The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “You’re terrible,” Rena said.

  “They put me off my feed, our crowd does,” Benny Maxine said. “I don’t think I could take one contented munch off meself round this lot.”

  “Oh, Benny.”

  “You know what a tontine is?”

  “A tontine?”

  “It’s this agreement, like. Usually geezers make it? Flyers from the war, daft old boys, a particular chapter, say, of the Baker Street Irregulars—people tied up in some dotty mutual enterprise. And each puts something into the kitty, survivor take all. That’s what our bunch ought to do. Get up a tontine. We could have Mister Moorhead handicap us. Like underwriters do for the life assurance societies. We prorate what each puts in and—hey,” Benny Maxine said, “hey, don’t. Hey.”

  The girl was crying, her tears melding with the clear gelatins of her runny nose.

  “What’s happened?” her mother demanded, running from where she and the other parents had been talking with the staff. “Stop that, Rena! Stop! You know what crying does to you. Oh, Rena,” she said, and held the child in her arms, dabbing at her daughter’s nose with handkerchiefs from the drawstring bag, stabbing her mucus, blotting it up, stanching it as if it were some queer, devastating blood.

  Bale feared they might never take off. Last-minute hitches. At this point almost a sign. Something might have been waving red flags at him, warning him off. Stand clear or be destroyed with them, his kids, his doomed collective charges. (Charges indeed. Bale’s bombs. Rigged. Set. Eddy’s timed tots. He felt like a sapper.) Ginny was there, Eddy waving and calling “Over here, over here,” like a reconciliation in pictures, the kids looking as if a ringer had been snuck in on them, the wise-guy kid, Benny Maxine, rolling his eyes and nodding his Uh-oh’s and What now’s? as if he knew something. How do you like that kid? Bale wondered. Playing to the crowd, putting on his phony Cockney accent when the closest he’d been to Bow Bells was Michael Caine films; Eddy Bale spotting Ginny meanwhile and doing his own home movies in his head, crying and laughing like a loon in Heathrow’s crowded departure lounge and singing “Over here, over here!” as if it were a railroad platform at Waterloo they stood on, both of them caught up in the indifferent traffic, swimming against the stream like salmon and Eddy already figuring out what to say. Ginny not even an apparition, not even someone who just looked like her, who wore her hair the same way or had similar tics. Ginny Ginny, and, worse luck, embarrassed. “Gee, Eddy, I didn’t remember today was the big day.” “What are you doing here then?” “Meeting a friend.” “Oh,” Eddy said. “Are those the children?” “What? Them? The saucy blue baggage who looks like she’s been dipped in grape juice? The boy with no place to put his ring? That little tyke with the wig who looks like she’s eight months pregnant? Or maybe you mean that idiot-looking nipper sucking chemotherapy from a bottle.” “Oh, Eddy.” “What friend?” “My lover friend, Eddy.” “Your lover friend. Ri-ight.” “I don’t want to hold you up,” she said. “Anyone I know?” “Oh, Eddy.” “Is he?” “Yes.” “You know something, Ginny? That’s too bad. I mean it really is. That makes me sorry for you in a way. Because I can’t, I mean try as I may, I brutal truthfully can’t think of anyone we both know who can hold a candle to me in the way of friendship or anything like loyalty.” The uproar in the lounge a welcome distraction by this time, a sound like the sudden appearance of celebrity, Eddy Bale looking over his shoulder.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “It’s the wiseacre.”

  Benny Maxine was talking to the media.

  “After all this excitement, what’s the first thing you mean to do when you get on that plane, Benny?”

  “Hijack it to Monte Carlo. I’ve had an ’art-to-’art wif me mates an’ we’ve decided dat Florider is a nice ernuff place ter be if you’re a horange or a halligator, but Monte Carlo’s where de action is for poor blokes wot are last-flinging it an’ habout ter make deir mums an’ das orfinks, as ’twere. Der red an’ der black, Chemmy-de-fer an’ de nude beaches, dat’s de place fer us!” Benny Maxine said into their television cameras.

  “You really mean to hijack that seven forty-seven, Benny?”

  “You de bloke from de Times?”

  “Evening Standard.”

  “I want ter see de Times chap. De Queen takes de Times.”

  “I’m from the Times.”

  “Tell der Queen we’re Englitchmen, loyal subjects one an’ all. Tell ’er we go where we’re sent. Tell ’em in Piccadilly, tell ’em in Leicester Square. Tell ’em on de playink fields de lent’ an’ bret’ uh dis great kingdom. We’re nought but poor terminal yunsters wot may be dying an’ all, but true blue Englitch for all dat. Hip hip, haw haw!”

  They stared at him.

  “Too much?” Benny asked in his own voice.

  Benny abandoned, the press off to take down the views of the more solemnly sick, getting Janet Order’s blue opinions, Noah Cloth’s amputate pearls, Rena Morgan’s sob story, the wit and wisdom of Lydia Conscience and Charles Mudd-Gaddis and Tony Word.

  “I make the best copy,” Benny Maxine sulked to Bale. “I’m the character here.”

  “It isn’t a contest, Benny,” Eddy consoled. “Don’t push so hard.”

  “Jimmy Cagney,” Benny Maxine said. “I want to go out like those guys they used to send down that last mile to the chair. Chewing gum, cracking jokes. ‘I know what you’re up to, Fadda. You’re a good Joe, but you’re wasting your time. I guess I’m just this bad hardboiled egg, Fadda.’”

  “Come on, Benny.”

  “I’m fifteen years old, Mr. Bale. Those other kids. Some of them are sicker than I am, but I don’t think it’s hit them yet. What’s what. How they’ve been kissed off by God and medical science both. The nits are actually excited.”

  “Listen, Benny, don’t get the idea you’re here to set anyone straight. There’s no timetable. It ain’t British Rail. Leave them alone with your inside information.”

  And filling in the nanny, Nedra Carp, about Benny: “Use the spurs on that one, Miss Carp. He wants to tell ghost stories.”

  “Call me Nanny,” Nedra Carp said. “Prince Philip called me Nanny. Her Highness did.”

  And Mr. Moorhead, who advised him that Ben was very likely in a manic phase just now and that they could expect a reactive depression to follow. Telling Eddy that while there wasn’t much he could do medically for the child at this point, if his symptoms became more focused they could take certain steps. “Jesus,” Bale said. “He’s manic depressive too?”

  “We can handle it. If he gets really low,” said the physician, “I’ve some reds I can give him.”

  “Reds,” Eddy said.

  “Sure,” the good doctor said, “and if he climbs too high we can put him on blues.”

  “Reds and blues,” Eddy Bale said, staring at the medical man.

  “Uppers and downers, Eddy,” the doctor explained scientifically. “This could all have been avoided if we’d had extensive psychological profiles on these kids. Though it just might help if we kept him off sweets.”

  Eddy Bale thought of Benny Maxine’s hi-cal fingernails.

  Because the last-minute hitches were something more than the odd mislaid passport or their friends crowding round to see them off, their relatives’ helpful hints, special-pleading the kids’ tics and habits that they chose only at this last minute to disclose to Eddy, Eddy’s staff, Eddy taking notes and going into a furious, extemporized version of a shorthand he would not later be entirely able to decipher, offering the benefit of their close, habituate knowledge, their eight- to fifteen-year-old front-line observation of their offspring, filling them in—even the hostesses, even the stewards, the pilot, the crew of the 747 who had come out to look at their special passengers—on everything they could think of, as if the children were temperamental doors that only they knew how to open, cars difficult to start unless you knew just how to turn the ignition—Eddy furiously writing, writing—or houses leased for a season to strangers, pressing on them, too,
medications that would have to be chilled, chipped toys, broken dolls, scraps of blanket, swatches of garment: all the emergency rations of a crisis comfort. (Exactly as if they were mechanical, their disorders trying as someone else’s machinery.) Or even the crush of the press. Not hitches, not even helpful hints, so much as a series of charms and spells. And Eddy trying to keep up, to get it all down. The real hitches his queer staff. Only Colin Bible quietly coping. Only Mary Cottle serene. The kids themselves in palace revolt, bloodless coup. Not noisy—they wouldn’t be noisy children, giving loudness only to their pain, the klaxon fortissimos of alarm—but moving along vaguely forbidden routes, doing the water fountains excessively, the lever- operated ashtrays, the now dismantled television equipment, the mikes and lights, watching the planes land, pointing, their eyes peeled for catastrophe. The real hitch his staff, his caper- dreamed crew. (Bale taking notes furiously, abbreviating, jotting, underscoring, placing exclamation points like unsheathed daggers beside main points he would later puzzle over, wondering what they could possibly mean.)

  Out of the side of Bale’s mouth: “Get on them, please, Nanny.”

  “At once, sir,” Nedra agreed, and Bale, even out of just the corner of his eye and even with only half an ear cocked and only a fraction of his already divided attentions, could tell at once the enormity of his mistake. She was solicitous and intimidated, her months with Prince Andrew no plus at all, a season of watered, undermined authority. (He should have demanded references from Her Majesty.) Eddy saw her for what she was, more nursemaid than nanny, a tucker-inner, a pusher of perambulators and strollers, protective enough but incapable of anything but loyalty, by nature a fan, for Labor, he guessed, when Labor was in, a Tory under the Tories, on all Authority’s impressive tit, effaced, invisible as a poor relation or maiden aunty. Wouldn’t the children be happier in the airport’s lovely, comfortable seats? she wondered. Would they like to look at some of our nation’s lovely newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind? Perhaps a few of the bigger children could read some of the smaller children the news?

  “Was that a crack?” Charles Mudd-Gaddis snarled.

  “Of course not, Charles,” Nedra Carp said. “I’m sorry if you took it that way.”

  “I may only be eight years old and three feet tall,” he sneered, “and weigh only thirty-nine pounds, but I’m not ‘some of the smaller children.’”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ve got progeria,” he said bitterly.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a condition,” he grumbled.

  “I know.”

  “It ages me prematurely,” he complained.

  “Tch-tch.”

  “It shrivels me up like a little old man,” he groused sullenly.

  “Of course it does,” she said, and looked around desperately, studying Heathrow’s lovely lever-operated ashtrays should she be taken ill.

  “It wrinkles my skin and hardens my arteries and causes my hair to fall out,” he whined.

  “That’s only natural,” she said vaguely.

  “No one knows the cause,” he said acrimoniously. He pointed to the doctor. “That one, for example. He doesn’t know the cause. He doesn’t know the cure either,” he grumped.

  “I’m sure they’re working on it,” Nedra Carp offered brightly.

  “Too rare,” Mudd-Gaddis shot back crossly.

  Her attention had wandered. She was looking at the airport’s comfortable seats and wishing she were seated in one now, curled up with one of the nation’s newspapers travelers were forever leaving behind. “Sorry?” she said, turning back to him.

  “I said too rare. What’s wrong with your ears, woman?” he asked irritably. “One in eight million births. No one’s going to commit the research money to wipe out progeria when only one in eight million gets it,” he growled.

  Nedra Carp nodded.

  “It constipates me and makes me cranky,” he told her crankily.

  “That’s awful.”

  “I have to take prune juice,” he said resentfully.

  “I’ll see there’s some always on hand.”

  “But I’ve got all my faculties,” he protested indignantly.

  “Certainly,” Nedra Carp said.

  “Which I daresay is more than many can say,” he added accusingly. “I can recall things that happened to me when I was two years old as if it were yesterday. I’m very alert for my age.”

  “What about yesterday?”

  “I don’t remember yesterday.”

  “I see.”

  He studied her carefully.

  “Yes?” Nedra coaxed.

  “Are you my uncle Phil?” he asked.

  “I’m Nanny,” Nanny said.

  “That’s right,” Mudd-Gaddis said, and shuffled off, Nedra Carp looking after the little withered fellow in a sort of awe. Death was the authority here. Death was boss.

  Bale, who’d overheard Benny Maxine offer to make book with the children about who’d get back alive, wanted a piece of the action. The kid quoted long odds for naming the deceased in a sort of daily double, suggested complicated bets—trifectas, quinellas. When they looked at him peculiarly he objected that there was nothing illegal about it, it was just like the pools. Eddy thought of going up to the boy. He’d have put Nedra Carp’s name down beside his own.

  Meanwhile, Ginny had come back into the lounge with a man who looked familiar, who rather resembled, except for his clothes, Tony, their old newsagent and tobacconist. A sport in a sort of savvy, modified trench coat television journalists sometimes wore in the field, he seemed absolutely at home in a world class airport like Heathrow and looked, in his cunning, elegant zippers, loops and epaulets, one hand rakishly tipped into what might have been a map pocket, every inch the double agent. He could almost have been holding a gun, was awash in gaiety and a kind of hysterical flush—joy?—and seemed as if he might be taken off any second now by a sort of apoplectic rapture.

  “You remember Tony,” Ginny said.

  “How are you, Eddy?” Tony said, and withdrew the gun- toting hand from the depths of his trench coat. Bale wondered why all the men who broke up homes in Britain were named Tony. “Fine bunch of bairn,” the anchorman added affably, indicating the terminally ill children. “You know, they don’t seem all that sick?” he said.

  “They don’t?” Bale said.

  “Well,” Tony said, qualifying, “maybe the little preggers kid doesn’t look quite strong enough to carry to term.”

  “The preggers kid.”

  Ginny’s friend indicated wasted little Lydia Conscience, eleven, whose ovarian tumor had indeed punched up her belly to something like the appearance of a seventh- or eighth-month pregnancy.

  “She has dysgerminoma,” Eddy Bale said with great feigned dignity. “That’s a tumor she’s carrying to term.”

  “Hmm,” the foreign correspondent said thoughtfully. “You know what gets me about all this?”

  “What’s that?”

  He lowered his voice. “When they’re that sick they go all emaciated, and it makes their eyes something enormous,” he said. “That’s because eyes don’t grow. It’s a fact. Eyes is full size at birth. Then, when the face comes down, it’s pathetic. ‘Windows of the soul,’ eyes are. Big eyes touch a chord in Christians. Oxfam understands this. That’s why you see all them great full- moon eyes in the adverts, Eddy.” Bale widened his own eyes and looked at his wife. She hung on the fellow’s arm, attached there like one more of the trench coat’s accessories. Tony, intercepting Bale’s glance, shrugged shyly. “It’s odd and all, me calling you Eddy like this.”

  Eddy studied him. “Tell me something, would you?” he said at last.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you really our old tobacconist?”

  “You don’t recognize me?”

  “Not without the cardigan, not without the loose buttons hanging by a thread. You pronging my wife, then, Tony?”

  “That isn’t a question a gentleman a
sks another gentleman,” their newsagent said stiffly.

  “Come on, old man. Are you?”

  “I shouldn’t have thought that was any of your bloody business,” said their ice lolly monger.

  “Too personal?”

  “Yes,” he said, poking about in his trench coat for a grenade, “I’d say too personal.”

  “You’d say too personal.”

  “I’d say so. Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose it was too personal when you were selling us cigarettes!” Bale exploded. “I gather it wasn’t too personal when we bought your damned newspapers!” he shouted senselessly. He saw Mary Cottle reappear from the Ladies’. She seemed to watch them from behind a thick, almost weighty tranquillity. He turned to his wife. “This is a joke, right? Showing up in the departure lounge like this?”

  “A joke?”

  “He’s our tobacconist, for Christ’s sake! He keeps house behind a yellow curtain. A bell rings when the door opens and he pops out to sell ten pence worth of sweets. How’d you get him to close the shop?”

  “You know something, Eddy? You’re a snob.”

  “Tony, I really didn’t recognize you in that getup. Amateur theatricals, am I right? You’re good. You’re damned good. Isn’t he good, Ginny? Hey, thanks for coming by to see us off. Both of you. Really, thanks. It’s a grim occasion. And the fact is I was nervous. You took a lot of pressure off.”

  “Getup? Getup?”

  “Listen,” Bale said, “I appreciate it.”

  “Sure I prong her,” Tony said. “Certainly I do. We prong each other. Turn and turn about. Behind the yellow curtain.”

  Ginny was tugging at the sleeve of Tony’s coat. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll miss our plane.”

  Benny Maxine was taking it all in. Mary Cottle was. Colin Bible looked up for a moment from the bottle of chemically laced orange juice he was nursing past Tony Word’s lips, and the nipple slid out of the little boy’s mouth. Some juice squirted into the corner of the child’s eye and he startled. “Watch what you’re doing,” the little boy said. “That stuff smarts.”