The Magic Kingdom

1

light, fine snow was falling on the Magic Kingdom. It covered the streets and rooftops of the amusement province with a thin dry powder. The storm cell was totally unexpected and caught the weathermen on the TV and radio stations in Orlando completely by surprise. It was a freak storm in all its aspects. No one working in the park remembered its like, and though some of the citrus growers in the area could recall similar storms — there’d been one back in 1959, before the park opened, when the temperature had dropped forty degrees in less than seven hours, and the growers had had to arrange sheets over the crowns of the trees and burn smudge pots in an attempt to save their orchards — those had been in deep winter, not late October. In any event, it wasn’t really that cold, the temperature only in the mid-thirties. That the snow didn’t melt at all but collected on the ground, experts attributed to the fact — or speculation, rather — that it must have fallen from a very great height, possibly the stratosphere, pushed through — well, nothing, a sort of stalled, rare, and massive air pocket that just happened to coincide in its dimensions with the boundaries of the park itself.A

Naturally the children were disappointed by the chilly weather, particularly after their surprise when, deplaning in Miami and bundled in heavy coats and scarves more convenient to wear than carry along with their cumbersome burden of toys and parcels, they had been hit full in the face with the warm, humid Florida air, an air — or so it seemed to Janet Order, or so it seemed to Lydia Conscience, or so it seemed to Charles Mudd-Gaddis, who back in those few days when he had been a young man had enjoyed going there — as sultry and earthy and steamy as the air in the big hothouse in Kew Gardens.

By the time they cleared Customs and made their connecting flight and used their transfers in Orlando and been registered in the hotel, it was already late afternoon and, with the time difference, well past their British bedtimes, and they were ordered to their rooms by Mr. Moorhead. So, although it was barely eight o’clock when it began to snow, they were asleep and only noticed the accumulation the following morning.

It looked like a scene shaken up in a crystal.

Snow was falling on Cinderella Castle, snow was falling on Main Street and Liberty Square. It was falling on Adventureland and on Fantasyland. It sheathed the spires on the Haunted Mansion and clung to the umbrellalike strutted sides of Space Mountain and looked grim and oddly bruised against the spiky red slopes of Big Thunder Mountain. It coated the crazed, bulging eyes of Captain Nemo’s surfaced craft and collected as slush in the saucers of the Mad Tea Party and left powdery traces along the big ledges and sills of the Liberty Tree Tavern’s wide leaded windows. Discrete drifts of the stuff were swept against the heavily weathered stockade fences of Frontierland and intensified the gleam of Tomorrowland’s crisp concretes and metals and alloys. A fine powder dusted the notched and scalloped foliage along the banks of the steaming river that bent and flexed, hooked and curled past tropical rain forest and choked veldt, past the Asian jungle and the rich green growth of the Nile Valley. It filled in the pocked surfaces of Spaceship Earth and lent the entire park the look of some new, raw, terrible ice age.

From Top of the World, the hotel’s fifteenth-floor restaurant, Nedra Carp and the children saw it cover the islands in Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon and, beyond, watched horses on a distant ranch roll in the white stuff, startle, leap up, and furiously throw themselves over and over into the strange, cold element, stinging their skin and alarming their great horse hearts.

Nine stories below in Mr. Moorhead’s room, which Benny Maxine had dubbed “the intensive care ward,” the adults watched it fall on the roofs of the longhouses in the Polynesian Village. They watched it snag in the tops of the palm trees and cover the gleaming tracks of the park’s monorails in a flat white.

It’s…it’s a…it’s a mistake, Eddy Bale thought. And, despondent, realized he’d come all this way and raised all their hopes in a futile cause. Because it was almost gone eleven — never mind the freak storm or rapidly rising temperatures through which the flakes fell, losing their icy edge, their crystalline structures collapsing so that what dropped through the air seemed less like weather than some spilled aspect of the jettisoned, not a freak storm at all so much as a mid-course meteorological correction, and never mind either whatever of accidental, unintentioned beauty the storm, by way of the blind bizarre, happened, like paint in milk, to bring about — and the morning of the first day was damn near shot and the children hadn’t even had their breakfasts. The storm not of account here either, though with other children it might have been (the guests caught short, the coffee shops and restaurants filling up, tables, food, tea, and cigarettes lingered over, no one in a hurry, the whole company of displaced persons thrown together like cheery flood victims), an excuse, certainly, but not of account, since what Bale had not taken into consideration (so busy with long-haul logistics, the finances, his caper crew and gleaned, short-listed candidates, his Heathrow-to-Miami arrangements, his Miami-to- Orlando ones, the room assignments worked out in advance) were the sluggish ways of the dying, their awful morning catarrhs and constipations, the wheezed wind of their snarled, tangled breathing, their stalled blood and aches and pains like an actual traffic in their bones, all the low-grade fevers of their stiff, bruised sleep. He’d forgotten Liam’s nausea and given no thought to theirs — mouths stenchy as Beirut, stomachs floating a slick film of morning sickness, the torpid hangover of their medications. They groaned. They stumbled listlessly through their rooms or waited, hung in trance above shoes, buttons, expression denied their faces as if they lived in some lulled climate of withdrawn will.

Ah, it was terrible, Eddy Bale thought hopelessly. Time wasting and the doctor’s hands tied and none of them able to organize anything as simple as breakfast. Only Nedra Carp up and about, standing behind the maid when that woman had let herself in with her passkey just after eight that morning, her surprise, if she was surprised, concealed, taking in himself, the sleeping Colin, and the two boys — the doctor had made the room assignments, Bale drawing Colin, Mudd-Gaddis, and Benny Maxine — with a kind of stoic patience, almost, it struck Eddy, a hotel policy, as if she knew their special circumstances, perhaps. She had whispered Bale a soft apology for having disturbed them and withdrew. But not before Nedra had appeared from behind her back like a surprise, a clutch of the park’s pamphlets and a “Walt Disney World Newsletter” in her hand.

“Will the boys want to go to Mass? I didn’t mention it last night and thought they’d be too worn out to disturb them this morning, but there’s a lovely little chapel off what they call the Interstate Four, and transportation is quite convenient. I caught the brown-flagged bus outside the hotel and showed the driver the I.D. they gave us when we checked in.”

“You’ve been to Mass, Miss Carp?”

“Not proper Mass, Mister Bale — I don’t even know if the chapel’s consecrated — but there was something that looked like an altar, and pews and stained glass, and a priest comes on Sundays.”

“Benny is Jewish. I don’t know Mudd-Gaddis’s affiliations, but I’ll ask if he’s interested.”

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” she said, and handed Bale the newsletter. “There’s this lovely write-up about us in the paper. Quite tasteful, I think.” Eddy read the notice. It was a modest story under a small headline on the back page: ENGLISH CHILDREN WIN TRIP TO VACATION KINGDOM. It recorded all their names and listed the children’s ages but said nothing of the purpose of the trip. Death wasn’t mentioned, disease wasn’t. Mr. Moorhead wasn’t identified as a doctor. “The big news is all about the weather,” Nedra Carp said.

“The weather?” Bale had said, who’d not yet looked out the window and had forgotten the strange inclemency of the previous day.

“Oh, yes,” Nedra Carp said, “there must be three or four inches of snow. The driver — he’s called a ‘cast member,’ everyone who works here is; did you know that, Mister Bale? — was quite concerned he had no chains. Though not a flake’s fallen outside the park.”

Which was before the kids had awakened, Nedra drawing back the curtains and indicating the scene, unveiling and flourishing it like a commissioned portrait. And Bale, already fainthearted, despairing, worrying his — their — losses like a field marshal, awake even before the maid had let herself in, awake and despondent a full hour before first light, already brooding when he’d turned in, and in his dreamless sleep too, hopelessness like a cinder in his eye. (Though Bale was no dummy, though he knew himself well enough, or well enough to recognize his habits, the if-then sequences of his conditioned behavior. And reminded himself, Eddy, watch it; Eddy, don’t let the part stand for the whole. You always go all sad-ass and sourpuss at finish lines and destinations. My God, man, there was a time when it broke your heart just to hear the bus conductor call out your stop. And reminded himself of the time when he’d allowed an unfavorable rate of exchange — so they’d have money in their pockets he’d traded a few quid for pesetas at the duty-free shop at Gatwick — almost to ruin their honeymoon on the Costa Brava. Ginny had tried to reassure him, had told him at least half a dozen times that the 20 percent premium they’d paid for the pesetas was irregular, that the banks in Spain would give them the official rate, but he continued to worry, the pound he’d lost on the deal multiplied in his head by a factor of five for all the pounds and Thomas Cook traveler’s checks they carried on their persons, for all the drafts they would have yet to write on their bank at home to make up for the one-to-five deficiency, his poor, depleted, gutted lolly, their love stake; doing in his head, too, all the complicated projections of suddenly inflated meals, souvenirs, hotel bills, fares, sun creams, tabs at nightclubs, and mad money. Discounting their honeymoon to the Spaniards. And wouldn’t leave the room for more than twenty-four hours — they had ten days — thinking: If we don’t go out they can’t cheat us; thinking: But they already have, a day shot, one already 20 percent less precious day of our ten out the window. Where he saw the sun shining 20 percent brighter than it had even on the brochure, the sea 20 percent bluer, the waves that much higher, too, conspiring by remaining in the room to recover: They had ten days. If they had ten days and the ratio was four to one — five to one? — what would it be, 10 percent of their losses, but they had to make love, they had to sleep, they had to use the room, call it twelve out of the twenty-four hours anyway, so it would be more like 5 percent than 10 percent, and they were still 15 percent in the hole. “There’s this bodega,” he’d told Ginny, “not a block from the hotel. We could get wine, we could get oranges and bread. Maybe they do Spanish sandwiches. We’ll eat in the room tonight. We’ll use the money they stuck us with at Gatwick. We’ll stick them with it.” Ginny accused him of being mean. Meanness had nothing to do with it, he said. And it didn’t. He was no miser. He was a coward of the unaccustomed, raw, all thumbs, greenhorn fear in his bones and blood, in his nails and hair. He explained this to Ginny, his oblique vertigo. “Give me time,” he said. “When the banks open”—they’d arrived too late, the banks had already closed—“and we get our proper rate, I’ll be the last of the big-time spenders for you.” Or choice. Burdened by choice. Overwhelmed. Dreading evenings on the town. Hating to read menus, picking a movie, choosing a play. And craven in taxis if he didn’t know the route. Though forgetting this. Each time forgetting this. Hailing cabs with the authority and assurance of an M.P. until, inside, he felt the greenhorn paranoid temerity again, one eye on the meter, another looking not for landmark, since this would be, for him, terra incognita, but for some discoverable logic of the route, the principles of geography, and all the while listening to the cabby for clues, the chatty-seeming observation, the too-matey question, Bale figuring the hackman figuring him. The both of them lost in Willesden one time, looking for 14 Broalbrond Road because Bale, without actually saying so, had implied he’d been there before, practically old stamping grounds for Eddy, and had, to keep the driver honest, indicated with nothing much more than the mildest sarcastic thrust to his tone that such and such a building, standing, it had to be, since the Great War, must, it seemed to him, at least if they were anywhere near the Willesden he knew, his old stamping grounds, have gone up overnight. And in Johannesburg, with Liam for new aggressive treatment, the same dark curtains descending. In Beijing. Even in Lourdes. Especially in Lourdes. The beginnings of all expeditions the same sad business, jet lag in Eddy an actual disease. But not mean, no miser, no screw or scrimp. Not a lickpenny bone in his body. Abject at waste is all, a cringer for missed opportunity, abused life. And who could say he was wrong? Hadn’t Ginny left him, hadn’t Liam died? Wasn’t he usually disappointed at the theater? Hadn’t oysters Casino given him indigestion?) So he didn’t wake Colin. So he didn’t wake the children.

Who dropped out of sleep into wakefulness — Eddy watching through his lashes — like synchronized swimmers. A contagion of halt beginnings, the stuttered start of a new day. Colin Bible supervising from his rollaway, calling ablutions like stations of the Cross. “Brush your teeth, Benny. Move your bowels.” Then, raising his voice for the little old man: “Your teeth are in the glass by the nightstand, Mudd-Gaddis. Don’t forget to wear your sweater, don’t forget to put on your scarf.” Winking at Eddy past his shut eyes, past his lashes, piercing Bale’s squeezed charade, a laser intrusion. Who wanted nothing more than to be done with it and wondered if it was as late as he hoped. And, looking for grievance, tried to resent the tone the nurse had taken with the little golden-ager, condescension loaded into his voice like a round of ammunition, tried to resent the implied conspiracy of the wink (who was, after all, found out, discovered as a shirker, known for what he was, could be, by a bloody pansy), tried and failed — struck finally only by the difference in their styles, Eddy not so much outraged as intimidated, orientalized by a holdover respect for his elders, the sense he had that Mudd-Gaddis’s freaky years deserved a kind of honor, for — God, what was a bloke like him doing with folks like these? — it was, to Bale, almost as if Charles Mudd-Gaddis was the genuine article, a brittle scroll of a being, some actual ancient. Bale had to bite his lips to keep the deference out of his voice, and once had actually been on the verge of calling him “sir.”

“’Ello, ’ello,” said Benny Maxine, coming out of the bathroom and spotting the snow outside their window. “Coo, la! Look at the weather, will you! What odds on something like that happening?”

The snow had already begun to melt. In the restaurant Nedra Carp and the children, joined by the rest of the adults, tried not to notice as Lydia Conscience, swept in the waves of her morning sickness, gagged bits of dry toast and gouts of grapefruit into her napkin.

“Must have gone down the wrong pipe,” Lydia said, her face red.

“Here, dear,” Rena Morgan said, offering Kleenex she’d slipped from a sleeve.

“Sorry, didn’t think,” Mary Cottle said, snuffing a Gitane into her saucer.

“Smokes like a man, that one,” Benny Maxine whispered to Noah Cloth. “Bet she’s les.”

“Well,” said Mr. Moorhead, again taking up the remarkable topic the children had been discussing when he, Bale, Bible, and the two ladies had first joined Nedra in the restaurant, “I don’t agree.”

“You only mean my disease,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said. He was seated at the head of the table, and it seemed to Eddy that a queer clarity had settled over the strange child. The waitress had handed him the check, and before Eddy could even reach for it, Mudd-Gaddis was already signing the back of the bill. “I want to be fair. What’s fifteen percent of seventy-three dollars and forty-four cents? I can’t think,” he said in his reedy old voice.

“Leave eleven dollars,” Mary Cottle said.

Mudd-Gaddis smiled up at the waitress. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, and turned back to the doctor. “I really haven’t. I’ve never felt special, I’ve never felt marked. Singled out, I mean. What I’ve lived was just”—and here the little geriatric paused, struggled for the exact words—“a life.”

“Just a life, my dear fellow? Just a life?”

“Oh, you mean my symptoms,” Mudd-Gaddis said. “You’re a physician. Symptoms make a difference to you. I’ve my fingerprints, of course, and my eyes are probably their own shade of blue. And I sit on a different bum than the rest, my own special customized behind, but so does everyone.”

“Charles!” Nedra Carp scolded.

But his hearing was bad. He was a little deaf and went on as if there’d been no interruption. “I mean we all know that bit about no two snowflakes, and when we first hear it it’s news of a sort. Of a sort, it is. We think, we think, ‘All this stuff in the world and no two leaves exactly alike? No two thumbs or signatures?’ Make-work for the handwriting experts, the forgery detectives. But what difference does a difference make? A fine distinction? All right.” He sighed. “Those three or four months back when I was a kid, I admit it, I do rather remember imagining I was wrapped in some mantle of the special. But all kids think that. It’s a snare and a delusion.”

He’s wise, Eddy Bale thought. He’s a wise old nipper. Like whoosis, Sam Jaffe, in Lost Horizon. One day I’ll get him alone. I’ll pour out my soul. I’ll ask about Liam, I’ll ask about Ginny.

“What’s Her Royal Highness’s given name?” Moorhead asked suddenly.

“Her Royal Highness?”

“Her Royal Highness. The Queen. What’s the Queen’s given name?”

Mudd-Gaddis seemed confused. There was cloud cover in his eyes. “Wait,” he said, “it’s on the tip of my…on the tip of my…the tip of my…”

“I’ll give odds he don’t get it,” Benny Maxine said.

Moorhead nodded encouragement, but the little pensioner could only look helplessly back at the physician.

It was Goofy and Pluto who broke the tension. They came up to the table clutching a brace of balloons in vaguely articulated paws, a cross, it seemed to Eddy, somewhere on the evolutionary scale between mittens and hands. Goofy grinned at the children behind his amiable overbite. Pluto, his long red tongue lolling like an oversize shoehorn, stared at them in perpetual pant, his tremendous, lidless eyes fixed in agreeable astonishment. Ears hung from the sides of their heads like narrow neckties.

“Hi, there,” Rena Morgan said.

Goofy nodded.

“Ta,” said Noah Cloth, choosing a purple balloon from the bunch like a great grape and taking it in his own modified mitt.

Janet Order patted the crouching Pluto, soft boluses of orange-brown nape in her blue hand. “Does that feel good? Does it? Do you like that, Pluto? Do you, boy?” The doggish creature turned its head, silently offering luxurious swatches of bright coat to her cyanotic nails. “Can you beg? Can you growl for me? Pluto? Can you beg?”

“They’re not allowed to speak,” Nedra Carp said. “It’s a strict rule. I read it in the brochure.”

“What? Like in the Guards, you mean?” Tony Word said.

“Outside Buckingham Palace?” Lydia Conscience said.

“That’s right,” Nedra Carp said. “They’re trained.”

“Ooh,” said Benny Maxine, “there’s a bet. I’ll provoke them!”

“Benny!” Eddy Bale warned.

But it was too late. Maxine had stood up and was already holding Goofy’s nose, round and black as a handball. “Bugger off,” he said. “Go on, beat it.”

The manlike animal — Goofy wore a kind of clothes, a bunting of vest, a signal of trousers, a streamer of shoes, over his body — just stood there. Perhaps he inclined his head a few degrees to the side, but if he had he still stood in a sort of plaintive, lockjaw serenity, his dim good humor stamped on his face, broad, deep and mute as a crocodile’s.

“Think you’re a hard case, do you? All right, all right, but I haven’t shown you my best stuff yet. You ready, dogface?”

The creature brought its head to attention.

“Benny,” Eddy Bale said, “don’t.”

“What’s this then,” Benny Maxine said, and placed his hands on the spiky bristles stuck like splinters along the cusps of its jowls. “What’s this then, quills? Call yourself a dog? You’re a bleedin’ porcupine.”

“I told you they were trained,” Nedra Carp said. “Well done, young man!”

“Cut it out, Benny,” Eddy Bale said.

But the animal stood still, quite as the guardsmen he’d been compared to, his cheerfulness like an indifference.

“Oh, I ain’t done wif you yet, young porcupine,” Benny Maxine said, and laid hands on the tall bent-stovepipe hat pinned to its costume. “Ooh, ’ere’s a doggy bone. What you want to put it on your head for? You hidin’ it from the mutt? Suppose I throw it. Suppose you fetch.”

“I mean it, Benny,” Eddy Bale said. “If you expect to eat with us again, if you don’t want to take the rest of your meals in the room…”

Benny Maxine carefully removed the first pin. “Steady, fellow, this could smart,” he said, withdrawing a long second pin from Goofy’s scalp.

“Benny,” Rena shouted, “if you’re going to be wicked I won’t be your friend.” She began to cry, her fluids and phlegms spilling from their reservoirs.

“’Ere now, ’ere now,” Benny Maxine said, “me and the Goof was only ’avin’ a bit of fun. ’E enjoys it. Don’t you enjoy it, Goof?” Though its expression of stony contentment hadn’t at all changed, the animal seemed to shrink before its tormentor, its amusement subtly bruised, its bearing and demeanor at odds with the gorgeousness of its trusting smile, the Cheshire risibilities of its pleased teeth, almost as if its doggy expectations and hopes were frozen forever two and three beats behind its more clever limbs and more knowing body. Rena Morgan was pulling Kleenex and handkerchiefs from all their cunning places of concealment. “All right,” Benny said, chastened. Carefully he replaced the first hatpin, weaving it through the hat and loose folds of Goofy’s fabric scalp. Rena continued to sniffle and Benny handed over the second dangerous-looking pin to the contented, oddly dignified Goofy, who, though it was his own, bowed, stood to his full height, accepted it as if it were a surrender sword, and withdrew.

“Tongue,” Mudd-Gaddis cried triumphantly. “Tip of my tongue!”

“What is, Charles?” Moorhead asked. “What’s on the tip of your tongue?”

The withered little youth seemed to collapse under the weight of his sweaters. He seemed shawled and slippered.

Benny Maxine looked accusingly at Eddy Bale and Nedra Carp. With Rena Morgan he seemed at once both apologetic and the injured party. “Why’d you want to go and make me lose my bet? What for? Why?”

“You didn’t have a bet,” Mary Cottle said. “No one took you up on one. You had no bet.”

“Sure I did,” he said. “With myself.” And turned from them. And raising his voice, called after the retreating orange figures. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! I bet we don’t die! Not one of us. I bet you. I bet we don’t die!”

Embarrassed, all the adults and children except for Charles, Benny, and Rena, who was tamping at her now tapering mucus as if it were the last drippings about an ice-cream cone, watched Goofy and Pluto distribute their balloons at a far table. They seemed restored, recovered, bright and tawny as mint lions.

“What’s their relationship to each other, do you suppose?” Noah Cloth asked speculatively. “Is Pluto Goofy’s son?”

“Is he its brother?” Tony Word said.

“I think he’s its nephew,” said Lydia Conscience.

“Maybe he’s its dog,” muttered Benny Maxine.

2

It was awkward. Even for Mary Cottle, flexible as a flag, practiced and accommodate to prevailing conditions as a windsock, it was awkward. Accustomed to quirk and anomaly as an old shoe — the expression “hand-in-glove” occurred to her, the expressions “square peg in a round hole,” “finger in the pie” did — to all the oddball contingencies and weird one-in-a- million circumstances. And never caught out, never, not once in all the doomtime she’d put in since her second abortion, since her blood tests came back all stained, the workups and medical reports and dire prophecies which she’d accepted like a knowledgeable Oedipus, a more clever Macbeth, her eyes neither blinded to loopholes nor shut to them—“loophole” occurred to her — since she’d seen them at once, she had, even before the doctor had had a chance to outline her options: tubal ligation, even a hysterectomy. (“Listen,” the surgeon said, “that’s asking over the odds, a hysterectomy is. There isn’t a useful doctor or doctorine in the Kingdom who’d hold the baby on this one. Why, your glory garden’s all sweetness and light, untouched by tare, vetch, or pesky vermin. There ain’t a mite, louse, or flea to trouble it. No earwig or locust, no beetle or bedbug. There are only very delightful faeries at the bottom of your garden, Miss Cottle. Your little polluted eggies aside, the carton is fit as a fiddle. So who would touch you, who would tamper? It’s all ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume’ with these wowser castor-oil artists and Tory flesh tailors.” “Thank you, doctor, for your professional candor.” “Hold the job,” the surgeon said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t perform it.” “No, thank you.” “Besides, it’s preventive medicine. It takes down the odds on cancer.” “No, thank you,” she said, and blew thick fog from her cheap cigarettes in the doctor’s direction. “It’s like having your appendix out. You don’t actually ne—” “No. Thank you.” “So,” the doctor said, “you’re a tough customer. All right, luv, you’re the doctor. If you prefer I tie granny knots in your strings, then granny knots it shall be. Hell, dearie, I’ll do you braids and corn rows, bows and reef knots. I’ll—” “No, thank you.” Which was when he really let loose with his candor. “Go ahead, then,” the physician said, “go get your second opinions. It won’t make any difference. You carry chemistries so rancid you could poison wells. I do assure you, Miss Cottle, any child you have the misfortune to bear could have you up on charges. You can only bear monsters. Your kids would be kraken, children chimeras, and basilisk babes. Mummy to wyvern, to snark, and to sphinx. Generations of vipers, Miss Cottle.” “Is that your professional opinion?” “The pill’s no guarantee against conception. You’re on the pill and have already had a couple of miscarriages, a pair of abortions. We don’t yet understand why some women are less susceptible than others to its effects, but that’s the way it is. I’m afraid you’re one of those who can’t afford to rely on the usual methods of birth control.” “I shan’t.” “If you intend to live the life,” he continued, without hearing her, “of a normal, healthy young woman, you’ll almost certainly have to undergo one of the mildly radical procedures I’ve outlined.” “No, thank, you.” “Oh, there are other surgeons. If you don’t trust me, I’d be happy to put you on to one of them. I should think I might even be able to locate a quite upright man willing to perform the hysterectomy. I mean, once he knows the circumstances.…” “There’ll be no hysterectomy, there’ll be no procedures.” “You know,” he said, “I was having you on with that bit about those knots I was going to tie. It’s a simple thing, really. I was teasing to cheer you up.” “I know that.” “So then,” he said, “what’s your decision? I don’t mean to rush you, but the sooner we do something about all this the sooner you’ll be able to resume your normal sexual activities.” “I told you,” she said, “there will be no procedures.” The surgeon studied her. “Then I’m afraid I shall certainly have to inform the authorities,” he said quietly. “It’s a crime in this country willfully to bring a child into the world when it’s known long enough in advance of its birth that it would suffer multiple and severe physical and mental disorders.”) And the other loophole too. The one the surgeon hadn’t mentioned. That she could have it off with men who were sterile. With men with vasectomies, even with men who were impotent, men with implants, with little rubber bulbs they squeezed in their palms to fill up their spurious erections with fluids, actually coming, ejaculating, shooting fluids, douche water, perfume, actual champagne, up her parts. She would have none of it. Hating arrangements, she would make none. Men lied. If you held out, if you told them you couldn’t have children, if you explained, they could do you a song and dance, admit to sterility, vasectomy, even to impotence, even to implants, excusing themselves to show up next time with a syringe, the makeshift rubber tubing broken off from enema bags, bicycle pumps, doucheworks, sphygmomanometers, machineries from the chemist. She hated subterfuge, she hated being courted. The burdensome, elaborate, social choreographies embarrassed and depressed her. Gifts, flowers, love letters, telephone calls taken in bed late at night, home from a date, even the engagement ring her fiancé had given her. (And had agreed to marry him, to move in with him, and even been the one to suggest this, if only to get him to call off the courtship.) Because she was modest, refined, lustrate, nice. Because she was natty, spruce, spic-and-span. Because she was always morally well turned out. Pure, discreet, demure. Because she was picky, discriminating, dainty, shocked. Even squeamish, even shy. Because she had this honed sense of occasion, of nuance and nicety. Because she drew the line and split the hair. Because she was puritanical. Because she was tasteful. Because she was good. Because, finally, she was fastidious. This fastidious whack-off artist.

So of course it was awkward. Because she needed her relief — the strongest nicotines and harshest blends were almost useless to her now — and would, had she known she was to have been assigned three roommates — Moorhead had put her in 629 with Nedra Carp, Lydia, and Rena — willingly have paid for a single. (Of course her cigarettes were useless. With Rena Morgan around she didn’t dare light one. The cystic fibrotic was even more sensitive to smoke, however mild, than Janet Order and was sent off into spasms of respiratory seizure if someone so much as struck a match within ten feet of her. Even now she toyed with the idea of taking a room of her own, on a different floor perhaps, a place where she could go off by herself if the strain became too great. And hesitated only because that would have been an arrangement.) Or brought along the three little steel balls she’d purchased at the sex shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. (Though she hadn’t used them — a most hideous arrangement — except that one time, she still had them about somewhere, probably in her closet with the gifts her fiancé had given her. She had fit them between her legs, inserting them, deep, high up — the instructions had indicated that for best results she consult her gynecologist, but of course she’d been too discreet to do anything like that, and, though she played with the notion of going back to the smart-ass surgeon to teach him a thing or two about radical procedures, in the end, expert as she was, familiar as she was with her own sweet, rich territories, she decided to do it herself — and went about her apartment in a state of unrelieved ecstasy, her orgasms triggered by her own footsteps. Seven paces across the lounge to the geraniums in the flower pot on the window ledge and wow, oh God, oh, oh, oh Christ, oh, o, o, ooh! A few steps to the fridge in the kitchen to get out some veggies for supper and ooh, ooh, ahh, ahh, ah, mnn, mnnnn, ahhh, ah, ah, mnnnnnhnhuhh! A short walk to the W.C. to wash her hands before dinner and she had to stuff her fists into her mouth to modulate her cries and yelps. No way for a nice, modest, refined, pure, natty, demure and dainty, spruce and lustrate lady like herself to behave.) So she’d left them at home. Along with the vibrator, neutrally enough shaped except for its roundish, bluntish tip, but covered in a tight, almost fleshlike plastic a little like the electrical wire on her stereo — on the whole Mary rather disapproved of music, it being itself something of an arrangement — and picked up in that same sex shop on that same day on Shaftesbury Avenue when she’d purchased the little stainless steel perpetual orgasm machine, ignoring the glances of the men — there were no other lone women in the shop — and genuinely indifferent to the clerk’s sly leer, his callous, unprofessional remark—“Will madam be wanting these wrapped?”—handling him with that same brash refinement with which she’d almost undone the surgeon, still controlled, still prim even after his next remark, telling him, “If I were as ballsy as you seem to think I am, I wouldn’t really need this shit, would I?” Used once and abandoned, leaving it home, perhaps in that same closet with the fiancé’s porcelain presents (because shame, though she felt no shame, would be an arrangement too and lead to other arrangements — doing away with the “evidence,” disguising it, dismantling it, burying it a piece at a time in the rubbish so even the dustman wouldn’t recognize it). Her reasons this time having nothing to do with unrelieved ecstasy, the propriety of a bounded pleasure, or even the slight uneasiness she felt about the possibility of becoming wet enough and thrusting it deep enough actually to electrocute herself. No. It was that little arrangement of the manufacturer, that deference to fantasy. It was the lifelike skin. She needed relief, not fantasy. (She thought of nothing when she masturbated, nothing, her attention only on the mechanics of the thing or, in a tight spot like this one now, of strategies, planning ahead, arrangements.) Because, finally, she was high-strung and, like anyone who drills deportment like intaglio into her character, was subject to nerves, spells, jitters, all the gooseflesh of the hair, all the alarmist knee-knock of scene, flap and disorder. Valium only made her sleepy. Music she disapproved of. Reading took too long to get into and, in any event, was impractical on the wards. Needlepoint, cooking, and the crafts had their own built- in liabilities. Only orgasm calmed her, lined up the iron filings — this is how she thought of it, as tiny, piercing shrapnel — of her scattered spirit like a powerful magnet, restored her, and, wonderfully, could hold her for hours. So flexible Mary Cottle found herself climbing the walls who, in emergency, could bring herself off in under two minutes. (Because it wasn’t fulfillment she needed any more than fantasy. Duration meant nothing to her, multiple orgasms didn’t, and were incapable of extending her self-induced relief by as much as five minutes. This by empirical evidence. She’d needed to know. She’d experimented. Withdrawal had been an experiment, the occasional, deliberately willed fantasy, and other clever white noises of deflection and deferral. The steel balls were an experiment, the vibrator was.)

The monorail made its steady slot-car yardage. There’d been a balls-up. The Cottle woman had vanished, and now Colin Bible was bringing the boys back to the hotel by himself. After the rapid melt, in its way quite as astonishing as the freak snowstorm (and practically no trace of moisture left, as burned off as fog, as over and done as morning dew), there’d been a palpable rise in all their spirits. Even Moorhead, rubbing his hands (and thinking of Jews, anxious to be out among them), had seemed overcome by a pumped and racing enthusiasm that Colin (who’d nursed for the man, who’d followed his orders, who’d attended his low-keyed talks about the special needs of dying tykes — Moorhead’s own odd and discrepant term — and who felt without particularly liking him a rapport that was almost a kind of affection that people of different castes in related fields often have for each other) had never seen. The doctor had practically burst into lecture.

“We’re foreigners in a foreign land here, and it’s only proper we begin by paying our respects to our hosts. That’s what all those tourists are about tramping up and down Whitehall, you know. Taking each other’s photographs with Parliament in the background and nosing out Number Ten. This isn’t a seat of government, of course, but I’ve been studying the guides and I should say we ought to begin on Main Street, U.S.A.”

Which the children had loved, which they all had. Falling in at once with the cobbled ambiance of the place, its pretty High Street shops and brisk Victorian roofs, touched by the gold-lettered nimbuses of the names in the second-story windows, by the horse-drawn trams and open double-deck buses, trim as sunlight, by the gaslights and the bandbox atmospherics of its boater feel, its emporiums and ice-cream parlors and all the sweet, from-scratch, holiday aromatics of its candy treasuries. They were overwhelmed by nostalgia, even the youngest, by the vague and unspoken consanguine textures of its British- seaside-resort equivalencies. They moved briskly, swept along by that boater feel and bunting mode, almost sensing wind at their backs, almost smelling taffy, almost sniffing salt. This could be Blackpool, some thought. This could be Brighton, thought others.

They’d enjoyed, too, the Hall of Presidents, sitting politely through the brief historical film that preceded the main show, even Mudd-Gaddis’s aged cynicism in abeyance, even Benny Maxine’s cultivated scorn suspended. “Shh,” said Nedra. “Hush.” Though she needn’t have bothered. No one was making very much noise. For one thing, they were too comfortable, sitting back in the deep, soft seats, breathing the air conditioning like oxygen, all of them, the sick and the well, in that perfectly balanced state of absorption and anticipation, the easy doldrums that surround an entertainment and seem to fill time and make even the preparations and directions, soft warnings, and signals between the ushers and guides an organic part of the proceedings, as pleasant to watch, as interesting to overhear, as anything that follows, other people’s work an extension of the performance.

Yet none was prepared when the patriotic film ended and the curtains rose on the automatons, the curiously detailed machines that were at once as stiff and fidgety as people caught in some fret of life, the shuffling and bitten-back coughs of a group photograph, say, a public ceremony.

“They’re these androids,” Nedra Carp said in a whisper. “They’re not real.”

“Actors,” Tony Word said.

“They’re actors,” Noah Cloth conceded, “but like that frog actor you see on the telly they got over in France who plays like he’s a machine.”

“But there must be forty of them up there,” Lydia Conscience said.

“Sure,” Benny Maxine said, “it’s a chorus line.”

“They’re robots. I think so,” Janet Order said.

“They’re these special computers,” Rena Morgan said.

“They’re real,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said with all the authority of his years.

“They’re real? They’re real?” Benny challenged. “Don’t you read the papers, don’t you keep up? That one’s Ronald Reagan. There’s Nixon, there’s Carter. You think there’s this band of statesmen, this troupe of artiste presidents engaged in theatrical entertainments?”

“They’re real,” Mudd-Gaddis repeated.

“Sure, Grandpa,” Benny said, “they went all out.”

And when Lincoln began speaking, Colin Bible could only feel shame for his friend back in England, for the pale dead figures in the pale dead waxworks, for all the pale unresurrected heroes and villains here mocked.

Remarkable anatomical detail, thought Mr. Moorhead. But how could anyone ever have thought that Roosevelt was Jewish, I wonder?

Let them wonder, thought Eddy Bale.

“They’re not real,” Colin Bible said, choking back his sob, as taken with the fret of life as any of the machinery on the stage. And moved, terribly moved. He never told me anything about this, Colin thought. He never told me because he loves me. The nit wanted me to be proud of him. And there, in the Hall of Presidents, in the solemn silence that had replaced the quiet debate that had buzzed throughout the auditorium, Colin was. Proud of being loved like that. He’d say nothing to Colin. He wouldn’t mention the matter. And if Colin brought it up he’d make a joke. “What, them?” he’d say. “Circuits and circuitry. They were put together by electricians. They were turned out by Japanese,” he would reassure him.

And even Eddy Bale, breathing easy because they’d come through the first morning and a piece of the first afternoon. They were doing it properly. Even lunch had been easy, a piece, thought Bale cheerfully, of cake. Moorhead had found a sort of juice bar, and the children had snacked on the juices of fresh fruits and vegetables. Two or three had had yogurt. So Bale, whatever it was that made him reluctant and kept him indoors, the old tourist misgivings that almost ruined his and Ginny’s honeymoon on the Costa Brava and made him sit upright in cabs, his greenhorn temerity stilled, his sucker-oriented agoraphobia, actually — though Mr. Moorhead by simple dint of status outranked him, Eddy was still the leader of this expedition — made a decision. They would split up. It made more sense. More bang for the buck, as the Americans put it. (As Bale did. Putting “as the Americans put it” before even “more bang for the buck,” drawing them in not with the slang so much as the Britishism, drawing them in, consolidating and federating them, reminding them in this southerly latitude on this thick spit of land if not who they were then at least where they were from.)

So Bale delegates Mary and Colin to lead Charles, Tony, Noah, and Ben to the Haunted Mansion. Which, it turns out, is not all that much unlike one of the lesser stately homes of England, more particularly Mr. Moorhead’s. It is, surprisingly, the wizened little in-and-out memory-damaged Charles Mudd- Gaddis who points this out to the rest of them.

“It’s the very place,” Benny Maxine said.

“Well, not the very place,” Colin Bible said.

“Awfully like,” said Noah Cloth and out of habit held up a fingernail to bite which had been amputated along with the phantom finger it had grown from seven months before.

“It’s sort of eighteenth-century,” Mary Cottle said, “but it’s Dutch.”

“Mister Moorhead is Dutch,” Tony Word said.

“Mister Moorhead is? How would you know something like that?” Colin asked.

“Well, he told me,” Tony Word said. “That one time we went there.”

“They were testing us,” Benny Maxine said. “To see if we were compatible.”

“Compatible?” Noah Cloth said.

“If we could get along,” Benny said. “Be good companions.”

“And he showed me these wooden shoes. That he said were his great-grandad’s.”

“We’re compatible,” Mudd-Gaddis cackled.

“Only I was afraid to touch them,” said Tony Word.

“We’re compatible,” said Mudd-Gaddis, who was enjoying a respite, a period of lucidity.

“There could have been splinters.”

“We’re compatible. We’re children who die,” said Mudd- Gaddis in his hoarse, old-man’s wheeze.

When Noah begins to cry, when Tony does. And Charles Mudd-Gaddis, his lucidity shining, his head clear as crystal, seeing the bright, sharp angles on causes, effects; restored, it could be, to his true, rightful age, seeing everything, even that what he feels now, at this minute, the perfectly furnished ripeness of his eight seasoned years, might only be a trick; his sluiced and dancing chemicals misfiring, some neurological overload, some snapped and brittle synapse, his remission only some long-shot bit of coincident, collusive senescence, quite suddenly rips off his wig and hurls it to the ground. “Yellow,” he snarls. “I had brown hair. My hair was brown!” And begins to stamp on it. Frightened Maxine reaching out to calm him, restore him, unaware of course that he is already restored, that his compatible, furious friend, kicking at the ripped yellow hair, tromping it, wiping his shoes on it as though it were a mat, stumbling on it in his aged, broken gait, is beyond reassurance.

“This won’t do, old chap,” Benny says, taking his arm. “No, this won’t do at all. Come on, old boy. Come on, old fellow. This really won’t do. Tell him, Miss Cottle,” Benny says, imploring the woman, tears flowing now from his own eyes. “Please, Miss Cottle, can’t you do something?”

Whose right hand covers her mouth in shock, in horror, whose left already clutches her crotch, palming a handful of fabric there, Colin Bible sees, as if she’s had an accident.

They were quickly surrounded by cast members. (Mary Cottle, despising scenes as much as arrangements, thinking: They’d have come anyway. Having our number. They’d have come anyway. Something telltale about us even in repose. They’d have come anyway.)

The one in the black mourner’s band — it’s the Haunted Mansion — kindly offers to take them to the front of the line. While a handsome, well-built young man retrieves Mudd-Gaddis’s wig and, brushing it off, hands it to Colin, who, Mary Cottle observes, seems touched by the gesture. A girl affectionately pats Charles’s bald little head and, lifting him up, bypasses the people standing in line and carries him on her shoulders to a side door while the others follow, hustled along by the remaining cast members, openly winking, not at each other but at the children, at the two adults, flashing secret agreement, doling these out somehow — the winks — managing the delicate choreography of their high-sign arrangements so that no one is winked at twice by the same person or is even observed to have winked. Except that Mary Cottle sees the young man who had handed Colin Charles’s hairpiece wink at Colin and Colin return it, giving as good as he got, better. She sees the kid flush. I’m admired, Colin thinks guiltily. In a country where AIDS is rampant.

Inside, they stand, could be, along the building’s stitching, shabby as a kitchen in a posh restaurant, as anything backstage or where workers gather to punch out by time clocks. They can hear a babble of recordings, just make out the winding, canted, interlocking paths, vaguely like baggage carrousels in airports, of other tour groups, the black, open trains that carry them. They can see periodic flashes of special effects like a kind of heat lightning, like phosphorent bursts of insect. Afterimage burns along their retinas like wick: the laser bombardments, the fireball theatrics of warfare, all the burnt-out guttering torches and candles and tapers of haunted radiance.

The fellow in the armband signals a girl standing by a control board, who presses a button that halts the tour. She takes a microphone down from the wall. “We have to stop now to take on some ’late’”—she pauses, lowers a voice charged with joke menace—“visitors.” “Visitors” is pronounced like a question.

The machinery grinds down — it’s as if some solemn, tender armistice is taking place — and Colin, Mary, and the boys are helped in the dark into an empty gondola, are settled into seats that have some sort of built-in stereo arrangement. They begin their tour. Which is rather enhanced than otherwise — something has been done to the air in here, a tampered humidity like the wet, faint chill of a catacomb — by their having been plucked from the bright sunlight into the damp darkness.

Their faces move against cobwebs, break them like phantom finishers in a phantom race. The same raven seems to appear over and over. Resisting death, a suit of armor, its old fierce metals sweating, its hinges groaning, transcends rust, swells into life. The eyes of night creatures blink on the wallpaper. A teapot pours a poisoned tea. Specters, translucent as the tea, move in the air like laundry. A living woman is entombed in a crystal ball. All about them they can hear the wails of the dead, insistent and hopeless as the demands of beggars. It’s this note, the noise of desperate petition, that causes the children more trouble than the conventional props of death: the bats, the coffins set out like furniture. They’re still upset. Mary Cottle senses it; Colin Bible, still seeing the afterimage of the twenty-year-old boy who’d winked at him, who’d touched his hand a fraction of a section longer than he was required to when he’d handed him Charles’s wig, does.

“They’re trying to say something,” Noah Cloth whispers to his companion, Tony Word. “What is it, you think, they’re trying to say?”

“Dunno. It’s like the lowing of cattle.” Both boys shudder.

Only Charles Mudd-Gaddis’s trapped, soft screams go almost unheard among these professional spookhouse shrieks and cries of actors, the funhouse arias of the dead. If the others are upset, Mudd-Gaddis is terrified; if they hear him at all they mistake the sound for the low-priority complaint of the infant dead. He has been whimpering like this since the strong tall girl had raised him to her shoulders and carried him into the mansion, and who sits beside him now, holding his hand, mindlessly squeezing his arthritic joints, amiably mashing them while she makes her own soft noises at him, noises which he not only cannot hear but which he will not listen to.

Because, in darkness, his ancient eyes are almost blind; and outdoors was riding — his back to them, too — so high up on the big girl’s shoulders he dared not look down, did not pick up, and would not have accepted if he had, the hale fellow, semaphore reassurances of the cast members. Indeed, he is barely aware that the girl who sits beside him now is the same young woman who had swooped down on him in his rage and lifted him from the ground he had been stamping on and kicking at only seconds before, raised him, removed him from earth, torn him off that lying, hideous yellow wig he had been trying to muddy back to the brown he remembered. He is not in remission now, not enjoying a lucid moment, is uncertain, for that matter, where he is, and has the sense only that he’s somewhere underground, riding along a narrow-gauge track in a coal mine, perhaps, or being pulled on a sled, though he’s not cold, through the six-months’ midnight of the Arctic Circle. He is not in remission, does not enjoy the crystal clarifics of only twenty minutes before — though he remembers all that clearly enough, in perfect detail, in fact, not a single thing slipped or blurred, not one, even the at once humiliating and infuriating business of the wig as clear to him as if it happened years ago — and recalls the day he was seven years old. His whimpers a sort of nostalgia, his memory of the day so sharp and poignant the whimper becomes a snuffling, the snuffling a sob, the sob a cry.

“Oh, my lost youth!” he cries.

“Hush, cutie,” the girl beside him says, “the tour’s almost done. Another two minutes.”

Charles Mudd-Gaddis begins to scream. Colin, the children, Mary, are frightened. He screams. He screams and screams.

“Another two minutes,” the big girl says. “Two minutes. I promise.”

He screams.

“Stat!” shouts the girl to cast members behind the scenes. Charles knows the word. Mary, Colin, all the children do. It is the code word for emergencies in hospitals. Mary, Colin, and the kids think something has happened to Charles. “Stat! Stat!” the girl shouts. The gondola stops abruptly.

“Hey!” a tourist jokes. “Whiplash!”

Cast members rush up with flashlights.

“What is it?”

“What’s happened?”

“I think he’s scared of the dark,” the girl says.

Colin starts to climb over the seats to get to Charles.

“Please don’t do that, sir. Please sit down. Arlene’s got the boy.”

“He’s—”

“I’m going to have to ask you to sit down, sir. For your own safety. The little boy will be fine. We’re going to evacuate him.”

“He moves like he’s a thousand,” Benny Maxine says. “He’ll fall and break his hip in the dark.”

“There’s an ample catwalk. He’ll be all right.”

All have scrambled out of the car; the children are led away by solicitous cast members. It’s as if they’re being guided through tear gas. Then lights come on through the Haunted Mansion like the stark auxiliary lights in theaters and hospitals, like emergency lights in subway cars. Props fade, patterns disappear from the bare canvas walls, the specters are snuffed out, the crystal ball is empty, the bats’ eyes on the wallpaper are tiny light bulbs, the puppet teapot spills a ribbon of twisted, colored cellophane, the coffins and old chests seem only a reliable wood, the ravens some hinged taxidermy, the illusionary space they have been traveling through a sort of warehouse. Visitors to the mansion groan.

“Just look at this place,” Noah Cloth grumbles. “I bet there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“I guess not,” Tony Word agrees dispiritedly.

“Dying blokes like us ain’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell,” Benny Maxine says, moving along the pavement beside the curving tracks, the baffled architecture, up the trace inclines and down the indifferent slopes which, in the dark, had seemed so formidable.

“There’s probably no such place as Hell,” Noah says.

“No,” says Tony Word.

“No,” says Benny Maxine, “it’s just an expression.”

“Like Heaven.”

“Let’s don’t tell the girls,” Benny says.

And the three boys dissolve in tears.

Charles Mudd-Gaddis was inconsolable.

So was Mary Cottle, who, practically bleeding from the nerves by this time, her mile-high tensions actually giving her a sort of pain, managed to shake Colin, who received the four children at the same door through which they’d been admitted, accepting them like prisoners formally surrendered by the good- looking attendant who’d dusted off the boy’s blond wig and handed it to the male nurse (“Still got the little fellow’s yellow hat, Dad?” “Oh, I’m not their dad.” “No?” “I’m just the nurse who travels with them.” “Is that so?” “I’m nobody’s dad.” “Not the daddy type?” “Never have been, never will be.” “Where you staying?” “At the Contemporary.” “Swell health club at the Contemporary. You ought to check it out.” “Maybe I will”), and extricated herself from the crowd on the ramp at the Transportation and Ticket Center, using it as a shield and positioning herself behind a lone gate on the platform, and now sits by herself in the dark, empty car on the same monorail on which Colin Bible and the four boys ride, her skirt hiked above her knees, her hand down in her panties and two fingers on her dry clit, pulling the till-now dependable flesh, ringing it like a bell, but distracted, her mind not quite blank this time (which, frankly, her body abandoned to a merely mechanical friction had always been an ally in this business) but filled with a whole catalogue of vagrant images (rather, she thinks, like the Haunted Mansion itself), from the could-be-trouble exchange between Colin and the tall, good-looking attendant to, for example, the skirt, the dresses she’s packed, how proud she is of what can only have been a keen sense of her own character, a trained forethought, anticipating, she supposed, that there would be scenes, that there’d have to be, and so eschewing pants suits (though she had known that these, in all likelihood, would be the standard mode of dress, as indeed, they quite turned out to be) for the skirts and dresses which would be more convenient in emergency. So on the one hand — even the idiom distracts her, takes her still further from that state of mind, not desire, not lust, but merely the bleeding nerves, the mile-high tensions, the sort of pain — pleased, but on the other bothered, the absence of soap and water, for another example, being a damned nuisance just now, most inconvenient, for if she brings herself off or, for that matter, even if she doesn’t, it won’t do to touch any of the children without first washing her hands, so she’ll have to continue to hide from them, duck into the Ladies’, though none of this constitutes even a fraction of her real nervousness, for if she is able to bring herself off, why, she’ll be cool as a cucumber, able to cope, but she’s not so sure now she will. For one thing she hadn’t paid close enough attention on the way out, can’t recall how long it takes to get to the hotel, whether there’s a stop. There is, at the Polynesian Village Resort Hotel, and though more people get off the monorail there than on, and absolutely no one comes into her car, the doors automatically open and Mary is forced to do some very fancy cape work with the skirt — thank God she’s wearing one, otherwise she’d have had to stand, she’d never be able to get the pants up over her hips in time without becoming something of another attraction at Disney World, at least for the people passing by on the station platform — and now she’s quite sure it’s clear sailing back to their hotel and she might just be able to make it if only the recorded voices on the car’s loudspeaker that keeps nattering on about Disney and the “imagineers” who built this place would just shut up for a minute, and if only she could get that damned vision of Colin Bible out of her head. The silly sod. The poof nurse would have to go making googoo eyes at the kid from the Haunted Mansion. Blast people who make scenes, she thinks.

As the train pulls into the big bright interior of the Contemporary Resort Hotel. And the doors open. And Mary Cottle, coming up empty, hastily lowers her skirt over her bare thighs and her awry panties and leaves the monorail.

Pretending to be searching for something she’s dropped, she crouches behind the wide-flung doors and waits until Colin and the kids clear the platform, are out of sight.

Then she goes down to the desk and rents that room.

3

dunno,” Colin Bible said. “I dunno what happened. Maybe he’s bent.”I

“He’s a little kid. He was spooked. He was afraid of the ghosts,” Bale said.

“It was before we ever got inside. It was before he ever even seen any ghosts. We was still in the queue.”

“You waited in the queue?”

“They don’t want special treatment, Mister Bale.”

“Eddy,” Eddy said.

“Jeez, ‘Eddy’s’ hard, Mister Bale. No disrespect, but ‘Eddy’s’ hard for me. You’ve got to remember that Liam was my patient.”

“You don’t think I remember that?”

“I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“Nonsense.”

“I’ve hurt your feelings. It was all right to call Liam by his first name. He was my patient but he was a kid. It’s just not on to go all intimate with a patient’s family. You can ask Mister Moorhead regarding the ethicals of all this.”

“Mary Cottle calls me Eddy.”

“If Liam had lived it’d be a different story.”

“Oh? Yes?”

“If Liam had lived, you, me, and your missus could have gone off to the boozer, bought pints all around, tossed darts into the cork, and toasted one another’s health. It’d’ve been, ‘Here’s to your health, Colin.’ And turn and turn about I’d have picked up my mug and replied, ‘And ’ere’s to your own, Eddy!’ And Liam’s, of course. And Ginny’s — Mrs. Bale as was. If Liam had lived.”

“We could have been mates? If Liam had lived?”

“We’d have come through something important, don’t you see.

“And of course, if Liam had lived, you’d have had no reason to keep your distance.”

“I don’t think of it as a question of distance, Mister Bale.”

“Don’t you? You know, Colin, I was rather surprised you let me recruit you on this enterprise. I should have thought you could have made more money if you’d stayed on in England.”

“I’m paid well enough. Higher than regular.”

“Still,” Eddy said.

“What, didn’t you know that?”

“Higher than higher than regular,” Eddy said.

“Anyways, I wouldn’t want you to think I’m here for the money. These kids, these kids are condemned and convicted. They’ve been found guilty. Mister Bale. They’ve been put on the index. There’s a price on their heads. I’m a nurse. It’s my professional duty. Still, if my friend hadn’t given his blessing I shouldn’t have come.”

“Yes,” Eddy said, “it’s your ‘friend’ we’ve been talking about.”

Which was when Eddy thought the now flushed, embarrassed, and unforgiven man seemed to lose his temper. Colin glared at him and Bale thought, Won’t call me Eddy but’d strangle me easily enough. Though when he spoke, Colin’s voice was meek, the put-upon tones of patient, humbled injury muffling it like carpet, heavy drapes. “I’m not aware,” he said, “that we’ve ever discussed my friend, Mister Bale.”

“Liam brought him up,” Bale said.

“Liam? Liam did?”

“Oh, please,” Eddy said, “I saw you hugging at Heathrow. I know all about it. How you promised my son he’d go into the waxworks when he died.”

“I was cheering him up.”

“Liam didn’t believe you were cheering him up. Liam thought you meant every word. He believed it on his deathbed.”

“He didn’t seem a religious boy, our Liam. I was sounding him out like, Mister Bale. He seemed to take to the notion, so I encouraged him to believe I could arrange it.”

“What? To think he could be turned into some great wickless candle?”

“Candle? Candle? We’re talking about art, Mister Bale. That’s art what my friend does.”

“Oh, your friend again! That gave you his blessing. That told you, ‘Certainly, Colin. Go for it, darling. Take the Brownie along, why don’t you? Maybe we can get all of them in the picture.’”

“We could!” Colin snapped. “We never discussed it but we could! No one stands in the way of art. Oh, I don’t say what you’re doing isn’t well meant, even heroic in some proper charlie sort of way, but if it’s all to end up in the boneyard what difference does it make?”

“It calls attention.”

“And wax doesn’t? Wax doesn’t call attention?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Why’d you hire me? Why’d you hire me then, you think I’m so bloody ridiculous?”

“Because mugs have no control,” Bale said calmly. “Because sooner or later they get in over their heads. They become outrageous.”

“Outrageous?”

“Outrageous. Oh, yes. Because sooner or later they’re thinking Great Train Robbery. They’re dreaming about tunneling under Lloyd’s. They have Old Lady of Threadneedle Street schemes and hold opinions about Richard III, the babes in the Tower.”

“You’ve been to the Madame’s then?”

“They’re thinking Madame Tussaud’s! Oh, yes, outrageous. Some dreadful crèche of the infant dead. Because I thought you might pull something like this, that’s why. That if you had enough rope…You never gave a thought to bad taste, did you? Or turned your mind to public opinion, invasion of privacy, the terrible consequences of going too far?”

“Not a bit of it,” Colin Bible said. “Just as you never thought about what it means to be dead.”

“What? What does it mean, Colin?”

“It means you’ve no longer any say in the matter,” Colin Bible said. “According to my friend, who happens to be an expert in this particular area, it means public domain, Mister Bale.”

“Eddy,” Eddy Bale said.

Who was astonished but not displeased to be speaking as he’d meant to speak back in England, warning them away from their private fiddles, his quiet caper heart at last unburdened. Sorry only that it had to be Colin Bible, whom he liked and trusted more than the others, who took the brunt of his wild charges. Seeing he had set a fire under the man.

Then I am mad, he thought sadly.

Colin certainly was. Furious. All he’d meant was to take Bale aside and cite the woman’s dereliction. Getting separated like that was unforgivable. He wanted it on the record. Now he couldn’t remember whether they’d even spoken of it. And he was fond of Eddy. How had they gotten into such a foofaraw? However, they were in it. The man had implied just awful things about his friend. Poor Colin, Colin thought. And not without a blast of the same shame, stricken, embarrassed for his fuddy- duddy technology, he’d felt earlier that day in the Hall of Presidents when Lincoln had begun to speak. And felt again, only this time with the full force of an idea which earlier had been only the vaguest of notions and was to its implications and consequences what loose change in one’s pocket might be to an idea of money, say. Now it was almost fully formed, beginning to take shape even as he’d tried to deflect Bale’s wild charges, and still firming up, though what he was going to do already clear enough for him to begin to take the first dreadful steps.

Because she shared a room with them, Nedra Carp was partial to Lydia Conscience and Rena Morgan. If this was unfair to the rest of the children, if it excluded the boys or put a distance between Janet Order and herself, why, then, it couldn’t be helped. It would have been a defiance of her nanny heart otherwise. A nanny — she could not, in conscience, endorse the justice of this, only vouch for it; it seemed an instinct, almost a condition, some less-than-neutral magnetism of the blood that drew her loyalties and turned her into some patriot of the propinquitous that carried with it all the convenient obligations of hired-hand love — she felt herself constitutionally unable (and disinclined, too) not so much of assuming responsibility — she was responsible by nature and would probably have put herself at risk without a second thought, throwing herself into burning buildings and heavy seas, though she feared fire above all else and was not a strong swimmer, if a young life were at stake — for the welfare of children not in her charge, as unable to work up any affection that had not actually been bought and paid for. It was a flaw in her character. She understood and even chided herself for this. She even tried to be better but knew she was incapable of an unauthorized love. What bothered her even more were her aversions, her view of other children, even these children — the boys, Janet Order — as threats and rivals, something “other” in them that put her off and made her uneasy, queasy, squeamish: rather, she thought, like some hungry, willful orthodox offered proscribed food. Objectively, she disapproved of this aspect of her character. She was nothing if not objective, professional objectivity being her strong suit, her stock in trade, and was prepared not only to do the fair thing but to perceive it, which was not always easy (turns, for example; not whose turn, necessarily, which was usually only a matter of simple reckoning, but the quality of a turn, too, its special boons or built-in deficiencies: if the wind was down and refused the kite, if the one pushing the swing was a slacker, if a child didn’t fully understand the terms of a game; or trades: whether fraud was intended, whether a toy was damaged by abuse, accident, or through some basic defect in its construction; settling all manner of arguments and disputes right down to the thorny question of taste itself: what to do, for instance, if only yellow balloons remained to be distributed; who should get the caramel, who must take the toffee) and was, because she dealt with children who didn’t have her fine perceptions and sensibilities and were without skill in weighing evidence or making her surgical distinctions, who had, in fact, nothing but their own supercharged egos to judge by and go on, and whose blind, barbaric self-interest lived in them like a weight in dice and was sometimes, even for Nedra, impossible, a judgment call. And not just her aversion to children who did not come under her immediate purview. Mary Cottle seemed a nice enough young woman — though Nedra could not have been more than four or five years older than Mary and quite possibly may even have been the same age, it was Nedra, in her capacity as nanny, who willingly took it upon herself to assume the seniority — yet to Nedra, Mary was just one more “other.” Though she could hardly have meant “just” since she did not suffer others all that lightly. The fact was that Mary Cottle’s presence in the room was nothing less than an affront. Nedra couldn’t help it and even felt bad about her squeamish antipathies and unreasonable inimicals, but facts were facts. She was put off by the sight of the woman’s toothbrush in the bathroom they shared, by the razor she used to shave her legs, the stench of her cigarettes, the hair in her comb, her nightgown on the hook on the back of the bathroom door, the sight of her soiled, unmade bed, the sound of her breathing when she’d fallen asleep. And if it was true what the children were saying, that Miss Cottle had become separated from Colin Bible and the youngsters on the way back to the hotel…? Dereliction of duty made Nedra’s skin crawl.

She knew her impatience was hardly the Mary Poppins ideal, but it did not do to betray one’s character. She admitted when she was wrong. She was wrong in this instance. She admitted when she was wrong but she was all-forgiving. All right, she did play favorites, but she could have played God, come, were it required of her, to terrible determinations — who should live, who should die — and come to them, moreover, according to the same sound principles that permitted her to decide who should get the caramel, who must take the toffee.

She knew how she must appear to them, of course. People so loved their stereotypes. Living for others the sublimate life. They would put her down as a dried-up old maid. Quiet as a mouse and hung up in the love department on her male employers or, less flattering and more disgusting, her prepubescent charges. Playing with them, she suspected others suspected, in the tub, soaping and tickling their little thingummies till they stood up in the bathwater like periscopes. So she knew how she must appear to them. With a dried-up old pussy. More dust collector than sex organ. Nedra Carp giggled. The divine Mary Poppins had had her Bert, after all. Nedra was no libertine. Her juices happened not to flow in that direction, but she was no old maid. She’d had her ashes hauled, chim chim-i-ney, chim chim-i-ney, chim chim cheroo. It just wasn't that important, is all.

The nanny business was important, the nanny business was. And maybe, she thought, maybe you had to go around in a sort of disguise. Maybe other people’s stereotypes protected you, kept you hidden, quiet, wrapped up in cotton wool and otherwise engaged.

Because all her life she’d never forgiven them for abandoning her, all her life picked at her resentment, worried her loco parentis history, nursed her injured-Gretel misgivings.

And all because of the formative years, Nedra thought bitterly. The formative years. That small, not even full handful of kiddie time when anything that was not already stuffed into the genes — and for Nedra, as for Mary, between nature and nurture it was no contest — must be packed into the child like a kind of tuck pointing. If, as the poet said, the child was father to the man, the stepmothers, governesses, step-relations, and nannies were worth all the rest of relation. Particularly the nannies. (Because children that small would not have heard about stereotypes yet, would, before memory kicked in, have taken their imprinting from the available, anyone near at hand, anyone bigger or older or stronger than oneself, anyone: a close distant cousin would do; the upstairs maid; the lad from the greengrocer’s.) But particularly the nannies. Who drew, she recalled, the bath, and adjusted the temperature of the water, who came with towels of great thickness, the cozy naps and piles of love, who managed one’s meat and, later, held one’s small, still imperfect hands to the cutlery and guided one’s movements over the joint, who gave lessons in spreading jam and buttering toast, who offered the hankie as if it were a rose, who rinsed the cut and kissed the bruise, who showed the picture books, all the abecedarian “A is for Apple, B is for Bird” lap tutorials, and read the storybooks in the safe and serious weather of the quilt or blanket, who did first for the body the stations of kindness and later, like choirmasters prompting hymn, mouthed the close and intimate terms of prayer (kindness here, too: some infant noblesse oblige, and even the names of rivals offered to God, of detractors and enemies, the by-now thinned and thinning not-even consanguineous and imperfectly understood merely legal relation). And, still later yet, ministered to the soul itself, explaining, explaining away, the sudden breaches of faith and inexplicable hostilities of once close distant cousins. Taking actual instruction from them, a sort of convert, a sort of catechumen — no Catholic, she attended Mass as often as possible; it wasn’t the ceremony or the gorgeous trappings that attracted her, it was the absolute conviction and authority — it was to her nannies she turned whenever she felt confused, had run out of lessons she could apply to a new situation — Nedra was in command of many solutions and hundreds of explanations but few principles — seeking, though she didn’t know this, hadn’t learned it yet, neither explanations nor principles but only the old cocoa comforts. It was to a nanny she’d turned (though she’d outgrown them, no longer had one, was with the governesses now and had, since her own had left and this was a new girl, even lost the right to call her Nanny, though she did anyway, not realizing that in doing so — it was a different nanny who’d provided this explanation too, though to Nedra it would forever after seem a principle — she had unwittingly placed herself in a kind of authority over the girl, compromised the title, that only a present or former charge, employer, or fellow employee of the household retained that particular privilege — she said “privilege”—) to explain her period, a nanny who’d explained, explained away, her half brother’s cold warning that they could no longer enjoy, once the twins were born and he had a new half sister and half brother of his own, their special relationship. (“He’s sucking up to them, miss.”) The nannies whom she relied on for comfort and depended upon for what she still thought of as love. Except that they moved on too, were, in that department at least, as unreliable and transient as real mothers and fathers. And was shocked to discover that they were actually paid, were in it for money, were not merely some distant sort of relation themselves, like a kind of Cinderella, say, two or three times removed. (And, although she’d be the first to admit — admit to herself since it was no one else’s business and could only hurt others if it ever got out — that hers was hired-hand love too, Nedra Carp wasn’t in it for the money. For one, she had money.)

Who now waited for others to turn to her. Assuming, on those rare occasions when they did, the very same poses and attitudes her own nannies had assumed. Vaguely abstracted, detached, as if she wore imaginary shawls about her shoulders and had been come upon knitting, an aura of an old-aunty love clinging to her like some musty, foolish dignity.

Rena Morgan looked up from the television set, turned low so as not to disturb Lydia Conscience’s sleep.

“Was Prince Andrew brave?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“Prince Andrew. Was he brave?”

“Oh, very brave, dear.”

“Even when he was small?”

“A little hero.”

“So you weren’t surprised when he went off to fight the Argies?”

“I expected it.”

“You did?”

“I was only surprised it took him so long.”

“Bravery is important, isn’t it, Nanny?”

“Quite important, dear. Valor is the sine qua non of gentlemen.”

“Of ladies too. Anyway, I should have thought so.”

“Bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

“Do you think so?”

“Women, well-brought-up women, don’t have the upper- body strength for true bravery.”

“When push comes to shove, do you mean?”

“What a clever way to put it! What a very bright little girl you are!”

“Thank you, Nanny, but there are many things I don’t understand.”

“If something’s troubling you, Rena dear, perhaps I can be of some help. Has that Janet Order been bothering you?”

“Janet Order?”

“She seems quite cheeky to me, and, though I shouldn’t be the one to say it, her blue color does put one off so. I noticed that you just picked at your food today. Your four basic food groups are extremely important, you know. If it’s Janet who’s putting you off your feed, I think I can arrange with Mister Moorhead and Mister Bale for you and Lydia to take your meals separately.”

“I like Janet.”

“What a charitable girl as well!”

“As a matter of fact, Nanny, it’s something you said just now.”

“What? Something I said? I don’t know what it could have been then, dear, I’m sure.”

“That bit about bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

“Calm endurance, dear. Tolerant imperturbability. Forebearance, resignation, and submission.”

“Janet isn’t in the least submissive, and I shouldn’t have thought to have called her resigned.”

“Ah, but I was talking about ladies.”

“Yes. Bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

“Just so.”

“I think Janet Order is brave,” Rena said. “If I’d her complexion I think I should have it whitewashed, hide it away as I do my handkerchiefs.”

“Show consideration for the feelings of others, yes.”

“For myself, rather. People stare. She takes no notice.”

“Cheeky.”

“Courage.”

“If you say so, dear,” Nedra Carp said, returning to her imaginary knitting.

“I wonder if I could go down to the game room,” Rena said after a while.

“What, the game room? At this time of night? It’s almost gone nine. That Miss Cottle’s nowhere about. Lydia’s sleeping, but what if she should wake up? Of course I could leave a note.”

“No,” Rena said, “she might not find it.”

“Oh, don’t fear on that score. Nanny would leave it somewhere she’d be certain to find it.”

“She’s in a new place. She could panic. There might be something she needs.”

“Mister Moorhead’s just ’cross the hall. Mister Bale and that nurse are the next room over.”

“Do you suppose she’d think of all that in those first moments of terror?”

“And thoughtful too! I like that in my girls.”

“Nanny, I’m not thoughtful or considerate either. Nor charitable nor even all that clever.”

“And modest!”

“When I asked you that about Prince Andrew before, about his being brave — well, you know that’s a quality I very much admire.”

“What very lovely values you have, dear,” Nedra Carp said.

“It’s a quality I very much aspire to, Nanny,” the child said.

“That’s very noble.”

“That’s why I want to go down to the game room by myself.”

“By yourself? By yourself? But you’re dying, dear. It’s quite out of the question.”

“It’s because I’m dying that I have to be brave. I’ve this awful cystic fibrosis which the doctors can’t seem to control, and I go about with all this linen folded up my sleeves. I haven’t the courage to be seen blowing my nose, Nanny. I just thought if I went down to the game room by myself for an hour or so and let people stare — they know us here, you know, they see us traveling with our caretakers like this clan of the doomed, and after that scene in the restaurant this morning, and whatever it was that happened to the boys at the Haunted Mansion — healthy kids, kids my own age: well, I just thought they might think better of us, and of me — of me, I admit it — if they saw us one at a time once in a while. Please, Nanny. Please.”

“You’d play those arcade games?”

“Yes,” Rena said.

“They’re very stimulating. You could become overexcited.”

“I’ll just have to learn to control it.”

“What if someone teases you? Children can be quite cruel. It could bring on an attack.”

Rena opened her purse, showed Nedra a single white handkerchief. “This will have to serve then, won’t it?”

“Well.” Nedra considered. “This is a situation. For my part I think you’re already very brave. Thoughtful, charitable, considerate, clever. Lovely values, just lovely. You’re doing this as much for the others as you are for yourself. You are, aren’t you, Rena? You’re showing the flag, aren’t you, dear?”

“Yes, Nanny,” the child said, looking down.

“It isn’t an easy decision. I have to parse this,” Nedra Carp said. “You’re dangerously ill with a condition that makes you subject to devastating attacks. You mean deliberately to put yourself in harm’s way. Knowing full well that people recognize you, you mean to encourage one of your attacks by going to a place which would tax the resistance of even a normal child. Moreover, rather than provide yourself with your usual aids — I didn’t see your inhalator when you opened your purse just now, did I? — you mean to go down to that game room with a single handkerchief, one or two less than a child might carry who merely suffers from a common cold. Is that about it?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, dear, a dangerous game indeed.”

“But that’s just the point of it, Nanny.”

“Oh, I understand the point of it, child.”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“But do you understand that Nanny is responsible for you? Do you understand that if anything…well, untoward should happen to you during the course of this…adventure, Nanny could, and quite properly, be brought up on charges, and that almost certainly it would mean the end of the dream holiday?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“Yet you’re still willing to put your friends’ pleasure and your nanny in jeopardy — and yourself, yourself too — just to prove some quite abstract point that no one is ever likely to understand? I do not make exception of your dear parents. Do you see the ramifications of all this, Rena?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“Cause all that trouble all for the sake of a vague principle?”

“Yes, Nanny.”

“An hour is out of the question. If you’re not back in the room within forty-five minutes I shall have hotel security bring you back,” Nedra Carp said.

“Thank you, Nanny.”

“Well, spit-spot, child! Spit-spot! The clock is ticking,” Nedra Carp said, and Rena Morgan, her inhalator banging against the pocket in her skirt and the rolled handkerchiefs she kept like magician’s silks along the sleeves of her dress absorbing her perspiration, ran off to meet Benny Maxine, who was already waiting for her outside Spirit World, the liquor store where by prearrangement they had agreed to meet at nine.

Colin Bible lurked — lurked was the word for it — in the health club of the Contemporary Resort Hotel. He loitered by the urinals, skulked near the stalls, slunk along the washstands, and insinuated himself at the electric hand-dry machines. He looked, he supposed, like a madman, like someone, all dignity drained, in throes, the rapturous fits of a not entirely undivided abandon, as if, by avoiding eye contact, he preserved some last-minute, merely technical remnant of sanity. He knew his type, he thought uneasily, had often enough recognized it in the Gents’ at the great Piccadilly and Baker Street, Knightsbridge and Oxford Circus underground stations. He did not even lack the obligatory newspaper, the peculiar faraway cast — put on, assumed as a disguise — to his expression. Nor did he bother to make a show of busying himself, heartily pretending to shake free the last drops of urine from his dick or noisily opening and slamming the stall doors as if he were all preoccupied urge and dither. Neither had he rolled up his shirt sleeves, his hands and forearms thickly lathered as a surgeon’s. Or stood by the electric hand-dry machines, waving off excess water with all the brio of a symphony conductor imposing a downbeat. He was not happy to hide, didn’t enjoy his stealthy camouflage, took no pleasure from his furtive tiptoe masquerade. It was only that he didn’t have the nerve to make an overture of his own — unless turning himself into something coy and clandestine was itself an overture — and didn’t believe the guy would recognize him. He thought, that is, that he would have to be picked up all over again, winked at again, his hand brushed a second time. This was the reason he made himself so suspicious looking, why he kept himself under wraps in his best suit among the men in their gym shorts and jogging outfits, posing in it as if it were a raincoat, why he leaned like a flirt beside the stationary bicycle, why he prowled surreptitiously between the Nautilus machines and pussyfooted along the treadmill and gym’s small track. It was the reason he snuck back and forth by the weight bench, why he snooped in the sauna and inferred himself past the rowing machine. It was because he didn’t think he’d be recognized that he so ostentatiously lay in ambush — lost and shrouded, a burrowed lay-low, a smoke screen, anonymous, covert, sequestered, disguised and reticenced and secluded, an inference, a stowaway.

He didn’t even hear him when he came in.

“Hi, toots,” the fellow said, “been waiting long?”

If you tried to guess what annoyed Noah Cloth most about having to die, in all likelihood you’d have been wrong. His parents, trying to guess what went on in their little boy’s head, trying to poke past his terminally ill child’s view of things, suspected it was pain or the flat-out fear of death itself, sensibly reading the fierce denial of his condition as simple terror but, with it, some sense of ideal justice insulted, sullied, outraged, his shortchanged, short-circuited life a smear on his values, some ultimate slur of the ought, an aspersion on the otherwise. They saw him, that is, as noble, reading his reluctance to acknowledge symptoms or admit to pain as the reaction of a gentleman to that which was grossly one-sided and indefensibly unfair. They prized this in him, and though by keeping his complaints to himself for as long as he could he probably stymied their own and the doctor’s best efforts to help him extend his life, they cherished this aspect of their child’s character and doubled up on their losses, grieving an ever-escalated, ever-escalating grief, although they determined that when the time came they would try to be, must try to be, as good as their son, his match, for his sake his match. They would not be the sort of parents who turned their home into a shrine, preserving his pathetic bits and relics, his clothes, his pictures, his toys and braces and canes. It was their pledge to him — what they whispered in his ear when he boarded the plane at Heathrow — that they’d try to survive him with style, with tact and honor and class and grace, assuring him too that he’d not been wrong, that his fate was a quirk, almost apologizing, almost begging his pardon if it looked otherwise (indicating to Noah the line of wheelchairs, the special boarding procedures the airline insisted upon), assuring him that most children grew up to be adults, that most adults had children of their own and, after a reasonably long and happy life, did not survive them. Seeing his need and trying to comfort him. “It’s a blot, Noah,” his father said. “It’s a slip-up, son.” Noah, looking up at them from the wheelchair the airline would not allow them to push, trying to grasp his father’s words as he walked along beside the boy being rolled down the jetway. “Dad’s right, Noah,” his mum said. “What’s happened to you is a crook go, but in the long run, in the long run…” “Things average out, she’s trying to say,” his father finished. “They do, Noah,” his mum said, “so you mustn’t think it’s not a democratic business. Because it is, ain’t it, Dad?” “Oh, aye,” the father said, “turn and turn about. It really is. You’re the exception that proves the rule.”

In some ways they were right about their son: the pain, the fear, the outrage. But it was more complicated than that.

In a real way it came down to the fact that he would not live to make money.

He was almost unschooled (the woman at the hospice, who was good, not a psychiatrist or even a psychologist but a grand listener, a genuine death expert, interested in all the messages of death, would have been able to explain it even to unschooled Noah, would have been able to give back his reasons to him, not to reconcile him, never to reconcile him, but to sharpen his rage); even for an eleven-year-old — so much time in hospital, so much time blasted by radiation and smothered by chemotherapy, so much time sedated, so much confused by painkillers — he was unschooled. He didn’t read right, could barely follow the plot when people read stories to him, and looked for diversion in newspapers and their colored Sunday supplements, in the advertisements in magazines and on television shows, in the fat illustrations of picture books. It was this which had set him to drawing in the first place. He was not a natural artist or even a very dedicated one. He traced his drawings or copied them with a care that was literally painstaking, the crayons and drawing pens squeezed against his wounded joints, putting pressure on his decomposing wrist. Had he been more mobile he would have taken snapshots of the toasters and estate cars he drew, of the houses and cameras and lounge furniture, of the stocked shelves in the supermarkets, of the gas ranges, fridges, and central heating systems, of the coats, shirts, dresses, ties, and television sets, of the stereos, flatirons, cosmetics jars, of the boxes of candy and bottles of gin, of the computers and shoes, of the packets of cigarettes and tubes of toothpaste and all the other consumer goods that so fascinated him. Because what he could follow who could not follow a simple story line was the news on television, the bleak steady theme of growing unemployment, redundancies, angry men laid off, entire shipyards shut down, assembly lines, factories shut, services reduced and the people who supplied them sent home, and feared first for his father’s job, then for his father, because he was mortal too — gravestones he drew, monuments, wreaths — and then, because he was unschooled, couldn’t read well, do his maths, wasn’t getting the technical training so important to the current generation of workers and so, as the news reader told him almost every evening, absolutely indispensable to his own. Because where would he get money who couldn’t read, do his maths, had no skills? Because where would he get money for the foodstuffs he traced, for the fridge and cabinets which stored them, for the range on which they were prepared? Because where would he get money for the luxuries, the big-ticket items of consolation? So he drew them, copied them down from advertisements. By magic homeopathy to have that which he would never live to earn. “So,” the lady in the hospice — who really was good — would have comforted, “it isn’t really death you fear. It’s getting well.” “No,” unschooled Noah, the easing cosmetics of morphine withheld during these times when they spoke, would have answered, all the acuity of his stiff, unblurred pain on him like solid facts lined up and marshaled as the packages and canned goods on those stocked supermarket shelves he used to draw. “Not anymore. I hurt too much. The stitches from my first operations, that finger they cut off, my bones and my buttons, the stuff drying in my handkerchief. The light that falls across my sheet from the bed lamp, the shadows. All, all of it hurts me. I’m not afraid,” he would have said, “I’m not. May I please have my morphine now please?”

But that would have been then. An aspect of the conditional. Alternative time. But now, in the here-and-now of Disney World, he is perfectly delighted with the shops. It is, for him, rather like being plunked down in the very center of those colored supplements in the Sunday paper. (Because he has been rarely to shops. Even his clothes — it would have been too much of an ordeal for him to undress in changing rooms — have been first brought home by one of his parents for him to try on. He has been to the gift shop in hospital, of course, and has often enough been visited by the cart volunteers — he supposed they were volunteers: nurses laid off, people in maintenance, the National Health having no money to pay people to push the cart; he supposed they were volunteers — have brought to his ward with its meager inventory. He could count on his remaining fingers the times he has ever actually bought anything and to this day does not remember, if he ever knew, the correct posture for giving money or accepting change. Even in Heathrow, his first time in an airport, they hadn’t let him browse W. H. Smith’s immense stall and hustled him past the duty-free shop. Though he had his look, of course, spied in passing the window displays, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of liquor he recognized from the adverts, cameras he’d drawn the like of in his sketchbooks.)

“All right,” Mr. Moorhead said, “if you think you’re up to it.”

“I do. I do think I’m up to it. Ta, sir. Ta, Mister Moorhead.”

“What about you, Janet? How do you feel?”

“Shipshape,” Janet Order said. Shipshape, she thought, the very color of the seas they ride upon.

“All right. As an experiment, then. But remember, you operate on the buddy system when you’re by yourselves. Under no circumstances, no circumstances, may you leave the hotel. And no sweets. If you’re thirsty you may take water. Have you money?”

“The twenty dollars you gave me in London, Mister Moorhead,” Noah said.

“Well, that’s quite a lot. You mustn’t spend it all. We’ve another five days yet, plenty of time to think about what sort of souvenirs you’ll be wanting to take home with you.”

“When may we have the rest of our money, Mister Moorhead?” Noah asked timidly.

“Why, when I give it to you.”

The children started toward the door.

“You’re quite sure you’ll be fine?”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“At the first sign of weakness, the first, you get word to me. Don’t try to return to the room. You’ve your pills that I gave you?”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“Yes, Mister Moorhead.”

“You know each other’s symptoms? You’re alert to the danger signals I told you about?”

Janet Order nodded; unschooled Noah, uncertain about the words Moorhead had tried to teach him — stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, syncope — but who remembered in a general sort of way what bad things to look for in his blue buddy, did.

So for him it’s like being plunked down right in the very center of those bright-colored supplements in the Sunday paper. He tells this to Janet Order.

“No smart remarks, nine knuckles,” the little blue girl says.

“Look at it all,” Noah says, and thinks with pride about the sort of customer he’d make.

“What, this junk?”

“My mum would love this.”

“Film? Your mum would love a box of film?”

But he’s not listening. He’s lost not only in his first shopping spree but in the first experience he’s ever had of any sort of shopping at all. Within ten minutes he has bought the box of film, a bottle of shampoo, an antihistamine he’s seen advertised on television, a flea and tick collar, and a pair of infant’s water wings. He has spent more than twelve dollars (and guessing incorrectly — he’s not too embarrassed to ask Janet, he’s too excited by the actual act of spending money to remember that she’s even there: if she is struck by stenosis, atresia, dyspnea, or syncope just now she is almost certainly a goner — he waits for the clerk to take the money from his hand and almost forcibly wrenches his change from her own) but isn’t bothered because he still has, in addition to the change from the twenty dollars that Moorhead advanced him out of the hundred each child has been promised for spending money, the fifty his dad had slipped to him at Heathrow and which he’s not even mentioned to Moorhead. (It’s the long-term and higher maths he can’t do, those which perhaps even he knows he has no use for.) And returns to the same clerk five separate times, once for each of the five items he has purchased. Janet, beside him, is almost breathless. She’s never seen anything like it, this frenzy, and wonders if she’s in the presence of some seizure Mr. Moorhead has neglected to tell her about.

“Come away,” she says. “Come away, Noah. Please, Noah. We’ll find another shop. There are these other shops we can go to.”

She feels her breathlessness — the dyspnea — and is almost prepared to squat down right there in the middle of the store. (Squatting sometimes restores her breathing, though it’s an act that embarrasses her, conscious as she is that people seeing her will be listening for grunts, looking for little blue turds beneath her skirt when she rises.) She has her Inderal ready to hand when Noah can suddenly see her again.

“Other shops?”

Clumsily, he holds five paper bags, which another clerk, noticing his deformity, offers to put into a large plastic carrier that he can hold by its handle.

“Other shops?”

“Would you like me to take one of your parcels, Noah?”

“No,” he says sharply, angrily, almost greedily. But though they’re quite light he can’t manage them very well and twice they have to stop while Noah rearranges his packages. Which he does with his nose, with his teeth, which he keeps in balance by bringing his hands up and moving the bags from side to side with his face, all the while thinking, who cannot read — Who would fardels bear? Before they have reached the next shop along the hotel’s wide concourse, the sack with the shampoo drops to the hard floor and Noah starts to cry.

“Look, Noah,” Janet Order tells him reassuringly, “the bottle’s plastic. It didn’t break. Why don’t you let me carry this one for you?”

“You better not drop it if you know what’s good for you.”

And in the store, which is a sort of Disney boutique, Noah’s strange frenzy returns. He seems neither irritable nor calm but somehow triumphant, rather, Janet supposes, the way explorers might look, discoverers at the headwaters of great rivers they have been tracing, men come upon new mountain ranges, waterfalls, archaeologists at digs yielding sudden, spectaular treasures.

“Oh, Noah,” Janet Order says, and watches him as he performs what she does not know are his entirely personal maths, his customized sums. He flicks price tags, turns over china figurines to see the prices on their base. (How did I know? he wonders. How did I even know that that’s where they’d be?) He doesn’t bother to add the odd cents but counts by two- and five- and seven- and ten-dollar units, rounding the figures off to the next highest dollar, the sums to their next highest even number, adding on taxes, too, all the old asterisk attachments he’s seen beside the goods pictured in the adverts he’s not only looked at but studied, drawn, copied. Even unschooled Noah, who can’t read right, knows that’s where the catch will lie, in the fine print, the asterisk not only a trap but fair warning that a trap exists: “plus V.A.T.” and “Batteries Not Included” and “Allow Eight to Twelve Weeks for Delivery” like all smug arms-across-the- chest-folded caveat emptor. So adding on taxes too, adding on anything he can think of, not so much extravagant as preparing himself for disappointment who can’t read right or do any but the personal maths and who is going to die. (Nor does he understand American money, seeing it for the first time not when his father had slipped fifty dollars to him at Heathrow, since that had been sealed in an envelope, and not even when Mr. Moorhead had advanced them the twenty out of the hundred that had been promised, since that had been sealed in an envelope too, and not even when he had torn the envelope open and patiently waited for the clerk to take the twenty-dollar bill out of his hand when he made that first purchase, but when he physically wrested his change out of the clerk’s astonished grip, having no notion at all of a dollar, a dime, a nickel, a penny. He has a vague idea of the United States as a rich and powerful country — on the news this evening they never mentioned redundancies, shipyards shut down, factories closed — and so supposes the dollar is worth more than the pound. To him it even looks more valuable, the high numerical face values of the paper bills, the portraits of the nation’s male rulers, that wicked- looking eagle, the green artillery of the arrows. Even the dull, flimsy coins suggest an indifferent sense of plenitude. And he has an impression of bounty, of infinite variety — the things in this shop that fall neither under the category of staple nor luxury and that seem to him products for which no real use exists — the Mickey Mouse candle holders, for example, the cartoon stamp books, their gauzy, transparent envelopes filled with pictures of Mowgli, Mr. Toad, Bambi, Snow White, the dwarfs on gummed stamps.)

“Noah? What will you do with all this stuff? Noah?”

But he doesn’t bother to answer and takes his purchases — he no longer pays for the items separately but waits until he’s made all his selections before bringing them to the clerk, not because he’s grown accustomed to shopping but because he sees that he has been wasting time, that it is more efficient this way — to the woman at the register.

By the time they enter the next shop Noah Cloth has spent sixty-two dollars and fourteen cents and, because it would be impossible otherwise, has agreed to accept the plastic carrier. In this, in addition to his original purchases, are two china figurines, one of the Mad Hatter, the other of the Cheshire Cat, a Dumbo quartz wristwatch, duplicate Mickey Mouse sweat shirts, and a deck of playing cards picturing Minnie as Queen, Mickey as King. There is also a set of wooden coasters in which are etched the faces of Donald Duck, his little duck nephews.

In the Contemporary Man, Noah buys casual beachwear for his dad: sandals, a bathing suit, sunglasses, a terry-cloth robe, a beach towel, a visored sun hat.

The bill comes to seventy-three dollars and change.

“Lend me money,” he whispers to Janet Order. “I’ll give it back to you when Moorhead pays up.”

“Oh, Noah,” she says, “I haven’t that much.”

“If you’re staying in the hotel,” says the salesman (who is no more salesman than Noah is customer; there is nothing even close to negotiation going on here, not transaction, not commerce, not even business; the merchandise, which is no more merchandise really than the salesman is salesman or Noah customer but only the counter or token, as is the money Noah exchanges it for, the to-him foreign denominations and queer seals and symbols scribbled across its face and back and which, however powerful, are merely power in some unfamiliar, unaccustomed language and thus unknown, unknowable, only the counter or token for the simple symbolic occasion of his old frozen dreams), “you can charge it to your room. All you have to do is show your guest card.”

“I’m exhausted,” Noah Cloth says.

“Do you want me to call Mister Moorhead?”

“I’m exhausted,” he says. “I think I ought to sit down.”

“I’ll call Moorhead.”

“I’ll just sit down.”

“Where’s your phone? I have to call his doctor.”

“This is better.”

Janet Order feels Noah’s head. His temperature doesn’t seem to be elevated, his pulse is regular and strong.

The salesman has already packed the beachwear away.

“Yes, this is much better,” Noah says, his legs up, stretched out and comfortable in the wood-and-canvas lawn chair the salesman has set up for Noah to sit in.

“Don’t go off, Noah. Technically,” she tells the salesman, “on the buddy system, you’re not supposed to leave them alone.”

“I’m fine.”

You’re daft, she thinks. My buddy is daft.

“What does a nice chair like this usually run?” Noah Cloth asks the man while Janet is off making her call.

I can charge it, he thinks when he hears the price, I can charge it to the room.

“He doesn’t think it’s anything,” Janet Order tells Noah when she returns. “A little fatigue.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you rested up enough to go back to the room?”

“I’m fine.”

“All right,” she says and holds her arm out to assist him in getting out of the chair. When they go back up in the elevator together she doesn’t bother to tell him — he’s just a bonkers, crackers kid — that she has spotted Benny Maxine with Rena Morgan. It looked to her as if they were up to something.

Lamar Kenny has spotted the little wise guy. He thinks maybe he’ll have some fun with him.

With Tony Word asleep for the night and Noah and Janet gone off, Mr. Moorhead is left free to think about the Jew.

There is a kind of villain — Moorhead has spent too much time on sick wards not to have noticed the type on kid’s cartoon shows; indeed, these scoundrels have actually been absorbed into the doctor’s bedside manner, become a source of preliminary chat with his small patients, a device to trivialize the physician’s presence — who seems to thrive on adversity, who again and again overestimates his own dark powers at the expense of his adversary’s light and more potent ones. Every defeat suffered by one of this sort somehow becomes the occasion for a greater gloating, a nefarious gibe, an unruly, unfounded optimism. In a way, Moorhead, who tries to steady himself by remembering that he’s been wrong before, puts himself in mind of such fellows. For one, he shares their incredible enthusiasm, their sense of invulnerability. He recalls his days at university, his theories, the confidence with which he strolled art galleries, diagnosing the portraits and statues there, a kind of cocky Grand Rounds. He remembers why he chose medicine as his life’s work, his aesthetic attraction to health, his old notion that children carried theirs as lightly as a man might his umbrella. Chiefly he recalls his cheerful, discarded overview: his old modeling-clay inclinations, his belief that health, not disease, sat at the core of life. Laid forever by those photos he’d seen of survivors from the camps, those too-intimate pictures, naked as surgery, of Jews, their maniac expressions and broken posture, bone projecting from bone in awry cantilever like an unkempt architecture of bruise and wound, their skin, slack as men’s garments on the bodies of children, their almost perceptible joints and sockets ill fitting their faulty scaffolding, the predicament of their swollen-seeming bones like badly rigged pulley, stripped gear.

His idea was as simple as a before-and-after photograph. A superb diagnostician, he believed (as he believed he’d spotted the Mona Lisa’s incipient goiter and explained the famous smile as nothing more than the bitter aftertaste of iodine gushing from her overactive thyroid) that almost all illness was chronic, even congenital. If the admiration of health and well-being was what sent him into pediatrics in the first place, it was those pictures from the camps which — except for his brief tour on the casualty wards, almost as good an opportunity as an autopsy for getting close to the human body — caused him to stay there. The child, he knew, was father to the man.

His mistake in the old days was that he’d put too much faith in those artists. They’d idealized their subjects as much as any of the blokes who illustrated those perfect organs — the perfect hearts and perfect livers — in the textbooks. (For all Moorhead knew, Da Vinci had probably reduced the Mona Lisa’s goiter and trained to a mysterious smile what could already have been a grimace.) So what was wanted were photographs, the kind the Germans had made, the kind the Allies had. Though what was really wanted was the complete record, photographs of the Jews before they were rounded up — it would already have been too late when they were in the camps, the debilitating ride in the cattle cars, the bad sanitation — family albums with their individual and group photographs taken in different, more relaxed settings: on the beach, at picnics and parties, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, baby’s first picture, rabbis at their devotions, all the candids of the daily round. (But still a sucker for good health, at least its appearance, his mind stuffed with images of perfect specimens, of strong, beautifully tapered athletes, women as well as men. Which accounted, of course, for his shyness with Bible. Had he been thrown in with the man it would have been no time at all before he asked him to strip for an examination, auscultated his chest, palpated and poked the fellow till he was black and blue, then asked if he might examine the bruises. Once, just once, he wanted to feel the ostensibly healthy kidney, hear the report of the seemingly sound heart. Which would have created many misunderstandings.)

In the hands of a superior diagnostician, what he’d stumbled upon could be a great and useful tool. Working backward, and using follow-up studies of survivors from the camps as a control, he could test his theory about the latency of all pathologies. If he could lay his hands on those albums — he doubted the Germans would have let them keep them, but the Jews were a clannish people and surely early pictures of Jews who survived the camps were available in the albums of even distant family relations who’d never entered them — that would be perfect, but it was more important for him to find the survivors themselves, to take their medical histories and examine them, to see, finally, if their conditions jibed, as he was certain they would who could not understand the obstinacy of villains in children’s cartoons but admitted up front that he sometimes shared it, with the diagnoses and prognoses — he didn’t mean malnutrition except as it affected related, subsequent diseases; he didn’t mean psychological disturbances unless they preceded and were exacerbated by their experience in the camps — he’d made in his early holocaust studies. (New technologies were available now; he used blowups and computer enhancements of those grainy old photographs, bringing it all out, punching it all up, making all that latency and incipience stand out crisp as a scab, articulated as a rash.) Because there was no Registrar to answer to now and he had in his personal collection something over a thousand computer-enhanced blowups of men and women at the fences posing for their liberation, most of them right out of the front rows, too, along with some really wizard shots of their palms splayed out against the barbed wire, clumsily leaning against it to take the weight off their bodies, or their fingers clutching it, their distended knuckles and broken nails fine and well defined in his enhanced photographs as the features of knaves, queens, and kings on playing cards. Though it was a risky business, far riskier actually than asking Colin Bible to submit to an examination. (One day, for the sake of the sample, he would have to examine superior specimens, but he supposed that was still a way off.) Though there’d be no more garden parties if it ever got out. And he could kiss his position in Great Ormond Street good-bye. To say nothing of any O.B.E.’s. To say nothing. Not even his nefarious gibe.

In his joke he’s completed the preliminary part of his studies. He delivers a paper: “Diagnoses and Prognoses of Some Jewish Survivors from the Concentration Camps.” Afterward, during the question period, he’s asked if he found no use for the photos of those victims who’d been gassed or shot. After all, his questioner says, the survivors had been clad. Those others had been commanded to strip, killed, then dumped into open graves. Surely their naked bodies could have been useful for his studies.

And he tells him, he says, he goes, “Yes, but only for the diagnosis!”

So he’d come to Florida.

And found his Jew.

Mary Cottle, looking rested, is standing outside Eddy Bale’s door when he answers her knock.

“I’m told you’ve been asking about me.”

“Oh. It was good of you to drop by. It’s nothing important. Come in, why don’t you?”

“Thank you. I seem to have lost the others at the monorail station.”

“Colin said there’d been a mix-up.”

“Yes. Quite stupid of me.”

“No, no, of course not. No harm done. All present and accounted for.”

“Who’s that in the bed, Mudd-Gaddis?”

“Oh. Right. Well, accounted for, anyway. Benny Maxine seemed a little antsy. I thought I’d let him out for a bit. You know how kids love to explore hotels.”

“I don’t actually.”

“Oh, yes. They’re quite in ecstasy in lifts. They quite fancy pushing buttons and being allowed to call out the floors for the other guests.”

“Do they? It just doesn’t seem Benny’s line of country somehow.”

“No, I suppose not. He’s — what? — fifteen. I guess he’d be more interested in hanging about the hotel’s cocktail lounges. I reckon I was thinking more about my son.”

“I’m awfully sorry. I don’t think I ever offered my condolences.”

“Well.”

“It’s just that one feels such a fool. One feels terrible, of course, but there’s nothing to say.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you. I appreciate that.”

“He seemed a nice kid.”

“You knew Liam?”

“Well, more by reputation than otherwise, but I did help with his lunch one or two times.”

“I’m sorry. I think I may have known that and forgotten.”

“Of course.”

“Would you care for a drink? There’s not a great selection, but I have some lovely gin I bought in the duty-free shop. Or if you prefer I think I could organize some of Colin’s sherry.”

“Thank you. You go ahead. Cigarettes are my vice. I was never much of a drinker.”

“Yes. I’ve noticed the smell of your tobacco.”

“I know. It’s a nasty habit.”

“Not at all. I like the smell of foreign cigarettes. French, are they?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes French. Or Russian, Bulgarian. The Iron Curtain flavors.”

“Aren’t those rather harsh?”

“I decided long ago that if I was going to smoke I was going to smoke. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I hope you’ve stocked up. American brands are mild by comparison.”

“I’m a bit of a smuggler, I’m afraid. I snuck two cartons past Customs.”

“Good for you.”

“Does your wife smoke?”

“She smokes our tobacconist.”

“Sorry. That was stupid of me. I’d heard you’d separated.”

“She separated.”

“She’d been under a strain.”

“It was my strain too.”

“My God, Eddy — may I call you Eddy? That’s right, you insist, we went through this at Moorhead’s — it was all Britain’s strain. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight. You fair gave all of us the hernia, Ed.”

“Is something wrong? What’s wrong? I lost my boy. What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? Nothing. I’m this volunteer, I’m this paladin. I’m this lenient melt-mood Candy Striper.”

“Shh.”

“Old Mudd-Gaddis can really snore, can’t he? I wonder if any air gets through all that.”

“I’m working on my second lovely gin and you’re the one who’s one over the eight.”

“Organize Colin’s sherry, I’ll join you.”

“You’re a smoker. You were never much of a drinker.”

“You know I gave to all your campaigns?”

“What? Money, you mean?”

“Over the years probably more than a hundred quid.”

“I’m afraid you made a bad investment, Mary.”

“Hey! Watch that. Just who the bloody hell do you fucking think you are?”

“Jesus! Bloody hell is right. You’ve gone and spilled Colin’s sherry all over the place. It looks like a massacre in here.”

“That’s not on. That’s not on, I said!” Mary Cottle said, and stormed out of Eddy Bale’s room.

Because everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation. Everything. Wars, earthquakes, and the self-contained individual disasters of men. Courage as well as cowardice. Generous acts out of left field and the conviction that one is put upon. Everything. Man’s fallen condition and birth defect too, those San Andreas and Anatolian, Altyn Tagh, and Great Glen faults of the heart, of the ova and genes. They’re working on it, working on all of it: theologians in their gloomy studies where the muted light falls distantly on their antique, closely printed texts, as distant as God (which, God’s exorbitant aphelion, outpost, and mileage — the boondocks of God — also has a perfectly reasonable explanation); scientists in their bright laboratories where the light seems a kind of white and stunning grease.

Everything has a reasonable explanation.

So Charles Mudd-Gaddis in Bale’s and Colin’s, Lydia Conscience in the nanny’s and Mary’s, and Tony Word in Mr. Moorhead’s room, meet in each other’s sleep.

They gather on a Sunday afternoon in one of the public rooms in the Contemporary Resort Hotel, which Mudd-Gaddis believes to be a nursing home where he has been stashed by his family. By what, that is, Mudd-Gaddis guesses, is not the remains of, so much as in a certain sense accounts for, what is his family now, his family informed by time and evolution, an increment of new additional relation which, try as he may, as he does, he can’t keep straight. Though he’s certain it’s all been explained to him, and repeatedly too, and probably even patiently — they are not unkind here; stashed or no, this is no Dickensian charnel house and the doctors and staff are as pleasant as they are efficient; he’s no complaints on that score, or on the other either, for that matter — the stashed business, he means; he’s a man of the world, or anyway was; in their shoes he’d have done the same, because what can you do, what can you actually do when people get so old they can’t take care of themselves any longer? When they get so old (talk about your second childhoods) they become incontinent and piss their pants and shit their sheets and move about (though it isn’t as if they actually could — move about, that is — they can’t, and have to be pushed in wheelchairs, lifted in and out of them like, like — what? — socks in a drawer, laundry in a hamper) under some stink of the personal, the inclement intimate? So old they can’t cut meat or butter bread. Of course you stash and warehouse them, though he knows it’s a waste of breath, of time and money. It’s a joke, really. A joke and at the same time a tribute to the basic decency of people that they even bother to explain. All right, so they slow their normal speech patterns and maybe raise their voices. He can understand that too. Because what the devil would you expect? Would you expect otherwise? Would you talk Great Ideas with an infant? And if you did, if you could, but it was this hard-of-hearing infant, this deaf infant, wouldn’t you raise your voice? It’s a wonder to him how they find the patience. It’s a wonder to him they don’t go all shirty every once in a while and send up the old fart. “I’m Jim and that’s Bill. You remember Bill, don’t you, Dad? He was your fireman on your postmistress’s side. I’m your dustman on your papal nuncio’s, nuncle.”

Which is not to say he doesn’t have it coming. The deference. The weekly visits. However uncomfortable they make him feel, whatever trouble they put him to. Well, all that fuss and bother. Having to endure the shave, the indignity of the double nappies if he shits where he shouldn’t. All of it: the fresh shirt and starched collar (which gives him a rash like a bedsore; and that’s another thing, having to sit before them in his wheelchair perched on his sheepskin as if his arsehole might take the cold), the ordeal of the tie which, even though it’s no charnel house here and even though they’re gentle, is still no protection from the orderly’s breath which, even if it isn’t bad, could still carry the germ — so close they get when they do your tie — which could give him pneumonia. All of it. Though he’s the one who insists on this: the damn-fool mummery of the scents and talcums which, since his nose seems to be going along with everything else, he probably puts on, or rather that orderly puts on for him, too liberally. Which, face it, is maybe the one plus — he doesn’t count having to be diapered — in the whole business, sensitized and able as he is to respond to the pats and tickles of flesh on flesh even though those pats and tickles are administered by a poof male orderly and even though, unless they hang old men, he’ll never be tumescent again?

Because everything has a reasonable explanation and his visitors mustn’t get wind of his old man’s stench.

So he has these visits coming no matter that it’s a basinful for all concerned, no matter that they banjaxed each other or that all of them — he doesn’t exclude himself — usually just spend the afternoon sitting around and talking through the back of their necks.

It was quite a predicament. Being so old. So suspicious. Because maybe the real reason it’s no charnel house, maybe the real reason they’re so gentle and kind in this well-appointed palace of pensioners, is that they don’t want to cross him, that with all his other functions and faculties deserting him, he still retains the power of the purse, can write them out of his will — what’s left of his will? — with one stroke of the legal. Obviously they still believe him to be compos. Which may be the real reason he’s so polite to them, so gracious and agreeable, which may even be the real reason why he consents to see them every Sunday.

Because how could it possibly be love?

On any of their parts?

My God, he doesn’t even remember them from one week to the next!

And for their part, for their part, what was left of him to love? A nappied, sheepskin-assed old man who stank on top of perfume flowers that never grew in nature, and of the compost which never grew them underneath.

Lydia Conscience begins.

“How are you today, Charles?”

And old Mudd-Gaddis thinking: So that’s how it stands. Not Pop, not Granddad or Great-granddad either. So old. Not Uncle or Cousin-German. Charles. (Not friends, too young to be friends, never friends.) Relation reduced to the watered technicalities of lineage. So old. So old.

Tony Word sees the old boy’s rheumy eyes inspect him.

“Yeah, Charles, how are you keeping?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Mudd-Gaddis tells them politely. “And yourself? Yourselves?”

Lydia Conscience rests her engagement and wedding rings across her belly. “Very well, thank you, Charles.”

“No morning sickness?” he inquires alertly.

“My goodness no,” she tells him gratefully. “That passes in about two months. I’m long into my awkward phase by now. My ankles are ever so swollen. I tell my friends I feel like a cow and must look like the full moon.”

“No, of course not,” he hastens to reassure her. “She looks…”—he tries to think of the word—“radiant, positively radiant,” he tells Tony Word.

Who nods noncommittally.

“And how are you feeling?”

“Me? No complaints, no letters to the Times,” Tony Word says. “As long as I stick to my diet.”

Now Mudd-Gaddis, who has no idea what the little stick figure can possibly be talking about and who was just about to offer him some sweets out of the box he keeps for his Sunday visitors, nods and, covering his ass, adds, “Good, good. That’s very important.”

(Because with great age comes paranoia — so old, so old — and he knows he’s already made one mistake when he asked his stupid question about morning sickness, not his finest hour, because he’s given them something to jump on and maybe they think he can’t remember his own wife’s pregnancies, which he can’t, or if he ever even had one, and he’s on the verge of making another, a lulu, and it’s all he can do to keep from making it because what he really wants to know, what he really wants to do is cut the crap altogether and demand of them straight out, “Just who in hell are you people?” They look like kids, for Christ’s sake. Though to him, of course, everyone does these days. So old, so old. And why does the woman keep flashing those damned rings? So old. Still, he thinks, in the common dream the three of them share, it isn’t as if I were a complete twit. It’s plain enough she’s trying to remind me of something. My responsibilities, probably. I wish I’d better eyesight, though. From here the rings look like toys from the Cracker Jacks.)

“Oh, what lovely candy!” Lydia Conscience says.

“I’m sorry. Would you care for some?”

She takes two jaggery toffees and a chocolate caramel.

“It’s positively shameless,” Lydia Conscience says. “I’m eating for two now.”

Though when she puts one of the sweets into her mouth she chews it without interest.

Mudd-Gaddis moves the box almost imperceptibly toward Tony Word. “How about you, old man? Unless the diet prevents, of course.”

“I’d love to, ta very much. It’s just that it would kill me.”

“Of course.”

“Though they look delicious.”

“Yes, I’m told they’re quite good,” Mudd-Gaddis says. “I always try to have some on hand for my guests.”

Tony Word nods, Lydia Conscience does.

“You have many guests then?”

The baggage! The little preggers baggage! Because suddenly he understands what this is all about.

How rich he must be!

And if it’s not a charnel house here then it’s because he, Mudd-Gaddis, must make it well worth their while for it not to be.

How rich he must be!

For all these poor relations to come trotting out here every Sunday — he feels himself in the country, Sussex, the Cotswolds — in their beat-up old Anglias and Ford Cortinas. And the ring business too, he understands the ring business. Which doesn’t have damn all to do with reminding him of his responsibilities. It’s semaphore, is all. Why the little light o’ love is only signaling. The fat baggage was just making her manners. She was telling him that the contraband she carries in her breadbasket was legal now, that she and the little wimp — surely he can’t be the father — were all conjugaled and properly wedlocked. She was only publishing the banns with those rings across her belly. And that question about his guests! So of course he understands what it’s all about. It’s a competition. To them he’s just the goddamn pools!

Still, you can’t be too careful. He doesn’t know what claims they have on him, though he’s certain they can’t be great. Charles. Not Pop, Granddad, Great-granddad, Uncle, or Cousin. But still you can’t be too careful. He sees he will have to continue to be rational, compos, polite, continue to chat them up, continue to endure them. So old, so old! They have some farfetched stake of relationship, but it’s a sure thing that however tenuous it may turn out to be it’s enough to get him committed — because you don’t get to be as wealthy as he is without knowing at least something about the law; a judge, one psychiatrist, and a neighbor’s kid could probably do it — and if they’re that greedy it won’t be any well-appointed palace of pensioners next time but the true and genuine charnel house itself. And something else. If he’s stashed, it was never any family did it to him. He has no family, only this attenuated bond of cousins, thinner than cheap paint. God knows why, but he’s stashed himself. He’s certain of it. He’s self and voluntarily stashed!

Old. So old, so old, so old, so old. (Sold, sold, sold.)

“I say, do you have many guests then, Charles?”

“Oh. Beg pardon, dear, the hearing isn’t what it used to be,” Mudd-Gaddis tells her. (Because they can’t commit you for deafness. He’s thrown them a bone. It’s the compos thing to do. And because he’s canny now whom great age, subtracting faculties piecemeal, has managed to add only this, his almost volitionless cunning, to a character that always before had been strong enough to despise cunning. Just as, when he’d offered what’s-his-name a confection, he’d taken none himself and automatically implied his dentures. Let them have deafness, let them have dentures. Let them see how far those will get them in Her Majesty’s Courts!)

“I say, do you have many visitors?” repeats Lydia Conscience, raising her voice.

“Now and then. The odd male, the odd female.”

“Benny Maxine?”

“Benny?”

“Maxine. The lumpy-faced Jewish boy.”

He does recall a lad with a puffy face and thinks he recollects the voice, persistent, wheedling. He acknowledges Maxine’s visits. But Jewish? Has he Jewish cousins?

“Janet Order?”

“Ye-es, I think so,” Mudd-Gaddis says. “Dark girl.”

“Dark?” Tony Word chimes in. “She’s all over blue as a bruise.”

“Well, my eyes,” says Mudd-Gaddis, anteing his vision, throwing that in with his ears and his teeth.

“Does Noah Cloth come? Does Rena Morgan?”

“Noah’s this finger amputee,” Tony Word reminds. “Has a digit missing on his left hand. And Rena’s nose runs. She’s this phlegm faucet.”

“My goodness,” Mudd-Gaddis says and wonders about his time-informed, incremented, evolutionated family. A lump-faced Jew, a female bruise, a hand-gimp, and a Niagara nose. Plus these two. A wimp, a wimp’s trollop. (And remembers now, has them sorted out. By their afflictions. And canny or no, believes he understands the real reason he keeps the box of sweets for them. It may be for no better reason than to please them.)

“Well, I must say,” Lydia Conscience says. “It’s no wonder to me.”

“What’s that, dear?”

“Why they’re not here today.”

“Yes. We thought we’d see them,” Tony Word says.

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t?”

“Of course not. And you wouldn’t either if you’d been paying attention.”

“I pay attention.”

“Oh, yes,” Lydia Conscience says.

“I pay attention, I do.”

“To your diet.”

“I have to. You know that.”

Charles Mudd-Gaddis, who can’t bear to witness lovers’ quarrels, attempts to bring her back on track. “Why is it you’re not surprised they’re not here today, dear?”

Lydia Conscience looks from one to the other. Baffles seem to be hung about each of them in their common dream like curtains, like shunts and chutes, like traps in games, like all walled-off, buffered interveniency. They are discrete as people beneath earphones. None knows what the other is thinking. It’s like one of those round robin petitions where signature is arranged in a circle to confuse the order of signing. How can Tony feign surprise, how can Charles stage ignorance?

“Well, the buddy system,” she says. “They’re never buddies. Whatever happened to the buddy system?” she demands anxiously.

“The buddy system,” Mudd-Gaddis says.

“Boy/girl, boy/girl. It never had anything to do with rooms,” she says.

“Rooms.”

“Janet Order is off with Noah Cloth. Benny Maxine’s off with Rena Morgan.”

“I don’t think I quite…”

“Tony heard Noah and Janet plotting. And I knew Rena was up to no good. All that taffy and rose water on the nanny. The poor bitch is quite barmy. The ‘game room’ indeed! I can quite imagine what games those two are up to. Anyway, Benny Maxine is my buddy. I know his condition as well as I know my own. I was prepared for any contingency. Any contingency. Tony’s Janet’s buddy, Rena Morgan was supposed to be Noah’s. We were assigned. It never had anything to do with rooms.”

“Who’s mine?” Mudd-Gaddis asks.

“Oh, Charles,” she says brokenly, “you never had one. You couldn’t remember the symptoms.”

“You’re out of my will!” Mudd-Gaddis roars at them suddenly.

“Oh, Charles,” Tony Word says kindly, “were we in your will? That’s awfully sweet of you, old man, but don’t you think that’s a wee foolish? I mean, I’ve this nasty case of leukemia to deal with. I haven’t a chance of surviving you.”

“Oh, Charles,” Lydia Conscience says, “you’ve no will. You’re a pauper. What could be in it? You’re this charity boy, Charley. You’re stony broke.”

“I’m not rich?”

“Poor as a pebble,” Lydia Conscience says.

“How do you explain all this, then?” He indicates the well- appointed public room.

“What, the hotel lobby?”

“It’s a hotel lobby?”

“What’d you think it was, old-timer, the Albert Hall?” Tony Word asks, winking at Lydia.

“Why do you come then? Why do you all come every Sunday?”

“Oh, that was foolish,” Lydia says. “Pique, I suppose. When I found out about the others, that they went off by themselves, I thought the three of us might try to do something about it. That maybe we could ally ourselves against them.”

So it is love, Charles thinks. “We will,” he declares. “All for one and one for all! The Three Musketeers!”

“Mouseketeers,” Tony Word says cheerfully.

“We’ll see,” Lydia says.

So it is love. A kind of love. Love of a sort. At least friendship, the seesaw, shifting allegiance of mates.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. Everything. They are dying. They sleep fitfully, tossing and turning on their symptoms, waking to the slightest disturbance, even to Nedra Carp’s, Eddy Bale’s, and Mr. Moorhead’s light permissions.