Masters of Illusions (14 page)

“Surgeon told me he didn’t believe either of them would live. The boy died a few hours later.” He closed his eyes for a few
seconds. He said, “Bob Corcoran’s mother, Rhoda Banks, was in the hospital for eight months, her face so badly injured that
her lips couldn’t move. Her eyes were bandaged.

“When she gained enough strength—this is months later—she wrote on a piece of paper that a Mr. and Mrs. John Corcoran of Simsbury
were her closest relatives. I checked the records and told the nurses to tell her that her younger two children had died.
If one of the men reported that the Corcoran boy identified his sister as the Little Miss, the guy never said anything. Uncle
must have been pretty convincing. Jesus.”

Charlie and Margie watched Chick wipe his forehead with his handkerchief “I’ll tell ya, I felt bad for that woman. Anyway,
we couldn’t find the Corcorans. They’d moved. The nurses went bullshit, but there was no way we would have followed those
people up. We kept trying to find them, but it turned out, they’d moved again. To Maine. No forwarding address. I expressed
my apologies to Mrs. Banks, told her we’d keep looking. We did. Nothing.

“Then, about a year later, she called me. Rhoda Banks told me her brother-in-law reached her and that he told her the surviving
son eventually died of complications from his injuries.”

“What?” Margie couldn’t help herself.

“Let him finish, honey.”

“But why would he say such a thing?”

Chick said, “Yeah. Why? It never crossed my mind that it was a lie. Who would have thought to question that Corcoran guy—we
only worked with the squeaky wheels. Hundred and fifty dead kids needing to be sorted out. Why should we question him? His
story was simple.”

Chick, Margie knew, was really asking himself how he had messed up. But what was he supposed to do? Keep going back to people
and asking if they’d counted correctly? Are you sure you lost two kids? Maybe you lost three. Are you sure this little girl
isn’t your little girl? And then the Corcorans were just an aunt and an uncle, not parents. Margie saw that Chick, everybody
actually, would rather have kept the Little Miss a mystery rather than have another heartbroken family; there had been so
many.

Chick got up and stood still for just a few seconds, and then he got on the phone for half an hour. Margie and Charlie listened
as he put the wheels into motion. His network of friends and comrades tracked down Rhoda Banks. She was at St. Theresa’s Nursing
Home in West Hartford. She was indigent. Chick went off to Bob Corcoran’s hotel to tell him that his mother was not dead,
to apologize, and then to bring him to see his mother. Charlie and Margie met them at the nursing home. Margie refused to
let Charlie bring the tape recorder. “Not now, Charlie. If anybody says something worth remembering, you’ll remember it.”
He wanted to protest, but it was Margie who was asking for something so he didn’t.

Mrs. Banks screamed when Bob came into the room, even though she knew he was coming—the nuns had prepared her. But in that
first instant, she thought Bob was her husband. It took a while to calm her. Then she was so overwhelmed with guilt for not
knowing Bob was alive, and Bob was so enraged at his aunt and uncle’s deception, that Mrs. Banks started weeping terribly
and Bob began punching one hand into the other as if he were a robot with his dial set to that one action. The nuns kept trying
to soothe Mrs. Banks but no one had the courage to reach out to her son. And then Chick, though he tried, could not contain
himself. Amidst the wailing his voice boomed the way it had in the war room, his question a clap of thunder, and they were
all struck by it. “
Why didn’t you identify your daughter, Mrs. Banks?
”

It took a while to set in. At some point, after she could speak, obviously Rhoda Banks must have been shown the picture. She
must have seen it in the papers. It was there every year, year after year, in the Hartford
Courant
and a thousand other papers across the country.

The nuns gaped at Chick. Bob stopped pounding at himself, and Mrs. Banks turned to stone. She made a little noise and they
all looked at her. Margie knew about scars. The ones on Mrs. Banks’s face were terrible. And she looked like such an old,
old woman, though she was several years younger than Chick. Chick said in his normal voice, “Please, Mrs. Banks.”

Rhoda Banks said, “My sister wanted to believe her alive. Well, so did I. And my brother-in-law… maybe…” she stopped, took
a breath, and now her voice came out angry. “… he must have figured… he knew that maybe… if his wife at least had Bobby…”

Then she covered her ravaged face with her hands. Bob Corcoran said, “He figured if she had me, she would forget about Louise.
Well, she didn’t.”

He went over to his mother, and took her hands down, and held them tight. His mother looked into his eyes. And then Mrs. Banks
said to him, mother to son, “What did Louise call your Aunt Elizabeth?”

Bob pressed his lips together, but he got the word out: “Mama.”

Mrs. Banks said to Chick, “Louise called my sister Mama. After living with my sister, she called her Mama and she didn’t call
me anything. She was my sister’s daughter. My sister took her from me.” Her eyes went back to Bob “But why did she have to
take you, too? My big boy?” And she pulled Bob’s hands back to her cheeks. Her voice came through the fingers of Bob’s hands,
and everyone listened, paralyzed. “I wanted to be dead. Sometimes I just thought—even years after the fire—well, we’re all
dead. Then I’d remember. I wasn’t. Later… in the papers… I saw the picture. But Louise had straight hair, not curly hair.
When I saw the picture… after all that time… the pretty curls… I couldn’t be sure, could I? My sister… my sister had Louise’s
hair styled and permed. And I… I had to cut my own hair with my sewing scissors.” She was drifting, but she came right back.
“It was the curls. My daughter had straight hair, not curls. That’s what I kept thinking about. And… and maybe Louise was
alive, after all. Maybe two little girls got mixed up.… Maybe one of my children had lived.…” She drifted.

Then Bob said, “Mama. One of them did.”

The old woman’s head turned back to her son. And then she became overwhelmed and began weeping. Weeping and weeping. Bob held
her in his arms, kept saying he was going to bring her home with him and take care of her. Margie broke down. Charlie put
his arm around her. Chick had his head in his hands. The nuns didn’t cry; instead they prayed furiously, their lips moving
a mile a minute. Their prayers worked. It took a while, but a wave of calm spread across the room. The crying became sniffling
and the nuns passed around a box of Kleenex. And finally, someone spoke again. Rhoda Banks. She said to Bob, “You’re a fine
man. You’re a handsome man, like your Pop.” And that got him going again. He couldn’t control his tears, but they weren’t
tears of despair, or rage either, like at first. They were tears of relief. Tears of peace.

“It was the Depression, Bobby. He had to go find work. But I guess he couldn’t. He knew your aunt would take care of us. Her
husband had money. That’s why he didn’t come back. For our own good.”

Margie could hear her heart beating. She was no longer feeling pity for Bob Corcoran, but envy. He had found his mother.

Bob Corcoran’s whole body was shaking, and Rhoda Banks did her best to hold him and pat him. But still it wasn’t over. Chick
cleared his throat, Margie guessed to keep himself from bellowing again. He asked, “Mrs. Banks, could you positively identify
the photograph of Little Miss 1565 as your daughter, Louise Corcoran, today?”

Bob said, “Banks. Louise Banks. My uncle changed my name… after.”

Chick said, “Louise Banks.”

Rhoda Banks said, “No, I couldn’t.”

But Charlie, who loved his own little baby girl so and whose mind worked in different ways from the rest, said, “Do you have
a picture of Louise, Mrs. Banks?”

She looked at the nuns and smiled. They looked at each other and then smiled back at her. One of them went over to Rhoda Banks’s
bureau, opened a drawer, and took out a picture album. Rhoda Banks said to Chick, “My husband had a Brownie box camera. He
knew how to develop film, too. He taught me.”

And there, first with one brother and then with two, were pages and pages of the pretty little blond girl so many people held
in their hearts, except that her hair was fine and straight. The last picture in the album was of Louise, her bright hair
fit with a big bow, pulling her little brother in the new red Radio Flyer wagon he’d gotten for his birthday. Timmy had on
a party hat. Bob stood off, the big brother, arms folded across his chest, surveying the scene. There was no question that
Louise Banks was Little Miss 1565.

Bob said, “I want her to be with Timmy.”

Chick said, “I’ll start on that right now,” and his voice was quaking so hard that Charlie went with him down the corridor
to the phone. Margie was near the doorway so she heard Charlie say, “I’m gonna get the son of a bitch, Chick. I’m gonna get
him.”

M
argie had never been worried about Charlie before. Oh, she worried about him all the time because he was a fireman—he’d been
burned several times. And he had a bad cough. Some fires he put out released blankets of asbestos dust onto him. But she’d
never worried about his hobby. His hobby was not dangerous, his work was. The hobby was a game. Like Clue, Martha’s favorite.
But it should have ended. Life was divided into segments, after all. When you have a child, you see the segments clearly.
Children finish with one and move into the next. Adults do the same thing. But Charlie’s life was just one big section that
didn’t seem to have a finish. In fact, if anything, it had become more intense; Charlie himself had become more intense because
of the Little Miss, who now had a name, and because of the arsonist, who now had a name as well—Louise’s murderer. Charlie
was more bent than ever on finding his firebug, whom he no longer called the Arsonist. Now it was Louise’s Killer.

Margie decided to have a visit with her mother-in-law, Palma. Palma had lived alone since her husband died, the year Martha
was born. But she didn’t live alone the way Margie’s father lived alone. She loved visitors; whoever came was welcome. That’s
because Denny O’Neill, when he was alive, had never let her have any friends. Not even visitors, except for her children when
they’d grown up and no longer lived at home. He wasn’t just an alcoholic, he was scum.

Margie asked Palma the kinds of things she’d asked her Aunt Jane about herself, only about Charlie. She asked, “Was Charlie
always such a serious person?”

Palma said, “No.”

Margie waited for more, but Palma had become busy breaking out the cannoli and getting the espresso machine cooking. When
she’d put all the goodies in front of her daughter-in-law, she sat down across the table, and Margie asked, “When did he change?”

Palma cradled her cup in both hands as if she’d just come in from the cold. She said, “Margie, this new generation—Martha’s
and my other grandchildren’s—they believe it is important to speak of any such thing that is troubling them. To talk those
things out. My generation was taught that to let people see inside you was a sign of weakness.”

Margie said, “And mine was in the middle. We never knew what to do so we just said anything or did anything without really
thinking about it. The impulse generation.”

“Yes. And now you’ve decided that Martha’s has the right idea.”

“I think so.”

“You were always one to ask questions, though.”

“I know. But that was just to hear myself think. I don’t think I got good answers.” And Margie thought of Baby Pete, and the
sperm, and the one-word answer that was all he needed.

Palma talked to Margie because she knew how much her daughter-in-law loved her son. When other people visited her, she’d flit
around doing all sorts of things at once, but now she sat down and drank her coffee. She would talk to Margie.

“I don’t like what’s happening,” Margie said.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m beginning to look at Charlie in a new light.”

Palma tossed a little grappa in their coffee, which was what her father used to do when he talked with his Abruzzi cronies.
Before her husband died, when she’d make time for Margie, her eyes would keep shifting back and forth to be sure her husband
wasn’t hovering somewhere. When her little antennae told her he wanted something, she’d excuse herself and go to the bedroom
or den and say, “Did you want something, Denny?” He always did. And when he didn’t, he’d make up something. If she didn’t
stay a step ahead of him, he’d get especially ugly. He expected her to know what he wanted and when he wanted it, and she
was able to do it, her intuition based on his location in the house, the tone of the grunts he emitted, and her cultural traditions.

Her eyes still shifted back and forth now and again—the habit so ingrained—but then she’d relax. She was no longer on call
twenty-four hours a day. Also, now that the grappa was on a shelf next to the Crisco instead of hidden under the sink behind
the hundred of bottles of cleaning fluids and powders, she’d take a hit quite often, not just with coffee. It loosened her
up.

Margie said, “Palma, I didn’t think an answer to my questions would mean that you’d have to expose something you don’t want
to expose.”

Palma sighed. She ate another cannoli. She was so fat. She sighed again. She said, “Charlie was a happy baby. All my children
were happy so long as they were small enough to fit into my arms. Then, after that, I couldn’t protect them from their father.
I thank God for my brothers who did.” She made the sign of the cross over the expanse of her upper body.

Her brothers. Charlie and his own brothers adored them all, these Italian uncles who were all over six feet tall and who took
after their mother from the Piedmont, strapping mountain climbers. One or another of them had been always at the ready, protecting
their round little sister from the wrath of her husband. Charlie couldn’t help but adore them, considering that his father
was such a mean bastard. And then he came to truly love them because he realized that they’d have killed his father if the
man laid a finger on their sister, saving Charlie and his brothers the trauma of having to do it themselves. The uncles respected
their sister’s marriage and never said a disapproving word to her, but they’d have thrown their brother-in-law in the Hog
River if he’d touched her.