“But she had hurt his feelings, and she had never hurt anyone before. And, too, something happened that morning that made her anxious for her honesty.
“She said she was sorry if she’d done anything to make him uncomfortable but that she had found something of Mrs. Simon’s that had been missing since just after she had come to work for her and that—she didn’t want to ask him about himself so she couldn’t stop herself from telling him about everything that had led up to the insult—she had become too excited and had suddenly gotten the urge.
“ ‘The urge?’
“ ‘I had to go to the bathroom,’ she said.
“He didn’t really follow.
“ ‘That’s her bathroom,’ she said, ‘Mrs. Simon’s. I’m not supposed to use it. I have my own I’m supposed to use. But I’d just found Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch. She never accused me of stealing it, but of course she thinks I did. She took me without references, you see. It’s my first job. I’m seventeen. I didn’t have references. But she said she’d give me a chance if I would let her read a letter I was sending to my folks.
“ ‘When I found her watch this morning I knew it would look more than ever like I was the one who’d taken it. I thought I’d leave it somewhere she could find it herself, you see. Then I realized she’d know I’d put it there or I’d have found it when I was cleaning. That’s when I was caught short, when I had to go to the washroom, and’—she was blushing but it was too dark for your father to see—‘as luck would have it, that’s when it busted. She’d told me not to use hers. So, what with the wrist watch and the broken washroom and all, I didn’t know what to do. I was only trying to do everything right when I offered you the shot.’
“Your father understood. She couldn’t have said anything that would have made him more certain that he’d just found someone so like himself that they might already have been related. He believed in relations. No one living set more stock in them than he. He’d come to Milwaukee when he had heard the history of his family, the same long history you’ve been hearing. He heard the story and exiled himself to that basement, that strange room.
“Because Nancy was right. No one had to live that way. It wasn’t Mindian’s, the landlord’s, idea, it was his own, and he was not so much living as sulking there, feasting on his role as outcast, protecting his heritage in that stick fortress as if it had been a reign, some government in exile, signaling God knows who that, well, what could you expect, he was a Mills. Millses lived in the ground, a whole story below other people’s lives.
“And Nancy had heard of him. Everyone in the neighborhood had heard of him——and not just the people in his buildings either, the two hundred or so men, women and children in the forty-eight units, in the eight apartment houses, on the two blocks, but all the people along Prospect and Kenwood Avenues. And not just the tenants who spoke his language, but the janitors who didn’t. He was famous, as the hermit is famous, as the savage who moves to town is, as anyone distinguished by mythology or distanced by dream.
“He was famous. Nancy had heard of him. Only she was surprised that he was so young, so beardless, so cute. Tales had gone round. People who knew better told them, the tenants who had actually seen him, whose garbage cans he had carried down the back stairs to the alley, whose busted locks he had replaced, whose paint-fastened windows he had opened, whose sprung doors he had planed. And the housemaids in the building where he actually lived, who used the laundry room that was, in effect, his patio, his front yard. The children brave enough to ask his help in pulling their bicycles out of the storage lockers and carry them up the stairs to the street.
“ ‘It was the way,’ she said, ‘I’d seen Mrs. Simon wash out those glasses. It wasn’t because I heard you live down here all by yourself like some old bear.’
“ ‘You heard that?’ He was genuinely surprised. He truly did not know of his fame. His act had been for his own entertainment; he didn’t realize others had been enjoying it as well. ‘What else did you hear?’ Nancy blushed again, this time so deeply that even in the dimness he saw it, even felt its heat perhaps. ‘No, go on,’ he said, ‘what do they say?’ She’s stalling, he thought. He could just imagine what people told one another. That he’d been cut off, that he’d cut himself off without a penny, the monk of modern times. People’s imaginations! ‘What?’
“ ‘That you’re not right.’
“He exploded. ‘Of course I’m right! I didn’t come down here without thinking about it. What do they know! It was a carefully thought-out decision. I weighed the pros and cons. Not even my fath——’
“ ‘That you’re not right in the head.’
“ ‘That I’m crazy?’
“ ‘That you’re not smart enough to be crazy. That you’re slow.’
“‘Hey!’
“Because already they were talking about him! Not five minutes into the courtship and already they were talking about him! The slight to his pride in the kitchen explained, Nancy forbidden access to certain toilets forgotten if it had ever registered in the first place, the wrist watch back-burnered. Maybe he wasn’t right in the head, not crazy but slow. Here he had just found out that he had what he didn’t even know he wanted—fame, notoriety—and all he could think to do was quibble with its nature. He set Nancy straight, you bet!
“ ‘You just go back to those biddies and tell them to mind their business. If they have nothing better to do than talk about people, the least they can do is get the facts right.’
“Which was really the official beginning of the courtship, your father laying out his reasons and justifications for the bewildered girl as if they were stunning chess moves or winning hands in poker, reeling off his history like debater’s points or telling arguments in a letter to the editor. And indeed it had just that quality of pent righteousness such letters have, that same burst, off-the-chest violence of nourished grudge.
“She had never met anyone with anything so fancy as a fate before. She couldn’t even follow him.
“ ‘No,’ he said, summing up, ‘I won’t kill myself. That’s not the scheme. It’s to hide out for the fifty or so years I have left to live, go about my business and accomplish by myself in a single lifetime what all my family haven’t been able to pull off in a thousand years——the extinction of my long, bland, lumpish line.’
“ ‘What are you going to do?’
“ ‘I just told you. Nothing.’
“ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it sounded as if you were going to do something crazy.’
“ ‘Not crazy, slow. So slow it will amount to nothing. I’m going to remain a bachelor.’
“ ‘You’re never going to get married?’
“ ‘I’m never going to have children. I’m never even going to go near a woman.’
“Which was absurd. He lived in proximity not only to the six housemaids in that very apartment building, but every day except Thursday afternoons and Sundays had to walk the same saucy, laundered, hung-to-dry gauntlet of damp female apparatus, brassieres, corsets, panties and garter belts——all the luscious, silken, sexual bunting of all the mothers, housewives, sisters, maids and daughters in all those eight apartment houses he serviced. It brushed his face like climate, it pierced his skin like itch, and, because it was empty, it could have been filled with anybody, anyone.
“Fate really is a lame way of doing business. It’s a wonder that history ever happens. Your dad said he would never marry, never have anything to do with women. She had no reason not to believe him, so if it had ever crossed her mind that he was an eligible young man, he disabused her of the notion within minutes of her having formed it. What I said about Thursdays notwithstanding, the odds against your ever being born were overwhelming. No, Mrs. Simon was your real fate.
“But a word about your father. It’s one thing to hide out, it’s another to be misrepresented. No sooner did he learn from your mother not only that people thought of him but what they thought of him, and no sooner did he understand that Nancy was the very
one to set them straight—he was overreacting of course; they knew about him but he was hardly the only thing on their minds—no sooner, that is, did he realize that he had need of Nancy—and we’re talking, too, of how she looked in that little make-believe doorway of his little make-believe room—than he repudiated her.”
It felt good to sit there, George thought, knowing the end of the story, that whatever its complications, it would turn out well, that his father would turn out to be his father, that his mother would turn out to be his mother, and that he himself would eventually be brought to life.
“You see,” Wickland said, “everyone is something of an occasion. Even the kings, even the officials and presidents, those, I mean, whom history has need of. But you’re even more of an occasion than most. You were proscribed. Think about it. Your father said he would never go near women. Your mother believed him.
“So it was up to Esther Simon. She was the deciding factor in your existence.
“ ‘Doll,’ she called when Nancy returned that evening from her afternoon off. ‘Can you come into the master bedroom a sec, doll?’
“I don’t think it ever occurred to Nancy that her employer, the woman who presumed to read her mail in lieu of references, who suspected her of being a thief, who called her doll because she couldn’t always remember her name, who ordered her about, could almost have been a spoiled, slightly older sister. Esther Simon was only twenty-two years old. She had known her husband, Barry, a distant cousin, all her life, since they had been children in adjacent Hyde Park mansions in Chicago. It did not even occur to her as odd that when Mrs. Greene came to visit her daughter and son-in-law in Milwaukee, the Simons were ‘the kids,’ Nancy ‘the woman.’
“ ‘Yes ma’am,’ your seventeen-year-old mother said to her twenty-two-year-old boss.
“ ‘Your sweetie must have dropped this,’ she said. ‘You better not wait till next Thursday to return it.’
“ ‘What?’
“ ‘What indeed? It’s a wrench. I found it in the master bathroom.’
“ ‘That’s not mine,’ Nancy said.
“ ‘Well of course it’s not. It’s his. He must have dropped it when he presumed to use my toilet.’
“ ‘Please, Mrs. Simon, you’re making—’
“ ‘A mistake? Of course, doll. It’s probably Mr. Simon’s monkey whoosis, only Mr. Simon’s out of town and it wasn’t there when I left this morning.’
“ ‘It’s the janitor’s.’
“ ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Simon said, ‘I suppose that strange young man has unusual bathroom arrangements and from time to time is compelled to move his bowels above his station, but not in my house. Is that clear, doll? Look, your Thursday afternoons are your own affair, but you are not to make appointments in what is after all my home. I shall certainly speak to Mindian about this. Change my sheets.’
“ ‘I changed the sheets—’
“ ‘I know. Yesterday. Unless, of course, you were about to say afterward.’
“ ‘We didn’t do anything, Mrs. Simon.’
“ ‘It’s enough if you so much as sat with him on the side of the bed. Change my sheets.’
“ ‘Look—’
“ ‘Oh no, doll. You look. You’re seventeen years old. This is your first employment. You don’t have references. You’re not used to living away from home. Certainly you’re unused to living with your employers. Mr. Simon and I, however, have lived with servants all our lives.
“ ‘Do you know why it’s necessary that you girls have references? Do you know what’s actually in those characters we write? Our phone numbers and addresses, doll. So we may telephone each other. So we may visit. So we may say to each other what it would not always be wise to put down on paper.
“ ‘Some girls are sickly, some nasty, some dishonest.’
“ ‘I’m not any of those things,’ your mother said.
“ ‘Oh?’ Mrs. Simon said. ‘But as soon as my back is turned you invite a janitor into my home to use a bathroom you were specifically told was out of bounds. Mr. Mindian will definitely have to be informed.’
“ ‘He didn’t use your toilet. I did.’
“ ‘You let him watch? Oh,’ she said, ‘loathsome!’
“ ‘No,’ your mother said. ‘Oh my God, you don’t understand. Here.’ And chose just that moment to return Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch, which she took out of her purse, having put it there because she had not yet decided how to tell her she had found it.
“It was almost a formal exchange, trade. Wrist watch for wrench, the two objects changing hands, not returned so much as simultaneously surrendered, restored, like spoils appropriated in a war.
“ ‘I want you out of my house,’ Mrs. Simon said.
“ ‘But where could I go?’
“ ‘Why, to your janitor,’ she said. ‘What, will he want a reference? Very well. You may tell him that you are a lying, quarrelsome young girl who steals watches and permits men to observe her while she sits on toilets. I will vouch for it. Get your things.’
“She kept house for him in the storage locker.
“It was more like a kid’s clubhouse than ever, that tucked snug sense of coze and warm comfy, all of luxury they would ever know, the two of them, the brooding, self-conscious young man and the farmer’s daughter returned to a kind of sybaritic nest condition, some quilted idyll of semiconscious life.
“It wasn’t even sex. It was more like bathing, some long, painless, post-op ease.
“They knew she was there, the maids and tenants and children. Even Mindian knew she was there. No one complained. Why would they? They were fearful of driving off for nothing in return the one absolutely special and spectacular thing that had ever happened to them. It was like having peacocks in your backyard, tamed bears, docile deer. Just knowing they were there lent a sort of glory and luck to the neighborhood. They didn’t even discuss it among themselves——as his catcher and teammates will say nothing even in the seventh and eighth and ninth innings of the pitcher’s no-hit game for fear of jinxing they can barely say what——love in vitro, domestic science in the cellar. The freak your father and the freak your mother belonged to all of them, and if they happened to make their queer nest in one of Mindian’s buildings rather than in another, why that was merely the way Nature arranges these things. It was understood, accepted, the way Catholics understand and accept that the Pope must reside in Rome, or a Normandy Frenchman that Paris is his capital. If George, living alone in that storeroom, had been famous, the two of them down there were twice as famous, more. (Yet everyone, even those who were not Mindian’s tenants, understood that they were not to be disturbed——that is to say, stared at; that is to say bothered.)
“So they knew they were there. The housemaids even agreed, it may even have been without conferral, upon a suitable genealogy for the pair. They had it that your mother and father were the daughter and son of Polish and Italian janitors in the neighborhood, that not only could they not speak English, even though they had heard them speak it, but could not even speak to each other, even though they had heard them.
“The neighborhood, still without conferral, knew it had a problem. (They really didn’t want anything to change.) It knew it was not enough not to rock the boat or simply to maintain silence. If they ignored the principals to their faces, wouldn’t this be taken as a sign of disapproval? The lovers—though God knows that whatever they were it wasn’t lovers, highly developed animals, perhaps, of two entirely different species, each the last of its kind, who took their comfort from each other only because there was no one else in the world they could get it from; lovers? they were too far gone in despair, too lonely to love; lovers? they were the King and Queen of cuddle is all—needed reassurance they thought.
“The maids and housewives sometimes took Nancy with them when they went shopping. In the stores they would hold up ripe tomatoes, crisp stalks of green celery, fruits of the season, candy, for God’s sake, whatever was accommodate to that heatless, iceless lard
er in which they lived, whatever could be consumed raw. (Or left treats for them on the cellar steps, fresh-baked cookies, hard-boiled eggs, leftover meats which even your doggy daddy and puss mom understood were scraps.) Using Nancy’s (George’s) money of course, but giving it to the grocer themselves, the lovers’ middlemen and agents, and counting the change, too—though who had ever heard of them would have ever shortchanged them?—before handing it over. As if Nancy were a child perhaps, or handicapped. And who knows, maybe they did need help. How many pounds of tomatoes and grapes do you need when you’re shopping for two and tomatoes and grapes are all that you’re buying? But the food was the single overture they made. They never attempted to add anything to, or alter anything in, the room itself. As if your parents really were animals and it was understood that animals knew best how to furnish their lairs and nests and dens. (If your father’s light bulb had burned out, I don’t think anyone would have thought to offer the loan of a spare for so much as a night.)
“George had his chores, his work. He rose at 5:00 A.M. to climb the twenty-four flights of back stairs in Mindian’s eight buildings to take down the forty-eight garbage cans. He had his furnaces to tend, the small repair jobs, the sleds that he carried up from the basement for the smaller children, the three or four emergencies a day that he could absolutely count on. (People locked themselves out of their apartments, they ran out of fuses, they let their bathtubs spill over.) I say count on because he counted on them for tips. (They tipped him now. All the world loves a lover.)
“When he got out of their narrow bed in the fifty-degree room (the temperature of a cave) he told her to stay where she was and she did. While he dressed in the dark. She could just make him out, his naked body. And wondered: What is happening to me? What has already happened? Wondering not who this stranger was who had taken her virginity and with whom she had committed acts that had been reserved in her head not for some future when she was safely married but for other people altogether. Not questioning, as you might think, her own, or even George’s, character so much as marveling at her luck. She loved it. She even loved the little room, their unicorn position in other people’s imaginations. She too believed they brought luck to the neighborhood. She believed that she and George were a blessing to all of Milwaukee, a feather in the cap of the United States of America.
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