“We can’t do that. Suppose Colin Bible has to get in there?”
“He’s beastly. He’s a nasty, beastly boy. He tells them smutty stories.”
“He’s a pubescent kid. He’s showing off. What’s the harm? He probably has a crush on them.”
“His conversation is all double entendre. He teases my girls. He milks his zits and tells them there’s sperm in his pores. That they could become pregnant if he touched them.”
“He’s flirting. Don’t you think they need someone to flirt with them?”
“Those little girls are dying, Mister Bale.”
“What would you like me to do, Miss Carp?”
“We’re responsible for these children. Surely you could speak to him.”
“And tell him what? That he not only has to accept his death but his virginity too?”
(And remembers that Liam had begun to masturbate two months before he died.)
“You think I’m an old maid.”
“No. Of course not.”
“You do. Yes. You think I’m picturesque. You think I’m this quaint, picturesque spinster. That’s why you invited me.”
“Not at all.”
“Not at all? You believe you smell cedar chest on me. Sachet, laundry soap, and an old hygiene.”
“I’ll say something to Benny.”
“I know about bodies,” Nedra Carp said.
“About bodies.”
“I know about bodies!” she said.
He did say something to Benny. It was embarrassing for him, but it was hardly a man-to-man talk. He didn’t give him the birds and the bees. Benny would already have the birds and the bees. He didn’t make Nedra Carp’s crisp case for the unseemliness of the boy’s position. He didn’t even warn Benny off, lay down the law, or try to appeal to the kid’s sense of the special vulnerability of doomed girls. What he did in effect was to tell Benny what he hadn’t dared to tell Liam. What he did in effect, to forestall anxiety and allay fear, and out of neither makeshift bonhomie nor Dutch-uncle, scout-master love, was to apologize to Benny Maxine on behalf of everyone who would be surviving him.
“You’ll be missing out.”
“So it’s all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Eddy Bale admitted.
“I thought it might be,” Benny Maxine said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
“Five-alarm.”
“Fantastic,” Benny Maxine said.
When the child tried to draw him out about which parts of a woman’s anatomy Eddy preferred, the breasts, the behind, or the quim, Bale blushed and said he supposed it was a matter of individual taste.
Benny smiled and nudged Bale in the side with his elbow.
“You know what gets me?” he said.
“Perhaps I oughtn’t to be talking to you like this.”
“Their pelt.”
“Perhaps these things might more properly be discussed in the home environme—”
“Their pelt, their fleece, their fell, their fur,” Benny went on happily. “Their miniver, their feathers.”
“Yes, well,” Eddy said.
“Ask you a question?”
Bale stared at the boy.
“It’s personal, but you’re the one brung it up.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Bale said ruefully.
“Well,” Benny Maxine said, “what it is then is…it’s just only it’s a bit awkward, me putting it, like.”
“Look,” Eddy said, “not on my account. I mean, if you’re at all uncomfortable about this, you don’t have to—”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” the child reminded him.
“Right,” said Eddy.
“I’m still pretty much virgo intacta and all,” Benny told him. “Well,” he said, “you must know that or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”
“Hey,” Eddy reassured him, “at your age I was pretty virgo intacta myself. You make too much of it.”
“Of virginity?”
He recalled Benny’s list. The miniver, the feathers. “Of birds,” Bale said.
“Well, it ain’t the birds exactly.”
“Maybe you should talk to Mister Moorhead,” Eddy said quickly. “He’s the physician on board. He could advise you on these things better than I. If this is anything at all to do with the effects of self-abuse on your condition, I’m sure he can fill you in on what’s what.”
“Nah, if I die, I die,” Benny said and glared at Bale, accusing him with the full force of his doom. “Are you in for a pound?” he asked at last. “Are you even in for a penny even?”
“Sure,” Eddy said. “I told you.”
“Why won’t you let me get it out then?”
“What is it?” Eddy asked.
“You sure it’s okay?”
“Yes,” he said, “certainly.”
“All right,” Benny said, “so so far I’m this yid vestal, this kid monk. I’m this fifteen-year-old virgin with this fifteen-year- old virgin maidenhead. Fifteen years, and it ain’t any sure-thing, lead-pipe, dead-cert cinch I’ll ever make sweet sixteen. So what I need to know is how long.”
“How long?”
“It lasts. How long it lasts. That the chemicals work. That a chap can do it. That given the clean bill of health, the normal drives, and what the actuaries say, how long a party can keep his pecker up, Mister Bale.”
Eddy was confused. “Sustain an orgasm?”
“Sustain an orgasm?” Benny said. “No, of course not. I know how long a chap can come off. It’s the other I’m not sure of. How long the power’s there for, I mean. How long he has till his knackers go off on him.”
“How long? How old he is?”
“Yeah,” Benny said. “How old he is.”
“Oh, well,” Bale said, “that all depends, I should think. They say we’re sexual until the day we die.”
“Right,” Benny said.
“Oh, Benny,” Eddy said.
“What? Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re thinking? Forget it,” he said, “that ain’t in it. I mean I can subtract fifteen or sixteen from three score and ten and get the difference. I can take away the subtrahend from the whoosihend well enough. That’s not what bothers me. So I miss out on whatever it is, the fifty- four or fifty-five years of what you haul me in here to tell me the shouting’s all about. No big deal, no Commonwealth case. Nah,” Benny Maxine said, “that don’t bother Benny Maxine.”
“What does bother you?”
“That slyboots. That old son of a bitch,” Benny says, almost to himself.
“What?”
“The crafty old bastard.”
“I don’t—”
“Mudd-Gaddis. Here I schlepp him from room to room giving him gazes, giving him ganders, and at his age the little geezer has probably nineteen dozen times my own experience. Pushed his wheelchair, I did. Took him for a ride. Showed him the sights. And him under his shawls and lap robes with his hand in the heather. Ooh, he’s the sly one!”
“Benny,” Eddy Bale says quietly, “it’s not what the shouting’s all about. Benny, it isn’t.”