But we suddenly stopped, pretending, as always, to have been rendered catatonic by more happiness than was good for us.
That was always the end of the show. After that, we were led away.
Hi ho.
Chapter 9
WE were put into custom-made cribs – in
separate but adjacent bedrooms. The rooms were connected by a secret panel in the wall. The cribs were as big as railroad flatcars. They made a terrible clatter when their sides were raised.
Eliza and I pretended to fall asleep at once. After a half an hour, however, we were reunited in Eliza’s room. The servants never looked in on us. Our health was perfect, after all, and we had established a reputation for being, as they said, ” … as good as gold at bedtime.”
Yes, and we went through a trapdoor under Eliza’s crib, and were soon taking turns watching our parents in the library – through a tiny hole we ourselves had drilled through the wall, and through the upper corner of the frame around the painting of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
Father was telling mother of a thing he had read in a news magazine on the day before. It seemed that scientists in the People’s Republic of China were experimenting with making human beings smaller, so they would not need to eat so much and wear such big clothes.
Mother was staring into the fire. Father had to tell her twice about the Chinese rumor. The second time he did it, she replied emptily that she supposed that the Chinese could accomplish just about anything they put their minds to.
Only about a month before, the Chinese had sent two hundred explorers to Mars – without using a space vehicle of any kind.
No scientist in the Western World could guess how the trick was done. The Chinese themselves volunteered no details.
Mother said that it seemed like such a long time since Americans had discovered anything. “All of a sudden,” she said, “everything is being discovered by the Chinese.”
“We used to discover everything,” she said.
It was such a stupefied conversation. The level of animation was so low that our beautiful young parents from Manhattan might have been up to their necks in honey. They appeared, as they had always appeared to Eliza and me, to be under some curse which required them to speak only of matters which did not interest them at all.
And indeed they were under a malediction. But Eliza and I had not guessed-its nature: That they were all but strangled and paralyzed by the wish that their own children would die.
And I promise this about our parents, although the only proof I have is a feeling in my bones: Neither one had ever suggested in any way to the other that he or she wished we would die.
Hi ho.
But then there was a bang in the fireplace. Steam had to escape from a trap in a sappy log.
Yes, and Mother, because she was a symphony of chemical reactions like all other living things, gave a terrified shriek. Her chemicals insisted that she shriek in response to the bang.
After the chemicals got her to do that, though, they wanted a lot more from her. They thought it was high time she said what she really felt about Eliza and me, which she did. All sorts of other things went haywire when she said it. Her hands closed convulsively. Her spine buckled and her face shriveled to turn her into an old, old witch.
“I hate them, I hate them, I hate them,” she said.
And not many seconds passed before Mother said with spitting explicitness who it was she hated.
“I hate Wilbur Rockefeller Swain and Eliza Mellon Swain,” she said.
Chapter 10
MOTHER was temporarily insane that
night.
I got to know her well in later years. And, while I never learned to love her, or to love anyone, for that matter, I did admire her unwavering decency toward one and all. She was not a mistress of insults. When she spoke either in public or in private, no reputations died.
So it was not truly our mother who said on the eve of our fifteenth birthday, “How can I love Count Dracula and his blushing bride?” – meaning Eliza and me.
It was not truly our mother who asked our father, “How on Earth did I ever give birth to a pair of drooling totem poles?”
And so on.
As for Father: He engulfed her in his arms. He was weeping with love and pity.
“Caleb, oh Caleb – ” she said in his arms, “this isn’t me.”
“Of course not,” he said.
“Forgive me,” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
“Will God ever forgive me?” she said.
“He already has,” he said.
“It was as though a devil all of a sudden got inside of me,” she said.
“That’s what it was, Tish,” he said.
Her madness was subsiding now. “Oh, Caleb – ” she said.
Lest I seem to be fishing for sympathy, let me say right now that Eliza and I in those days were about as emotionally vulnerable as the Great Stone Face in New Hampshire.
We needed a mother’s and father’s love about as much as a fish needs a bicycle, as the saying goes.
So when our mother spoke badly of us, even wished we would die, our response was intellectual. We enjoyed solving problems. Perhaps Mother’s problem was one we could solve – short of suicide, of course.
She pulled herself together again eventually. She steeled herself for another hundred birthdays with Eliza and me, in case God wished to test her in that way. But, before she did that, she said this:
“I would give anything, Caleb, for the faintest sign of intelligence, the merest flicker of humanness in the eyes of either twin.”
This was easily arranged.
Hi ho.
So Eliza and I went back to Eliza’s room, and we painted a big sign on a bedsheet. Then, after our parents were sound asleep, we stole into their room through the false back in an armoire. We hung the sign on the wall, so it would be the first thing they saw when they woke up.
This is what it said:
DEAR MATER AND PATER: WE CAN NEVER BE PRETTY BUT WE CAN BE AS SMART OR AS DUMB AS THE WORLD REALLY WANTS US TO BE.
YOUR FAITHFUL SERVANTS,
ELIZA MELLON SWAIN
WILBUR ROCKEFELLER SWAIN
Hi ho.
Chapter 11
THUS did Eliza and I destroy our Paradise –
our nation of two.
We arose the next morning before our parents did, before the servants could come to dress us. We sensed no danger. We supposed ourselves still to be in Paradise as we dressed ourselves.
I chose to wear a conservative blue, pinstripe, three-piece suit, I remember. Eliza chose to wear a cashmere sweater, a tweed skirt, and pearls.
We agreed that Eliza should be our spokesman at first, since she had a rich alto voice. My voice did not have the authority to announce calmingly but convincingly that, in effect, the world had just turned upside down.
Remember, please, that almost all that anyone had ever heard us say up to then was “Buh” and “Duh,” and so on.
Now we encountered Oveta Cooper, our practical nurse, in the colonnaded green marble foyer. She was startled to see us up and dressed.
Before she could comment on this, though, Eliza and I leaned our heads together, put them in actual contact, just above our ears. The single genius we composed thereby then spoke to Oveta in Eliza’s voice, which was as lovely as a viola.
This is what that voice said:
“Good morning, Oveta. A new life begins for all of us today. As you can see and hear, Wilbur and I are no longer idiots. A miracle has taken place overnight. Our parents’ dreams have come true. We are healed.
“As for you, Oveta: You will keep your apartment and your color television, and perhaps even receive a salary increase – as a reward for all you did to make this miracle come to pass. No one on the staff will experience any change, except for this one: Life here will become even easier and more pleasant than it was before.”
Oveta, a bleak, Yankee dumpling, was hypnotized – like a rabbit who has met a rattlesnake. But Eliza and I were not a rattlesnake. With our heads together, we were one of the gentlest geniuses the world has ever known.
“We will not be using the tiled diningroom any more,” said Eliza’s voice. “We have lovely manners, as you shall see. Please have our breakfast served in the solarium, and notify us when Mater and Pater are up and around. It would be very nice if, from now on, you would address my brother and me as ‘Master Wilbur’ and ‘Mistress Eliza.’
“You may go now, and tell the others about the miracle.”