The Magic Kingdom (38 page)

“No.”

“Then please shut up,” Janet Order said.

Rena reached out for Benny Maxine’s hand.

“I beg your pardon,” Pluto said timidly. “Just who is it you were expecting to call?”

There was so much talent in the world, Mickey Mouse thought. Even Matthew. His friend’s panic couldn’t entirely have been an attribute of the cunning mask. He had to admit: The Dog got a lot more out of the Pluto suit than he ever did. Gee, he thought sadly, remembering other auditions he’d blown up and down central Florida, maybe I’m not nearly the theatrical champ I’m cracked up to be.

“Benny?”

“Righty-o,” Maxine said, “hit’s our Benjamin ’ere.”

“Please, Benny,” she said, her voice crackling in her heavy phlegm like a sort of static, “could you give me your hand?”

Inside his mask, Mickey Mouse began to cry.

“Me ’
and?
Give you me ’
and?
Why, wot an idear! I don’ fink
dat’s
a bolt from da blue.”

Because many of them were seeing straight now. And had begun to drift toward the door. Lydia Conscience pushed Mudd- Gaddis’s wheelchair. Pluto tugged at Mickey Mouse’s arm and whispered something in his big ear the foolish but ultimately not unkindly Mouse couldn’t quite make out, though he believed he caught the Dog’s gist—which he hadn’t at all—and, nodding, reluctantly joined him in the exodus, all the while looking back over his shoulder, rubbing his big white gloves against what he’d forgotten were only one-way black glass buttons and not eyes, and thinking, the not-so-standoffish softy Lydia Conscience had been told about in her dream, that perhaps it made better art not to be in on the very end of their performance, that perhaps there were some things best left unstated in theater, following, nodding, glancing back over his shoulders and rubbing his eyes, perhaps the only one to get out of there with his honor intact.

Because despite the fact that the children were dying themselves, they had gone and bought trouble anyway. Getting home free had been denied them, not having to apologize had. All they could hope for now was to cover their ass.

“Hey,” Benny called, “where
you
off to then? Lydia? Charley? Hey, Noah,” he called.

“Let them,” Rena said. “Benny?”

“Yeah,” he said, “sure,” watching them leave.

The buddy system had broken down completely. Noah had thrown his arm about Tony Word’s shoulder. Janet Order fell into step between Pluto and Mickey and dared them to speak once they’d left the confines of the room and were in the hall again. Pluto kept his own counsel, but Mickey Mouse, grown into his part, said he thought all of them had done a wonderful job.

“Do you think you could hold me?” Rena asked.

“Hold you?”

“I shouldn’t ask. I know I’m a mess.”

“Listen,” he said, “are you going to be all right?”

“After that night,” she said, breathing brokenly, “we explored the hotel, when we had all that fun…”

“What?” Benny said. He could hardly hear her. “What?”

“Oh,” said the fastidious girl, “look at this bed. What I’ve done to the sheets.” Some of her handkerchiefs, wadded, stained, had shaken loose from the sleeves of her dress, from her collar and waistband, from the hem of her skirt. They lay about her like ruined flowers, exploded ordnance. “Please,” she said, “hold me. Just till they find us.”

He held her, and it hurt where even her frail weight pressed against his chest, his belly, his heart. He held her, and she told him she’d never taken her eyes off him that day they’d all undressed on the island. He held her, and she told him she loved him.

“Oh, Benny, the good die young,” Rena Morgan said, and died.

He was with her when Mary Cottle and the others found them.

“She said she loved me,” Benny told them when they walked in.

“Oh,” Mr. Moorhead said. “Oh, God. Oh,” he said, as if suddenly it was all quite clear to him.

Which it was.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. The physician had determined to bring no one along who he was not certain could survive the trip. It was her respiration, her terrible heavy breathing that had caused her spasms and loosed the poisons in her chest, the mucus and biles, the clots of congestion hanging together and preserving her life by the strings of the ordinary. The great prognostician had simply failed to factor her desire into the equation. He had missed his prognosis because he hadn’t taken her sighs into account, the squalls, blasts, and aerodynamics of passion, all the high winds and gale- force bluster of love.

8

B
ale wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, who felt, that is, he must earn his rewards. As a kid he hadn’t dutifully done his vegetables in order to get to the meat, or eaten all his meat up in order to tuck away dessert. He wasn’t anal enough for rigmarole and would occasionally, though he was never particularly fond of greens, use the spoon he’d just dipped into his trifle to take up his salad. “Eating around” was his term for the habit. Though this wasn’t a habit either. He had no habits and noticed that Liam had inherited the tendency. (It delighted him, even when his boy was in hospital, to watch the child—the hospital trays with the meal’s portions isolated and set in the tray’s hollows and pockets like paints spread out on a palette made this easy to keep track of—and know that this piece of business came from him, from Eddy, or at least from his, the Bales’, side of the family.) It wasn’t exactly a blockbuster heritage and he made no great claims for it, but it was amusing nevertheless to be able to identify and claim—though he didn’t do this either—the trait as strictly his own contribution. Because Ginny, he’d noticed, ate in accordance with secret and, within terms of the discipline, totally arbitrary principles of her own, or at least of her side of the family. He’d made no study, of course—he
wasn’t
compulsive—but had observed that, though it was unknown to him and perhaps even to her, she had a sort of game plan, changed as often as good code. Sometimes it was as elementary as eating everything on her plate from left to right. Sometimes he didn’t realize until days afterward—he
wasn’t
compulsive, he wasn’t compulsive and he wasn’t anal; he had a good head for menus is all—that she had eaten her food alphabetically, or along the points of the compass.

So why had he waited almost a year to open that letter she’d left for him the day she’d gone off in the taxi, the letter he had assumed, assumed now, assumed at the time, would explain everything? Because he already knew why she’d left. Indeed, if Ginny hadn’t left him it could only have been a matter of time till he’d left Ginny. Liam had been a remarkable child. In health remarkable: bright, good, cheerful, pleasant, thoughtful, generous, obliging, and kind. And in sickness remarkable too: all he’d been in health plus a saint of suffering. In sickness and in health. A self-contained marriage of true mind. (He might have taken vows, though he was better than that, better than vows.) To have remained together after Liam died would have been a constant reminder that they were not as good as Liam, that they’d been brought low. If time was to do its job and heal all things, then first the wound had to be taken off, covered over, removed. Liam must die and the Bales must separate.

So he knew why Ginny had left and why, it could even be, she’d taken up with Tony the Tobacconist. At the time he hadn’t known that she had. Otherwise he’d probably have ripped open the letter at once, skipping over all the stuff that was sure to be there (“…and the short of it, Eddy, is that Liam was simply too good. We should never have been able to recover from his loss. Even if we never mentioned his name again, darling, we should be reminded every time we called each other’s. We’re both young and don’t deserve to live in the shadow of his loss another thirty…”) to get to the juicy parts.

So why? Who’d deliberately left his son’s scrapbook at home, photos from the papers of the ill head-bandaged boy, and which, according to the very letter of his own topsy-turvy laws of reasoning, eschewing the good memories, preserving the bad, he could easily have afforded to bring along with him, but who’d left it instead unlooked-for in Putney, or for Ginny to take with her, her dead dowry, to her tobacconist, and who carried on his person only the black, dissolving shards of the memorial brassard, little more now than a kind of officially sanctioned death dust? So why? Why the letter? Who by inclination, and all the sugarotropism of those familial, historic, biologic, Balean, sweet- seeking genes, took dessert with his soup, appetizer with his coffee?

Because while he wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, wasn’t dutiful about his veggies or anal enough for rigmarole, he had, in fact, a sense of the last, a knowledge and feel, that is, real as his pride in his own continuity in good Liam’s eating patterns, for the conclusionary ripeness—an instinct, that is, for when worse came to worst.

So maybe he
was
anal, or at least retentive, squirreling away the best if not for last then for when it was most needed.

Though he thought he pretty much knew what would be in it. (They weren’t
enemies,
after all, they loved each other, had been married almost fourteen years.) There’d be solace in it. Solace most needed.

And what else was there to do while Rena Morgan was being prepped in the Orlando funeral parlor?

They’d taken their terrified charges to the chapel off I-4 which Nedra Carp had discovered on their first morning in Florida. The nanny had organized a hasty, last-minute service for the little group of mourners, and it struck Bale that what Nedra had told him—could it have only been a week ago?—about the chapel was probably true. It had the altar and pews, the stained glass and track lighting, and even a dried-out font sort of thing, vaguely baptismal, vaguely birdbath, but there was a real question in his mind about whether the place had ever been consecrated. Notices were everywhere in the pew racks that “a priest came on Sunday.” What that left to be made of the young man in charge on the day of Rena’s memorial service was also a question. Clearly, however, the child’s death was probably the most important religious event in the history of the chapel. The pastor, if that’s what he was—he wore a sort of gray modified cassock—seemed more affected than any of them. He could hardly get through a psalm without crying, and his brief eulogy stressed over and over again the pity of the little girl’s having come all the way from England to Florida to die. He couldn’t seem to get past the sheer mileage of the thing.

There were official representatives from the Magic Kingdom in attendance. Also, Matthew Gale and Lamar Kenny had shown up. They sat quietly in one of the rear pews. Benny recognized Kenny from their encounter at the elevator and pointed him out to Eddy. Mary Cottle recognized Gale as the young man who’d winked at Colin Bible at the Haunted Mansion and said nothing. Though by now, of course, the adults had pretty much pieced together a general idea of what had gone on that night. The Disney people were on to the false Pluto and had fired him. They’d fired Kenny, too, on suspicion of being the false Mickey Mouse, but Lamar, fearing he’d never work again and still believing he’d been duped into his phony audition, would admit nothing. Nor would Matthew Gale tell them otherwise.

“I got you into this,” Gale told him.

“You bet,” Lamar said.

“I won’t let you down.”

“He won’t let me down,” Lamar said. “Big deal. Top Disney dicks crawling all over the place watching us, and he won’t let me down. Loyalty! Follows me everywhere as if he really
was
Pluto!”

Back at the hotel, Nedra had taken the children to the game room.

Colin, off to see what could be done about changing their tickets, called to say that they didn’t have to be changed, that Rena would be ready in time for their flight the following day.

“What are they doing to her, do you think?” Eddy asked Moorhead.

They were sitting in the Coconino Cove, a bar just outside the Pueblo Room.

“They’re embalming her. It’s not generally done in Europe, but it seems to be mandatory in this country.”

“Embalming her,” Bale said. “What is that actually?”

“Well,” Mr. Moorhead said, “it’s pretty much what you’d think. They treat the corpse to prevent decay and putrefaction.”

“Putrefaction,” Bale said. “She was barely thirteen years old, for God’s sake.”

“She was old enough to fall in love,” Moorhead said. He finished his gin and ordered another. “It’s what killed her.”

“Yeah, you said.”

“It was the unforeseen complication.”

“How do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Prevent decay, prevent putrefaction.”

“With preservatives.”

“What, like in the rashers and bangers, you mean?”

“The Egyptians soaked their dead in brine and filled the body cavities with spices and aromatic substances.”

“That’s nice,” Bale said. “A little attar of roses, a splash of Nuits de Paris.”

“Then they drain the blood from her veins with a hollow needle called a trocar, which they use in conjunction with a tube called a cannula.”

“Secrets of the ancients revealed,” Bale said.

“To prevent the body from shriveling and turning brown—”

“Like an apple,” Bale said.

“—they pump formaldehyde into the cavities in combination with alcohol.”

Eddy set his drink down.

“They apply cosmetics. They apply masking pastes.”

“Hey,” Bale said, “I just remembered, there’s something I have to do back in the room,” and left the bar, returned to the room, and took Ginny’s letter out of his suitcase.

I was his mother, Eddy [Bale read], I was his mum. I’m the one carried him those nine months, who lost her figure and still wear stretch marks like chevrons—my corporal, as it were, punishment, as it were.

Have the decency. Spare me your shock and outrage. Keep to yourself your reservations about my taste and sensibilities. Four years like these down one’s craw and anyone’s taste would have soured,
SHOULD,
have soured, if, that is, any sensibility is still there to function at all. I don’t need any crap just now.