“I should like to say, then, that she was always fully in control of the ironies. Even then, pampered as she certainly was, hurt as she certainly was, no longer in any way in control of her circumstances, having every reason to give over the ironies; indeed, having every reason to let happen whatever was going to happen and to solace herself with a warming hatred for those who hated her, she nevertheless continued to command them, to command the ironies:
“If I die I leave as estate the value of one one-way, full-fare coach ticket to Paterson, New Jersey, plus that portion of Georgie’s fare which I have already saved. If the baby dies, nothing is gained, since Janet would have traveled on my ticket free.
“If I don’t die—and this, I rather think, must be the case—there would still be the remainder of Georgie’s fare to get, but I don’t think I could do that now. I would not, I think, be too weak to continue to save, put by money for an event that now seems pointless even to me, but too dispirited. Yes, and too weak too, for if flight is pointless if Janet dies, surely it is a pointlessness for which I have been the chief agent. (My husband is wrong. There is no fate where there is no character. We are what happens to us.) As first my discomfort and now my danger were caused by the very plans I had made to escape discomfort and danger, too. I doomed myself by trying to save myself. I muffed my pregnancy by starving myself. I was too honest to eat for two. And too dishonest to eat for one. If I really wanted to get to New Jersey, I should have given the Georges the smaller portions. If I had had real appetite for my salvation, I should have stinted on theirs. It’s all ironic, all of it. If I had told the girls to hold back just thirty-five or fifty cents from what George gave them to buy food, I could have had both our tickets by now. Even if Janet dies there is nothing to do but just go.
“The doctor was there now.”
“I was there,” George Mills said. “My father was there.”
“Your father was drunk.”
“He was crying. He was talking to me. He was trying to tell me something.”
“He wasn’t talking to you, he was making a speech. Like the best man at a wedding. He had found his audience and pinned it to attention by its own captive courtesy and embarrassment.
“ ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he demanded. ‘Why shouldn’t I drink? What do they give me all those bottles of scotch and bourbon for Christmas for if they don’t expect me to get pie-eyed? Hell, it may even be part of the bargain. Maybe they actually want me pissed. It’s not even bad booze. Only the best. Don’t they tell me that themselves as if maybe I couldn’t read the grand ads in the fine magazines that they save up for me and give me two and three months past their dates? Oh oh, my hand-me-down perks! Liquor twice as old as my son. Where is that rascal? Here, boy, you want a drink? Here. I think I’ve been remiss with you, behindhand in the instruction. Maybe even the doomed have to be trained up to their doom. So they can think about it, turn it over in their minds, connoisseur it like booze for the janitor so it won’t be wasted on someone who can’t appreciate it. Bottoms up, son. Here’s mud——Look out, stomach, here she comes! Drink, lad. Drink for the hair on your chest. Drink to low ways!’
“ ‘Come on, George. Hold it down. The doctor can hear you. Your wife can.’
“ ‘Sure, Irene. Sorry, Irene. It’s just that I’m a little nervous. No Mills woman ever had any trouble before with anything low down and natural as just birth. They take their inspiration from the beasts in the field. Mills women don’t just have babies. They litter, they foal. They farrow, they spat. They brood and spawn. They fucking fledge!’
“ ‘You all right, George?’ Vietta said.
“ ‘Hey sure.’
“ ‘Easy there, George.’
“ ‘Right, Bernice.’
“That’s when he took you into the bedroom with him.
“I think the blood reassured him. I think he was right in at least one respect. I think your squeamish father had some instinct for the placentary, for the treacly obstetrical a step up from mud, for caul haberdash like the bonnets of being. For all gynecology’s greasy modes, for its fish bowls of amnion and its umbilicals like ropes down wells.
“ ‘What’s that damned kid doing in here?’
“ ‘He’s my son, Doc.’
“ ‘This man is drunk. Get him out of here. Come on, Nancy, push. I can’t do a Caesarean here in your bedroom. Push. Push.’
“ ‘It hurts.’
“ ‘Of course it hurts. Push!’
“But the doctor knew Janet was already dead, your sister was already dead.
“ ‘I knew she was dead. I knew. It just didn’t feel right. Something dead weight to the pain, to the pain itself. It was nothing to do with me. Like a splinter, say, or a cinder in my eye. Like a bone caught in my throat or brambles stuck to my insides. Like decay in a tooth. Something dead weight, foreign matter about the pain. Something violating me. Like a body blow. Like a wound picked up in a war. And, oh God, my dead Janet like so many shards of busted girlbone. Help me, Janet. Help meee!’
“Perhaps the doctor didn’t really care that a child was watching, that the father was, nor the curious young women, neither nurses nor midwives, not even related to the patient, in what the doctor, distracted as he was, busy as he was, may not even have noticed was not a hospital bed it looked so much like one.
“ ‘Something dead weight, out of place, your tiny daughter-corpse caught trespass in my thousand-year male preserve Mills belly like some spooked purdah.’
“Perhaps he even wanted them there. To watch him. To see what he was doing. To grasp a little of what he was up against some of the time. Not just a go-between between a mother and her infant but occasionally having to do the actual main-force dirty work itself. About as scientific as someone pulling teeth or tearing up the ground. Horsing death around in the dark and trying not to cut anything important. Maybe—had he dared—he would have asked one of them to spell him, like a lifeguard over someone drowned. And when he said, ‘Come on, Nancy, push,’ it was at least a little to get Nancy to spell him.
“ ‘Take him out,’ Nancy said. ‘Take George out.’
“ ’Is that child still here? Go on, sonny. Wait outside.’
“ ‘When Georgie had gone. Then I pushed. Then I did. At last it came free. I had not known I could raise the dead.’
“ ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with my kid?’
“ ‘Give me one of those sheets,’ the doctor said.
“ ‘Here,’ Louisa said.
“ ‘Wrap it in this.’ But Louisa just stood there. The doctor looked at each of the girls, then wrapped it himself. But he was a good doctor really, not finally used to infant mortality. When he swaddled the child he left a little open space for the head. He carried it through the living room on his way out.”
“It was blue,” George Mills said.
“Yes,” Wickland said.
“Behind the blood. Under the blood it was blue.”
“Yes.”
“Like a black eye. I saw her. I——”
“ ‘What?’ your father said. ‘What?’
“ ‘Because if you leave history,’ your mother said, ‘you think you have nowhere to go. That’s why you married me. That’s why you said we had to name him George. That’s why you teased my womb with little-girl bait. Yes, George, teased it, then set all your dependably overwhelming centuries of male Mills history against what was after all only my country-girl biology. That’s why our daughter died.’
“ ‘Oh, Nancy,’ your father said. ‘Oh, Nancy, oh, Nancy.’ He was crying.
“ ‘Rosalie and Vietta,’ your mother said. ‘Bernice, Louisa and Irene and all the others.’
“ ‘What?’ your father said.
“ ‘We’ll have to let them go, won’t we?’
“ ‘Let them go?’
“ ‘I mean they can’t do for us anymore. We can’t keep them. There’s only the three of us. Our apartment isn’t that large. You’re out most of the time. Georgie’s in school all day.’
“ ‘They pitched in,’ Mills said. “They pitched in, Nancy, when you weren’t feeling well.’
“It isn’t what you think,” Wickland said. “It wasn’t what it sounds like. She was mad, not crazy. She was still in control of the ironies. She didn’t want you ever to find out about the Millses. She made him promise. Only then would she agree to stay with him.
“The girls wouldn’t be coming once she was on her feet again. She would have no one to work her judgments on. She had already judged her husband. She had already judged you.”
“Me?” George said. “What did she say about——”
“ ‘This child must have no ancestors. I am on the child’s side in this. If the child is to assign blame it will have to assign it to the near-at-hand, to its own propinquitous, soured operations, its own ordinary faults and weaknesses, errors in judgment, deficiencies of will, the watered cement of its inadequate aspirations and glass-jaw being. I will have done all I could. I will have set it free.’ ”
“She’s going to leave me after all,” George said.
“She’s not even talking about you,” Wickland said harshly.
“But——”
“The girl,” Wickland said. “She’s talking about the girl, she’s referring to Janet.”
“But——”
“Janet starts school in September. I don’t think she knows we’re poor. She knows I have to work of course, and that our little family is dependent upon even what George brings in from working after school. She isn’t a stupid child, but when she asked me that time about her daddy she seemed to accept my answer. She only questioned me that once. Perhaps she’s really rather sensitive. Perhaps she understands more than she lets on. Maybe she speaks to Georgie about it at night in their room in the dark. Up to now, I don’t think he’s told her any more about it than I have, but I’ve noticed that he’s restless and a little angry. Someday he’ll tell her the truth, what he knows about it. Why kid myself? He’s told her already. Of course he’s told her. He’s told her of a grand man, a strong, kind man waiting in Milwaukee, and that if things are ever terrible enough he’ll take her there and then they won’t be terrible anymore. And if he hasn’t written yet, it’s because things aren’t terrible enough yet. He’s afraid of course. It’s his trump card and he’s afraid to play it. Poor Georgie.
“But I hope she’s sensitive. But who knows? She’s so docile. She accepts everything. She’s like everyone else finally. As Georgie is. As I am. As George is like a thousand years of Millses and has never dared not to be.
“We take what comes. Everybody does. Even a little girl. I am certain she has never said, ‘Write him then. You showed me his address. Write him then.’ We take what comes. And if nothing comes we take that. Everybody does. George was wrong. You can’t quit Corinth. There isn’t any Corinth to quit.
“You’re wondering if I shall ever get to the point. But I already have, you see. Must I spell it out for you? Very well then.
“I shall do no more references. There’s no need. In my judgment there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between any of us. There’s no such thing as character. It’s as I said in Milwaukee. One size fits all.
“Now look,” Wickland said. “Can you see her?”
“Yes,” George said, sobbing. “But I don’t want to.”
“It won’t last,” Wickland said. “Nothing lasts.”
“But——”
“Yes?” Wickland said. “Was there something else?”
George didn’t know. That is, he didn’t know what it was. He was certain there was something else and that Wickland would show it to him, and that it would be terrible, worse than anything yet. It had begun by his wanting to know if he had powers. Kinsley had said he had and, for a time, he thought he had. But only Wickland had powers. He was a reverend of reality and George believed that at that moment he could have shown him anything, everything. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know what was left to see or if he wanted to see it, but Wickland had powers and Wickland hadn’t dismissed him yet.
They sat for perhaps an hour. The sun was beginning to set. There was a chill. He wanted to be released but the reverend was not ready to let him go. Or he wasn’t ready.
Then George sighed.
“You said he didn’t want me to find out about the Millses. You said she got him to promise that he wouldn’t tell.”
“Yes,” Wickland said.
“But I did find out about them. He has told me.”
“Yes. He still thinks there’s a Corinth. He thinks it’s Cassadaga.”
“I don’t——”
“Because he’s no rebel,” Wickland said, “because there’s nothing you can do to him to make him one. Because telling you was his trump card, and playing it was the only way he had to avenge what I did and to stand by history.”
“What you did?”
“You told me you saw her, you said you could see her. She’s going to have a baby.”
He did not return to Kinsley’s. It was already dark when he left Cassadaga. In the sky the stars must have looked like salt.
PART THREE
1
Messenger, running late, found the little street off Carondolet and parked. It was his second day on Judith Gazer’s route. When he took Mrs. Carey’s tray from the insulated box there were three left. He locked the door on the driver’s side, found the house and opened the gate of the little low fence, low as a fence in storybooks.
He had called first, phoning from Albert Reece’s apartment, the man’s permission grudgingly granted.
“That wasn’t long distance, was it?” Reece asked when Messenger had hung up. “If it was only across the river they’d charge me a toll.”
“It was in the city,” Messenger said.
“Could I see that paper?” Messenger showed him the number and Reece studied it for a moment. “All right then,” he said. “Call it a dime.” Cornell handed him the coin. “If this was Russia you could call for free. They got Socialized Telephone in Russia.”
“Long distance too?”
“Kids,” Reece said, “don’t ever talk about you. You get a free ride with kids. Kids don’t give a shit about your morals or your politics. I’m talking infants, toddlers, boys on tricycles. Kids just ain’t shockable. If a little golden fairy was to tip his cap to a kid in the street, the kid would just look at the fairy and tell him good morning. The only way to shock a kid is to hold his finger to the socket. The elderly is different. Old-timers love to correct you. They enjoy it that you’re a traitor or that you live in sin. They love that you sit with your legs apart or are on the take. It warms their hearts the parks ain’t safe and you’re going to hell.
“Don’t get me wrong, Professor. The old are just as hard to shock as any six-year-old. They not only seen it all, they done eighty-six percent of it. Christ, they’re as crazy about bad news as you are. Why shouldn’t things stink if you’re going to die soon? It’s just that we love to correct, show our disapproval like preserves we’ve put up. If we had the strength we’d throw stones. So just don’t underestimate us. Don’t be sly and don’t be disrespectful. Don’t ask an old-timer ‘Long distance too?’ when he’s trying to explain Socialized Telephone in the USSR to you.
“All I want to know is this. How’d a son of a bitch like you get into this line of work?”
“What do you want from me?” Messenger asked. “Tomorrow we have chunks of braised beef served with noodles in a rich broth, buttered Texas toast, French-style green beans and glazed pineapple tidbits. Or you could have breaded beef cutlet, Wisconsin whole-grain corn and red beet slices. What do you want from me?”
“Wise guy,” Reece said. “That’s all right. We love it you’re a wise guy. We think it’s terrific you’re a horse’s ass.”
Messenger, understanding that they didn’t like him, was untroubled. He only found it a little unfair. He brought their dinners, he did for them, even helping to feed those one or two of his clients who could not manage
for themselves. He spent perhaps fifteen minutes with each of them, twice as much as Judith told him would be necessary. At some other time of his life he would have been bothered perhaps by their hostility, but now it was a matter of indifference to him, as things were a matter of indifference to him to which he had never thought he would become accommodated.
Messenger had had what he thought of as a curious life. He had published a collection of stories and three novels, all of which were out of print, none of which had ever come out in paperback. And though he was still occasionally invited to read from his work on various campuses, the fees were always small and the invitations invariably came from friends who themselves hoped to be invited to his school in return. (It was a point of pride with him that he never returned the favor.) There were seldom more than thirty or forty people in his audiences, half of whom were there because they had been asked to the party in his honor afterward. He was forty-five years old and accepted these offers not for the money and certainly not for the opportunity they gave him to see his old friends but because on one such trip, shortly after the publication of his second novel, he had met a really beautiful young graduate student who had driven him back to his motel after the party and spent the night with him in his room. She said she was nuts about his work, but when he ordered breakfast for them the next morning it turned out she had read only one of his stories. It was the single story he had published in The New Yorker, the title story of a collection he was to publish a year later, and the only thing he’d ever written to be optioned for the movies. The amiable madman who had purchased the option, Amos Ropeblatt, a hopeful fellow who had once had something to do with an Orson Welles film made back in the fifties, renewed it annually for five hundred dollars.
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