the three of them. Four. Margie added her father to the list.

  When Margie was back in her car, she wondered: Why Charlie? She wondered that because she was feeling bitter about what happened to her. What the hell did Charlie ever lose?

  Chapter Nine

  That evening, Margie said to Charlie, “My first memory had to do with fire.”

  He looked up at her from his dinner. He said, “You were too young to remember.”

  “Not with the circus fire. Another fire.”

  And Margie lapsed into another tale, all her own this time, describing the recollection to her attentive husband.

  It was when she was a small child. She was sitting across from her father at dinner, reading Casper the Friendly Ghost. Margie looked up from the comic book and watched him for a few moments. Then she asked, “Daddy, what if I died in the fire, too?”

  He glanced over the top of his paper at her, and without taking any time to think, he gave her his answer. Since he answered so quickly Margie knew he’d already asked himself that question too. He said, “I would have committed suttee.”

  Then he put his paper back up between them again. It was a very ugly word he’d said; she didn’t know what it meant and felt glad that she didn’t know. Margie was too young to read a dictionary so she couldn’t find out, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he’d given her an answer.

  Margie paused from her story and said to Charlie, “You know, that’s all children ever want—answers, not necessarily meanings.”

  “I guess.”

  “I remember Little Pete’s son asking something at the dinner table when we were over there for one of the kids’ birthdays. You had to work. Baby Pete asked, ‘How does the sperm get to the egg?’”

  Charlie smiled. “Kids always wait till they’re at the dinner table to ask about the birds and the bees, don’t they?”

  “They do.” Margie smiled, too. “Well, Little Pete took Baby Pete into the living room, broke out the medical encyclopedia, and explained the mechanics. When they came back to the table, they sat down and Baby Pete looked over at Little Pete and asked, ‘But, Daddy, how does the sperm get to the egg?’ So Martha looked down the table and told him, ‘Swim, Baby Pete. They swim.’“

  Charlie said, ’And Baby Pete was happy and went back to his meat loaf.”

  “Exactly. Charlie, the one-word answer my father gave me—suttee—was all I needed. So I went back to Casper the Friendly Ghost.

  “But that word kept sticking with me until I was old enough to think about meaning. Suttee would come back in dreams, or I’d see something in a book at school, or once when I saw a dead, stiff cat on the road.”

  “What—”

  “And about that time, Charlie, I had a big rubber ball, almost the size of a basketball; it had red and white stripes around the middle, and white stars on blue everywhere else. One day, it was run over by the bread truck. The ball got cut into six or seven pieces. Kids played with the pieces and kept them, and passed them around. Every so often, months later—and months is a long time to a kid—I’d be in the car and we’d pass by a strange kid I didn’t know playing with a piece of my ball, and terrible images of dead, stiff cats, and nightmares, and the word suttee would come into my head.”

  Charlie didn’t try to interrupt, to find out what suttee meant. Instead, he listened to Margie’s story, waiting for the denouement that would eventually come.

  “The older I got, the more curious I became about the word and about my father, too, as a matter of fact. I wondered more and more about what he’d told me, the thing he’d have done if I’d died in the fire. Whatever it was must have been more shocking than suicide to have such an ugly name. He would have committed that other thing—the strange suttee thing.

  “Then when I was around seven, I asked my Aunt Jane what suttee meant. She told me she’d never heard of a suttee. Dictionaries aren’t exactly in my aunt’s frame of reference. After that, when I realized that even Aunt Jane didn’t know what my father was talking about—that it most definitely must have meant something even worse than suicide—the word went away for a long while.” Margie looked over at Charlie from the window where she’d been gazing. “Or as Martha would say, I suppressed it.

  “Then when I was around ten, I spotted the word in the newspaper.”

  Margie’s father read two newspapers every day: The Hartford Courant in the morning, and in the evening, the New York Times, which arrived in the mail. She came to be a newspaper reader herself, what with that influence. She loved both those newspapers, too, the Courant because she learned all about her home, and the New York Times because it was an international newspaper and she was curious about what was going on in the world.

  “You know what Martha told me one time, Charlie?”

  “What, honey?”

  “She said I treat the articles in the Times like my novels. Good stories, but make-believe.”

  “Was she right?”

  “Well, it’s no fun to imagine that the perils of the world are real perils.” He didn’t say anything, “Anyway, every day, I’d come home from school and get the mail, which was bills and the New York Times. First I’d go to the bathroom, then change into my play clothes, and I’d get some cookies and sit at the kitchen table with the newspaper. I’d say I was a fifth-grader when the front page of the Times had this picture of a funeral pyre in India. A dead man’s body was burning-his body was a long lump but you could see his face. His widow had just hurled herself across him. Her hair was on fire. The article was about a humanitarian group exposing the rite of suttee, saying that the widow didn’t volunteer to die out of love. She’d been drugged and tossed onto the fire so that the man’s family wouldn’t be financially responsible for her.”

  Charlie’s eyes were narrower.

  “My father meant to volunteer, Charlie. Out of love. And I was a little girl, so I didn’t realize he’d been speaking, urn, metaphorically. I thought he would have lit a bonfire on her grave and mine, and lay down on it.”

  “I’m sorry, Margie.” Charlie covered her hand with his.

  “So then I got up from the table and went out, and buried the newspaper in the backyard. That night, my father came home from work with cream puffs from the bakery for our dessert. My father fried lamb chops. When the lamb chops were cooked, we read and ate. I read my comic books at dinner instead of my books in case I spilled anything.”

  By the time Margie was nine she had had a stack of several hundred comic books in a box on the floor of her closet. She’d read the new one her father bought her on Saturday night, and then she’d put it face down in a pile next to the box. When the box was empty, she’d turn the other pile over and put it in the box, and start reading from the top again. Margie looked forward most to Uncle Scrooge, Casper, Blackhawk, and a one-time issue of Cinderella. Every time she got to Cinderella it was a victory that her father hadn’t married a wicked stepmother. And she looked forward to finding out who Prince Charming would be, never thinking for a minute that because there wasn’t a wicked stepmother in her life there might not be a Prince Charming, either. But of course, there was. He was holding her hand right now.

  “So he read and ate while I waited, making believe I was engrossed. I tried to eat my cream puff, but I kept gagging. Then he folded up the paper, the Courant, and he said, ‘Where’s the Tlimes, Margie?’

  “I lied. I told him it hadn’t come.”

  Charlie rubbed the back of her wrist. “Poor kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want some coffee? I’ll grind some special.”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  While Charlie puttered, Margie thought about the rest. Her lie hadn’t been a hard one to say because sometimes the Times wouldn’t come, and then they’d get two the next day in the mail. After the lie,
her father sighed, got up, and went and found the book he was reading. The next evening, Margie realized how her father’s daily habits sustained him. When yesterday’s Times still hadn’t come it was as if a drug had been withdrawn. He was unable to read the new one without reading the old one. Obsessive. Not romantically obsessive—neurotically. “Compulsive,” Martha once explained. “Like Lady Macbeth. Like Dad.”

  Jack Potter paced around after dinner and then said, “I’m going to take a walk to the library, Margie.”

  She said, “Okay. I’ll be in my room.” She knew he’d read the missing Times at the library.

  He had come home very late. She heard him stumble. Two doors down from the library was the Brookside Tavern. Her father went there on the anniversary of the circus fire and on her mother’s birthday. He just couldn’t concentrate on reading on those days. The next day he’d be fine, though. He’d take aspirins with his orange juice before heading off to Fuller Brush.

  Margie had been consumed by pity for her father. She tended to feel sorry for him all the time, but she had been desolate on that night. She lay awake listening to the stumbling. She had prayed for him. The she had set her alarm early and gone downstairs and set the table and put two aspirin next to his glass, her offering as a way of apologizing. They had sat down and he’d taken them. He hadn’t said anything. The relief they’d felt that neither spoke was enormous. And oh, what Martha would have to say about that, Margie thought.

  Charlie sat back down while the coffee dripped through the filter.

  “People always felt so sorry for me, Charlie. But I’d tell them not to bother. I’d keep telling them I was just a baby when my mother died like I told Captain Bart. Like I’ve always told you. I couldn’t have really missed her. And growing up without a mother wasn’t so bad since I had no idea what it was like to have one—I had nothing to compare not having a mother with. Sort of like asking a twin what it’s like to be a twin.