The Man Without a Shadow Read online

  “‘Medical guardian’? No-oo. Not a thing in her will about that, Doctor.”

  “Lucinda didn’t have time to prepare the codicil! But she intended to . . .”

  “There’s no evidence of that, Doctor. And if you don’t mind, I would prefer that you call my mother ‘Mrs. Mateson’—not ‘Lucinda.’ You were not her friend, or I would have known of you.”

  “I was your mother’s friend—for years! I drove Eli home from Darven Park to Gladwyne, your mother and I had tea together two, sometimes three times a week . . .”

  There is an awkward silence. Margot is made to wonder if she has invented everything.

  Out of her yearning, an entire world has been invented.

  Coolly Jonathan Mateson says, “Well—there is no codicil. There is no amendment to the trust my mother established for Eli Hoopes in 1987.”

  Weakly Margot protests, “But Mr. Mateson—don’t you owe anything to your mother’s wishes? How can you be so cruel to someone who has already suffered terribly? Eli Hoopes is your own relative—please rethink your decision to sell the house.”

  Margot worries that she has gone too far, and that Jonathan Mateson is about to hang up. The property is immensely valuable, surely it’s folly to imagine that the Matesons and the Hoopeses would wish to maintain Eli Hoopes as he’d been for thirty years. No one cares for him but me. And I have no power.

  “What business is it of yours what happens to Eli Hoopes, Doctor? Seems to me that Project E.H. has wrung the poor man dry—how much longer are you going to ‘experiment’ with him?”

  Margot protests that Project E.H. has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Endowment; it is one of the most crucial neuropsychological projects in history. Already many of the Project’s findings have been beneficial in the field of post-stroke therapy, for instance—how amnesia happens in the brain, and how the amnesiac might be treated. She tells him that Eli Hoopes has always been fully cooperative with researchers and that she, Margot Sharpe, as the principal investigator, closely overlooks all testing. “Eli’s visits to the Institute are the high points of his life, you must know. Tests to the brain-damaged are immensely beneficial to them. Otherwise Eli would have seen virtually no one for years except his aunt Lucinda—he has few visitors. He’d have vegetated at home watching TV.”

  “Ridiculous! Eli has plenty of visitors—except he can’t remember who we are, so what’s the purpose of ‘visiting’ him? It’s damned depressing. And he can read perfectly well, he can read his favorite books over and over again—he can watch his favorite movies—my mother said he was very happy seeing the same old classics again and again. And he could take photographs again, if he used his old camera. He could take a bus to the art museum—he knows his way around Philadelphia from before his injury. It’s no good coddling him, and infantilizing him, as my mother did—that’s the reason his condition never improved. In fact, Eli has a life that’s enviable—someone always takes care of him. He doesn’t worry about the future, and he doesn’t worry about the past.”

  Margot protests, “Of course Eli ‘worries’ about the past. It is all he has to think about.”

  “All right, then—he ‘worries’ about the past. But he can’t remember anything that happens to him now, so the ‘past’ is getting smaller in his life.”

  This is a nonsensical remark which Margot ignores.

  “But without your mother, he will be so lonely . . .”

  “In the facility we’ll find for him he will have plenty of company. People like himself who are ‘disabled’—have lost parts of their personalities, or bodies. He’ll get along just fine.”

  “But Eli isn’t mentally ill! He will be miserably out of place.”

  “He will make new friends. Just give him a chance.”

  “He won’t be able to remember his new surroundings. He won’t be able to remember new people he meets. He will just be—lost.”

  Margot’s tone is so forlorn, it seems that Jonathan Mateson can’t bring himself to hang up just yet. Desperately Margot continues, “I—I could bring your cousin home with me at least temporarily. I could make a home for him. I’m a professor at the university—I have a private house near campus. When I had to be away from home, I would hire someone to care for him—he would have twenty-four-hour care. If I were to receive the payment—oh, just a fraction of the payment—you would be making to this facility, it would be a good compromise—don’t you think?”

  Mateson is silent. Is he confounded, stunned? Is he insulted?

  “Of course—it would all be clearly designated in a contract . . . I would meet with you and any of Eli’s other relatives, and we could work out a plan . . .”

  “Jesus, Doctor! Why’d you take on such a burden? I haven’t seen Eli Hoopes in years, my mother has said he was ‘gradually deteriorating’ . . . I don’t understand this at all.”

  “If it were a matter of, of—money—if you didn’t want to pay me out of the trust—I could use the grant money—in any case, I could support us both on my university salary . . .”

  Margot is speaking rapidly, helplessly. She is so warm now, she tugs off the heavy-knit sweater. A flush rises through her body, groin to face. Almost, she fears that Jonathan Mateson can see her: a woman of late middle age, untidy dark hair shot with white wires, the former girl’s face contorted in an expression of yearning, hope, and shame.

  Mateson is embarrassed for Margot Sharpe, it seems. He has heard the raw yearning in her voice.

  He asks her again why she would take on the burden of caring for an afflicted man who is no relative of hers and Margot tells him stiffly:

  “It is the right thing to do, Mr. Mateson. Eli needs—someone to care for him.”

  How close she has come to saying Eli needs me.

  Madness, desperation, folly.

  Jonathan Mateson seems to be weighing the situation. Perhaps he feels sorry for her, suddenly. He tells Margot that her suggestion is unorthodox, he doesn’t really think it’s a feasible solution to the problem of Eli Hoopes but he will think about it—“I’ll discuss it with Eli’s brothers and sister tomorrow. My impression is they’re all pretty much fed up with coddling their ‘brain-damaged’ sibling. In the meantime, thank you for calling, Doctor—is it ‘Sharpe’?”

  “Yes. ‘Sharpe.’”

  Quietly as an indrawn breath, Margot breaks the phone connection. She finishes the glass of whiskey, sticky-fingered. And then so light-headed, she can manage only to stumble to her bed before collapsing on it.

  THE RAVENOUS LOVER. In her sleep she feels him. The man’s touch, his mouth, his body hot and aching with life, and with desire. Everywhere against her skin she feels him.

  It is a terror to her, the feeling comes so strong. She has been a cowardly woman, terrified of such feeling, the sex-sensation, that annihilates her, and leaves her desperate, helpless. It is how she knows that she loves the man—this annihilation. It is a risk she will make for him, the risk of utter abnegation.

  He is so much stronger than she. His arms close tight about her like the wings of a great bird, folding and clasping its prey.

  The pen falls from her fingers to the floor. The notebook falls to the floor.

  What has passed between us will not be recorded. It will be lost to all memory.

  AXEL HIS NAME. Skinny stoop-shouldered boy twisting Eli’s arm behind his back. Whimpering with pain and Axel McElroy laughed. And pressing the canvas cushion from one of the heavy wooden Adirondack chairs against his face. Dirty cushion Axel said smirking, people’s asses on it. Terrified he’d be suffocated forced onto the ground and the canvas cushion against his face and Axel leaning on it, hard—it was a joke (he wanted to think it was a joke) but it continued too long so his skin was scraped, his nose bleeding and he was trying to scream but could not.

  The bishop’s grandson they said of him. Axel he’d hated, and was frightened of for Axel was like no one else they knew, his brothers too were fearful of the ol
der boy for Axel would say and do anything but never so adults knew. Nasty gestures with his hands like pulling at himself—at his crotch. The girls looked away, disgusted. Eli had tried to make Axel go away but he was too small and too weak. Upper arm so skinny, Axel could close his fingers around it laughing. The girl cousins were laughing. His cousin Gretchen looked away. She was laughing at poor shamed Eli—was she? Would not ever forgive her. Wished she would die. In a canoe, he’d tip over the damn canoe and she would drown in the lake. Wanted to run from Axel but Axel’d catch his arm, grab his hair pretending he was going to “scalp” Eli. He was such a little boy, and a coward. The older cousins laughed at him if but tenderly feeling sorry for him. And Averill laughed at him, and Harry. Hiding beneath the porch and they had no idea where he’d gone. Through slats in the lattice he spied on them. Girls’ bare legs, hair tied back in ponytails for swimming. His cousin Gretchen only eleven but tall for her age—“mature”—trusted with little children. Flat little breasts in a pink halter-top, elastic-ribbed pink swimsuit panties. Bright fair-brown hair shining in the sun, ponytail trailing down her back. Her pale legs, bare feet. Her family had just come to the lake, it was their first week that summer. “Eli? Eli?”—she’d called for him. And he had not crawled out.

  Telling the other children not to play on the dock, she’d be right back. Maybe she’d been flattered by the older boy Axel McElroy the bishop’s grandson who was seventeen and wore his hair in a pompadour like Elvis Presley.

  He had not seen where she’d gone. Not in which direction she’d gone. Hiding beneath the porch embarrassed and ashamed and filled with hatred for them all not just Axel McElroy the bishop’s grandson but all of them—Gretchen too.

  And later he had more reason to be ashamed. No way to make it right. No words for how cowardly he was, more contemptible than anyone knew.

  Shameful too, their father drank too much. When Gretchen was missing Byron Hoopes drank too much and could not keep up with the other adults searching in the woods. And there was Granddaddy’s chrome-yellow Beechcraft single-prop. An airstrip had been cleared on the Hoopes property for Granddaddy’s aircraft. Convinced that they would find the missing girl—they would find Gretchen where she’d wandered in the woods and they would bring her home in the little prop-plane. Except the plane lost altitude suddenly above the lake and Granddaddy had to “crash-land.” And they did not find Gretchen.

  They had not found her in the woods. Not then.

  He had not seen her in death. He had abandoned her, he’d been angry with her and had not seen her ever again.

  Prayed to God, to bring Gretchen back. But God was higher than the highest white pine and paid him no heed.

  (Where is this place? Why is he here? He has a vague memory of his office at Hoopes & Associates—staring out the window at high-rise buildings in the near distance. Windows of winking glass. Behind these windows, who?)

  The view from the window here is very different. Not downtown Philadelphia, but an older residential neighborhood. He is in a “hospital” or a “clinic”—he thinks. At this height he can see a short distance. The tree line is ragged. Badly he regrets the days of his youth, he’d felt the presence of God so easily. And he’d lost God out of carelessness and self-absorption and now it is too late, he is damned.

  In his white skin he is damned.

  Trying to raise the window. But it is not a window that one can raise. Frustrated and furious brings his head against the plate-glass pane. Forehead against the pane—hard enough to draw blood, and harder.

  She is very frightened. Her throat is very dry.

  In San Francisco she is addressing the AAEP (American Association of Experimental Psychology) in a ballroom so vast, the farther, facing wall is barely visible. In Chicago she is addressing the NICN (National Institute of Cognitive Neuroscientists), rows upon rows of uplifted faces blurred and indistinct as the faces in dreams. In Washington, D.C., the NIH (National Institutes of Health)—waves of applause lapping at her feet, rising swiftly to cover her mouth and engulf her. In Orlando, Florida—in Seattle, Washington—in Denver, Colorado—in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia—she feels the rush of blood in her ears, the rapid drumbeat of her heart, as she makes her way through a glare of lights to a podium and a figure darts beside her whose face she can’t see gripping her elbow tightly to steady her—“This way, Professor. Watch that step.”

  She is giving a keynote address. She is accepting an award. She is reading a paper. She is participating in a symposium. She is answering questions posed to her by an interviewer even as a part of her mind yearns for him.

  Like an experimental animal that has long been penned up and its spirit broken and once the door of the cage is opened, remains in its cage.

  Those chimpanzees who’d been “liberated” by animal rights activists but remained in their cages, cowering.

  (Milton Ferris had told them of these poor animals. Milton Ferris had smiled as he told the story for it was amusing to him.)

  “Professor Sharpe?”

  Margot glances up. They are looking at her expectantly. They are strangers with no idea of how far Professor Sharpe has drifted from them as in a little skiff on a wide, churning river.

  Margot feels a sharp pain in her breast. She is determined not to betray her sorrow, however. She is determined not to betray the slightest glimmer of her true self in public.

  She tells a story of how she’d introduced the amnesiac subject “E.H.” to a distinguished neuroscientist from Columbia University who’d come to the Institute to interview him, and contrary to his usual habit of courtesy “E.H.” refused to shake hands with the man and instead folded his arms tightly across his chest and backed away.

  He’d said Doctor, my regrets! There isn’t enough of my poor brain to go around any longer. The doctors here have gobbled up the last dry morsels.

  Margot laughs, for her amnesiac subject was very witty, she thinks. Her eyes glisten with tears. Her listeners who are primarily neuropsychologists and neuroscientists laugh in awkward waves through the amphitheater not knowing whether they should laugh at all.

  “A posthumous life. Like breathing undersea through a narrow straw—it can be done, if barely.”

  She talks to herself, in this posthumous life. Often she is wry, good-humored. And often, she is being interviewed.

  Breathlessly she laughs, clenching her small fists in her lap in a way that no one can see. (Of course, observers see. Margot Sharpe has become such a curious, eccentric female scientist, legends must be spun about her. That ridiculous, touching, silly-exotic “sexy” braid dangling down the side of her face! And the lavish silk shawls, scarves trailing down her back.)

  Such solemn words as she is being introduced to applause that rises like waves to engulf her.

  Except Margot Sharpe is not laughing. The death-grin has clamped onto her lower face.

  Extraordinary work in the biology of memory, Margot Sharpe’s research of decades, model for young women scientists who look to women like Margot Sharpe for inspiration and guidance in their lives as in their work . . .

  Such helium-inflated words signal a public occasion. Yes, it is so—when she lifts her eyes upward she sees lights, a stage. If she turns her head, she will see rows of graded seats, as in an amphitheater.

  Searching in vain for—a particular face.

  “Face recognition”—the earliest mental act of the infant.

  For survival depends upon such recognition. It is the most elemental, the most primitive and the most profound of human acts.

  Yes, there has been a lavish dinner beforehand at a wood-paneled dark-lighted steak house. Valiantly the guest of honor tried to eat but was unable. Lifting her fork to her mouth, and lowering it. Lifting her fork to her mouth, and lowering it. Lifting a glass of wine to her mouth, and lowering it. She sees—They are observing, memorizing. These tales that will outlive me.

  She is called “Professor Sharpe” here. There is no one who knows her as “Margot.” S
he is the oldest person at the dinner with the exception of a gleaming-bald-headed neuroscientist whose reputation was established as a young collaborator with the great B. F. Skinner at Harvard in the 1940s.

  Pleading with her eyes to this older gentleman—Please do not speak to me of Milton Ferris! Not even in commiseration.

  Of course conversation often—invariably—swings onto Milton Ferris, if/when Margot Sharpe is the subject.

  The tales told of that couple! No neuroscientist of younger generations at Penn, MIT, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, UC–Berkeley, and the Salk Institute has failed to hear of how the preeminent womanizer Ferris “identified” Margot Sharpe on the very first day she walked into his memory lab as a mere graduate student—how Ferris realized at once what a brilliant scientist the twenty-three-year-old was, or would be; how Ferris initiated an affair with Margot Sharpe that endured for years that allowed him to exploit her both sexually and professionally; how Ferris clawed his way to a Nobel Prize for himself, but not for Margot Sharpe; this affair of decades ending abruptly when Ferris found another, younger woman neuroscientist to seduce. Or, a yet more lurid tale is told of how as a mere graduate student Margot Sharpe coolly initiated an affair with the great Milton Ferris, in order to advance her career; how Margot Sharpe later blackmailed the older scientist into establishing her as the head of the memory lab, though she was not able to inveigle him into sharing his Nobel Prize with her (which even certain of Margot Sharpe’s detractors believe she deserves). Equally lurid tales swirl about Margot Sharpe’s (emotional, sexual) involvement with the amnesiac subject “E.H.” which prevailed for years—but these tales lack the particular resonance of the accounts of Ferris-Sharpe, a delicious (if largely uncorroborated) scandal in the field of neuroscience and neuropsychology.

  At the same time, Margot Sharpe is routinely heralded as a model for young women scientists. She is a passionate feminist; or, rather, she is a passionate anti-feminist. Her former women students revere her, or rather, they are intimidated by her. They love her, or rather, they hate her—yet admit that there has never been anyone quote like Professor Sharpe in their lives, and that they hope (in some way) to emulate her.