Who dropped out of sleep into wakefulness — Eddy watching through his lashes — like synchronized swimmers. A contagion of halt beginnings, the stuttered start of a new day. Colin Bible supervising from his rollaway, calling ablutions like stations of the Cross. “Brush your teeth, Benny. Move your bowels.” Then, raising his voice for the little old man: “Your teeth are in the glass by the nightstand, Mudd-Gaddis. Don’t forget to wear your sweater, don’t forget to put on your scarf.” Winking at Eddy past his shut eyes, past his lashes, piercing Bale’s squeezed charade, a laser intrusion. Who wanted nothing more than to be done with it and wondered if it was as late as he hoped. And, looking for grievance, tried to resent the tone the nurse had taken with the little golden-ager, condescension loaded into his voice like a round of ammunition, tried to resent the implied conspiracy of the wink (who was, after all, found out, discovered as a shirker, known for what he was, could be, by a bloody pansy), tried and failed — struck finally only by the difference in their styles, Eddy not so much outraged as intimidated, orientalized by a holdover respect for his elders, the sense he had that Mudd-Gaddis’s freaky years deserved a kind of honor, for — God, what was a bloke like him doing with folks like these? — it was, to Bale, almost as if Charles Mudd-Gaddis was the genuine article, a brittle scroll of a being, some actual ancient. Bale had to bite his lips to keep the deference out of his voice, and once had actually been on the verge of calling him “sir.”
“’Ello, ’ello,” said Benny Maxine, coming out of the bathroom and spotting the snow outside their window. “Coo, la! Look at the weather, will you! What odds on something like that happening?”
The snow had already begun to melt. In the restaurant Nedra Carp and the children, joined by the rest of the adults, tried not to notice as Lydia Conscience, swept in the waves of her morning sickness, gagged bits of dry toast and gouts of grapefruit into her napkin.
“Must have gone down the wrong pipe,” Lydia said, her face red.
“Here, dear,” Rena Morgan said, offering Kleenex she’d slipped from a sleeve.
“Sorry, didn’t think,” Mary Cottle said, snuffing a Gitane into her saucer.
“Smokes like a man, that one,” Benny Maxine whispered to Noah Cloth. “Bet she’s les.”
“Well,” said Mr. Moorhead, again taking up the remarkable topic the children had been discussing when he, Bale, Bible, and the two ladies had first joined Nedra in the restaurant, “I don’t agree.”
“You only mean my disease,” Charles Mudd-Gaddis said. He was seated at the head of the table, and it seemed to Eddy that a queer clarity had settled over the strange child. The waitress had handed him the check, and before Eddy could even reach for it, Mudd-Gaddis was already signing the back of the bill. “I want to be fair. What’s fifteen percent of seventy-three dollars and forty-four cents? I can’t think,” he said in his reedy old voice.