Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“This is sane? What about heredity? These are good spirits? The kid’s a nympho. That stuff has to come from somewhere. It comes from her mother.”

“Why are you telling me this?” George said.

“It comes from her mother, the madwoman! How’d they get to you, Mills? Just tell me what they promised.”

“Nobody promised anything. Nobody got to me.”

“You swear you didn’t give them your affidavit?”

“I didn’t,” George said.

“Jesus,” Sam Glazer said, “you scared me there, George. You really had me going for a time.”

It was crazy, George thought. As if by saying his wife had been in good spirits he had somehow slandered her. Glazer was calm now. He was calm when he spoke to George about the possibility of something opening up in buildings and grounds, calm when with practically no transition he asked Mills for his affidavit, calm when George turned him down, calm, even smooth, when he told him that all he really wanted was for George to keep an open mind, not to say anything to the Claunches until he’d had another chance to speak with him.

“You’re in the catbird seat, you know,” Sam Glazer said pleasantly before ringing off. “You’re the only eyewitness.”

The senior partner called again.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve given more thought to what you asked for your Special. You did say it’s the original grille, didn’t you?”

Even Laglichio. He was impressed, he said, with Mills’s apparent ability to deal with blacks. He wanted, he said, his input on some schemes he’d been developing.

Then there was Coule. The minister wanted to know when Mills was going to make good on that sermon he’d promised.

“What sermon I promised?”

“Testimony then.”

“Oh yeah,” George said, “sure thing.”

“You’re not saved, are you?” Coule demanded. “You made all that up about grace. Boasting.”

“Who’d brag anything small potatoes as salvation?”

“You’re outrageous.”

“Yeah? Am I? You’re this man of the cloth, this cloth man. It rumples your tail feathers, don’t it, Reverend, I got grace, you got shit? Sure. I’ll fill in for you. I’ll give you my affidavit on holiness. Name the day. Easter? Christmas?”

As if they were waiting for him to pounce, as if he were some blackmailer. As if all they ever thought about was that whatever he’d learned in Mexico would be used against them. Or not a blackmailer at all — a sort of cop. George Mills, the arresting officer, their prosecutor, the law, the state. Their rights read at them like charges, boredom and cynicism built into their inner ear, hearing fair warning, the rattler’s obligatory sizzle — then sock! pow! blammo! and all bets off.

Mills unable to reassure them, unable to convince them they had nothing to worry about.

“Why did you let me take her to Mexico?” he asked Harry Claunch.

“She was inoperable,” Harry said. “Even the oncologist said the chemotherapy was tearing her guts out. Under the circumstances, could we deny her her long shot?”

“But why me?”

“Why not you? She would have laid it all out for the woman who brought her bedpan.”

So he had his legacy too. Their secrets like so many pieces of costume jewelry, like so many hand-me-downs. The repository now not only of Mills history but everyone’s. And he’d told Coule he was saved.

But mostly Messenger. Messenger’s hang-ups, Messenger’s circle, Messenger’s kid.

“Yeah,” Cornell, high, told him one day over a ham and ravioli sandwich, “I take the cake. Here I sit, enhanced and laid back as some California surfer — want a drag? no? it’s sinsemilla, two hundred fifty bucks a lid — and … What was I on about then? Oh yeah, the cake. It’s Chocolate Mint Heart today, Lulu. I’m going to tell you something, George. You think it’s because I’m enhanced I say this. But I was telling whoosis, my paraplegic lady, Gert. She thinks so too.” He fell silent. The rusts from his ham and ravioli sandwich smeared the corners of his mouth and lips, turning them down like the sad-face expression on a clown. “It’s the applesauce. Meals-on-Wheels puts out a great applesauce, maybe the best in the world.” And he tore into the applesauce, shoveling it into his mouth with his plastic spoon. “You got a slice of bread, Lulu, I can soak up the juice? Hey,” he said giggling, “don’t bother. I’ll use a Kleenex. The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” He grinned at them. “I’m bold,” he said. “What the hell, what’s there to hide? Judy G. told you all about me. She gave you my mantra. Well, her mantra. I can’t get the goddamn thing to work. Did you know they were her last words? Big-deal holy lady, big-deal saint. Pain up to here and her brother bending down over her bed for, for God knows what — instructions probably. ‘Do thus and so with the kids. Give Sammy my love. Tell the Mex to leave the room and smother me with the fucking pillow.’ God knows what! ‘Christ’s a redhead. He wears designer jeans.’ And what does he hear? ‘ Mahesvaram, mahesvaram, mahesvaram. ’ The born-again son of a bitch off to Heaven on a wave of transcendental meditation, at one with her cancer, the lint on her pesos. That lady could have been buried out of the Ethical Society, the Automobile Association. I tell you, George, she left me a haunted mantra. She squeezed the blood out of it, Lulu. I can’t even levitate. The horror, the horror.”

“You can’t levitate? You’re high as a kite.”

“Because I’m in pain, George and Lulu. Because I’m in pain. Because the griefs ain’t leaking no more, they’re whelming. There’s flash-flood griefs, man overboard. Let me just tell you a few of the things that have been happening in my neighborhood. Oh, look at Lulu, she likes it when I talk Despair. Despair’s her turn-on.”

Louise did enjoy Messenger’s visits. The man was a crybaby and blabbermouth, and Mills saw that Louise took the same comfort from him that Mrs. Glazer had taken from Maria’s sad adventures on Mexican television. Because she knew most of the people involved — the Claunches had invited her to return to the estate and bring some of the Meals-on-Wheels people with her; Sam Glazer had called and asked them to dinner; she’d met his girls; she’d met Messenger’s dyslexic son when Cornell brought Harve to the house one day; she had even spoken to Losey, Messenger’s surgeon friend, about George’s bad back, had met Nora, his wife, when the failing student of architecture had come to South St. Louis with a classmate on an assignment to study the city’s “vernacular architecture” (Cornell had given Nora Losey Mills’s name; neither Louise nor Nora knew at the time that the classmate was the girl with whom the surgeon was having an affair, George didn’t) — they’d taken on an immediacy and importance in her life which George Mills resisted but could do little to discourage.

Meanwhile Louise was thrilled with other people’s bad news, tried to catch Mills’s eye and nod at him knowingly each time Cornell delivered himself of some new heartache in the portfolio.

“We don’t have it so bad,” Louise told her husband one night.

“No sir,” George said. “We’ve got it made.”

“When are you going to play your China card, George?”

This was Messenger’s phrase. George had told him about the calls — the dean’s job offer, Claunch’s lawyer’s bid on the Buick Special. He thought Mills beyond bribery and did not know that the only reason George had mentioned the calls was to get some idea of what his affidavit was actually worth to them. Either side could have it for top dollar. He had liked Judith but Judith had died, convinced of her salvation as he was of his. Nothing he said about her now could alter either of their conditions.