The Magic Kingdom (5 page)

(“Of course not, sweetheart,” his mother agrees.

(“No,” Liam pleads with them, bewildered, “you have to let them. Please,” he says. “I want…I want it there. Promise me!” he says, and dies.)

The ex-casualty ward physician is Mr. Moorhead. He is not, as Eddy Bale vaguely wishes, a ship’s doctor, someone ruined, a hardened stray from the China trade, the belowdecks, palmetto-fanned heats and ruthlessnesses of tubs and packets, the steamy African river routes, or the pack-ice Murmansk and Greenland ones—some drummed-out being, some tainted, weary wiz. (Why do I insist on this stuff? Bale wonders. Who will have young lives in his charge. Not even the just ordinary Boy Scouts and Girl Guides of summer’s hold-hand organized wayfare but the real thing, some from-the-start-doomed-and-threatened expedition itself. So why do I insist on this stuff? My wife walked out on me. I lost a son. Ain’t my life full enough already?) But far from being in disgrace, he is, despite Eddy Bale’s garish dreams for him, an eminent man. (In less than the four years since Bale first met him, Moorhead had left the National Health, set up in private practice, and was now Senior Registrar in Internal Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, an excellent, highly regarded doctor with a service at Sick Children’s which was one of the most distinguished in Britain.) Secretly he wishes to be awarded an O.B.E. Editorial leaders in
Lancet
have favorably mentioned his name, and even respected colleagues, to whom he’s never disclosed his ambitions, can’t understand why he’s overlooked while, year after year, rock stars, actors, TV journalists, designers, and others, less deserving and perhaps even less famous, are included. The omission has been noted and actually occasioned several letters to the
Times,
usually followed and sometimes accompanied by delicately worded, clearly embarrassed disclaimers from Moorhead himself. Who knows well enough, but will not of course state, the real reason he’s been passed over. Just as he knows why he’s chosen to go off with Bale and the children on their futile flying circus to Florida. Almost certainly, though he loves the sun, the heat, and regularly goes on holiday to Spain’s Balearic Islands or Africa’s west coast or even out on the banana boats, those fuming tubs and packets of Eddy Bale’s imagination, it’s a place he would never, as a tourist, enter on his own. It is the Jews. He is going to see the Jews. He has heard that there is an even higher concentration of them in Florida than there is in Israel. It is the Jews who have kept him off the Queen’s Honors List, who for three years now have permitted him to attend the Queen’s Garden Party but drawn the line when it came to sharing real privilege and power. All those Jews. It is for Moorhead alone the dream holiday.

They were in Eddy Bale’s council flat in Putney. “Doct—” Bale, offering refreshment, started to say, then, correcting himself, named instead the inverted, oddly up-ante’d title of certain physicians. “
Mister
Moorhead?”

Eddy, fussing tea, opening in front of his guest, who had followed him into his small kitchen, the all-in selection from Sainsbury’s dairy case, murmuring, apologizing for his surviving father’s and bachelor’s ready-to-wear arrangements, popping the tiny crustless sandwiches and little cakes into the gas range to take the chill off.

“It all looks quite delicious, Bale,” Mr. Moorhead said.

“I know it isn’t what you’re accustomed to.”

“It looks quite delicious.”

“Well,” Eddy said, “it’s hardly what they serve at the Queen’s Garden Party.”

“You know the Queen’s Garden Party?”

“I’ve been this fund raiser, this special pleader, for years now. I have the guest lists by heart. Well, I’d have to, wouldn’t I? For the leads. Like an assurance broker or a customer’s man in the City. I know my nobs. I know my hons.”

“My dear Bale,” the doctor said, “I don’t think you know
me.
It’s true I federate with the nobs and hons at Her Majesty’s company picnic. I’ve even an eye out for the chain and collar. Which makes me as much customer’s man as yourself, as anyone in bourse or bucket shop, but it all goes for the children in Great Ormond Street. If I climb it’s for them I climb, more Sherpa than Hillary. Which could explain my presence on this long march of yours. Now,” he said, “
about
these terminal kiddies, these goner spawn.” And indicated an immense pile of folders on the sofa in Eddy’s lounge.

And Mary Cottle, neither nanny nor nurse, a woman in her early thirties who’d lost neither husband nor child but fiancé, not to death, not even to a rival, and who would herself bear no children, who could conceive them readily enough and even carry them to term, but who wore a poisoned womb, a terrible necklace of tainted genes that could destroy any child, boy or girl, to whom she might give birth. Healthy herself, and quite beautiful, she suffered from the strangest disease of all. She was a carrier. Twice, once in her teens and again in her twenties, she had delivered ruined, stillborn babes. Two other times amniocentesis had revealed awful birth defect, chromosomes suffused with broad and latent deformity like too-bitter tea.

“There’s something wrong,” the doctor said. “Your children will be born blind. With cancer, measles, swollen glands. With canes in their little fists.”

“We shall have to throw out the baby with the bathwater,” the surgeon said who performed her second abortion.

“It’s all bathwater,” Mary said and broke off her engagement.

“It’s crazy,” her fiancé had said. “We don’t have to have kids.”

“No,” Mary Cottle said.

“We could adopt.”

“You don’t understand,” Mary Cottle said. “I could never sleep with you.”

“That’s ridiculous. What is it you’re supposed to have?”

“Everything. I’m this Borgia madonna. I poison babies.”

Since then she has not so much as kissed a man and kept herself equable by frequent and furious bouts of masturbation, each time wondering what unkempt, dreadful, sickened soups she stirred with her finger.

Although she was precisely the sort of self-exiled outcast Eddy wanted for his enterprise, Bale knew nothing of her history. She came to him with queer credentials: as a highly recommended gray lady, a candidate, in everybody’s books, of unchurched sanctity, always peaceful—her sponsors knew nothing of her habits either, her steady state, orgasmic calm—always serene.

“Mary’s a brick,” the parents of dying children told him. “She’s quite marvelous. I can’t imagine where she gets her strength.”

“We depend on Mary,” her supporters said when he checked with them. “I don’t think she has a nerve in her body.”

“All she’s supposed to have seen,” Eddy confided to two trusted nurses at the London Clinic, “perhaps she’s callous.”

“Go on, she never is. It’s more like—well, something spiritual. Isn’t that what you’d call that far-off look in her eyes, Bert?”

“Spiritual, yes,” Bert said. “I’d say so. That calm, spiritual quality.”

“Always smiling. You know what she reminds me of? The Mona Lisa.”

“She’s an angel, is Mary.”

“Angels don’t smoke,” Bale, who’d never seen her enter a room without a cigarette in her lips, said.

She was smoking one then, in Putney, on the day they chose their finalists.

“Sorry I’m late,” Mary Cottle said, sitting down, and Eddy was struck by the lack of sorrow in her voice or on her beautiful, blissful face, which seemed never to have entertained the slightest anxiety. “What have I missed?”

“Mister Moorhead’s been disposing of our case load,” Colin Bible said, and pointed to about two dozen file folders at the physician’s feet.

Nedra Carp had to laugh over that one, she said, and did, loudly, and Bale was reminded again of something he’d noticed all his life: that people, even quite humdrum people, often behave eccentrically in groups. He’d seen this in school, had observed it when he’d done his National Service, in the office when he’d held down a regular job. It was as if the laws of civility, which not only governed but actually controlled people in one- on-one situations, were repealed once individuals joined with others, as if sanity were only a sort of practiced shyness and that what they were, what they were
really,
their true colors, wild as the plumage of exotic birds, was permitted to glow only in association, all their nut-case gushers and bonanzas, all their moonstruck, batty doings flourishing in packs, fielded herds of the erratic.

Because on television she had seemed such a
nice
woman. On the phone she had. And although it was true what Colin Bible had suggested, that Moorhead had been behaving with peremptory flair, rummaging among the names Eddy had proposed for the dream holiday with something more like impatience than judgment, like a card player discarding anything not of immediate value to his hand, say, Bale supposed it was only what Moorhead, as the only physician there, supposed was expected of him. Perhaps he
did
think that, for when Colin Bible said what Nedra Carp had laughed about so loudly, Moorhead looked up sharply. “It isn’t a contest, you know,” he said. “None of these children has actually made application to come with us. This is only a sort of
triage.
Doctors do it in casualty wards all the time. On battlefields they do. What we’re looking for here are those children who would most profit from our attentions.”

“The deserving dead,” Mary Cottle said. Nedra Carp shrieked.

“There are ethical considerations,” Moorhead said.

“My friend Colin warned me this would happen,” Colin Bible whispered to Mary Cottle. “‘Just take what comes,’ he said. ‘Regard the group, whatever its final makeup, as a sort of found sculpture.’”

“What ethical considerations?” Eddy Bale said.

“Well, if we chose a child whose parents can afford to make the trip on their own,” Moorhead said.

“Say, that’s right,” Eddy said.

“And the children ought to be compatible.”

“And what if they haven’t taken in yet that they’re going to die?” Mary Cottle asked equably. “Seeing some of their companions could come as a frightful shock.”

“The trip will be exhausting. It could shorten their lives.”

“That’s right,” Moorhead said.

“Then there’s the whole question of taste,” Colin Bible said.

“Taste?” said Eddy Bale.

“I’m sorry,” Colin Bible said. “My roomie warned me to keep my nose out of this.”

“Where’s the Ladies’?” Mary Cottle wanted to know.

“Taste?”

“Well, there’ll be all that media coverage, won’t there?” Colin Bible said. “You know how the press exploits these kids, Mister Bale. Who better?”

“They trained their long lenses on us whenever we went on an outing,” Nedra Carp said. “They could shoot right into Prince Andrew’s picnic hamper.”

“And medicine is more of an art than an exact science anyway.”

“So?” Eddy Bale said.

“A doctor gives one child six months and another two years.”

“So?”

“There’s no guarantee the one with six months couldn’t go two years.”

“Or the one with two years die in a week.”

“We have to be sure, you see,” Nedra Carp said.

“That they’re dying. That it’s actually imminent.”

“It’s a nice question,” Moorhead said.

“Like when brain death occurs.”

“Lung death.”

“Finger death,” muttered Mary Cottle in the loo.

“There are many nice questions.”

“There are many ethical considerations.”

“Suppose one kid is religious?”

“That he believes in God?”

“Has hope of Heaven?”

“Is convinced of it.”

“While the other kid isn’t even a believer?”

“Thinks when you’re dead you’re dead.”

“Or’s Jewish.”

“It wouldn’t be fair.”

“To the skeptic, atheist, agnostic kid.”

“To the kosher boy.”

“To the skeptic, atheist, agnost—?”

“Well, the religious kid would have it both ways, wouldn’t he?”

“Disney World, and Heaven too.”

“Or look at it the other way around.”

“That’s right.”

“Should the believer be penalized for his beliefs?”

“There are all these nice questions. I shouldn’t have thought we’d even scratched the surface.”

“Ought they to spend their final weeks away from their family, friends, and pets?”

“If I wear my armband all the time,” Bale reflected, “that could put them off.”

“Perhaps something less ostentatious. Perhaps a button in your lapel.”

“Well, you know, I never thought about the nice questions,” Eddy Bale said. “All I thought about was the fellowship of the thing.”

“See Naples and die.”

“See Naples and die?”

“He means how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm.”

“He means England and home might be a letdown.”

“That they could go into a reactive depression.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Bale asked. “You parse good deeds. Lawyers, ambulance chasers. I don’t know damn-all about the ethics and nice questions. Only ordinary human action. Nobody tells me ‘Have a good day’ anymore,” he said.

They stared at him.

“The chief’s right,” Colin Bible said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Mary Cottle, rubbing her hands as if she’d just dried them but hadn’t managed to get all the wetness off, came back into the room and smiled at them beatifically.

“Well,” Moorhead said, and picked up the remaining folders.

“Spit-spot!” said the nanny, Nedra Carp.

Which was when he got the giddies. Could barely refrain from spouting his gibberish about the desperado backgrounds he was constantly sketching in for them, their base
curricula vitae
pasts. “Chief” had worked on him, on all of them, like an enchantment. Eddy couldn’t help it, was as giddy with their gibberish and low bosh as with his own. Chief he’d never been, yet as soon as Bible spoke Bale perceived the change in the room, the simple fact of the matter. He was their chief, the responsible one in the bunch. The organizer. The enforcer. In their group madness they had, as madmen have always done—even those with delusions of grandeur—looked for someone at whose feet they could dump their delusions, fetching them to him with the pride of cats with dead mice, birds, cleverly preparing their loophole lunacy. While, just as cleverly (if with less good judgment), he saw what they were doing and accepted their nutty proposition, their singular single condition—that he be the one in charge.