“And when Eliza and Wilbur die and go to Heaven at last,” our father’s letter went on, “we can lay them to rest among their Swain ancestors, in the private family cemetery out under the apple trees.”
Hi ho.
As for who was already buried in that cemetery, which was separated from the mansion by a fence: They were mostly Vermont apple farmers and their mates and offspring, people of no distinction. Many of them were no doubt nearly as illiterate and ignorant as Melody and Isadore.
That is to say: They were innocent great apes, with limited means for doing mischief, which, in my opinion as an old, old man, is all that human beings were ever meant to be.
Many of the tombstones in the cemetery had sunk out of sight or capsized. Weather had dimmed the epitaphs of those which still stood.
But there was one tremendous monument, with thick granite walls, a slate roof, and great doors, which would clearly last past Judgment Day. It was the mausoleum of the founder of the family’s fortune and the builder of our mansion, Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
Professor Swain was by far the most intelligent of all our known ancestors, I would say – Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Mellons, Vanderbilts, Dodges and all. He took a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of eighteen, and went on to setup the Department of Civil Engineering at Cornell University at the age of twenty-two. By that time, he already had several important patents on railroad bridges and safety devices, which alone would soon have made him a millionaire.
But he was not content. So he created the Swain Bridge Company, which designed and supervised the construction of half the railroad bridges in the entire planet.
He was a citizen of the world. He spoke many languages, and was the personal friend of many heads of state. But when it came time to build a palace of his own, he placed it among his ignorant ancestors’ apple trees.
And he was the only person who loved that barbarous pile until Eliza and I came along. We were so happy there!
And Eliza and I shared a secret with Professor Swain, even though he had been dead for half a century. The servants did not know it. Our parents did not know it. And the workmen who refurbished the place never suspected it, apparently, although they must have punched pipes and wires and heating ducts through all sorts of puzzling spaces.
This was the secret: There was a mansion concealed within the mansion. It could be entered through trap doors and sliding panels. It consisted of secret staircases and listening posts with peepholes, and secret passageways. There were tunnels, too.
It was actually possible for Eliza and me, for example, to vanish into a huge grandfather clock in the ballroom at the top of the northernmost tower, and to emerge almost a kilometer away – through a trap door in the floor of the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
We shared another secret with the Professor, too – which we learned from going through some of his papers in the mansion. His middle name hadn’t actually been Roosevelt. He had given himself that middle name in order to seem more aristocratic when he enrolled as a student at M.I.T.
His name on his baptismal certificate was Elihu Witherspoon Swain.
It was from his example, I suppose, that Eliza and I got the idea, eventually, of giving simply everybody new middle names.
Chapter 4
WHEN Professor Swain died, he was so
fat that I do not see how he could have fitted into any of his secret passageways. They were very narrow. Eliza and I were able to fit into them, however, even when we were two meters tall – because the ceilings were so high –
Yes, and Professor Swain died of his fatness in the mansion, at a dinner he gave in honor of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Thomas Alva Edison.
Those were the days.
Eliza and I found the menu. It began with turtle soup.
Our servants would tell each other now and then that the mansion was haunted. They heard sneezing and cackling in the walls, and the creaking of stairways where there were no stairways, and the opening and shutting of doors where there were no doors.
Hi ho.
It would be exciting for me to cry out, as a crazed old centenarian in the ruins of Manhattan, that Eliza and I were subjected to acts of unspeakable cruelty in that spooky old house. But we may have in fact been the two happiest children that history has so far known.
That ecstasy would not end until our fifteenth year.
Think of that.
Yes, and when I became a pediatrician, practicing rural medicine in the mansion where I was raised, I often told myself about this childish patient or that one, remembering my own childhood: “This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.”
That surely describes the state of mind of Eliza and me, when we were very young. And all the information we received about the planet we were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be.
So we cultivated idiocy.
We refused to speak coherently in public. “Bun,” and, “Duh,” we said. We drooled and rolled our eyes. We farted and laughed. We ate library paste.
Hi ho.
Consider: We were at the center of the lives of those who cared for us. They could be heroically Christian in their own eyes only if Eliza and I remained helpless and vile. If we became openly wise and self-reliant, they would become our drab and inferior assistants. If we became capable of going out into the world, they might lose their apartments, their color televisions, their illusions of being sorts of doctors and nurses, and their high-paying jobs.
So, from the very first, and without quite knowing what they were doing, I am sure, they begged us a thousand times a. day to go on being helpless and vile. There was only one small advancement they wished us to make up the ladder of human achievements. They hoped with all their hearts that we would become toilet-trained.
Again: We were glad to comply.
But we could secretly read and write English by the time we were four. We could read and write French, German, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek by the we were seven, and do calculus, too.
There were thousands of books in the mansion. By the time we were ten, we had read them all by candlelight, at naptime or after bedtime – in secret passageways, or often in the mausoleum of Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
But we continued to drool and babble and so on, whenever grownups were around. It was fun.
We did not itch to display our intelligence in public. We did not think of intelligence as being useful or attractive in any way. We thought of it as being simply one more example of our freakishness, like our extra nipples and fingers and toes.
And we may have been right at that. You know?
Hi ho.
Chapter 5
AND meanwhile the strange young Dr.
Stewart Rawlings Mott weighed us and measured us, and peered into our orifices, and took samples of our urine – day after day after day.
“How is everybody today?” he would say.
We would tell him “Bluh” and “Duh,” and so on. We called him “Flocka Butt.”
And we ourselves did all we could to make each day exactly like the one before. Whenever “Flocka Butt” congratulated us on our healthy appetites and regular bowel movements, for example, I would invariably stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers, and Eliza would hoist her skirt and snap the elastic at the waist of her pantyhose.
Eliza and I believed then what I believe even now: That life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.
Life, ideally, I think, should be like the Minuet or the Virginia Reel or the Turkey Trot, something easily mastered in a dancing school.
I teeter even now between thinking that Dr. Mott loved Eliza and me, and knew how smart we were, and wished to protect us from the cruelties of the outside world, and thinking that he was comatose.
After Mother died, I discovered that the linen chest at the foot of her bed was crammed with packets of Dr. Mott’s bi-weekly reports on the health of Eliza and me. He told of the ever-greater quantities of food being consumed and then excreted. He spoke, too, of our unflagging cheerfulness, and our natural resistance to common diseases of childhood.
The sorts of things he reported, in fact, were the sorts of things a carpenter’s helper would have had no trouble detecting – such as that, at the age of nine, Eliza and I were over two meters tall.