Stanley Elkin - George Mills

Nor was it the fear of lawsuits that caused him to give up his mission. He knew better there, too. It was her eyes, the holy panic, the fear of the Lord he saw in them, a fear more contagious than any disease at which he’d ever made passes with his ring-fingered hands.

It was Coule Louise went to when Mills told her he was saved.

They were nominally Baptist, or Louise was. They belonged to the church which promised the greatest return on their emotional dollar. The Baptists had the hymns and water ceremonies and revivals, though not the latter, not since Coule’s time, and the Virginia Avenue Baptist Church was a large, almost theaterlike building which had been a Catholic church until its chiefly German congregation had moved to more affluent areas of South St. Louis. One or two of the old families, with no place else to go, continued to come not to attend services — the church had been deconsecrated by the Cardinal himself — but to pray in its familiar pews, crossing themselves timidly, rather like people adjusting their clothing with rapid, feathery movements. These people, mostly women, were like folks caught short in the streets. They felt that way themselves, and Coule thought Louise one of them when he saw her sitting by herself in a pew in the dark, empty church. He was turning to go when Louise saw him and waved. He still didn’t recognize her. He might not have recognized her even if she had been one of his regulars. It was the old business — though his congregation was smaller now, numbering about two hundred or so where once it had been in the thousands — of not remembering the faces of the people he served.

“I don’t come often, Minister,” she said. “We’re Baptists here, but we don’t come often. Well George doesn’t come at all. He does sometimes, you know, at Christmas, like that. He’s not much of a church-goer.” She told him about George, about his salvation, then wondered why she’d come at all. Salvation would be a run-of-the-mill event for a minister. Here she was, she said, going on about nothing. She had seen him on television, she said. She giggled.

“What?”

“I was almost going to ask for your autograph. You’re the only famous person I know.” Then she did something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She vaguely curtsied. Embarrassed, she made the same exiguous gestures the scant handful of Catholics did who still came by from time to time. She touched her hands to her hair as if she were wearing a hat. Everything she did suggested imaginary items of clothing to Coule — pushing up on the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other as if she wore gloves, lightly brushing her throat as if a scarf were there. He walked outside with her through the big church doors.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t guess being saved’s such a big deal to a man in your line.”

“Of course it is. I just don’t know what you want me to do.”

“I wish you would see him.”

“Certainly,” Coule said. “Have him call my office, we’ll make an appointment.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t come here,” she said.

“But if he’s saved—”

“He says he’s saved. That he’s in a state of grace and doesn’t have to do anything.”

“Tell me,” he said, “did I save him?”

“Nobody saved him.”

Coule waited for Mills’s call, though Louise had told him not to. He looked for them on Sunday morning. They weren’t there. They weren’t there the following Sunday. He was bothered by the woman, by her face, which recalled to him the face of the husband and had about it that same sense of wounded reciprocity. Marriage is terrible, he thought.

What bothered him most was his question. “Did I save him?” he’d asked. He, Coule, famous from coast to coast for what had seemed like wrath — he’d edited his shows himself, purposely building them around his furious disclaimers — had not let her leave until he’d asked it. And imagined the look on his face, the coast-to-coast wrath crestfallen, declined to disappointment, acknowledging, if only to himself, what the husband and Mills’s wife had never acknowledged — though what did he know about hearts? — the nonreciprocity of desire, its utter pointlessness.

There was currently a campaign on to bring people into the church. It was the membership’s doing, Coule pretty much staying out of it for he had rather renounced proselytizing when he left Ohio. When the chairman of the committee reported to him he could not help himself. “Has anyone contacted the Millses?”

“The Millses?”

“They live over on Wyoming Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. George Mills?”

The man referred to his list.

“It’s all right,” Coule said, “I’ll call them.”

He called that night. George answered the phone.

“This is Reverend Coule, Mr. Mills. Virginia Avenue Baptist?”

“Yes?”

“We’re having a membership drive. I wonder, could I come over and call on you sometime?”

“You want to speak to Louise,” Mills said.

“Well, frankly, I was hoping I could speak to you.”

Mills didn’t answer at once. When he did Coule was surprised by what he said. “I’m busy,” George told him. “I do heavy work. Nights I’m tired. I watch television. I got all my programs picked out for the week. I don’t like to miss them. I know what you’re going to say.”

Then his wife had told him of their meeting. “Oh,” Coule said. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“You’re going to say I could always catch the reruns. But they don’t repeat all the shows. Only the best. What they think is the best. I have no way of knowing which show’s going to be repeated. You see my position.”

This man was saved? This was the delivered, salvationed, redeemed, and ransomed fellow for whom Christ had died?

And then he knew. Of course he was.

“I do,” Coule said. “I see your position. You know,” he said, “ I used to be on television.”

“Louise told me. I never watch any of that stuff. I never watch those shows.”

“Because you’re already saved,” Coule said quickly.

“Louise tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Well I never told her it was a secret.”

“Look,” Coule said, “I really think we should talk. Perhaps I could drop by where you work.”

“I work the nigger neighborhoods. I carry their furniture down the stairs. They got black ice in their ice cube trays. Their furniture slips through my fingers from their greasy ways. There’s come stains on the drapes. Their rent money goes for Saturday night specials. Welfare buys them knives.”

“You’re saying you won’t see me,” Coule said.

“Sure,” Mills said, “I’ll see you. Don’t get in my way. If I drop a couch you could break your legs.”

“Who was that on the phone?” Louise asked.

“Coule,” Mills said. “He says you told him all about me.” Like Greatest Grandfather Mills, he was bilingual. He talked in tongues. The neutral patois of the foolish ordinary and a sort of shirty runic. He had used both on Coule but the minister had not been put off. “I could have said no,” he told his wife, “but I would have gotten you in Dutch.”

“I’m already in Dutch.”

“No,” Mills said.

“I live with one of the elect. I’ll never catch up. Will I go to hell, George?”

“Gee,” Mills said, “I don’t know, Louise.”

They met in an almost empty apartment in the projects. There were still some cartons to take down, a broken chair.

“I’m Ray Coule,” the minister said.

“Will you look at that?” Mills said. “We’re on the seventh floor here and the windows are all covered with wire mesh. They got to do that. That’s government specification. Steal? They take from the sandbox!” There was a framed picture of Martin Luther King on the living room wall. “This go, Uncle?” George asked an old man in a wooden wheelchair. Mills winked at his visitor.