Charles Mudd-Gaddis, that little old man, dreams of his first birthday. He dreams the cake and dreams the candles, dreams the balloons and dreams the streamers; he dreams the toys, he dreams the clapping. And dreams he’s three, the little boy, who would have been a man by now—twenty, twenty-one. Then dreams the girl, six, to him a woman. And now he’s five and pushing forty. Ah, to be thirty-four again! he dreams. And dreams he’s seven and confusion comes, that white aphasia of the heart and head. And dreams in awful clarity it’s now, and can’t recall how old he really is.
Rena Morgan can’t tell if she’s awake or sleeping. She’d sensed Miss Cottle pass down the aisle, the trace of tobacco scent clinging to her clothes and skin like an odor backed up in a cellar. In what is more likely sleep than not, she brings a hanky, which she is never without, up to her nostrils, and mildly blows, delicately, ladylike, folding the discharge into a dry patch of handkerchief as expertly as a magician hiding a coin. She has taught herself to make these passes at her face before actual mirrors, using as her model images she’s picked up of tragic ladies dabbing at tears in the corners of their eyes, her fingertip eased along a groove of linen so that, when it works, as it almost always does now that she so perfectly executes the gesture, it isn’t as if she were wiping tears away at all so much as brushing cosmetics into her flesh or whisking flecks of mascara and excess powder out of her vision—even in sleep there is exactly that look of concentrated dispassion on her face—doing all the last-minute repairs and touch-ups of grace. Yet it is really as tears that she thinks of her mucus, some vast reservoir of the sorrowful, her sad pain treasury. She fills her hankies and disposes of them in her sleep, folding them neatly into pockets, putting them under pillows, a kind of controlled, sedentary somnambulism, her tricky cardsharp slumber. She doesn’t know why she does this (or even how), though she supposes it a form of pride, some maidenly self-governance, romantic even, the hope-chest antics of the heart. But has no time for dreams and, vigilant, ever on her toes, can never quite tell whether she dozes or is wide awake.
In Monte Carlo, Benny Maxine held a bad hand and waited for the croupier to scoop in his losses.
The amputee, Noah Cloth, held up his bad hand and counted his losses.
This was the best time, thought Nedra Carp. The children all tucked and making their bye-byes. She even enjoyed their little snores. Hardly snores, really. Barely rustles. Just only some tinny nasality of warmed air. In with the good, out with the bad. Though she couldn’t hear even this. Not over the husky drone of the motors. (Engines, would they be?) Or, for that matter, even see her charges. Only, on her right, Charles Mudd-Gaddis and, on her left, Rena, who, in her sleep, raises hankies to her eyes as though she dreams something sad, watching whatever it is like some warmhearted little dear at a play or cinema. She likes such tenderness, enjoys being with children who can’t hold back their tears when Bambi’s mother dies or, at the pantomime, when Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and stepsisters plot against her. She doesn’t care what they say, sentiment is the only true breeding. Prince Andrew had shocked her when he’d been small and had watched with cool indifference and unalterably dry eyes the terrible sufferings of Hansel and Gretel when they finally realized that their father, that hen-pecked woodcutter, meant actually to abandon them in the forest just because his shrew of a wife told him there wasn’t enough food to go round. It’s a jolly good thing for the U.K., Nedra Carp thinks, that Andrew is so far removed from the succession. Monarchs ought to be properly compassionate, she feels, to understand that not all their subjects are as well-off as themselves. Ho. Not half, they aren’t. (And wasn’t that woodchopper’s wife another stepmother? Though Nedra doesn’t let the husband off so easily. The reconciliation at the end is all very well, but if she were those two she wouldn’t have been so quick to jump back into his arms. Suppose times turned bad again. Suppose…Well. Once burned, twice sorry.)
Or even, when it comes down to it, tucked. Not properly anyway. Only a dusty old airline blanket thrown over them, smoothed about their shoulders and flowing loose about their torsos. Hardly like being in their own beds, though one does one’s best. And recalls the healthy children she has tended. Nedra, reading them stories, stroking their heads, has almost absorbed their soporific comfort, that agreeable ease and comfy coze, their bodies’ balmy thermometry and featherbed climate just so, like a snug tropic. Oh, yes, she knows well enough how they feel, their maiden, their bachelor laze and grand smug innocence and sometimes wonders if she takes this from them to bed with her, if the memory of that heavy rest that lies about her like perfume is not hers but the airy burr they exhalate? Is all this, to her, to Nedra Carp, what their stuffed animals and bits of blanket and fingered cloth and crushed bunches of palmed wool are to them? She rejects the supposition. She stands in loco parentis, after all. Yes, she thinks grimly, like all those wicked stepmothers. Yet she is not wicked, if anything too tender, discipline not her strong suit, her lack of firmness a weakness. Ha ha, she laughs in her reverie, that’s a good one; lack of firmness a weakness is a good one. Yet she knows the literature well enough, the stories of stern nannies, repressed, dried-up old crazies jealous of their privileged charges. Letting them howl their hunger, then tweaking them in the nursery, laying on sharp twists and pinches when no one important’s about, gossiping in the parks among the sisterhood. Oh, well, they probably meant governesses. To the uninitiated, governesses gave nannies a bad name.
It’s ironic, Nedra Carp thinks, but here I am, off to America, to Disney World, Florida, and feels a queer thrill. It was Mr. Disney and the Yanks that made Mary Poppins famous, a household name throughout the world, in all the climes and cultures, a comfort, a tonic. It’s silly, she thinks, I’m no R.C., but Mary Poppins is practically my patron saint.
She was. Nedra Carp imagines Mary Poppins watching over her, not convinced of so much as comforted by the idea of her presence. She has seen the film seventeen times, and though she knows she is nothing like that mysterious woman, has neither her powers nor her flair, yet it is to Mary she turns when she’s in trouble, to Mary to whom she flies now high above the watery rooftops and smoking chimney wisps of the clouded world. And thinks of Mary, that stout, good-natured voyager, of Mary of England and all the globey sky. And knows that it’s because of Mary Poppins that she makes this trip, racing toward Disney World as to a sort of Lourdes, bringing, who has no talent even for changing a diaper and is probably embarrassed by it, no skill with even feverish children let alone dying ones, who cannot make even healthy children laugh or, for that matter, keep them entertained or, if you must know, make them behave, who has none of Mary Poppins’s aptitudes but only her own dull gift of love, flying to Florida, to her patron there—maybe there—to pray before some very likely tarted-up, possibly animated saint. Off to Orlando, who is in the wrong profession and whose love of little children is unrequited, a repressed, dried-up old crazy herself, one muy loco parentis who can’t bear to think of those characters she carries in her handbag like a packet of tame old love letters.
Nedra Carp, Nedra Carp thinks. With my name like a fish. And though most of her employers these self-conscious, egalitarian days call her Mrs. Carp—the Queen herself did; lisping Andrew, keeping his distance, did—she has never married. And knows those aren’t love letters she carries in her purse but only her tepid warrants and credentials—she’s peeked; she’s read them—like the lukewarm references of someone honest and even diligent but uninspired. And knows, too, that if she had married it would probably have been to some widower with kids, in loco parentis again, in loco parentis always who would never have a place of her own. And also knows, as she knows she’s never gossiped about her charges or practiced any of the petty cruelties of her trade, that she would starve rather than deny her stepchildren even one morsel or talk behind their backs to the woodchopper, that unlike Cinderella’s stepmother she could play no favorites, not she, she thinks proudly, not Nedra Carp, who has, for good or ill, like a built-in murmur, her
adoptive heart.
Because probably no one but Nedra and those involved know that as a child she had had nannies herself and, as an older child, a governess, or that she was herself a stepchild, her mother having died when Nedra was four, her father remarried to a woman with two children of her own. Hers had been kind enough, nannies, governess, stepmother, stepsister, stepbrother, father, and, later, her half brother and half sister. But then, when she was nine, it was her father who died and her stepmother, not yet thirty-four, who remarried, a widower with two daughters. And Nedra carries with her still a sad sense of fragmentation and dissolved loyalties, a vague notion of having grown up with distant and distancing cousins, who had two stepsisters now, a new baby brother, a new baby sister, and a confused notion of having been raised by aunts and uncles or even just in-laws, all tenuously related and removed, too, by marriage. Only she and the half brother and half sister were Carps, and as much out of confusion as blood and love she sought to make an alliance with them, which they did, but when the last of the stepmother’s children was born, he’d come to her, the half brother. “I find I may no longer in good conscience honor our special relationship,” he said.
“Oh?” said Nedra.
“It would be unfair to my half brother, my new half sister.”
“I see,” Nedra said.
“This complicates things awfully,” the only male Carp apologized.
“It does, rather,” Nedra admitted.
“Though I shall always half love you,” he said, and seemed to fade before her very eyes.
But then it was the stepmother who died and the double widower who remarried, the house filled now with steps and halves and quarters, an ever more fractioned tangle of thinned kinship, practically a decimalized one.
So it was to the nannies she’d turned. Perhaps because they understood even less than she who was who, the strange range of relation in the house. It would have taken a Debrett to work it all out. I was no poor relation, you understand, thinks Nedra Carp, but the only living child in that household of the true founders of the family. The very house in which we lived had belonged to my mother. So it was to the nannies I turned, as bonded and blooded to any of them as to any of the steps and halfs and lesser fractions of alliance there, those amiable nonconsanguineous sleep-in ladies: to them, to the nannies I turned, pitching in, pulling my oar, helping out with the smaller children, a Cinderella of the voluntary, who must have thought of me, if they regarded me at all, as some nanny apprentice or nanny greenhorn, whom though they—the nannies—did not scold, were yet without love, their trained, neutral hearts less in it—yes, and less called for, too—than their time.
Except, Nedra Carp thinks, that should never have been permitted. That was unforgivable. Someone should have corrected that when it first came up. My new stepmother, my diluted half brother, the double widower, the real nanny herself, somebody. My mother had owned that house. Those children had no right to call me Nanny.
Eddy Bale talks to his dead son, Liam, in his sleep addresses the boy in a hospital room he does not remember, cheered by that very fact, taking heart from the realization that it isn’t just that he can’t remember the room but, looking past Liam and out the boy’s window, doesn’t recall the view. It isn’t London, it isn’t even England. There’s a park out there but the vegetation is unfamiliar, the cars going back and forth in the heavy traffic. They are not even of a design he recognizes, and trail from their tailpipes a faint, curious steam he does not recognize as ordinary exhaust. He wishes a nurse or doctor would drop by so he could see what race they are. He is too high above street level to make out the ethnic characteristics of the passersby, and he’s unable to make out anything at all of the drivers in their oddball machines. Indeed, there’s a curiously opaque quality to the window glass of the strange automobiles. What he really hopes, of course, is to have confirmed that he is somewhere he has never been, in a land of new breakthrough technologies, some boldly experimental hi-tech country where they have their priorities right. He would like to see, for example, one of those pie-shaped charts that tell where the tax dollars go: 25 percent for social services, 25 percent for R&D, 25 percent for entitlement programs, and 25 percent for a military so strong no country would dare challenge such a civilized power.
He can’t ask Ginny. Ginny isn’t around. But perhaps that’s good news, too. Maybe the treatment here is so advanced that visitors are either nonexistent or only come out of some true sociability, as one might call on a pal in town overnight in his hotel room.
So he can’t ask Ginny and won’t ask the boy. For fear he might be interfering with some delicate therapeutic balance. And is heartened, too, by other things, small stuff, little touches not ordinarily associated with science but, or so runs his hunch, telling enough in a hospital room. There’s the gas range, for example, and a larder stocked with bakery goods, with rich pâtés and cheeses. There is a small refrigerator with fine wines and various drugs lining its shelves. Beside it, on a laboratory table adjusted to what must be his son’s height, is an assortment of pharmaceutical equipment: Bunsen burners, a good microscope, and, nearby, several covered petri dishes glowing with cultures as with bits of bread. There is a burette, sundry flasks, an old-fashioned mortar and pestle where his son probably ground his cunning nostrums and medications and coffee beans into a fine powder. Other instruments whose names he doesn’t know. Also, there’s a box of candy, a nice bowl of fruit.
“What I thought I’d explain to you, Liam,” he says guardedly to the boy in the bed, “is this ‘Dream Holiday’ business. I’m trying to make it up to them, you see. For being so sick, I mean. For having these catastrophic diseases. For having to die before their time, you understand. Well if you don’t understand, who would?” he adds, chuckling. “I mean, you’ve been there, son. You know how it is. Who better? I mean, you’re that Indian whom no one may criticize until they walk a mile in your moccasins, my child.
“So it’s like a reward is the way I look at it. Entre nous, kiddo,” he whispers, “bonus pay for hazardous duty.” He winks at the boy. “Just this little inducement, just this small ‘consideration,’ if you know what I mean,” and rubs his thumb and forefinger together, and makes a sign as if he were greasing a palm. “Just this bit on the side, boy. Hey, son? Hey, Liam?” And shakes his head and slowly raises a finger to his lips. It’s that delicate therapeutic balance again. That he doesn’t want upset. So he paces the room. Diligently avoiding eye contact. Wondering to himself, How’m I doin’? How’m I doin’?
The Magic Kingdom Page 9
