Stanley Elkin: George Mills

“I was going to call you,” he said. “There’s some loose ends to tie up.”

“Sure,” Mills said.

“The name Albert Reece mean anything to you?”

“Arthur Reece?” Mills said absently. He wasn’t paying close attention. A woman he thought he recognized from the neighborhood had come into the supermarket. She wore a man’s loose-fitting khaki trousers and a tan jacket. She wore a fedora and carried a big leather drawstring bag. A heavy key ring on a retractable steel cord hung from her belt loop.

“ Albert Reece. One of the Meals-on-Wheelers. A sour-hearted old bastard. I told you about him.”

The woman had taken the key ring and stretched it out as far as it would go. She slipped a key into a lock in the copy machine at the front of the store, turned the key and pulled out the cash drawer where the change collected. She dumped the money into the bag. When she replaced the drawer she took a rag and a bottle of Windex from her jacket pocket and proceeded to polish the glass facing plate where the customers set the originals they wanted copied.

“Sure, I told you about him,” Messenger said.

“Probably,” Mills said. “You told me about everyone else.”

“He won a hundred thousand dollars,” Messenger said. “He’s going to be on the six o’clock news.”

“A hundred thousand dollars?”

“In one of those contests. Some sweepstakes thing. Reader’s Digest, Publishers’ Clearing House — something. He was so excited I couldn’t get it straight.”

The woman was cleaning the money out of the bubble gum machines, the dime and twenty-five and fifty-cent candy and toy vending machines with their miniature NFL helmets and tiny major league baseball caps folded like fetuses inside their clear globes. She took about twenty dollars from the plastic pony. She owns them, he thought. She owns them, they’re hers. She makes a fortune. I’ll be, he thought.

“He says he’s going to buy a house with it,” Messenger said, “that any Meals-on-Wheelers on his route who want to can move in and live with him.”

“I’ll be,” Mills said.

“How do you like that?” Messenger said.

“I’ll be.” But he was staring at the woman from the neighborhood who owned the machines. She was talking to a man Mills guessed was the manager, who was checking the money with her from her drawstring bag and who accepted a percentage of the receipts from the machines and wrote out a check to her in exchange for the rest of the coins.

And that still wasn’t the last time. The last time was a few days later. Messenger phoned.

“Did you see him?” Messenger asked. “On TV? Did you see him?”

“Yes.”

“Did I lie?”

“No.” He could barely speak.

“Well there’s something else,” Messenger said.

“Yes.”

“Remember I told you about that story I wrote? The only one I ever published in The New Yorker? The one Amos Ropeblatt took out an option on? That he’s been renewing every year for eleven or twelve years now for five hundred dollars a year?”

“Yes,” Mills said.

“Well he bought it!” Messenger said. “The son of a bitch actually bought it. They’re actually going to make the movie.”

“That’s fine,” George Mills said. “Congratulations.”

“How do you like that?” Messenger said. “How do you like the way things work out? How do you like this idyll vision, this epithalamion style? How do you like it the game ain’t over till the last man is out? How do you like it you can dig for balm? That there’s balm and joy mines, great fucking mother lodes of bower and elysian amenity? How do you like deus ex machina? How do you like it every cloud has a silver lining? What do you make of God’s pastoral heart? How do you like it there’s pots of gold at the end of rainbows and you can’t keep a good man down? How do you like it ships come in, and life is just a bowl of cherries? How do you like it it isn’t raining rain you know, it’s raining violets? What do you make of it every time I hear a newborn baby cry or see the sky then I know why I believe?”

“Audrey,” George Mills said.

“What’s that?”

“Audrey,” he said. “Audrey Binder. Victor’s wife. In the hospital. With the kid who can’t throw. Audrey. Whose shoelaces have to be signed for. Who cries in her sleep. Audrey. Who chews her IV. Audrey! Audrey !”

“Audrey?”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“What?”

“Audrey’s fine. Audrey’s all better.”

“All better,” Mills said.

“Sure,” Messenger said. “She’s out of the loony bin. Audrey’s home.”

“Just like that,” George Mills said. “She’s all better.”

“Sure,” Messenger said. “All the happy endings. All the good news. She snapped out of it. She just cheered right up when she heard,” Messenger said. “Oh yeah,” Messenger said, “the horror, the horror, hey Mills?”

About a year after he had become convinced of his salvation George Mills delivered his sermon to the hundred or so people in Coule’s congregation at Virginia Avenue Baptist.

They had not consulted about a date. One Sunday morning in September Mills had simply appeared and, after Coule led them through the formal parts of the service — the opening prayer, some announcements, a hymn, the offering, another hymn, some prayers for the sick, and a scripture — the preacher seemed suddenly to spot Mills among the congregation and, probably without their knowing anything of the impromptu circumstances, so seamless was his conduct — this is how he must have done it on television, George Mills thought, told to hurry it along or to stretch by his director — introduced George, and invited him to come up to the pulpit.

Brother Mills — it was Coule’s term — eased past his wife’s knees and came down the aisle to where the big preacher stood behind his deconsecrated lectern. Coule shook Mills’s hand and retired to an empty chair on the platform.

“I’m a little nervous,” he began, surprised by the amplification of his voice when he spoke. It was the first time he had ever heard the vaguely metallic sound of his amplified voice, and for just a moment he thought that perhaps his voice was going out over the radio or was somehow being beamed to other churches.

“I’m here to testify,” he said. And looked out over the congregation as if he might almost be searching for someone in particular, some latecomer yet to arrive. He recognized a handful of neighbors. They smiled their encouragement at him, as did others he did not recognize, raising some Sunday morning umbrella of benevolence and good will, inviting him to step in under it, kindhearted and tender, well meaning and fraternal as hippies. But he was not encouraged. Indeed, he had a sad sense of intricacy. He told them that. He told them he supposed that would be his text.

And started, for reasons that were also intricate and sad, to tell them a story about charity. “I used to watch the telethons,” he said. “One of the first to call and make my pledge when the poster kid pled. One time — it was the Jerry Lewis, Muscular Dystrophy — I phoned in and got to speak to Ed McMahon. Someone told me to turn down my set, Big Ed wanted to speak to me on the air. I’d gone into the bedroom to phone. Our TV’s in the living room. I couldn’t hear it. Before I understood what was happening Ed McMahon was already talking to me. He asked my name and I told him. ‘I want to pledge five dollars,’ I said.

“ ‘Where are you calling from, Mr. Mills?’

“ ‘St. Louis. I called the number at the bottom of the screen. I thought it was a local call.’