Stanley Elkin - The Magic Kingdom

“You’ve been to Mass, Miss Carp?”

“Not proper Mass, Mister Bale — I don’t even know if the chapel’s consecrated — but there was something that looked like an altar, and pews and stained glass, and a priest comes on Sundays.”

“Benny is Jewish. I don’t know Mudd-Gaddis’s affiliations, but I’ll ask if he’s interested.”

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” she said, and handed Bale the newsletter. “There’s this lovely write-up about us in the paper. Quite tasteful, I think.” Eddy read the notice. It was a modest story under a small headline on the back page: ENGLISH CHILDREN WIN TRIP TO VACATION KINGDOM. It recorded all their names and listed the children’s ages but said nothing of the purpose of the trip. Death wasn’t mentioned, disease wasn’t. Mr. Moorhead wasn’t identified as a doctor. “The big news is all about the weather,” Nedra Carp said.

“The weather?” Bale had said, who’d not yet looked out the window and had forgotten the strange inclemency of the previous day.

“Oh, yes,” Nedra Carp said, “there must be three or four inches of snow. The driver — he’s called a ‘cast member,’ everyone who works here is; did you know that, Mister Bale? — was quite concerned he had no chains. Though not a flake’s fallen outside the park.”

Which was before the kids had awakened, Nedra drawing back the curtains and indicating the scene, unveiling and flourishing it like a commissioned portrait. And Bale, already fainthearted, despairing, worrying his — their — losses like a field marshal, awake even before the maid had let herself in, awake and despondent a full hour before first light, already brooding when he’d turned in, and in his dreamless sleep too, hopelessness like a cinder in his eye. (Though Bale was no dummy, though he knew himself well enough, or well enough to recognize his habits, the if-then sequences of his conditioned behavior. And reminded himself, Eddy, watch it; Eddy, don’t let the part stand for the whole. You always go all sad-ass and sourpuss at finish lines and destinations. My God, man, there was a time when it broke your heart just to hear the bus conductor call out your stop. And reminded himself of the time when he’d allowed an unfavorable rate of exchange — so they’d have money in their pockets he’d traded a few quid for pesetas at the duty-free shop at Gatwick — almost to ruin their honeymoon on the Costa Brava. Ginny had tried to reassure him, had told him at least half a dozen times that the 20 percent premium they’d paid for the pesetas was irregular, that the banks in Spain would give them the official rate, but he continued to worry, the pound he’d lost on the deal multiplied in his head by a factor of five for all the pounds and Thomas Cook traveler’s checks they carried on their persons, for all the drafts they would have yet to write on their bank at home to make up for the one-to-five deficiency, his poor, depleted, gutted lolly, their love stake; doing in his head, too, all the complicated projections of suddenly inflated meals, souvenirs, hotel bills, fares, sun creams, tabs at nightclubs, and mad money. Discounting their honeymoon to the Spaniards. And wouldn’t leave the room for more than twenty-four hours — they had ten days — thinking: If we don’t go out they can’t cheat us; thinking: But they already have, a day shot, one already 20 percent less precious day of our ten out the window. Where he saw the sun shining 20 percent brighter than it had even on the brochure, the sea 20 percent bluer, the waves that much higher, too, conspiring by remaining in the room to recover: They had ten days. If they had ten days and the ratio was four to one — five to one? — what would it be, 10 percent of their losses, but they had to make love, they had to sleep, they had to use the room, call it twelve out of the twenty-four hours anyway, so it would be more like 5 percent than 10 percent, and they were still 15 percent in the hole. “ There’s this bodega,” he’d told Ginny, “not a block from the hotel. We could get wine, we could get oranges and bread. Maybe they do Spanish sandwiches. We’ll eat in the room tonight. We’ll use the money they stuck us with at Gatwick. We’ll stick them with it.” Ginny accused him of being mean. Meanness had nothing to do with it, he said. And it didn’t. He was no miser. He was a coward of the unaccustomed, raw, all thumbs, greenhorn fear in his bones and blood, in his nails and hair. He explained this to Ginny, his oblique vertigo. “Give me time,” he said. “When the banks open”—they’d arrived too late, the banks had already closed—“and we get our proper rate, I’ll be the last of the big-time spenders for you.” Or choice. Burdened by choice. Overwhelmed. Dreading evenings on the town. Hating to read menus, picking a movie, choosing a play. And craven in taxis if he didn’t know the route. Though forgetting this. Each time forgetting this. Hailing cabs with the authority and assurance of an M.P. until, inside, he felt the greenhorn paranoid temerity again, one eye on the meter, another looking not for landmark, since this would be, for him, terra incognita, but for some discoverable logic of the route, the principles of geography, and all the while listening to the cabby for clues, the chatty-seeming observation, the too-matey question, Bale figuring the hackman figuring him. The both of them lost in Willesden one time, looking for 14 Broalbrond Road because Bale, without actually saying so, had implied he’d been there before, practically old stamping grounds for Eddy, and had, to keep the driver honest, indicated with nothing much more than the mildest sarcastic thrust to his tone that such and such a building, standing, it had to be, since the Great War, must, it seemed to him, at least if they were anywhere near the Willesden he knew, his old stamping grounds, have gone up overnight. And in Johannesburg, with Liam for new aggressive treatment, the same dark curtains descending. In Beijing. Even in Lourdes. Especially in Lourdes. The beginnings of all expeditions the same sad business, jet lag in Eddy an actual disease. But not mean, no miser, no screw or scrimp. Not a lickpenny bone in his body. Abject at waste is all, a cringer for missed opportunity, abused life. And who could say he was wrong? Hadn’t Ginny left him, hadn’t Liam died? Wasn’t he usually disappointed at the theater? Hadn’t oysters Casino given him indigestion?) So he didn’t wake Colin. So he didn’t wake the children.

Who dropped out of sleep into wakefulness — Eddy watching through his lashes — like synchronized swimmers. A contagion of halt beginnings, the stuttered start of a new day. Colin Bible supervising from his rollaway, calling ablutions like stations of the Cross. “Brush your teeth, Benny. Move your bowels.” Then, raising his voice for the little old man: “ Your teeth are in the glass by the nightstand, Mudd-Gaddis. Don’t forget to wear your sweater, don’t forget to put on your scarf.” Winking at Eddy past his shut eyes, past his lashes, piercing Bale’s squeezed charade, a laser intrusion. Who wanted nothing more than to be done with it and wondered if it was as late as he hoped. And, looking for grievance, tried to resent the tone the nurse had taken with the little golden-ager, condescension loaded into his voice like a round of ammunition, tried to resent the implied conspiracy of the wink (who was, after all, found out, discovered as a shirker, known for what he was, could be, by a bloody pansy), tried and failed — struck finally only by the difference in their styles, Eddy not so much outraged as intimidated, orientalized by a holdover respect for his elders, the sense he had that Mudd-Gaddis’s freaky years deserved a kind of honor, for — God, what was a bloke like him doing with folks like these? — it was, to Bale, almost as if Charles Mudd-Gaddis was the genuine article, a brittle scroll of a being, some actual ancient. Bale had to bite his lips to keep the deference out of his voice, and once had actually been on the verge of calling him “sir.”