This was not Father's fault or Mother's fault. It was not anybody's fault. It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.
And now Eliza and I had raised that instinct to intolerable tragedy.
Without knowing what we were doing, Eliza and I were putting the traditional curse of monsters on normal creatures. We were asking for respect.
12
IN THE MIDST of all the excitement, Eliza and I allowed our heads to be separated by several feet--so we were not thinking brilliantly any more.
We became dumb enough to think that Father was merely sleepy. So we made him drink coffee, and we tried to wake him up with some songs and riddles we knew.
I remember I asked him if he knew why cream was so much more expensive than milk.
He mumbled that he didn't know the answer.
So Eliza told him, "It's because the cows hate to squat on the little bottles."
We laughed about that. We rolled on the floor. And then Eliza got up and stood over him, with her hands on her hips, and scolded him affectionately, as though he were a little boy. "Oh, what a sleepy-head!" she said. "Oh, what a sleepy-head!"
At that moment, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott arrived.
*
Although Dr. Mott had been told on the telephone about Eliza's and my sudden metamorphosis, the day was like any other day to him, seemingly. He said what he always said when he arrived at the mansion: "And how is everybody today?"
I now spoke the first intelligent sentence Dr. Mott had ever heard from me. "Father won't wake up," I said.
"Won't he, now?" he replied. He rewarded the completeness of my sentence with the faintest of smiles.
Dr. Mott was so unbelievably bland, in fact, that he turned away from us to chat with Oveta Cooper, the practical nurse. Her mother had apparently been sick down in the hamlet. "Oveta--" he said, "you'll be pleased to know that your mother's temperature is almost normal."
Father was angered by this casualness, and no doubt glad to find someone with whom he could be openly angry.
"How long has this been going on, Doctor?" he wanted to know. "How long have you known about their intelligence?"
Dr. Mott looked at his watch. "Since about forty-two minutes ago," he said.
"You don't seem in the least surprised," said Father.
Dr. Mott appeared to think this over, then he shrugged. "I'm certainly very happy for everybody," he said.
I think it was the fact that Dr. Mott himself did not look at all happy when he said that which caused Eliza and me to put our heads together again. Something very queer was going on that we badly needed to understand.
*
Our genius did not fail us. It allowed us to understand the truth of the situation--that we were somehow more tragic than ever.
But our genius, like all geniuses, suffered periodic fits of monumental naivete. It did so now. It told us that all we had to do to make everything all right again was to return to idiocy.
"Buh," said Eliza.
"Duh," I said.
I farted.
Eliza drooled.
I picked up a buttered scone and threw it at the head of Oveta Cooper.
Eliza turned to Father. "Bluth-luh!" she said.
"Fuff-bay!" I cried.
Father cried.
13
SIX DAYS HAVE PASSED since I began to write this memoir. On four of the days, the gravity was medium--what it used to be in olden times. It was so heavy yesterday, that I could hardly get out of bed, out of my nest of rags in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When I had to go to the elevator shaft we use for a toilet, making my way through the thicket of candlesticks I own, I crawled on all fours.
Hi ho.
Well--the gravity was light on the first day, and it is light again today. I have an erection again, and so does Isadore, the lover of my granddaughter Melody. So does every male on the island.
*
Yes, and Melody and Isadore have packed a picnic lunch, and have gone bounding up to the intersection of Broadway and Forty-second Street, where, on days of light gravity, they are building a rustic pyramid.
They do not shape the slabs and chunks and boulders they put into it, and neither do they limit their materials to masonry. They throw in I-beams and oil drums and tires and automobile parts and office furniture and theater seats, too, and all manner of junk. But I have seen the results, and what they are building will not be an amorphous trash-pile when it is done. It will clearly be a pyramid.
*
Yes, and if archaeologists of the future find this book of mine, they will be spared the fruitless labor of digging through the pyramid in search of its meaning. There are no secret treasure rooms in there, no chambers of any kind.
Its meaning, which is minuscule in any event, lies beneath the manhole cover over which the pyramid is constructed. It is the body of a stillborn male.
The infant is enclosed in an ornate box which was once a humidor for fine cigars. That box was placed on the floor of the manhole four years ago, amid all the cables and pipes down there--by Melody, who was its mother at the age of twelve, and by me, who was its great-grandfather, and by our nearest neighbor and dearest friend, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa.
The pyramid itself is entirely the idea of Melody and Isadore, who became her lover later on. It is a monument to a life that was never lived--to a person who was never named.
Hi ho.
*
It is not necessary to dig through the pyramid to reach the box. It can be reached through other manholes.
Beware of rats.
*
Since the infant was an heir of mine, the pyramid might be called this: "The Tomb of the Prince of Candlesticks."
*
The name of the father of the Prince of Candlesticks is unknown. He forced his attentions on Melody on the outskirts of Schenectady. She was on her way from Detroit, in the Kingdom of Michigan, to the Island of Death, where she hoped to find her grandfather, who was the legendary Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.
*
Melody is pregnant again--this time by Isadore. She is a bow-legged little thing, rickety and snaggle-toothed, but cheerful. She ate very badly as a child--as an orphan in the harem of the King of Michigan.
Melody sometimes looks to me like a merry old Chinese woman, although she is only sixteen. A pregnant girl who looks like that is a sad thing for a pediatrician to see.
But the love that the robust and rosy Isadore gives her counterbalances my sadness with joy. Like almost all the members of his family, the Raspberries, Isadore has nearly all his teeth, and remains upright even when the gravity is most severe. He carries Melody around in his arms on days like that, and has offered to carry me.
The Raspberries are food-gatherers, mainly, living in and around the ruins of the New York Stock Exchange. They fish off docks. They mine for canned goods. They pick fruits and berries they find. They grow their own tomatoes and potatoes, and radishes, and little more.
They trap rats and bats and dogs and cats and birds, and eat them. A Raspberry will eat anything.
14
I WISH MELODY what our parents once wished Eliza and me: A short but happy life on an asteroid.
Hi ho.
*
Yes, and I have already said, Eliza and I might have had a long and happy life on an asteroid, if we had not showed off our intelligence one day. We might have been in the mansion still, burning the trees and the furniture and the bannisters and the paneling for warmth, and drooling and babbling when strangers came.
We could have raised chickens. We could have had a little vegetable garden. And we could have amused ourselves with our ever-increasing wisdom, caring nothing for its possible usefulness.
*
The sun is going down. Thin clouds of bats stream out from the subway--jittering, squeaking, dispersing like gas. As always, I shudder.
I ca
n't think of their noise as a noise. It is a disease of silence instead.
*
I write on--in the light of a burning rag in a bowl of animal fat.
I have a thousand candlesticks, but no candles.
Melody and Isadore play backgammon--on a board I painted on the lobby floor.
They double and redouble each other, and laugh.
*
They are planning a party for my one hundred and first birthday, which is a month away.
I eavesdrop on them sometimes. Old habits are hard to break. Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa is making new costumes for the occasion--for herself and her slaves. She has mountains of cloth in her storerooms in Turtle Bay. The slaves will wear pink pantaloons and golden slippers, and green silk turbans with ostrich feather plumes, I heard Melody say.
Vera will be borne to the party in a sedan chair, I've heard, surrounded by slaves carrying presents and food and drink and torches, and frightening away wild dogs with the clangor of dinnerbells.
Hi ho.
*
I must be very careful with my drinking at my birthday party. If I drank too much, I might spill the beans to everybody: That the life that awaits us after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one.
Hi ho.
15
ELIZA AND I were of course not allowed to return to consolations of idiocy. We were bawled out severely whenever we tried. Yes, and the servants and our parents found one by-product of our metamorphosis positively delicious: They were suddenly entitled to bawl us out.
What hell we caught from time to time!
*
Yes, and Dr. Mott was fired, and all sorts of experts were brought in.
It was fun for a while. The first doctors to arrive were specialists in hearts and lungs and kidneys and so on. When they studied us organ by organ and body fluid by body fluid, we were masterpieces of health.
They were genial. They were all family employees in a way. They were research people whose work was financed by the Swain Foundation in New York. That was how they had been so easily rounded up and brought to Galen. The family had helped them. Now they would help the family.
They joshed us a lot. One of them, I remember, said to me that it must be fun to be so tall. "What's the weather up there like?" he said, and so on.
The joshing had a soothing effect. It gave us the mistaken impression that it did not matter how ugly we were. I still remember what an ear, nose and throat specialist said when he looked up into Eliza's enormous sinus cavities with a flashlight. "My God, nurse--" he said, "call up the National Geographic Society. We have just discovered a new entrance to Mammoth Cave!"
Eliza laughed. The nurse laughed. I laughed. We all laughed.
Our parents were in another part of the mansion. They kept away from all the fun.
*
That early in the game, though, we had our first disturbing tastes of separation. Some of the examinations required that we be several rooms apart. As the distance between Eliza and me increased, I felt as though my head were turning to wood.
I became stupid and insecure.
When I was reunited with Eliza, she said that she had felt very much the same sort of thing. "It was as though my skull was filling up with maple syrup," she said.
And we bravely tried to be amused rather than frightened by the listless children we became when we were parted. We pretended they had nothing to do with us, and we made up names for them. We called them "Betty and Bobby Brown."
*
And now is as good a time as any, I think, to say that when we read Eliza's will, after her death in a Martian avalanche, we learned that she wished to be buried wherever she died. Her grave was to be marked with a simple stone, engraved with this information and nothing more:
*
Yes, and it was the last specialist to look us over, a psychologist, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who decreed that Eliza and I should be separated permanently, should, so to speak, become forever Betty and Bobby Brown.
16
FEDOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKI, the Russian novelist, said one time that, "One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education." I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.
That was Eliza's and my experience with Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who was widely believed to be the greatest expert on psychological testing in the world--with the possible exception of China. Nobody knew what was going on in China any more.
*
I have an Encyclopaedia Britannica here in the lobby of the Empire State Building, which is the reason I am able to give Dostoevski his middle name.
*
Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner was invariably impressive and gracious when in the presence of grownups. She was elaborately dressed the whole time she was in the mansion--in high-heeled shoes and fancy dresses and jewelry.
We heard her tell our parents one time: "Just because a woman has three doctors' degrees and heads a testing corporation which bills three million dollars a year, that doesn't mean she can't be feminine."
When she got Eliza and me alone, though, she seethed with paranoia.
"None of your tricks, no more of your snotty little kid millionaire tricks with me," she would say.
And Eliza and I hadn't done anything wrong.
*
She was so enraged by how much money and power our family had, and so sick, that I don't think she even noticed how huge and ugly Eliza and I were. We were just two more rotten-spoiled little rich kids to her.
"I wasn't born with any silver spoon in my mouth," she told us, not once but many times. "Many was the day we didn't know where the next meal was coming from," she said. "Have you any idea what that's like?"
"No," said Eliza.
"Of course not," said Dr. Cordiner.
And so on.
*
Since she was paranoid, it was especially unfortunate that her middle name was the same as our last name.
"I'm not your sweet Aunt Cordelia," she would say. "You needn't worry your little aristocratic brains about that. When my grandfather came from Poland, he changed his name from Stankowitz to Swain." Her eyes were blazing. "Say 'Stankowitz!'"
We said it.
"Now say 'Swain,'" she said.
We did.
*
And finally one of us asked her what she was so mad about.
This made her very calm. "I am not mad," she said. "It would be very unprofessional for me to ever get mad about anything. However, let me say that asking a person of my calibre to come all this distance into the wilderness to personally administer tests to only two children is like asking Mozart to tune a piano. It is like asking Albert Einstein to balance a checkbook. Am I getting through to you, 'Mistress Eliza and Master Wilbur,' as I believe you are called?"
"Then why did you come?" I asked her.
Her rage came out into the open again. She said this to me with all possible nastiness: "Because money talks, 'Little Lord Fauntleroy.'"
*
We were further shocked when we learned that she meant to administer tests to us separately. We said innocently that we would get many more correct answers if we were allowed to put our heads together.
She became a tower of irony. "Why, of course, Master and Mistress," she said. "And wouldn't you like to have an encyclopaedia in the room with you, too, and maybe the faculty of Harvard University, to tell you the answers, in case you're not sure?"
"That would be nice," we said.
"In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else--where everybody learns to make his or her own way.
"I'm here to test you," she said, "but there's a basic rule for life I'd like to teach you, too, and you'll thank me for it in years to come."
This was the lesson: "Paddle your
own canoe," she said. "Can you say that and remember it?"
Not only could I say it, but I remember it to this day: "Paddle your own canoe."
Hi ho.
*
So we paddled our own canoes. We were tested as individuals at the stainless steel table in the tile-lined diningroom. When one of us was in there with Dr. Cordiner, with "Aunt Cordelia," as we came to call her in private, the other one was taken as far away as possible--to the ballroom at the top of the tower at the north end of the mansion.
Withers Witherspoon had the job of watching whichever one of us was in the ballroom. He was chosen for the job because he had been a soldier at one time. We heard "Aunt Cordelia's" instructions to him. She asked him to be alert to clues that Eliza and I were communicating telepathically.
Western science, with a few clues from the Chinese, had at last acknowledged that some people could communicate with certain others without visible or audible signals. The transmitters and receivers for such spooky messages were on the surfaces of sinus cavities, and those cavities had to be healthy and clear of obstructions.
The chief clue which the Chinese gave the West was this puzzling sentence, delivered in English, which took years to decipher: "I feel so lonesome when I get hay fever or a cold."
Hi ho.
*
Well, mental telepathy was useless to Eliza and me over distances greater than three meters. With one of us in the diningroom, and the other in the ballroom, our bodies might as well have been on different planets--which is in fact their condition today.
Oh, sure--and I could take written examinations, but Eliza could not. When "Aunt Cordelia" tested Eliza, she had to read each question out loud to her, and then write down her answer.
And it seemed to us that we missed absolutely every question. But we must have answered a few correctly, for Dr. Cordiner reported to our parents that our intelligence was "... low normal for their age."
She said further, not knowing that we were eavesdropping, that Eliza would probably never learn to read or write, and hence could never be a voter or hold a driver's license. She tried to soften this some by observing that Eliza was "... quite an amusing chatterbox."
She said that I was "... a good boy, a serious boy--easily distracted by his scatter-brained sister. He reads and writes, but has a poor comprehension of the meanings of words and sentences. If he were separated from his sister, there is every reason to believe that he could become a fillingstation attendant or a janitor in a village school. His prospects for a happy and useful life in a rural area are fair to good."
Slapstick or Lonesome No More! Page 5
