Stanley Elkin: George Mills

“ ‘They patched you through to Vegas. Jerry and I want to find out what gets the average viewer involved enough to get off the dime. What was it with you, Mr. Mills? Can you tell us?’

“I told him it was the kid.

“ ‘Stu? Great kid, isn’t he?’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said.

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘I want to pledge five dollars. Do you take my name and address?’

“ ‘One of our lovely volunteers will do that.’

“Then, forgetting I was on the air, and because I had someone on the phone who probably knew, I asked what had happened to the little girl, how she was coming along, last year’s poster child. Mr. McMahon was embarrassed. He told me she’d died.

“My wife was watching in the living room. She’d seen it all. Ed McMahon had been stunned, she told me. There were tears in his eyes. It was an affecting moment, she said.

“I never sent in my five dollars, I never watched another telethon.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. It hadn’t anything to do with the sad intricacy of things. I’m grandstanding, he thought. I’m not in the right place, he thought. He should be seated in the congregation. He shouldn’t have come. He glanced at Louise, who remembered the story and seemed to nod in agreeable confirmation. He knew she was pleased to have made it into his anecdote. George wanted to cry.

Then he tried to tell them who he was, how there had been a George Mills since the time of the First Crusade. He told them about the curse they lived under, the thousand years of blue collar blood. He told about the Millses’ odd orphanhood, their queer deprivation of relation.

“I mean Coule called me ‘brother.’ That’s the last name we go by. We don’t have brothers. We’re brothered to fathers, brothered to sons.”

He told them of their alliances, their long, strange allegiance to class.

He couldn’t explain it, he said.

He knew he was failing, knew that if Coule were sitting where he could see him he would not see the God panic in his eyes he put so much stock in. And though he could not see the preacher either, he knew that if he could, he would see himself bathed in waves of tolerance, some queer smug tide of forgiveness. Not love, not even gloating, but a sort of neutral recognition of his, of all failure, a patience with it, good temper, composure, even acquiescence, even compliance.

And now he stood apart from his inability to deliver, cool as the preacher. Whatever of urgency or nervousness he’d felt had dissipated and he felt he could go on forever, like each Mills before him, filibustering his life. He could say anything to them, tell them anything.

“Years ago,” he said, “I saw the double helix. I saw it thrashing around on the floor of the Delgado Ballroom refracted from the light of a chandelier. I didn’t know what it was. I never followed through. I recognized it many years later in a photograph.

“I don’t know anything. I mean I drank it for years but I can’t tell you what Ovaltine is. What is Ovaltine? Why is it good for us?”

He listened for Coule to clear his throat, shift in his chair, offer some signal that enough was enough. Coule was silent. They all were.

From time to time his eyes swept the congregation. From time to time he searched the church. He did this covertly, like an agent, like an actor peering out from behind a curtain examining the house. He couldn’t himself have said what he was looking for. Not old Messenger Merlin, the epilogue man. He’d broken with Messenger, though it may have been Cornell’s compulsions which served him now, which drove him to breach secrecy and decorum, which drove him, he realized, to stall. Then he didn’t want to go on forever. He told them more or less what he’d promised Coule he would tell them. He told them he was saved. He told them he had grace. That nothing could happen to him, that he was stuck in his grace like a ship sunk in the sea.

“Amen,” someone called, startling him. George looked up. All over the church people were calling out their amens, not patient now, neither considerate nor tolerant so much as dutiful, not even fervent, nothing so much as accustomed, almost like actors answering promptings. “Amen, amen,” they called.

“Amen,” a woman in Louise’s aisle said in her print dress, in her hat, in her gloves and white shoes.

Which was why he hadn’t recognized her, the woman from the supermarket. Because she’d been in men’s clothing. Now his bowels ached, now his hands sweated, now his heart labored, now his tongue thickened and his mood ring ignited like the mirrored ball on the Delgado ceiling, running with color, bruised with light. Now his pulses leapt and things closed in, his ideas rushing him, swarming, his words issuing from, crowding from, rudely shoving from his head and throat and mouth and lips, jostling for priority as if head, throat, mouth and lips were on fire.

Now he felt shaken, blasted by the truth of his life. Which he found himself delivering in this public place in messages so Pentecostal and private they might have been the jumbled, contradictory tongues and bulletins of disaster.

She’s dressed up! No wonder! He laughed.

“Because I never went home. Because I never went back to—” And held his tongue. Thinking: I can’t say that. I mustn’t say Cassadaga, I mustn’t even say Florida. I can’t even say that what I’d seen in that supermarket was not just a lady in men’s pants but the actual sister I might by now actually have, and that what I saw in her, who might in that jacket and those trousers and that hat have been an honest-to-God brother, who was I thought then, and not just that masculine businesswoman got up in drag I see now she didn’t mean and wasn’t doing for fun but out of some necessity of the vending machine trade, protecting herself from the dark oils and thick greases much as I myself wear my eviction habit, the heavy furniture pads, not, as I’d once thought, out of deference to the furniture of the poor, but, as Laglichio says, the illusion of deference, keeping myself safe from splinters, blood poison, the rough, unvarnished and nail-studded underneaths of a black man’s dining room suite.

“Because I never went home to see, to find out.

“And who may by then and certainly by now, as all Mills kids do, have already left home herself, quit the roost, split, gone off not to make their fortune but simply to repeat it.

“Hell, it’s a long shot. Don’t I know it’s a long shot? I know that. Could it be any longer than a thousand years of George Millses?

“Hey,” he said, “it isn’t plausible. What long shot is? They’re all sucker bets.”

(And he thought of long shots, numbers so high they were beyond mathematics, beyond odds, outside hope. What Magaziner had told George XLIII just before that old campaigner had found the Valide Sultan’s body on one of the two or three days out of all the year when she was in residence at the seraglio, and that had enabled him to say the words that turned the keys that moved the tumblers that released the bolts that sprung the locks that opened the doors of Yildiz. And not just her body, and not just on the two days — three at the outside — she came to pour tea, but rather on the one day — she was seventy-one years old — out of the twenty-five thousand, nine hundred and fifteen — at the inside, the inside; there would be eighteen leap year days, plus the days she had already lived beyond her seventy-first birthday — that body would be dead and available for him to find! So he wasn’t even talking about long shots. He was talking about out-and-out miracle!)

“But no Mills made her up,” he said. “She’d be—” He couldn’t say Wickland. “She’d be named something else. Not Mills. She’d never even heard the name Mills. Our mother wouldn’t have told her, and the man who would have been her stepfather would have been long gone once he saw she was a girl. Millses didn’t make girls. His wife was unfaithful. So he’d have been long gone. Just a few months behind his son, just five or six months behind me.