Masters of Illusions (4 page)

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 about 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.

Margie’s Aunt Jane had been very close to her mother, and used to say to her—in fact still said to her—“Your mother and I
were best buddies.” Her mother and her Aunt Jane were married to brothers. Once Margie’s father and her Uncle Pete came home
from the war, they all stayed on in Charter Oak Terrace for a few years until they got established in new jobs.