Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! Part 8

"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 time I graduated from medical school-at the bottom of my cla.s.s, 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 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.

27.

I NEVER SAW NEVER SAW E 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 States of America, and she had been dead for a long, long time. 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 States 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 rea.s.sured 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 surgery 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 love you! I you! I really really love you!" love you!"

"I heard you," she said. "n.o.body 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: "G.o.d guide the hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain."

And then the helicopter flew away.

Hi ho.

28.

I RETURNED TO THE RETURNED TO THE R RITZ, laughing and crying-a two-meter Neanderthaler in a ruffled s.h.i.+rt 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 ma.n.u.script of the child-rearing manual Eliza and I had written during our orgy on Beacon Hill.

Somehow, we had put everything everything in there. 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.

After our divorce, he and his mother bought a condominium in the same building with Eliza, down in Machu Picchu, Peru. I never heard from them again-even when I became President of the United States.

And the time flew.

I woke up one morning to find that I was almost fifty years old! Mother had moved in with me in Vermont. She sold her house in Turtle Bay. She was feeble and afraid.

She talked a good deal about Heaven to me.

I knew nothing at all about the subject then. I a.s.sumed that when people were dead they were dead.

"I know your father is waiting for me with open arms," she said, "and my Mommy and Daddy, too."

She was right about that, it turned out. Waiting around for more people is just about all there is for people in Heaven to do.

The way Mother described Heaven, it sounded like a golf course in Hawaii, with manicured fairways and greens running down to a lukewarm ocean.

I twitted her only lightly about wanting that sort of Paradise. "It sounds like a place where people would drink a lot of lemonade," I said.

"I love lemonade," she replied.

29.

MOTHER TALKED toward the end, too, about how much she hated unnatural things-synthetic flavors and fibers and plastics and so on. She loved silk and cotton and linen and wool and leather, she said, and clay and gla.s.s and stone. She loved horses and sailboats, too, she said. toward the end, too, about how much she hated unnatural things-synthetic flavors and fibers and plastics and so on. She loved silk and cotton and linen and wool and leather, she said, and clay and gla.s.s and stone. She loved horses and sailboats, too, she said.

"They're all coming back, Mother," I said, which was true.

My hospital itself had twenty horses by then-and wagons and carts and carriages and sleighs. I had a horse of my own, a great Clydesdale. Golden feathers hid her hooves. "Budweiser" was her name.

Yes, and the harbors of New York and Boston and San Francisco were forests of masts again, I'd heard. It had been quite some time since I'd seen them.

Yes, and I found the hospitality of my mind to fantasy pleasantly increased as machinery died and communications from the outside world became more and more vague.

So I was unsurprised one night, after having tucked Mother in bed, to enter my own bedroom with a lighted candle, and to find a Chinese man the size of my thumb sitting on my mantelpiece. He was wearing a quilted blue jacket and trousers and cap.

As far as I was able to determine afterwards, he was the first official emissary from the People's Republic of China to the United States of America in more than twenty-five years.

During the same period, not a single foreigner who got inside China, so far as I know, ever returned from there.

So "going to China" became a widespread euphemism for committing suicide.

Hi ho.

My little visitor motioned for me to come closer, so he would not have to shout. I presented one ear to him. It must have been a horrible sight-the tunnel with all the hair and bits of wax inside.

He told me that he was a roving amba.s.sador, and had been chosen for the job because of his visibility to foreigners. He was much, much larger, he said, than an average Chinese.

"I thought you people had no interest in us any more," I said.

He smiled. "That was a foolish thing for us to say, Dr. Swain," he said. "We apologize."

"You mean that we know things that you don't know?" I said.

"Not quite," he said. "I mean that you used used to know things that we don't know." to know things that we don't know."

"I can't imagine what those things would be," I said.

"Naturally not," he said. "I will give you a hint: I bring you greetings from your twin sister in Machu Picchu, Dr. Swain."

"That's not much of a hint," I said.

"I wish very much to see the papers you and your sister put so many years ago into the funeral urn in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain," he said.

It turned out that the Chinese had sent an expedition to Machu Picchu-to recover, if they could, certain lost secrets of the Incas. Like my visitor, they were oversize for Chinese.

Yes, and Eliza approached them with a proposition. She said she knew where there were secrets which were as good or better than anything the Incas had had.

"If what I say turns out to be true," she told them, "I want you to reward me-with a trip to your colony on Mars."

He said that his name was Fu Manchu.

I asked him how he had got to my mantelpiece.

"The same way we get to Mars," he replied.