Naturally the children were disappointed by the chilly weather, particularly after their surprise when, deplaning in Miami and bundled in heavy coats and scarves more convenient to wear than carry along with their cumbersome burden of toys and parcels, they had been hit full in the face with the warm, humid Florida air, an air — or so it seemed to Janet Order, or so it seemed to Lydia Conscience, or so it seemed to Charles Mudd-Gaddis, who back in those few days when he had been a young man had enjoyed going there — as sultry and earthy and steamy as the air in the big hothouse in Kew Gardens.
By the time they cleared Customs and made their connecting flight and used their transfers in Orlando and been registered in the hotel, it was already late afternoon and, with the time difference, well past their British bedtimes, and they were ordered to their rooms by Mr. Moorhead. So, although it was barely eight o’clock when it began to snow, they were asleep and only noticed the accumulation the following morning.
It looked like a scene shaken up in a crystal.
Snow was falling on Cinderella Castle, snow was falling on Main Street and Liberty Square. It was falling on Adventureland and on Fantasyland. It sheathed the spires on the Haunted Mansion and clung to the umbrellalike strutted sides of Space Mountain and looked grim and oddly bruised against the spiky red slopes of Big Thunder Mountain. It coated the crazed, bulging eyes of Captain Nemo’s surfaced craft and collected as slush in the saucers of the Mad Tea Party and left powdery traces along the big ledges and sills of the Liberty Tree Tavern’s wide leaded windows. Discrete drifts of the stuff were swept against the heavily weathered stockade fences of Frontierland and intensified the gleam of Tomorrowland’s crisp concretes and metals and alloys. A fine powder dusted the notched and scalloped foliage along the banks of the steaming river that bent and flexed, hooked and curled past tropical rain forest and choked veldt, past the Asian jungle and the rich green growth of the Nile Valley. It filled in the pocked surfaces of Spaceship Earth and lent the entire park the look of some new, raw, terrible ice age.
From Top of the World, the hotel’s fifteenth-floor restaurant, Nedra Carp and the children saw it cover the islands in Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon and, beyond, watched horses on a distant ranch roll in the white stuff, startle, leap up, and furiously throw themselves over and over into the strange, cold element, stinging their skin and alarming their great horse hearts.
Nine stories below in Mr. Moorhead’s room, which Benny Maxine had dubbed “the intensive care ward,” the adults watched it fall on the roofs of the longhouses in the Polynesian Village. They watched it snag in the tops of the palm trees and cover the gleaming tracks of the park’s monorails in a flat white.
It’s…it’s a…it’s a mistake, Eddy Bale thought. And, despondent, realized he’d come all this way and raised all their hopes in a futile cause. Because it was almost gone eleven — never mind the freak storm or rapidly rising temperatures through which the flakes fell, losing their icy edge, their crystalline structures collapsing so that what dropped through the air seemed less like weather than some spilled aspect of the jettisoned, not a freak storm at all so much as a mid-course meteorological correction, and never mind either whatever of accidental, unintentioned beauty the storm, by way of the blind bizarre, happened, like paint in milk, to bring about — and the morning of the first day was damn near shot and the children hadn’t even had their breakfasts. The storm not of account here either, though with other children it might have been (the guests caught short, the coffee shops and restaurants filling up, tables, food, tea, and cigarettes lingered over, no one in a hurry, the whole company of displaced persons thrown together like cheery flood victims), an excuse, certainly, but not of account, since what Bale had not taken into consideration (so busy with long-haul logistics, the finances, his caper crew and gleaned, short-listed candidates, his Heathrow-to-Miami arrangements, his Miami-to- Orlando ones, the room assignments worked out in advance) were the sluggish ways of the dying, their awful morning catarrhs and constipations, the wheezed wind of their snarled, tangled breathing, their stalled blood and aches and pains like an actual traffic in their bones, all the low-grade fevers of their stiff, bruised sleep. He’d forgotten Liam’s nausea and given no thought to theirs — mouths stenchy as Beirut, stomachs floating a slick film of morning sickness, the torpid hangover of their medications. They groaned. They stumbled listlessly through their rooms or waited, hung in trance above shoes, buttons, expression denied their faces as if they lived in some lulled climate of withdrawn will.
Ah, it was terrible, Eddy Bale thought hopelessly. Time wasting and the doctor’s hands tied and none of them able to organize anything as simple as breakfast. Only Nedra Carp up and about, standing behind the maid when that woman had let herself in with her passkey just after eight that morning, her surprise, if she was surprised, concealed, taking in himself, the sleeping Colin, and the two boys — the doctor had made the room assignments, Bale drawing Colin, Mudd-Gaddis, and Benny Maxine — with a kind of stoic patience, almost, it struck Eddy, a hotel policy, as if she knew their special circumstances, perhaps. She had whispered Bale a soft apology for having disturbed them and withdrew. But not before Nedra had appeared from behind her back like a surprise, a clutch of the park’s pamphlets and a “Walt Disney World Newsletter” in her hand.
“Will the boys want to go to Mass? I didn’t mention it last night and thought they’d be too worn out to disturb them this morning, but there’s a lovely little chapel off what they call the Interstate Four, and transportation is quite convenient. I caught the brown-flagged bus outside the hotel and showed the driver the I.D. they gave us when we checked in.”
“You’ve been to Mass, Miss Carp?”
“Not proper Mass, Mister Bale — I don’t even know if the chapel’s consecrated — but there was something that looked like an altar, and pews and stained glass, and a priest comes on Sundays.”
“Benny is Jewish. I don’t know Mudd-Gaddis’s affiliations, but I’ll ask if he’s interested.”
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” she said, and handed Bale the newsletter. “There’s this lovely write-up about us in the paper. Quite tasteful, I think.” Eddy read the notice. It was a modest story under a small headline on the back page: ENGLISH CHILDREN WIN TRIP TO VACATION KINGDOM. It recorded all their names and listed the children’s ages but said nothing of the purpose of the trip. Death wasn’t mentioned, disease wasn’t. Mr. Moorhead wasn’t identified as a doctor. “The big news is all about the weather,” Nedra Carp said.
“The weather?” Bale had said, who’d not yet looked out the window and had forgotten the strange inclemency of the previous day.
“Oh, yes,” Nedra Carp said, “there must be three or four inches of snow. The driver — he’s called a ‘cast member,’ everyone who works here is; did you know that, Mister Bale? — was quite concerned he had no chains. Though not a flake’s fallen outside the park.”
Which was before the kids had awakened, Nedra drawing back the curtains and indicating the scene, unveiling and flourishing it like a commissioned portrait. And Bale, already fainthearted, despairing, worrying his — their — losses like a field marshal, awake even before the maid had let herself in, awake and despondent a full hour before first light, already brooding when he’d turned in, and in his dreamless sleep too, hopelessness like a cinder in his eye. (Though Bale was no dummy, though he knew himself well enough, or well enough to recognize his habits, the if-then sequences of his conditioned behavior. And reminded himself, Eddy, watch it; Eddy, don’t let the part stand for the whole. You always go all sad-ass and sourpuss at finish lines and destinations. My God, man, there was a time when it broke your heart just to hear the bus conductor call out your stop. And reminded himself of the time when he’d allowed an unfavorable rate of exchange — so they’d have money in their pockets he’d traded a few quid for pesetas at the duty-free shop at Gatwick — almost to ruin their honeymoon on the Costa Brava. Ginny had tried to reassure him, had told him at least half a dozen times that the 20 percent premium they’d paid for the pesetas was irregular, that the banks in Spain would give them the official rate, but he continued to worry, the pound he’d lost on the deal multiplied in his head by a factor of five for all the pounds and Thomas Cook traveler’s checks they carried on their persons, for all the drafts they would have yet to write on their bank at home to make up for the one-to-five deficiency, his poor, depleted, gutted lolly, their love stake; doing in his head, too, all the complicated projections of suddenly inflated meals, souvenirs, hotel bills, fares, sun creams, tabs at nightclubs, and mad money. Discounting their honeymoon to the Spaniards. And wouldn’t leave the room for more than twenty-four hours — they had ten days — thinking: If we don’t go out they can’t cheat us; thinking: But they already have, a day shot, one already 20 percent less precious day of our ten out the window. Where he saw the sun shining 20 percent brighter than it had even on the brochure, the sea 20 percent bluer, the waves that much higher, too, conspiring by remaining in the room to recover: They had ten days. If they had ten days and the ratio was four to one — five to one? — what would it be, 10 percent of their losses, but they had to make love, they had to sleep, they had to use the room, call it twelve out of the twenty-four hours anyway, so it would be more like 5 percent than 10 percent, and they were still 15 percent in the hole. “There’s this bodega,” he’d told Ginny, “not a block from the hotel. We could get wine, we could get oranges and bread. Maybe they do Spanish sandwiches. We’ll eat in the room tonight. We’ll use the money they stuck us with at Gatwick. We’ll stick them with it.” Ginny accused him of being mean. Meanness had nothing to do with it, he said. And it didn’t. He was no miser. He was a coward of the unaccustomed, raw, all thumbs, greenhorn fear in his bones and blood, in his nails and hair. He explained this to Ginny, his oblique vertigo. “Give me time,” he said. “When the banks open”—they’d arrived too late, the banks had already closed—“and we get our proper rate, I’ll be the last of the big-time spenders for you.” Or choice. Burdened by choice. Overwhelmed. Dreading evenings on the town. Hating to read menus, picking a movie, choosing a play. And craven in taxis if he didn’t know the route. Though forgetting this. Each time forgetting this. Hailing cabs with the authority and assurance of an M.P. until, inside, he felt the greenhorn paranoid temerity again, one eye on the meter, another looking not for landmark, since this would be, for him, terra incognita, but for some discoverable logic of the route, the principles of geography, and all the while listening to the cabby for clues, the chatty-seeming observation, the too-matey question, Bale figuring the hackman figuring him. The both of them lost in Willesden one time, looking for 14 Broalbrond Road because Bale, without actually saying so, had implied he’d been there before, practically old stamping grounds for Eddy, and had, to keep the driver honest, indicated with nothing much more than the mildest sarcastic thrust to his tone that such and such a building, standing, it had to be, since the Great War, must, it seemed to him, at least if they were anywhere near the Willesden he knew, his old stamping grounds, have gone up overnight. And in Johannesburg, with Liam for new aggressive treatment, the same dark curtains descending. In Beijing. Even in Lourdes. Especially in Lourdes. The beginnings of all expeditions the same sad business, jet lag in Eddy an actual disease. But not mean, no miser, no screw or scrimp. Not a lickpenny bone in his body. Abject at waste is all, a cringer for missed opportunity, abused life. And who could say he was wrong? Hadn’t Ginny left him, hadn’t Liam died? Wasn’t he usually disappointed at the theater? Hadn’t oysters Casino given him indigestion?) So he didn’t wake Colin. So he didn’t wake the children.