The Magic Kingdom (12 page)

“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’?

“It isn’t as if this trip were your memorial or anything. Of course not. What, are you kidding? A clambake in Florida? A binge on the roundabout? A spree at the fun fair? Your
memorial?
You think your mum and I would turn something like that into a great bloody red-letter day or go skylarking about like nits in the pump room? It’s shocked I am you should think so, well and truly shocked. Come on, Liam, you know better!” But still won’t look at the lad.

“Or
should. Should
know better. Because we’ve a proper memorial stone already picked out. Your favorite kind, kid. Pure solid marble. None of this newfangled ‘composition’ crap. Nothing ersatz, nothing trashy. With your name, address, dates, phone number, and grades cut in to last a thousand years. Could a father say fairer?

“Because we’re proud of you, son. You bust our buttons. Really, child, Daddy’s pleased you’re getting on so well. All this equipment. Whew! I wouldn’t begin to know what to do with it, I’m sure. You mix this black sauce with the snotty green lumps all by yourself? P.U.…Smells nasty enough. What it must taste like, eh? It’s the furry part
I
couldn’t get down.” And suddenly turns to look at his son directly. Though Liam’s eyes are shut, his lids seem to follow Eddy wherever he goes in the room, like a trick of perspective in a portrait. “But then again you’ve taken plenty of punishment in your time. The x-rays and lasers, the invasive procedures, the pain and the nausea. Suffering was always your very particular speciality. I’d give you a first. I really would. I’m not just saying this because you’re my son. Somebody ought to do something about all that vomit, though.

“Well, I’m sure it was very clever of the doctors to let you work out your cure for yourself. They seemed to be stymied there when
they
had a go at it, God knows. So what did it turn out to be? The breakthrough? What’d it turn out to be in the end? When all is said and done, I mean?”

This time he rushes his finger to his lips, admonishing Liam’s silence. The gesture is like an awry slap.

“No,” Eddy says. “Hush, Liam. Hush, son. Because if you really
are
dead—not that I think you are, you understand, not for a minute—but just in the event, on the outside chance, I don’t want to hear about it. I
won’t
hear about it. Nor will I listen to a word about bold cures and new breakthroughs. Not if you’re dead, I won’t.

“How’m I doin’?”

II

1

A
light, fine snow was falling on the Magic Kingdom. It covered the streets and rooftops of the amusement province with a thin dry powder. The storm cell was totally unexpected and caught the weathermen on the TV and radio stations in Orlando completely by surprise. It was a freak storm in all its aspects. No one working in the park remembered its like, and though some of the citrus growers in the area could recall similar storms—there’d been one back in 1959, before the park opened, when the temperature had dropped forty degrees in less than seven hours, and the growers had had to arrange sheets over the crowns of the trees and burn smudge pots in an attempt to save their orchards—those had been in deep winter, not late October. In any event, it wasn’t really that cold, the temperature only in the mid-thirties. That the snow didn’t melt at all but collected on the ground, experts attributed to the fact—or speculation, rather—that it must have fallen from a very great height, possibly the stratosphere, pushed through—well, nothing, a sort of stalled, rare, and massive air pocket that just happened to coincide in its dimensions with the boundaries of the park itself.

Naturally the children were disappointed by the chilly weather, particularly after their surprise when, deplaning in Miami and bundled in heavy coats and scarves more convenient to wear than carry along with their cumbersome burden of toys and parcels, they had been hit full in the face with the warm, humid Florida air, an air—or so it seemed to Janet Order, or so it seemed to Lydia Conscience, or so it seemed to Charles Mudd-Gaddis, who back in those few days when he had been a young man had enjoyed going there—as sultry and earthy and steamy as the air in the big hothouse in Kew Gardens.

By the time they cleared Customs and made their connecting flight and used their transfers in Orlando and been registered in the hotel, it was already late afternoon and, with the time difference, well past their British bedtimes, and they were ordered to their rooms by Mr. Moorhead. So, although it was barely eight o’clock when it began to snow, they were asleep and only noticed the accumulation the following morning.

It looked like a scene shaken up in a crystal.

Snow was falling on Cinderella Castle, snow was falling on Main Street and Liberty Square. It was falling on Adventureland and on Fantasyland. It sheathed the spires on the Haunted Mansion and clung to the umbrellalike strutted sides of Space Mountain and looked grim and oddly bruised against the spiky red slopes of Big Thunder Mountain. It coated the crazed, bulging eyes of Captain Nemo’s surfaced craft and collected as slush in the saucers of the Mad Tea Party and left powdery traces along the big ledges and sills of the Liberty Tree Tavern’s wide leaded windows. Discrete drifts of the stuff were swept against the heavily weathered stockade fences of Frontierland and intensified the gleam of Tomorrowland’s crisp concretes and metals and alloys. A fine powder dusted the notched and scalloped foliage along the banks of the steaming river that bent and flexed, hooked and curled past tropical rain forest and choked veldt, past the Asian jungle and the rich green growth of the Nile Valley. It filled in the pocked surfaces of Spaceship Earth and lent the entire park the look of some new, raw, terrible ice age.

From Top of the World, the hotel’s fifteenth-floor restaurant, Nedra Carp and the children saw it cover the islands in Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon and, beyond, watched horses on a distant ranch roll in the white stuff, startle, leap up, and furiously throw themselves over and over into the strange, cold element, stinging their skin and alarming their great horse hearts.

Nine stories below in Mr. Moorhead’s room, which Benny Maxine had dubbed “the intensive care ward,” the adults watched it fall on the roofs of the longhouses in the Polynesian Village. They watched it snag in the tops of the palm trees and cover the gleaming tracks of the park’s monorails in a flat white.

It’s…it’s a…it’s a mistake, Eddy Bale thought. And, despondent, realized he’d come all this way and raised all their hopes in a futile cause. Because it was almost gone eleven—never mind the freak storm or rapidly rising temperatures through which the flakes fell, losing their icy edge, their crystalline structures collapsing so that what dropped through the air seemed less like weather than some spilled aspect of the jettisoned, not a freak storm at all so much as a mid-course meteorological correction, and never mind either whatever of accidental, unintentioned beauty the storm, by way of the blind bizarre, happened, like paint in milk, to bring about—and the morning of the first day was damn near shot and the children hadn’t even had their breakfasts. The storm not of account here either, though with other children it might have been (the guests caught short, the coffee shops and restaurants filling up, tables, food, tea, and cigarettes lingered over, no one in a hurry, the whole company of displaced persons thrown together like cheery flood victims), an excuse, certainly, but not of account, since what Bale had not taken into consideration (so busy with long-haul logistics, the finances, his caper crew and gleaned, short-listed candidates, his Heathrow-to-Miami arrangements, his Miami-to- Orlando ones, the room assignments worked out in advance) were the sluggish ways of the dying, their awful morning catarrhs and constipations, the wheezed wind of their snarled, tangled breathing, their stalled blood and aches and pains like an actual traffic in their bones, all the low-grade fevers of their stiff, bruised sleep. He’d forgotten Liam’s nausea and given no thought to theirs—mouths stenchy as Beirut, stomachs floating a slick film of morning sickness, the torpid hangover of their medications. They groaned. They stumbled listlessly through their rooms or waited, hung in trance above shoes, buttons, expression denied their faces as if they lived in some lulled climate of withdrawn will.

Ah, it was terrible, Eddy Bale thought hopelessly. Time wasting and the doctor’s hands tied and none of them able to organize anything as simple as breakfast. Only Nedra Carp up and about, standing behind the maid when that woman had let herself in with her passkey just after eight that morning, her surprise, if she was surprised, concealed, taking in himself, the sleeping Colin, and the two boys—the doctor had made the room assignments, Bale drawing Colin, Mudd-Gaddis, and Benny Maxine—with a kind of stoic patience, almost, it struck Eddy, a hotel policy, as if she knew their special circumstances, perhaps. She had whispered Bale a soft apology for having disturbed them and withdrew. But not before Nedra had appeared from behind her back like a surprise, a clutch of the park’s pamphlets and a “Walt Disney World Newsletter” in her hand.