but he survived for several years. He had the goblet with him, and every day it filled up with food and drink.
So the Romans let him go. They couldn’t have known about the goblet, or they surely would have taken it from him. And Joseph went to England to spread the word about Christ. The goblet fed him on the way. And this wandering Jew founded the first Christian church in England—at Glastonbury. He stuck his staff into the ground there, and it became a tree which bloomed every Christmas Eve.
Imagine that.
Joseph had children, who inherited the goblet, which came to be known as the “Holy Grail,”
But sometime during the next five hundred years, the Holy Grail was lost. King Arthur and his knights would become obsessed with finding it again—the most sacred relic in England. Knight after knight failed. Supernatural messages indicated that their hearts weren’t pure enough for them to find the Grail.
But then Sir Galahad presented himself at Camelot, and it was evident to everyone that his heart was perfectly pure. And he did find the Grail. He was not only spiritually entitled to it. He was legally entitled to it as well, since he was the last living descendant of that wandering Jew, Joseph of Arimathea.
• • •
Mr. Barry told me what the “stock” part of a “laughingstock” was. It was a tree stump used as a target by archers. I had told him that I guessed I was the laughingstock of New York.
Fred’s mother said to me, speaking of herself, “Shake hands with the laughingstock of Midland City, and the laughingstock of Venice, Italy, and the laughingstock of Madrid, Spain, and the laughingstock of Vancouver, British Columbia, and the laughingstock of Cairo, Egypt, and of just about every important city you can name.”
• • •
Felix got to talking to the pilot, Tiger Adams, about Celia Hildreth, who had become Celia Hoover. Tiger, who had been a year ahead of Felix in high school, had taken her out once, which was par for the course. He guessed that she was lucky to have married an automobile dealer who didn’t care what was under her hood.
“A cream puff,” he said. At that time, this was a common description for an automobile which was flashy and loaded with accessories—and never mind whether it ran or not.
He had one interesting piece of information, which I had also heard: that the place to see Celia was at the YMCA at night, where she was enrolled in several self-improvement programs—calligraphy and modern dance and business law, and things like that. This had been going on for a couple of years or more.
Felix, hunching forward, asked Adams how Dwayne Hoover took it, having his wife go off night after night. And Adams replied that Dwayne had probably given up interesting her in sex. It was a futile undertaking. Dwayne was consoling himself, no doubt, in somebody else’s arms.
“And that’s probably a chore for him,” Adams went on, “like having his teeth cleaned.” He laughed. “It’s something everybody should do at least twice a year,” he said.
“Some sexy town,” said Felix.
“Some towns had better pay attention to business,” said Adams. “It would be a terrible thing for the country if they were all like Hollywood and New York.”
• • •
And after we set down on the one runway that was open at Cincinnati, it was evident to me that the runway had been cleared at great expense and just for us. That was how important Fred T. Barry was. It turned out that he was on an emergency mission, although he and his mother had said nothing about that to us. The Air Force was deeply concerned about sensitive work that Barrytron was doing for them. They had a helicopter waiting to take him straight to Midland City, so that he could evaluate and remedy any damage the blizzard might have done to the plant.
In order that we might come along with him, Mr. Barry said that Felix and I were two of his top executives. So up we went again, this time in a clattering contraption invented by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo had obviously modeled it on some mythological creature—half eagle, half cow.
That was Fred T. Barry’s image: “Half eagle, half cow.”
He made me a present of another image, too, as the shadow of our heavier-than-air machine skittered over the unbroken snowfield where Route 53, the highway from Cincinnati to Midland City, used to be.
I was in a permanent cringe in my