plenty of things to think about, both privately and publicly, since our hometown had so recently been depopulated by the neutron bomb. We might so easily have had our peepholes closed, too, if we hadn’t come down to take over the hotel.
When we heard about that fatal flash back home, in fact, I had quoted the words of William Cowper, which a sympathetic English teacher had given me to keep from killing myself when I was young:
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
So I said to Ketchum, after we had finished our chocolate seafoams, our
spume di cioccolata
, “Tell us about the Metzgers.”
And Felix dropped his spoon. Curiosity about the Metzgers had been the most durable of all our family taboos. The taboo had surely existed in large measure for my own protection. Now I had broken it as casually as I had served dessert.
Old Ketchum was impressed, too. He shook his head wonderingly, and he said, “I never expected to hear a member of the Waltz family ask how any of the Metzgers were.”
“I wondered out loud only once,” said Felix, “—after I came home from the war. That was enough for me. I’d had a good time in the war, and I’d made a lot of contacts I could use afterwards, and I was pretty sure I was going to make a lot of money and become a big shot fast.”
And he did become a big shot, of course. He eventually became president of NBC, with a penthouse and a limousine and all.
He also “tapped out early,” as they say. After he was canned by NBC twelve years ago, when he was only forty-four, he couldn’t find suitable work anywhere.
This hotel has been a godsend to Felix.
“So I was a citizen of the world when I came home,” Felix went on. “Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or might not live. Who gave a damn? Anyplace you could put a microphone was home enough for me. So I treated my own mother and father and brother as natives of some poor, war-ravaged town I was passing through. They told me their troubles, as natives will, and I give them my absentminded sympathy. I cared some. I really did.
“I tried to look at the lighter side, as passers-through will, and I speculated as to what the formerly penniless Metzgers might be doing with their million dollars or so.
“And Mother, one of the most colorless women I would ever know, until she developed all those brain tumors toward the end,” Felix went on, “—she slapped me. I was in uniform, but I hadn’t been wounded or anything. I had just been a radio announcer.
“And then Father shouted at me, ‘What the Metzgers do with their money is none of our business! It’s theirs, do you hear me? I never want it mentioned again! We are poor people! Why should we break our hearts and addle our brains with rumors about the lives of millionaires?’ ”
• • •
According to Ketchum, George Metzger took his family to Florida because of a weekly newspaper which was for sale in Cedar Key, and because it was always warm down there, and because it was so far from Midland City. He bought the paper for a modest amount, and he investedthe rest of the money in two thousand acres of open land near Orlando.
“A fool and his money can be a winning combination,” said Ketchum of that investment made back in 1945. “That unprepossessing savannah, friends and neighbors, which George put in the name of his two children, and which they still own, became the magic carpet on which has been constructed the most successful family entertainment complex in human history, which is Walt Disney World.”
There was water music throughout this conversation. We were far from the ocean, but a concrete dolphin expectorated lukewarm water into the swimming pool. The dolphin had come with the hotel, like the voodooist head-waiter, Hippolyte Paul De Mille. God only knows what the dolphin is connected to. God
When we heard about that fatal flash back home, in fact, I had quoted the words of William Cowper, which a sympathetic English teacher had given me to keep from killing myself when I was young:
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
So I said to Ketchum, after we had finished our chocolate seafoams, our
spume di cioccolata
, “Tell us about the Metzgers.”
And Felix dropped his spoon. Curiosity about the Metzgers had been the most durable of all our family taboos. The taboo had surely existed in large measure for my own protection. Now I had broken it as casually as I had served dessert.
Old Ketchum was impressed, too. He shook his head wonderingly, and he said, “I never expected to hear a member of the Waltz family ask how any of the Metzgers were.”
“I wondered out loud only once,” said Felix, “—after I came home from the war. That was enough for me. I’d had a good time in the war, and I’d made a lot of contacts I could use afterwards, and I was pretty sure I was going to make a lot of money and become a big shot fast.”
And he did become a big shot, of course. He eventually became president of NBC, with a penthouse and a limousine and all.
He also “tapped out early,” as they say. After he was canned by NBC twelve years ago, when he was only forty-four, he couldn’t find suitable work anywhere.
This hotel has been a godsend to Felix.
“So I was a citizen of the world when I came home,” Felix went on. “Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or might not live. Who gave a damn? Anyplace you could put a microphone was home enough for me. So I treated my own mother and father and brother as natives of some poor, war-ravaged town I was passing through. They told me their troubles, as natives will, and I give them my absentminded sympathy. I cared some. I really did.
“I tried to look at the lighter side, as passers-through will, and I speculated as to what the formerly penniless Metzgers might be doing with their million dollars or so.
“And Mother, one of the most colorless women I would ever know, until she developed all those brain tumors toward the end,” Felix went on, “—she slapped me. I was in uniform, but I hadn’t been wounded or anything. I had just been a radio announcer.
“And then Father shouted at me, ‘What the Metzgers do with their money is none of our business! It’s theirs, do you hear me? I never want it mentioned again! We are poor people! Why should we break our hearts and addle our brains with rumors about the lives of millionaires?’ ”
• • •
According to Ketchum, George Metzger took his family to Florida because of a weekly newspaper which was for sale in Cedar Key, and because it was always warm down there, and because it was so far from Midland City. He bought the paper for a modest amount, and he investedthe rest of the money in two thousand acres of open land near Orlando.
“A fool and his money can be a winning combination,” said Ketchum of that investment made back in 1945. “That unprepossessing savannah, friends and neighbors, which George put in the name of his two children, and which they still own, became the magic carpet on which has been constructed the most successful family entertainment complex in human history, which is Walt Disney World.”
There was water music throughout this conversation. We were far from the ocean, but a concrete dolphin expectorated lukewarm water into the swimming pool. The dolphin had come with the hotel, like the voodooist head-waiter, Hippolyte Paul De Mille. God only knows what the dolphin is connected to. God
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