George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “He said he had letters. She must have saved them. Of course. She would have had letters and some would even have been marked Personal, because people who are upset want to make sure that their mail gets through and probably they figure that if they’ve put down Personal and drawn a line under it they’ve warned the authorities and the busybodies at the circus that they mean business. Maybe they even think there’s something official about it, that it’s an actual aid in sorting the mail and seeing that it goes where it’s directed, like sticking on the extra postage that buys special handling. So that wasn’t why she saved it. If all she wanted was letters that said Personal on the envelope she could have had a hope chest full of them. Haven’t I read enough mail down here in Cassadaga to know that people will say anything if they’ve pencil and paper and a few cents for stamps? That they address letters to the dead or particular saints or even to God Himself because they’ve heard and even believe that we’re this clearing house for the extraordinary? It wasn’t the Personal that made her keep this one out of all the crazy correspondence that had come her way. It was what was inside. Not the expression of sympathy, because every last letter she ever got would have started with that. That would have been as regulation as the salutation. Even the madmen who wished her an even worse life than the one which had already been visited upon her would first have showered her with their declarations of pity, waiting until all that was out of the way before ever taking up the matter of reproach, blasting her with what would not even occur to them was ill-nature and ill will and citing her ‘condition’ as evidence that a retributive Lord not only existed but was at all times on His toes, no procrastinative, Second Coming Lord who put off till tomorrow what could just as easily be done today, but an eager beaver early bird God who didn’t care to wait till even today, who did His stuff retroactively, smiting you if He had a mind to in the cradle, in the womb. So it wasn’t the sympathy. Maybe she even skipped that part. Probably she wasn’t interested until she came to the stuff about the writer’s credentials, and maybe she was relieved when she saw that it wasn’t a doctor this time because she’d heard from the doctors before, so interested in her ‘case,’ so sure a particular pill or course of some special serum or amazing, recently discovered diet was just the thing to fix her up. Doctors were quacks, and reverends were worse, because when all was said and done the reverends were usually on the same side as the madmen and believed that the Lord had made her what she was, and that rather than flaunt it she would do better either to hide it away or send it on tour as a warning to others. Proceeds to charity.”

  “Yes,” Wickland said. “Proceeds to charity is a good touch.”

  “But a professor,” George said, “a professor was different. She had never even seen a professor. She knew about them though. They were the ones who followed truth as if it was a river in New Guinea, who looked for it to come out only where the river itself comes out.” He’s making me say these things, Mills thought. He puts these words in my mouth. “And this one was going to get to the bottom of things. Or no, if all he had promised was just to get to the bottom of things, she’d probably have disposed of this letter as she’d disposed of the others. What he really said was that together they would get to the bottom of things. He needed her help. Which already was not only twice as much as what the others had asked for but something she could actually give.

  “But I don’t think that even then she would have taken it upon herself to write back ‘Sure, come on down.’ She would have wanted certain things cleared up first, certain nagging doubts put to rest that this time had nothing whatever to do with the age-old question ‘Why me?’ For one thing, she’d have wanted to know what a lusus naturae was before they went any further.

  “ ‘My dear lady, lusus naturae is Latin for freak. I myself am a lusus naturae.’

  “So,” George said, “not only a professor but a fellow lusus naturae as well! And one, furthermore—though she’d noted this before it still touched her—who signed his name to his mail and provided a return address. What could she do but write back?

  “ ‘What sort of lusus naturae?’

  “ ‘I am a tiny fellow, dear lady, a midget.’

  “So not only a professor and fellow lusus naturae but a lusus naturae who for all his smallness stood at the upper levels and very heights of lusus naturae respectability.

  “Until the letters—sure he has letters, of course he has letters—made quite a tidy correspondence, thick as a book perhaps, or a packet of love letters. Which is what they were. Probably she never even got the chance to write the one that said ‘Sure, come on down.’ Or their letters crossed in the mail, his, the one that said he was on his way, the one in which he proposed. They might even have been married by the time hers had been returned to sender.

  “I don’t know if she ever worked with him as a control or not. All I know is that ‘the young fourteen-year-old girl with the gray hair and withered body of an old woman’ must have been the one who gave Jack Sunshine his height!”

  “Is that what you see?” Wickland asked.

  “Boy oh boy,” George said. “I do. I really enjoyed our chat.”

  He was pleased with himself. He had raised the dead, momentarily held them aloft on the energy of concentration, argument and the polar shifts of alternative. He was convinced and wondered if he had convinced Wickland. But Wickland knew what had happened and was beyond his arguments. And suddenly, simply by knowing something George didn’t, the reverend seemed smug, and George began to understand something about the nature of the place he had lived in for over two years now. Nowhere he would ever live would be so theoretical. Cassadaga was a sort of stump, a kind of congress. It was somewhere one could orate, a neighborhood of debate. (Perhaps that was why there were no stores or restaurants, no schools or hotels, only this little square of the civic.) All, all longed to be heroes of life, even Wickland, even himself. Now the reverend would show him his sister. She would go up like fireworks and now he’d be wowed. It was simple, really. One lived by sequence, by a sort of Roberts’ Rules of Order. Cassadaga was only a kind of conversation.

  “Your mother,” Wickland began, “is very nice.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder why she’s so quiet though.”

  “She talks.”

  “She’s most polite.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “She is not wild, George.”

  “I don’t want a wild mother.”

  “Isn’t it interesting that she is not interesting?”

  “Sunshine’s mother was interesting,” George said. “My mother is good.”

  “I gather from what you’ve told me that all the women in your family have been good.”

  “I never told you about all the women in my family. I hope they’ve been good.”

  “Otherwise we should have heard,” Wickland said slyly. “Don’t be defensive, George. I’m not going to insult your mother. I’m not going to call you a son of a bitch.”

  “Hey,” George said.

  “That bristle you feel is not pride,” Wickland said. “It’s breeding. Ten hundred years of doggy antagonism and the biological bitters of instinct.”

  “Here we go,” George said.

  “Indeed,” Wickland said, “for isn’t it curious that you Millses, servants and dog soldiers of the domestic, think Honor only on the occasion of its aspersion and only when the distaff takes the slur?

  “You were not bankers or lawyers or politicians or even merchants. A millennium of benchwork. That’s your tradition, George. A thousand years. And your women the same.”

  “Hey!”

  “A thousand years in the typing pool.”

  “Hey.”

  “Have you never wondered how you’ve managed to last so long, how there could be this unbroken thousand-year streak of George Millses? It’s your women, George, your nice, quiet, polite, unwild women.”

  “You keep my mother out of——”

  “Look at you. Lo
ok at you! I see your gums and balled fists, your hard-on hackles. Don’t worry, you won’t. You won’t have to. This is the seance now. I’m only explaining. You won’t have to.

  “Not bitch, not bitch anyway. Hen. Sow. Cow. Not bitch, not even filly. Mare! Not wench, not even lady. Virgin, maiden! Certainly not dame or broad or bimbo. Mother, parent, housewife, spouse——all the feminized, maidenly matronics of passive womaninity.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. It’s what kept you alive. It’s what killed your sister.”

  “Hey!”

  “Because you don’t last a thousand years in this dispensation unless you’ve got something special going for you. Luck couldn’t account for it. It wouldn’t.

  “A thousand years of benchwork, ten centuries of day labor. Not even clerks, though you’d an eye for the clerical, the file folder heart, the women who would prove in motherhood what they’d already testified to by the filing cabinet, their gift for organization, their prim loyalties like a lesson to passion. They’d spend a lifetime as mothers and would die old maids.

  “No wonder they bore male children only! It was only more deference, birth a sort of muscle control like the swift bows, nods and courtesies of a maitre d’. (Alphonse and Gaston must have been women, too.) They had minds like Miss America. (Don’t tell me ‘Hey!’ I’m being kind.) We’re talking marriage like motherhood in guitar songs, we’re talking self-denial, devotion. (No wonder you guys bristle. It isn’t your women you’re defending, it’s your moms.) And maybe when your sister died it was just intuition. Maybe stillbirth is just the female Millses’ way of saying ‘No thanks, I gave at the office!’

  “You know why she goes to the crystal gazers and tarot dealers? Because we don’t read breakfast cereal, because we don’t read laundry. Because women like her don’t have daughters!

  “I tell you, George, these women were wonders. The cookbooks of obligation, the flannel of duty, the curlers of love!

  “But why are they so dowdy, eh?

  “Because dowdy is what you choose them for. Because dowdy is part of the package, part of their heritage, like the cheekbones of Scandinavians or the dark skin of belly dancers. Have you ever seen them dolled up? They look, in their make-up, as if they’ve been crying, in their white shoes and cheap dresses like hicks at matinees. Do you see your sister?”

  “No.”

  “Because your mother is different,” Wickland said. “Nancy is different.” And it was true what Wickland had been saying. He did want to hit him. He did bristle, enmity crawling his skin like a contact rash and his saliva a rich soup in his jaw. He felt actual aversion, fear, the cornered, grating grudge of opponents in nature. This man is my rival, he thought. I’ve been reckless, he thought. I’ve told him too much.

  “Your father knew beans about plumbing,” Wickland said. “He could use a plunger and work the shutoff valve with his wrench, but the scaffolding of pivots, shafts and pipes and the improbable ball that floated at the top of the tank like a lesson in leverage were about as meaningful to him as airplane engines. Also, he was squeamish. The black rubber plug at the bottom was something he didn’t have to hold to feel. His greatest grandfather had shoveled manure for a living and your father suspected that was where his antipathy came from, not custom and acclimation catching in his genes but the original shock and revulsion themselves.

  “Which was why he hoped to God it was a big job when Mindian sent for him, something they would have to tear the walls out to get to. Mindian had authorized him to call in a plumber for the big jobs. He climbed the back stairs and pressed the buzzer by the back door. The pretty cleaning girl opened the door.

  “ ‘I’m the janitor,’ he said. ‘I hear you got big trouble with your WC.’

  “There are three things you should know about your father. I’ve already told you he was squeamish, and perhaps you already know that at this time, at the time he met your mother, he lived in a basement, in a room in the cellar of one of the buildings he serviced. The third thing is that he was thoroughly versed in the family history.

  “The room in which he lived was not a real room at all. It was a wooden-slatted storage locker, one of several that had been set aside for the tenants, where they could put odd bits of furniture, old mattresses, castoff stoves, the children’s bicycles, busted lamps, cartons of outgrown clothes, derelict chairs and beds, whatever was remnant in their households, whatever they could find no use for yet could not bring themselves to throw away, whatever they had forgotten they still owned. Not for safekeeping—the locks that went through the flimsy hinges were ceremonial rather than effective; often they were not even fastened; any burglar who cared to take the trouble could have come into the basement and browsed the equivocal possessions there like a window shopper; the dark, six-by-ten-foot cells were slatted, the thin boards not carpentered so much as slapped together like so many kids’ tree- or clubhouses—perhaps not for keeping—except possibly for the bicycles—at all. A place where possession was not so much protected as simply resolved, defined, where one family’s cargo left off and the next one’s took up.

  “Your father’s cubicle had walls of oilcloth nailed to the slats for privacy and it was furnished with what the tenants let him have. He had a youth bed, a lamp which was plugged into an extension cord that went into an outlet near the zinc washtubs, a broken card table chair, and two cartons, one for his clothes and personal possessions, one for his dirty laundry. Heat was provided by what slipped off the coal furnace your father stoked, and he used the spigots by the gray tubs for his water and the lidless toilet behind the furnace for his needs. Yes?”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He was almost twenty. He had no family in Milwaukee, no friends even among the other janitors in the neighborhood, immigrants whose Polish and Lithuanian and Sicilian had not yet lapsed into even broken American speech. He was old enough. Certainly he was lonely enough. You’d think he would have seen that she was weeping.

  “ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘What did you say?’

  “ ‘I’m the janitor. I’ve come to fix the WC.’

  “That was how they met. She was the maid. He was the man who came to fix the toilet. She was as ignorant as he was. Afterward, because she was in from the country less than a month—this was her first job; she’d been hired when the new tenants moved in—and had heard Mrs. Simon make the same offer to the painters and moving men and delivery people who carried the new Frigidaire up the three flights of stairs, she asked him if he cared for a shot. She took a whiskey bottle from the liquor cabinet in the living room and poured a jigger of rye into a water glass which she left for him on the kitchen table.

  “ ‘Your drink is in the kitchen,’ she said and your father nodded. He sat by himself in the kitchen and looked absently at all the food, the canned goods and condiments and boxes of cereal in the pantry. He barely tasted the whiskey, which he drank down in one swallow. Though he didn’t see Nancy she must have been watching him, because as quickly as he was done she came back into the kitchen and began actually to scour the glass from which he had just drunk.

  “ ‘Why don’t you just break it and throw it away?’ he said.

  “He didn’t drink; he may not even have been sober. Certainly Nancy didn’t think he was. When she had offered him what she had heard Mrs. Simon call a shot he believed she was going to join him, at least sit down with him. She didn’t know what to say when he asked his question about the glass. She had merely been following what she thought were the forms, embarrassed about offering the drink but offering it anyway because she thought he expected it. She began to cry and he believed she was afraid of him.

  “Squeamishness lives neither in the gut nor in the head but in the entire organism. It’s a sort of constriction of the self, a physical pulling back, as if the hand has been offered fire or the soul affront. They were both squeamish, both embarrassed, both hurt. It was only your father, however, who had somewhere to go, so he was the on
e who left.

  “This was a Thursday. So tenuous is life, so random, it needs all the help it can get, and enters into conspiracy with everything, with all that’s trivial and all that isn’t. If that toilet hadn’t broken down on a Thursday you wouldn’t exist. This was a Thursday. Everywhere in middle class life Thursday afternoon is the maid’s day off, like some extra, fractional Sabbath.

  “She sought him out in the basement of the building where he lived, going up to the oilcloth-rigged room where he was chewing the bread and raw, whole vegetables, the carrots and tomatoes and green beans and lettuce which he bought as he needed them and kept in their original paper bags.

  “ ‘Are you in there?’ she asked.

  “ ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’

  “ ‘It’s Nancy. From Mrs. Simon’s.’

  “ ‘Wait a minute.’

  “He drew back the bolt on the inside of the storage locker. It was all that made it a room. Not the spurious oilcloth walls nailed to the random, jerry-built joists, not the ruined, odd-lot furniture. The oilcloth was only a kind of screen, and the very nature of the furniture seemed to signify the little area’s storage function, as exposed bedsprings or wheel rims or empty oil drums signify a dump. Only the thin, four-inch bit of metal lifted it into the margins of architecture at all.

  “ ‘Yes?’ he said.

  “She did not say, ‘You’re eating. It’s your lunchtime. I’ll come back.’ Not because she didn’t understand that she was intruding but because she still didn’t believe that this was where he lived, where he dressed and slept and ate and spent the time when he wasn’t working. She would not even say, ’Is this really where you live?’ She was squeamish, too, recall, and she knew that if it was where he lived it didn’t have to be, and that by asking outright she would be demanding reasons of him that she wouldn’t want to know.