Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  —Aljean Harmetz

  The Making of the Wizard of Oz

  The hostility to the Oz books is in itself something of a phenomenon . . .

  It is significant that one of the most brutal attacks on the Oz books was made by the director of the Detroit Library system, a Mr. Ralph Ulveling, who found the Oz books to have “a cowardly approach to life.” They are also guilty of “negativism.” Worst of all, “there is nothing elevating or uplifting about the Baum series.” For the Librarian of Detroit, courage and affirmation meant punching the clock and then doing the dull work of a machine while never questioning the system.

  —Gore Vidal

  in an essay, “The Oz Books”

  Bill Davison had a few months to go before he got his draft notice, so he went to work in the Home. He was hired for his muscles. Bill Davison had been a linebacker on the high school football team, had fairly bad grades and was generally recognized to be a nice guy. He was huge, happy and surprisingly gentle. Girls loved his gentleness. He was seventeen now and engaged to his girlfriend, Carol. He was a practicing Christian and had the bravery and confidence to be kind to his mother in public.

  His father had been killed when he was six, during the Italian campaign. The experience had been terrible for him. He had needed and wanted his father, kept photographs of him in his uniform, had a map on the wall that traced with pins where his father was. The news of his death had been delivered personally by a friend of the family at the recruiting office. War had taken Bill’s father away and would make of him a young man whose urges to violence were all sublimated into sports.

  Bill’s grades were bad—straight C’s. Even so, people were surprised when he took on work at the Home. Who cared about grades? Bill was a presentable young man and could have gotten a good job behind a counter or in an office somewhere. Fat white women with too many kids ended up working at the Home, or blacks, or Mexicans. The Home was one of three state institutions for the mentally ill in all of Kansas. The citizens of Waposage were rather proud of their provision for the insane. They just didn’t want to work in the place. Bill did.

  He wasn’t sure why. “Oh, I don’t know,” he would tell people. “I guess I just wanted a job helping people. The Home was nearby.”

  Since graduating in June, he had been working in an electrical supply store and showroom. It was run by Mr. Hardie. He was one of the many friendly older men who thought they had taken on the job of acting like a father to Bill.

  “People in the Home can’t always be helped,” said Mr. Hardie, when Bill told him he was leaving the store.

  “Well. They still need caring for,” Bill replied.

  “That’s true, Bill, and it’s a fine thought. But you still have got to think of yourself, and of Carol too. They won’t be paying you much money for that job.”

  “Carol’s got her job at the hairdresser’s. And anyway, I got the Army coming up in a couple of months. It’s just till then.”

  “From now on,” said Mr. Hardie, “you got to be thinking of how you’re going to set yourself up in life. You got to be thinking about what’s going to happen after those two years. You find things are getting tight over the next few months, or you just want a change of scenery, you know there’ll always be a job waiting for you here in the store. Need a fine young man like you.”

  Bill knew he was a fine young man—he had worked at it—but he wore his knowledge lightly. “Thank you, Sir,” he replied.

  Bill Davison started work in September 1956, in the geriatric ward. He would always remember arriving. On his first day at the Home, he was shown around by another orderly. The man’s name was Tom, Tom Heritage. Tom was tall, plump, friendly, and had a very nearly invisible blond beard. He had been a truck driver until he lost his license for three years.

  “First thing you do every morning is help wheel up the food from downstairs. Then, while they’re eating, we change all the bedding. Some of them leak a little, so we just give them clean sheets. You make their beds for them, tidy up. During the day you help some of them around, maybe take them for a walk. If any of them get sick, you help them down to the infirmary.”

  “Anything else?” Bill asked, disappointed.

  “What, you mean like try to cure them or something? No way, son. That’s the Doctor’s job.”

  Tom Heritage pushed against the swinging doors, and they walked into a ward of cots. The old people slept in cots to stop them from rolling out at night. Each one of them had a metal locker that doubled as a bedside table, and a chair to sit on.

  “This here’s what we call Heaven. It’s where all the ones that don’t give anyone trouble are. The Angels.”

  One old man was still in bed, back turned to the door.

  “Okay, Bobby,” said Heritage, neatly flipping down one rank of blue cot bars. “It’s time to get up. Breakfast.”

  The old man’s face had fallen in on itself, collapsed, and he stared ahead with watery blue eyes. There was white stubble all over his chin.

  “Sorry, Bobby, but we got to make your bed.” Heritage gave Bill Davison a nod. Bill stared back. “Got to lift him out,” explained Heritage. “You take the legs.”

  Heritage took the arms. Quickly, neatly, the old man was hoisted out of bed and lowered down into his wheelchair. He still stared. One foot began to jiggle up and down with nerves.

  Heritage stood back and held up a greeting card from the table. The card had grown soft and worn around the edges, as if trying to grow fur. The corners were grubby. On the front there was a wide-eyed cartoon bunny.

  “It says ‘Get well soon,’” said Heritage, his eyes and smile just the slightest bit grim.

  Heritage wheeled the old man off to his breakfast. All by himself, Bill stripped the beds. It was all so impersonal. The Angels of Heaven were bereft of possessions. Pajamas, a change of clothing, used handkerchiefs, a smell of weak and sweaty bodies. There would be nothing to move away when they died. Heritage returned with the sheets.

  About eleven o’clock, they moved off toward the women’s ward. From somewhere down the corridor came dim, echoing voices, murmuring or raised and querulous. They sounded like a choir that had not yet begun to sing.

  “We treat the women just the same as the men, except that we come in after breakfast when we know they’re all decent. Some of the old dears are a bit old-fashioned.”

  “Don’t we do anything to help them?” Bill asked again.

  Heritage gave him a thin-lipped smiled and shook his head. “Nobody’s going to help these people,” he said. “Some of them been here for fifty years.”

  Some of the women sat beside their cots. One of them was making knitting motions with empty hands.

  “Good morning, girls,” said Heritage. None of them responded, except for one woman who looked up, very slowly, with round, haunted eyes.

  Then, suddenly, someone spoke. It was a surprisingly smooth, polished voice, almost like an adolescent’s.

  “If you’re through gabbing, you could get me up off this floor,” said the voice. An outraged head reared itself up over the horizon of a crumpled cot.

  It was a fine head, a noble head, something like a lion’s ringed with wild gray hair. The eyes were wild too.

  Heritage closed his eyes and smiled. “Remember how I said none of them were trouble?” he said. He began to walk backward toward her, looking at Bill, talking to Bill. “Well. Meet trouble.”

  Bill Davison followed him, tardily. “Dotty,” Heritage asked, “what are you doing on the floor?”

  “I fell down!” she exclaimed, enraged. “Fell down and I can’t get up!”

  Tom Heritage had slipped his arms under hers and already had her on her feet when Bill finally arrived to offer assistance. He managed only to touch her elbow.

  “Where do you want to be?” Heritage asked.r />
  “Anyplace but here. In that chair.”

  She moved in tough little jerks, and she talked in tough little jerks. Looking at her, Bill thought: The West, the Old West. She had the tang of it.

  “You miss breakfast?” Heritage asked her.

  “Dang right,” said Dotty. “That eggy stuff looks like cat sick. Can’t stand it.”

  Heritage was smiling again. “Bill,” he said, “this here’s Old Dynamite. Dynamite Dotty. You want to help people, well this is one of our success stories. Used to take three big men to hold Old Dynamite down. Till she became an Angel and grew wings.”

  “I,” announced Dotty, “always had wings.” She began to stroke them, growing invisibly from her shoulders. She looked regal. “Hmmmph!” she said, and made a dismissive gesture.

  “Come on, we got to make all these beds,” said Heritage.

  As they worked, Bill looked at Old Dynamite. A smile had grown on her face. It grew wide and joyous, and the eyes fixed on Heaven seemed to be full of light.

  Bill stood and looked at her. He wanted to say to Heritage that she looked like something in a Sunday School painting. Heritage was rolling sheets, quickly, into loosely wound balls and throwing them into sacks. Dimly, Bill could hear her singing. She sang to herself. It was an old, grand song, some kind of hymn, but not one that Bill knew from years of churchgoing. But he did know it from somewhere. The words, high and thin, over and over, were “Hally hoo hah.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Bill said, later.

  “Dot? Stick around,” said Heritage.

  Bill and Heritage wheeled up lunch in huge industrial catering tureens on carts. They boomed their way through swinging doors that were plated with metal. They themselves ate and then wheeled the tureens back down.

  And after lunch, they stood watch over the men and women in the common room. There were wide windows looking over the lawns. It was cold and misty, and the landscape was in layers of misted silhouette. A row of leafless trees looked like charts of nerves.

  There was nothing for any of the Angels to do. Some of them were playing cards. The cards were black around the edges. There was a chess set. Pieces were missing. There were a few deserted books, all of them left a quarter of the way through, facedown. And the constant murmuring, almost musical. The sound of the Angels.

  “We call this the Pearly Gates,” said Heritage.

  Women sat mouthing the air or rocking the ghosts of children.

  “It’s so boring for them,” said Bill.

  “Used to be a radio, but they kept messing with the dials until it broke.” Suddenly Old Dot loomed next to them. She was huge, almost as tall as Bill, and even now neither fat nor thin. She was very stiff on her pins, but that lent her a kind of creeping iron dignity.

  “We haven’t died, you know,” she said, to Heritage. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Heritage leaned back against the wall and gave her an amused and crooked smile.

  He feels superior, thought Bill. That’s it. He’s not mean or anything. He just knows he’s farther up the scale, and he thinks there’s nothing to be done. So he won’t listen.

  Bill thought he knew what the old woman meant. “So you think we shouldn’t call this place Heaven?” Bill asked Dotty.

  “But it is,” she said, suddenly fierce, drawing up. “It is, goddamn it. Take a look! I don’t know. You people!”

  Old Dynamite turned away, shaking her head. Heritage gave Bill another crooked smile. You see? his raised eyebrows seemed to say. Very slowly Old Dot crept toward the window. From behind, she looked far more frail, bowed, her shoulders turning inward.

  She stared out the window at the mist until it was dark.

  Without realizing it, Bill must have said something to Mr. Hardie, because a few days later Hardie Electrical Supplies donated a television set to the Home. It was a great embarrassment. First, it embarrassed Bill, who had not asked and thought perhaps the Home would think he had been criticizing it. Second, it embarrassed the Home, which was overwhelmed by the generosity but was worried that one of the Angels would shove a fist into the vacuum tube.

  When they tried to give it back, Mr. Hardie apparently suggested that Bill be put in charge of it, to change channels, to turn it off, to wheel it around, to guard its plugs and dials and glass face.

  Bill was very wary of television sets himself. He had seen an accident. An assistant at Mr. Hardie’s had been carrying two picture tubes, whistling as he walked, swinging them gently. The tubes hit each other, and there was a kind of popping sound, like small pistol shots, and a gasp. Glass had been sucked in and then spat out. The assistant stood surprised and startled, rivulets of blood trickling down his face and his arms. Slivers of glass had been driven into him all over his body. Like the wilderness, like a cyclone, televisions had a nothingness in their hearts.

  There was some discussion among the senior staff of the Home. It was decided to allow television only at certain times. Late evening was forbidden in case the dependants of the Home got overexcited. News would be forbidden or any program with guns or violence. The children of the Home would be allowed Captain Kangaroo and The Three Stooges and the morning game shows like The Price is Right and Queen for a Day. In the afternoon, they would be allowed soap operas.

  Bill carried in the television the first day. He switched it on with trepidation and stood guard over it.

  The first show the Angels saw was Search for Tomorrow. The title appeared over a picture of the moon in a cloudy night sky.

  Bill waited for the reaction. There was none. At first the old, mad people kept staring somewhere else in their own private world. Then some of the women looked up, attracted by the sound of a young female voice and the sight of fresh makeup and nice dresses.

  Brought to you by Procter and Gamble.

  They scowled slightly, not sure they had the thing figured out. A kind of radio with pictures. They were only mildly bemused. The whole world had passed them by so long ago that nothing made sense. But they liked the sound of families, and breakfasts, and husbands being kissed goodbye, and the softened voices of women dealing with secret shame.

  At night, it was taken away.

  The next day, they clustered around it, a new hunger in their eyes. Inside that little box, children bounced in and out of living rooms or wept in their mothers’ arms. Grand and powerful women schemed; husbands faced bankruptcy; toothpaste was sold. Gradually the nothingness sucked in the Angels.

  Old Dynamite stood with her back to it, looking out of the window. Or she sat, staring somewhere else, her mouth creased around with smiles as if her face were a pond into which someone had thrown a stone. Sometimes her eyes blazed. Sometimes she sang softly. Bill found himself growing disturbed by her.

  “Listen, Bill,” said Tom Heritage, “the only way you can stick this job is to put it all to the back of your mind. You start taking it to heart, you could end up like them. Once I get my license back, I’m getting out of here, drive a taxi, anything. You should do the same, boy, I can tell you.”

  Forty years, fifty years, in this place, thought Bill. What a waste of a life.

  In November, there was going to be a movie on TV. Networks did not usually show movies, so it was a special thing, a lot of publicity. It was a kids’ movie, but a lot of the staff wanted to see it. A kids’ movie would not have anything in it to rile the Angels.

  So it was decided to wheel out the television from nine to eleven at night. The Angels, like children all over the country, were going to be allowed to stay up late to watch it. Bill, the gentle master of the TV, took the night shift for the first time.

  The staff crowded in, the caterers especially, all the employees who were still too poor to own a television. They returned to the Home in their cloth coats. Some of them brought their kids. The children looked fat and
sleepy and grumpy. A few of the Angels showed up too, drawn by the excitement and by the sound and sight of children.

  The old people in their slippers shuffled up to the children, cooing, confused, wanting to warm their hands around young life, such as they had never had a chance to nurture. The children hated it.

  Old Dynamite came lumbering forward too, like some stick insect on long prairie pins, in her Home pj’s, smelling slightly of sweat and dry-cleaned sheets. She staggered toward one of the children.

  “Hello, hello,” she said in a breathless but supple voice. “Hello children. Hello my little ones.”

  “Mo-mmmie!” wailed one of the children, in fear, and turned her face toward her mother.

  “I told you, Hattie,” said the mother. “I said you was to be nice to the old people.”

  “Now aren’t you the prettiest little thing!” said Dotty, with longing and bad breath. The child covered her mouth, shrank back into her mother’s arms.

  “Sunflowers,” said Dotty. “You like sunflowers, honey?”

  The child stared at her with sullen dislike.

  “Well,” whispered the old woman. “Their real name is moonflowers.”

  Bill smiled at the mother to let her know that nothing was wrong. “Come along, Dotty, it’s about to start,” he said, across the room.