The Man Without a Shadow (16 page)

“It was such a tragedy! How small his life had become, how repetitive and routine . . . how depressing for others who'd known him well to see. Eli had always been so concerned with what he called ‘social justice'—he could be hypercritical of others close to him—like his family—(and like me)—who weren't committed as he was to such ideals. He did well in his family's business but scorned his work as contemptible—‘money-grubbing.' We all thought that he shouldn't have dropped out of the seminary—he'd have made a wonderful minister. Not a conventional minister with a congregation but someone like the Berrigans who were willing to go to prison for their beliefs. (How Eli would have admired the Berrigans! But they came too late for him.) Though
I guess the difference between the Berrigans and other activists is that the Berrigans were Catholic priests and so not encumbered by wives and families . . .”

Amber McPherson has begun to speak vehemently now. Inside the stolid-bodied middle-aged woman is a girl who has been hurt, her love flung back into her beautiful face, and has never understood why.

“Eli was always the center of attention. He was always a natural leader. He hadn't much awareness of or interest in other people, except people he could help—like the poor, and Negroes. He needed to be
revered
—I think that was Eli's secret. Of course, it was what made Eli special, too. A person like myself, people like his family—sister, brothers, cousins—he hadn't much patience with us for being who we were.”

Waxy-white gardenias—the scent is strong. Margot inhales the fragrance with something like an inward swoon.

Margot assures Amber McPherson, she understands. Of course.

Margot is trying not to feel an intense jealousy for this woman whom Eli Hoopes once chose as a lover, at least as a potential wife, at a time in his life before he was incapacitated and diminished. At such a time, Margot has to concede, he'd have hardly chosen
her.

She is not a sexual being at all, is she. Set beside this woman with an opulent body, sweetly vulnerable lined face.

“Well, Doctor, maybe they've told you—the Hoopeses—I stopped seeing Eli after about ten months. I just could not bear it. As soon as he was out of the hospital and his condition was ‘stabilized'—when it was apparent he would never be himself again. I guess I had something like a breakdown of my own—I was very depressed. I was plucking out my hair, and stopped eat
ing . . . Frankly, I didn't at all care if I lived or died. Even now I dream about that terrible time. It was relayed to me that Eli asked after me often—he did remember me—or some notion of ‘Amber'—and he'd become convinced that I'd died—that I'd had a fever, and died of encephalitis . . .”

Amber McPherson's distressed voice trails off. She has been picking at the soft skin about a thumbnail as if to draw blood.

Margot thinks—
She wanted to die, for him. For love.

And this, too, provokes jealousy in Margot Sharpe. Envy.

After a respectful interval Margot asks in what ways had Eli Hoopes changed, after his illness? What were the most significant changes? Could Amber describe?

“In what ways had he changed, Doctor?”

Amber McPherson stares at Margot Sharpe as if Margot Sharpe has uttered a particularly foolish question.

“In what
ways
? Every way.”

“But you said that he did know you? He recognized, remembered you . . .”

“Oh yes. Eli ‘knew' us. His relatives, his friends. Yet, at the same time it was as if he didn't know us at all—we were strangers to him. He tried to behave as if he knew us—as an actor might. But it was as if every cell in Eli's body had changed . . . He didn't even look like himself.”

Margot has been looking through some of the photographs Amber has spread onto a table. Fascinating to her, this evidence of her amnesiac subject's earlier life! It is true to a degree that the middle-aged Eli Hoopes no longer quite looks like this young, very fit, vigorous man with thick tufted dark hair, of the 1950s and 1960s; yet a greater change has taken place in Amber McPherson.

Margot studies Polaroids of the slender young woman with
shoulder-length pale-blond hair and her tall handsome male companion, as Amber nervously chatters. If she were a clinical psychologist, Margot thinks, she would have a difficult time attending to a patient who spoke so effusively; far rather would one prefer a reticent patient who spoke tersely, but significantly. Where there is outspokenness, there is no selection; the psychologist must make the selection herself.

“We were very happy together—I mean, it seemed that we were. At least—I think that I was . . . When something like this happens, when you are rejected, you look back trying to make sense of—whatever it was that happened. But it's the other person, in this case Eli, who knows what happened—not me.”

Polaroids, snapshots, photographs of the couple posed together on a lavishly green lawn, in a sumptuous garden, on a riverbank; on a tennis court, each grasping a racket and each dressed in impeccable dazzling white; in a long, heavy-looking canoe, on a hiking trail amid tall pines, on a white-sand beach (in the Caribbean?). In some of the pictures Eli Hoopes is darkly tanned, and wears a sailing cap; in some, his hair has grown long, hippie-length nearly, and he wears a red headband. Both Eli and Amber are wearing shorts, or they are wearing stylish sporty clothes, or they are wearing “dressy” evening clothes. Eli has his arm around Amber's shoulders, drawing her to him; Amber teeters on high-heeled sandals, perceptibly off balance. They are smiling happily at the camera, and they are demonstrably “in love”—or so the evidence suggests.

In certain of the photos Eli is gazing off into the distance with a slight, vexed frown, in a way Margot has noticed him do at the Institute. Amid the intensity of testing, the amnesiac subject has a way of fading from view. You glance up at him and he's gone—like that.

Eli? Mr. Hoopes? Hello . . .

In most of the photos he is standing beside the blond fiancée in a way to suggest protectiveness.

“Yes, you can see—so many pictures . . . What it all adds up to, I'm not sure.” Amber McPherson laughs, sadly.

But Amber McPherson is proud of these photos, nonetheless. Margot supposes that there is nothing in her present life as Mrs. Prescott Adams that so compels her attention, her guilt and her regret.

“How beautiful you are in these pictures!”—Margot exclaims naïvely. She is fortunate not to have blundered
were.

Margot sees that, when she was younger, in her twenties, Amber McPherson braided her hair; most strikingly, in several snapshots, Amber has braided a single strand of hair, that falls over the left side of her face beguilingly. It must have been a style of the era—a black influence. Instead of tight, cornrowed hair, a single narrow braid falling from forehead to shoulder. Margot wonders if it was to beguile Eli Hoopes, this appropriation of sexy black hair fashion. Margot wonders if Eli suggested it, and if he did, if Eli found the single narrow braid of pale blond hair sexually alluring.

There are a number of snapshots presumably set at Lake George—path along a rocky shore, figures in a canoe, vast expanse of water reflecting a gray-tinged sky. At the end of a dock, the white-clad couple poses beside a white-sailed sailboat. Margot asks if Amber McPherson had spent much time at the Hoopeses' Lake George house? If she knew much about his boyhood summers there? The setting seems to mean a good deal to Eli.

Amber McPherson wipes at her eyes. Yes, she'd spent some time there, in the summer. The lodge at Lake George was—is—a large, family house with many rooms, many people coming and
going—the Hoopeses and their relatives and friends. She'd been Eli's guest at least a dozen times. Eli had a very special close attachment to Lake George. He hadn't felt much sentiment for his family home in Gladwyne where he'd grown up, but the beautiful lodge at Lake George, built of treated pine logs and fieldstone, with its several porches and numerous outbuildings, was special to him—“Eli said, he was always ‘there' in his dreams. Even when the setting wasn't distinct, Eli knew he was at the lake.”

“Had anything ever happened to him, at the lake?”

“‘Happened to him'—? I suppose yes, many things—over the years. He'd been brought to Bolton Landing—that's the name of the little town—since he was a baby.”

“Do you think—do you recall—if anything particular might have happened to him there? Or—any family event, incident? A death, a drowning . . .”

Reluctantly Amber McPherson says yes, she does remember—something.

Not clear what it was. A death in the Hoopes family, she thinks.

“Eli never spoke of it but his sister Rosalyn told me, an older girl cousin had gone missing in the woods, and her body was found in a shallow creek—or maybe wasn't found . . . Rosalyn had been very young at the time. Or maybe she hadn't even been born, and had only heard stories, later.”

“Eli never spoke of it?”

“No.”

Amber McPherson frowns. She has not been comfortable with this line of questioning, Margot thinks, because attention is being drawn away from her and Eli, and in another direction. The record of the photographs is all the history she wishes to summon—it is her cherished personal history with Eli Hoopes. Beyond this, an earlier history doesn't interest her at all.

Every woman wants to think—
His emotional history begins with me.

Amber McPherson says, with an air of accusation, “Eli was reckless with his life. We all thought he'd be killed—or terribly injured—in a civil rights protest. We almost thought he was expecting to be, himself. But—something else happened to Eli instead, catastrophic in a different way.” Her voice isn't breathless now but grave, brooding. “Some of us who loved Eli thought it would have been better for him if he'd—died . . .”

A sun-dappled snapshot of the smiling young couple in T-shirts and shorts, leaning against a porch railing and in the background a shimmering lake—presumably Lake George.

Margot sees, on the back of the snapshot, the hastily scrawled date—
July 1963
.

He'd had only another year of his life as Eli Hoopes, at this time. The dark-tanned handsome youngish man in the picture, face partly obscured by sunglasses, arm around the shoulders of the smiling blond fiancée, has no foreknowledge of this catastrophe, which is why he smiles with such confidence.

Margot hears, belatedly, Amber McPherson's shocking remark. Margot hears, but doesn't want to judge.
Better if he'd died.

This is not true. Margot wants to protest, it is
not true.

The rejected fiancée is still in love with Eli Hoopes. With the man she'd known. That is her secret.

Amber is saying, anxiously: “You must think I'm a terrible person, Doctor. To say such things. But if you'd known Eli . . .”

“Of course. I understand.”

Margot is grateful for Amber McPherson's generosity, and is not here to judge. Even as she is faintly appalled—
Better for him if he'd died? Better for you and for his family, perhaps. But not for Eli—and not for me.

“Thank you, Mrs. Adams. You've been very kind, and very helpful.”

“Have I, Doctor? I'm not sure how . . .”

“It's always helpful to meet with people who've known a patient
before
.”

Half-consciously Margot has used the word
patient
. In this way she has allowed Amber McPherson to think that indeed, Margot Sharpe is Eli Hoopes's “doctor.”

Is this deceptive? Is this unethical? Would her colleagues be surprised, and questioning of her motives? Margot doesn't want to think.

Amber McPherson can't leave Margot Sharpe with a memory of her blunt, despairing words, and so the last several minutes of the visit are taken up with Amber's assurance to Margot that her life as a wife and a mother is “very rich, full”—her work as co-chair of the Bryn Mawr Historical Society is “very challenging, and rewarding.” To offset the photos of her younger self with Eli Hoopes she shows Margot photos of her several children—“Todd, Emily, and Stuart. Aren't they beautiful!” She laughs, showing her pearly, perfect teeth for the first time.

Margot agrees, yes the children are beautiful. Studying the features of the eldest, the boy Todd, Margot would like to imagine that she can discern a ghostly glimmer of Eli Hoopes—but no, there is none.

Departing the house, led to the massive front door, Margot sees in the foyer a seven-foot grandfather clock, made of an old, polished, exquisite wood. Behind the stenciled glass, a gravely-moving brass pendulum like an exposed heart.

Amber McPherson is so gracious by both instinct and training, she can't allow her “doctor”-visitor to leave without murmuring to Margot, with apparent sincerity, and a sud
den startling embrace, that she hopes they will see each other again—“Sometime soon.”

Margot returns to her car mildly dazed. Margot drives away feeling the soft imprint of the other woman's body against her own, and smelling still the rich, intoxicating odor of gardenias. She is halfway home before she realizes that Amber McPherson didn't ask her to “say hello” to Elihu Hoopes for her.

She thinks he is dead. Whoever lives now is not him.