Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“I don’t know if she ever worked with him as a control or not. All I know is that ‘ the young fourteen-year-old girl with the gray hair and withered body of an old woman ’ must have been the one who gave Jack Sunshine his height!”

“Is that what you see?” Wickland asked.

“Boy oh boy,” George said. “I do. I really enjoyed our chat.”

He was pleased with himself. He had raised the dead, momentarily held them aloft on the energy of concentration, argument and the polar shifts of alternative. He was convinced and wondered if he had convinced Wickland. But Wickland knew what had happened and was beyond his arguments. And suddenly, simply by knowing something George didn’t, the reverend seemed smug, and George began to understand something about the nature of the place he had lived in for over two years now. Nowhere he would ever live would be so theoretical. Cassadaga was a sort of stump, a kind of congress. It was somewhere one could orate, a neighborhood of debate. (Perhaps that was why there were no stores or restaurants, no schools or hotels, only this little square of the civic.) All, all longed to be heroes of life, even Wickland, even himself. Now the reverend would show him his sister. She would go up like fireworks and now he’d be wowed. It was simple, really. One lived by sequence, by a sort of Roberts’ Rules of Order. Cassadaga was only a kind of conversation.

“Your mother,” Wickland began, “is very nice.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why she’s so quiet though.”

“She talks.”

“She’s most polite.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“She is not wild, George.”

“I don’t want a wild mother.”

“Isn’t it interesting that she is not interesting?”

“Sunshine’s mother was interesting,” George said. “My mother is good.”

“I gather from what you’ve told me that all the women in your family have been good.”

“I never told you about all the women in my family. I hope they’ve been good.”

“Otherwise we should have heard,” Wickland said slyly. “Don’t be defensive, George. I’m not going to insult your mother. I’m not going to call you a son of a bitch.”

“Hey,” George said.

“That bristle you feel is not pride,” Wickland said. “It’s breeding. Ten hundred years of doggy antagonism and the biological bitters of instinct.”

“Here we go,” George said.

“Indeed,” Wickland said, “for isn’t it curious that you Millses, servants and dog soldiers of the domestic, think Honor only on the occasion of its aspersion and only when the distaff takes the slur?

“You were not bankers or lawyers or politicians or even merchants. A millennium of benchwork. That’s your tradition, George. A thousand years. And your women the same.”

“Hey!”

“A thousand years in the typing pool.”

“Hey.”

“Have you never wondered how you’ve managed to last so long, how there could be this unbroken thousand-year streak of George Millses? It’s your women, George, your nice, quiet, polite, unwild women.”

“You keep my mother out of—”

“Look at you. Look at you! I see your gums and balled fists, your hard-on hackles. Don’t worry, you won’t. You won’t have to. This is the seance now. I’m only explaining. You won’t have to.

“Not bitch, not bitch anyway. Hen. Sow. Cow. Not bitch, not even filly. Mare! Not wench, not even lady. Virgin, maiden! Certainly not dame or broad or bimbo. Mother, parent, housewife, spouse — all the feminized, maidenly matronics of passive womaninity.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. It’s what kept you alive. It’s what killed your sister.”

“Hey!”

“Because you don’t last a thousand years in this dispensation unless you’ve got something special going for you. Luck couldn’t account for it. It wouldn’t.

“A thousand years of benchwork, ten centuries of day labor. Not even clerks, though you’d an eye for the clerical, the file folder heart, the women who would prove in motherhood what they’d already testified to by the filing cabinet, their gift for organization, their prim loyalties like a lesson to passion. They’d spend a lifetime as mothers and would die old maids.

“No wonder they bore male children only! It was only more deference, birth a sort of muscle control like the swift bows, nods and courtesies of a maitre d’. (Alphonse and Gaston must have been women, too.) They had minds like Miss America. (Don’t tell me ‘Hey!’ I’m being kind.) We’re talking marriage like motherhood in guitar songs, we’re talking self-denial, devotion. (No wonder you guys bristle. It isn’t your women you’re defending, it’s your moms.) And maybe when your sister died it was just intuition. Maybe stillbirth is just the female Millses’ way of saying ‘No thanks, I gave at the office!’

“You know why she goes to the crystal gazers and tarot dealers? Because we don’t read breakfast cereal, because we don’t read laundry. Because women like her don’t have daughters!

“I tell you, George, these women were wonders. The cookbooks of obligation, the flannel of duty, the curlers of love!

“But why are they so dowdy, eh?

“Because dowdy is what you choose them for. Because dowdy is part of the package, part of their heritage, like the cheekbones of Scandinavians or the dark skin of belly dancers. Have you ever seen them dolled up? They look, in their make-up, as if they’ve been crying, in their white shoes and cheap dresses like hicks at matinees. Do you see your sister?”

“No.”

“Because your mother is different,” Wickland said. “Nancy is different.” And it was true what Wickland had been saying. He did want to hit him. He did bristle, enmity crawling his skin like a contact rash and his saliva a rich soup in his jaw. He felt actual aversion, fear, the cornered, grating grudge of opponents in nature. This man is my rival, he thought. I’ve been reckless, he thought. I’ve told him too much.

“Your father knew beans about plumbing,” Wickland said. “He could use a plunger and work the shutoff valve with his wrench, but the scaffolding of pivots, shafts and pipes and the improbable ball that floated at the top of the tank like a lesson in leverage were about as meaningful to him as airplane engines. Also, he was squeamish. The black rubber plug at the bottom was something he didn’t have to hold to feel. His greatest grandfather had shoveled manure for a living and your father suspected that was where his antipathy came from, not custom and acclimation catching in his genes but the original shock and revulsion themselves.

“Which was why he hoped to God it was a big job when Mindian sent for him, something they would have to tear the walls out to get to. Mindian had authorized him to call in a plumber for the big jobs. He climbed the back stairs and pressed the buzzer by the back door. The pretty cleaning girl opened the door.

“ ‘I’m the janitor,’ he said. ‘I hear you got big trouble with your WC.’

“There are three things you should know about your father. I’ve already told you he was squeamish, and perhaps you already know that at this time, at the time he met your mother, he lived in a basement, in a room in the cellar of one of the buildings he serviced. The third thing is that he was thoroughly versed in the family history.

“The room in which he lived was not a real room at all. It was a wooden-slatted storage locker, one of several that had been set aside for the tenants, where they could put odd bits of furniture, old mattresses, castoff stoves, the children’s bicycles, busted lamps, cartons of outgrown clothes, derelict chairs and beds, whatever was remnant in their households, whatever they could find no use for yet could not bring themselves to throw away, whatever they had forgotten they still owned. Not for safekeeping — the locks that went through the flimsy hinges were ceremonial rather than effective; often they were not even fastened; any burglar who cared to take the trouble could have come into the basement and browsed the equivocal possessions there like a window shopper; the dark, six-by-ten-foot cells were slatted, the thin boards not carpentered so much as slapped together like so many kids’ tree- or clubhouses — perhaps not for keeping — except possibly for the bicycles — at all. A place where possession was not so much protected as simply resolved, defined, where one family’s cargo left off and the next one’s took up.