Slapstick or Lonesome No More! Read online

  Good for Eliza and me!

  *

  Hi ho.

  7

  HOW NICE it would have been, especially for Eliza, since she was a girl, if we had been ugly ducklings--if we had become beautiful by and by. But we simply grew more preposterous with each passing day.

  There were a few advantages to being a male 2 meters tall. I was respected as a basketball player at prep school and college, even though I had very narrow shoulders and a voice like a piccolo, and not the first hints of a beard or pubic hair. Yes, and later on, after my voice had deepened and I ran as a candidate for Senator from Vermont, I was able to say on my billboards, "It takes a Big Man to do a Big Job!"

  But Eliza, who was exactly as tall as I was, could not expect to be welcomed anywhere. There was no conceivable conventional role for a female which could be bent so as to accommodate a twelve-fingered, twelve-toed, four-breasted, Neanderthaloid half-genius--weighing one quintal, and two meters tall.

  *

  Even as little children we knew we weren't ever going to win any beauty contests.

  Eliza said something prophetic about that, incidentally. She couldn't have been more than eight. She said that maybe she could win a beauty contest on Mars.

  She was, of course, destined to die on Mars.

  Eliza's beauty prize there would be an avalanche of iron pyrite, better known as "Fool's Gold."

  Hi ho.

  *

  There was a time in our childhood when we actually agreed that we were lucky not to be beautiful. We knew from all the romantic novels I'd read out loud in my squeaky voice, often with gestures, that beautiful people had their privacy destroyed by passionate strangers.

  We didn't want that to happen to us, since the two of us alone composed not only a single mind but a thoroughly populated Universe.

  *

  This much I must say about our appearance, at least: Our clothing was the finest that money could buy. Our astonishing dimensions, which changed radically almost from month to month, were mailed off regularly, in accordance with our parents' instructions, to some of the finest tailors and cobblers and dressmakers and shirtmakers and haberdashers in the world.

  The practical nurses who dressed and undressed us took a childish delight, even though we never went anywhere, in costuming us for imaginary social events for millionaires--for tea dances, for horse shows, for skiing vacations, for attending classes at expensive prep schools, for an evening of theater here in Manhattan and a supper afterwards with lots of champagne.

  And so on.

  Hi ho.

  *

  We were aware of all the comedy in this. But, as brilliant as we were when we put our heads together, we did not guess until we were fifteen that we were also in the midst of a tragedy. We thought that ugliness was simply amusing to people in the outside world. We did not realize that we could actually nauseate strangers who came upon us unexpectedly.

  We were so innocent as to the importance of good looks, in fact, that we could see little point to the story of "The Ugly Duckling," which I read out loud to Eliza one day--in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

  The story, of course, was about a baby bird that was raised by ducks, who thought it was the funniest-looking duck they had ever seen. But then it turned out to be a swan when it grew up.

  Eliza, I remember, said she thought it would have been a much better story if the little bird had waddled up on shore and turned into a rhinoceros.

  Hi ho.

  8

  UNTIL THE EVE of our fifteenth birthday, Eliza and I never heard anything bad about ourselves when we eavesdropped from the secret passageways.

  The servants were so used to us that they hardly ever mentioned us, even in moments of deepest privacy. Dr. Mott seldom commented on anything but our appetites and our excretions. And our parents were so sickened by us that they were tongue-tied when they made their annual space voyage to our asteroid. Father, I remember, would talk to Mother rather haltingly and listlessly about world events he had read about in news magazines.

  They would bring us toys from F.A.O. Schwarz--guaranteed by that emporium to be educational for three-year-olds.

  Hi ho.

  *

  Yes, and I think now about all the secrets about the human condition I withhold from young Melody and Isadore, for their own peace of mind--the fact that the human afterlife is no good, and so on.

  And then I am awed yet again by the perfect Lulu of a secret that was concealed from Eliza and me so long: That our own parents wished we would hurry up and die.

  *

  We imagined lazily that our fifteenth birthday would be like all the rest. We put on the show we had always put on. Our parents arrived at our suppertime, which was four in the afternoon. We would get our presents the next day.

  We threw food at each other in our tile-lined diningroom. I hit Eliza with an avocado. She hit me with a filet mignon. We bounced Parker House rolls off the maid. We pretended not to know that our parents had arrived and were watching us through a crack in the door.

  Yes, and then, still not having greeted our parents face-to-face, we were bathed and talcumed, and dressed in our pajamas and bathrobes and bedroom slippers. Bedtime was at five, for Eliza and I pretended to sleep sixteen hours a day.

  Our practical nurses, who were Oveta Cooper and Mary Selwyn Kirk, told us that there was a wonderful surprise waiting for us in the library.

  We pretended to be gaga about what that surprise could possibly be.

  We were full-grown giants by then.

  I carried a rubber tugboat, which was supposedly my favorite toy. Eliza had a red velvet ribbon in the mare's nest of her coal black hair.

  *

  As always, there was a large coffee table between Eliza and me and our parents when we were brought in. As always, our parents had brandy to sip. As always, there was a fizzing, popping blaze of pine and sappy apple logs in the fireplace. As always, an oil painting of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain over the mantelpiece beamed down on the ritual scene.

  As always, our parents stood. They smiled up at us with what we still did not recognize as bittersweet dread.

  As always, we pretended to find them adorable, but not to remember who they were at first.

  *

  As always, Father did the talking.

  "How do you do, Eliza and Wilbur?" he said. "You are looking very well. We are very glad to see you. Do you remember who we are?"

  Eliza and I consulted with one another uneasily, drooling, and murmuring in ancient Greek. Eliza said to me in Greek, I remember, that she could not believe that we were related to such pretty dolls.

  Father helped us out. He told us the name we had given to him years ago. "I am Bluth-luh," he said.

  Eliza and I pretended to be flabbergasted. "Bluth-luh!" we told each other. We could not believe our good fortune. "Bluth-luh! Bluth-luh!" we cried.

  "And this," said Father, indicating Mother, "is Mub-lub."

  This was even more sensational news to Eliza and me. "Mub-lub! Mub-lub!" we exclaimed.

  And now Eliza and I made a great intellectual leap, as always. Without any hints from anybody, we concluded that, if our parents were in the house, then our birthday must be close at hand. We chanted our idiot word for birthday, which was "Fuff-bay."

  As always, we pretended to become overexcited. We jumped up and down. We were so big by then that the floor began to go up and down like a trampoline.

  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.

  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 hal
f 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.

  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.

  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 othe
rs about the miracle."

  Oveta remained transfixed. I at last had to snap my fingers under her nose to wake her up.

  She curtseyed. "As you wish, Mistress Eliza," she said. And she went to spread the news.

  *

  As we settled ourselves in the solarium, the rest of the staff straggled in humbly--to have a look at the young master and the young mistress we had become.

  We greeted them by their full names. We asked them friendly questions which indicated that we had a detailed understanding of their lives. We apologized for having perhaps shocked some of them for changing so quickly.

  "We simply did not realize," Eliza said, "that anybody wanted us to be intelligent."

  We were by then so in charge of things that I, too, dared to speak of important matters. My high voice wouldn't be silly any more.

  "With your cooperation," I said, "we will make this mansion famous for intelligence as it has been infamous for idiocy in days gone by. Let the fences come down."

  "Are there any questions?" said Eliza.

  There were none.

  *

  Somebody called Dr. Mott.

  *

  Our mother did not come down to breakfast. She remained in bed--petrified.

  Father came down alone. He was wearing his nightclothes. He had not shaved. Young as he was, he was palsied and drawn.

  Eliza and I were puzzled that he did not look happier. We hailed him not only in English, but in several other languages we knew.

  It was to one of these foreign salutations that he responded at last. "Bon jour," he said.

  "Sit thee doon! Sit thee doon!" said Eliza merrily.

  The poor man sat.

  *

  He was sick with guilt, of course, over having allowed intelligent human beings, his own flesh and blood, to be treated like idiots for so long.

  Worse: His conscience and his advisors had told him before that it was all right if he could not love us, since we were incapable of deep feelings, and since there was nothing about us, objectively, that anyone in his right mind could love. But now it was his duty to love us, and he did not think he could do it.

  He was horrified to discover what our mother knew she would discover, if she came downstairs: That intelligence and sensitivity in monstrous bodies like Eliza's and mine merely made us more repulsive.