Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Your father’s cubicle had walls of oilcloth nailed to the slats for privacy and it was furnished with what the tenants let him have. He had a youth bed, a lamp which was plugged into an extension cord that went into an outlet near the zinc washtubs, a broken card table chair, and two cartons, one for his clothes and personal possessions, one for his dirty laundry. Heat was provided by what slipped off the coal furnace your father stoked, and he used the spigots by the gray tubs for his water and the lidless toilet behind the furnace for his needs. Yes?”

“How do you know this?”

“He was almost twenty. He had no family in Milwaukee, no friends even among the other janitors in the neighborhood, immigrants whose Polish and Lithuanian and Sicilian had not yet lapsed into even broken American speech. He was old enough. Certainly he was lonely enough. You’d think he would have seen that she was weeping.

“ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘What did you say?’

“ ‘I’m the janitor. I’ve come to fix the WC.’

“That was how they met. She was the maid. He was the man who came to fix the toilet. She was as ignorant as he was. Afterward, because she was in from the country less than a month — this was her first job; she’d been hired when the new tenants moved in — and had heard Mrs. Simon make the same offer to the painters and moving men and delivery people who carried the new Frigidaire up the three flights of stairs, she asked him if he cared for a shot. She took a whiskey bottle from the liquor cabinet in the living room and poured a jigger of rye into a water glass which she left for him on the kitchen table.

“ ‘Your drink is in the kitchen,’ she said and your father nodded. He sat by himself in the kitchen and looked absently at all the food, the canned goods and condiments and boxes of cereal in the pantry. He barely tasted the whiskey, which he drank down in one swallow. Though he didn’t see Nancy she must have been watching him, because as quickly as he was done she came back into the kitchen and began actually to scour the glass from which he had just drunk.

“ ‘Why don’t you just break it and throw it away?’ he said.

“He didn’t drink; he may not even have been sober. Certainly Nancy didn’t think he was. When she had offered him what she had heard Mrs. Simon call a shot he believed she was going to join him, at least sit down with him. She didn’t know what to say when he asked his question about the glass. She had merely been following what she thought were the forms, embarrassed about offering the drink but offering it anyway because she thought he expected it. She began to cry and he believed she was afraid of him.

“Squeamishness lives neither in the gut nor in the head but in the entire organism. It’s a sort of constriction of the self, a physical pulling back, as if the hand has been offered fire or the soul affront. They were both squeamish, both embarrassed, both hurt. It was only your father, however, who had somewhere to go, so he was the one who left.

“This was a Thursday. So tenuous is life, so random, it needs all the help it can get, and enters into conspiracy with everything, with all that’s trivial and all that isn’t. If that toilet hadn’t broken down on a Thursday you wouldn’t exist. This was a Thursday. Everywhere in middle class life Thursday afternoon is the maid’s day off, like some extra, fractional Sabbath.

“She sought him out in the basement of the building where he lived, going up to the oilcloth-rigged room where he was chewing the bread and raw, whole vegetables, the carrots and tomatoes and green beans and lettuce which he bought as he needed them and kept in their original paper bags.

“ ‘Are you in there?’ she asked.

“ ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’

“ ‘It’s Nancy. From Mrs. Simon’s.’

“ ‘Wait a minute.’

“He drew back the bolt on the inside of the storage locker. It was all that made it a room. Not the spurious oilcloth walls nailed to the random, jerry-built joists, not the ruined, odd-lot furniture. The oilcloth was only a kind of screen, and the very nature of the furniture seemed to signify the little area’s storage function, as exposed bedsprings or wheel rims or empty oil drums signify a dump. Only the thin, four-inch bit of metal lifted it into the margins of architecture at all.

“ ‘Yes?’ he said.

“She did not say, ‘You’re eating. It’s your lunchtime. I’ll come back.’ Not because she didn’t understand that she was intruding but because she still didn’t believe that this was where he lived, where he dressed and slept and ate and spent the time when he wasn’t working. She would not even say, ’Is this really where you live?’ She was squeamish, too, recall, and she knew that if it was where he lived it didn’t have to be, and that by asking outright she would be demanding reasons of him that she wouldn’t want to know.

“But she had hurt his feelings, and she had never hurt anyone before. And, too, something happened that morning that made her anxious for her honesty.

“She said she was sorry if she’d done anything to make him uncomfortable but that she had found something of Mrs. Simon’s that had been missing since just after she had come to work for her and that — she didn’t want to ask him about himself so she couldn’t stop herself from telling him about everything that had led up to the insult — she had become too excited and had suddenly gotten the urge.

“ ‘The urge?’

“ ‘I had to go to the bathroom,’ she said.

“He didn’t really follow.

“ ‘That’s her bathroom,’ she said, ‘Mrs. Simon’s. I’m not supposed to use it. I have my own I’m supposed to use. But I’d just found Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch. She never accused me of stealing it, but of course she thinks I did. She took me without references, you see. It’s my first job. I’m seventeen. I didn’t have references. But she said she’d give me a chance if I would let her read a letter I was sending to my folks.

“ ‘When I found her watch this morning I knew it would look more than ever like I was the one who’d taken it. I thought I’d leave it somewhere she could find it herself, you see. Then I realized she’d know I’d put it there or I’d have found it when I was cleaning. That’s when I was caught short, when I had to go to the washroom, and’—she was blushing but it was too dark for your father to see—‘as luck would have it, that’s when it busted. She’d told me not to use hers. So, what with the wrist watch and the broken washroom and all, I didn’t know what to do. I was only trying to do everything right when I offered you the shot.’

“Your father understood. She couldn’t have said anything that would have made him more certain that he’d just found someone so like himself that they might already have been related. He believed in relations. No one living set more stock in them than he. He’d come to Milwaukee when he had heard the history of his family, the same long history you’ve been hearing. He heard the story and exiled himself to that basement, that strange room.

“Because Nancy was right. No one had to live that way. It wasn’t Mindian’s, the landlord’s, idea, it was his own, and he was not so much living as sulking there, feasting on his role as outcast, protecting his heritage in that stick fortress as if it had been a reign, some government in exile, signaling God knows who that, well, what could you expect, he was a Mills. Millses lived in the ground, a whole story below other people’s lives.

“And Nancy had heard of him. Everyone in the neighborhood had heard of him — and not just the people in his buildings either, the two hundred or so men, women and children in the forty-eight units, in the eight apartment houses, on the two blocks, but all the people along Prospect and Kenwood Avenues. And not just the tenants who spoke his language, but the janitors who didn’t. He was famous, as the hermit is famous, as the savage who moves to town is, as anyone distinguished by mythology or distanced by dream.