“Did you enjoy your tour, Mrs. Mills?” the aunt asked. She sat in a large, curving wing chair of upholstered silk, her long, thin forearms and mottled, arthritic hands arranged over twin tracks of tight gold fringe, her large purse open and settled beside her like a queen’s. Her fine, crossed legs were clear, firm as a dancer’s, and her expression as she waited for Louise’s answer, layered, a cool palimpsest of serenity, indifference and concern. Like several of the senior members of the family George had noticed at the funeral, she did not wear mourning. Indeed, her light woolen coat dress, exactly the color of fleshtone in a black and white photograph, seemed more the clothing of the owner of an odds-on Derby favorite in her special box than it did of someone who had just buried a niece. Mills noticed her long, misshapen, ringless fingers and wondered whether she had ever been married or if she had had her jewelry cut from her painful, blistered joints.
“Oh yes,” Louise said, “oh yes, indeed. It may not be proper etiquette to say so, but this has been a very special and exciting day for us. I never expected to be invited to a house like this. Goodness, it’s like something in picture books. Or what I imagine palaces in the old country must look like. George knows more about these things but I can tell he’s as thrilled as I am. Aren’t you, George?”
He sweltered for Louise in her black mourning dress, for himself in his dark suit. “Yes,” he said.
“I know,” his wife said. “And we want to thank you for having us. And the children are darling. I only hope that it had to be on such a sad occasion. I mean…”
“Of course,” the aunt said, smiling. “But surely you needn’t go yet, Mrs. Mills. My nieces-in-law want to show you the miniature railroad that Judith’s father built for her to ride in when she was a child.”
“You mean like the little train that takes you around the zoo?”
“Quite like that, yes. I’ll tell Grant to organize a ride for you. My nieces will go with you.”
“Oh, George, did you hear? We’re going for a ride on a little train.”
“Well, Mrs. Mills, I thought you and the girls might make do on your own. This might be a good time for Mr. Mills to speak with Mr. Claunch.”
“Oh,” Louise said.
“I go with Lulu on the choo-choo?” Cornell said.
The aunt—George was not sure of her name, though he knew that the rich did not always give their names, that they lived unlisted lives—glared at Cornell. “Yes,” said the aunt, “of course. I should have thought to ask.”
Mr. Claunch, as it turned out, was not Harry, but Harry’s father.
The builder of the miniature railroad and the splinter-free ballet studio was waiting for him in a kind of trophy room. Plaques the shape of arrowheads hung next to framed oval photos of horses and riders, of dogs and handlers. There were mounted blue ribbons that fell away from inscribed rosettes big and round as clocks in schoolrooms, like pressed pants. Leather straps with tiny bronze horseshoes dangled from them, the sculpted heads of horses snugged into their curves. Silver bowls rested on bric-a-brac shelves next to porcelain animals, and everywhere, no larger than pocket watches, bas-relief medallions were pressed onto the walls like an equine coinage. Along another wall, high up, were prep school banners large as pillowcases, college pennants, the guidons of military academies like a felt heraldry. Beneath these were columns of framed team photographs—football, baseball, hockey, swimming, soccer, track—oddly like the Won and Lost listings in newspapers. Mary and Milly, in ice skating costumes, their arms spread, dipped toward the camera in clumsy arabesques. There were pictures of golfers and tennis players, and slalomers on skis kicking their bodies past gates like conga dancers. There were queer, high-altitude photographs of people on the summits of mountains. They seemed shy as foot shufflers, scuffers of shoes.
Claunch was seated beside a writing table with his legs crossed and his left hand resting lightly on the surface of the table. He wore a dark blazer and bright plaid trousers lustered as kilt. He had a large face, and thick black horn rims—dated as Mills’s mood ring—hung on his eyes like shiners. Though he was smoking, Mills saw no ashtray in the room. Here and there thin columns of smoke rose from the silver trophy bowls into which Claunch Sr. dropped unextinguished cigarettes.
“You’re here,” he said glumly. “All right, come in. Beat it please, Aunt.” Was she his aunt? George wondered. “I look,” he said gloomily when the woman had gone, “like a past president of an International Olympic Games Committee.”
“I’m Mills,” Mills said meekly, “and I just want to say how sorry I am about Mrs. Glazer.”
“All torn up, are you?”
“She was very nice,” George said. “She went through a lot.”
“I know what she went through,” Mrs. Glazer’s father said. “She went through all of us. She went through all of us like a high wind. Trailer courts arse over tip, dozens left homeless. I know what she went through.” He leaned suddenly forward, like Milly and Mary in their ice skating costumes. “Was I missed? At my daughter’s funeral, was I missed? What was the dark, black-ass buzz?”
“I didn’t hear anything, sir.”
Claunch closed his palms rapidly over his eyes, ears and mouth, and Mills shifted uneasily. “Oh come on, Mills,” Claunch said, “she called me from Mexico. She called collect like some kid off at college. The things she said to me.” He shook his head. “I tell you, George,” he went on, “at first I thought that pancreatic cancer was a blessing. Not a blessing in disguise, but the outright, up-front, stand-tall stuff itself. Some no-strings cancer, three to four months at the outside and the patient so stuffed with pain, medication and final things she wouldn’t have time for her dotty trouble campaigns. Even after she decided on her last-ditch stand, her hundred percent final effort, and went off for fruit therapy in old Mexico, I still thought blessing! Blessing, godsend, favorable balance of payments!
“It didn’t occur to me until after I stopped accepting her calls and began to hear from two or three of her hot-lunch clients that even if there’s no God the devil sure exists. And something else became clear, too. That the weight of those charges she continued to press even in extremis took on something of a deathbed power, that even a poor old bunch of poor old bastards in their own extremis would hear her out and make vows, pledges. Deathbed calling to deathbed in perseverant, unfaltering howl. The nerve of that woman! Intruding on their desuetude, enlisting the worn-out in her worn-out life.”
“Meals-on-Wheels people phoned? I never heard this. She must have called them when I wasn’t in the room.”
“She gave away all my unpublished numbers. She put it out on the highest authority—her word as somebody terminal—that I was their absentee landlord, the s.o.b. who wouldn’t pay for their crumbled plumbing or fix their faulty wiring, that I darkened their hallways and stairs and put governing devices on their water and electric. She told them that she became involved with Meals-on-Wheels when she discovered who owned those rat traps. She said it was to make moral restitution.”
“They called you up?”
“They’re poor, Mills. Do you know what poverty is? Real poverty? It’s not having any conception of how rich the rich really are. They don’t know doodly squat about us. Sure they called. I set them straight of course. Judith wasn’t crazy enough to believe her campaign would fly. But she did her damage. She got what she wanted.”
“What did she want?”
“What did she want? I’m an old man. It was those goddamn unpublished numbers. There must have been fifteen of them. It was to annoy me. All that trouble just to annoy me. Think! If I replaced them, tell me, how in hell could a man my age learn the new ones?”
Mills watched the old man, a rich old man who had the sturdy look of one who had had his children late in life, whose spiffy, offhand rich man’s style, his blazers and rakish, researched plaids (and dozens more just like them in hotel suites along prime beach front properties on selected coasts) would be familiar in boardrooms and the cockpits of pr
ivate jets, at golf classics and aboard presidential yachts, to popes come calling and heads of state dropped in on, to mistresses (they would not be beautiful or even all that much younger than he), to society and the horsy and doggy sets in the capital cities (because surely he liked to get out once in a while, down to Brasilia to see the generals, off to Brussels for cabal and conspiracy with the good old boys of the Trilateral Commission), which were clothes and climate too, serviceable as an Arab’s burnoose. It was just possible, Mills thought, that Claunch alone had no decent suit, and he wondered how he came by his fervid imagination and privy fantasies. And just how rich the rich really are. Poor Mills, Mills thought. For all his serving-man’s history and butler’s genes, there had been no rich men in his life. These little litanies were a sort of crazy faith, the only one the saved, grace-stated man possessed. And was weary of his star-struck inventories which pulled against his nature in ways he did not even begin to understand.
He did not want to hear Claunch out, was suddenly ashamed of the services he’d already rendered. He told himself he listened out of courtesy, as a guest. For Lulu in the choo-choo for whom this day had been an outing. (And Messenger still to be heard out!)
“This,” Claunch said, waving his cigarette about the room, “was my daughter’s dollhouse.”
“Sir?”
“Well she made it up,” he said. “The team photographs were clipped out of yearbooks. The ribbons and trophies came from pawnshops, garage sales. Even the loving cups, the silver bowls.”
“But they’re inscribed,” George said.
“To strangers. To Whom It May Concern.’ “
“What for?”
Claunch shrugged. “She was nuts.”
Mills wasn’t interested. Not in Claunch’s money and power nor in his abrupt, summary ways. There was nothing for him here. He did not need to know anything or have anything. It was astonishing to him that he had ever gone to Mexico, that he had supervised deathbeds so unreluctantly. That his passions had been up. He was tired of all of them—of Breel, the Claunches, the Meals-on-Wheelers, Messenger, the Glazer girls, himself. Amazed he’d consented to be a pallbearer or given a moment’s thought to the character of his suit. Dumbstruck he’d taken any part at all. He had let everyone bully him, everyone. Father Merchant, all his lockstep, aspic’d ancestors. Now he would turn to go and Claunch Sr. would embrace him with one more confidence, one last devastating request. He knew what it might be, knew he would decline. That whatever the disparity in their wealth or power, it was Claunch who was subject to temptation, snarled in gravity and desire, Mills who was free.
So he turned to go. Disengaged as the dead, indifferent as wood.
“What did she tell you?”
“Nothing,” Mills said.
“She wasn’t a quiet woman. She wasn’t shy, she wasn’t modest. Anything on her mind burned holes in her pockets. She spent confidence like a drunken sailor.”
“Nothing was on her mind.”
“You were with her for weeks. You saw her die, you watched her dress size come down.”
“Yes.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Your unpublished numbers.”
“Don’t tangle with me, Mills. What did she tell you?”
“Everything.”
“Horseshit.”
(And thought of Greatest Grandfather Mills.)
“Wait,” Claunch said, “don’t go. Please, Mills. Please, George.”
“Tell me what you want,” George Mills said. (Thinking: You can’t have it, there’s nothing left.) And didn’t wait for Claunch to reply, telling him instead what any of them—his forebears—would have told him, mollycoddling grief and concern, handling his anxiety like something armed, primed, talking him in off all his rich man’s window ledges—because much had been lost in the retelling, blurred in the father-to-son translations, distinction smudged as a ruin—seeing a thousand pairs of boots radiant in the hall, hearing even as he spoke them the rote and passionless lies, his ancient tribe’s ancient there-theres and now-nows, the primitive consolations—for bread, a nickel for a cup of coffee, a coin for a candy, a place to hide from the wind—worn-out as a witchdoctor’s gibberish. (And seeing for perhaps the first time in a thousand years something even more radiant and splendid than the cumulative shine on the cumulative boots. Glittering spectra beyond trust. Bright as belief. And thinking: Why, we could have destroyed them!)
“Was the pain ever more than she could handle?”
“Sometimes she’d take an extra aspirin.”
“Aspirin? Only aspirin?”
“Her belief comforted her.”
“Yes,” Claunch said, “there was that. She believed.”
(And Cornell to be mollified. Was something between them? Not his business. Nothing his business.)
“Tell me,” Claunch said softly, “did she curse me?”
“There was a kind of message.”
“Oh?” he said. “A message?”
“She didn’t want there to be hard feelings.”
“She told you she forgave me?” Claunch asked hopefully.
“No,” Mills said, and looked directly at the ambassadorlike man. “She told me she apologized.”
He passed a row of garages with their antique and classic automobiles. (He had noticed one or two at the church, three more at the cemetery. In the narrow roadway it had looked more like a rally than a burial.) And crossed past a middle-aged couple examining a restored 1933 Plymouth which Mills recognized as being exactly like Wickland’s old car in Florida, the one his father had driven to De Land on his errands. The man smiled and waved, and George nodded at him.
He did not have to be told where to go. Not instinct this time either, and certainly not grace and down from déjà vu and history. Not even imagination so much as a blueprint knowledge of its location, certain, sure as a housekeeper where things went. Knowing there’d be a toy station, population, elevation signs, a town’s given name high on the station nostalgic as a stand of trees or the iron horse itself. (It would bear the name of wood or game: Elmville. Deerfield.) Flowers would be planted around its platform, along its borders.
And started to climb a low knoll. And heard the train before he saw it. Not its comical whistle—certain of this, too: the outsize locomotive wail that would be hung about its neck like some apocalyptic joke—but its tinny chuff chuff as it pulled them along the banks and straightaways of its miniature routes. (Imagining Mrs. Glazer as a child, laughing hysterically, pissing her drawers, unable to help herself, seduced, ravished by motion.) Seeing it before he actually saw it (because despite reservation, protestation, all his low-grade weariness of their complicated, graceless lives, he had his Mills-given gift for the inventory of the rich, as intimate a knowledge of their safes, attics and basements as he had of his own clothes closet——precious treasure’s second sight).
At the top of the rise he spotted them in their luscious, bulldozed valley. Grant—who forebore to wear the engineer’s cap Mills saw stuffed in his pocket—sat behind a long locomotive on a sloping tender which served as a seat, his hands on controls which poked out of the rear of the engine like levers in a tavern game. Four topless passenger cars the dimensions of desks were pulled along at about fifteen miles an hour. The coaches’ only slightly scaled-down seats were plush, reversible, wide as rumble seat. George saw the heavy brass handles, tickets fluttering from them like bright feathers. Frames had been painted onto the wide safety glass that wrapped each car to give the illusion of windows. Milly sat primly alone in the last coach, his wife and Cornell facing each other in the second, their knees touching in the crowded quarters. Louise was the one who rode backward. Mary sat on a bench outside the station and glanced impatiently at her wrist watch and then up the line just as if she were waiting for a real train.
He started down the slope, his eyes on the single and sometimes double set of tracks which merged and seemed to cover each other like stripes on a barber pole. When he was halfway d
own the hill Louise spotted him and waved. She called to the engineer and Grant sounded the whistle, bass as a boat’s, and rang the bell, his face obscured in the plume of steam which feathered back from the stack.
George came to a siding next to some signals and switches and waited for the train to pass. He smiled—instinct again, or reflex—at Milly. Messenger grinned and shouted something to him which he couldn’t make out, and when the train had gone by he crossed the tracks and passed through the thin verisimilitude of tiny trees which masked the passengers’ vision from their toy environment, and walked directly across the carefully landscaped oval to the station.
He sat next to Mary, who seemed subdued now, all interest lost, if she’d ever had any, in the elaborate rig.
“That train ain’t going in your direction?”
“I never ride the day my mother is buried.”
“Oh,” Mills said.
“I bet they don’t stop,” she said. “Your wife and that Cornell character have been going round and round just forever. Not a thought for poor old Grant who has to catch all that steam in his face.”
“The steam is hot?”
“Well no, it isn’t hot exactly but it’s not very pleasant. It’s just especially horrible when you’ve just had your hair done, even if you’re sitting well back in the cars like Milly.”
“I see.”
She shifted about to face him. “But it’s all right at night if there’s interesting guests and we all get inside and Grant puts the roofs on the coaches. Then one can have air conditioning in summer or electric heaters in winter. Then it’s very cozy. Very especially if it’s a boy-girl party. There’s lots more track that runs through those woods yonder. Then it can be better than a sleigh or hayride. Then it’s just like the tunnel of love.”
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