Masters of Illusions

by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  Martha happened to be in her room. “Are you in the mood to be my shrink for a few minutes, honey?”

  Margie knew Martha had smiled. Martha said, “You’re beginning to like searching your soul, right?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Mommy. I’m sorry. What’s the matter?”

  “I need to search my soul.”

  “You’re a brave lady, Mom.”

  “I wish.”

  Margie told her about coffee with her grandmother.

  “You want me to analyze Grandma’s behavior?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Well, hell. I don’t know why she would say that. Nobody’s going to get Daddy to stop, that’s for sure. She must feel she knows something about you that isn’t really there, or else something is there but you’re not aware of it.”

  “But what should I do?”

  “About what?”

  “About figuring out what she was really saying.”

  “Mom. First of all, are you really sure she was trying to say something other than what she was saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re getting good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You could ask her, obviously.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “Yeah, right. Listen, Mom, you were a child when you met Grandma. Seventeen. That was me a year ago, right?”

  “Yes.” Incredible.

  “So there’s a good chance she knows things about you that you don’t. Good chance.”

  “Martha?”

  “What?”

  “How’s school?”

  Long pause. “Great. I wish I didn’t love calculus so much.” “So maybe you’re not meant to be a lawyer.”

  “I’m meant.”

  “Is this calculus teacher a handsome man?”

  Silence.

  “Sorry, Martha. Didn’t mean to read your mind.”

  Silence.

  “I said I was sorry. But crushes are normal. And besides, when you develop a crush, you don’t think: Gee, I guess I’ll marry this guy and live happily ever after. Instead you think: He sure is cute. Period. Women of my generation envy that. We always thought in terms of, Is this the one? Really, Martha. No offense.”

  Martha laughed. “No offense taken. We’re through with that other part of the conversation though, right? The part you called me about?”

  “For now.”

  “Just think things through. Control those impulses.”

  “I will, baby.”

  Martha said, “Mom?”

  “What, honey?”

  “God! He is so frigging cute!”

  Martha always knew when to let her mother off the hook, even though she did remind Margie on occasion that she had taken up with a man who was engaged to another woman. To everyone else in Margie’s life, breaking another womatis engagement by stealing her man was shocking. No one ever brought it up. Not even while it was happening. Martha, however, found it very curious. Margie felt badly that Martha didn’t see anything else about her that was intriguing, but that one bit of personal history did keep Martha from taking her for granted.

  Margie took Martha’s advice. She thought things through. She analyzed her relationship with her mother-in-law She went back to the beginning. Those Sunday dinners were the beginning.

  Margie had come to enjoy her new big family except for Charlie’s father, whom she treated like a piece of furniture. She walked around him in her own brand of deference. He would look at Margie and she would look into the two holes that were his eyes. Every Sunday, he’d lurk, but then one Sunday he wasn’t there. He’d never come home the night before. That had happened before, Margie was told, but by morning one or another of his buddies would arrive at the doorstep holding him up, and Palma and her sons would get him to the bathroom, where his wife would clean him. Charlie said to Margie that those times weren’t so bad; it was when he’d come home still roaring drunk, stand in the living room, unzip his fly, and pee on the carpet. Now that was tough to take. Margie asked Charlie to please not tell her things like that, she couldn’t stand it.

  On this one Sunday everyone was getting ready for dinner and debating whether somebody should go look for him when the doorbell rang. Chick opened the door. Two of his friends, two cops, stood in the doorway. The crowd of people in the house flowed to the front door. Chick was whispering to the cops, and then he waved them off and turned.

  “Denny’s at the hospital.”

  Palma said, “Sweet mother of God.”

  Chick said, “He’s dead.”

  Denny O’Neill had had a fight with his buddies and insisted on walking home from the bar just over the line in West Hartford. The dividing line between the two cities was the railroad tracks. He’d been hit by a freight train.

  Margie watched the commotion that went on for days, and through all the telegrams and arrangements and visits from the priest, Margie especially watched Charlie. She couldn’t take her eyes from his face, the face of a victor. The face of the warrior who’s seen the enemy slain.

  The final arrangements included the plan that Denny’s sons should carry his coffin. Charlie said, “Not me.”

  The family enveloped Charlie. His mother begged him not to be bitter. His uncles spoke of scandal. His brothers told him to grow up. After all, this man was his father. Margie said to him, “I think you should do it for Palma.”

  So when Charlie said no to Margie, they all knew he meant it. There would be other pallbearers. The family was disgusted with Charlie, though. Margie said to him, “I respect you, Charlie, I do. If you can’t do it, I know your reasons are right.”

  Charlie’s eyes were clear. He said, “The filthy son of a bitch.”

  As it turned out, Charlie didn’t even go to the funeral.

  Now in thinking all that through, it wasn’t Charlie’s father whom Margie was imagining. The burned out holes instead of eyes had become her own father’s. There was nothing there in Jack Potter’s eyes anymore. Not when Margie stood watching him from the door of his room. But when he spotted her, they would fill with duty, and with affection, if not love. Love had been taken from him by the war, though Jack Potter blamed something else. The psychiatrist said to Margie, “If a prisoner of war is liberated, he leaves his prison with nothing. In a way, putting it simply, he’s almost like a baby being born. He has to find out who he is. Most are able to do it, though it is a great burden to them since it forces them to relive what they wish they could forget. But, of course, they can’t forget even if they want to. Your mother was an excuse for your father not to have to relive what he’d been through.”

  Margie said, “I think it’s too late to do anything about that.”

  The doctor said, “I’m afraid that’s true. I wish it wasn’t so.”

  “Me too.”

  Margie wondered at what point it had been too late for her father-in-law to get out of the hellhole he was in. Margie had never had a single conversation with Denny O’Neill; she’d just said that one word to him. Lush. Her own father didn’t initiate conversations with his daughter, but he answered everything she asked, and paid attention, in a hazy way, to things she told him. When Margie was twelve, she read The Diary of a Young Girl. Margie didn’t know how it would end. As she read it, she couldn’t wait to get to that final scene when the Americans would invade Europe and save the day: She could just see the GIs crashing into the Annex to rescue the Franks, the van Damms, and Mr. Dussel; then Anne and Peter going out on a real date; Anne’s sister, Margot, finding a boyfriend of her own. But when Margie finished the book, she couldn’t believe the ending that she’d found there—no ending—and was horrified as she read the afterword. She ran downstairs and said to her father, “Did you know that Hitler tried to kill every Jew in the world, even the kids?” She waved the book at him. “Even Anne Frank?”

  He said yes, of all things, and that was more of a shock than the horrendous secret Margie had come upon. Her father was in on it.

  �
�You knew about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  He said, “Same reason your schoolbooks won’t tell you. People think it’s best to isolate children from the truth. That’s why teenagers go wild. They find out the truth and are rightfully angry that it was kept from them. People are very stupid, Margie. Especially the smart ones.”

  She’d gone back to her room to think. Twelve-year-olds do a lot of thinking because no one ever tells them anything, as her father had just pointed out. She began to see that this Jew-killing was kept from kids for the same reason sex was hidden. People didn’t tell their children about the Nazis killing the Jews because maybe kids would think that if adults did things as bad as that, why wouldn’t they?

  Margie had learned about sex two years before. Her father had given her a book on menstruation. Margie tended to skim-read when she was reading something exciting. She could read an Agatha Christie in forty-five minutes. Her brain automatically condensed books the way Reader’s Digest does for people who don’t have the natural ability. So she skimmed the menstruation book, learning first of all that Modess rhymed with, Oh yes, no exclamation point. When she finished it, she held the mind-boggling notion that girls bled from all their pores once a month and wrapped these bandages that rhymed with Oh yes around their arms and legs and bodies, and presumably, during that time of the month, went around in long-sleeved shirts and dungarees. (Not only did Margie skim, she filled in pertinent information that she inevitably missed) But what about your face and hands? she wondered. She wondered about logistics rather than the female body’s need to rid itself of a gallon of blood every twenty-eight days. (The book had said pint, but she’d skimmed by that.)

  Margie, being a Catholic, accepted the whole thing as some kind of stigmata, which the nuns told the children in catechism class was an especially wonderful gift of God bestowed on the very, very few Margie’s nun, at the time, had looked down at her own unblessed palms soulfully.

  Margie ran across the street to her friend Julie’s house and shoved the pamphlet under her nose. But Julie knew all about it already, and proceeded to set Margie straight on where the blood actually came out. The place she told Margie the blood came out seemed far more outrageous than Margie’s pores idea. Margie told her friend that she had to use the bathroom, and she went in, pulled down her pants, put Julie’s mother’s magnified makeup mirror on the floor, and squatted over it. Then she ran back out and said, “Julie! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Julie said, “My mother told me she’d kill me if I told any of my friends because it’s up to their mothers to tell them.”

  Margie said, “I don’t have a mother.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

  Julie didn’t have a father. He had died of a heart attack when she was five. But she could remember him, at least. Now Margie looked back at the kids on her street where she grew up. Every one of them came from what would now be labeled a dysfunctional family, but no one knew the word functional, let alone dysfunctional, so no one felt deprived. There was Margie whose mother was dead, and Julie whose father was dead. And Margie would never forget the thrilling day she was down the street at her friend Barbara’s house and the police came to the kitchen door.

  They banged on the door so hard Margie couldn’t imagine why they didn’t break through—something so easily accomplished by Mickey Spillane. She and Barbara were at the kitchen table writing to their pen pals in Egypt, and Barbara’s dad sat across from them and it looked to Margie like he was writing to a pen pal, too. Barbara’s mother was at the stove slicing carrots into a pot. After those initial shouts of, “Open up! Police!” there was an instant when Barbara’s kitchen became a tableau. Margie could picture exactly when she and Barbara and Barbara’s parents all looked into each other’s eyes at the same time. Then Barbara’s mother ran to the door and pretended she couldn’t open it while Barbara’s father started ripping up the pieces of paper he’d been writing on. Then he started eating the pieces. Barbara grabbed more of his papers, handed Margie a bunch, and said, “C’mon, Margie. C’mon, c’mon.” Margie ran with her, following her to the bathroom, tearing up papers the whole while. Margie did the same to the letter to her pen pal, which she had in her hand. In the bathroom, Barbara flushed away all the little pieces of paper. Then she grabbed Margie’s arm and dragged her back to the kitchen table and said, “Write.”

  Margie could hear Barbara’s father charging down the cellar stairs. Then Barbara’s mother wiped off her hands on her apron, smiled, and said cheerfully, “Well, here we go,” and she opened the door. Two policemen fell through, looked around, ran in and out of every room in the house, down and back up the cellar stairs, and then they ran back out. Barbara’s mother shut the door behind them and said to Barbara and Margie, “Now that the stew’s out of the way, would you girls like to make a nice refrigerator cake?”

  When Margie got home, carrying a piece of cake Barbara’s mother insisted she bring to her father, she told him what happened. He put down his magazine and said, “Well, I guess I won’t hit the double today. Not that I ever have it, anyway.” Then he described to Margie the profession of booking horses. Definitely dysfunctional, Margie now knew.

  Her friend Pidgie, whose house was a little farther down the street from Barbara’s, lived with her aunt and uncle, who were from Sweden. They didn’t call her Pidgie, though. The kids in the neighborhood made up that name because they couldn’t pronounce her real name and because she tamed a pigeon that would land on her shoulder when she called him. Then there was Carol, who was adopted and whose parents were very old. And next to Carol, Barry, who had a sister who was a mongoloid who also had a hole in her heart and was addicted to Cokes. She sucked at the Cokes through a big nipple that her mother would pull onto the bottles for her. And Artie’s parents were divorced at a time when only movie stars were divorced, and Johnny’s grandmother had a nervous breakdown so she had to sleep in his room on a cot while she got better. Then there was Poor Barry. Never just “Barry” He wasn’t allowed out to play. He could only study and practice his violin. Once Margie and her friends went en masse to his house and told his mother they were desperate for one more ballplayer. She gave in to their pleas and her son’s tears but she told Poor Barry that he couldn’t use the children’s bats. He’d have to use the one she’d gotten him. It was a souvenir bat from the Statue of Liberty, twelve inches long.

  All of the kids in the neighborhood were not terribly concerned about any of this. They’d tease each other once in a while, and say things like: “Hey, Johnny, does your grandmother snore?” Or, “Pidgie, you ever get sick of Swedish meatballs?” But nobody seemed to ask why Johnny’s grandmother had a nervous breakdown or where Pidgie’s parents were. Like Jack Potter said, children were isolated from the truth. They were not encouraged to think. In fact, after explaining why the cops broke down Barbara’s door, Jack Potter said, “Best to forget about the whole thing. Just keep on being Barbara’s friend.” So Margie never said anything to Barbara about the incident, and Barbara never said anything to Margie.

  But then when kids start to get a little older, they get surprises more far-reaching than a friend’s father being a bookie. Like Anne Frank. She was from a dysfunctional country. She was my childhood trauma, Margie told herself, not my mother being dead, not my father being a hermit. So Margie had promised herself that when she had children, they would know the truth. Now she had one and she did know everything. Margie had told Martha about sex from the time she was little. Martha at ten had been nothing like Margie at ten. Give her an answer, you’d get another question. At ten, she’d said, “So how does a baby fit through this hole?”

  Margie told her the hole stretched. Martha said, “Oh, yeah. Right.”

  When Vietnam came along, Martha and her fellows were up to the challenge.

  Once Margie was watching a sports talk show. Dick Schaap and Joe Namath were talking about the Franco Zeffirelli film Romeo and Juliet. J
oe found the plot very upsetting and said he didn’t like such depressing movies. Dick Schaap kind of looked out at the audience and then back at Joe. Then he said, “You didn’t know how it would end, did you, Joe?” And Joe said, “How could I know how it’d end? I just seen it.” That was about the only time ever that Margie figured it was advantageous to not know what life was all about. Lucky Joe. Shakespeare as thriller seemed a good idea to her. Margie wished she didn’t know what happened to Anne Frank.

  Chapter Twelve

  During the time Martha was away at school, Margie got another one of those Anne Frank kind of surprises. From Charlie. Charlie told her that Chick’s wife, Aunt Annette, had finally brought herself to the point where she was able to talk about the fire.

  Margie asked, “What does she want to talk about?”

  “About what it was like for her. Aunt Annette was there.”

  Margie repeated the words, though they came out a question. “Aunt Annette was there?”

  Charlie said, “Yes. She’s finally able to discuss her experience. After all these years.”

  Now Margie said words of her own, but they were framed in another question. “Aunt Annette was at the circus?” “Yes. And Cindy and Ruth-Ann.”

  “Cindy and Ruth-Ann?” She was back to repeating.

  Charlie said, “Jesus, what’s the matter with you?”

  Margie actually began to say: What’s the matter with me? But she didn’t. She just stared at him. His face was concerned, as always, but his eyes were innocent. Innocent, goddamn it. She said, “Charlie, it’s the same as lying.”

  “What’s the same as lying?”

  “Not being frank. Deliberately not being frank. It’s worse than lying.”

  He went into a spiel. A planned-out spiel, Margie could tell. Prepared, like Martha’s briefs. He had known she would be hurt when he told her about Annette. Hurt, but according to Charlie’s definition. Hurt feelings, like when a child learns a secret has been kept from her. Betrayed, according to Margie—like Anne Frank. So he began to talk to her as if she were a child, filling her in on the details she knew nothing about. All the while, Margie kept thinking, What is happening here? Why did he hide this from me? She tried to listen to him.