Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

from the new novel

Chapter 1

To whom it my concern:

It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Smoke from a cooking fire on the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the Empire State Building on the Island of Death floats out over the ailanthus jungle which 34th Street has become.

The pavement on the floor of the jungle is all crinkum-crankum--heaved this way and that by frost heaves and roots.

There is a small clearing in the jungle. A blue-eyed, lantern-jawed old white man, who is over two meters tall and 100 years old, sits in the clearing on what was once the back seat of a taxicab.

I am that man.

My name is Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain.

•

I am barefoot. I wear a purple toga made from draperies found in the ruins of the Americana Hotel.

I am a former President of the United States of America. I was the final President, the tallest President and the only one ever to have been divorced while occupying the White House.

I inhabit the first floor of the Empire State Building with my 16-year-old grand-daughter, who is Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald, and with her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen. The three of us have the building all to ourselves.

Our nearest neighbor is one and one half kilometers away.

I have just heard one of her roosters crow.

•

Our nearest neighbor is Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, a woman who loves life and is better at it than anyone I ever knew. She is a strong and warmhearted and hard-working farmer in her early 60s. She is built like a fireplug. She has slaves whom she treats very well. And she and the slaves raise cattle and pigs and chickens and goats and corn and wheat and vegetables and fruits and grapes along the shores of the East River.

They have built a windmill for grinding grain, and a still for making brandy, and a smokehouse--and on and on.

"Vera," I told her the other day, "if you would only write us a new Declaration of Independence, you would be the Thomas Jefferson of modern times."

•

I write this book on the stationery of the Continental Driving School, three boxes of which Melody and Isadore found in a closet on the 64th floor of our home. They also found a gross of ball-point pens.

•

Visitors from the mainland are rare. The bridges are down. The tunnels are crushed. And boats will not come near us, for fear of the plague peculiar to this island, which is called the Green Death.

And it is that plague which has earned Manhattan the sobriquet the Island of Death.

Hi ho.

•

It is a thing I often say these days: "Hi ho." It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long.

Hi ho.

•

The gravity is very light today. I have an erection as a result of that. All males have erections on days like this. They are automatic consequences of near weightlessness. They have little to do with eroticism in most cases and nothing to do with it in the life of a man my age. They are hydraulic experiences--the result of confused plumbing and little more.

Hi ho.

•

The gravity is so light today that I feel as though I might scamper to the top of the Empire State Building with a manhole cover and fling it into New Jersey.

That would surely be an improvement on George Washington's sailing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. And yet some people insist that there is no such thing as progress.

•

And who will read all this? God knows. Not Melody and Isadore, surely. Like all the other young people on the island, they can neither read nor write.

They have no curiosity about the human past nor about what life may be like on the mainland.

As far as they are concerned, the most glorious accomplishment of the people who inhabited this island so teemingly was to die, so we could have it all to ourselves.

I asked them the other evening to name the three most important human beings in history. They protested that the question made no sense to them.

I insisted that they put their heads together anyway and give me some sort of answer, which they did. They were very sulky about the exercise. It was painful to them.

They finally came up with an answer. Melody does most of the talking for them, and this is what she said in all seriousness: "You, and Jesu Christ, and Santa Claus."

Hi ho.

Chapter 2

And I really will try to stop writing "Hi ho" all the time.

Hi ho.

•

I was born right here in New York City. I was not then a Daffodil. I was christened Wilbur Rockefeller Swain.

I was not alone, moreover. I had a dizygotic twin, a female. She was named Eliza Mellon Swain.

We were christened in a hospital rather than in a church, and we were not surrounded by relatives and our parents' friends. The thing was: Eliza and I were so ugly that our parents were ashamed.

We were monsters, and we were not expected to live very long. We had six fingers on each little hand and six toes on each little footsie. We had supernumerary nipples as well--two of them apiece.

We were not Mongolian idiots, although we had the coarse black hair typical of Mongoloids. We were something new. We were Neanderthaloids. We had the features of adult, fossil human beings even in infancy--massive brow ridges, sloping foreheads and steam-shovel jaws.

•

We were supposed to have no intelligence and to die before we were 14.

But I am still alive and kicking, thank you. And Eliza would be, too, I'm certain, if she had not been killed at the age of 50--in an avalanche on the outskirts of the Chinese colony on the planet Mars.

Hi ho.

•

Our parents were two silly and pretty and very young people named Caleb Mellon Swain and Letitia Vanderbilt Swain, nee Rockefeller. They were fabulously well to do and descended from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight--obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money, and then money back into power again.

But Caleb and Letitia were harmless themselves. Father was very good at backgammon and soso at color photography, they say. Mother was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Neither worked. Neither was a college graduate, though both had tried.

They wrote and spoke nicely. They adored each other. They were humble about having done so poorly in schools. They were kind.

And I cannot fault them for being shattered by having given birth to monsters. Anyone would have been shattered by giving birth to Eliza and me.

•

Young Caleb and Letitia were advised not to break their hearts and risk their furniture by attempting to raise Eliza and me in Turtle Bay. We were no more true relatives of theirs, their advisors said, than baby crocodiles.

Caleb and Letitia's response was humane. It was also expensive and Gothic in the extreme. Our parents did not hide us in a private hospital for cases such as ours. They entombed us instead in a spooky old mansion that they had inherited--in the midst of 80 hectares of apple trees on a mountaintop, near the hamlet of Galen, Vermont.

No one had lived there for 30 years.

•

Carpenters and electricians and plumbers were brought in to turn it into a sort of paradise for Eliza and me. Thick rubber padding was put under all the wall-to-wall carpets, so we would not hurt ourselves in case we fell. Our dining room was lined with tile and there were drains in the floor, so we and the room could be hosed off after ever meal.

More important, perhaps, were two chain link fences that went up. They were topped with barbed wire. The first enclosed the orchard. The second separated the mansion from the prying eyes of the workmen who had to be let in through the first from time to time in order to look after the apple trees.

Hi ho.

•

A staff was recruited from the neighborhood. There was a cook. There were two cleaning women and a cleaning man. There were two practical nurses, who fed us and dressed us and undressed us and bathed us. The one I remember best is Withers Witherspoon, a combination guard, chauffeur and handy man.

His mother was a Withers. His father was a Witherspoon.

•

Yes, and these were simple country people, who, with the exception of Withers Witherspoon, who had been a soldier, had never been outside Vermont. They had rarely ventured more than 16 kilometers from Galen, for that matter--and (continued on page 122)Slapstick(continued from page 92) they were necessarily all related to one another, as inbred as Eskimos.

•

Yes, and it was easy for our parents to buy the fealty of these living fossils from the family past. They were given modest salaries that seemed enormous to them, since the money-making lobes of their brains were so primitive.

They were given pleasant apartments in the mansion and color-television sets. They were encouraged to eat like emperors, charging whatever they liked to our parents. They had very little work to do.

Better still, they did not have to think much for themselves. They were placed under the command of a young general practitioner who lived in the hamlet. Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, who would look in on us every day.

Dr. Mott was a Texan, incidentally, a melancholy and private young man. To this day, I do not know what induced him to move so far from his people and his birthplace--to practice medicine in an Eskimo settlement in Vermont.

•

Yes, and there was an automatic sprinkler system in the mansion--and burglar alarms on the windows and doors and skylights.

When we grew older and uglier, and capable of breaking arms or tearing heads off, a great gong was installed in the kitchen. This was connected to cherry-red push buttons in every room and at regular intervals down every corridor. The buttons glowed in the dark.

A button was to be pushed only if Eliza or I began to toy with murder.

Hi ho.

Chapter 3

Father went to Galen with a lawyer and a physician and an architect--to oversee the refurbishing of the mansion for Eliza and me and the hiring of the servants and Dr. Mott. Mother remained here in Manhattan, in their town house in Turtle Bay. Father wrote a graceful letter to Mother from Vermont, which I found in Mother's bedside table after she died.

It may have been the whole of their correspondence by mail.

"My dearest Tish," he wrote. "Our children will be very happy here. We can be proud. Our architect can be proud. The workmen can be proud.

"However short our children's lives may be, we will have given them the gifts of dignity and happiness. We have created a delightful asteroid for them, a little world with only one mansion on it and otherwise covered with apple trees."

•

"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.

•

Many of the tombstones in that cemetery had sunk out of sight or capsized. Weather had dimmed the epitaphs of those that still stood.

But there was one tremendous monument, with thick granite walls, a slate roof and great doors, that 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 18 and went on to set up the department of civil engineering at Cornell University at the age of 22. 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 on 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 place 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 stair-cases 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 MIT.

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 one another 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, in fact, have been the two happiest children that history has so far known.

That ecstasy would not end until our 15th 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 described the state of mind of Eliza and me, when we were very (continued on page 160)Slapstick(continued from page 122) 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. "Buh," 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 television, 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 time 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 passage-ways 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 "Buh" 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 panty hose.

•

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 biweekly 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.

No matter how large Eliza and I became, though, one figure remained constant in his reports: Our mental age was between two and three.

Hi ho.

•

Eliza and I must have given him thousands of clues as to our intelligence. We weren't the cleverest of deceivers. We were only children, after all.

It seems probable to me that when we babbled in his presence, we used words from some foreign language that he could recognize. He may have gone into the library of the mansion, which was of no interest to the servants, and found the books somehow disturbed.

He may have discovered the secret passageways himself, through some accident. He used to wander around the house a great deal after he was through with us, I know, explaining to the servants that his father was an architect. He may actually have gone into the secret passageways and found books we were reading in there and seen that the floors were spattered with candle wax.

Who knows?

Chapter 6

Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not.

Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and the determination to be utterly happy all the time.

Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.

•

What is happiness?

In Eliza and my case, happiness was being perpetually in each other's company, having plenty of servants and good food, living in a peaceful, book-filled mansion on an asteroid covered with apple trees and growing up as specialized halves of a single brain.

Although we pawed and embraced each other a great deal, our intentions were purely intellectual. True--Eliza matured sexually at the age of seven. I, however, would not enter puberty until my last year in Harvard Medical School, at the age of 23. Eliza and I used bodily contact only in order to increase the intimacy of our brains.

Thus did we give birth to a single genius, which died as quickly as we were parted, which was reborn the moment we got together again.

•

We became almost cripplingly specialized as halves of that genius, which was the most important individual in our lives but which we never named.

When we learned to read and write, for example, it was I who actually did the reading and writing. Eliza remained illiterate until the day she died.

But it was Eliza who did the great intuitive leaping for us both. It was Eliza who guessed that it would be in our best interests to remain speechless but to become toilet trained. It was Eliza who guessed what books were and what the little marks on the pages might mean.

It was Eliza who sensed that there was something cockeyed about the dimensions of some of the mansion's rooms and corridors. And it was I who did the methodical work of taking actual measurements and then probing the paneling and parquetry with screwdrivers and kitchen knives, seeking doors to an alternate universe, which we found.

Hi ho.

•

Yes, I did all the reading. And it seems to me now that there is not a single book published in an Indo-European language before the First World War that I have not read aloud.

But it was Eliza who did the memorizing and who told me what we had to learn next. And it was Eliza who could put seemingly unrelated ideas together in order to get a new one. It was Eliza who juxtaposed.

•

Much of our information was hopelessly out of date, of course, since few new books had been brought into the mansion since 1912. Much of it, too, was timeless. And much of it was downright silly, such as the dances we learned to do.

If I wished, I could do a very presentable and historically accurate version of the tarantella, here in the ruins of New York.

•

Were Eliza and I really a genius when we thought as one?

I have to say yes, especially in view of the fact that we had no instructors. And I am not boasting when I say so, for I am only half of that fine mind.

We criticized Darwin's theory of evolution, I remember, on the grounds the creatures would become terribly vulnerable while attempting to improve themselves, while developing wings or armor plate, say. They would be eaten up by more practical animals, before their wonderful new features could be refined.

We made at least one prediction that was so deadly accurate that thinking about it even now leaves me thunder-struck.

Listen: We began with the mystery of how ancient peoples had erected the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, and the great heads of Easter Island, and the barbaric arches of Stonehenge, without modern power sources and tools.

We concluded there must have been days of light gravity in olden times, when people could play tiddlywinks with huge chunks of stone.

We supposed that it might even be abnormal on earth for gravity to be stable for long periods of time. We predicted that at any moment gravity might again become as capricious as winds and heat and cold, as blizzards and rainstorms.

•

Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too. We argued that it was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves--and yet it described no practical machinery that would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.

We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.

We thought it was more likely, though, that the framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves as composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.

Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives--which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families that, again perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.

Eliza and I, thinking as halves of a single genius, proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.

Good for Eliza and me!

Hi ho.

Chapter 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 two and one quarter 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 that could be bent so as to accommodate a 12-fingered. 12-toed, four-nippled. Neanderthaloid half-genius--weighing one quintal and two and one quarter meters tall.

•

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 millionaries--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 afterward with lots of champagne.

And so on.

Hi ho.

Chapter 8

Until the eve of our 15th 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 for so long: that our own parents wished we would hurry up and die.

We imagined lazily that our 15th 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 dining room. 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 16 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 each other 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 him years ago. "I am Bluth-luh," he said.

Eliza and I pretended to be flabber-gasted. "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.

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 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 trap door 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 newsmagazine 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 starting into the fire. Father had to tell her twice about he 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 200 explorers to Mars--without using a space vehicle.

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 that required them to speak only of matters that did not interest them at all.

And, indeed, they were under a male-diction. 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 fire-place. 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 15th 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 resonse was intellectual. We enjoyed solving problems. Perhaps Mother's problem was one we could solve--short of suicide, of course.

She pulled herself together 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 bed sheet. 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, pinstriped, 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, one of our practical nurses, 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 that had met a rattlesnake. But Eliza and I were not a rattlesnake. With our heads together, we were one of the gentlest geniuses the world had ever known.

•

"We will not be using the tiled dining room anymore," 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."

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

She curtsied. "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 that indicated that we had a detailed understanding of their lives. We apologized for having perhaps shocked some of them by 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 anymore.

"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 night clothes. 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.

"Sir 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.

This was not Father's fault or Mother's fault. It was not anybody's fault. It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.

And now Eliza and I had raised that instinct to intolerable tragedy.

Without knowing what we were doing, Eliza and I were putting the traditional curse of monsters on normal creatures. We were asking for respect.

Chapter 12

In the midst of all the excitement, Eliza and I allowed our heads to be separated by several feet--so we were not thinking brilliantly anymore.

We became dumb enough to think that Father was merely sleepy. So we made him drink coffee and we tried to wake him up with some songs and riddles we knew.

I remember I asked him if he knew why cream was so much more expensive than milk.

He mumbled that he didn't know the answer.

So Eliza told him. "It's because the cows hate to squat on the little bottles."

We laughed about that. We rolled on the floor. And then Eliza got up and stood over him, with her hands on her hips, and scolded him affectionately, as though he were a little boy. "Oh, what a sleepyhead!" she said. "Oh, what a sleepyhead!"

At that moment, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott arrived.

•

Although Dr. Mott had been told on the telephone about Eliza and my sudden metamorphosis, the day was like any other day to him, seemingly. He said what he always said when he arrived at the mansion: "How is everybody today?"

I now spoke the first intelligent sentence Dr. Mott had ever heard from me. "Father won't wake up," I said.

"Won't he, now?" he replied. He rewarded the completeness of my sentence with the faintest of smiles.

Dr. Mott was so unbelievably bland, in fact, that he turned away from us to chat with Oveta Cooper. Her mother had apparently been sick down in the hamlet. "Oveta," he said, "you'll be pleased to know that your mother's temperature is almost normal."

Father was angered by this casualness and no doubt glad to find someone with whom he could be openly angry.

"How long has this been going on, doctor?" he wanted to know. "How long have you know about their intelligence?"

Dr. Mott looked at his watch. "Since about forty-two minutes ago," he said.

"You don't seem in the least surprised," said Father.

Dr. Mott appeared to think this over, then he shrugged. "I'm certainly very happy for everybody," he said.

I think it was the fact that Dr. Mott himself did not look at all happy when he said that that caused Eliza and me to put our heads together again. Something very queer was going on that we badly needed to understand.

•

Our genius did not fail us. It allowed us to understand the truth of the situation--that we were somehow more tragic than ever.

But our genius, like all geniuses, suffered periodic fits of monumental naïveté. It did so now. It told us that all we had to do to make everything all right again was to return to idiocy.

"Buh," said Eliza.

"Duh," I said.

I farted.

Eliza drooled.

I picked up a buttered scone and threw it at the head of Oveta Cooper.

Eliza turned to Father. "Bluth-luh!" she said.

"Full-bay!" I cried.

Father cried.

Chapter 13

Eliza and I were, of course, not allowed to return to consolations of idiocy. We were bawled out severely whenever we tried. Yes, and the servants and our parents found one by-product of our meta-morphosis positively delicious: They were suddenly entitled to bawl us out.

What hell we caught from time to time!

•

Yes, and Dr. Mott was fired, and all sorts of experts were brought in.

It was fun for a while. The first doctors to arrive were specialists in hearts and lungs and kidneys, and so on. When they studied us organ by organ and body fluid by body fluid, we were masterpieces of health.

They were genial. They were all family employees, in a way. They were research people whose work was financed by the Swain Foundation in New York. That was how they had been so easily rounded up and brought to Galen. The family had helped them. Now they would help the family.

They joshed us a lot. One of them, I remember, said to me that it must be fun to be so tall. "What's the weather up there like?" he said, and so on.

The joshing had a soothing effect. It gave us the mistaken impression that it did not matter how ugly we were. I still remember what an ear, nose and throat specialist said when he looked up into Eliza's enormous sinus cavities with a flashlight. "My God, nurse," he said, "call up the National Geographic Society. We have just discovered a new entrance to Mammoth Cave!"

Eliza laughed. The nurse laughed. I laughed. We all laughed.

Our parents were in another part of the mansion. They kept away from all the fun.

•

That early in the game, though, we had our first disturbing tastes of separation. Some of the examinations required that we be several rooms apart. As the distance between Eliza and me increased. I felt as though my head were turning to wood.

I became stupid and insecure.

When I was reunited with Eliza, she said that she had felt very much the same sort of thing. "It was as though my skull was filling up with maple syrup," she said.

And we bravely tried to be amused rather than frightened by the listless children we became when we were parted. We pretended they had nothing to do with us, and we made up names for them. We called them Betty and Bobby Brown.

•

Yes, and it was the last specialist to look us over, a psychologist, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who decreed that Eliza and I should be separated permanently, should, so to speak, become forever Betty and Bobby Brown.

Chapter 14

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoievsky, the Russian novelist, said one time that "one sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education." I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.

That was Eliza and my experience with Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who was widely believed to be the greatest expert on psychological testing in the world--with the possible exception of China. Nobody knew what was going on in China anymore.

•

I have an Encyclopaedia Britannica here in the lobby of the Empire State Building, which is the reason I am able to give Dostoievsky his middle name.

•

Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner was invariably impressive and gracious when in the presence of grownups. She was elaborately dressed the whole time she was in the mansion--in high-heeled shoes and fancy dresses and jewelry.

We heard her tell our parents one time: "Just because a woman has three doctor's degrees and heads a testing corporation that bills three million dollars a year, that doesn't mean she can't be feminine."

When she got Eliza and me alone, though, she seethed with paranoia.

"None of your tricks, no more of your snotty little kid millionaire tricks with me," she would say.

And Eliza and I hadn't done anything wrong.

•

She was so enraged by how much money and power our family had, and so sick, that I don't think she even noticed how huge and ugly Eliza and I were. We were just two more rotten-spoiled little rich kids to her.

"I wasn't born with any silver spoon in my mouth," she told us, not once but many times. "Many was the day we didn't know where the next meal was coming from," she said. "Have you any idea what that's like?"

"No," said Eliza.

"Of course not," said Dr. Cordiner.

And so on.

•

Since she was paranoid, it was especially unfortunate that her middle name was the same as our last name.

"I'm not your sweet Aunt Cordelia," she would say. "You needn't worry your little aristocratic brains about that. When my grandfather came from Poland, he changed his name from Stankowitz to Swain." Her eyes were blazing. "Say 'Stankowitz'!"

We said it.

"Now say 'Swain,' " she said.

We did.

•

And finally one of us asked her what she was so mad about.

This made her very calm. "I am not mad," she said. "It would be very unprofessional for me to ever get mad about anything. However, let me say that asking a person of my caliber to come all this distance into the wilderness to personally administer tests to only two children is like asking Mozart to tune a piano. It is like asking Albert Einstein to balance a checkbook. Am I getting through to you, 'Mistress Eliza and Master Wilbur,' as I believe you are called?"

"Then why did you come?" I asked her.

Her rage came out into the open again. She said this to me with all possible nastiness: "Because money talks, Little Lord Fauntleroy."

•

We were further shocked when we learned that she meant to administer tests to us separately. We said innocently that we would get many more correct answers if we were allowed to put our heads together.

She became a tower of irony. "Why, of course, Master and Mistress," she said. "And wouldn't you like to have an encyclopedia in the room with you, too, and maybe the faculty of Harvard University, to tell you the answers, in case you're not sure?"

"That would be nice," we said.

"In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else--where everybody learns to make his or her own way.

"I'm here to test you," she said, "but there's a basic rule for life I'd like to teach you, too, and you'll thank me for it in years to come."

This was the lesson: "Paddle your own canoe," she said. "Can you say that and remember it?"

Not only could I say it but I remember it to this day: "Paddle your own canoe."

Hi ho.

•

So we paddled our own canoes. We were tested as individuals at the stainless-steel table in the tile-lined dining room. When one of us was in there with Dr. Cordiner, with "Aunt Cordelia," as we came to call her in private, the other one was taken as far away as possible--to the ballroom at the top of the tower at the north end of the mansion.

Withers Witherspoon had the job of watching whichever one of us was in the ballroom. He was chosen for the job because he had been a soldier at one time. We heard "Aunt Cordelia's" instructions to him. She asked him to be alert to clues that Eliza and I were communicating telepathically.

Western science, with a few clues from the Chinese, had at last acknowledged that some people could communicate with certain others without visible or audible signals. The transmitters and receivers for such spooky messages were on the surfaces of sinus cavities, and those cavities had to be healthy and clear of obstructions.

The chief clue that the Chinese gave the West was this puzzling sentence, delivered in English, which took years to decipher: "I feel so lonesome when I get hay fever or a cold."

Hi ho.

•

Well, mental telepathy was useless to Eliza and me over distances greater than three meters. With one of us in the dining room and the other in the ballroom, our bodies might as well have been on different planets--which is, in fact, their condition today.

Oh, sure--and I could take written examinations, but Eliza could not. When "Aunt Cordelia" tested Eliza, she had to read each question out loud to her and then write down her answer.

And it seemed to us that we missed absolutely every question. But we must have answered a few correctly, for Dr. Cordiner reported to our parents that our intelligence was "low normal for their age."

She said further, not knowing that we were eavesdropping, that Eliza would probably never learn to read or write and, hence, could never be a voter or hold a driver's license. She tried to soften this some by observing that Eliza was "quite an amusing chatterbox."

She said that I was "a good boy, a serious boy--easily distracted by his scatterbrained sister. He reads and writes but has a poor comprehension of the meanings of words and sentences. If he were separated from his sister, there is every reason to believe that he could become a filling-station attendant or a janitor in a village school. His prospects for a happy and useful life in a rural area are fair to good."

•

The People's Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses--by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were the equals of Sir Isaac Newton's or William Shakespeare's say.

Oh, yes--and long before I became President of the United States of America, the Chinese had begun to combine those synthetic minds into intellects so flabbergasting that he universe itself seemed to be saying to them, "I await your instructions. You can be anything you want to be. I will be anything you want me to be."

Hi ho.

•

I learned about this Chinese scheme long after Eliza died and long after I lost all my authority as President of the United States of America. There was nothing I could do with such knowledge by then.

One thing amused me, though: I was told that poor old Western civilization had provided the Chinese the inspiration to put together such synthetic geniuses. The Chinese got the idea from the American and European scientists who put their heads together during the Second World War, with the single-minded intention of creating an atomic bomb.

Hi ho.

Chapter 15

Our poor parents had first believed that we were idiots. They had tried to adapt to that. Then they had believed that we were geniuses. They had tried to adapt to that. Now they were told that we were dull normals, and they were trying to adapt to that.

As Eliza and I watched through peepholes, they made a pitiful and fogbound plea for help. They asked Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner how they were to harmonize our dullness with the fact that we could converse so learnedly on so many subjects in so many languages.

Dr. Cordiner was razor keen to enlighten them on just this point. "The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are," she said. "They dazzle us with facts and quotations and foreign words, and so on, whereas the truth is that they know almost nothing of use in life as it is really lived. My purpose is to detect such people--so that society can be protected from them and so they can be protected from themselves.

"Your Eliza is a perfect example," she went on. "She has lectured to me on economics and astronomy and music and every other subject you can think of, and yet she can neither read nor write, nor will she ever be able to."

•

She said that our case was not a sad one, since there were no big jobs we wished to hold. "They have almost no ambition at all," she said, "so life can't disappoint them. They want only that life as they have known it should go on forever, which is impossible, of course."

Father nodded sadly. "And the boy is the smarter of the two?"

"To the extent he can read and write," said Dr. Cordiner. "He isn't nearly as socially outgoing as his sister. When he is away from her, he becomes as silent as a tomb.

"I suggest that he be sent to some special school, which won't be too demanding academically or too threatening socially, where he can learn to paddle his own canoe."

"Do what?" said Father.

Dr. Cordiner told him again. "Paddle his own canoe," she said.

•

Eliza and I should have kicked our way through the wall at that point--should have entered the library ragingly, in an explosion of plaster and lath.

But we had sense enough to know that our power to eavesdrop at will was one of the few advantages we had. So we stole back to our bedrooms, and then burst into the corridor and went running down the front stairs and across the foyer and into the library, doing something we had never done before. We were sobbing.

We announced that if anybody tried to part us, we would kill ourselves.

•

Dr. Cordiner laughed at this. She told our parents that several of the questions in her tests were designed to detect suicidal tendencies. "I absolutely guarantee you," she said, "that the last thing either one of these two would do would be to commit suicide."

Her saying this so jovially was a tactical mistake on her part, for it caused something in Mother to snap. The atmosphere in the room became electrified as Mother stopped being a weak and polite and credulous doll.

Mother did not say anything at first. But she had clearly become subhuman in the finest sense. She was a coiled female panther, suddenly willing to tear the throats out of any number of child-rearing experts--in defense of her young.

It was the one and only time that she would ever be irrationally committed to being the mother of Eliza and me.

•

Eliza and I sensed this sudden jungle alliance telepathically, I think. At any rate, I remember that the damp velvet linings of my sinus cavities were tingling with encouragement.

We left off our crying, which we were no good at doing, anyway. Yes, and we made a clear demand that could be satisfied at once. We asked to be tested for intelligence again--as a pair this time.

"We want to show you," I said, "how glorious we are when we work together, so that nobody will ever talk about parting us again."

We spoke carefully. I explained who Betty and Bobby Brown were. I agreed that they were stupid. I said we had had no experience with hating and had had trouble understanding that particular human activity whenever we encountered it in books.

"But we are making small beginnings in hating now," said Eliza. "Our hating is strictly limited at this point--to only two people in this universe: to Betty and Bobby Brown."

•

Dr. Cordiner, as it turned out, was a coward, among other things. Like so many cowards, she chose to go on bullying at the worst possible time. She jeered at Eliza and my request.

"What kind of a world do you think this is?" she said, and so on.

So Mother got up and went over to her, not touching her, and not looking her in the eyes, either. Mother spoke to her throat and, in a tone between a purr and a growl, she called Dr. Cordiner an "overdressed little sparrow-fart."

Chapter 16

So Eliza and I were retested--as a pair this time. We sat side by side at the stainless-steel table in the tiled dining room.

We were so happy!

A depersonalized Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner administered the tests like a robot, while our parents looked on. She had furnished us with new tests, so that the challenges would all be fresh.

Before we began, Eliza said to Mother and Father, "We promise to answer every question correctly."

Which we did.

•

What were the questions like? Well, I was poking around the ruins of a school on 46th Street yesterday and I was lucky enough to find a whole batch of intelligence tests, all set to go.

I quote:

"A man purchased 100 shares of stock at five dollars a share. If each share rose ten cents the first month, decreased eight cents the second month and gained three cents the third month, what was the value of the man's investment at the end of the third month?"

Or try this:

"How many digits are there to the left of the decimal point in the square root of 692038.42753?"

Or this:

"A yellow tulip viewed through a piece of blue glass looks what color?"

Or this:

"Why does the Little Dipper appear to turn about the North Star once a day?"

Or this:

"Astronomy is to geology as steeple jack is to what?"

And so on. Hi ho.

•

We made good on Eliza's promise of perfection, as I have said.

The only trouble was that the two of us, in the innocent process of checking and rechecking our answers, wound up under the table--with our legs wrapped around each other's necks in scissors grips, and snorting and snuffling into each other's crotches.

When we regained our chairs, Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner had fainted and our parents were gone.

•

At ten o'clock the next morning, I was taken by automobile to a school for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod.