The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Against the far wall, in a chromium wheelchair, an ancient man sat gazing straight up into the air, mouth agape, as if expecting an imminent miracle to take place somewhere near the ceiling.

Off to one side a desk, bare except for a silver bell and a smudged card marked Ring Plse., hinted at some official, yet unseen, presence.

I gave the striker four brisk strokes. At each ting of the bell, the old man blinked violently, but did not take his eyes from the air above his head.

Suddenly, as if she had slipped through a secret panel in the woodwork, a wisp of a woman materialized. She wore a white uniform and a blue cap, under which she was busily poking limp strands of damp straw-colored hair with one of her forefingers.

She looked as if she had been up to no good, and knew perfectly well that I knew.

"Yes?" she said, in a thin but busy, standard-issue hospital voice.

"I've come to see Dr. Kissing," I said. "I'm his great-granddaughter."

"Dr. Isaac Kissing?” she asked.

"Yes," I said, "Dr. Isaac Kissing. Do you keep more than one?"

Without a word the White Phantom turned on her heel and I followed, through an archway into a narrow solarium which ran the entire length of the building. Half way along the gallery she stopped, pointed a thin finger like the third ghost in Scrooge, and was gone.

At the far end of the tall-windowed room, in the single ray of sunshine that penetrated the overhanging gloom of the place, an old man sat in a wicker bath chair, a halo of blue smoke rising slowly above his head. In disarray on a small table beside him, a heap of newspapers threatened to slide off onto the floor.

He was wrapped in a mouse-colored dressing gown—like Sherlock Holmes's, except that it was spotted like a leopard with burn holes. Beneath this was visible a rusty black suit and a tall winged celluloid collar of ancient vintage. His long, curling yellow-gray hair was topped with a pillbox smoking cap of plum-colored velvet, and a lighted cigarette dangled from his lips, its gray ashes drooping like a mummified garden slug.

"Hello, Flavia," he said. "I've been expecting you."

AN HOUR HAD PASSED: an hour during which I had come to realize truly, for the first time, what we had lost in the war.

We had not got off to a particularly good start, Dr. Kissing and I.

"I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.

I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.

"A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?”

I recognized it as one of those questions which doesn't require an answer. I raised the corners of my lips into what I hoped was a Mona Lisa smile—or at least one that signaled the required civility.

"So you're Jacko's daughter," he said. "You're not a bit like him, you know."

"I'm told I take after my mother, Harriet," I said.

"Ah, yes. Harriet. What a great tragedy that was. How terrible for all of you."

He reached out and touched a magnifying glass that perched precipitously atop the glacier of newspapers at his side. With the same movement he pried open a tin of Players that lay on the table and selected a fresh cigarette.

"I do my best to keep up with the world as seen through the eyes of these inky scribblers. My own eyes, I must confess, having been fixed on the passing parade for ninety-five years, are much wearied by what they have seen.

"Still, I somehow manage to keep informed about such births, deaths, marriages, and convictions as transpire in our shire. And I still subscribe to Punch and Lilliput, of course.

"You have two sisters, I believe, Ophelia and Daphne?"

I confessed that such was the case.

"Jacko always had a flair for the exotic, as I recall. I was hardly surprised to read that he had named his first two offspring after a Shakespearean hysteric and a Greek pincushion."

"Sorry?"

"Daphne, shot by Eros with a love-deadening arrow before being transformed by her father into a tree."

"I meant the madwoman," I said. "Ophelia."

"Bonkers," he said, pressing out his cigarette butt in an overflowing ashtray and lighting another. "Wouldn't you agree?"

The eyes that looked out at me from his heavily lined face were as bright and beady as those of any teacher who had ever stood watch at a blackboard, pointer in hand, and I knew that I had succeeded in my plan. I was no longer a “little girl.” Whereas the mythical Daphne had been transformed into a mere laurel tree, I had become a boy in the lower Fourth.

"Not really, sir," I said. "I think Shakespeare meant Ophelia to be a symbol of something—like the herbs and flowers she gathers."

"Eh?" he said. "What's that?"

"Symbolic, sir. Ophelia is the innocent victim of a murderous family whose members are all totally self-absorbed. At least that's what I think."

"I see," he said. "Most interesting.