The Book of Illusions

  That was as far as Hector could take the story, Alma said. He could talk about what happened up to that moment, up to the moment when he started running toward the man, but he had no memory of hearing the gun go off, no memory of the bullet that tore into his chest and knocked him to the ground, no memory of seeing Frieda break loose from the man. Frieda was in a better position to see what happened, but because she was so busy twisting herself out of the man’s arms, she missed many of the subsequent events as well. She saw Hector drop to the floor, she saw the hole that opened in his overcoat and the blood that came spurting out of it, but she lost track of the man and didn’t see him trying to escape. The shot was still ringing in her ears, and with so many people shrieking and howling around her, she didn’t hear the three additional shots that the bank guard fired into the man’s back.

  They were both certain of the date, however. That was fixed in their minds, and when Alma visited the microfilm vaults of the Sandusky Evening Herald, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and several other defunct and surviving local papers, she was able to piece together the rest of the story for herself. BLOODBATH ON COLUMBUS AVENUE, BANK ROBBER DIES IN SHOOTOUT, HERO RUSHED TO HOSPITAL read some of the headlines. The man who almost killed Hector was named Darryl Knox, a.k.a. Nutso Knox, a twenty-seven-year-old ex–auto mechanic wanted in four states for a series of bank robberies and armed holdups. The journalists all celebrated his demise, calling special attention to the nifty gunwork of the guard—who managed to deliver the conclusive shot just as Knox was slipping out the door—but what interested them most was Hector’s bravery, which they extolled as the finest demonstration of courage to have been seen in those parts in many years. The girl was a goner, one eyewitness was quoted as saying. If that fellow hadn’t taken the bull by the horns, I’d hate to think where she’d be now. The girl was Frieda Spelling, age twenty-two, variously described as a painter, a recent graduate of Bernard College (sic), and the daughter of the late Thaddeus P. Spelling, prominent Sandusky banker and philanthropist. In article after article, she expressed her thanks to the man who had saved her life. She had been so scared, she said, so certain that she was going to die. She prayed that he would recover from his wounds.

  The Spelling family offered to cover the man’s medical expenses, but for the first seventy-two hours it seemed doubtful that he would pull through. He was unconscious when he arrived at the hospital, and after so much trauma and loss of blood, he was given no more than an outside chance of warding off the dangers of shock and infection, of walking out of there alive. The doctors removed his destroyed left lung, picked out the bits of exploded metal that had lodged in the tissue around his heart, and then they sewed him up again. For better or worse, Hector had found his bullet. He hadn’t meant for it to happen that way, Alma said, but what he hadn’t been able to do himself someone else did for him, and the irony was that Knox bungled the job. Hector didn’t die from his encounter with death. He simply went to sleep, and when he woke up after his long slumber, he forgot that he had ever wanted to kill himself. The pain was too excruciating to dwell on anything as complicated as that. His insides were on fire, and all he could think about now was how to draw his next breath, how to go on breathing without bursting into flames.

  At first, they had only the sketchiest idea of who he was. They emptied his pockets and examined the contents of his wallet, but they found no driver’s license, no passport, no identification papers of any kind. The only thing with a name on it was a membership card for a North Side branch of the Chicago Public Library. H. Loesser, it said, but there was no address or telephone number, nothing to pinpoint where he lived. According to the newspaper articles published after the shooting, the Sandusky police were making every effort to uncover more information about him.

  But Frieda knew who he was—or at least she thought she knew. She had gone to college in New York, and as a nineteen-year-old sophomore in 1928 she had managed to see six or seven of the twelve Hector Mann comedies. It wasn’t that she had any interest in slapstick, but his films had been playing along with other films, part of the program of cartoons and newsreels than ran before the featured attraction, and she had become familiar enough with his looks to know who he was when she saw him. When she spotted Hector in the bank three years later, the absence of the mustache momentarily confused her. She recognized the face, but she couldn’t attach a name to it, and before she could figure out who the man was, Knox rushed in behind her and pointed the gun at her head. Twenty-four hours went by before she was able to think about it again, but once the horror of her near death had begun to recede a little, the solution came to her in a flash of sudden, overpowering certainty. It didn’t matter that the man’s name was supposed to be Loesser. She had followed the news of Hector’s disappearance in 1929, and if he wasn’t dead, as most people seemed to think he was, then he had to be living under another name. What made no sense was that he had popped up in Sandusky, Ohio, but the truth was that most things made no sense, and if the laws of physics stipulated that every person in the world occupied a certain amount of space—which meant that everyone was necessarily somewhere—then why couldn’t that somewhere have been Sandusky, Ohio? Three days later, when Hector emerged from his coma and started talking to the doctors, Frieda visited the hospital to thank him for what he had done. He couldn’t say much, but the little he did say bore the irrefutable marks of a foreign accent. The voice clinched it for her, and when she bent over and kissed him on the forehead just before she left the hospital, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her life had been saved by Hector Mann.

  6

  LANDING TURNED OUT to be less difficult for me than taking off. I had prepared myself to be afraid, to be thrown into another frenzy of slobbering incompetence and spiritual malfunction, but when the captain told us that we were about to go into our descent, I felt curiously stable, unperturbed. There must have been a difference between going up and going down, I decided, between losing touch with the earth and returning to solid ground. One was a farewell, the other was a salutation, and perhaps beginnings were more bearable than endings, I thought, or perhaps I had discovered (quite simply) that the dead were not allowed to scream in you more than once a day. I turned toward Alma and gripped her arm. She was just getting into the early stages of Hector’s romance with Frieda, moving past the night when he broke down and confessed to her and then going on to describe Frieda’s startling response to that confession (The bullet absolves you, she said; you gave my life back to me, now I’m giving your life back to you), but when I put my hand on Alma’s arm, she suddenly stopped talking, breaking off in mid-sentence, in mid-thought. She smiled, then leaned forward and kissed me—first on the cheek, then on the ear, and then square on the mouth. They fell hard for each other, she said. If we don’t watch out, the same thing is going to happen to us.

  Hearing those words must have made a difference, too—helped me to be less afraid, less prone to inner meltdown—but how apt, finally, that the word fall should have been the verb in the two sentences that summed up my history of the past three years. A plane falls from the sky, and all the passengers are killed. A woman falls in love, and a man falls with her, and not for an instant as the plane goes down does either one of them think about death. In midair, with the land revolving below us as we banked into our final turn, I understood that Alma was giving me the possibility of a second life, that something was still in front of me if I had the courage to walk toward it. I listened to the music of the engines as they shifted key. The noise inside the cabin grew louder, the walls shook, and then, almost as an afterthought, the wheels of the plane touched the ground.

  It took a while for us to get going again. There was the opening of the hydraulic door, the walk through the terminal, the stopping in at the men’s room and the women’s room, the search for a telephone to call the ranch, the buying of water for the trip to Tierra del Sueño (Drink as much as you can, Alma said; the altitudes are deceiving here, and you don’t want to get dehyd
rated), the combing of the long-term parking lot for Alma’s Subaru station wagon, and then a final pause to fill up with gas before we hit the road. It was the first time I had been to New Mexico. Under normal circumstances, I would have gawked at the landscape, pointing to rock formations and demented-looking cacti, asking the name of this mountain or that gnarled shrub, but I was too caught up in Hector’s story to bother with that now. Alma and I were passing through some of the most impressive country in North America, but for all the effect it had on us we could have been sitting in a room with the lights out and the shades drawn. I would travel that road several more times in the days to come, but I remember almost nothing of what I saw on that first trip. Whenever I think about riding in Alma’s banged-up yellow car, the only thing that comes back to me is the sound of our voices—her voice and my voice, my voice and her voice—and the sweetness of the air rushing in on me through a crack in the window. But the land itself is invisible. It had to have been there, but I wonder now if I ever bothered to look at it. Or, if I did, if I wasn’t too distracted to register what I was seeing.

  They kept him in the hospital until early February, Alma said. Frieda went to visit him every day, and when the doctors finally said that he was strong enough to go, she talked her mother into letting him recuperate at their house. He was still in bad shape. It took another six months before he could move around very well.

  And Frieda’s mother was okay with that? Six months is an awfully long time.

  She was thrilled. Frieda was a wild thing back then, one of those liberated bohemian girls who’d grown up in the late twenties, and she had nothing but contempt for Sandusky, Ohio. The Spellings had survived the crash with eighty percent of their wealth intact—which meant that they still belonged to what Frieda liked to call the inner circle of the midwestern haute booboisie. It was a narrow world of Republican stick-in-themuds and foggy-headed women, and the principle entertainments consisted of joyless country club dances and long, stultifying dinner parties. Once a year, Frieda would grit her teeth and come home for the Christmas holidays, enduring those gruesome events for the sake of her mother and her married brother, Frederick, who still lived in town with his wife and two children. By the second or third of January, she’d rush back to New York, vowing never to return again. That year, of course, she didn’t attend any parties—and she didn’t go back to New York. She fell in love with Hector instead. As far as her mother was concerned, anything that kept Frieda in Sandusky was a good thing.

  You’re saying she had no objections to the marriage either?

  Frieda had been in open rebellion for a long time. Just one day before the shooting, she’d told her mother that she was planning to move to Paris and would probably never set foot in America again. That’s why she was in the bank that morning—to withdraw money from her account to buy the ticket. The last thing Mrs. Spelling ever expected to hear from her daughter’s lips was the word marriage. In the light of this miraculous turnaround, how not to embrace Hector and welcome him into the family? Not only did Frieda’s mother not object, she organized the wedding herself.

  So Hector’s life begins in Sandusky, after all. He plucks the name of a town out of thin air, tells a bunch of lies about it, and then he makes those lies come true. It’s pretty bizarre, don’t you think? Chaim Mandelbaum becomes Hector Mann, Hector Mann becomes Herman Loesser, and then what? Who does Herman Loesser become? Did he even know who he was anymore?

  He went back to being Hector. That’s what Frieda called him. That’s what we all called him. After they were married, Hector became Hector again.

  But not Hector Mann. He wouldn’t have been that reckless, would he?

  Hector Spelling. He took Frieda’s last name.

  Wow.

  Not wow. Just practical. He didn’t want to be Loesser anymore. That name represented everything that had gone wrong with his life, and if he was going to start calling himself something else, why not use the name of the woman he loved? It’s not as if he ever went back on that. He’s been Hector Spelling for more than fifty years.

  How did they wind up in New Mexico?

  They drove out West on their honeymoon and decided to stay. Hector had a lot of respiratory problems, and the dry air turned out to be good for him.

  There were dozens of artists out there by then. The Mabel Dodge crowd in Taos, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe. Did that have anything to do with it?

  Nothing at all. Hector and Frieda lived in another part of the state. They never even met those people.

  They moved there in 1932. Yesterday, you said that Hector started making movies again in 1940. That’s eight years. What happened in the interval?

  They bought four hundred acres of land. Prices were incredibly low at the time, and I don’t think they paid more than a few thousand dollars for the whole property. Frieda came from a rich family, but she didn’t have much money of her own. A small inheritance from her grandmother—ten or fifteen thousand dollars, something like that. Her mother kept offering to pay her bills, but Frieda wouldn’t accept her help. Too proud, too stubborn, too independent. She didn’t want to think of herself as a sponge. So she and Hector weren’t in a position to hire large crews of workers to build a house for them. No architect, no contractor—they couldn’t afford those things. Luckily, Hector knew what he was doing. He had learned carpentry from his father, had built sets for the movies, and all that experience allowed them to keep costs to a minimum. He designed the house himself, and then he and Frieda more or less built it with their own hands. It was a very simple place. A six-room adobe cottage. Just one story, and the only help they got with it came from a team of three Mexican brothers, unemployed day laborers who lived on the outskirts of town. For the first few years, they didn’t even have electricity. They had water, of course, they had to have water, but it took a couple of months before they were able to find it and start digging the well. That was the first step. After that, they chose the site for the house. Then they drew up the plans and started construction. All that took time. They didn’t just move there and settle in. It was blank and savage space, and they had to build everything from the ground up.

  And then what? Once the house was ready, what did they do with themselves?

  Frieda was a painter, and so she went back to being a painter. Hector read books and kept up with his journal, but mostly he planted trees. That became his major occupation, his work of the next few years. He cleared several acres of land around the house, and then, bit by bit, he installed an elaborate system of underground irrigation pipes. That made gardening possible, and once the garden was under way, he got busy with the trees. I’ve never counted them all, but there must be two or three hundred of them. Cottonwoods and junipers, willows and aspens, pinyons and white oaks. There used to be nothing but yucca and sagebrush growing there. Hector turned it into a little forest. You’ll see it for yourself in a few hours, but for me it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth.

  That’s the last thing I would have expected from him. Hector Mann, horticulturalist.

  He was happy. Probably happier than at any other time in his life, but with that happiness came a total lack of ambition. The only thing that concerned him was taking care of Frieda and tending to his patch of ground. After all he’d been through in the past years, that felt like enough, like more than enough. He was still doing penance, you understand. It’s just that he was no longer trying to destroy himself. Even now, he still talks about those trees as his greatest accomplishment. Better than his films, he says, better than anything else he’s ever done.

  What did they do for money? If things were so tight, how did they manage to get by?

  Frieda had friends in New York, and many of those friends had contacts. They found jobs for her. Illustrating children’s books, drawing for magazines, freelance work of one kind or another. It didn’t bring in much, but it helped keep them afloat.

  She must have had some talent, then.

  We’re talking abou
t Frieda, David, not some upper-crust poseur. She had enormous gifts, a real passion for making art. She once told me that she didn’t think she had the stuff to be a great painter, but then she added that if she hadn’t met Hector when she did, she probably would have spent her life trying to become one. She hasn’t painted in years, but she still draws like a demon. Fluid, sinuous lines, a terrific sense of composition. When Hector started making movies again, she did the storyboards, designed the sets and costumes, and helped establish the look of the films. She was an integral part of the whole enterprise.

  I still don’t understand. They were living this bare-bones existence out in the desert. Where did they come up with the money to start making movies?

  Frieda’s mother died. The estate was worth over three million dollars. Frieda inherited half of it, and the other half went to her brother, Frederick.

  That would account for the financing, wouldn’t it?