The Man Without a Shadow Read online

  Mrs. Mateson speaks with an air of oddly cheerful resignation. She insists upon pouring tea for Margot, and offers her cookies scattered on a silver tray. She laughs often, as if to herself. Margot is fascinated by the older woman’s composure—this confidence in oneself, not shared by most people Margot knows or has known in Orion Falls, Michigan, and not natural to Margot herself, is impressive.

  In Orion Falls, Margot recalls, women like Lucinda Mateson, widowed, living alone, usually stricken with some sort of female illness, just-diagnosed, in the midst of treatment, or post-treatment and skeletal—(Margot rarely allows herself to think of Orion Falls for just these reasons)—are likely to be apologetic, not composed.

  By contrast Lucinda Mateson seems quite healthy or, at any rate, unperturbed by health problems. She is a widow only in name—not in person. Margot thinks: if a widow has money, a widow has not exactly lost a husband.

  She is grateful for Lucinda Mateson in E.H.’s life. For what would E.H.’s life be without this generous kinswoman . . .

  With a show of pleasure Margot drinks the lukewarm tea. Nibbles at chocolate chip cookies that taste like baked lard laced with tiny bits of tar. She smiles to think that there is nowhere else she would rather be than in this drawing room, in this house.

  As Mrs. Mateson speaks to her Margot listens for sounds of footsteps overhead or on the stairs. Thinking—Eli will come downstairs to say good-bye. He will want to see me before I leave.

  Or, better yet—Eli will not want me to leave. He will take my hand, he will insist that I stay longer. For dinner . . .

  With an indulgent smile, as if she can read Margot’s naïve thoughts, Mrs. Mateson says reprovingly, “Eli will often disappoint.”

  Disappoint? Margot stares blankly.

  “Yes! It was said of him, ‘Eli will break your heart if you’re foolish enough to give it to him.’”

  Mrs. Mateson tells Margot (whose face is burning, slightly) that even as a boy her nephew was a “problem” to his elders. He was “idealistic—but terribly stubborn.” He lacked a sense of courtesy and restraint—“You see it in young people of the 1960s, and now it’s just swept the land—a coarsening. Eli lacked charity and patience for those who didn’t think as he did, or as fast as he did. He wasn’t sensitive to those in the family who were more conservative than he was—that’s to say, everyone! He particularly infuriated his father, my brother Byron. He certainly precipitated Byron’s first heart attack. Just wearing his hair to his shoulders, and a red headband around his forehead—unforgivable! ‘Hell no, we won’t go’—but where was Eli going? Not to fight in Vietnam—hardly! Eli behaved like a Quaker—a ‘radical’—but he wasn’t a religious person. He enrolled in Union Theological Seminary though he didn’t believe in God! Some of us thought he’d enrolled there just to provoke fights with his teachers. Of course, that didn’t last. Finally Eli accepted his position in the family business, when he was almost thirty, and he did well financially, but his heart wasn’t in it—‘Making money is the death of the soul.’” Mrs. Mateson pauses, pressing a hand against her soft sloping chest. “He should have married, he’d been engaged at least twice—lovely young women—from very good families here in Philadelphia—but something always disappointed him. The last time, the date was set at the Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, a beautiful old church near the Free Library, but by that time—this was October 1964—the old Eli was lost to us . . . Oh, we’d been so exasperated with him for years! He wasn’t nice—kind—at all. I mean, to girls and women. He was very handsome, you know—you can’t judge from his appearance now. He broke hearts—and I don’t mean just young women.” Mrs. Mateson laughs breathlessly as if she has said something daring. She glances at Margot with a puckish expression as if to say I hope you aren’t one of those pathetic women who throw themselves at my nephew.

  “Eli was involved in civil rights activism in Philadelphia in the 1950s—much earlier than many people. He gave money to the NAACP and to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—that is, to Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was one of his heroes. He terrified his parents with his reckless behavior—not just that he marched with Negroes and white activists here but also in the South, in terrible places like Alabama and Mississippi. Some of his co-marchers were murdered—‘Freedom Riders’ they called themselves. They were all beaten, including Eli—it turned out later, they’d made out their wills before they went south! Imagine, making out your will as a young person, and going off to march knowing you might get lynched. Eli was always getting roughed-up and beaten. His cameras were smashed—he said by ‘rabid’ racists. He was arrested and thrown in jail in some terrible place in Alabama. We don’t even think of Alabama as a part of the United States, why would a ‘Freedom Rider’ go there? Eli would call home—‘I’m not dead yet!’ It was a tonic to him, all that excitement. We were always worried he’d come back married to one of those activists—Jewish, or Negro . . . But he had to come home finally, he had to take his place at Hoopes, Inc. He always knew that. He wasn’t totally irresponsible. He refused to live in Gladwyne—he preferred Rittenhouse Square, in central Philadelphia, in a beautiful old building on the north side of the park—owned by the family, in fact. He gave money to activist causes. He gave money to Negro churches. He subsidized that scruffy radical newspaper—Philadelphia Inquiry. He endowed scholarships for ‘minority’ students at Penn and Drexel. He’d been shocked and depressed by the assassination of John Kennedy—(thank God he doesn’t know that his beloved Reverend King has been assassinated, too! Of course, Eli ‘knows’—but he wouldn’t remember, since it was 1969 it happened—I think). Eli was always careless with his life—hiked and camped by himself in the Adirondacks even as a boy. He’d swim by himself, canoe by himself in bad weather—d’you know, Lake George is like an inland sea, it is very wide. He’d terrify his poor mother, out in a canoe alone, in a thunderstorm. Long after the rest of the family returned home in early September, Eli would stay at the lake. This awful thing that happened to him, this ‘infection’—‘brain fever’—wouldn’t have happened except he’d been at Lake George alone. Eli was always damned stubborn.”

  Margot is disconcerted by Mrs. Mateson’s way of speaking of E.H. as was. Chilling to think that his aunt considers his life over.

  “Eli seemed to be living several lives at once. If you knew him in one of his lives, you wouldn’t know him in another. My son Jonathan said he was sure he’d seen Eli once—in the city—on a street near the university with some ‘crazed-looking scruffy people’—Eli with his hair all shaggy and wild and the headband around his forehead like a ‘hippie’—and as Jonathan drove past, very slowly since the street was partially blocked, these people—including his own cousin Eli Hoopes!—began pounding on the hood of his car, yelling obscenities and even spitting on his windshield. And now, sometimes—that’s exactly how Eli seems to behave with all of us. Like he has never seen us before, and wants to pound his fists against us, without any care how our hearts are broken for him.”

  “But Eli is never violent, is he? He has never been reported—in any way . . .”

  “No, no. Eli is never ‘violent.’ Of course not. I mean just—it’s the way he looks at us. Or doesn’t look at us. You would have to have known my poor nephew beforehand, to know.”

  Margot has been noticing on the older woman’s hands a number of jeweled rings. Indeed she is fascinated by the rings, as Mrs. Mateson continues to speak pettishly.

  Margot thinks If I could marry into the Hoopes family! I would take care of Eli for the rest of his life.

  “I would invite you to stay for dinner, Miss—is it Sharpton?—except we just don’t ‘have dinners’ anymore. My housekeeper who’d been with me for twenty years has returned to the Philippines and I haven’t yet been able to replace her. Eli rarely gets hungry unless I remind him, and when he does eat, he doesn’t want to sit down with me but to take a tray upstairs to watch TV. (Those damned news programs! They make him all excited and upset and
a few minutes later he doesn’t know why, and can’t explain to me what has made him so angry.) Sometimes we have ‘TV dinners’ on trays—I’m embarrassed to say, our favorite is Birds Eye Frozen Chicken à la King—and watch old movies together—‘classics.’ We’ve seen Wuthering Heights and Rebecca so many times, Eli knows all of Laurence Olivier’s dialogue. He’s very amusing reciting the words exactly in unison with Olivier. And Potemkin—that’s a Russian Communist film—a silent film from a hundred years ago—not anything I’d care to see more than once—but Eli has memorized it and is never bored by it. But mostly I’ve gotten into the habit of nibbling little meals through the day and never have much appetite in the evening. Since Harold died I’ve lost eighteen pounds.” Mrs. Mateson speaks with regret, wistfully.

  Margot thinks—Oh but you could invite me anyway, Mrs. Mateson! We could watch TV together upstairs with Eli.

  Margot tells Mrs. Mateson that Eli has to be reminded to eat at the Institute, also.

  How strange it is, that some amnesiacs forget to eat, even as some amnesiacs forget that they have just eaten: the danger for one is malnutrition, for the other, obesity.

  Margot does not tell Mrs. Mateson that one of her most successful experiments in Project E.H. has been testing E.H.’s capacity for hunger. The amnesiac is presented with a complete meal and told that he is “hungry”—he will eat this meal and, within an hour afterward, if he is presented with another, identical meal, and told that he has not eaten for many hours, E.H. will eat this meal also, or most of it, in a manner that would appear to the objective observer to be “normal.”

  Conversely, if E.H. is told over a period of hours that he has just eaten he will give no evidence of being “hungry” at all—politely, he will even decline offers of “more food”!

  Margot is overseeing similar experiments, executed by her cadre of graduate students, testing the amnesiac’s thirst, and his capacity to endure pain; with her most reliable postdoc, Margot is planning a battery of tests to measure E.H.’s capacity for sleep and dreaming.

  Some of these findings have been reported in Margot’s recent article in the prestigious publication Science titled “Memory Deficit and ‘Appetite’: The Case of ‘E.H’”; another, in the Journal of Experimental Neuropsychology titled “Social Determinants of ‘Appetite’: The Case of ‘E.H.’”—but Margot decides against mentioning this to Mrs. Mateson, for it might seem boastful. She says, carefully:

  “Much of being human depends upon our memories, you see. Some things you might think are instinctive like appetite—including also ‘sexual appetite’—are not, entirely.”

  Seeing the older woman’s expression of disbelief tinged with distaste Margot regrets having said quite so much.

  “Isn’t it strange!” Mrs. Mateson says, with a shudder. “You’d think that a person would eat when he feels hungry. I just don’t understand how Eli can go for so long—as long as twelve hours—without getting ‘hungry’—or so he claims. But then, when he begins to eat, he will eat and eat and eat—I have to watch him or he would make himself sick.” Mrs. Mateson pauses, frowning. “And the same is true with drinking— Poor Eli must not be allowed to drink.”

  Margot assures Mrs. Mateson that there is no alcohol allowed at the Institute. And smoking is confined to restricted areas.

  Still with an air of disapproval Mrs. Mateson says, “Well—we had beagles once, and those sweet dogs will eat and eat until they make themselves sick. And goldfish will eat until they explode. Nature doesn’t seem to have been designed with much common sense.”

  Margot considers saying with professorial authority that nature has not been “designed” at all. But this might be offensive, and in its way it is a boastful statement, also.

  Margot says, with an attempt at humor, “There isn’t much place for ‘common sense’ in nature, as in humankind.”

  Margot describes to Mrs. Mateson how at the Institute E.H. always has the identical lunch: tuna salad on whole grain bread with lettuce and tomato and potato chips on the side.

  Yet, when lunch orders are taken, E.H. always studies the menu carefully. Each time he appears to be choosing a tuna fish sandwich for the first time. And he will deliberate over the choice of bread, invariably choosing whole grain—for the first time.

  Margot has presented this information with a smile, meant to be a warm confiding smile. But Mrs. Mateson frowns.

  “Yes. Poor Eli is like that, of course—where once he was the most unpredictable of young men, now he is the most predictable. Oh, God.”

  Margot is stricken with remorse. She’d meant to make Mrs. Mateson smile fondly; she has been hoping that they might smile fondly together, united in their affection for the absent, eccentric Eli. Instead, she has made the woman feel sad. What thoughtless remarks has she been making!

  Still, she wants to ask Mrs. Mateson more about the women in E.H.’s life. Two engagements? She’d heard of just one. What has become of the women?

  Are they still in love with him? Or—have they abandoned him, like everyone else except you?

  Even more Margot wants to ask Mrs. Mateson about the disturbing drawings in E.H.’s sketchbook, of what appears to be a drowned child in a shallow stream.

  It has been—how long, now?—ten years? Countless weeks when Margot has worked with the amnesiac E.H. over the course of these years, each session recorded in her logbook, rarely less than two or three times a week. And during these weeks, E.H. has executed this sketch hundreds of times.

  Thousands of times?

  Sometimes the sketch is done in pencil, sometimes in charcoal. Sometimes the figure is small on the page, sometimes it takes up the entire page. Margot is reminded of those (terrifying, to a child) drawings of Alice in Wonderland by the Victorian illustrator John Tenniel, tiny Alice, giant Alice, Alice trapped in a room in which she has become so large, her head is crushed against the ceiling and she must shove her arm out a tiny window . . .

  The image itself is virtually identical each time: a streambed, rippling water, a (naked) girl of about eleven lying beneath the surface of the water with hair flowing about her head, eyes opened wide and sightless and skin deathly pale.

  The girl is always positioned with her upper body in the left half of the page. Her hair streams into darkness in the left-hand margin and her pale, naked feet dissolve into shadow in the right-hand margin.

  The girl’s nakedness is not vividly rendered but rather shadowy, suggestive. Between the girl’s legs, a deeper shadow.

  Each time Margot has seen the sketch she has been shocked—it isn’t an image to which one grows accustomed. If she asks, with a pretense of casual interest, Eli? What’s this?—E.H. will frown and shut up his sketchbook.

  E.H.’s other drawings and sketches are obsessively repeated as well. Most are set at the lake which she supposes to be Lake George.

  There are many lake scenes—at twilight, and by moonlight; there are landscapes of pine forests with the tree-topped mountains of the Adirondacks in the background; there are rivers, streams; deep-shadowed interiors of forests; marshlands; fields and meadows. There are sailboats on the lake, canoes and rowboats tied to docks. There is a large, lakeside house made of logs, that must be the Hoopes family summer place; there are (deliberately smudged or indistinct) portraits of individuals, and there are figures (adult) seen at a distance. There is a small propeller plane, a “Beechcraft single-prop” (as E.H. has identified it to Margot) both on the ground and precariously aloft; in some drawings, you can see a child in the front cockpit, and an older man behind him at the controls of the plane. Many of these recur more frequently than the ghostly drowned girl but none is so intensely rendered.

  Margot has fantasized an experiment: she will (surreptitiously) take E.H.’s sketchbook from him while he’s engaged in a test at the Institute, and she will photograph a sketch of the drowned girl; she will make a negative of this sketch, and from the negative she will make a print and a slide, but it will be the reverse of E.H.’s image: the g
irl’s head will be positioned at the upper right, her naked feet at the lower left. Margot will show it to the amnesiac subject with no explanation and see what his reaction will be . . .

  For the best results, the experimenter should include other images. The drowned girl should be one of a sequence.

  Eli, do you recognize this?

  Eli, just tell us what you think this is. The first words that come to you.

  Mrs. Mateson is telling Margot that her nephew doesn’t mean to be rude—“He will have forgotten you are here, you know. He doesn’t forget me, of course—he knows his ‘Aunt Lucinda’ from before his illness when he was—when he was himself.”

  When he was alive. Margot wonders if this is what Mrs. Mateson meant to say.

  “Mrs. Mateson, your nephew isn’t at all rude. He’s the most gentlemanly person I’ve ever met. He’s kindly, considerate, thoughtful, observant—he listens. Almost no one else truly listens.”

  Mrs. Mateson thanks Margot for these extravagant words, touching Margot’s wrist lightly. “Margot, you’re so sweet. I wish Eli had friends like you, now—the others have all abandoned him. Even his brothers and sister have abandoned him.”

  “Have they! That’s very sad.”

  “It is very, very sad. Very selfish of them, but they say it just makes them upset, to see Eli the way he is now. ‘Like a zombie’—they say. Even the girl—the woman—the nicer of his fiancées Eli was going to marry . . . Fortunately, I will always take care of Eli, as his mother would have wished. I’m not a young woman but I’m young enough to care for him for a long time—I hope! I love Eli like a son—and I have my own sons, in fact.” Mrs. Mateson laughs, mysteriously. “But now I have a spare son, who will never leave me.”

  Margot laughs, uncertainly. She liked Mrs. Mateson touching her wrist as in a seemingly spontaneous gesture of complicity.