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 invested the 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 only knows what Hippolyte Paul De Mille is connected to.
He claims he can make a long-dead corpse stand up and walk around, if he wants it to.
I am skeptical.
“I surprise you,” he says in Creole. “I show you someday.”
• • •
George Metzger, according to Ketchum, is still alive, and a man of very modest means by choice—and still running a weekly paper in Cedar Key. He had kept enough money for himself, anyway, that he did not have to care whether anybody liked his paper or not. And very early on, in fact, he had lost most of his advertisers and subscribers to a new weekly, which did not share his exotic views on war and firearms and the brotherhood of man and so on.
So only his children were rich.
“Does anybody read his paper?” said Felix.
“No,” said Ketchum.
“Did he ever remarry?” I said.
“No,” said Ketchum.
Felix’s fifth wife, Barbara, and the first loving wife he had ever had, in my opinion, found the solitude of old George Metzger in Cedar Key intolerable. She was a native of Midland City like the rest of us, and a product of its public schools. She was an X-ray technician. That was how Felix had met her. She had X-rayed his shoulder. She was only twenty-three. She was pregnant by Felix now, and so happy to be pregnant. She was such a true believer in how life could be enriched by children.
She was carrying Felix’s first legitimate child. He had one illegitimate child, fathered in Paris during the war, and now in parts unknown. All his wives, though, had been very sophisticated about birth control.
And this lovely Barbara Waltz said of old George Metzger, “But he has those children, and they must adore him, and know what a hero he is.”
“They haven’t spoken to him for years,” said Ketchum, with ill-concealed satisfaction. He plainly liked it when life went badly. That was comical to him.
Barbara was stricken. “Why?” she said.
Ketchum’s own two