We left off our crying, which we were no good at doing anyway. Yes, and we made a clear demand which could be satisfied at once. We asked to be tested for intelligence again – as a pair this time.
“We want to show you,” I said, “how glorious we are when we work together, so that nobody will ever talk about parting us again.”
We spoke carefully. I explained who “Betty and Bobby Brown” were. I agreed that they were stupid. I said we had had no experience with hating, and had had trouble understanding that particular human activity whenever we encountered it in books.
“But we are making small beginnings in hating now,” said Eliza. “Our hating is strictly limited at this point – to only two people in this Universe: To Betty and Bobby Brown.”
Dr. Cordiner, as it turned out, was a coward, among other things. Like so many cowards, she chose to go on bullying at the worst possible time. She jeered at Eliza’s and my request.
“What kind of a world do you think this is?” she said, and so on.
So Mother got up and went over to her, not touching her, and not looking her in the eyes, either. Mother spoke to her throat, and, in a tone between a purr and a growl, she called Dr. Cordiner an “overdressed little sparrow-fart”
Chapter 18
SO Eliza and I were retested – as a pair this
time. We sat side-by-side at the stainless steel table in the tiled diningroom.
We were so happy!
A depersonalized Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner administered the tests like a robot, while our parents looked on. She had furnished us with new tests, so that the challenges would all be fresh.
Before we began, Eliza said to Mother and Father, “We promise to answer every question correctly.”
Which we did.
What were the questions like? Well, I was poking around the ruins of a school on Forty-sixth Street yesterday, and I was lucky enough to find a whole batch of intelligence tests, all set to go.
I quote:
“A man purchased 100 shares of stock at five dollars a share. If each share rose ten cents the first month, decreased eight cents the second month, and gained three cents the third month, what was the value of the man’s investment at the end of the third month?”
Or try this:
“How many digits are there to the left of the decimal place in the square root of 692038.42753?”
Or this:
“A yellow tulip viewed through a piece of blue glass looks what color?”
Or this:
“Why does the Little Dipper appear to turn about the North Star once a day?”
Or this:
“Astronomy is to geology as steeplejack is to what?”
And so on. Hi ho.
We made good on Eliza’s promise of perfection, as I have said.
The only trouble was that the two of us, in the innocent process of checking and rechecking our answers, wound up under the table – with our legs wrapped around each others’ necks in scissors grips, and snorting and snuffling into each others’ crotches.
When we regained our chairs, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner had fainted, and our parents were gone.
At ten o’clock the next morning, I was taken by automobile to a school for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod.
Chapter 19
IT is sundown again. A bird down around
Thirty-first Street and Fifth, where there is an Army tank with a tree growing out of its turret, calls out to me. It asks the same question over and over again with piercing clarity.
“Whip poor Will?” it says.
I never call that bird a “whippoorwill,” and neither do Melody and Isadore, who follow my lead in naming things. They seldom call Manhattan “Manhattan,” for example, or “The Island of Death,” which is its common name on the mainland. They do as I do: They call it “Skyscraper National Park,” without knowing what the joke is in that, or, with equal humorlessness, “Angkor Wat.”
And what they call the bird that asks about whipping when the sun goes down is what Eliza and I called it when we were children. It was a correct name which we had learned from a dictionary.
We treasured the name for the superstitious dread it inspired. The bird became a nightmare creature in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch when we spoke its name. And, whenever we heard its cry, we spoke its name simultaneously. It was almost the only occasion on which we would speak simultaneously.
“The cry of The Nocturnal Goatsucker,” we would say.
And now I hear Melody and Isadore saying that, too, in a part of the lobby where I cannot see them. “The cry of the Nocturnal Goatsucker,” they say.
Eliza and I listened to that bird one evening before my departure for Cape Cod.
We had fled the mansion for the privacy of the dank mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
“Whip poor Will?” came the question, from somewhere out under the apple trees.
Even when we put our heads together, we could think of little to say.
I have heard that condemned prisoners often think of themselves as dead people, long before they die. Perhaps that was how our genius felt, knowing that a cruel axeman, so to speak, was about to split it into two nondescript chunks of meat, into Betty and Bobby Brown.
Be that as it may, our hands were busy – which is often the case with the hands of dying people. We had brought what we thought were the best of our writings with us. We rolled them into a cylinder, which we hid in an empty bronze funerary urn.
The urn had been intended for the ashes of the wife of Professor Swain, who had chosen to be buried here in New York, instead. It was encrusted with verdigris.
Hi ho.
What was on the papers?
A method for squaring circles, I remember – and a utopian scheme for creating artificial extended families in America by issuing everyone a new middle name. All persons with the same middle name would be relatives.
Yes, and there was our critique of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and an essay on the nature of gravity, which concluded that gravity had surely been a variable in ancient times.
There was a paper, I remember, which argued that teeth should be washed with hot water, just like dishes and pots and pans.
And so on.
It was Eliza who had thought of hiding the papers in the urn.
It was Eliza who now put the lid in place.
We were not close together when she did it, so what she said was her own invention: “Say goodbye forever to your intelligence, Bobby Brown.”
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Eliza – ” I said, “so many of the books I’ve read to you said that love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that I love you now.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“I love you, Eliza,” I said.
She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.”
“Why not?” I said.
“It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, 1 love you, too’?”
“You don’t love me?” I said.
“What could anybody love about Bobby Brown?” she said.
Somewhere outside, out under the apple trees, the Nocturnal Goatsucker asked his question again.
Chapter 20
ELIZA did not come down to breakfast the
next morning. She remained in her room until I was gone.
Our parents came along with me in their chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine. I was their child with a future. I could read and write.
And, even as we rolled through the lovely countryside, my forgettery set to work.
It was a protective mechanism against unbearable grief, one which I, as a pediatrician, am persuaded all children have.
Somewhere behind me, it seemed, was a twin sister who was not nearly as smart as I was. She had a name. Her name was Eliza Mellon Swain.
Yes, and the school year was so structured that none of us ever had to go home. I went to England and France and Germany and Italy and Greece. I went to summer camp.
And it was determined that, while I was surely no genius, and was incapable of originality, I had a better than average mind. I was patient and orderly, and could sort out good ideas from heaps of balderdash.
I was the first child in the history of the school to take College Boards. I did so well that I was invited to come to Harvard. I accepted the invitation, although my voice had yet to change.
And I would now and then be reminded by my parents, who became very proud of me, that somewhere I had a twin sister who was little more than a human vegetable. She was in an expensive institution for people of her sort.