The Cloud of Unknowing (3 page)

He took her hand and they started walking back.

“Bold paynits,” she said after a moment.

“What, honey?”

“Bold paynits. That's what the man called them.”

“Oh,” Lou said, “Boiled peanuts! What we've got here is a failure to commun'cate,” he said, doing his best George Kennedy impression.

“What we
got
here is a failure to comm
un
'cate!” she answered. Then after a bit, “Daddy?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Can I have an orange soda?”

“Yech. Why do you want an orange soda? It rots your teeth and makes you stupid. We're in the land of sunshine and
oranges, Kitty. Why have a cheap imitation when you could have the real thing? There's no greater pleasure in life than biting into a piece of fruit that was just picked off a tree.”

As he was saying this, he noticed a place near a fencepost where the bottom of the page wire fence had been bent back. He knelt down, looked around him, and tugged at it a little.

“And if it's not your tree,” he said, standing back up, “so much the better!”

Lou pulled up alongside the spot where the fence was loose. Behind the cover of the Imperial, Jonathan slipped under with no problem. The back pocket of Kitty's pants snagged on a piece of page wire, but Lou freed it without tearing the corduroy too much, and she slithered the rest of the way through.

“Scoot!” he said when they were both inside. “Get away from the road so they can't see you. No, Kitty, leave the ones on the ground. We don't want those; we want fruit right off the tree.”

They ran a few rows into the orchard. Jonathan could reach the oranges on the lower branches easily, but Kitty sprang up like a kangaroo again and again, grabbing at the air.

“The ripe ones are higher up,” Lou shouted. “Jonathan, give your sister a boost so she can climb up there.” Jonathan kneeled down and made a stirrup with his hands. Just as Kitty put her foot in it, Lou heard a tractor start up somewhere nearby. He whistled and waved them back.

As his children ran toward him, stolen oranges gathered up in their T-shirts, he wished with all his heart that he had not promised to take them to Disney World.

Lou had the first premonition of a headache the next morning as the Imperial passed under the Walt Disney World archway and entered the buffer zone surrounding the Magic Kingdom. A
three-lane road funneled them into a vast outdoor parking lot. They boarded an open-sided shuttle that dropped them at the ticket office, where the line zigzagged through what seemed like a quarter mile of roped stanchions. When they got to the front, Lou paid their admission and traded his Villa Serena coupon for a booklet of color-coded ride tickets and a map of the park.

“It looks like Purity Supreme money,” Kitty said.

“What, honey?”

“She means food stamps,” Jonathan explained.

“Can I hold them?” Kitty pleaded.

“Don't let her, Dad. She'll lose them. Give them to me.”

Lou decreed that Kitty would hold the ticket book, keeping it in a zippered pocket, and Jonathan would hold the map, and after lunch they would switch.

It turned out they were still nowhere near the Magic Kingdom, which lay beyond a vast manmade lagoon and was accessible only by ferry. Lou had to admire this feat of land-gobbling showmanship; still, his stomach clenched with dread as he followed his children up the ramp. On board, he sat on a bench and watched the dock disappear, along with any hope of a quick get-away. Jonathan sat next to him studying the map. “That's Blackbeard's Island,” he said, pointing into the glare. Kitty joined the crowd leaning over the rail. A shout went up when land appeared.

The first thing they saw when they disembarked was a cheery replica of a Victorian railroad station, high up on a landscaped embankment. Lou was momentarily dismayed, thinking that yet another leg of the journey awaited them, but Kitty and Jonathan pulled him into the stream of parents and children that flowed through a tunnel under the railroad trestle and into a bank of turnstiles, where Jonathan took the entry passes from Lou and handed them to the ticket-taker.

They found themselves in a simulacrum of small-town
America circa 1890, complete with a three-quarter-scale town hall built in an imitation of the Second Empire style. Covered arcades lined rows of old-timey storefronts. Everything was freshly painted in candy colors, and atop each mansard roof an American flag rippled in the mild breeze. They stood for a moment staring up the wide boulevard, immaculately paved and lined with saplings, at the bright blue Gothic spires of Cinderella's Castle.

“Come
on
!” Kitty said, leading the way.

Lou's headache was upon him fully now, and he was suddenly exhausted. The all-encompassing artificiality of his surroundings made everything seem foreshortened, so that he couldn't judge how far away the castle was. He followed Jonathan's blue windbreaker and Kitty's red one up the teeming sidewalk until they came to a gazebo, where he sat down and called out for them to wait. While he rested, Kitty and Jonathan hunched over the map. They seemed to have instantly gotten the lay of the land.

“Can we go on Cinderella's Golden Carrousel, Daddy?” Kitty asked.

“But the Frontierland Shootin' Gallery is on the way,” Jonathan said. “Can't we go there first?”

Lou took the map. “I'll tell you what. I'm going to have a little lie-down over here.” He pointed to a grove of cartoon trees behind a building in Tomorrowland that looked like a flying saucer. “You kids have fun, and come get me when you're ready for lunch.” He handed the map to Jonathan. “Kitty, you still have those tickets, right?” She unzipped her pocket and took the booklet out and waved it.

Lou walked back the way they'd come. He found an alley, hidden from view by an information booth, which led to an open area. He saw the flying saucer building in the distance, and cut due southeast until he found the grove—in reality just
a scattering of spindly young pines—where he stretched out on the grass and shut his eyes.

“Sir?
Sir
, are you awake?”

Two security guards stood over Lou. They were wearing short-sleeved uniforms with white Panama hats, and red ties patterned with tiny Mickey Mouse heads. Both of them were young and fit. The one who addressed Lou had a moustache. He looked a bit like Lee Van Cleef.

“Sir, is your name Mr. Schultz?”

“Yes, that's me. Lou Schultz,” he said, sitting up. “How did you know my name?”

“We have your children, sir. They're waiting at the security office.”

The guards escorted Lou back to Main Street, to a storefront between a candy shop and a photography studio. “Town Sheriff” was painted in ornate gold letters on the front window. Jonathan and Kitty were inside, sitting close together on a wooden bench.

The guard with the moustache kneeled down in front of them. “Is this man your father?” he asked.

“
Yes
,” Jonathan said impatiently. “Dad, tell him we don't need a babysitter.”

“What are you doing here?” Lou asked. “I thought you were going to Frontiertown.”

“Frontierland,” Jonathan said.

“Sir, we found your children in the park unattended.”

“Ah! There's been a misunderstanding,” Lou said. “They were not unattended. You see, they came here with me. But I thank you for your concern.”

“I realize that, sir, but they were unattended when we found them.”

“Yes, but we had plans to meet for lunch.” He looked at his watch and saw that it wasn't even noon yet. “I suppose we might as well eat now.”

“Mr. Schultz, your children were found taking coins out of the Cinderella Fountain.”

Lou saw that their pants were soaked up to their knees. He furrowed his brow. “Is this true, children, what the officer is saying?” he asked, making his voice deep with concern.

“Kitty lost the tickets,” Jonathan said. “She got to go on the Dumbo ride, and then we were supposed to go on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but she lost all the tickets. The whole book. We were going to buy another ticket book.”

“My pocket came unzipped,” Kitty protested.

To Lou's relief, Kitty and Jonathan's outrage at getting picked up by security seemed to have preempted any complaints they might have had about spending under two hours at Disney World.

“Well kids,” he said as the ferry nosed out into the lagoon, “what did you think of the Magic Kingdom?”

“So-called Magic Kingdom,” Jonathan said.

“They acted like we were
babies
,” Kitty said.

“Did they get all the coins off you?”

“Yeah, and fifty cents of it was mine,” Jonathan said. “I found it in the back seat.”

“Tell you what. Let's go to the beach and have a picnic lunch.”

Resort hotels in various stages of completion lined the highway along the ocean. Lou stopped at a market a few miles north of Palm Coast and bought a loaf of bread and a jar of pickles and two cans of sardines. He asked the clerk where they could go swimming.

“Most of the beaches around here are private, but if you want to leave your car here, y'all can walk up the road a bit to the town boat launch,” he said.

“Say, is there a payphone around here?”

“Out front, left of the door.”

Lou got two dollars in change from the clerk and stuffed a dollar in a jar on the counter that had a picture of a kid in a leg brace taped to it.

“Much obliged,” he said. “C'mon, kids,” he called to Kitty and Jonathan, who were browsing a rack of comic books. “Who wants to talk to Mommy?”

“I do,” yelled Kitty, but Jonathan was impatient to get to the water.

“The boat launch should be just up that way.” Lou pointed north. “Go ahead and find us a spot.”

Kitty talked to Helena while Lou emptied his flight bag and packed it with motel towels and their swimsuits and a few oranges. Kitty handed him the phone when he came back. “I'm gonna go find Jonathan, okay?”

Lou waved her off. “Careful crossing the street,” he said. “Helena?”

“Hi, Lou.”

“The kids are having a great time.”

“They didn't mind getting thrown out of Disney World?”

“You know, they really didn't seem to.”

“I'm glad you called, Lou—”

“I'm glad I called, too.”

“I'm glad you called, because I was over at the house today—I thought maybe they'd sent my 1099 there—and I noticed that the radiator in the front hall was seeping. Did you bleed the radiators last fall?”

“Helena, I was thinking. Maybe we could all go to Europe this summer. I don't think the Soviet trip would be much fun
for the kids, but I've got it down pretty well at this point. I can put someone else in charge for three or four weeks. We'll go to Poland, and Czechoslovakia, maybe even drive down to Bulgaria and take the kids to some monasteries. I think they're old enough to appreciate it. They really are good travelers, Helena. Very resourceful. Did Kitty tell you about the fountain?”

“Oh, Lou.”

“Oh?”

“I can't take a month off. I'd lose all my shifts.”

“Oh.”

“It's a lovely idea, though. It really is. I think the kids would love it if you took them. We'll have to get them passports.”

“Okay, Helena. It was just an idea. We'll see you in a couple of days.”

“Tell Jonathan hi.”

“I'll tell him.”

Lou crossed the highway and looked out at the water, grey and opaque under a thin cloud cover. The seawall was under construction, and sections of concrete slab were stacked on the sand. He saw the boat launch a hundred yards up the beach, and two figures, knee-deep in the surf with their pant legs rolled up. It took him a minute to realize that he was looking at Jonathan and Kitty. They seemed so small.

The Endless Mountains

In 1976, the Bicentennial year, Jonathan turned twelve and started calling his father Lou. The two of them shared a room on the top floor of Lou's large brown-shingled Victorian in Cambridge, all the other bedrooms being occupied by paying tenants. Jonathan's younger sister, Kitty, lived in a nearby apartment with their mother. It was informal arrangement, though. Most summers Jonathan moved into the lower bunk in Kitty's room while Lou, who taught Slavic languages at Brandeis, was away leading camping tours of the Soviet Union. During the rest of the year he and Kitty made their way home together or separately after school as the mood suited them, sometimes wandering around until they got hungry and then fixing themselves a snack in whichever kitchen was closest.

One day at breakfast, Lou put down his newspaper and said he thought he'd walk to work.

“How far is it, Lou?” Jonathan asked.

“Ten miles, give or take.”