The Book of Illusions (19 page)

The stock market crashed while he was in Portland, and when the Comstock Barrel Company went out of business in mid-1930, Hector lost his job. By then, he had worked his way through several hundred books, beginning with the standard nineteenth-century novels that everyone had always talked about but which he had never taken the trouble to read (Dickens, Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy), and then, once he felt that he had got the hang of it, going back to zero and deciding to educate himself in a systematic manner. Hector knew next to nothing. He had left school at sixteen, and no one had ever bothered to tell him that Socrates and Sophocles were not the same man, that George Eliot was a woman, or that
The Divine
Comedy
was a poem about the afterlife and not some boulevard farce in which all the characters wound up marrying the right person. Circumstances had always pressed in on him, and there hadn’t been time for Hector to worry about such things. Now, suddenly, there was all the time in the world. Imprisoned in his private Alcatraz, he spent the years of his captivity acquiring a new language to think about the conditions of his survival, to make sense of the constant, merciless ache in his soul. According to Alma, the rigors of this intellectual training gradually turned him into someone else. He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust—and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness. He had shown her his journals from that period, and fifty years after the fact, Alma had been able to witness the agonies of his conscience firsthand.
Never
more lost than now
, she recited to me, quoting a passage from memory,
never more alone and afraid—yet never more alive
. Those words were written less than an hour before he left Portland. Then, almost as an afterthought, he sat down again and added another paragraph at the bottom of the page:
I talk only
to the dead now. They are the only ones I trust, the only ones
who understand me. Like them, I live without a future
.

The word was that there were jobs in Spokane. The lumber mills were supposedly looking for men, and several logging camps to the east and north were said to be hiring. Hector had no interest in those jobs, but he overheard two fellows talking about the opportunities up there one afternoon not long after the barrel factory shut down, and it gave him an idea, and once he began to think the idea through, he could no longer resist it. Brigid had grown up in Spokane. Her mother was dead, but her father was still around, and there were two younger sisters in the family as well. Of all the tortures Hector could imagine, of all the pains he could possibly inflict on himself, none was worse than the thought of going to the city where they lived. If he caught a glimpse of Mr. O’Fallon and the two girls, then he would know what they looked like, and their faces would be in his mind whenever he thought about the harm he had done to them. He deserved to suffer that much, he felt. He had an obligation to make them real, to make them as real in his memory as Brigid herself.

Still known by the color of his boyhood hair, Patrick O’Fallon had owned and operated Red’s Sporting Goods in downtown Spokane for the past twenty years. On the morning of his arrival, Hector found a cheap hotel two blocks west of the train station, paid in advance for one night, and then went out to look for the store. He found it within five minutes. He hadn’t thought about what he would do once he got there, but for caution’s sake he figured it would be best to stand outside and try to get a look at O’Fallon through the window. Hector had no idea if Brigid had mentioned him in any of her letters home. If she had, the family would have known that he talked with a heavy Spanish accent. More important, they would have paid particular attention to his disappearance in 1929, and with Brigid herself now missing for close to two years, they might have been the only people in America who had figured out the link between the two cases. All he had to do was go into the store and open his mouth. If O’Fallon knew who Hector Mann was, the odds were that his suspicions would be aroused after three or four sentences.

But O’Fallon was nowhere to be seen. As Hector pressed his nose against the glass, pretending to examine a set of golf clubs on display in the window, he had a clear view into the store, and as far as he could make out from that angle, there was no one inside. No customers, no clerk standing behind the counter. It was early yet—just past ten o’clock—but the sign on the door said OPEN, and rather than remain on the crowded street and risk calling attention to himself, Hector scrapped his plan and decided to go in. If they found out who he was, he thought, then so be it.

The door made a tinkling sound when he pulled it open, and the bare wood planks creaked underfoot as he walked toward the counter in back. It wasn’t a big place, but the shelves were crammed with merchandise, and there seemed to be everything a sportsman could possibly want: fishing rods and casting reels, rubber fins and swimming goggles, shotguns and hunting rifles, tennis racquets, baseball gloves, footballs, basketballs, shoulder pads and helmets, spiked shoes and cleated shoes, kicking tees and driving tees, duck pins, barbells, and medicine balls. Two lines of regularly spaced support columns ran the length of the store, and on each one there was a framed photograph of Red O’Fallon. He had been young when the pictures were taken, and they all showed him engaged in some form of athletic activity. Wearing a baseball uniform in one, a football uniform in another, but most often running races in the skimpy garb of a track-and-field man. In one photo, the camera had caught him in full stride, both feet off the ground, two yards ahead of his closest competitor. In another, he was shaking hands with a man dressed in top hat and tails, accepting a bronze medal at the 1904 Saint Louis Olympics.

As Hector approached the counter, a young woman emerged from a back room, wiping her hands with a towel. She was looking down, her head tilted to one side, but even though her face was largely obscured from him, there was something about her walk, something about the slope of her shoulders, something about the way she rubbed the towel over her fingers that made him feel that he was looking at Brigid. For the space of several seconds, it was as if the past nineteen months had never happened. Brigid was no longer dead. She had unburied herself, clawed her way out from the dirt he had shoveled over her body, and there she was now, intact and breathing again, with no bullet in her brain and no hole where her eye had been, working as an assistant in her father’s store in Spokane, Washington.

The woman kept walking toward him, pausing only to lay the towel on top of an unopened carton, and the uncanny thing about what happened next was that even after she raised her head and looked into his eyes, the illusion persisted. She had Brigid’s face, too. It was the same jaw and the same mouth, the same forehead and the same chin. When she smiled at him a moment later, he saw that it was the same smile as well. Only when she had come to within five feet of him did he begin to notice any differences. Her face was covered with freckles, which had not been true of Brigid’s face, and her eyes were a deeper shade of green. They were also set more widely apart, ever so slightly farther from the bridge of her nose, and this minute alteration in her features enhanced the overall harmony of her face, making her a notch or two prettier than her sister had been. Hector returned her smile, and by the time she reached the counter and spoke to him in Brigid’s voice, asking if he needed help, he no longer felt that he was about to fall to the floor in a dead swoon.

He was looking for Mr. O’Fallon, he said, and he wondered if it would be possible to talk to him. He made no effort to hide his accent, pronouncing the word
Meester
with an exaggerated roll to the final r, and then he leaned in closer to her, studying her face for signs of a reaction. Nothing happened, or rather the conversation continued as if nothing had happened, and at that moment Hector knew that Brigid had kept him a secret. She had been raised in a Catholic family, and she must have balked at the idea of letting her father and sisters know that she was bedding down with a man engaged to another woman and that the man, whose penis was circumcised, had no intention of breaking off his engagement to marry her. If that was the case, then they probably hadn’t known she was pregnant. Nor that she had slit her wrists in the bathtub; nor that she had spent two months in a hospital dreaming of better and more efficient ways to kill herself. It was even possible that she had stopped writing to them before Saint John had ever appeared on the scene, when she was still confident enough to suppose that everything was going to work out as she hoped it would.

Hector’s mind was galloping by then, rushing off in several directions at once, and when the woman behind the counter said that her father was out of town for the week, away on business in California, Hector felt that he knew what that business was. Red O’Fallon had gone down to Los Angeles to talk to the police about his missing daughter. He was urging them to do something about a case that had already dragged on for too many months, and if he wasn’t satisfied with their answers, he was going to hire a private detective to begin the search all over again. Damn the expense, he had probably said to his Spokane daughter before he left town. Something had to be done before it was too late.

The Spokane daughter said that she was filling in at the store while her father was gone, but if Hector cared to leave his name and number, she would give him the message when he returned on Friday. No need, Hector said, he would come back on Friday himself, and then, just to be polite, or perhaps because he wanted to make a good impression on her, he asked if she had been left to run things on her own. It looked like too big of an operation to be handled by just one person, he said.

There were supposed to be three people, she answered, but the regular assistant had called in sick that morning, and the stockboy had been fired last week for pilfering baseball gloves and selling them at half price to kids in his neighborhood. The truth was that she was feeling a little lost, she said. It had been ages since she’d helped out at the store, and she couldn’t tell the difference between a putter and a wood, could barely even use the cash register without pushing nine wrong buttons and bollixing the sale.

It was all very friendly and direct. She didn’t seem to think twice about sharing these confidences with him, and as the conversation continued, Hector learned that she had been away for the past four years, studying to become a teacher at something she called State, which turned out to be the State College of Washington in Pullman. She had graduated in June, and now she was back home living with her father, about to begin her career as a fourth-grade teacher at the Horace Greeley Elementary School. She couldn’t believe her luck, she told him. That was the same school she had attended as a girl, and she and her two older sisters had all had Mrs. Neergaard in the fourth grade. Mrs. N. had taught there for forty-two years, and it struck her as something of a miracle that her old teacher had retired just when she herself had started looking for a job. In less than six weeks, she would be standing in front of the same classroom where she had sat every day as a ten-year-old pupil, and wasn’t it strange, she said, wasn’t it funny how life worked out sometimes?

Yes, very funny, Hector said, very strange. He knew now that he was talking to Nora, the youngest of the O’Fallon girls, and not to Deirdre, the one who had married at nineteen and gone off to live in San Francisco. After three minutes in her company, Hector decided that Nora was nothing like her dead sister. She might have resembled Brigid, but she had none of her tense, smart-aleck energy, none of her ambition, none of her high-strung, darting intelligence. This one was softer, more comfortable in her own flesh, more naive. He remembered that Brigid had once described herself as the only one of the O’Fallon sisters with real blood running in her veins. Deirdre was made of vinegar, she said, and Nora was composed entirely of warm milk. She was the one who should have been named Brigid, she said, after Saint Brigid, the patron saint of Ireland, for if there was ever a person destined to devote herself to a life of self-sacrifice and good works, it was her baby sister, Nora.

Again, Hector was about to turn around and leave, and once again something held him there. A new idea had entered his head—the maddest of impulses, a thing so risky and self-destructive that it amazed him that he had even thought of it, let alone that he felt he had the nerve to carry it out.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he said to Nora, smiling apologetically and shrugging his shoulders, but the reason why he’d come in this morning was to ask Mr. O’Fallon for a job. He’d heard about that business with the stockboy and wondered if the position was still open. That’s odd, Nora said. It happened just the other day, and they hadn’t gotten around to placing a notice in the want ads yet. They weren’t planning to do that until after her father returned from his trip. Well, word gets around, Hector said. Yes, that was probably true, Nora answered, but why would he want to be a stockboy anyway? That was a job for nobodies, for strong-backed men with dull minds and no ambitions; surely he could do better than that. Not necessarily, Hector said. Times were tough, and any job that paid money these days was a good job. Why not give him a chance? She was all alone in the store, and he knew that she could use some help. If she liked his work, maybe she would put in a good word for him with her father. What did Miss O’Fallon say? Did they have a deal?

He had been in Spokane for less than an hour, and already Herman Loesser was employed again. Nora shook his hand, laughing at the audacity of his proposal, and then Hector removed his jacket (the one decent article of clothing he owned), and started to work. He had turned himself into a moth, and he spent the rest of the day fluttering around a hot, burning candle. He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night:
If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within
an inch of destroying it
.