The Man Without a Shadow (34 page)

In Gladwyne yearbooks, available in the school library, Margot has sought out Eli Hoopes's earliest classmates. She has contemplated photographs of Eli as a boy—surprisingly, not a very handsome boy, but recognizably Eli Hoopes. Until the age of ten or eleven Eli was a “small” boy; soon after he grew to become one of the taller boys in his class. Even when his skin was blemished, young Eli exuded a brash sort of confidence. He was a very good student, clearly—always on the honor roll; and he was an athlete—lacrosse, swim, tennis, track teams. Class vice president, class president.

English Club, Latin Club, Math Club, History Club, Drama Club, Choristers, “Hi-Lo.” Margot is surprised and impressed by the block of small print listing Eli Hoopes's activities beneath his yearbook photos, so much larger than those of most of his classmates.

Also in the yearbooks she has located “Margaret Madden”—“Margie Madden”—who was in Eli Hoopes's class. A slight girl, not pretty, with dark, slanted eyes and hair severely parted on the left side of her head, and a small wistful mouth—
Yes I know that I am plain but I am very special so love me please! Love me.

It is so, Margot discovers: this girl does resemble her, if one looks closely. The slanted eyes, and also faint shadows beneath the eyes; the set of the mouth; small nose, narrow chin. The smart girl, the watchful girl. However different the adult Margot Sharpe and the child Margaret Madden might appear to the ordinary gaze, to a sharp eye like Eli Hoopes's there is something essential about their faces that links them like sisters.

Face recognition is a marvel of the human brain, only partly understood. There is a region in the brain that “remembers” faces instantaneously; there are said to be “face cells” specialized for each face known to an individual, a concept Margot finds difficult to comprehend though neuroscience colleagues in her department have tried to explain the phenomenon to her.

Obviously, “face cells” in the amnesiac's brain are no longer forming. Memories are no longer consolidating. But “face cells” pertaining to faces seen long ago are still active.

Margot is pleased to see that, shy-seeming and diminutive as she was, Margaret Madden was nearly as active as Eli Hoopes: English Club, Latin Club, History Club, Girls' Choir, “Hi-Lo.” Yet more surprising, little Margaret Madden was on the girls' volleyball team.

Margot smiles. She is proud of her lookalike sister of the late 1930s.

“Eli, do you ever hear about ‘Margie Madden'? You remember—we went to school with her at Gladwyne.”

Eli laughs as if Margot has said something very witty. Then, a cloud comes into his face. Warily he asks,

“You are Margie Madden—is that it?”

Margot shakes her head
no,
certainly she is not Margie Madden.

She laughs, protesting. Eli regards her doubtfully.

“Yes, I think that I resemble her—I mean, we used to resemble
each other. We were often mistaken at school, especially by some of our teachers. But my name is ‘Margot Sharpe.'”

“‘Mar-got Sharpe.' Yes.”

But Eli continues to look doubtfully at Margot, as if undecided whether he should speak further. It is unusual for Eli to be so silent, when the subject is his school past.

“Eli, is something wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Margot speaks gaily, for her heart is beating rapidly.
He knows—this is all a masquerade. He knows everything.

But Eli only strokes Margot's arm, and squeezes her fingers. She clasps his hand in response, tightly.

No. He is my dear husband, he doubts nothing. He loves me.

“Well, ‘Mar-go'—I'm trying to calculate how Margie Madden, who would be approximately thirty-seven years old, could be a classmate of yours at Gladwyne Day. You're a beautiful woman, my dear wife, but you are not—obviously—thirty-seven years old any longer.” Seeing the look of hurt in Margot's face, Eli lifts her hand to kiss it playfully, yet urgently.

“Don't worry, dear wife—I love you just the same. Even if you are
not her
.”

THERE IS A
carpet, or a strip of something, that I am walking on . . . and it is being rolled up behind me. So that there is only the strip I am walking on, and nothing in front of me or behind me. Sometimes, I am so very tired—but there is no place to rest.

LIKE A MARRIED
couple, they lapse into bickering.

Almost, there is pleasure in such bickering. There is familiarity.

Securing an uncooperative husband into the passenger seat of her car. Always it is a challenge for Margot, for it is always new to her husband.

Laughing she pleads, “Eli, please! Don't be ridiculous, we do this every time we drive,” and Eli says, “God damn, nobody needs a ‘seat belt' for a car. In an airplane, yes. Not a car,” and Margot says, “Well, there are new laws in Pennsylvania now. There are state laws all citizens have to obey.”

Eli says, snorting in derision, “If you want to ‘belt' yourself in, go ahead. But not me.”

“Eli, please! Will you let me buckle this, as a favor to me?”

“No.”

“You're smart enough, Eli, to figure this out: if the car is equipped with seat belts, they are meant to be used. And if they are meant to be used, it's a good idea to use them.”

“Really! What sort of illogic is that?”

“But a seat belt is a safety feature, Eli. You must know that.”

“Why must I ‘know' that? If we have an accident, how will I escape? I'll be trapped in a flaming car.”

“Well, the idea is—you are prevented from being thrown through the windshield.”

“The idea is, I will be immolated in my ‘seat belt.' In a flaming holocaust.”

Eventually, Eli relents. It is a husbandly gesture, gallant and exasperated, to humor a foolishly worried wife.

AND THEN, SOMETIMES
he is furious with her. Out of nowhere like a match recklessly struck, his anger flares.

This evening at dusk on the interstate headed for the Gladwyne exit and Eli has been telling Margot about how his camera was taken from him and smashed by a “rabid” sheriff's deputy in Birmingham, Alabama—a story Margot has heard many times before, and is fascinated to hear again, noting not so much similarities in the recollections but small, subtle divergences which
only Margot Sharpe could detect—when abruptly Eli wonders where his camera is; and Margot assures him, his camera is “back home”—“Eli, all your things are back home where you left them. Safe ‘back home.'”

Margot has found that the words
back home
are a comfort to the amnesiac. Though the amnesiac's conception of
back home
may be insubstantial as a dream.

And stroking the amnesiac's arm, and hand—that often helps.

Margot has become E.H.'s nurse. Badly wanting to be for him what Yolanda and Eva had been—a source of female solace, with all the sexual accommodation that it implies.

But Eli is impatient tonight, and throws off the nurse's hand. Eli is in a sudden fury demanding to know where his sketchbook is—his camera is gone, and now his sketchbook—where is it?

He tries to twist around in his seat, but the seat belt secures him. He is fussing, cursing, panting—Margot, at the wheel, tries to calm him—she will stop the car, she says, and find the sketchbook which (she is sure) is in the backseat as it usually is, with other items; but Eli continues to be excited and upset and she sees in his gaunt face, in the fleeting light of oncoming headlights, a look of such loathing for her, she almost loses control of the car. “Eli, please! I'm sure that your sketchbook is just behind you . . .”

Margot brakes the car to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate as traffic rushes by. Still cursing, Eli manages to unbuckle his seat belt and turn around furiously in his seat, groping for the sketchbook—which is propped up against the back of his seat as usual on such drives to Gladwyne.

But Eli isn't mollified by finding the sketchbook which he leafs through suspiciously, concerned that some of the pages have been torn out. Margot assures him that no one has interfered with his sketchbook—she allows no one at the Institute to touch
it—but Eli is sure that drawings are missing, his work has been “sabotaged.”

Margot offers to look through the sketchbook with Eli, to see that nothing has been touched, but Eli shoves her away in a fury. And then, before she can protect herself, in a paroxysm of rage he strikes her with his fists and closes his fingers around her throat as he berates her—“You! God damn you! I don't know you! I don't trust you! Who the hell are you—‘Doctor'!”

Margot claws at Eli's fingers, but his fingers are too strong for her, and too frenzied. Fortunately the attack is over within seconds.

So swiftly over, Margot can tell herself, dazed—
This is not happening. This did not happen.

It was fleeting, and not deliberate—a kind of accident, not to be recorded in Margot Sharpe's
Notes on Amnesia: Project E.H.

Not a personal attack, in any case. A flailing-out, as a drowning man may flail out against his very rescuer. And Margot did not lose consciousness, not even for an instant. She is sure.

When Margot recovers, she is alone in the car. She is gasping for breath, wincing with pain. Her vision is blotched—(is there blood in her eyes?). A man's strong, phantom fingers are still closed on her throat, pitiless.

For some minutes Margot is too dazed to comprehend what has happened, and where she is.

On a shoulder of the interstate? Alone in her car? Traffic rushing by, as in a nightmare avalanche?

In the twilit sky at the horizon, the sun resembles a great broken yolk bleeding into a bank of clouds massed and gnarled as brains.

She is on the interstate south, to Gladwyne. She remembers.

“Eli? Oh God, Eli—where are you?”

She finds him fifty feet away, staggering at the edge of the highway like a drunken man, as if hoping to flee the car. Margot dares to touch his arm and he turns to her in a panicked crouch, eyes affrighted and glaring in oncoming headlights like the eyes of a wild beast.

He is panting, he is whimpering. Rude gusts of wind from passing vehicles fling dust and bits of dried leaves into his face.

He has no idea where he is. He is utterly, utterly lost.

He is mine.

Though Margot is badly shaken herself she knows that she must exert control. She must prevent the amnesiac from running from her—throwing himself into traffic, for instance. She soothes him with her voice, stroking and calming his agitated hands. Gently she calls him “Eli”—“My dear husband, Eli”—until at last the amnesiac is calmed, or in any case subdued, fatigued suddenly, but managing a faint, hopeful smile—“Hel-
lo,
my dear wife.”

So long they have floated in the present tense. So long each has floated without a shadow.

Yet now one evening in October 1994 Margot is listening in astonishment as, seemingly for no reason, in the drawing room at 466 Parkside, Gladwyne, elderly Mrs. Lucinda Mateson begins to speak in a halting voice of the drowned girl in the Adirondack stream.

“. . . a terrible thing. Just—terrible . . . She was my niece—my brother Edgar's daughter Gretchen—eleven years old that summer . . . She'd been watching some of the younger children including Eli and his brothers and evidently ‘someone came by'—and next thing anyone knew, Gretchen was gone. And none of the children ever saw her again.”

Margot sits very still, not sure what she is hearing. She and Mrs. Mateson are seated together in the drawing room smelling of lilies while upstairs, in another part of the stately old house Margot has never seen, Eli Hoopes has hidden away and has forgotten them.

Margot has brought lilies, an armful of lilies, for Mrs. Mateson who is her friend. And Mrs. Mateson has served Margot Earl Grey tea as she always does on these occasions, and a scattering of cookies on a silver platter.

How sweetly overpowering, the scent of lilies! It is almost too much, Margot thinks. She feels drunk—drunken.

And Mrs. Mateson's eyes blur with tears as she confides in Margot, in a husky, lowered voice, of a family tragedy that happened more than six decades before.

“Our lives were darkened by it—‘enshadowed.' It would turn out that my beautiful little niece had been talked into going into the woods with an older boy—also from Philadelphia, whose family had a place at Lake George, and who were friends of the Hoopeses. This boy—‘Axel'—‘Axel McElroy'—was seventeen, tall and very thin, stoop-shouldered, troubled, difficult—he liked to play with much younger children and he had a history of harassing them, especially girls. It was said in the papers that Axel was the grandson of Bishop McElroy—(you wouldn't know that name, probably, but the McElroys were prominent Philadelphians at the time)—but in fact he was the adopted son of a niece of the bishop's—there was no close connection at all. You know what the newspapers are like, and today TV is worse—making scandal out of what they can, if prominent families are involved. The bishop—an Anglican bishop—was just devastated by this tragedy, and retired soon afterward . . .