George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  The train came by without slowing and an enhanced Messenger stood up in the coach, his hands braced on top of the glass. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” He was laughing.

  “If you want a ride you have to flag the train,” Mary said.

  “That’s all right,” Mills said.

  “There’s a toilet inside the station if you have to go. There’s a potbelly stove.”

  “I know,” Mills said. “There’s a map of the line behind glass. There’s travel posters and old waiting room benches.”

  Mary looked at him curiously. “Did Grandfather tell you?”

  “No.”

  “My mom?”

  “Is Grant nice?”

  “Very nice. He’s worked for the family years. We’re all very polite to Grant.”

  “Is Grant his first name or his last name?”

  “You’d have to ask Milly.”

  “Where’s the flag?”

  “Over there,” she said, “but you can use your handkerchief or raise your hand as if you were hailing a cab.”

  “You do it,” Mills said.

  “No,” she said, “it’s stupid.”

  “Does Grant ever get to go for a ride?”

  “He’s riding now.”

  “I mean in the cars. I mean in the coaches.”

  Messenger, grinning, helped Louise down from the train when it pulled in. It’s her big day, Mills thought.

  “Can my husband have a ride?” Louise asked.

  “I’m all right,” George said.

  “Just once or twice around,” she said. “You can’t tell from here but there’s a tiny model city where the train makes its first turn. It’s very unique.”

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” Cornell Messenger whispered.

  “Miss Claunch said that maybe we could bring Daddy’s Meals-on-Wheels friends out for a ride someday,” Louise said. “It’s really amazing. You ought to try it, George.”

  “There’s not much water in the boiler,” Grant said. “I’d have to fill it and fire it up again.”

  “Oh yeah?” George said. “You’d have to go to all that trouble? For me? Oh yeah?”

  And suddenly—Mills didn’t know how—the two of them were bristling about each other, hackled as rivals dithered and suspicious over pawed ground, cautious, their glands giving off signal, tooth-and-claw stuff.

  Mills asked if Grant were Grant’s first name or last.

  Grant wondered if George was the same George who’d taken Mrs. Glazer to Mexico to die.

  “That’s right,” Mills said. “She asked for me.”

  “Specifically asked for you?”

  “Specifically. That’s right.”

  “She was very ill.”

  “Bereft,” Mills shot back. “Bereft of folks to count on.”

  “Hey,” Messenger said. “Hey, come on.”

  “Leave me alone,” George said.

  Milly was crying. Mary, sedate on the bench, looked from her sister to the others. Louise announced that if they were driving back to the city she had better stop in at the station first. Grant walked to his tender and started to climb aboard. Mills followed him.

  “It’s hot,” he said. “Those cars are air-conditioned. You didn’t turn it on for my wife.”

  “I’d have had to put the roofs up.”

  “You should have! She just had her hair done. Now it’s all unkempt from the steam.”

  “It was unkempt when she got on board.”

  “Don’t you talk about my wife that way.” But Grant had already started the train up. George backed away from the steam shooting out from the pistons. “I’m talking to you. Where are you going? Someone is talking to you!”

  Grant turned around and smiled. “Who?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” Messenger said behind him.

  “What? What do you want?”

  “Let’s go down a ways. I don’t want anyone to overhear.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the city.”

  “Hey fellow, come on, will you? I lit up again in the station. I’m so stoned you could make a citizen’s arrest. Why do I do this? Do I do this for fun? It’s the griefs, Mills. I owe it to my problems. It’s medicine for the griefs.”

  “I don’t care about your problems.”

  “Sure, if you did you’d get stoned too.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got my own troubles,” George said, turning away.

  “What, a saved, tucked-in guy like you? All snuggy snug and living the lap robe, deck chair life?”

  “Louise told you that on the train.”

  “Who? Oh. Lulu? Nah. The mischief maker told me.”

  “Mrs. Glazer?”

  “Long distance. She was dying. She reached out and touched someone. Cancerous bitch.”

  “Come if you’re coming. I’m going back.”

  “Wait,” Cornell said, and his voice was unenhanced. “Does Mahesvaram mean anything to you?”

  When George turned back to look at him Cornell was standing on the tracks, all the fingers of his left hand stuffed into his mouth. “It’s that word she gave you,” he said quietly, “it was her mantra.”

  Messenger seemed as if he were going to collapse, and Mills rushed to support him.

  “Watch out!” Grant shouted. “You’re standing on the third rail!”

  The two men leaped away from each other, tripping over the outside track. Grant roared. “Geez, that’s the oldest one in the book,” the engineer wheezed. “I used to get Judith with that one. Same as I got her kids. A third rail on a steam engine?”

  “What else?” Cornell hissed, recovering, grasping the sleeve of Mills’s suit coat. “Did she tell you about my kid?”

  “Not now,” George said, and pulled away. “You go on. I have to talk to that guy.” He turned toward the engineer, already addressing him while he was still several yards away. “What’s your problem, Grant?”

  “Oh, my problem.”

  “This morning I was your dead mistress’s pallbearer. The family knows the use I’ve been to them. I mean the girls, I mean the sisters-in-law, I mean the aunt. I mean Mr. Glazer and the Claunches, Jr. and Sr. both. If I were to mention your rudeness to me, or the people in my party…”

  Grant was laughing, applauding his speech. “Hear hear,” he said. “Har har.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Do you play cards?” Grant asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Cards. Card games. Do you know how to play card games?”

  “Yes,” Mills said, “sure.”

  “How many games?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How many card games do you know how to play? Gin? Do you know gin?”

  “I play gin.”

  “Call rummy? Michigan rummy?”

  “Michigan rummy.”

  “Pinochle? Bridge?”

  “I never learned bridge.”

  “You never learned.”

  “So?”

  “You never learned. You don’t know call rummy. Or a dozen games I could mention you’ve never heard of. The poker variations. Sure, you play cards. You never learned. You know who taught me bridge? Judith. Judith did. I was her bridge partner.”

  “You’re crazy,” Mills said.

  “What do you think my father did? For a living? How did he support us?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know. He worked for the Claunches. He was in service. I don’t know. You’re the gardener’s boy.”

  They were at the station.

  “My father was a pharmacist. He owned a drugstore.”

  “Guess what?” Louise said, coming out of the train station. She was laughing.

  “My daughter programs computers and my son has three shoestores in Kansas City,” the servant said.

  “That john’s no bigger than a child’s potty,” Louise said. “The toilet paper’s no wider than a reel of tape. It’s scale. Everything’
s scale.”

  He opened the door of his Buick Special and was about to get in—Louise was already in the back, Cornell in front—when someone called to him. “Hold on a moment would you?” It was the man who had waved to him, the one who’d been admiring the classic cars when Mills had passed the garages on his way to find Louise.

  “Yes?” Mills said. “What?”

  “Don’t mean to hold you up,” the man said, approaching the car. “Your Special?”

  “Yes,” Mills said.

  “Sixty-three?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so,” the man said. “Spotted it when you drove up to St. Michael and St. George this morning. Recognized the grille straight off. Dead giveaway. Had that lovely grille on her the year she was introduced and then they went to a different design the following year. Why’d they do that? Any idea?”

  “No,” Mills said.

  “Could be birds. Scooped in birds. Some aerodynamic thing. You think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s mine. Over there. The Studebaker.”

  “Very nice.”

  “Thank you,” the man said. “Felt a bit odd about driving it to her funeral but if that’s what old Judy wanted, why, hell, what the hell, eh?”

  “What the hell,” George said.

  “Look,” the man said, “take my card, will you? I know it’s a long shot, but if you ever do want to sell, give me a call. If I’m not at the office call me at home. The number’s unlisted but I’ve jotted it down on the back.”

  Mills told him he wasn’t thinking of selling his car.

  “I know,” the man said. “I’d feel the same way if I were you. But call anyway. We’ll do lunch at the club.” He looked in the car window and tipped an imaginary hat.

  “Sir,” he said. “Madam.”

  PART FOUR

  1

  It wasn’t religious this time, it was political and historical.

  And maybe if I wasn’t the thinking man’s George Mills was the vocal one’s one. A witness, in a dynasty of witnesses, one more chump who crewed history, whose destiny it was to hang out with the field hands, just there, you see, in range and hard by, but a little out of focus in the group photographs, rounded up when the marauders came, feeding the flames, one more wisp of smoke at the Inquisitions, doing all the obligatory forced marches, boat folks from the word go, but nothing personal on anybody’s part. Not the government’s, not the rebels’. Certainly not our own.

  My own taling meant for more than just the story hour, that kid’s garden of lullaby and closed circle of our family tradition. Your father-to-son disclosures I mean, all archived confidence and my spooked clan’s secret recipes. And if I was different it’s because I seemed to clamor for audience as well as style. Because we Millses have always had the latter. The former, too, if you come right down to it. Maybe particularly the former, even if it always turns out to be, as it always does turn out to be, some knee-jounced, lap-settled, thumb-sucking babe child who can’t get over any of it, who takes it all in, who takes it, terrified and relieved too that nothing, nothing whatsoever, is all that will ever be expected of him. That the only thing he has to do is remember that primal incident in the Polish forest when Guillalume fixed forever the Millsian parameters and gave us—never mind revolution, never mind reform bills, modern times or the inchworm creep of hope—our Constitution. And one thing other of course: to be ready to spill it all out when the babe child was on the other knee as it were, meanwhile perfecting his style—which we Millses have always had—rendering the story to his own inner ear if he were still without issue, perfecting his nuance as another might perfect his French for a trip abroad, and taking care to get the magic parts pat.

  Because we’re not even a joke. After all these years, all these centuries. Not fabled in song and story, not even a joke. Our name, till I came along, never even in the papers. Our eyewitness unrecorded, our testimony not so much ignored as never even overheard, the generations sworn to secrecy, or if not actually sworn at least inclined that way. Content enough with our secret handshakes and coded bearing, our underground railway ways.

  Which is just as well could be. Or so the story goes. Our version of it anyway, the way I heard it, how it came down to me, our baton-passed history apostolically successioned. Tag, and you’re it.

  Maybe we should have tried America, put in some time in the New World. Or maybe not. It’s all new world for our kind anyway, ain’t it? See why I began by implying I was the thinking man’s George Mills? Not because I was any smarter than those other guys, God knows, but because I was capable of all this alternative, but-on-the-other-hand understood like some spiffy grammatical usage. My lot calls that thinking. Your lot too probably. (There I go again.) And if I had this Millsian perspective that lends detachment and magnanimous neutrality, perhaps it’s really because…This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.

  It wasn’t religious this time, it was political, historical. Perhaps the King himself opened the door.

  I don’t say answered. Opened. Perhaps he was on his way out as I was already knocking. Anyway, now I think of it, I must have startled him (despite his size, which was immense, he was big around as a kiosk) a good deal more than he startled me. I had the advantage, you see, of not knowing he was the King. (What advantage did he have? The man about to step out, nothing on his mind, to judge from his whistling, but his mood, calling, as was his destiny, all the shots of his daily round, and submissive at details as a tool, the arrangements already delegated, assigned, giving over his entire person like a horseman a heel for a hoist. And there I was, blocking his way, stuck in the doorway like an insurrectionist, a man, to look at me, to judge from my seedy clothes and peasant’s seamy appurtenances, the countryman’s straw helmet still on my head, the loose smock that could have concealed weapons, the rude boots like someone’s who might have been in his mutiny suit, for rebellion dressed, a far-flung Jacobin say, some Luddite-come-lately uniformed for sedition and putsch.) Advantage to the hick. (Because what really alarmed him, I learned later, too late, was not my crummy clothes or savage bearing—he was King of Great Britain and Ireland, King of Hanover; he knew our homespun, had closets of the stuff made to order for the bumpkin balls and bog-trots, the hayseed hoedowns and rustic masquerades of his youth—but my simple failure to bow and scrape, to make a leg or flat out kneel. What did I know? My fourth day in town. To me he looked like any other fat, well-groomed London gentleman of breeding. Where were his crown and sceptre? His sash and ribbons? His sword? The feather in his cap no higher than any other man’s. [Indeed, he was bareheaded.] And where, for that matter, were all the King’s men? Some of them? Any? One? His appearance less regal finally than a footman’s. Less regal than the livery of the men who drove the carriages in the streets. [Which was what I’d thought I’d do, why I’d come to London, with no weapons but only my letter of introduction greasy and rumpled under my smock that explained my presence at that particular door—it was not even the front door—at the very time when the man I did not yet know was my sovereign was about to emerge from it.] Dressed in long trousers, the plain style that had just come in, vestless, his neck unadorned save for a wide black circle of cloth that served as cravat.)

  So we did this mutual side shuffle, feinting and parrying like swordsmen, like men before mirrors. I would have bowed if he’d given me a chance, displayed nape like a white flag, bobbed and bowed, ducked and dithered. Why not? It costs nothing to give way to squires, even when they’re coming out servants’ entrances, and it pleases them so.

  “Stand still, damn ye,” the old fellow said.

  And I did, recovering my balance like a tumbler. He looked me over, asked my name.

  “It’s George,” I said.

  “George,” he mocked.

  “Aye,” I said. Then, haughtily, as he’d been scornful: “George, son of George. Son of George, son of George, son of George. George, son of George to the forty-second or forty-third power if it comes t
o that.”

  “And does it come to that?”

  “It sure does.”

  “British?”

  “As the day is long.”

  “Bow to the King,” hissed the aging dandy.

  “What? Where? Here?” Startled, reflexive, bent as in cramp. Taking, before him, a kind of cover, as if shells had gone off, rockets, explosives, sunbursts of majesty. (A Mills first, an historical highlight, whose eight and a half centuries had been a kind of preparation for just such a moment. The subject is subjects. The subject is subjects! Who’d lived always in monarchical climes the low-liege life. Assured of kings as a Christian of God but who’d yet to see one. Never mind been in one’s presence, had actual audience. Glimpsed his coach I mean, spotted retainers. Living centuries on a small island since practically the invention of kings, ringed by their circumstance and circumscribed by their ordinance, hemmed by decree, paying the rates and loyal at the levy, doing the death duties and making good on the ransoms, prizing the special commemorative coins and celebratory postage like heirloom, and coming up with the surtaxes and VAT’s, the excise and octroi, all tolls all told and the taxes on war and peace and all the royal expeditions. Excused from nothing yet and exacting from ourselves what they’d tax collectors to exact. Among the poorest of their subjects and withal over the years and down through the reigns and dynasties—how we told time—contributing to their collective, cumulative well-being at least one gold spoke on at least one golden wheel that turned the coach we had yet to see.) I grabbed the sleeve of the old guy’s coat and yanked.

  “Get down, Guv! Get down for the sovereign!”

  And, groveled as spider, did this dance of good citizenship. Palace farce. For the handkerchief that came off in my hand when I’d grabbed his wrist was embroidered with a silken seal of majesty, his royal monogram in king’s tailored cursive, HMGIV like Roman numerals of state. By this time, too, recognizing elements of the declined, devalued handsomeness in the aging face from the mint, intact perfection of his image on my coins. (Thinking: Not merely a man, not merely even an important man, but actual animate money.)

  We aren’t stupid. It was so unexpected. Indeed, I got the picture before the King did, and made my adjustments, all my Kentucky windage reassignments of perception, the King himself still preoccupied with a king’s terrors——mutiny, red menace, rout and regicide. It was my duty to calm him.