The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “Let them,” Rena said. “Benny?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “sure,” watching them leave.

  The buddy system had broken down completely. Noah had thrown his arm about Tony Word’s shoulder. Janet Order fell into step between Pluto and Mickey and dared them to speak once they’d left the confines of the room and were in the hall again. Pluto kept his own counsel, but Mickey Mouse, grown into his part, said he thought all of them had done a wonderful job.

  “Do you think you could hold me?” Rena asked.

  “Hold you?”

  “I shouldn’t ask. I know I’m a mess.”

  “Listen,” he said, “are you going to be all right?”

  “After that night,” she said, breathing brokenly, “we explored the hotel, when we had all that fun…”

  “What?” Benny said. He could hardly hear her. “What?”

  “Oh,” said the fastidious girl, “look at this bed. What I’ve done to the sheets.” Some of her handkerchiefs, wadded, stained, had shaken loose from the sleeves of her dress, from her collar and waistband, from the hem of her skirt. They lay about her like ruined flowers, exploded ordnance. “Please,” she said, “hold me. Just till they find us.”

  He held her, and it hurt where even her frail weight pressed against his chest, his belly, his heart. He held her, and she told him she’d never taken her eyes off him that day they’d all undressed on the island. He held her, and she told him she loved him.

  “Oh, Benny, the good die young,” Rena Morgan said, and died.

  He was with her when Mary Cottle and the others found them.

  “She said she loved me,” Benny told them when they walked in.

  “Oh,” Mr. Moorhead said. “Oh, God. Oh,” he said, as if suddenly it was all quite clear to him.

  Which it was.

  Because everything has a reasonable explanation. The physician had determined to bring no one along who he was not certain could survive the trip. It was her respiration, her terrible heavy breathing that had caused her spasms and loosed the poisons in her chest, the mucus and biles, the clots of congestion hanging together and preserving her life by the strings of the ordinary. The great prognostician had simply failed to factor her desire into the equation. He had missed his prognosis because he hadn’t taken her sighs into account, the squalls, blasts, and aerodynamics of passion, all the high winds and gale- force bluster of love.

  8

  Bale wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, who felt, that is, he must earn his rewards. As a kid he hadn’t dutifully done his vegetables in order to get to the meat, or eaten all his meat up in order to tuck away dessert. He wasn’t anal enough for rigmarole and would occasionally, though he was never particularly fond of greens, use the spoon he’d just dipped into his trifle to take up his salad. “Eating around” was his term for the habit. Though this wasn’t a habit either. He had no habits and noticed that Liam had inherited the tendency. (It delighted him, even when his boy was in hospital, to watch the child—the hospital trays with the meal’s portions isolated and set in the tray’s hollows and pockets like paints spread out on a palette made this easy to keep track of—and know that this piece of business came from him, from Eddy, or at least from his, the Bales’, side of the family.) It wasn’t exactly a blockbuster heritage and he made no great claims for it, but it was amusing nevertheless to be able to identify and claim—though he didn’t do this either—the trait as strictly his own contribution. Because Ginny, he’d noticed, ate in accordance with secret and, within terms of the discipline, totally arbitrary principles of her own, or at least of her side of the family. He’d made no study, of course—he wasn’t compulsive—but had observed that, though it was unknown to him and perhaps even to her, she had a sort of game plan, changed as often as good code. Sometimes it was as elementary as eating everything on her plate from left to right. Sometimes he didn’t realize until days afterward—he wasn’t compulsive, he wasn’t compulsive and he wasn’t anal; he had a good head for menus is all—that she had eaten her food alphabetically, or along the points of the compass.

  So why had he waited almost a year to open that letter she’d left for him the day she’d gone off in the taxi, the letter he had assumed, assumed now, assumed at the time, would explain everything? Because he already knew why she’d left. Indeed, if Ginny hadn’t left him it could only have been a matter of time till he’d left Ginny. Liam had been a remarkable child. In health remarkable: bright, good, cheerful, pleasant, thoughtful, generous, obliging, and kind. And in sickness remarkable too: all he’d been in health plus a saint of suffering. In sickness and in health. A self-contained marriage of true mind. (He might have taken vows, though he was better than that, better than vows.) To have remained together after Liam died would have been a constant reminder that they were not as good as Liam, that they’d been brought low. If time was to do its job and heal all things, then first the wound had to be taken off, covered over, removed. Liam must die and the Bales must separate.

  So he knew why Ginny had left and why, it could even be, she’d taken up with Tony the Tobacconist. At the time he hadn’t known that she had. Otherwise he’d probably have ripped open the letter at once, skipping over all the stuff that was sure to be there (“…and the short of it, Eddy, is that Liam was simply too good. We should never have been able to recover from his loss. Even if we never mentioned his name again, darling, we should be reminded every time we called each other’s. We’re both young and don’t deserve to live in the shadow of his loss another thirty…”) to get to the juicy parts.

  So why? Who’d deliberately left his son’s scrapbook at home, photos from the papers of the ill head-bandaged boy, and which, according to the very letter of his own topsy-turvy laws of reasoning, eschewing the good memories, preserving the bad, he could easily have afforded to bring along with him, but who’d left it instead unlooked-for in Putney, or for Ginny to take with her, her dead dowry, to her tobacconist, and who carried on his person only the black, dissolving shards of the memorial brassard, little more now than a kind of officially sanctioned death dust? So why? Why the letter? Who by inclination, and all the sugarotropism of those familial, historic, biologic, Balean, sweet- seeking genes, took dessert with his soup, appetizer with his coffee?

  Because while he wasn’t the sort who necessarily saved the best for last, wasn’t dutiful about his veggies or anal enough for rigmarole, he had, in fact, a sense of the last, a knowledge and feel, that is, real as his pride in his own continuity in good Liam’s eating patterns, for the conclusionary ripeness—an instinct, that is, for when worse came to worst.

  So maybe he was anal, or at least retentive, squirreling away the best if not for last then for when it was most needed.

  Though he thought he pretty much knew what would be in it. (They weren’t enemies, after all, they loved each other, had been married almost fourteen years.) There’d be solace in it. Solace most needed.

  And what else was there to do while Rena Morgan was being prepped in the Orlando funeral parlor?

  They’d taken their terrified charges to the chapel off I-4 which Nedra Carp had discovered on their first morning in Florida. The nanny had organized a hasty, last-minute service for the little group of mourners, and it struck Bale that what Nedra had told him—could it have only been a week ago?—about the chapel was probably true. It had the altar and pews, the stained glass and track lighting, and even a dried-out font sort of thing, vaguely baptismal, vaguely birdbath, but there was a real question in his mind about whether the place had ever been consecrated. Notices were everywhere in the pew racks that “a priest came on Sunday.” What that left to be made of the young man in charge on the day of Rena’s memorial service was also a question. Clearly, however, the child’s death was probably the most important religious event in the history of the chapel. The pastor, if that’s what he was—he wore a sort of gray modified cassock—seemed more affected than any of them. He could hardly get through a psalm with
out crying, and his brief eulogy stressed over and over again the pity of the little girl’s having come all the way from England to Florida to die. He couldn’t seem to get past the sheer mileage of the thing.

  There were official representatives from the Magic Kingdom in attendance. Also, Matthew Gale and Lamar Kenny had shown up. They sat quietly in one of the rear pews. Benny recognized Kenny from their encounter at the elevator and pointed him out to Eddy. Mary Cottle recognized Gale as the young man who’d winked at Colin Bible at the Haunted Mansion and said nothing. Though by now, of course, the adults had pretty much pieced together a general idea of what had gone on that night. The Disney people were on to the false Pluto and had fired him. They’d fired Kenny, too, on suspicion of being the false Mickey Mouse, but Lamar, fearing he’d never work again and still believing he’d been duped into his phony audition, would admit nothing. Nor would Matthew Gale tell them otherwise.

  “I got you into this,” Gale told him.

  “You bet,” Lamar said.

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “He won’t let me down,” Lamar said. “Big deal. Top Disney dicks crawling all over the place watching us, and he won’t let me down. Loyalty! Follows me everywhere as if he really was Pluto!”

  Back at the hotel, Nedra had taken the children to the game room.

  Colin, off to see what could be done about changing their tickets, called to say that they didn’t have to be changed, that Rena would be ready in time for their flight the following day.

  “What are they doing to her, do you think?” Eddy asked Moorhead.

  They were sitting in the Coconino Cove, a bar just outside the Pueblo Room.

  “They’re embalming her. It’s not generally done in Europe, but it seems to be mandatory in this country.”

  “Embalming her,” Bale said. “What is that actually?”

  “Well,” Mr. Moorhead said, “it’s pretty much what you’d think. They treat the corpse to prevent decay and putrefaction.”

  “Putrefaction,” Bale said. “She was barely thirteen years old, for God’s sake.”

  “She was old enough to fall in love,” Moorhead said. He finished his gin and ordered another. “It’s what killed her.”

  “Yeah, you said.”

  “It was the unforeseen complication.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Prevent decay, prevent putrefaction.”

  “With preservatives.”

  “What, like in the rashers and bangers, you mean?”

  “The Egyptians soaked their dead in brine and filled the body cavities with spices and aromatic substances.”

  “That’s nice,” Bale said. “A little attar of roses, a splash of Nuits de Paris.”

  “Then they drain the blood from her veins with a hollow needle called a trocar, which they use in conjunction with a tube called a cannula.”

  “Secrets of the ancients revealed,” Bale said.

  “To prevent the body from shriveling and turning brown—”

  “Like an apple,” Bale said.

  “—they pump formaldehyde into the cavities in combination with alcohol.”

  Eddy set his drink down.

  “They apply cosmetics. They apply masking pastes.”

  “Hey,” Bale said, “I just remembered, there’s something I have to do back in the room,” and left the bar, returned to the room, and took Ginny’s letter out of his suitcase.

  I was his mother, Eddy [Bale read], I was his mum. I’m the one carried him those nine months, who lost her figure and still wear stretch marks like chevrons—my corporal, as it were, punishment, as it were.

  Have the decency. Spare me your shock and outrage. Keep to yourself your reservations about my taste and sensibilities. Four years like these down one’s craw and anyone’s taste would have soured, SHOULD, have soured, if, that is, any sensibility is still there to function at all. I don’t need any crap just now.

  It ain’t all been dainties and plum puddings, has it, Eddy, our crusade? Passing the hat, doing our buskers’ shuffle up and down the kingdom’s avenues? For press and for public passing the hat, passing the hankie, touching it to the collective eye, the collective nose. God, Eddy, how we Hyde Park-cornered them with our despair, with our need and our noise. Our cause! Cause and affect! Anyway, our hats in our hands, our hearts on our sleeves, and our knees on the ground. Beggars! Beggars, Ed! Always for Liam, of course, never ourselves, of if for ourselves, then for the abstract motherhood and fatherhood in us, or if for Liam, then for some soiled and abstract childhood in him, some sentimental fiction of good order, natural birthright, the ought-to-be.

  “Well of course,” you’ll be saying, “Well of course, you silly git, of course we’d a right to expect better than we got, of course Liam did. Of course it’s good order, birthright, and proper dispensation for kids to grow up! Nothing sentimental there. No fiction about it. Childhood diseases are one thing—mumps and measles, chicken pox, croup. Maybe a broken bone or a tooth to be pulled. Rashes in summer from lessons botched in leaf identification. The coughs and sniffles and low-grade fevers. All the rocking-chair temps. The mustard plaster and the asafetida. Oils of clove and the hanging garlics. All the cuddle comforts—Epsom salts, vaporizers, and the Vicks reliefs. Your only scaled suffering, what the traffic can bear.

  “But car crash and brain damage,” you’ll be saying, “paralysis? Your tumors and cancers and drowning accidents in surf?”

  Don’t get me wrong, Eddy. I think so too. I was his mother, I was his mum. And lived nine months longer than ever you did with superstition and fear, the 4 a.m. credulities, all the toxic heterodoxies of lying-in, all pregnancy’s benighted, illiterate dread. Guilty for fried foods I’d eaten years before, the shadow of sugar incriminating me, of butter and egg yolk and marble in meat, all that candy, all those fish ’n’ chips.

  Even signs of life startling. “My God,” I thought when he kicked, “he’s got only one leg!” And “Christ!”—when I puked—“I’m upchucking bits and pieces of my kid!”

  Doing bargains with God, you see: “If he’s missing a finger, take it from his left hand, Lord,” “Make him deaf rather than blind, blind rather than simple.” “If he has to be ugly, don’t give him bad teeth.”

  Jesus, the stuff I thought! “I’d rather he be homosexual than nearsighted.” “If he’s fat I hope he’s tall.” “I prefer he be bad at games than not have a sense of humor; I’d rather he didn’t get the point of jokes than be stingy.” “It would be better if he were a poor Tory than a wealthy Red.”

  That’s not the half of it, of course. The half of it was another bargain, the half of it was this: “Let him have one leg, Lord. Take the fingers from his right hand and make him this deaf, blind, simple, rich, fat, Red. Rot his teeth, God, and let him be short, this clumsy, mean and ugly, humorless, nearsighted fag. Just let him be born alive!”

  Not just let him live, Eddy. Let him be born alive. Because if he was born alive I took it for granted he’d live. It never occurred to me it could be otherwise. What did I know about vicissitude who could strike such bargains? Who assumed you paid the price of admission up front and were never bothered again; who suspected, perhaps even expected that at the outside there might even be trouble, hard times, say, but to whom it just never occurred that she’d still be alive herself and have to witness out-and-out tragedy?

  But he was perfect, our Liam. From the beginning one of those rare, good-looking babies, alert and cheerful, sturdy, well. So even-tempered that if you didn’t know better you might believe him actually thoughtful, actually circumspect. And wasn’t his gaze clear? And wasn’t his grip strong? As if he was trying to chin on the world with those perfect, tiny hands? Pull himself up, have a look round?

  I was his mother, Eddy. I was his mum. And counted his limbs and totaled his toes, his fingers and features, doing the sums of my baby son like some holy arithmetic, as if I were a religious telling her beads, say, or as if I wer
e counting my blessings.

  But nervous…no, stunned, in the presence of such glory. The postpartum depression you hear about—I was his mother, I was his mum—is only a sort of stress, only a kind of strain, just the ordinary and decent apprehension of responsibility. His soft spot, for example, his fontanel, that dangerously malleable skullcap of infant membrane which I couldn’t help but think of as a kind of quicksand, some treacherous maelstrom of the vulnerable it half scared me to death to clean, to go near with water, a washcloth and soap.

  Or any crankiness that couldn’t be accounted for within the limited infant parameters of shit or hunger or sleep, the explosive, inexplicable tantrum cholerics of incommunicado grief like a sort of willful madness, which was…well, maddening, mysterious to me because it seemed so arbitrary and implacable, like…oh, a cow howling, or the panic neighing of a horse, or any other inarticulate anguish of the beasts. “What? What is it, Liam?” I’d lean over his crib and ask. “What, child, what?” Or pick him up, rock him, spoil him, try to bribe his anger with my comfort, my still swollen maternals, the boneless, angleless fillets of my soft shoulders, my tender breasts, my featherbed lap, my mother-meat. Crooning, cooing, ah-ah-ahhing a promised protection I had no more faith in than he did, the distraught, crazed, wailing Liam.

  Because that’s what I thought, Eddy, that he’d actually gone mad, as out of control as a demon. Dry, rested, fed (spitting my tit out like an orthodox offered interdicted fruit) and outraged. No longer even bothering to reason with him through reason (my new mum’s version of it anyway—love, a hug, a kiss, a squeeze), but cutting through all that and going directly to the recognized, time-honored lingua franca of all infants everywhere: that universal, gold-standard, pound-sterling, cosmic greenback, the comprehensive baby currency of distracting bauble. Shaking keys at him, offering my change purse, setting a ticking watch at his ear (which he wouldn’t have heard anyway above that racket he made), giving him a shiny spoon to look at, a rattle to bang, textures to feel: crumpled paper, a penny, a string of beads, an orange peel, grapes, bread, the flesh of an apple. Concerned, Eddy—well, I was his mother, I was his mum—that there might be something intractable and unyielding and malicious at the core.