Melody sometimes looks to me like a merry old Chinese woman, although she is only sixteen. A pregnant girl who looks like that is a sad thing for a pediatrician to see.
But the love that the robust and rosy Isadore gives her counterbalances my sadness with joy. Lake almost all the members of his family, the Raspberries, Isadore has nearly all his teeth, and remains upright even when the gravity is most severe. He carries Melody around in his arms on days like that, and has offered to carry me.
The Raspberries are food-gatherers, mainly, living in and around the ruins of the New York Stock Exchange. They fish off docks. They mine for canned goods. They pick fruits and berries they find. They grow their own tomatoes and potatoes, and radishes, and little more.
They trap rats and bats and dogs and cats and birds, and eat them. A Raspberry will eat anything.
Chapter 14
Iwish Melody what our parents once wished
Eliza and me: A short but happy life on an asteroid.
Hi ho.
Yes, and I have already said, Eliza and I might have had a long and happy life on an asteroid, if we had not showed off our intelligence one day. We might have been in the mansion still, burning the trees and the furniture and the bannisters and the paneling for warmth, and drooling and babbling when strangers came.
We could have raised chickens. We could have had a little vegetable garden. And we could have amused ourselves with our ever-increasing wisdom, caring nothing for its possible usefulness.
The sun is going down. Thin clouds of bats stream out from the subway – jittering, squeaking, dispersing like gas. As always, I shudder.
I can’t think of their noise as a noise. It is a disease of silence instead.
I write on – in the light of a burning rag in a bowl of animal fat.
I have a thousand candlesticks, but no candles.
Melody and Isadore play backgammon – on a board I painted on the lobby floor.
They double and redouble each other, and laugh,
They are planning a party for my one hundred and first birthday, which is a month away.
I eavesdrop on them sometimes. Old habits are hard to break. Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa is making new costumes for the occasion – for herself and her slaves. She has mountains of cloth in her storeroom in Turtle Bay. The slaves will wear pink pantaloons and golden slippers, and green silk turbans with ostrich feather plumes, I heard Melody say.
Vera will be borne to the party in a sedan chair, I’ve heard, surrounded by slaves carrying presents and food and drink and torches, and frightening away wild dogs with the clangor of dinnerbells.
Hi ho.
I must be very careful with my drinking at my birthday party. If I drank too much, I might spill the beans to everybody: That the life that awaits us after death is infinitely more tiresome than this one.
Hi ho.
Chapter 15
ELIZA and I were of course not allowed to
return to consolations of idiocy. We were bawled out severely whenever we tried. Yes, and the servants and our parents found one byproduct of our metamorphosis positively delicious: They were suddenly entitled to bawl us out.
What hell we caught from time to time!
Yes, and Dr. Mott was fired, and all sorts of experts were brought in.
It was fun for a while. The first doctors to arrive were specialists in hearts and lungs and kidneys and so on. When they studied us organ by organ and body fluid by body fluid, we were masterpieces of health.
They were genial. They were all family employees in a way. They were research people whose work was financed by the Swain Foundation in New York. That was how they had been so easily rounded up and brought to Galen. The family had helped them. Now they would help the family.
They joshed us a lot One of them, I remember, said to me that it must be fun to be so tall. “What’s the weather up there like?” he said, and so on.
The joshing had a soothing effect. It gave us the mistaken impression that it did not matter how ugly we were. I still remember what an ear, nose and throat specialist said when he looked up into Eliza’s enormous sinus cavities with a flashlight. “My God, nurse – ” he said, “call up the National Geographic Society. We have just discovered a new entrance to Mammoth Cave!”
Eliza laughed. The nurse laughed. I laughed. We all laughed.
Our parents were in another part of the mansion. They kept away from all the fun.
That early in the game, though, we had our first disturbing tastes of separation. Some of the examinations required that we be several rooms apart As the distance between Eliza and me increased, I felt as though my head were turning to wood.
I became stupid and insecure.
When I was reunited with Eliza, she said that she had felt very much the same sort of thing. “It was as though my skull was filling up with maple syrup,” she said.
And we bravely tried to be amused rather than frightened by the listless children we became when we were parted. We pretended they had nothing to do with us, and we made up names for them. We called them “Betty and Bobby Brown.”
And now is as good a time as any, I think, to say that when we read Eliza’s will, after her death in a Martian avalanche, we learned that she wished to be buried wherever she died. Her grave was to be marked with a simple stone, engraved with this information and nothing more:
[graphic of a tombstone with the words “Here Lies Betty Brown”]
Yes, and it was the last specialist to look us over, a psychologist, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who decreed that Eliza and I should be separated permanently, should, so to speak, become forever Betty and Bobby Brown.
Chapter 16
F?DOR Mikhailovich Dostoevski, the
Russian novelist, said one time that, “One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education.” I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.
That was Eliza’s and my experience with Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who was widely believed to be the greatest expert on psychological testing in the world – with the possible exception of China. Nobody knew what was going on in China any more.
I have an Encyclopaedia Britannica here in the lobby of the Empire State Building, which is the reason I am able to give Dostoevski his middle name.
Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner was invariably impressive and gracious when in the presence of grownups. She was elaborately dressed the whole tune she was in the mansion – in high-heeled shoes and fancy dresses and jewelry.
We heard her tell our parents one time: “Just because a woman has three doctors’ degrees and heads a testing corporation which bills three million dollars a year, that doesn’t mean she can’t be feminine.”
When she got Eliza and me alone, though, she seethed with paranoia.
“None of your tricks, no more of your snotty little kid millionaire tricks with me,” she would say.
And Eliza and I hadn’t done anything wrong.
She was so enraged by how much money and power our family had, and so sick, that I don’t think she even noticed how huge and ugly Eliza and I were. We were just two more rotten-spoiled little rich kids to her.
“I wasn’t born with any silver spoon in my mouth,” she told us, not once but many times. “Many was the day we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from,” she said. “Have you any idea what that’s like?”
“No,” said Eliza.
“Of course not,” said Dr. Cordiner.
And so on.
Since she was paranoid, it was especially unfortunate that her middle name was the same as our last name.
“I’m not your sweet Aunt Cordelia,” she would say. “You needn’t worry your little aristocratic brains about that. When my grandfather came from Poland, he changed his name from Stankowitz to Swain.” Her eyes were blazing. “Say ‘Stankowitz!’ “
We said it.
“Now say ‘Swain,’ ” she said.
We did.
And finally one of us asked her what she was so mad about.
This made her very calm. “I am not mad,” she said. “It would be very unprofessional for me to ever get mad about anything. However, let me say that asking a person of my calibre to come all this distance into the wilderness to personally administer tests to only two children is like asking Mozart to tune a piano. It is like asking Albert Einstein to balance a checkbook. Am I getting through to you, ‘Mistress Eliza and Master Wilbur,’ as I believe you are called?”