Masters of Illusions Read online

  OTHER NOVELS BY MARY-ANN TIRONE SMITH

  THE BOOK OF PHOEBE

  LAMENT FOR A SILVER-EYED WOMAN

  THE PORT OF MISSING MEN

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1994 by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56513-4

  Contents

  OTHER NOVELS BY MARY-ANN TIRONE SMITH

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Afterword

  About The Author

  This book is dedicated to my beloved Tirone cousins:

  Jack, Bobby, Kathy, Jule-Ann, Dee Dee, Frank, Tommy, Paul,

  Wally, Elaine, Sandy, Barbara and Jimmy.

  And to my equally beloved Deslauriers cousins:

  Ernie, Moe, Francis, Paul, Doris, Juney, Donny, Cleasse, Roger, Ruthie,

  Billy, Rita, Richard, Rusty, Joe, Matt, Ray, Marietta and Greg.

  And in precious memory of:

  Beezie, Jackie, Karen and Michael.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the enthusiastic assistance of the reference departments of the Hartford and Danbury Public Libraries, and the boundless support of the staff of the Ridgefield Library.

  Chapter One

  Margie Potter had a scar on her back, the thumbprint of a soldier on liberty who had passed her along the line of a bucket brigade. A bucket brigade of sorts. The actual bucket brigade—a dozen roustabouts plus Emmett Kelly the clown and two neighborhood women—passed their buckets of water from hand to hand just to give themselves something to do. But it was almost all military men in Margie Potter’s bucket brigade, soldiers waiting with their orders at Brainard Field in Hartford for the transport that would take them to Europe. Those furloughed on July 6 took a bus over from the field to enjoy the matinee performance of the Greatest Show on Earth. They were young, and so they’d chosen to come into town to the circus rather than head out for the nearest gin mills. Other than the soldiers, there were few men in the tent, instead, only women and children and a few grandfathers who’d already served in the first war.

  Six thousand people fled the burning tent, and now they stood in the lot, stock-still, horrified. And what was so strange was that, in the news photos, all those people standing stock-still were facing away from the tent. Fires were supposed to have something to do with thrills and sex; people’s eyes are irresistibly drawn to flames, but not this day. The fire that consumed the biggest circus tent in the world (three city blocks long) in less than six minutes meant only death and destruction. Unspeakable, just like that the war, but without hope of victory. Also unspeakable was that the war, in a way, was responsible for the fire. When the Ringling brothers constructed their new tent, they had had no access to waterproof canvas. The War Department needed all there was. So the clever roustabouts figured out how to waterproof the tent themselves: They mixed up a solution of one part softened paraffin to two parts gasoline, and when they got it to the consistency of mayonnaise, they painted their canvas with it.

  The soldiers formed a line leading from the wild animal chute running parallel to the main entrance to a place beyond the titanic heat where the ambulances would arrive, eventually. It was a “short” lot, the circus term for inadequate, and so the ambulances couldn’t get past the sideshow and food stands and all the trailers for many hair-raising minutes.

  After the men had managed to save about two dozen people, the first man in the line (the only one who wasn’t military) had to make a wretched decision—when to quit. He was Hermes Wallenda, the youngest of the Flying Wallendas, the troupe of tightrope performers whose lives were full of wretched decisions. Twenty years after the circus fire, when the seven-man pyramid collapsed under the big top in Detroit, it was Hermes who announced at a press conference that the survivors would go on with the show the next evening, though two of the family were dead and one severely injured.

  The men passed along burned, mostly unconscious, or shocked children, handed to them by their mothers up and over the metal rungs of the chute that barred their intended route to the wide entrance where they’d poured in just twenty minutes earlier, babbling with anticipation.

  There was no way to save the mothers.

  After Hermes made his decision, the men ran for their lives.

  People had spread blankets for the injured children to lie on while waiting for the ambulances to come. Those people bent over the victims, arms outstretched, trying to shade the seared bodies from the hot afternoon sun. They waited and waited, and then they became impatient, so they carried the maimed bodies down Barbour Street, which ran alongside the north edge of the lot to an old Italian woman’s house. She had a reputation for making fennel tea that cured colic, and parsley paste that halted balding, and garlic mash for stomach ulcer. She placed sliced raw potatoes all over Margie Potter’s melted back.

  The child was only six months old on the day of the circus fire, and her little overalls were a homespun cotton that protected her legs, but the back of her shirt had caught fire. One of the many doctors who came to treat her in the proceeding years said to his nurse as the two worked above the little girl, sitting before them in her underpants, “I’m going to have to do some research. But I suspect raw potatoes only served to cool the skin, which was, I guess, better than doing nothing.” Then, continuing to ponder, he said, “I wonder if a raw potato is a sterile medium… if the juice got rid of the bacteria on the woman’s hands…“ Margie blocked out his words at that point and thought about the people who had carried her down Barbour Street. She imagined them saying those words, “Anything is better than doing nothing.” Then she blocked out the image, too, and went back to the storybook in her lap. The story of Bambi.

  Since Margie’s scars were only on her back, she had been able to ignore them pretty much. In fact, she never had any qualms about wearing bathing suits or even strapless gowns, because what she couldn’t see, couldn’t hurt her, she’d scoff. She was wearing a bathing suit when she met her husband at the beach when she was seventeen.

  In point of fact, she’d made his acquaintance the day before when she’d gone out on a fishing boat with her cousin, Little Pete, and his friends, and her two girlfriends. She was the kind of teenager who always went out in groups. Boys were friends, not romantic interests. That was because she was “the girl with the scars,” which put her off-limits for romance. She did evoke kindness in boys because they all knew about her being in the fire, but when she wore a sleeveless blouse in warm weather, the recoil was there. All the same, the intimacy of group friendships offered her the kind of freedom she appreciated, saving her from having to act adorable, or dumb; and she didn’t have to let the boy win when they all went bowling. She found that she did fall into such a pattern when new members joined the group, when she was covered up. But she hated herself when she was acting coy. She found herself thinking, what am I doing?

  On the fishing boat there were six guys from the next beach who had rented a
cottage for a week to celebrate the coming wedding of one of their gang. An extended bachelor party. They were a little older than Margie and her cousin and friends. A bunch of Hartford cops, someone said. She and her girlfriends flirted with them. They flirted back. Margie had on a windbreaker because it was chilly out on the sound. If it hadn’t been chilly, she wouldn’t have had it on, and they wouldn’t have flirted back at her. But then, with her scars showing, she wouldn’t have flirted in the first place.

  The one getting married was Charlie O’Neill. He seemed to her to be uneasy about the attention he was getting. His friends kept saying things to him, like, “Your fishing days are about over, old buddy” She caught his eye and smiled. He shrugged. He was embarrassed. He fit in with his group in a lot of ways—same age, same clothes—but was somehow removed. He’s uncomfortable, Margie thought. Just the way she was when people tried to act as if she didn’t have the scars.

  When the captain gave the call to reel in, Charlie was watching her. He came by and said, “Hard to catch anything with no bait.”

  She said, “Yeah. I like to watch, not fish. I mean, I don’t like to watch people fishing, either. I mean… I love it out here.”

  He said, “Yeah,” too.

  The next day, she was sitting on a blanket on the beach facing into the sun reading a book, To Kill a Mockingbird. She was reading it for the second time. Margie had read it in school a few months earlier, and she couldn’t bear to leave it, so it was the first in her stack of summer books. Her friends were back at their cottages, sleeping late. She spotted the guys from the boat walking along the beach looking at girls. Charlie O’Neill was about ten feet from her blanket when he noticed her and squinted. He came closer, and he didn’t look away when he noticed the trails of scar tissue reaching up and across her shoulders. Not only did he not look away, he actually stared, and then he came right over to her blanket, squatted down, and said, “Where’d you get that?”

  He was right level with her. His long eyelashes fluttered. He was pretty nondescript looking, but he had long, dark eyelashes. She said, “The library.”

  He was confused for just an instant. Then he smiled a tiny bit, and he said, “No. The burns.”

  She said, “The circus fire.”

  He said, “Yeah.”

  Since the circus fire had become an integral component of the city of Hartford’s character, there really wasn’t much more for him to say than “Yeah.” If he’d just come from California, he might have said, “What circus fire?” But there wasn’t anyone from California who went to Chalker Beach in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1961.

  He said, “Your name’s Margie, right?” The eyelashes drew her in.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I heard your friends on the boat.”

  They talked. Charlie and his friends were not cops, they were firemen. Charlie was just a little kid the day the Barnum & Bailey tent went up like a marshmallow on a stick, the ashes blown away by the hot summer breeze until there was nothing left where the tent had been except the twisted animal chute and the stack of black lumps piled up against it. He apologized to Margie for his forward attitude by explaining that it must have been a really formative year for him when the circus burned because he could remember how no one could speak of anything else, day in and day out. He said that’s why he’d become a fireman. When everyone else finally stopped talking about the fire, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Charlie had become obsessed by the Hartford circus fire and was still obsessed now, even though it had happened more than fifteen years before. That was why he was such a dedicated fireman. And when he saw Margie Potter that day at the beach, he became obsessed with her, too. Obsession was a mere romantic notion in those days, not the form of psychopathy it’s seen as today. There was a wonderful book then, Magnificent Obsession, which was made into a movie with Jane Wyman. To be the object of all the love and desire one man could muster Margie found rather appealing. Romantic. More than romantic. Erotic.

  Margie smirked at Charlie. Charlie found that the smirk in combination with Margie’s clear, gray eyes was irresistible. As irresistible as the scars. There was that problem, though, his being engaged. The day Charlie saw Margie on the beach he was two weeks away from getting married. Because of that, he and Margie tried to act as though the connection happening between them as they sat on her blanket wasn’t really happening. He asked her about her book, for example. He told her he wasn’t a good reader. So Margie relayed to him the whole plot of To Kill a Mockingbird. He lay back on his elbows and listened. She read him the scenes with Boo Radley aloud. When she finished, she said, “You may not be a good reader, but you sure are a good listener.” He was one of those people whose expression changed in reflection of what someone was telling him. Margie found it endearing rather than comical. She said, “Were you read to a lot when you were little?” And then his expression became blank. The kind of blank when you anticipate something big is going to happen. Margie said, “Hey. What’d I say?”

  He relaxed again. “Nothing. No, I was never read to.”

  She said, “Me neither. But my father used to tell me bedtime stories.”

  “Like Goldilocks?”

  “Nope. Like ‘The Fox and the Grapes.’”

  He didn’t say anything so she told him it was a fable, an Aesop fable. He said, “Oh.” She didn’t know what to say next, so she said, “Want me to tell it to you?” Then he laughed at her in a quiet way. She laughed at herself, too, in the same silent way.

  Charlie said, “Let’s swim out to the raft. You can tell it to me out there.”

  Margie said, “Okay.” She got up and pulled on a T-shirt. He watched her. Great body, but so damaged. She said, “Scar tissue gets sunburned bad.” He winced a little, but not a wince of revulsion. A wince of sympathy.

  They swam out to the raft and then lay on the warm boards on their stomachs. Margie stared into the sparkle on the chop and thanked Aesop for fixing her up with Charlie and at the same time cursed the Lord because Charlie was engaged. They spent all day together, taking walks and swimming and just hanging out till his friends came and got him. One friend was his brother, who was not a fireman. Charlie introduced Margie to them.

  Then he introduced her burns. He said, “Margie got burned at the circus.” All serious, they treated her like a church relic. Then Charlie said, “See you around, Margie.”

  She said, “Okay,” but while she was saying the word okay and looking into his eyes, she was thinking: I love you. When she realized she was thinking that, she said to herself, Oh shit.

  They saw each other around that night. They took a walk to the Indian Town jetty. Indian Town was the next beach, where Charlie and his friends and brother had rented their bachelor cottage. They went out to the end of the jetty and sat down on the rocks a few feet apart. The southern sky was flaring. Margie said, “What do you suppose that is?”

  He said, “Looks like an electrical storm over Long Island.”

  “It’s really beautiful.”

  He said, “It is. Unless it hits a tree with a few people hiding under it.”

  Margie thought: Here I am, one of those famous circus fire victims, and I’m in love with someone who sees lightning and thinks immediately about people getting hit by it.

  Then they didn’t say anything because she was thinking about that and thinking about the fact that Charlie was getting married. She figured he was thinking the same thing. She was right. He said, “I’m getting married to get my mind off all this.”

  “All this?”

  “The circus fire.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m driving my family crazy.”

  “Because you aren’t married?”

  “Sort of. Because I don’t care about marriage. All I care about is figuring out who set it.”

  “Who set what?”

  He paused. “Margie, the fire. But I’m getting discouraged. And my mother kept threatening to call the old country and have
a bride sent from L’Aquila.”

  “Where?”

  “A town in Italy. Where my grandparents came from.”

  “I thought you said your name was O’Neill.”

  “My mother’s name was DeNardo.”

  “Oh.” Then Margie, looking over to him, said, “The circus fire was an accident.”

  Charlie’s gaze didn’t shift from the horizon. “No, it wasn’t.”

  She said, “How come I don’t know that?”

  He looked at her with his long eyelashes. Italian eyelashes. “You’re too young.”

  “So tell me about it.”

  “I don’t want to make you feel bad.”

  “I was just a baby, Charlie. It’s never really meant anything to me.”

  Then he scooted over next to her, put his arm around her shoulders, across the bumps and ridges, and he told her.

  Charlie said to Margie that all the firemen knew it had been set, but firemen have lots of other fires to worry about—the ones that they have to fight every single day. Their job was to put them out, not concern themselves with how they started. In those days, fire marshalls didn’t have any clout; the police were supposed to figure out who, if anyone, set suspicious fires, and the police in 1944 had concluded that the fire had been an accident, though a catastrophic one. But that was because the chief of police had accepted fifty free tickets to the circus in lieu of an inspection. Back then, bribery wasn’t considered psychopathic any more than obsession was. So out of guilt, the Hartford Police Department had announced within one week of the rack and ruin, with so many people dead and injured, that the fire had been an accident. They had planned to say it was an accident even while it was happening, was what Charlie told Margie. They went by the theory that the tent had been lit by a flipped cigarette butt.

  Then he changed the subject. Margie had been somehow cuddling up closer to him. He became sheepish and told Margie that, besides all the discouragement, Sylvia was a very beautiful girl.