Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“He was famous. Nancy had heard of him. Only she was surprised that he was so young, so beardless, so cute. Tales had gone round. People who knew better told them, the tenants who had actually seen him, whose garbage cans he had carried down the back stairs to the alley, whose busted locks he had replaced, whose paint-fastened windows he had opened, whose sprung doors he had planed. And the housemaids in the building where he actually lived, who used the laundry room that was, in effect, his patio, his front yard. The children brave enough to ask his help in pulling their bicycles out of the storage lockers and carry them up the stairs to the street.

“ ‘It was the way,’ she said, ‘I’d seen Mrs. Simon wash out those glasses. It wasn’t because I heard you live down here all by yourself like some old bear.’

“ ‘You heard that?’ He was genuinely surprised. He truly did not know of his fame. His act had been for his own entertainment; he didn’t realize others had been enjoying it as well. ‘What else did you hear?’ Nancy blushed again, this time so deeply that even in the dimness he saw it, even felt its heat perhaps. ‘No, go on,’ he said, ‘what do they say?’ She’s stalling, he thought. He could just imagine what people told one another. That he’d been cut off, that he’d cut himself off without a penny, the monk of modern times. People’s imaginations! ‘What?’

“ ‘That you’re not right.’

“He exploded. ‘Of course I’m right! I didn’t come down here without thinking about it. What do they know! It was a carefully thought-out decision. I weighed the pros and cons. Not even my fath—’

“ ‘That you’re not right in the head.’

“ ‘That I’m crazy?’

“ ‘That you’re not smart enough to be crazy. That you’re slow.’

“‘Hey!’

“Because already they were talking about him! Not five minutes into the courtship and already they were talking about him! The slight to his pride in the kitchen explained, Nancy forbidden access to certain toilets forgotten if it had ever registered in the first place, the wrist watch back-burnered. Maybe he wasn’t right in the head, not crazy but slow. Here he had just found out that he had what he didn’t even know he wanted — fame, notoriety — and all he could think to do was quibble with its nature. He set Nancy straight, you bet!

“ ‘You just go back to those biddies and tell them to mind their business. If they have nothing better to do than talk about people, the least they can do is get the facts right.’

“Which was really the official beginning of the courtship, your father laying out his reasons and justifications for the bewildered girl as if they were stunning chess moves or winning hands in poker, reeling off his history like debater’s points or telling arguments in a letter to the editor. And indeed it had just that quality of pent righteousness such letters have, that same burst, off-the-chest violence of nourished grudge.

“She had never met anyone with anything so fancy as a fate before. She couldn’t even follow him.

“ ‘No,’ he said, summing up, ‘I won’t kill myself. That’s not the scheme. It’s to hide out for the fifty or so years I have left to live, go about my business and accomplish by myself in a single lifetime what all my family haven’t been able to pull off in a thousand years — the extinction of my long, bland, lumpish line.’

“ ‘What are you going to do?’

“ ‘I just told you. Nothing.’

“ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it sounded as if you were going to do something crazy.’

“ ‘Not crazy, slow. So slow it will amount to nothing. I’m going to remain a bachelor.’

“ ‘You’re never going to get married?’

“ ‘I’m never going to have children. I’m never even going to go near a woman.’

“Which was absurd. He lived in proximity not only to the six housemaids in that very apartment building, but every day except Thursday afternoons and Sundays had to walk the same saucy, laundered, hung-to-dry gauntlet of damp female apparatus, brassieres, corsets, panties and garter belts — all the luscious, silken, sexual bunting of all the mothers, housewives, sisters, maids and daughters in all those eight apartment houses he serviced. It brushed his face like climate, it pierced his skin like itch, and, because it was empty, it could have been filled with anybody, anyone.

“Fate really is a lame way of doing business. It’s a wonder that history ever happens. Your dad said he would never marry, never have anything to do with women. She had no reason not to believe him, so if it had ever crossed her mind that he was an eligible young man, he disabused her of the notion within minutes of her having formed it. What I said about Thursdays notwithstanding, the odds against your ever being born were overwhelming. No, Mrs. Simon was your real fate.

“But a word about your father. It’s one thing to hide out, it’s another to be misrepresented. No sooner did he learn from your mother not only that people thought of him but what they thought of him, and no sooner did he understand that Nancy was the very one to set them straight — he was overreacting of course; they knew about him but he was hardly the only thing on their minds — no sooner, that is, did he realize that he had need of Nancy — and we’re talking, too, of how she looked in that little make-believe doorway of his little make-believe room — than he repudiated her.”

It felt good to sit there, George thought, knowing the end of the story, that whatever its complications, it would turn out well, that his father would turn out to be his father, that his mother would turn out to be his mother, and that he himself would eventually be brought to life.

“You see,” Wickland said, “everyone is something of an occasion. Even the kings, even the officials and presidents, those, I mean, whom history has need of. But you’re even more of an occasion than most. You were proscribed. Think about it. Your father said he would never go near women. Your mother believed him.

“So it was up to Esther Simon. She was the deciding factor in your existence.

“ ‘Doll,’ she called when Nancy returned that evening from her afternoon off. ‘Can you come into the master bedroom a sec, doll?’

“I don’t think it ever occurred to Nancy that her employer, the woman who presumed to read her mail in lieu of references, who suspected her of being a thief, who called her doll because she couldn’t always remember her name, who ordered her about, could almost have been a spoiled, slightly older sister. Esther Simon was only twenty-two years old. She had known her husband, Barry, a distant cousin, all her life, since they had been children in adjacent Hyde Park mansions in Chicago. It did not even occur to her as odd that when Mrs. Greene came to visit her daughter and son-in-law in Milwaukee, the Simons were ‘the kids,’ Nancy ‘the woman.’

“ ‘Yes ma’am,’ your seventeen-year-old mother said to her twenty-two-year-old boss.

“ ‘Your sweetie must have dropped this,’ she said. ‘You better not wait till next Thursday to return it.’

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘What indeed? It’s a wrench. I found it in the master bathroom.’

“ ‘That’s not mine,’ Nancy said.

“ ‘Well of course it’s not. It’s his. He must have dropped it when he presumed to use my toilet.’

“ ‘Please, Mrs. Simon, you’re making—’

“ ‘A mistake? Of course, doll. It’s probably Mr. Simon’s monkey whoosis, only Mr. Simon’s out of town and it wasn’t there when I left this morning.’

“ ‘It’s the janitor’s.’

“ ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Simon said, ‘I suppose that strange young man has unusual bathroom arrangements and from time to time is compelled to move his bowels above his station, but not in my house. Is that clear, doll? Look, your Thursday afternoons are your own affair, but you are not to make appointments in what is after all my home. I shall certainly speak to Mindian about this. Change my sheets.’