The Man Without a Shadow Read online

  Elihu Hoopes Fellowship in Neuropsychology.

  When Margot first discussed the endowment with her departmental chairman, Dr. Latta expressed surprise that Margot wasn’t establishing the fellowship under her own name; but Margot said, with a wincing laugh, “Oh but who would care or know about ‘Sharpe’? It’s ‘E.H.’ who is significant.”

  Latta expressed surprise, too, at the amount of money Margot was giving, which he calculated to be a high percentage of her salary for the past dozen years; and again Margot said, “Oh but what else is my money for? I have almost no expenses beyond minimal living.”

  This statement had seemed to the departmental chair a stunningly pathetic statement, and yet there was Margot Sharpe smiling strangely as if she’d confessed something laudable.

  Now, Lucinda Mateson is frowning, and she is not looking at Margot. Margot fears, with a heart of dread, that she has made a blunder—she has offended the thin-skinned woman, and will be expelled from the household. (Is it because Margot Sharpe isn’t from a socially prominent family? The Hoopeses were once Quakers, reform-minded and liberal; in later years, with the exception of Eli Hoopes, they have become more politically conservative. Margot is stung. Margot feels the hurt of exclusion on class grounds!)

  Badly Margot wants to plead: “But I will love your nephew as you love him. I will love him more, I will be his wife. I am his wife. I will take care of him as no one else can.”

  After a moment, as if she has heard this shameless plea very clearly, Lucinda Mateson relents, with a sigh. She sets down a teacup onto a table. With the grim practicality of a gambler she says:

  “Well—thank you for your suggestion, Professor Sharpe. I will take note of this in my will—a codicil to my will. We will want to make official your special connection with Eli—no matter what my son Jonathan might wish. Though I intend to live for a long, long time yet—I promise!”

  Mrs. Mateson laughs almost gaily; and Margot joins in, though she is not altogether sure what has been promised to her.

  “On your part, Margot, do you promise that you will always protect Eli? You will never let anyone exploit him?—any of your science colleagues, or strangers? And you will never let the poor man eke out his days alone, in a cocoon of forgetfulness?”

  “Mrs. Mateson, I promise!”

  Margot is so deeply moved, she has begun to cry. She would embrace Lucinda Mateson but the older woman resists her with a sharp little laugh and sharp upraised elbows. “Oh no—no no no. No tears, dear Margot! Tears will not help Eli—and tears will not help you. Life is cruel once you are in its grasp, and life begins to squeeze like that hideous Greek sea serpent who squeezed the father and his sons to death—‘Layo-koon.’ That has not happened to you—yet—but it has begun with me, and with poor Eli too. You must be young and healthy for my nephew and me, and help us to endure.”

  These are astonishing words. Margot is so moved, she risks another rebuff—clasps Lucinda Mateson’s sparrow-bone hand in both her hands, and kisses the thin blue veins at the knuckles to the surprise and consternation of the older woman.

  “Mrs. Mateson—I love Eli, and I love you. You are my only family. You are the only people in my life who mean anything to me.”

  STANDING ON THE plank bridge. Gripping the railing tight.

  Though you can prepare for hurricane-force winds, you are never prepared.

  And you are never forgiven.

  CHAPTER TEN

  He was my entire life. There has been no life for me apart from “E.H.”

  This award you are giving me, I am accepting in his name only.

  It is a posthumous award. But I thank you.

  “HELLO? PROFESSOR? I’M afraid there’s bad news. Eli Hoopes won’t be coming to Darven Park today.”

  Margot is so shocked, she fumbles to find a chair. What is it? What? Through a roaring in her ears she hears, not the terrible news that Eli Hoopes has died or collapsed but that Eli Hoopes’s aunt and guardian Lucinda Mateson died the previous night, of a massive stroke, in the University Hospital in Philadelphia.

  “Died? Mrs. Mateson has—died? I didn’t know that—that—I had no idea that . . .”

  Helplessly Margot protests. Her voice is weak, faltering. The first impulse is to deny the reported fact of any death, for death cannot be assimilated into life. All that Margot knows is that Eli Hoopes has not died.

  Awaiting him at the Institute they’d known that something was wrong. For the first time in many years, the amnesiac subject was late: an hour, ninety minutes, three hours . . . Telephone calls to the Mateson residence went unanswered, even by a housekeeper; calls to the limousine service that provides transportation to Darven Park were routed to a dispatcher who could say only that their driver arrived at the Parkside address in Gladwyne at the usual early hour, waited for his passenger who failed to appear, went to the door and rang the bell, and no answer, and no evidence that anyone was home—nor had anyone called to cancel the engagement.

  “We’ll have to charge, ma’am. Whether Mr. Hoopes was taken to Darven Park, or not. Thing is, the driver showed up as requested—and has had to come back without a fare.”

  “Don’t worry, you will be paid. You’ve always been paid out of our grant for all of your services, and you always will be!”—trembling with fury Margot hung up the phone.

  And so, Margot understood that something was wrong, terribly wrong, though Margot had driven Eli Hoopes home the previous Friday and she’d visited with Lucinda Mateson and everything had seemed so promising: a codicil in Mrs. Mateson’s will, pertaining to Margot Sharpe.

  And Margot understood that she must disguise her concern, and her mounting anxiety; Margot knew that her young lab colleagues from the university and her colleagues at the Institute would be struck by her deathly-pale face, and her inability to sit still; like the wife of a New England ship’s captain of a bygone era Margot positioned herself at a high window, gazing down into the Institute parking lot, awaiting the arrival of the sleek black Lincoln Town Car in which the amnesiac patient would be brought as usual to Darven Park . . . Margot never arrived later than 7:30 A.M., and E.H. never arrived later than 8:00 A.M.

  Margot knew but could not bring herself to care, how these witnesses would pity her—It was painfully obvious, Margot Sharpe was in love with “E.H.” It was sad and touching, and we were embarrassed for her, but there was a kind of tacit agreement among us—we would protect her, we would never violate her privacy.

  “Years have passed, and yet time has hardly passed”—Margot will recall these foolish words afterward, when all has changed.

  The routine of the Institute tests, the routine of driving E.H. back to his aunt’s house. The routine of the strained and yet (to Margot) pleasurable teatimes with the elderly widow Lucinda Mateson in which always there was the possibility, as in a magical children’s tale, of an interruption of great happiness—Oh Eli! You’ve come to join us! How sweet of you dear Eli, please take a seat beside Margot, please help yourself to tea and cookies, we have been avidly awaiting you these many years.

  Not until nearly 2:00 P.M. did the explanatory call come at last, and a very blunt and perfunctory call it was, from a harried stranger who asked to speak to “‘Professor Sharpe’—one of the doctors there.”

  In a heart-hammering daze Margot listens. Tries to listen. It is a stranger’s voice in her ear—a man’s voice—it is not Eli Hoopes’s voice. (Margot has never heard her dear friend’s voice on the phone, but would recognize it at once. She is wondering why Eli doesn’t call her with this shocking news of his aunt.)

  Margot feels her tongue grow numb. Lips numb, and chilled. Her extremities—toes, fingers. It is remarkable how quickly—(thinking as a neuroscientist now, with the detachment ascribed to those “out-of-the-body” experiences in which no reputable scientist believes)—the body reacts, that’s to say the brain reacts through the body, as shock is absorbed into consciousness. Margot is breathless but tries to laugh, as her colleagues rally to
comfort her—“Really, I’m fine! I’m all right! It isn’t E.H. who has died but his elderly aunt—the poor dear woman was in her eighties. We will be seeing E.H. again soon, later this week at least . . .”

  Repeated calls to the Mateson number go unanswered. Margot considers driving to Gladwyne, a desperate measure.

  Of course, Margot wants to see E.H. as soon as possible, to comfort him, and to commiserate with him; she has no idea how the amnesiac will absorb the death of his aunt, but he is certain to miss her from his routine, domestic life—“He will know that someone integral to his life is gone. But will he be able to name what is missing?”

  And there will be an absence in his life, Eli will feel keenly. More than ever, he will be emotionally dependent upon Margot.

  Margot is eager to drive to Gladwyne to attend whatever sort of funeral the Hoopeses have arranged for Lucinda, but she is not one of the family, she is not invited, she is kept wholly out of contact with any of the Hoopeses. Years before she’d taken pains to establish a connection with Eli’s sister Rosalyn who seemed like a sympathetic woman—but she has not spoken to Rosalyn for a long time. Averill and Harry she knows not at all—as she recalls, they’d rather snubbed her. And she knows Jonathan Mateson not at all.

  Margot makes calls, leaves messages with housekeepers, assistants, secretaries. Hears herself say pleadingly—But I am Elihu Hoopes’s doctor! I was a close friend of Lucinda Mateson! You must have heard of me—“Margot Sharpe” of the University Neurological Institute at Darven Park.

  There must be a funeral for Lucinda Mateson but so far as Margot can discover it is a “private, family” ceremony at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Gladwyne. Margot does learn that the deceased was eighty-two years old—older than she’d appeared. Margot feels a stab of grief for Mrs. Mateson, as for herself, that she’d never succeeded in making Eli’s aunt trust her, and like her—and now it is too late.

  As days pass, and no one returns Margot’s calls, she becomes ever more desperate. Her other responsibilities, at the university, are slighted. She herself fails to return calls left for her by colleagues. She is confounded: How will she see E.H. again? What has become of the amnesiac, could he even know that his aunt has died—that she has died irrevocably? Is the work of Project E.H. to end so abruptly? Thirty years of remarkable scientific research, and ending like this?

  At last, after many abortive attempts, Margot succeeds in being put through to speak with Jonathan Mateson, Lucinda’s eldest son; she recalls how dissatisfied Lucinda Mateson was with him, and thinks how ironic it is, the petulant-sounding Jonathan is now executor of his mother’s estate. And at last, Jonathan Mateson has his mother’s power of attorney.

  “Yes? H’lo? Who is this—‘Doctor Sharpe’? Not my mother’s doctor, are you? Never heard of you.”

  As in a nightmare Margot learns that Jonathan Mateson has not only never heard of her, but has never heard of any “codicil” in his mother’s will applying to any Dr. Sharpe, or with reference to his cousin Elihu Hoopes. Coolly Mateson tells her that with all that he has to do following his mother’s death he has no time for, and less interest in, dealing with his cousin Elihu; he has no intention of arranging for his “brain-damaged” cousin to continue to live in his mother’s house as he’d been living for such a long time—“Like some kind of psychiatric hospital my mother was running, out of her own pocket. Now, that’s fini.”

  Margot is astonished to hear these blunt words. Margot is so astonished, she asks Jonathan Mateson to repeat what he has said.

  “Doctor—whoever you are—this is not negotiable. You and I are not ‘negotiating’ anything. I have a date in probate court in Philadelphia, and clearing my mother’s estate will not be easy. She has many heirs, and there are many claimants. There appears to be a trust to provide for Eli Hoopes, and I am the executor of that trust. We will find a place for him—an assisted-care residence. Or some kind of ‘halfway house.’ My cousin Eli Hoopes is non compos mentis. He is not able to enter into any legal contracts, nor can legal contracts be arranged that bind him, without the permission of the executor of the trust, who happens to be me.”

  Margot is somewhat confounded by Jonathan Mateson’s brisk manner. She wants to ask what has happened to Eli, where is Eli at this moment, how has Eli reacted to his aunt’s sudden death, but she dares not. She hears herself pleading, “But Mr. Mateson, surely there is enough money in the trust to allow Eli to live by himself somewhere, in a private place, with a full-time caregiver?”

  “No, Doctor. Sorry.”

  “There is not enough money? But Mrs. Mateson had said—”

  “I’ve explained, Doctor: I am the executor of the trust. It is just one of the tasks that I’ve inherited with my mother’s death, and not the most crucial one. I’ve contacted Eli’s brothers and we are going to find a suitable place for him, as soon as possible. The house on Parkside will be put on the market as soon as possible. And now—”

  “But where is Eli, now?”

  “Where is Eli, now? Who are you to be asking this?”

  “I—I’m his doctor—‘Margot Sharpe.’ I’ve been his doctor—one of his doctors—since 1965 . . .”

  “Since 1965! And a hell of a lot of good you’ve done him, eh? His memory is as bad as ever, or worse. Doctors! ‘Neurophysiologists’! Why do you care about him now?”

  Margot speaks in a faltering voice. “Because—Eli is my patient . . .”

  “And what has this to do with my mother, who has just died? We are all in grief here, having lost our dear mother. What’s my cousin Eli got to do with it?” Jonathan Mateson’s voice exudes disdain, and a kind of bemusement beneath the disdain, as Margot pleads with him to allow her to speak with him in person, to appeal on Eli Hoopes’s behalf. But Jonathan Mateson is too busy, and is about to hang up.

  “If I could—somehow—buy the house? Your mother’s house? On Parkside Avenue? So that Eli could continue to live there, where he is familiar with his surroundings . . .”

  “Buy the house? Are you serious, Doctor? Do you know what it will cost?”

  “I—I don’t k-know . . . How much will you ask for it?”

  Jonathan Mateson quotes a figure. Margot isn’t sure that she has heard correctly, but doesn’t dare ask him to repeat it.

  “And property taxes are thirty-four thousand a year. Just property taxes, not maintenance.”

  Margot is stunned too by this figure, tossed at her as one might toss a pebble at an annoying dog.

  “Thirty-four thousand a year—property tax? How is that possible?”

  With a mortgage underwritten by the university, Margot has purchased her own small house in a residential neighborhood of small privately owned houses and rentals near the university. Her yearly property tax is four thousand, six hundred dollars.

  With scarcely concealed impatience Jonathan Mateson tells Margot that Gladwyne is a “desirable” suburb of Philadelphia. And Parkside is the “most desirable” of streets. The buyer will very likely purchase the property to tear down the old house and build a new, modern house in its place—“And we are eager to sell, since no one in the family wants to live in it.”

  But I would live in it! I will care for Eli there.

  Margot hears her faltering voice protest: Eli Hoopes knows his aunt’s house intimately and is at home there. He will not ever know any other residence—“He will be utterly lost.”

  Jonathan Mateson says sagely that his cousin has been “utterly lost” for the past thirty years. His mother was a saint to take care of him, or a fool—“But that’s over now.”

  Margot grips the phone tightly. In her other hand, a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey. Very carefully she sips the whiskey, and very carefully with her shaky fingers she sets the glass on a table. No one must hear. No one must suspect.

  She is safely in her home, where the thermostat is kept low, to save on fuel costs. At home, the blinds are drawn through much of the day. She wears heavy-knit sweaters and woolen socks
; sometimes, if the air is chill enough to make her breath steam, she wears a knit cap on her head. On her walls are pencil and charcoal drawings by E.H. which, over the years, always discreetly and very carefully, Margot cut out of Eli’s sketchbooks; some she has had framed but most are affixed to the wall with double-edged adhesive tape. The largest measure three feet by eighteen inches. The smallest are tablet-sized. These are replica drawings, Margot considers them, that replicate other drawings of E.H.’s—they are drawings E.H. would never miss.

  To Margot’s eye the drawings are exquisite and dreamlike and beautiful indeed like the drawings of Edvard Munch, especially those of the drowned girl with her dark hair lifting in the shallow sun-lit stream, and tiny, near-invisible shadows of water-skaters reflected on her pale body.

  And he never saw his girl cousin, in death. He has imagined it all.

  Margot wants to explain to Jonathan Mateson how crucial it is, that Eli Hoopes be cared for as he has been. He is not an ordinary person, his is an eloquent soul, the soul of an artist. Losing his aunt will be a terrible trauma for him, and equally traumatic will be losing his home. But she dares not presume to speak in too proprietary a way of the amnesiac subject. She says, “Mr. Mateson, your mother left a trust for your cousin so that he could be taken care of humanely. She would not have consented to have him moved to an ‘assisted-care facility’ or a ‘halfway house’—he doesn’t belong with mentally or physically ill persons, this would be devastating to him. I happen to know—Lucinda told me about it in detail, less than two weeks ago. She promised that I would be Eli Hoopes’s medical guardian.”