Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“We had it made. Princes, princes did. And lived with impunity like favored pets. It was sybaritic but don’t say no good ever came of it. There are always spin-offs, Mills. They trickle down. Sooner or later they do, they trickle down. Why, education, education was invented for us! Toys, lad, toys and gewgaws! Cakes and cookies, chocolates and collections! The most important artisans and cooks and engravers doing their best to keep us entertained. Great inventors pressed us to accept their original working models. (The first candle, the first candle was made for a seven-year-old Italian prince because he was afraid of the wall torches that flared in his nursery!) Those were the glory days, Mills. Those were the glory days, kid. We had this privately engraved stamp collection. (I would have been fourteen or fifteen by then.) Young Bill Blake was awarded the commission. (Hogarth was dead, and anyway I’d never really liked the wallpaper he sketched for my nursery.) He did this absolutely top-hole job, wizard work, wizard. A personalized postage on which our head was represented as the Crown Prince of three or four dozen imaginary kingdoms. Will I ever forget the New Jerusalem ha’penny? Coins were similarly minted for us and with them I purchased great pleasure of some of the most beautiful women in England and the Continent. Will I ever forget those ladies, most of them courtesans, cousins, dowager princesses — all of them older?

“Because even at nine and eleven and thirteen I was still wet-nursing. I couldn’t give up the tit. I’ve never given it up. (Enemies whisper it’s why I’m so fat and that could be the case. Science may side with their slanders. I’ve too well known the nipple’s weighty nourishment, the breast’s milky syrups, its rich creams and thick butters. All its queer cheeses, its chest junkets and bust custards. We’re addicted to tit. We love the taste we mean.) Though we’d never drawn Charlotte Sophia’s, our mother’s, milk. But this ain’t a mother thing, we think, only obsessive thirst annihilating itself at the very wellhead of lixiviate, suffocate whelm.

“It was how I met Maria.

“This would have been forty-one years ago. I would have been twenty-two, Maria six years older. And it would have been at a ball, and I would have been strolling down the formal presentation line, barely glancing at the men’s bowed kowtows and carefully observing the revealing curtsies of the women. Examining, I mean. Holding their hands and by a subtle pressure of my own keeping them down, availing myself of stunning vistas of bosom, controlling honor’s duration and causing those ladies to heat and blush as surely as if I had kindled their dry white flesh with the oxygens of my gloves. Although some never took color at all, their breasts pale as lime, fixed as paint or whitewash. (Or as if, I thought when I detected among them some recent mother, all the blood in the world could neither stain nor stanch the tide of such milk. I was neither prospecting for virgins nor inspecting for trollops, these little litmus tests of mine not so much science as interested, even-handed, even innocent forays into Nature, as a man might engage to witness sunsets, say.)

“Maria was the most charmingly endowed woman I had ever seen. But she was no flusher.

“If she had been I might not have ventured — though I may have, covered as a bed by my prince’s privilege and anything-goes protocol and all my good time Charlie dispensations — to have offered my proposal.

“ ‘Would you,’ I whispered, still on that inverted receiving line which was my style and preference and down which I ambled as if I were the only invited guest in some stuffed tenement of princes and princesses, ‘be my wet nurse? I will give you Tom Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. ’

“ ‘Sir, I have no milk.’

“ ‘My mistress then. I will give you a house in Brighton and five thousand a year.’

“ ‘Sir, I have a husband.’

“ ‘Two thousand for the husband. Could even a king say fairer?’

“ ‘Sir, I cannot.’

“ ‘Madam, I’m a generous prince.’

“ ‘Sir, I’m a virtuous woman.’

“ ‘You did not redden.’

“ ‘Redden?’

“ ‘When I leered your breasts, when I squinnied your nipples. When I leisurely look-see’d and gave them the once-over and the glad eye. You did not redden, madam! You did not plum or peach! I might for rise have well as ogled the stitch of your frock!’

“ ‘Then, sir, might I have glowed indeed for it is the very principle of propriety, if not of virtue itself, that the scrutiny of one’s fashion in high company can betoken only the awry and amiss. I would, in such a circumstance, have warmed under the gaze of a tailor or the glance of a seamstress.’

“ ‘I am no tailor, madam. I am no seamstress. I’m Prince of Wales and I attentioned your tits. You did not redden! ’

“ ‘Then, sir, I am no scarlet woman,’ Mrs. Fitzherbert told me softly.

“This was still on the line, still ceremonial. That the others who had yet to be presented had entirely ceased the customary buzz they do even at Court, even in the presence of the King himself, let alone a mere Prince of Wales who wouldn’t be Regent for another twenty-seven years or King for another thirty-six, ought perhaps to have given us pause or made one or the other of us a bit more cautious. Indeed, I suppose that at this point I should have smiled at Mrs. Fitzherbert’s clever grace note, clicked what I had for heels, bowed, and gone on to the next person waiting to be presented. Or, rather, I suppose it’s what you suppose. But the splendour of our arrangements, their true civility and grandeur, is actually quite opposite. Court must, simply must, have its gossip, its exclusionary spice. Well, do you understand, Mills, that gossip and rumor are always more or less horizontal, that, like certain species of fish, they swim only their customary strata and rarely attempt the antipathetical depths? Now, it ain’t in Newton, but it’s true as physics that in fixed societies like our own, nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin. It’s why we have to spy on you people. It’s why you’re cordoned off on state occasions; it’s why there’s crowd control, squeeze play, spurs on horsemen; cosh, curb and roped-off street — all rule’s royal leash law, all order’s rerouted traffic, all rank’s union shop. It ain’t assassination we fear, the villain’s and madman’s bullet at close quarters; it’s just hard by, at hand, stone’s throw, simple spit distance earshot.

“So, if anything, we were not more circumspect but less, not less garrulous but more. Is the Prince a clam? Is he an oyster? He brims with prate! He glibs with gush! And this was audience indeed, this was! This primed, fervent, rubberneck, avid, all-ears bunch. My true subjects, Mills, and not your remote, long-range, arm’s-length lot. The group. Our crowd. And I as much their subject this night as they mine. We were soliloqual, Mills!

“ ‘It is your breastplate, madam, those fleecy ramparts, that so astonish us. How may things which to our vision appear such soft and lenient stuff prove so intractable, so stony ground in the campaign of a prince? No no, don’t answer. We would not hear prattle of husbands and virtue, or passion talked down as if’twere only an obligation owed to pledge like the gambler a game debt or the poor student’s circumstanced promise to redeem a watch from some pawnshop Jew. Is this your honor, madam? Is this your merciless, inconsequent, merely proscriptive character? I’ll teach you character, ma’am, and it’s nothing to do with promises, declarations, assurances, covenants or nitwit oath. Honor is simply not contractual, Fitzherbert! It does not blindly undertake action in a future it cannot yet understand at the sacrifice of the only tense in which it may reliably do anyone any good at all. Which is the present. Which is the present, Mrs. Madam Fitzherbert!