Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“He’d been squeezing him pretty hard. Sam written off by his wife, by the family. Having to claim Judy was nuts, having to claim fraud because of those prenuptial agreements he’d lived up to to the letter of the law. The incident at the chancellor’s dinner party, Claunch calling him out in front of all those people, screaming for his resignation over a three-dollar roll of film.

“When Milly told him she caught him screwing some schoolgirl — Jenny’s textbooks were at the foot of the bed — Claunch figured Sam was determined to disgrace them, get back at him and the rest of the family by forcing them to step in and take the girls away from him too.”

“Is that what he’s up to?” Mills said, brightening.

“That’s what Claunch thought he was up to. It was the last thing Claunch wanted. He’s not a young man, after all. He hadn’t had all that much luck with his own daughter. The idea of two adolescent girls around the place, one of them not the most stable kid in the world — Well, you can imagine. That’s when he knew they’d have to sort things out. That’s when he thought he had to buy him off. He tore up the resignation himself. He had his son reassign his trusteeship to Sam.”

“Still,” George Mills said, “stuck with a stepmother they never bargained for.”

“This is the part that gets me,” Louise said.

“But they did bargain for her,” Messenger said. “At least Milly did.”

“Milly?”

“Because Milly’s the respectable one,” Messenger said. “You saw her, Mills. The day of the funeral. You saw how she acted.”

Mills recalled the little girl conducting them on the tour of Claunch’s home, then later, alone, sitting well back in the trains, prim as a spinster.

“Because Milly’s the respectable one,” Messenger repeated. “She always has been. She couldn’t abide her father’s disgrace. She couldn’t stand it that he’d taken a mistress. She couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t going to have money. She couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t going to be dean. That he thought of challenging her mother’s sanity in a court of law. If Claunch did some hard thinking it was about ideas Milly herself had put in his head.

“Because once everything was restored to him it was all right again. She’s the one who actually spoke to them.”

“Spoke to them,” George Mills said.

“Well questioned them.”

“Questioned them.”

“Well lectured them then. About their intentions. She told Jenny that what she was doing was wrong, her father that if he had to have a woman they’d all be better off if he married her. She’s the one who set the date.”

“Now her life’s okey-dokey,” George Mills said.

“Milly’s happy as a clam, George,” Messenger said pleasantly.

“Sure,” Mills said.

“She’s throwing the shower.”

“I see.”

“She’s organized the wedding. She’s worked out the arrangements, she’s made out the guest list. She hasn’t decided if the bride should wear white. She’s leaning toward white but she hasn’t decided.”

“What about the other one?” George asked hopelessly. “What about Mary?”

“George, you wouldn’t recognize her.”

“She’s a changed person,” Mills said.

“You remember how oversexed she used to be?”

“Used to be,” the straight man said.

“How she’d doodle all this really raunchy stuff in her school-books, put it all around her separators like a kind of embroidery, work it into her biology papers so that even her teachers couldn’t tell if she were a scientist or kinky?”

“This is the part that gets me,” George Mills said.

“She started sketching the stuff on her bedroom walls.”

“Fouled her own nest, did she?”

“Jenny saw it. Well she was meant to. Mary left her books all over the place. She never bothered to shut her bedroom door.”

“It was a cry for help,” George Mills said.

Messenger looked at him. “Well it was,” he said. “I mean there’s Milly and Sam yelling their heads off, shouting how sick she was, how a kid her age ought to get her head up out of the gutter. Then Jenny came along. Jenny has a trained eye, you know. You’ll never guess what happened. Jenny thinks she’s terrific, that she’s this anatomical savant or something. I mean no one noticed how really good the kid was till Jenny saw what she was up to. You know what she did when she first saw the stuff?”

“What did she do?”

“Stripped for the kid. Right then and there. Took off her dress, pulled down her panties, ripped off her bra. ‘Draw me, ’ she told her. ‘Get all my details.’

“She tried to get her enrolled in a life class at the university but they’ve got this rule that no one under sixteen—”

“Get on with it,” Mills said.

“She’s having her own show. When she gets a few more drawings together she’s having a show at this really important gallery. She draws her boyfriend, the kid she used to fuck. She poses him straining on the pot, she poses him whacking off. Sam shows them around, the sketches. The kid doesn’t mind. Nora’s agreed to pose for her, Jenny has. Even Sam.”

“Her father? Her father poses for her?”

“Even her sister,” Messenger said. “Even Milly. Even the respectable one.”

“Isn’t it queer, George?” Louise asked. “Isn’t it queer how life works out?”

“My back is killing me,” George Mills said. “Why are you telling me this stuff?”

“Because,” Messenger said. “Because it is queer how life works out. And because,” he said, “ because I’m the epilogue man, George! ” He rose to go, turned at the door to their bedroom. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t guess I’ll be dropping by anymore. I won’t be in the neighborhood much. I’ve given up my Meals-on-Wheels route.”

“Oh,” Louise said, “we’ll miss you, Cornell.”

“I turned it over to Max and Ruth. They’ve got a car. Meals-on-Wheels will pay for their gas. They qualify for free meals themselves. Meals-on-Wheels will provide them.”

Mills sprang out of bed and raced toward Messenger. Louise had to hold him. She forced her husband back to his bed, his feet sliding backward on the bare floor. He waved his raised fist at Cornell, who stood his ground in the doorway.

“They jumped at the chance,” Messenger said calmly. “It turns out they never really liked cheese. It turns out cookies were a stopgap. It turns out they don’t care much for poetry. It turns out lectures bore them. It turns out they’ve tin ears and won’t even miss the recitals.”

It turned out it was not the last time he was to hear Messenger’s news. He saw him again about a week later. Louise was in bed with a sore throat and George had stopped off at a supermarket to pick up some things for their dinner — canned soup, a frozen pizza. It was not one of the places they usually shopped. Mills was in the express lane waiting to be checked out. The store had installed scanners to read the universal product code stamped on the labels and packages like cramped, alternating thicknesses of wood grain in cross section, or marks on rulers, or passages of spectography, or like boxes of pencils, like awning, like pin stripes on shirts. The lines and numbers could have been ciphers, hieroglyphs, but when the checkout girl brushed the mysterious little blocks of code across a glass plate, a vaguely digital readout appeared in a banner like a red headline above the customer’s head. It registered the name of the item, the quantity, its cost. Mills had never seen the machine operate before. He had no idea how it worked and was so absorbed that at first he was unaware that someone was talking to him, saying his name. It was Messenger.