Machu Picchu, the old Inca capital on the roof of the Andes in Peru, was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but in all parts of the world. There were even some full-sized Chinese there, who had declined to let their children be miniaturized.
And Eliza moved into a condominium down there, to be as far away as possible from me.
When Mushari came to my house to tell me about Eliza’s prospective move to Peru, a week after the orgy, he confessed that he himself had become severely disoriented while tied to a diningroom. chair.
“You looked more and more like Frankenstein monsters to me,” he said. “I became convinced that there was a switch somewhere in the house that controlled you. I even figured out which switch it was. The minute I untied myself, I ran to it and tore it out by the roots.”
It was Mushari who had ripped the thermostat from the wall.
To demonstrate to me how changed he was, he admitted that he had been wholly motivated by selfinterest when he set Eliza free. “I was a bounty-hunter,” he said, “finding rich people in mental hospitals who didn’t belong there – and setting them free. I left the poor to rot in their dungeons.”
“It was a useful service all the same,” I said.
“Christ, I don’t think so,” he said. “Practically every sane person I ever got out of a hospital went insane almost immediately afterwards.
“Suddenly I feel old,” he said. “I can’t take that any more.”
Hi ho.
Mushari was so shaken by the orgy, in fact, that he turned Eliza’s legal and financial affairs over to the same people that Mother and I used.
He came to my attention only once more, two years later, about the tone I graduated from medical school – at the bottom of my class, by the way. He had patented an invention of his own. There was a photograph of him and a description of his patent on a business page in The New York Times.
There was a national mania for tap-dancing at the time. Mushari had invented taps which could be glued to the soles of shoes, and then peeled off again. A person could carry the taps in little plastic bags in a pocket or purse, according to Mushari, and put them on only when it was time to tap-dance.
Chapter 27
I never saw Eliza’s face again after the orgy. I
heard her voice only twice – more once when I graduated from medical school, and again when I was President of the United State of America, and she had been dead for a long, long time.
Hi ho.
When Mother planned a graduation party for me at the Ritz in Boston, across from the Public Gardens, she and I never dreamed that Eliza would somehow hear of it, and would come all the way from Peru.
My twin never wrote or telephoned. Rumors about her were as vague as those coming from China. She was drinking’ too much, we had heard. She had taken up golf.
I was having a wonderful time at my party, when a bellboy came to tell me I was wanted outside – not just in the lobby, but in the balmy, moonlit night outdoors. Eliza was the farthest thing from my mind.
My guess, as I followed the bellboy, was that there was a Rolls-Royce from my mother parked outside.
I was reassured by the servile manner and uniform of my guide. I was also giddy with champagne. I did not hesitate to follow as he led me across Arlington Street and then into the enchanted forest, into the Public Gardens on the other side.
He was a fraud. He was not a bellboy at all.
Deeper and deeper we went into the trees. And in every clearing we came to, I expected to see my Rolls-Royce.
But he brought me to a statue instead. It depicted an old-fashioned doctor, dressed much as it amused me to dress. He was melancholy but proud. He held a sleeping youth in his arms.
As the inscription in the moonlight told me, this was a monument to the first use of anaesthetics in forgery in the United States, which took place in Boston.
I had been aware of a clattering whir somewhere in the city, over Commonwealth Avenue perhaps. But I had not identified it as a hovering helicopter.
But now the bogus bellhop, who was really an Inca servant of Eliza’s, fired a magnesium flare into the air.
Everything touched by that unnatural dazzle became statuary – lifeless and exemplary, and weighing tons.
The helicopter materialized directly over us, itself made allegorical, transformed into a terrible mechanical angel by the glare of the flare.
Eliza was up there with a bullhorn.
It seemed possible to me that she might shoot me from there, or hit me with a bag of excrement. She had traveled all the way from Peru to deliver one half of a Shakespearean sonnet.
“Listen!” she said. “Listen!” she said. And then she said, “Listen!” again.
The flare was meanwhile dying nearby – its parachute snagged in a treetop.
Here is what Eliza said to me, and to the neighborhood:
“O! how thy worth with manners may I sing,
“When thou art all the better part of me?
“What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
“And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?
“Even for this let us divided live,
“And our dear love lose name of single one,
“That by this separation I may give
“That due to thee, which thou deserv’st alone.”
I called up to her through my cupped hands. “Eliza!” I said. And then I shouted something daring, and something I genuinely felt for the first time in my life.
“Eliza! I love you!” I said.
All was darkness now.
“Did you hear me, Eliza?” I said. “I love you! I really love you!”
“I heard you,” she said. “Nobody should ever say that to anybody.”
“I mean it,” I said.
“Then I will say in turn something that I really mean, my brother – my twin.”
“What is it?” I said.
She said this: “God guide the hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain.”
And then the helicopter flew away.
Hi ho.
Chapter 28
I returned to the Ritz, laughing and crying – a
two-meter Neanderthaler in a ruffled shirt and a robin’s-egg blue velvet tuxedo. There was a crowd of people who were curious about the brief supernova in the east,, and about the voice which had spoken from Heaven of separation and love. I pressed past them and into the ballroom, leaving it to private detectives stationed at the door to turn back the following crowd.
The guests at my party were only now beginning to hear hints that something marvelous had happened outside. I went to Mother, to tell her what Eliza had done. I was puzzled to find her talking to a nondescript, middle-aged stranger, dressed, like the detectives, in a cheap business suit.
Mother introduced him as “Dr. Mott.” He was, of course, the doctor who had looked after Eliza and me for so long in Vermont. He was in Boston on business, and, as luck would have it, staying at the Ritz.
I was so full of news and champagne, though, that I did not know or care who he was. And, having said my bit to Mother, I told Dr. Mott that it had been nice to meet him, and I hurried on to other parts of the room.
When I got back to Mother in about an hour, Dr. Mott had departed. She told me again who he was. I expressed pro forma regrets at not having spent more time with him. She gave me a note from him, which she said was his graduation present to me.
It was written on Ritz stationery. It said simply this:
” ‘If you can do no good, at least do no harm.’ Hippocrates.”
Yes, and when I converted the mansion in Vermont into a clinic and small children’s hospital, and also my permanent home, I had those words chipped in stone over the front door. But they so troubled my patients and their parents that I had them chipped away again. The words seemed a confession of weakness and indecision to them, a suggestion that they might as well have stayed away.
I continued to carry the words in my head, however, and in fact did little harm. And the intellectual center of gravity for my practice was a single volume which I locked into a safe each night – the bound manuscript of the childrearing manual Eliza and I had written during our orgy on Beacon Hill.
Somehow, we had put everything in there.
And the years flew by.
Somewhere in there I married an equally wealthy woman, actually a third cousin of mine, whose maiden name was Rose Aldrich Ford. She was very unhappy, because I did not love her, and because I would never take her anywhere. I have never been good at loving. We had a child, Carter Paley Swain, whom I also failed to love. Carter was normal, and completely uninteresting to me. He was somehow like a summer squash on the vine – featureless and watery, and merely growing larger all the time.