The Man Without a Shadow Read online

  Margot accepts from Mrs. Mateson a second cup of Earl Grey tea in the exquisite Wedgwood teacup, and another slightly stale cookie. There is an appetite generated sheerly by nerves, Margot thinks; a sort of anxious mouth-hunger.

  Mrs. Mateson nibbles at the cookies, too. “Will you have more, dear? I’m sure that there are more in the kitchen—on the cupboard counter.”

  Margot declines with thanks, before wondering if this remark of Mrs. Mateson’s is a hint of some kind: she might volunteer to go into the kitchen for the cookies, and see more of the house. She has been wishing that Lucinda Mateson would offer to take her on a tour of the elegant old Hoopes house. Especially, she wants to see E.H.’s quarters on the second floor.

  Eli, hello! It’s Margot—Dr. Sharpe. Yes, I’m here . . . visiting with your aunt.

  From Parkside Avenue the Hoopes house is a striking English Tudor in a neighborhood of small mansions, most of them stone and brick. It is set back in a deep, wide lot of elm trees, plane trees, oaks and evergreens.

  Close up, the house is weatherworn and stained and smells of wet, rotted wood: a house that time has bypassed. Straggly overgrown shrubs block much of the first-floor windows, casting the downstairs rooms in a perpetual twilight.

  Nothing can be altered in this house, Margot realizes. Or Eli, poor Eli, would become disoriented and lost.

  Dreading the moment when she will be expected to leave—when she will be expelled from Eli’s household—Margot inquires about the portraits in the drawing room, which she has been admiring. Like the matron-overseer of a small museum Mrs. Mateson is delighted to identify the subjects—indeed, they are Hoopes ancestors, all male—the oldest, the patriarch, is Erasmus Hoopes who was a prominent Quaker Abolitionist in the years preceding the Civil War and whose fate was to be “martyred” in a scuffle with antiwar demonstrators hostile to Negroes in 1864; Erasmus’s eldest son is Benjamin who with his younger brothers established Hoopes Emporium in the 1870s, on Broad Street, Philadelphia, one of the first and “very grand” department stores in the United States. Margot listens with great interest: how different Elihu Hoopes’s family background is from her own! And all of this family history, the amnesiac can recall. He will have lost very little of his ancestral identity.

  “Very interesting, Mrs. Mateson—all the portraits are male. Weren’t there any distinguished women in your family?”—Margot asks such a risky question in a light, nonconfrontational voice; almost, a flirtatious voice. But Mrs. Mateson only frowns, and then smiles, as if Margot has said something obscurely witty, or meant to be witty. In such circumstances the polite response is not to indicate that one has heard.

  On the fireplace mantel a porcelain clock chimes—it is 6:00 P.M. “Well!”—Mrs. Mateson sighs. As if to signal Teatime is over.

  Margot searches for her heavy shoulder bag, which she has left on a sofa. How reluctant she is to leave this house, with Eli Hoopes upstairs! How reluctant to return to her car, to a headachy drive back to her house with no company but her own.

  Sometimes when she is alone Margot talks to E.H. Since she knows E.H.’s response to most remarks, it is not entirely as if she is alone.

  “Mrs. Mateson, I’m so sorry to ask—but—was there a death in your family—the death of a young girl—at Lake George—sometime before Eli was sick?” Margot hears herself uttering these words impulsively. She is appalled at her audacity but cannot now stop.

  “It might have been long ago—when Eli was a child himself.”

  Mrs. Mateson stares at her as if uncomprehending. Margot immediately regrets her rude question. Quickly she says, “I—I mean—Eli seems to be haunted by the figure of—what looks like a drowned child . . .” When Mrs. Mateson doesn’t reply, but continues to stare, now with an expression of just perceptible indignation, Margot can only say, awkwardly, “Eli has sketched this scene many times. He seems quite—fascinated by it . . . And so, I was wondering—if . . .”

  If the drowned girl is anyone you know.

  “I can’t ask Eli about the drawing, or the girl. It seems to upset him too much. And I can’t risk losing his trust.”

  “And I’m afraid that I can’t help you, Doctor.”

  With an expression of polite perplexity, and very subtle distaste, Mrs. Mateson shakes her head. As one might dismiss a servant.

  In the exigency of the moment Margot isn’t able to determine if the older woman is telling her no, she knows nothing about any drowned girl; or no, Mrs. Mateson is not going to help her learn anything about any drowned girl.

  In the awkward silence Margot can only repeat that she hasn’t wanted to upset Eli. “He’s very protective of his art, and I’m honored that he shows his work to me, at times. I would never betray his confidence.”

  And then suddenly, when Margot has been thinking she will have no choice but to leave, Mrs. Mateson begins to speak as if to deflect Margot’s question with a flood of words, in a tone of intimacy.

  “Eli always used to brood on—things. He took after his father that way—my older brother. ‘Fear and trembling’—whatever that was. With Eli, no one outside the family could have guessed his true nature. He was as sociable as—well, Bing Crosby, in some song-and-dance movie—when it pleased him. And then so solitary and stubborn, when it pleased him. The men in our family have had a fixation on that place—Lake George. I would not call it a ‘morbid’ fixation—of course, Lake George is very beautiful. The old house, that was built back in 1926, is very beautiful—if you like Adirondack log-cabin architecture. It’s a place that grows on you—I’ve been told. Sometimes it’s like—(this was a remark my brother Byron made)—there’s a cemetery there, and our ancestors are buried there, and not here in Gladwyne . . . Well, Eli should never have spent so much time alone there as an adult, it’s no wonder he got sick. Shouldn’t have left his poor fiancée to become all emotional and hysterical. And when he got sick, he delayed medical care. He’d hike in the mountains and tramp for days in the woods—I can’t imagine what a person does with himself, all alone like that. He said he was taking pictures and painting but do you need to be alone, to do these things? And he’d throw away most of what he did in disgust. I think that ‘perfectionism’ is a kind of spite—you can’t acknowledge that your talent is what it is, God-given, and not something more. And all those years, Eli kept returning to Lake George after Labor Day. He and his fiancée poor Amber were going to be married in October of 1964—I remember that clearly!—but for some reason Eli went off to stay at the lake by himself. No one knew what Eli and his fiancée quarreled about, or if they’d quarreled about anything. Eli was the kind of gentlemanly person, he’d have arranged it to seem that Amber had broken off with him, not the other way—as if anyone would be taken in by that. Her name was—is—Amber McPherson.”

  Amber McPherson. The very name is romantic, mysterious.

  Margot asks what has become of “Amber McPherson”?

  Mrs. Mateson smiles, oddly. It is a sad smile, yet a smile that suggests an obscure sort of satisfaction.

  “Really, my dear, I don’t know. Our families are not in close contact.”

  Margot feels a pang of satisfaction also, that Amber McPherson had not married Eli Hoopes, and is not married to him now.

  Then, Margot feels a flush of shame. Only an individual with a stunted soul rejoices in the unhappiness of others.

  She is a very good scientist, she has no reason to be envious of anyone else. Certainly not a “fiancée” who’d been jilted by a man now severely amnesiac.

  She should want Eli Hoopes to be happy, at least. If he’d been married before his illness, his life would be completely different now; he would have a wife, he would probably have grown children, he would be cared for and loved by someone other than this woman.

  To be loved by Elihu Hoopes, Margot Sharpe would have had to meet him before his illness—after that date, for the afflicted one, love is no longer possible.

  Mrs. Mateson says, with a sigh, like one who is both exasperated a
nd admiring, “Maybe Eli was always going to be the way he is—I mean, maybe he was fated for a solitary life—a ‘tragic’ life. He is not unlike his Quaker ancestors, after all: how difficult they must have been to live with! ‘A martyr for a just cause’—easier than living a normal life, with a family and responsibilities. Miss Sharpton, you would not believe it now but no one—absolutely no one—had more friends than Eli Hoopes, in school, in college, and the years after—but it was all too easy for him. When women adore a man, what is a man to do but succumb to—being adored? There was some madness in him that drove him away from us and into the seminary, then drove him out again. He was ‘searching for God’—he said. Oh, dear Eli! Sometimes I think—there are those cruel persons in the Hoopes family who have said—‘Eli found God all right, at Lake George. Now he can live with God.’”

  Mrs. Mateson has been speaking with a restrained sort of emotion, like one who must carry herself with caution. Now she leans close to Margot, as if fearing she might be overheard: “Please be frank with me, dear: has his neurological condition improved? Can it improve? The ‘experiments’ you and your colleagues have been doing with him all these years—has his memory been strengthened at all, do you think? Can he ever be—‘normal’—or almost ‘normal’—again?”

  But he is missing a part of his brain! What you ask is impossible.

  Margot considers how to reply. She is not a clinician, she does not interact with patients and their families, and so she has had little experience in the craft, or the art, of seeming to say one thing while saying quite another, in medical terms. It is a violation of Margot Sharpe’s personal integrity to lie; yet, surely there are occasions when lying, or a kind of professional subterfuge, is required.

  And so Margot says yes, in some ways Eli’s memory has been “strengthened.” It is not untrue that E.H. can perform certain tasks without needing to consciously recall them, and it has been demonstrated that, if he practices his tennis serves, for instance, he can improve his performance on the tennis court though he will not be able to recall the practice sessions. By practicing piano, he can play more adeptly—but he insists upon playing those compositions which he has already learned, the memory of which lies deeply imprinted in a part of his (uninjured) brain, and summoned to his fingertips without conscious effort.

  Margot has noted and recorded these instances, and has recently designed a radical new experiment to further explore the phenomenon of non-declarative memory in amnesia.

  “But can Eli ever be ‘normal,’ dear? Or is that too much to ask?”

  “We can never tell definitively, Mrs. Mateson. Something new is being discovered about the brain every day. And soon, we’ll be able to photograph the brain, as we can’t do yet.”

  Margot speaks carefully, soothingly. It is Professor Sharpe’s public manner, at a podium, politely answering a question put to her from the audience.

  “‘Photograph the brain!’” Mrs. Mateson seems struck by this possibility. “Do you mean—like an X-ray?”

  “Something like an X-ray, though not exactly.”

  “And what of the soul, then? Will we be able to see the ‘soul’?” Mrs. Mateson speaks with a brave sort of wistfulness.

  Margot is stunned. How to answer this naïve question!

  She wants to take hold of the older woman’s delicate hands. She wants to console Mrs. Mateson, and in this way console herself.

  Carefully she says, “Mrs. Mateson, maybe—one day.”

  The ceramic clock on the mantel is chiming again—delicately, unmistakably. Teatime is over.

  AT HER CAR, at the curb, Margot pauses to look back at the Hoopes mansion. She is feeling mildly dazed, both tired and excited—exhilarated. She will replay her lengthy, rambling conversation with Lucinda Mateson countless times, and she will realize belatedly that the woman never quite answered her question about a drowned girl—a “death in the family.”

  It is painful to her, though hardly surprising, that Eli Hoopes did not come downstairs to say good-bye to her.

  Of course he’d almost immediately forgotten her existence.

  Car key in her hand. (When did she take out her car key? She has no recollection of doing so.)

  No choice but to leave . . .

  Next week, she will arrange to drive E.H. home at least one evening. If it can be arranged without suspicion.

  Milton would not approve, probably. Her lab colleagues would disapprove.

  What on earth is Margot doing with E.H.? Is she testing him somehow—secretly?

  Margot hasn’t fallen in love with the amnesiac—has she?

  Margot shudders, hearing cruel laughter. She has been trying to envision a man’s face at one of the upstairs windows of the Hoopes house: E.H. gazing out at her. But she sees no one—of course.

  The part-timbered facade of the old house is broad, unyielding. No one at any of the windows. On the slate roof is a faint shimmer of green, moss is growing there in patches. In the putty-colored stucco are faint jagged cracks like arrested lightning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  To reply to your question which I will refrain from dismissing as an ignorant and provocative question, in fact it is a question much asked if indeed ignorant and provocative and with maddening frequency and in admission of a basic incomprehension of what science is and does—No. We did not exploit the amnesiac subject E.H. in more than thirty years of our association with him.

  The amnesiac lived in the present tense, and in the present tense we shared with him over the years, E.H. was happy, and hopeful. He loved to be tested and didn’t tire for hours. He was a superior subject in our testing-lab, as obviously he’d been superior as a child and adolescent, winning the praise of his teachers and high grades. Tests of the kind we administer are often the only opportunities of intellectual engagement available to the brain-damaged and so, as it was carefully explained to E.H., our work with him would benefit countless individuals unknown to him—as to us: victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s, dementia, brain tumors and lesions. For the brain-damaged individual who has once been a highly functioning citizen, and is now incapacitated, being a part of such an endeavor is deeply satisfying, and so it was with “Elihu Hoopes”—whose name can now be revealed.

  Yes. The world is much emptier without him—“Elihu Hoopes.”

  Even E.H.’s “failed performances” were valuable to us—to science. All that E.H. could not do, that a normal person could do, has been illuminating to us. It was the hypothesis of our principal investigator Milton Ferris that the amnesiac had suffered memory loss as a consequence of damage to a part of the brain called the hippocampus—in those early days, there were no MRIs to scan the brain.

  Basing our hypotheses on memory work in other neuropsychology and neuroscience labs, some of which conducted experiments inducing lesions in primate brains, we came to a more or less firm conviction that E.H.’s hippocampus had been devastated by encephalitis but we had no way of knowing this, or whether other, adjoining areas of the brain had been affected, and to what extent—we would not know until E.H.’s brain was at last scanned by an MRI in 1993.

  Often I am asked that question—indeed, it is one of the foolish, provocative questions of the kind scientists are asked by ignorant interviewers though I will respond more courteously than most of my—virtually all of my—male—colleagues would respond: No. E.H. did not “exhibit sexual proclivities”—not so far as we know. (Recall, we saw E.H. only under clinical conditions, and for a relatively small part of his time. We had no idea apart from anecdotal information casually and infrequently provided by his guardian Mrs. Lucinda Mateson how he “behaved” at home.) It was our hypothesis, borne out by the MRI, that there was encephalitic damage to E.H.’s amygdala—a part of the brain related to emotional and sexual activities.

  Perhaps as a consequence of this deficit, E.H. behaved like a gentleman of another, bygone era. He did not raise his voice. He was never quarrelsome. He was courtly, courteous. His speech was never suggestive or rude. W
hen he was older, he came to refer to women as “ladies”—female medical workers he described as “lady nurses.” We came to believe that he was emulating older male relatives, as he became older himself.

  And here is the crucial fact: without Project E.H., the afflicted man would have been marooned in his solitary life from the age of thirty-seven to his death.

  And so, my final answer is no: we did not “exploit” Elihu Hoopes.

  And I, Margot Sharpe, do not feel any regret, any remorse, any guilt for having worked with this remarkable individual for thirty-one years. I feel instead immense gratitude.

  And whatever other emotions I may feel for Elihu Hoopes will remain forever private.

  “I am not a jealous person. I am ‘investigating.’”

  She behaves riskily! Finds herself doing things she would not ever have anticipated doing as Professor Margot Sharpe who is a methodical and conventional scientist and (indeed) a methodical and conventional person.

  Except in this instance: seeking out the ex-fiancée of Elihu Hoopes.

  The woman whom he’d left with no explanation. The woman who must have felt herself abandoned, rejected. Not knowing if their engagement had been broken off—since Eli Hoopes had not informed her.

  There is something thrilling in this. A low, dirty thrill—the kind abhorred by Professor Sharpe.

  A woman who has loved, and has been abased. And by Elihu Hoopes.

  From what Margot has learned, Elihu Hoopes simply drove alone to the Adirondacks. He might have told his fiancée that he was going—or his sister told her—but he did not invite her to accompany him, and he made no effort to keep in phone contact with her.

  And so: how did “Amber McPherson” endure the embarrassment?—shame? A public sort of humiliation, a woman rejected by a man, treated so rudely by a man, how did the fiancée endure, how did she survive, what is the “narrative” this woman tells herself now after a decade, Professor Sharpe is eager to know.