George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “The starving woman thanks you on behalf of her five starving children, and wishes you to know that every bite of their first meal in four days will be dedicated to the honor of your gracious self.”

  “Hmph,” Judith Glazer said.

  “The legless cripple is profoundly moved by your generosity, and says that he will direct the nephews who carry him to his post every morning and pick him up again in the evening to take him up the steps and into the church so that he may light candles for your continued health and good fortune.”

  “Tell him,” Mrs. Glazer said evenly, “don’t try to thank me.”

  “The impaired wino sends his and his Saviour’s compliments, and resolves to pledge himself to a new life in partial repayment for the three dollars.”

  She had him take her into poorer and poorer sections of the city, abandoning the busy street corners and entrances to the fashionable shops and restaurants, the hotels and museums where beggars congregated to groan their appeals against the chipper discourse of the rich, driving with her into the narrow barrios, the blighted box board and charred, tar paper slums, places where the beggars had only each other to importune, raising the ante of their already stretched humility to outright, outraged fantasy.

  And now she had him lower the car windows. And now she had him open the doors.

  They looked on the big, late-model American car with as much astonishment and fear as if it had been a tank. Children backed against the jagged, chicken wire frames they used as doorways and called their adults to witness the strange new avatar, the queer incarnation, sudden in the roadless, streetless jumble of singed, mismatched shacks as a visitation of angels or government.

  Seeing it was only a lone man, a lone woman, they lost their alarm and began to push forward.

  “This is crazy,” Mills said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Sound the horn,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Let them know we’re here.”

  “They already know we’re here.”

  Mrs. Glazer raised herself from where she was slumped in the back seat and leaned forward. She reached over Mills’s shoulder and pressed the horn.

  “Oh boy,” Mills said.

  “Don’t get out. They can come forward and you can hand the money out to them.”

  When Mills didn’t move she reached for her purse and undid the clasp. Hands and arms like the feelers of sea creatures groped toward her through the car’s opened doors. Mills, frightened, pulled out his pesos and started to cram them into the first hand he saw. “No,” she said, “just one note. Just one! Here,” she said, “give me.” She pulled the notes out of his fist and, selecting the smallest denomination, pushed it into one of the outstretched hands. Then, inspired, she smiled, dropped the rest of the money into her lap, and took some loose change from her purse. She held out a handful of coins to them, ten-centavo pieces, twenty. “For all of you,” she said. “Para todos. Para todos de usted.” She sat back in her seat, lightly tapping the thick pile of bills in her lap, her gold and diamond rings loosely spinning on her thin fingers. She looked on serenely while the Mexicans talked to each other in whispers. Then, with great effort, she moved out of the car toward them, holding out the last of her change, perhaps six or seven cents.

  He thought they would both be killed, but the Mexicans only drew further away from the car, their mood nervous and apprehensive and lined with a sort of amusement. A woman indicated the two Americans and shook her head. Then they all did, making the high signs and hand signals of aloof contempt, the shrugs and semaphores of all touch-temple allowance. “Help me back into the car,” she said, disappointed.

  Mills was determined that they wouldn’t try that again.

  Meanwhile she continued to avoid the treatments.

  George drove her to the clinic each morning and called for her again at noon. It was she who sent him away. “There aren’t enough chairs,” she’d explain. “These people are waiting to see the doctors. You’d only be taking up the seat of someone terminally ill.” But when he returned he would find her sitting where he’d left her, or rummaging through a table of Mexican magazines. “Oh, Mills,” she said, “waiting rooms are the same all over the world. Only the names of the film stars in the periodicals are different, or the wall hangings in the legislative chambers. These hemlines are shorter, but I believe I saw this salad in the Sunday pictures section of the Post-Dispatch.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Oh, I haven’t seen the doctor yet. I was about to but this little girl—she couldn’t have been more than six—arrived with her parents. I gave them my place.”

  She’d had her tests, the blood profiles and X-rays and urine analyses she had first had done in St. Louis, as well as a cancer immunological test which was not performed in the United States. It was patented, the Mexicans told her.

  “Of course, I don’t really buy any of it,” she told him in the car. “But I believe that dreams come true.”

  She suggested they go out again that night on another alms spree.

  “You’re tired,” Mills said.

  “Yes,” she admitted, “I’m very weak.”

  “Look,” he said, “if it’s all that important to you I’ll go myself.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Don’t you trust me? You think I’d keep the money?”

  “I trust you dandy. It wouldn’t mean much unless I went. All right,” she said, “we won’t plan anything. We’ll wait and see how I feel this evening.”

  She felt terrible that evening. She couldn’t even get out of bed. Mills knew she’d made a mistake to bring him. He had no touch with pain. He had fears and misgivings about everything he did for her. At the height of her pain and nausea he thought she should try to eat something, that food might confuse the beast in her gut. He wasn’t sure but he thought it was probably a good idea. He wanted to phone the clinic but officially she hadn’t been assigned a doctor yet. He couldn’t remake her bed properly, and thought he should call Housekeeping to have them send someone while he carried her to the room’s other bed, but she objected to having anyone else in the room.

  He spoke to her, but it took so much effort for her to talk he cringed when she answered. He said nothing, and she thought he’d left her. The pain had affected her vision. “I’m here,” he said, “I haven’t gone anywhere. You mustn’t talk,” he said. “You’ve got to save your strength.” He watched her thrash in the bed, the sheets and covers and pillows in such disarray he could not straighten them without causing her pain. He moved her back into the other bed. He wondered if he should call St. Louis. It was after two in the morning. They’d be alarmed. He knew they’d blame him for everything that happened. He was no nurse. He recalled how peacefully Mr. Mead had died, the old sailor slipping beneath his death as casually as one enters tepid water. He decided she should be in a hospital and said so. Groaning, she shook her head. “They’re equipped for this stuff,” he said.

  “No good,” she managed. She’d already explained why. She was afraid they wouldn’t give her her pain pills when she wanted them, that they’d withhold them. She wanted Mills to give her a double dose now, two large, oddly shaped blocks of morphine like tiny bricks. It would have been the strongest dose she’d had yet. He broke a tablet in two and fed the halves past her impaired vision. He called the front desk and got on their caretaker service, although the caretaker had already left on his 2:00 A.M. rounds.

  “You have only one?”

  “The guests are either sleeping or already in the hospital this time of night.”

  “Get in touch with him. Send him by.”

  Suddenly she was worried about the expense. There was an extra charge for this amenity. It was the middle of the night, they had you over a barrel. “Shh,” George said. She wanted him to cancel the order, she became quite hysterical about it. He hadn’t, he told her, made one.

  “I heard you.”

  They lost each other in explanations.

  “I’m hungry,” she sa
id, and he told her that was a good sign, but he didn’t think he should give her anything too heavy. “Feed a cold and starve a cancer,” she said lucidly.

  The morphine was beginning to ease her. She dozed off. The caretaker waked her when he knocked on the door. It was the kid from the parking lot, the one he’d given a dollar to watch the car.

  The boy glanced at Mrs. Glazer. “She fine, man.” he said. “See joo in fifteen minuteses.”

  Strangely, the boy seemed to have reassured her. “Ask him,” she said, “if he thinks I should have something to eat.”

  “Him?”

  “He’s the caretaker. He sees dozens of patients. Ask.”

  The boy was standing beside a door three rooms down. “Good,” George said, “I thought I’d missed you.”

  “No, man. There’s this Mercedes SL 100 I watching out for on this side. Joo see it?”

  “No.”

  The boy shrugged. “Maybe they checked out.”

  “He says room service is closed,” he told her.

  “It’s just as well,” she said. “Everything is so expensive.” She questioned him closely about their expenses, recalling each traveler’s check she’d given him to cash, and demanding an account of how it had been spent.

  “We don’t get a good rate of exchange,” she mourned.

  They lived in waves, something peristaltic to their moods, reality pushing them to the wall one moment and surrendering not to joy so much as to a sort of deranged confidence the next. He understood that their burlesque hope had its source in her pain’s by now ludicrous remissions. In an odd way he had become dependent on Mrs. Glazer’s morphine, remotely hooked on the woman’s transitory well-being. He telephoned St. Louis only when she was without pain.

  Also, he was still unaccustomed to himself in a foreign country. This was more difficult to figure, but it had to do with his horizon vision, his sense of a life lived within parallel lines. Ciudad Juarez was situated in the open end of a three-sided valley, a trough of drying world set down within the clipped, broken waves of the surrounding hills and mountains. These became landmarks and mileposts. More. They were the spectacle mien and proclamation of his distance, exotic and outrageous as a milliary column in a woods. Snakes oozed in the hills. Queer lizards turned their heads in strobic thrusts. He was where the mountains were who had lived on plains beneath unpunctuated skies. He came from there. He was here. He was here and not there. And lived with a notion of having doubled himself. It was not unlike what he had felt in Cassadaga when he was a boy.

  She had started her treatments. After her terrible night there were no more delays. The curious dalliance was over. “It won’t work anyway,” she’d said the next morning. “Let’s get going.”

  They wanted to keep her in the clinic annex for two days to administer calcium in an IV solution. The nurse touched Mrs. Glazer’s hair lightly. “It will help keep your hair that pretty yellow color.”

  “My pretty yellow hair fell out. This is a wig.”

  George went with her to a sort of orientation seminar in the clinic’s cafeteria. They sat with other patients in the Eleventh of May Cafeteria. Father Merchant, at a rear table, was picking from a cylinder of popcorn. A tall man in hospital whites leaned against a stack of trays and greeted them.

  “Buen dia. I’m Dr. Jesus Gomeza. So,” he said, “I will answer all your questions about el grande C.

  “You know, not so long ago, people like you would hear cancer and think, Oh boy, sure death. Certain curtains. Even now. I know. I know what happens. I interned in your country. These white duds are from a Sears Roebuck in Omaha. So I know what happens.

  “The tests come back. The doctor breaks the news to a wife, or to some take-charge guy in from Portland with a good vocabulary. The patient is the last to know. Listen, I’ve been there. It’s this hush-hush, very top secret disease. The family cocks around with each other for weeks. Then this one tells that one, somebody else overhears someone on a telephone, but no one’s ever sure who knows what. Am I right? They’re not even sure if Pop knows what’s what, and he’s the poor bastard losing important pieces of himself on the operating table. They’re getting ready to bury him and the whispering campaign still ain’t over. ‘Did he know what he had? Does he know that he’s dead?’

  “But you know, don’t you? You folks know what you have, so we don’t have to worry about that part. You’ve got cancer. Say it. Say ‘Cancer, I’ve got cancer!’

  “I don’t hear you. Good golly, am I wrong? Have I made a mistake? Aren’t these the cancer people? Father Merchant, you rascal, have you played one of your tricks on me? Did you bring one of your tour buses by? Are you folks healthy? You don’t look healthy. Hell no, you look like you’ve got cancer. Why, I can see the tumors from over here. I can hear the brain tumors rolling around in your skulls like marbles. I see extra lumps in the bras. I can almost make out some of the more difficult stuff, the crapola tucked away in your organs like contraband. Hey, Mister, the guy in the green shirt——don’t turn around, you’re the one I’m talking to. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ve got a cancer,” a man said shyly.

  “Sure you do,” Dr. Gomeza said cheerfully. “And the lady at the long table holding the flower, what have you got?”

  “Cancer.”

  “I want,” he said, “to see the hands of everyone who believes that the national medical associations have conspired to suppress our so-called unproven treatments, that vested establishment interests are afraid to risk a head-on confrontation with the proponents of Laetrile research. Let’s see those hands.

  “So many? Tch-tch. The cancer’s spread that far, has it? It’s bitten that deep? No no, put your hands down. You’re too sick to be waving them about like that. Your disease has metastasized. It’s into your beliefs by now, it’s knocked the stuffing out of incredulity. Your gullibility glands are amok. Tch-tch.

  “So that’s why you’ve come. Not to be cured but to stand up and be counted on the deathbed. What, you think this is a protest rally? You hate your doctors? You begrudge your oncologist because he made you nauseous? There’s no conspiracy. They’re good men. My God, folks, nine out of twelve of you came down here with their permission, with their blessing even. I’m going to tell you something. American doctors are the best diagnosticians in the world. Those guys know what’s wrong with you. And I’ll tell you something else. If it were in their power they’d even cure you!

  “Say it,” he commanded. “Say ‘Cancer! I’ve got cancer!’ ”

  “Cancer!” they called out cheerfully, “I’ve got cancer!”

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Dr. Gomeza said.

  He told them about Laetrile, how it was found in the pits of peaches, apricots and bitter almonds, and gave them a chemistry lesson, explaining amygdalin and how hydrocyanic acid worked against the betaglucosidase in tumors, and even listed for them the drug’s pleasant side effects. He went over with them just what they must do, describing the regimen to them, a book of hours for their three daily injections, their course of special enzymes, the ritual of their vitamins, their diet.

  “Look,” he said, “we’re going to lose some of you. People still die of appendicitis, too. And sometimes even a paper cut has been known to derange the system and the victim dies. So maybe you’re out of luck. It could even be you’re stuck with some fluke cancer which doesn’t respond to fruit. It’s possible. This is the world. Unexpected things happen. Go ask Sloan-Kettering. How many of their guys go down?”

  He wished them luck.

  And when he finished they applauded. Even Mrs. Glazer. Even George.

  Father Merchant finished his popcorn and left.

  Now he was her visitor as well as her employee. She sat in one chair by the side of her bed, and he in the other. Since coming back from the clinic she had somehow created the illusion for him, for them both, that when he arranged a pillow behind her head or poured her a drink of the clinic’s bottled water or brought her the El Paso
newspaper or turned the channels on the TV set until they found a program acceptable to them both, it was as a guest, some loyal companion who might almost have been female, a bridge partner, say, someone who had served with her on committees.

  “What are you having for dinner?” she might ask.

  “I thought I’d go to that Mexican place again.”

  “Oh, don’t say it. I’m fond of Mexican food, too, but my husband won’t touch it. We almost never go.”

  “It’s time for your injection.”

  “Could you do it? The nurse the clinic sends bruises me so. I’ve never really been a delicate woman. It’s cancer which softened my skin and made me petite. Just look at these legs and thighs. You’d never suspect that at one time I had the limbs of a six-day bicycle racer.”

  At four in the afternoon they would watch a program on Mexican television, “Maria, Maria,” a soap opera set in the nineteenth century, about an illegitimate servant girl lusted after and badly treated by all the men in the benighted town in the obscure province in which she was indentured. It was the most popular program in Mexico, one of those shows that stops a country’s business for an hour or so and encourages people to believe that they are participants in an event of carefully resolved attention, their own lives temporarily forgotten in careless, throwaway sympathy. Mills and Mrs. Glazer had been watching for a week, and though neither understood the Spanish they knew the characters, and by reading the El Paso paper, which followed the plot with a daily summary like the synopsis in an opera program, they were able to understand the story.

  “The president is watching this now in the capital,” Mrs. Glazer said. “He is suspicious of Maria’s new friend while the Minister of Internal Affairs plots against him with his most trusted generals.”