Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“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.