The Magic Kingdom (31 page)

Because all she wanted to do was look at it, study it (not even touch it, actually ceasing to bathe him, not because he was too big, which he was, but because she did not want to fall again into her old patterns, did not wish ever again to inflict pain, even helplessly, even unconsciously, did not wish to administer—she had thrown the towel away—any of those at once thoughtless and obsessive rub-downs with which she had once raised welts on her own body and brought tears to the eyes of her clear- skinned halves, steps, and stairs), not even mentioning to him, though she wanted to, that she had one too.

They played. She was four years his senior. They played his games.

They played Fish, they played Old Maid. They pinned the tail on the donkey and fought wars with lead soldiers. She pushed him on the swing, she pulled him on the roundabout. She gave him piggyback rides. (She thought she could feel its heat through his jacket, through his shirt and undershirt, through her blouse and sweater and her own undershirt, the hot indelibles of his skin radiating through the half-dozen layers of fabric that separated them and warming her somewhere behind her heart at the contact point where he jounced against her.)

“You know, Nedra,” he said one day, “I’ve almost gone ten. I’m big for my age, as big as you are. It looks daft, your hauling me about.”

“You’re light as a feather,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I feel quite silly.” She had been about to carry him across the common, where quite recently she had begun to teach him to play rounders, where they leaned into each other in clumsy two-man rugby scrimmages, where they played a sort of hockey together, where they kicked the football about that Nedra had bought for him. They would have headed toward the small playground, where she still pushed him on the swing, where she still pulled him on the roundabout.

“All right then,” she said. “You carry me.”

Because she still hadn’t shown him, hadn’t told him. Not because it was a secret but because she was saving it, squirreling it away against the time when she would need it—perhaps the time had come, perhaps his misgivings about the piggyback rides was its presage—to bond him to her as she had been bonded to him for almost two years now. Her pretexts had begun to seem threadbare even to Nedra; the rough games they played and which had been her idea, the girl’s, who knew nothing about boys’ sports, not really, who had neither taste nor aptitude for them and had forced herself to bone up, to learn them from the rule books, and who practiced by herself in what spare time she had the fundamentals of football, of rugby and rounders and hockey, whose only game prior to the time she needed to know them had been washing children, playing nursemaid, and who had actually become quite competent at them, the rough games, if only so she could show them to him, keep him with her, keep him entertained. And who hadn’t known at the time that the pretext of teaching him sports would develop subsequent pretexts, that the sweat he worked up would become a pretext to get him to take off his shirt, to wipe him down. So that she could stare at it, study it, see if it was still there.

So his misgivings about the piggyback rides weren’t entirely unwelcome. She could see the advantages, all her served purposes. Which was why she didn’t put up a fight, why she was so quick to suggest that they trade places and the boy carry her. Because she hadn’t told him yet, and because she really didn’t know how to tell him even if the time
was
right.

“I won’t be too heavy for you, will I?” the fourteen-year-old girl asked the almost ten-year-old boy.

“No,” he said as she climbed on his back.

Because perhaps he’ll feel it, she thought. Because perhaps he’ll feel it and know from
the
heat and I won’t have to tell him.

But he said nothing when he put her down.

He’s shy, she thought. He’s just like me.

“Did you feel anything strange?” she asked him.

“You’ve got sharp tits,” he said. “You’ve got tits like tenpenny nails.”

What could I expect? she thought. He’s
too
shy. I should never have asked him that.

So she waited until they got home. She didn’t point out that he was perspiring, that he was overheated. She took him directly to her room and closed the door.

“You can’t expect to go down to the table looking like that,” she said. “Take your shirt off.”

“
Ne
dra,” he said.

“I’m not fooling, young man. Take it off.”

And because he perfectly well understood that blood didn’t matter in that house, special relationships, friendship, and knew where his treats were coming from, the desserts and the gifts and the extra money and his lessons in games, he agreed. He took his shirt and undershirt off and dutifully extended them to his queen of the queer-o’s bonkers half sister. Who took them from him and let them drop to the floor.

“Don’t you want to wipe me off? What are you doing? Hey,” he said, “what’s going on?”

“Look,” she said. “See?”

“Jesus, sis,” he said, “this is the best treat of all!”

And stood perfectly still as she came toward him and touched what at that moment Nedra didn’t even realize were the breasts which she could not remember when she had not known one day would grow, to the iridescent purple flaw on his chest, locking their matching jigsaw stigmata, pressing her costume jewelry nether lip to his pouting, port-wine-stained, crescent upper one.

He was full ten when he came to her. She remembered because he was wearing the handsome tweed touring cap she had given him on his birthday.

He cleared his throat, making it seem that he’d come upon her unaware and, out of honor, was not only signaling her attention but giving her an opportunity to collect herself, pretending not his invisibility but hers.

“Gregory,” she said.

“I find,” her half brother said, “I may no longer in good conscience honor our special relationship.”

“Oh?”

“Though I shall always half love you.”

Janet Order, Nedra Carp suddenly finds herself thinking, Janet Order, Janet Order. Livid Janet Order, Little Girl Blue, she thinks, who seems to defy Nedra’s longtime policies of bought-and-paid-for hired-hand love—it was, she acknowledged, a flaw—and old propinquitous patriotics and aversives, her dependence, for example, on the authorized and her slavish regard for her charges, the affront, for example, she took at just plain pure otherness, shared toilets and someone else’s hair in the comb, boxes of other women’s tampons and all the mnemonics of alternative being—it was a flaw, it was a flaw—her queasy antipatheticals and squeamish inimicals flaws (who would have resented Mary Cottle, for example, for no other reason than that she carried the Poppins baptismal name), her xenophobics and the coin’s other side, her played favorites flaws, flaws, her old pagan Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down determinations flaws, flaws, flaws.

But forgiving herself by the light and shine of her turned new leaf, Nedra feels sympathy for the girl who went both of them one better.
Janet Order,
she thinks, quite simply, quite suddenly awed.
Janet Order. Janet Order.
Who was herself a bruise, her entire body one brute blue stigma.

While in Mary Cottle’s room, Mr. Moorhead examined his Jew.

Because he was enough of a social animal never to volunteer at parties and gatherings that he was a pediatrician, or even an ex-casualty-ward physician. (But not courageous enough an egoist to proclaim himself, though he believed himself to be—and may in fact have been—one of the best diagnosticians in the world. And
never
mentioned what he absolutely knew to be the case: that what he really was was the finest prognostician ever to have lived. And though he may have wanted, at one of the Queen’s garden parties, say, to blurt this out to those stuffy O.B.E.’s, he knew well enough what the upshot would be—they would put him down as demented—and held his tongue. But give him credit, Mr. Moorhead thought. It was out of neither modesty
nor
fear that he failed to offer his strong suit. It was good, honest prudence. The fact was, his gift was a curse. He knew outcomes. He knew when people would die. He handicapped death. And while he might have been no master of the social graces, he knew enough about human nature to realize that unless a person was a pretty good sport, reeling off his mortality table might be too off-putting. They’d mark him down, he giggled, as a wet blanket at Her Majesty’s garden parties!

(Once he had. It was the first time he’d been asked to one, and he was a little squiffed. He’d boasted his forte to an eminent philanthropist. The man had been fascinated, telling the physician his medical history, leading him on to that point in the conversation where he was about to ask the awful question. Moorhead saw it coming—he was, after all, a prognostician—but there was no way to stop him. “I’ve told you,” he said at last, “more than a little bit about myself. So what do you think? What do you think, eh?” Sometimes knowing that a thing will happen provides the opportunity to deal with it when it does—he was, after all, a doctor—and he was ready for him. “Sir,” Moorhead told him indignantly, “I’m neither spiritualist, fortuneteller, nor flim-flam man. I’m a scientist. I will not perform parlor tricks for you!” And nervously awaited the millionaire’s reaction, which even to Moorhead’s half-slewed mind was a beat too long in coming. The fellow looked round slowly, taking in Buckingham Palace’s lush grounds, the ceremonial costumes of the guards, the fringed extravagant tents standing like Camelot. “Some parlor,” he said as Moorhead moved off. He was a pediatrician and knew a thing or two about childishness as well as about children and wasn’t surprised to see the man looking after him, Moorhead trying to lose himself among the other guests when the old boy came up to him again and actually ignoring him when he—he was a full-fledged Sir, one of the wealthiest men in England, and, in Mr. Moorhead’s best professional judgment, would not last two years—tried to intrude on the pediatrician and his new companions.) So when they asked, he simply told them “physician,” letting it go at that, knowing human nature well enough to understand that everyone wanted to learn about his symptoms, offering up their bodies like patriots, volunteers, recruits of their own raw mortality.

He didn’t mind these intrusions. He didn’t mind people picking his brains. In fact, he welcomed it. But he needed data. These weren’t data. They were anecdotal evidence, loose, quick- draw evaluations made at parties and never followed up by examinations and tests, the obituaries he sometimes spotted in the papers the only corroboration of his findings.

So when he asked the woman the time—he’d been hanging about the fringes of the queue looking impatient, as if he’d been stood up—and saw the bracelet of tattooed numbers on her arm, he shrugged his disgust at other people’s unreliability and drifted into line beside her. He offered small talk about the queue’s progress—he said “queue,” hoping she’d pick up on the foreign-sounding word—about the park’s attractions, his accommodations, about, finally, what he was doing in Florida. An international medical convention in Miami, he said.

“You’re a doctor?”

“Yes,” he said, “a physician. Yes. I am. From England.”

“From
En
gland,” she said. “I lived in England. In Liverpool.”

“Did
you?” he said. “I had a surgery in Liverpool after I came down from university. This would have been around ’57. There were still refugees about. From the camps.”

He had to raise his voice over the ruckus of the Country Bear Jamboree. After the show his colleague had still not shown up, and he asked if she cared to join him for lunch at the Liberty Tree Tavern. They could have a
schnaps,
he said.

The woman—he judged her to be about the same age he was, perhaps a year or two older; she would have been eighteen or nineteen after the war—declined and said she was tired and thought she would return to her room for a nap.

He walked along beside her for a while in silence.

“Look,” he said at last, “I don’t mean to pry, but has anyone ever triangulated those cysts on your face?”

So now, two days later, she is lying on Mary Cottle’s bed in her slip. She has complaints but Moorhead has shushed her, explaining that too much has been made lately of patient feedback, that a diagnosis independently arrived at is more likely to be sound than one in which the patient leads her doctor around by the nose.

He finishes his examination and is returning his instruments to the black leather bag.

“You may put your clothes on,” he says and hands the woman her dress. He goes into Mary Cottle’s bathroom and washes his hands in Mary Cottle’s sink.

“So what’s the story?” she asks when he’s back in the room. “Will I live?”

Mr. Moorhead frowns. “Obviously”—he indicates the room—“the facilities in here—Tell me, Mama, have you any family pictures?”

“Pictures.”

“Family pictures.”

“To tell you the truth, Doc, I don’t make a move without my snaps, but no one ever asked before.”

“I’m looking for possible genetic pathologies.”

“Oh,” she says, “genetic pathologies,” and hunts about in her big purse. She digs out a large blue plastic holder like an oversized wallet. It is held together by rubber bands and is stuffed with photographs.

Mr. Moorhead takes a ballpoint pen from Mary Cottle’s desk drawer, some hotel stationery, seats himself at the desk, turns on the three-way lamp to its highest position, pulls a chair over for the woman, and inserts the jeweler’s loupe in his eye.

“Hand them to me one at a time and tell me their relation to you.”

“That’s Danny, my grandson,” she says and shows him a color photograph of a spoiled-looking little boy playing a computer game in a finished basement in Shaker Heights, Ohio. “The little girl is Debbie, Danny’s sister.”

“I meant—” he says.

She shoves another photograph under his loupe. “That’s my son Ben. That’s his wife, Susan.” They are sitting in an open Chrysler convertible.

“Those are Ben and Susan’s twins, Sheila and Sharon. Ben and Susan can’t have children. They’re adopted.”

She shows him dozens of photos. They are all in color and have a matte finish. They are of birthday parties in paneled rec rooms. They are of affairs in hotels—weddings, bar mitzvahs—with great flower centerpieces on the tables. She identifies all the guests.