The Magic Kingdom (19 page)

“Noah? What will you do with all this stuff? Noah?”

But he doesn’t bother to answer and takes his purchases—he no longer pays for the items separately but waits until he’s made all his selections before bringing them to the clerk, not because he’s grown accustomed to shopping but because he sees that he has been wasting time, that it is more efficient this way—to the woman at the register.

By the time they enter the next shop Noah Cloth has spent sixty-two dollars and fourteen cents and, because it would be impossible otherwise, has agreed to accept the plastic carrier. In this, in addition to his original purchases, are two china figurines, one of the Mad Hatter, the other of the Cheshire Cat, a Dumbo quartz wristwatch, duplicate Mickey Mouse sweat shirts, and a deck of playing cards picturing Minnie as Queen, Mickey as King. There is also a set of wooden coasters in which are etched the faces of Donald Duck, his little duck nephews.

In the Contemporary Man, Noah buys casual beachwear for his dad: sandals, a bathing suit, sunglasses, a terry-cloth robe, a beach towel, a visored sun hat.

The bill comes to seventy-three dollars and change.

“Lend me money,” he whispers to Janet Order. “I’ll give it back to you when Moorhead pays up.”

“Oh, Noah,” she says, “I haven’t that much.”

“If you’re staying in the hotel,” says the salesman (who is no more salesman than Noah is customer; there is nothing even close to negotiation going on here, not transaction, not commerce, not even business; the merchandise, which is no more merchandise really than the salesman is salesman or Noah customer but only the counter or token, as is the money Noah exchanges it for, the to-him foreign denominations and queer seals and symbols scribbled across its face and back and which, however powerful, are merely power in some unfamiliar, unaccustomed language and thus unknown, unknowable, only the counter or token for the simple symbolic occasion of his old frozen dreams), “you can charge it to your room. All you have to do is show your guest card.”

“I’m exhausted,” Noah Cloth says.

“Do you want me to call Mister Moorhead?”

“I’m exhausted,” he says. “I think I ought to sit down.”

“I’ll call Moorhead.”

“I’ll just sit down.”

“Where’s your phone? I have to call his doctor.”

“This is better.”

Janet Order feels Noah’s head. His temperature doesn’t seem to be elevated, his pulse is regular and strong.

The salesman has already packed the beachwear away.

“Yes, this is much better,” Noah says, his legs up, stretched out and comfortable in the wood-and-canvas lawn chair the salesman has set up for Noah to sit in.

“Don’t go off, Noah. Technically,” she tells the salesman, “on the buddy system, you’re not supposed to leave them alone.”

“I’m fine.”

You’re daft, she thinks. My buddy is daft.

“What does a nice chair like this usually run?” Noah Cloth asks the man while Janet is off making her call.

I can charge it, he thinks when he hears the price, I can charge it to the room.

“He doesn’t think it’s anything,” Janet Order tells Noah when she returns. “A little fatigue.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you rested up enough to go back to the room?”

“I’m fine.”

“All right,” she says and holds her arm out to assist him in getting out of the chair. When they go back up in the elevator together she doesn’t bother to tell him—he’s just a bonkers, crackers kid—that she has spotted Benny Maxine with Rena Morgan. It looked to her as if they were up to something.

Lamar Kenny has spotted the little wise guy. He thinks maybe he’ll have some fun with him.

With Tony Word asleep for the night and Noah and Janet gone off, Mr. Moorhead is left free to think about the Jew.

There is a kind of villain—Moorhead has spent too much time on sick wards not to have noticed the type on kid’s cartoon shows; indeed, these scoundrels have actually been absorbed into the doctor’s bedside manner, become a source of preliminary chat with his small patients, a device to trivialize the physician’s presence—who seems to thrive on adversity, who again and again overestimates his own dark powers at the expense of his adversary’s light and more potent ones. Every defeat suffered by one of this sort somehow becomes the occasion for a greater gloating, a nefarious gibe, an unruly, unfounded optimism. In a way, Moorhead, who tries to steady himself by remembering that he’s been wrong before, puts himself in mind of such fellows. For one, he shares their incredible enthusiasm, their sense of invulnerability. He recalls his days at university, his theories, the confidence with which he strolled art galleries, diagnosing the portraits and statues there, a kind of cocky Grand Rounds. He remembers why he chose medicine as his life’s work, his aesthetic attraction to health, his old notion that children carried theirs as lightly as a man might his umbrella. Chiefly he recalls his cheerful, discarded overview: his old modeling-clay inclinations, his belief that health, not disease, sat at the core of life. Laid forever by those photos he’d seen of survivors from the camps, those too-intimate pictures, naked as surgery, of Jews, their maniac expressions and broken posture, bone projecting from bone in awry cantilever like an unkempt architecture of bruise and wound, their skin, slack as men’s garments on the bodies of children, their almost perceptible joints and sockets ill fitting their faulty scaffolding, the predicament of their swollen-seeming bones like badly rigged pulley, stripped gear.

His idea was as simple as a before-and-after photograph. A superb diagnostician, he believed (as he believed he’d spotted the Mona Lisa’s incipient goiter and explained the famous smile as nothing more than the bitter aftertaste of iodine gushing from her overactive thyroid) that almost all illness was chronic, even congenital. If the admiration of health and well-being was what sent him into pediatrics in the first place, it was those pictures from the camps which—except for his brief tour on the casualty wards, almost as good an opportunity as an autopsy for getting close to the human body—caused him to stay there. The child, he knew, was father to the man.

His mistake in the old days was that he’d put too much faith in those artists. They’d idealized their subjects as much as any of the blokes who illustrated those perfect organs—the perfect hearts and perfect livers—in the textbooks. (For all Moorhead knew, Da Vinci had probably reduced the Mona Lisa’s goiter and trained to a mysterious smile what could already have been a grimace.) So what was wanted were photographs, the kind the Germans had made, the kind the Allies had. Though what was
really
wanted was the complete record, photographs of the Jews
before
they were rounded up—it would already have been too late when they were in the camps, the debilitating ride in the cattle cars, the bad sanitation—family albums with their individual and group photographs taken in different, more relaxed settings: on the beach, at picnics and parties, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, baby’s first picture, rabbis at their devotions, all the candids of the daily round. (But
still
a sucker for good health, at least its appearance, his mind stuffed with images of perfect specimens, of strong, beautifully tapered athletes, women as well as men. Which accounted, of course, for his shyness with Bible. Had he been thrown in with the man it would have been no time at all before he asked him to strip for an examination, auscultated his chest, palpated and poked the fellow till he was black and blue, then asked if he might examine the bruises. Once, just once, he wanted to feel the ostensibly healthy kidney, hear the report of the seemingly sound heart. Which would have created many misunderstandings.)

In the hands of a superior diagnostician, what he’d stumbled upon could be a great and useful tool. Working backward, and using follow-up studies of survivors from the camps as a control, he could test his theory about the latency of all pathologies. If he could lay his hands on those albums—he doubted the Germans would have let them keep them, but the Jews were a clannish people and surely early pictures of Jews who survived the camps were available in the albums of even distant family relations who’d never entered them—that would be perfect, but it was more important for him to find the survivors themselves, to take their medical histories and examine them, to see, finally, if their conditions jibed, as he was certain they would who could not understand the obstinacy of villains in children’s cartoons but admitted up front that he sometimes shared it, with the diagnoses and prognoses—he didn’t mean malnutrition except as it affected related, subsequent diseases; he didn’t mean psychological disturbances unless they preceded and were exacerbated by their experience in
the
camps—he’d made in his early holocaust studies. (New technologies were available now; he used blowups and computer enhancements of those grainy old photographs, bringing it all out, punching it all up, making all that latency and incipience stand out crisp as a scab, articulated as a rash.) Because there was no Registrar to answer to now and he had in his personal collection something over a thousand computer-enhanced blowups of men and women at the fences posing for their liberation, most of them right out of the front rows, too, along with some really wizard shots of their palms splayed out against the barbed wire, clumsily leaning against it to take the weight off their bodies, or their fingers clutching it, their distended knuckles and broken nails fine and well defined in his enhanced photographs as the features of knaves, queens, and kings on playing cards. Though it was a risky business, far riskier actually than asking Colin Bible to submit to an examination. (One day, for the sake of the sample, he would
have
to examine superior specimens, but he supposed that was still a way off.) Though there’d be no more garden parties if it ever got out. And he could kiss his position in Great Ormond Street good-bye. To say nothing of any O.B.E.’s. To say nothing. Not even his nefarious gibe.

In his joke he’s completed the preliminary part of his studies. He delivers a paper: “Diagnoses and Prognoses of Some Jewish Survivors from the Concentration Camps.” Afterward, during the question period, he’s asked if he found no use for the photos of those victims who’d been gassed or shot. After all, his questioner says, the survivors had been clad. Those others had been commanded to strip, killed, then dumped into open graves. Surely their
naked
bodies could have been useful for his studies.

And he tells him, he says, he goes, “Yes, but only for the diagnosis!”

So he’d come to Florida.

And found his Jew.

Mary Cottle, looking rested, is standing outside Eddy Bale’s door when he answers her knock.

“I’m told you’ve been asking about me.”

“Oh. It was good of you to drop by. It’s nothing important. Come in, why don’t you?”

“Thank you. I seem to have lost the others at the monorail station.”

“Colin said there’d been a mix-up.”

“Yes. Quite stupid of me.”

“No, no, of course not. No harm done. All present and accounted for.”

“Who’s that in the bed, Mudd-Gaddis?”

“Oh. Right. Well, accounted for, anyway. Benny Maxine seemed a little antsy. I thought I’d let him out for a bit. You know how kids love to explore hotels.”

“I don’t actually.”

“Oh, yes. They’re quite in ecstasy in lifts. They quite fancy pushing buttons and being allowed to call out the floors for the other guests.”

“Do they? It just doesn’t seem Benny’s line of country somehow.”

“No, I suppose not. He’s—what?—fifteen. I guess he’d be more interested in hanging about the hotel’s cocktail lounges. I reckon I was thinking more about my son.”

“I’m awfully sorry. I don’t think I ever offered my condolences.”

“Well.”

“It’s just that one feels such a fool. One feels terrible, of course, but there’s nothing to say.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you. I appreciate that.”

“He seemed a nice kid.”

“You knew Liam?”

“Well, more by reputation than otherwise, but I did help with his lunch one or two times.”

“I’m sorry. I think I may have known that and forgotten.”

“Of course.”

“Would you care for a drink? There’s not a
great
selection, but I have some lovely gin I bought in the duty-free shop. Or if you prefer I think I could organize some of Colin’s sherry.”

“Thank you. You go ahead. Cigarettes are my vice. I was never much of a drinker.”

“Yes. I’ve noticed the smell of your tobacco.”

“I know. It’s a nasty habit.”

“Not at all. I like the smell of foreign cigarettes. French, are they?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes French. Or Russian, Bulgarian. The Iron Curtain flavors.”

“Aren’t those rather harsh?”

“I decided long ago that if I was going to smoke I was going to smoke. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I hope you’ve stocked up. American brands are mild by comparison.”

“I’m a bit of a smuggler, I’m afraid. I snuck two cartons past Customs.”

“Good for you.”

“Does your wife smoke?”

“She smokes our tobacconist.”

“Sorry. That was stupid of me. I’d heard you’d separated.”

“She separated.”

“She’d been under a strain.”

“It was my strain too.”

“My God, Eddy—may I call you Eddy? That’s right, you insist, we went through this at Moorhead’s—it was all Britain’s strain. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight. You fair gave all of us the hernia, Ed.”

“Is something wrong? What’s wrong? I lost my boy. What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? Nothing. I’m this volunteer, I’m this paladin. I’m this lenient melt-mood Candy Striper.”

“Shh.”

“Old Mudd-Gaddis can really snore, can’t he? I wonder if any air gets through all that.”

“I’m working on my second lovely gin and you’re the one who’s one over the eight.”

“Organize Colin’s sherry, I’ll join you.”

“You’re a smoker. You were never much of a drinker.”

“You know I gave to all your campaigns?”

“What? Money, you mean?”