“Noah? What will you do with all this stuff? Noah?”
But he doesn’t bother to answer and takes his purchases — he no longer pays for the items separately but waits until he’s made all his selections before bringing them to the clerk, not because he’s grown accustomed to shopping but because he sees that he has been wasting time, that it is more efficient this way — to the woman at the register.
By the time they enter the next shop Noah Cloth has spent sixty-two dollars and fourteen cents and, because it would be impossible otherwise, has agreed to accept the plastic carrier. In this, in addition to his original purchases, are two china figurines, one of the Mad Hatter, the other of the Cheshire Cat, a Dumbo quartz wristwatch, duplicate Mickey Mouse sweat shirts, and a deck of playing cards picturing Minnie as Queen, Mickey as King. There is also a set of wooden coasters in which are etched the faces of Donald Duck, his little duck nephews.
In the Contemporary Man, Noah buys casual beachwear for his dad: sandals, a bathing suit, sunglasses, a terry-cloth robe, a beach towel, a visored sun hat.
The bill comes to seventy-three dollars and change.
“Lend me money,” he whispers to Janet Order. “I’ll give it back to you when Moorhead pays up.”
“Oh, Noah,” she says, “I haven’t that much.”
“If you’re staying in the hotel,” says the salesman (who is no more salesman than Noah is customer; there is nothing even close to negotiation going on here, not transaction, not commerce, not even business; the merchandise, which is no more merchandise really than the salesman is salesman or Noah customer but only the counter or token, as is the money Noah exchanges it for, the to-him foreign denominations and queer seals and symbols scribbled across its face and back and which, however powerful, are merely power in some unfamiliar, unaccustomed language and thus unknown, unknowable, only the counter or token for the simple symbolic occasion of his old frozen dreams), “you can charge it to your room. All you have to do is show your guest card.”
“I’m exhausted,” Noah Cloth says.
“Do you want me to call Mister Moorhead?”
“I’m exhausted,” he says. “I think I ought to sit down.”
“I’ll call Moorhead.”
“I’ll just sit down.”
“Where’s your phone? I have to call his doctor.”
“This is better.”
Janet Order feels Noah’s head. His temperature doesn’t seem to be elevated, his pulse is regular and strong.
The salesman has already packed the beachwear away.
“Yes, this is much better,” Noah says, his legs up, stretched out and comfortable in the wood-and-canvas lawn chair the salesman has set up for Noah to sit in.
“Don’t go off, Noah. Technically,” she tells the salesman, “on the buddy system, you’re not supposed to leave them alone.”
“I’m fine.”
You’re daft, she thinks. My buddy is daft.
“What does a nice chair like this usually run?” Noah Cloth asks the man while Janet is off making her call.
I can charge it, he thinks when he hears the price, I can charge it to the room.
“He doesn’t think it’s anything,” Janet Order tells Noah when she returns. “A little fatigue.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you rested up enough to go back to the room?”
“I’m fine.”
“All right,” she says and holds her arm out to assist him in getting out of the chair. When they go back up in the elevator together she doesn’t bother to tell him — he’s just a bonkers, crackers kid — that she has spotted Benny Maxine with Rena Morgan. It looked to her as if they were up to something.
Lamar Kenny has spotted the little wise guy. He thinks maybe he’ll have some fun with him.
With Tony Word asleep for the night and Noah and Janet gone off, Mr. Moorhead is left free to think about the Jew.
There is a kind of villain — Moorhead has spent too much time on sick wards not to have noticed the type on kid’s cartoon shows; indeed, these scoundrels have actually been absorbed into the doctor’s bedside manner, become a source of preliminary chat with his small patients, a device to trivialize the physician’s presence — who seems to thrive on adversity, who again and again overestimates his own dark powers at the expense of his adversary’s light and more potent ones. Every defeat suffered by one of this sort somehow becomes the occasion for a greater gloating, a nefarious gibe, an unruly, unfounded optimism. In a way, Moorhead, who tries to steady himself by remembering that he’s been wrong before, puts himself in mind of such fellows. For one, he shares their incredible enthusiasm, their sense of invulnerability. He recalls his days at university, his theories, the confidence with which he strolled art galleries, diagnosing the portraits and statues there, a kind of cocky Grand Rounds. He remembers why he chose medicine as his life’s work, his aesthetic attraction to health, his old notion that children carried theirs as lightly as a man might his umbrella. Chiefly he recalls his cheerful, discarded overview: his old modeling-clay inclinations, his belief that health, not disease, sat at the core of life. Laid forever by those photos he’d seen of survivors from the camps, those too-intimate pictures, naked as surgery, of Jews, their maniac expressions and broken posture, bone projecting from bone in awry cantilever like an unkempt architecture of bruise and wound, their skin, slack as men’s garments on the bodies of children, their almost perceptible joints and sockets ill fitting their faulty scaffolding, the predicament of their swollen-seeming bones like badly rigged pulley, stripped gear.
His idea was as simple as a before-and-after photograph. A superb diagnostician, he believed (as he believed he’d spotted the Mona Lisa’s incipient goiter and explained the famous smile as nothing more than the bitter aftertaste of iodine gushing from her overactive thyroid) that almost all illness was chronic, even congenital. If the admiration of health and well-being was what sent him into pediatrics in the first place, it was those pictures from the camps which — except for his brief tour on the casualty wards, almost as good an opportunity as an autopsy for getting close to the human body — caused him to stay there. The child, he knew, was father to the man.
His mistake in the old days was that he’d put too much faith in those artists. They’d idealized their subjects as much as any of the blokes who illustrated those perfect organs — the perfect hearts and perfect livers — in the textbooks. (For all Moorhead knew, Da Vinci had probably reduced the Mona Lisa’s goiter and trained to a mysterious smile what could already have been a grimace.) So what was wanted were photographs, the kind the Germans had made, the kind the Allies had. Though what was really wanted was the complete record, photographs of the Jews before they were rounded up — it would already have been too late when they were in the camps, the debilitating ride in the cattle cars, the bad sanitation — family albums with their individual and group photographs taken in different, more relaxed settings: on the beach, at picnics and parties, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, baby’s first picture, rabbis at their devotions, all the candids of the daily round. (But still a sucker for good health, at least its appearance, his mind stuffed with images of perfect specimens, of strong, beautifully tapered athletes, women as well as men. Which accounted, of course, for his shyness with Bible. Had he been thrown in with the man it would have been no time at all before he asked him to strip for an examination, auscultated his chest, palpated and poked the fellow till he was black and blue, then asked if he might examine the bruises. Once, just once, he wanted to feel the ostensibly healthy kidney, hear the report of the seemingly sound heart. Which would have created many misunderstandings.)