The Magic Kingdom (8 page)

Out of the side of Bale’s mouth: “Get on them, please, Nanny.”

“At once, sir,” Nedra agreed, and Bale, even out of just the corner of his eye and even with only half an ear cocked and only a fraction of his already divided attentions, could tell at once the enormity of his mistake. She was solicitous and intimidated, her months with Prince Andrew no plus at all, a season of watered, undermined authority. (He should have demanded references from Her Majesty.) Eddy saw her for what she was, more nursemaid than nanny, a tucker-inner, a pusher of perambulators and strollers, protective enough but incapable of anything but loyalty, by nature a fan, for Labor, he guessed, when Labor was in, a Tory under the Tories, on all Authority’s impressive tit, effaced, invisible as a poor relation or maiden aunty. Wouldn’t the children be happier in the airport’s lovely, comfortable seats? she wondered. Would they like to look at some of our nation’s lovely newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind? Perhaps a few of the bigger children could read some of the smaller children the news?

“Was that a crack?” Charles Mudd-Gaddis snarled.

“Of course not, Charles,” Nedra Carp said. “I’m sorry if you took it that way.”

“I may only be eight years old and three feet tall,” he sneered, “and weigh only thirty-nine pounds, but I’m not ‘some of the smaller children.’”

“Of course not.”

“I’ve got progeria,” he said bitterly.

“Yes.”

“It’s a condition,” he grumbled.

“I know.”

“It ages me prematurely,” he complained.

“Tch-tch.”

“It shrivels me up like a little old man,” he groused sullenly.

“Of course it does,” she said, and looked around desperately, studying Heathrow’s lovely lever-operated ashtrays should she be taken ill.

“It wrinkles my skin and hardens my arteries and causes my hair to fall out,” he whined.

“That’s only natural,” she said vaguely.

“No one knows the cause,” he said acrimoniously. He pointed to the doctor. “That one, for example.
He
doesn’t know the cause. He doesn’t know the cure either,” he grumped.

“I’m sure they’re working on it,” Nedra Carp offered brightly.

“Too rare,” Mudd-Gaddis shot back crossly.

Her attention had wandered. She was looking at the airport’s comfortable seats and wishing she were seated in one now, curled up with one of the nation’s newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind. “Sorry?” she said, turning back to him.

“I said too
rare.
What’s wrong with your ears, woman?” he asked irritably. “One in eight million births.
No
one’s going to commit the research money to wipe out progeria when only one in eight million gets it,” he growled.

Nedra Carp nodded.

“It constipates me and makes me cranky,” he told her crankily.

“That’s awful.”

“I have to take prune juice,” he said resentfully.

“I’ll see there’s some always on hand.”

“But I’ve got all my faculties,” he protested indignantly.

“Certainly,” Nedra Carp said.

“Which I daresay is more than many can say,” he added accusingly. “I can recall things that happened to me when I was two years old as if it were yesterday. I’m very alert for my age.”

“What about yesterday?”

“I don’t remember yesterday.”

“I see.”

He studied her carefully.

“Yes?” Nedra coaxed.

“Are you my uncle Phil?” he asked.

“I’m Nanny,” Nanny said.

“That’s right,” Mudd-Gaddis said, and shuffled off, Nedra Carp looking after the little withered fellow in a sort of awe. Death was the authority here. Death was boss.

Bale, who’d overheard Benny Maxine offer to make book with the children about who’d get back alive, wanted a piece of the action. The kid quoted long odds for naming the deceased in a sort of daily double, suggested complicated bets—trifectas, quinellas. When they looked at him peculiarly he objected that there was nothing illegal about it, it was just like the pools. Eddy thought of going up to the boy. He’d have put Nedra Carp’s name down beside his own.

Meanwhile, Ginny had come back into the lounge with a man who looked familiar, who rather resembled, except for his clothes, Tony, their old newsagent and tobacconist. A sport in a sort of savvy, modified trench coat television journalists sometimes wore in the field, he seemed absolutely at home in a world class airport like Heathrow and looked, in his cunning, elegant zippers, loops and epaulets, one hand rakishly tipped into what might have been a map pocket, every inch the double agent. He could almost have been holding a gun, was awash in gaiety and a kind of hysterical flush—joy?—and seemed as if he might be taken off any second now by a sort of apoplectic rapture.

“You remember Tony,” Ginny said.

“How are you, Eddy?” Tony said, and withdrew the gun- toting hand from the depths of his trench coat. Bale wondered why all the men who broke up homes in Britain were named Tony. “Fine bunch of bairn,” the anchorman added affably, indicating the terminally ill children. “You know, they don’t seem all that sick?” he said.

“They don’t?” Bale said.

“Well,” Tony said, qualifying, “maybe the little preggers kid doesn’t look quite strong enough to carry to term.”

“The preggers kid.”

Ginny’s friend indicated wasted little Lydia Conscience, eleven, whose ovarian tumor had indeed punched up her belly to something like the appearance of a seventh- or eighth-month pregnancy.

“She has dysgerminoma,” Eddy Bale said with great feigned dignity. “That’s a tumor she’s carrying to term.”

“Hmm,” the foreign correspondent said thoughtfully. “You know what gets me about all this?”

“What’s that?”

He lowered his voice. “When they’re that sick they go all emaciated, and it makes their eyes something enormous,” he said. “That’s because eyes don’t grow. It’s a fact. Eyes is full size at birth. Then, when the face comes down, it’s pathetic. ‘Windows of the soul,’ eyes are. Big eyes touch a chord in Christians. Oxfam understands this. That’s why you see all them great full- moon eyes in the adverts, Eddy.” Bale widened his own eyes and looked at his wife. She hung on the fellow’s arm, attached there like one more of the trench coat’s accessories. Tony, intercepting Bale’s glance, shrugged shyly. “It’s odd and all, me calling you Eddy like this.”

Eddy studied him. “Tell me something, would you?” he said at last.

“What’s that?”

“Are you
really
our old tobacconist?”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“Not without the cardigan, not without the loose buttons hanging by a thread. You pronging my wife, then, Tony?”

“That isn’t a question a gentleman asks another gentleman,” their newsagent said stiffly.

“Come on, old man. Are you?”

“I shouldn’t have thought that was any of your bloody business,” said their ice lolly monger.

“Too personal?”

“Yes,” he said, poking about in his trench coat for a grenade, “
I’d
say too personal.”

“You’d
say too personal.”

“I’d
say so. Yes.”

“I don’t suppose it was too personal when you were selling us cigarettes!” Bale exploded. “I gather it wasn’t too personal when we bought your damned newspapers!” he shouted senselessly. He saw Mary Cottle reappear from the Ladies’. She seemed to watch them from behind a thick, almost weighty tranquillity. He turned to his wife. “This is a joke, right? Showing up in the departure lounge like this?”

“A joke?”

“He’s our tobacconist, for Christ’s sake! He keeps house behind a yellow curtain. A bell rings when the door opens and he pops out to sell ten pence worth of sweets. How’d you get him to close the shop?”

“You know something, Eddy? You’re a snob.”

“Tony, I really
didn’t
recognize you in that getup. Amateur theatricals, am I right? You’re good. You’re damned good. Isn’t he good, Ginny? Hey, thanks for coming by to see us off. Both of you. Really, thanks. It’s a grim occasion. And the fact is I
was
nervous. You took a lot of pressure off.”

“Getup?
Getup?”

“Listen,” Bale said, “I appreciate it.”

“Sure I prong her,” Tony said. “Certainly I do. We prong each other. Turn and turn about. Behind the yellow curtain.”

Ginny was tugging at the sleeve of Tony’s coat. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll miss our plane.”

Benny Maxine was taking it all in. Mary Cottle was. Colin Bible looked up for a moment from the bottle of chemically laced orange juice he was nursing past Tony Word’s lips, and the nipple slid out of the little boy’s mouth. Some juice squirted into the corner of the child’s eye and he startled. “Watch what you’re doing,” the little boy said. “That stuff smarts.”

“Don’t grumble,” Colin said. “That shows it’s working.”

“Isn’t he too big to take medicine from a bottle?” Noah Cloth asked.

“It’s nasty,” Colin explained. “A spoonful of titty makes the medicine go down. Don’t ask
me
why.”

Noah Cloth ran off laughing to tell the others what Bible had said.

Mr. Moorhead was making a sort of Grand Rounds in the departure lounge, almost abstractedly checking pulses, touching foreheads with the back of his hand, peering down throats and looking into eyes and ears, making jokes, soothing parents and children both with his big, complicated presence.

An airlines agent cleared his throat into a live microphone. “Well,” Ginny said, holding her hand out for her husband to shake, “happy landings.”

“Turn and turn about,” Eddy Bale said, taking it.

“Good trip, Colin,” she said, acknowledging her dead son’s nurse. Bible nodded, and Ginny went off with her lover.

Parents were hugging their own, each other’s kids. Colin Bible’s roommate, who’d shown up just as the children and their caretakers were about to board, reached out and patted his friend’s cheek and handed him what looked to be a brand-new Polaroid camera. Mary Cottle smiled dreamily as Lydia Conscience began to recite. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” she recited, “and pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

“It’s just like they say,” Benny Maxine said. “There ain’t no atheists in foxholes.” And Eddy Bale, boarding the airplane, wondered what he thought he was doing and, oddly, and not for the first time either, just what the hell went on behind that yellow curtain.

4

M
r. Moorhead needn’t have worried. He’d been unable to sleep during the long flight across the Atlantic. Though he hadn’t paid for a headset, he sat in the dark and watched a film he’d already seen, trying, with the aid of his memory and intense concentration, to read the actors’ lips, even to bring back the theme music, grand and vaguely classical, to see if he could match his memory of the story to the mood of the weak and watery silent scene projected before him on a screen the size of a desk top. For some reason the exercise reminded him of his days as a medical student, when he’d spent entire nights getting up an exam. A close-up of the heroine brought back the obscure pathology of a wasting disease, a master shot of a city street the sharp, deserted, shut-down memory of epidemic, an overview of a crowd scene the metallic taste and texture of plague. He rarely took his eyes from the screen—once to adjust the volume on Tony Word’s headset and again to find an additional blanket for Lydia Conscience—and when the film was over Mr. Moorhead had both a complicated sense of the film’s mildly melodramatic plot and the sour etiologies of a hundred diseases in his head.

What had upset him, however obscurely, what had forced him to his strange effort to bring back an entire motion picture he hadn’t enjoyed when he’d seen it the first time, was the fear that he might have to room with Colin Bible.

I’m not a bad man, Mr. Moorhead thought. I do no evil. And, wondering whether he was a good doctor, he began soundlessly to cry.

In the seat next to him Benny Maxine stirred, whimpered in his sleep. The doctor carefully removed the shoes from the boy’s swollen feet and loosened the small airline blanket from where it had become tangled, caught beneath his hips. He adjusted the pillow to a more comfortable angle and frowned in the dim light at the Jew’s oddly slacked jaw, the puffy, almost flexible bone structure that gave Benny’s head a queer mashed quality. If he could he would have remolded the kid’s face, tamping, patting, massaging the bad bones back into phase, packing the distended skin about them as he would have trimmed wet sand about the pylons and fretwork of a beach castle.

Mr. Moorhead had a vagrant impulse toward the chiropractic, an urge like some Pygmalion of the medical, a desire to extract health, to grow it like a culture in a petri dish, to adjust, as he’d adjusted Benny’s blanket and pillow, drawing off all the gnarled strings and matted clumps of illness and disease. At university he had led his classes in anatomy, a wizard of parts, an almost sculptor’s instinct for muscle and bone, an almost geologist’s or diviner’s one for the shales and fluids of form. He could tell at a glance the distortions on an anatomical chart and all the split ends of an internal organ badly drawn. He had an artist’s eye for the human body and, in museums, would actually diagnose statues, excitedly explaining to astonished friends, even to strangers, which statues and pictures were modeled from life, which were only the sculptor’s or painter’s Platonic ideal. Michelangelo he thought a fraud. “If there’d been an actual model for David,” he’d once told his professor, “he’d probably still be alive.” And had a theory that her incipient goiter would, were she real, almost certainly have killed off the Mona Lisa before her thirtieth year.

And that was the rub. A pal to whom he’d explained his David idea was a student at the Royal Academy of Art. “But look here, Moorhead,” his friend told him, “there really was. A model. Some kosher boy Michelangelo was sweet on. Genuine McCoy right down to his high holy circumcised pecker. There are life casts in the R.A. basement.”

“Life casts.”

His friend winked. “High times in sunny Italy. Signor Buonarroti liked them dripping in plaster, ooh la la.”

Because he was smitten by an ideal of health and life, some full-moon notion of the hale and hearty. Of soundness, bloom, the body filled to its sunny, f-stop conditions of solstitial, absolute ripeness like a ship floating in water precisely between its measured load lines. Flowers in their brief perfection broke his heart. Healthy beasts did. All perfect specimens, male and female. All heedless vitality, all organisms generally unconscious of pain, unmindful of death. It was why he had become a doctor in the first place and chosen pediatrics as his specialty. It was what both appalled and fascinated him about Jews.