“Everything. I’m this Borgia madonna. I poison babies.”
Since then she has not so much as kissed a man and kept herself equable by frequent and furious bouts of masturbation, each time wondering what unkempt, dreadful, sickened soups she stirred with her finger.
Although she was precisely the sort of self-exiled outcast Eddy wanted for his enterprise, Bale knew nothing of her history. She came to him with queer credentials: as a highly recommended gray lady, a candidate, in everybody’s books, of unchurched sanctity, always peaceful — her sponsors knew nothing of her habits either, her steady state, orgasmic calm — always serene.
“Mary’s a brick,” the parents of dying children told him. “She’s quite marvelous. I can’t imagine where she gets her strength.”
“We depend on Mary,” her supporters said when he checked with them. “I don’t think she has a nerve in her body.”
“All she’s supposed to have seen,” Eddy confided to two trusted nurses at the London Clinic, “perhaps she’s callous.”
“Go on, she never is. It’s more like — well, something spiritual. Isn’t that what you’d call that far-off look in her eyes, Bert?”
“Spiritual, yes,” Bert said. “I’d say so. That calm, spiritual quality.”
“Always smiling. You know what she reminds me of? The Mona Lisa.”
“She’s an angel, is Mary.”
“Angels don’t smoke,” Bale, who’d never seen her enter a room without a cigarette in her lips, said.
She was smoking one then, in Putney, on the day they chose their finalists.
“Sorry I’m late,” Mary Cottle said, sitting down, and Eddy was struck by the lack of sorrow in her voice or on her beautiful, blissful face, which seemed never to have entertained the slightest anxiety. “What have I missed?”
“Mister Moorhead’s been disposing of our case load,” Colin Bible said, and pointed to about two dozen file folders at the physician’s feet.
Nedra Carp had to laugh over that one, she said, and did, loudly, and Bale was reminded again of something he’d noticed all his life: that people, even quite humdrum people, often behave eccentrically in groups. He’d seen this in school, had observed it when he’d done his National Service, in the office when he’d held down a regular job. It was as if the laws of civility, which not only governed but actually controlled people in one- on-one situations, were repealed once individuals joined with others, as if sanity were only a sort of practiced shyness and that what they were, what they were really, their true colors, wild as the plumage of exotic birds, was permitted to glow only in association, all their nut-case gushers and bonanzas, all their moonstruck, batty doings flourishing in packs, fielded herds of the erratic.
Because on television she had seemed such a nice woman. On the phone she had. And although it was true what Colin Bible had suggested, that Moorhead had been behaving with peremptory flair, rummaging among the names Eddy had proposed for the dream holiday with something more like impatience than judgment, like a card player discarding anything not of immediate value to his hand, say, Bale supposed it was only what Moorhead, as the only physician there, supposed was expected of him. Perhaps he did think that, for when Colin Bible said what Nedra Carp had laughed about so loudly, Moorhead looked up sharply. “It isn’t a contest, you know,” he said. “None of these children has actually made application to come with us. This is only a sort of triage. Doctors do it in casualty wards all the time. On battlefields they do. What we’re looking for here are those children who would most profit from our attentions.”
“The deserving dead,” Mary Cottle said. Nedra Carp shrieked.
“There are ethical considerations,” Moorhead said.
“My friend Colin warned me this would happen,” Colin Bible whispered to Mary Cottle. “‘Just take what comes,’ he said. ‘Regard the group, whatever its final makeup, as a sort of found sculpture.’”
“What ethical considerations?” Eddy Bale said.
“Well, if we chose a child whose parents can afford to make the trip on their own,” Moorhead said.
“Say, that’s right,” Eddy said.
“And the children ought to be compatible.”
“And what if they haven’t taken in yet that they’re going to die?” Mary Cottle asked equably. “Seeing some of their companions could come as a frightful shock.”
“The trip will be exhausting. It could shorten their lives.”
“That’s right,” Moorhead said.
“Then there’s the whole question of taste,” Colin Bible said.
“Taste?” said Eddy Bale.
“I’m sorry,” Colin Bible said. “My roomie warned me to keep my nose out of this.”
“Where’s the Ladies’?” Mary Cottle wanted to know.
“Taste?”
“Well, there’ll be all that media coverage, won’t there?” Colin Bible said. “You know how the press exploits these kids, Mister Bale. Who better?”
“They trained their long lenses on us whenever we went on an outing,” Nedra Carp said. “They could shoot right into Prince Andrew’s picnic hamper.”
“And medicine is more of an art than an exact science anyway.”
“So?” Eddy Bale said.
“A doctor gives one child six months and another two years.”
“So?”
“There’s no guarantee the one with six months couldn’t go two years.”
“Or the one with two years die in a week.”
“We have to be sure, you see,” Nedra Carp said.
“That they’re dying. That it’s actually imminent.”
“It’s a nice question,” Moorhead said.
“Like when brain death occurs.”
“Lung death.”
“Finger death,” muttered Mary Cottle in the loo.
“There are many nice questions.”
“There are many ethical considerations.”
“Suppose one kid is religious?”
“That he believes in God?”
“Has hope of Heaven?”
“Is convinced of it.”
“While the other kid isn’t even a believer?”
“Thinks when you’re dead you’re dead.”
“Or’s Jewish.”
“It wouldn’t be fair.”
“To the skeptic, atheist, agnostic kid.”
“To the kosher boy.”
“To the skeptic, atheist, agnost—?”
“Well, the religious kid would have it both ways, wouldn’t he?”
“Disney World, and Heaven too.”
“Or look at it the other way around.”
“That’s right.”
“Should the believer be penalized for his beliefs?”
“There are all these nice questions. I shouldn’t have thought we’d even scratched the surface.”
“Ought they to spend their final weeks away from their family, friends, and pets?”
“If I wear my armband all the time,” Bale reflected, “that could put them off.”
“Perhaps something less ostentatious. Perhaps a button in your lapel.”
“Well, you know, I never thought about the nice questions,” Eddy Bale said. “All I thought about was the fellowship of the thing.”
“See Naples and die.”
“See Naples and die?”
“He means how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm.”
“He means England and home might be a letdown.”
“That they could go into a reactive depression.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Bale asked. “You parse good deeds. Lawyers, ambulance chasers. I don’t know damn-all about the ethics and nice questions. Only ordinary human action. Nobody tells me ‘Have a good day’ anymore,” he said.
They stared at him.
“The chief’s right,” Colin Bible said. “Let’s get on with it.”