The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “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, Edd
y 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.

  “Will the boys want to go to Mass? I didn’t mention it last night and thought they’d be too worn out to disturb them this morning, but there’s a lovely little chapel off what they call the Interstate Four, and transportation is quite convenient. I caught the brown-flagged bus outside the hotel and showed the driver the I.D. they gave us when we checked in.”

  “You’ve been to Mass, Miss Carp?”

  “Not proper Mass, Mister Bale—I don’t even know if the chapel’s consecrated—but there was something that looked like an altar, and pews and stained glass, and a priest comes on Sundays.”

  “Benny is Jewish. I don’t know Mudd-Gaddis’s affiliations, but I’ll ask if he’s interested.”

  “Oh, I nearly forgot,” she said, and handed Bale the newsletter. “There’s this lovely write-up about us in the paper. Quite tasteful, I think.” Eddy read the notice. It was a modest story under a small headline on the back page: ENGLISH CHILDREN WIN TRIP TO VACATION KINGDOM. It recorded all their names and listed the children’s ages but said nothing of the purpose of the trip. Death wasn’t mentioned, disease wasn’t. Mr. Moorhead wasn’t identified as a doctor. “The big news is all about the weather,” Nedra Carp said.

  “The weather?” Bale had said, who’d not yet looked out the window and had forgotten the strange inclemency of the previous day.

  “Oh, yes,” Nedra Carp said, “there must be three or four inches of snow. The driver—he’s called a ‘cast member,’ everyone who works here is; did you know that, Mister Bale?—was quite concerned he had no chains. Though not a flake’s fallen outside the park.”

  Which was before the kids had awakened, Nedra drawing back the curtains and indicating the scene, unveiling and flourishing it like a commissioned portrait. And Bale, already fainthearted, despairing, worrying his—their—losses like a field marshal, awake even before the maid had let herself in, awake and despondent a full hour before first light, already brooding when he’d turned in, and in his dreamless sleep too, hopelessness like a cinder in his eye. (Though Bale was no dummy, though he knew himself well enough, or well enough to recognize his habits, the if-then sequences of his conditioned behavior. And reminded himself, Eddy, watch it; Eddy, don’t let the part stand for the whole. You always go all sad-ass and sourpuss at finish lines and destinations. My God, man, there was a time when it broke your heart just to hear the bus conductor call out your stop. And reminded himself of the time when he’d allowed an unfavorable rate of exchange—so they’d have money in their pockets he’d traded a few quid for pesetas at the duty-free shop at Gatwick—almost to ruin their honeymoon on the Costa Brava. Ginny had tried to reassure him, had told him at least half a dozen times that the 20 percent premium they’d paid for the pesetas was irregular, that the banks in Spain would give them the official rate, but he continued to worry, the pound he’d lost on the deal multiplied in his head by a factor of five for all the pounds and Thomas Cook traveler’s checks they carried on their persons, for all the drafts they would have yet to write on their bank at home to make up for the one-to-five deficiency, his poor, depleted, gutted lolly, their love stake; doing in his head, too, all the complicated projections of suddenly inflated meals, souvenirs, hotel bills, fares, sun creams, tabs at nightclubs, and mad money. Discounting their honeymoon to the Spaniards. And wouldn’t leave the room for more than twenty-four hours—they had ten days—thinking: If we don’t go out they can’t cheat us; thinking: But they already have, a day shot, one already 20 percent less precious day of our ten out the window. Where he saw the sun shining 20 percent brighter than it had even on the brochure, the sea 20 percent bluer, the waves that much higher, too, conspiring by remaining in the room to recover: They had ten days. If they had ten days and the ratio was four to one—five to one?—what would it be, 10 percent of their losses, but they had to make love, they had to sleep, they had to use the room, call it twelve out of the twenty-four hours anyway, so it would be more like 5 percent than 10 percent, and they were still 15 percent in the hole. “There’s this bodega,” he’d told Ginny, “not a block from the hotel. We could get wine, we could get oranges and bread. Maybe they do Spanish sandwiches. We’ll eat in the room tonight. We’ll use the money they stuck us with at Gatwick. We’ll stick them with it.” Ginny accused him of being mean. Meanness had nothing to do with it, he said. And it didn’t. He was no miser. He was a coward of the unaccustomed, raw, all thumbs, greenhorn fear in his bones and blood, in his nails and hair. He explained this to Ginny, his oblique vertigo. “Give me time,” he said. “When the banks open”—they’d arrived too late, the banks had already closed—“and we get our proper rate, I’ll be the last of the big-time spenders for you.” Or choice. Burdened by choice. Overwhelmed. Dreading evenings on the town. Hating to read menus, picking a movie, choosing a play. And craven in taxis if he didn’t know the route. Though forgetting this. Each time forgetting this. Hailing cabs with the authority and assurance of an M.P. until, inside, he felt the greenhorn paranoid temerity again, one eye on the meter, another looking not for landmark, since this would be, for him, terra incognita, but for some discoverable logic of the route, the principles of geography, and all the while listening to the cabby for clues, the chatty-seeming observation, the too-matey question, Bale figuring the hackman figuring him. The both of them lost in Willesden one time, looking for 14 Broalbrond Road because Bale, without actually saying so, had implied he’d been there before, practically old stamping grounds for Eddy, and had, to keep the driver honest, indicated with nothing much more than the mildest sarcastic thrust to his tone that such and such a building, standing, it had to be, since the Great War, must, it seemed to him, at least if they were anywhere near the Willesden he knew, his old stamping grounds, have gone up overnight. And in Johannesburg, with Liam for new aggressive treatment, the same dark curtains descending. In Beijing. Even in Lourdes. Especially in Lourdes. The beginnings of all expeditions the same sad business, jet lag in Eddy an actual disease. But not mean, no miser, no screw or scrimp. Not a lickpenny bone in his body. Abject at waste is all, a cringer for missed opportunity, abused life. And who could say he was wrong? Hadn’t Ginny left him, hadn’t Liam died? Wasn’t he usually disappointed at the theater? Hadn’t oysters Casino given him indigestion?) So he didn’t wake Colin. So he didn’t wake the children.

  Who dropped out of sleep into wakefulness—Eddy watching through his lashes—like synchronized swimmers. A contagion of halt beginnings, the stuttered start of a new day. Colin Bible supervising from his rollaway, calling ablutions like stations of the Cross. “Brush your teeth, Benny. Move your bowels.” Then, raising his voice for the little old man: “Your teeth are in the glass by the nightstand, Mudd-Gaddis. Don’t forget to wear your sweater, don’t forget to put on your scarf.” Winking at Eddy past his shut eyes, past his lashes, piercing Bale’s squeezed charade, a laser intrusion. Who wanted nothing more than to be done with it and wondered if it was as late as he hoped. And, looking for grievance, tried to resent the tone the nurse had taken with the little golden-ager, condescension loaded into his voice like a round of ammunition, tried to resent the implied conspiracy of the wink (who was, after all, found out, discovered as a shirker, known for what he was, could be, by a bloody pansy), tried and faile
d—struck finally only by the difference in their styles, Eddy not so much outraged as intimidated, orientalized by a holdover respect for his elders, the sense he had that Mudd-Gaddis’s freaky years deserved a kind of honor, for—God, what was a bloke like him doing with folks like these?—it was, to Bale, almost as if Charles Mudd-Gaddis was the genuine article, a brittle scroll of a being, some actual ancient. Bale had to bite his lips to keep the deference out of his voice, and once had actually been on the verge of calling him “sir.”

  “’Ello, ’ello,” said Benny Maxine, coming out of the bathroom and spotting the snow outside their window. “Coo, la! Look at the weather, will you! What odds on something like that happening?”

  The snow had already begun to melt. In the restaurant Nedra Carp and the children, joined by the rest of the adults, tried not to notice as Lydia Conscience, swept in the waves of her morning sickness, gagged bits of dry toast and gouts of grapefruit into her napkin.

  “Must have gone down the wrong pipe,” Lydia said, her face red.

  “Here, dear,” Rena Morgan said, offering Kleenex she’d slipped from a sleeve.

  “Sorry, didn’t think,” Mary Cottle said, snuffing a Gitane into her saucer.

  “Smokes like a man, that one,” Benny Maxine whispered to Noah Cloth. “Bet she’s les.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Moorhead, again taking up the remarkable topic the children had been discussing when he, Bale, Bible, and the two ladies had first joined Nedra in the restaurant, “I don’t agree.”

  “You only mean my disease,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said. He was seated at the head of the table, and it seemed to Eddy that a queer clarity had settled over the strange child. The waitress had handed him the check, and before Eddy could even reach for it, Mudd-Gaddis was already signing the back of the bill. “I want to be fair. What’s fifteen percent of seventy-three dollars and forty-four cents? I can’t think,” he said in his reedy old voice.