Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“And your father had barely got going. Having given her an overview of George Mills history, he had not yet unburdened himself of more than two hundred years of particulars. She loved it. History had been one of her favorite subjects in high school. Your father did not know he was wooing her and she didn’t know she was being wooed. And that’s what was happening to her.

“She loved it. Whether the lovemaking—”

“Hey,” George Mills said.

“—was an adjunct to the history lessons, or the history lessons a subscript to the lovemaking was a matter of indifference to her, as was, as you already know, the tininess of the room, which could have been, and in effect was, like a kind of carrel in a library. Even the narrowness of the diminutive youth bed — it was a time when as many undergraduates as could squeezed themselves into flivvers, phone booths, changing rooms at beaches — had an air of the makeshift collegiate. Your mother and father matriculated on that little, cotlike bed.”

“Hey,” George Mills said, “hey.”

“Maybe she even expected to. It was the sort of virginal, celibate, nunnish, monkish bed she had slept in all her life. If she was at all romantic, the serf prince who was to free her would have come and ultimately joined her there. She would not have anticipated that it could have been otherwise. She may even have thought that that was part of the lovemaking, part of the act itself, that that crimped, cramped, rush-hour press of person, that closely close-quartered, neck-and-neck propinquity was concomitant with the conditions and moods of penetration. She may even have thought that that stall-like storage room in the basement of that apartment building was an out-and-out bower. And perhaps that was why she had been so offended the first time she had seen your father’s living arrangements, not because she knew that no one had to live that way but because she knew that no one was entitled to occupy a bower by himself! Perhaps she even moved in with him out of a sense of decorum and decency, out of some innate knowledge of how architecture was intended to be filled up and used.

“Mindian came.

“ ‘Be right with you, sir,’ your father said. ‘Just give us a moment, sir, if you would.’

“He slid the bolt back and opened the door, exposing the bright, flower-print oilcloth walls. Nancy was behind him. ‘Yes sir?’ your father said.

“ ‘It looks like a kitchen table exploded in here,’ he said. ‘Step out from behind George for a moment please, Nancy. I want to look at you.’

“She did as she was told. Mindian regarded her as he had regarded the interior of the room. ‘So it’s true,’ he said.

“ ‘True?’ George said.

“ ‘This woman is pregnant,’ Mindian said. ‘How far along are you? Four months? Five?’

“ ‘Not five I don’t think, Mr. Mindian.’

“ ‘The maids told me. My tenants did.’

“ ‘A lot of busybodies,’ your father said.

“ ‘Yes,’ Mindian said. ‘The same busybodies who’ve been protecting you for half a year now. Who not only countenanced your dalliance but actively supported it. We’d become fans, you see — I do not except myself — boosters and rooters. You kids were love’s home team. Even the polack, dago and wog janitors were for you. You were everybody’s darlings, apples of eyes, teacher’s pets, America’s sweethearts. I’m your landlord. I’ve come to marry you.’

“You will believe that your mother must certainly have thought about marriage. I tell you she did not. It’s not even certain that she loved George Mills.

“And your father. Have we not already seen how he repudiated women? And do we not know from his actions that it wasn’t women he meant but only the entailments pursuant to liaison, nervous not about his responsibilities to a real wife and a material son but to a hypothetical posterity which was even then fifty to sixty years off? Your father was an intellectual. He believed, that is, in the palpable reality of any idea or event which had not yet come to pass in his own lifetime. That’s why, squeamish as he was, he hid out in basements and cheerfully shouldered other people’s garbage — to subdue allure and retract hope. He was a victim of myth and handled himself as other myth victims have, finding his solutions in amateur and immediate expediency, rarely reading between the lines, which is where fate always has its way with you. Told, say, that he would murder his father and marry his mother, he would quit Corinth; or that no man born of woman could harm him, he would confidently chum even his enemies.

“ ‘I’m your landlord. Marry or leave.’

“ ‘We can stay if we get married?’ your mother asked.

“ ‘Hey,’ your father said.

“ ‘Not down here,’ Mindian said. ‘The Board of Health would condemn my basements.’

“ ‘I can’t marry,’ your father said.

“ ‘Then I shall have to fire you,’ Mindian said. And then, more passionately, with a concern that was the measure of how your parents had touched the life of this landlord, he asked your father if he really meant to abandon the girl.

“ ‘It’s the kid I’m abandoning, not Nancy.’

“ ‘You needn’t worry,’ Mindian told your mother. ‘You and the child will be taken care of. There’s a vacant apartment in one of my buildings. It’s one of the apartments reserved for the janitors. You may have it. The tenants and I will see that you and the baby are provided for.’

“ ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ your father said. ‘You mean there’ll be all right anyway? Nancy and the kid, too?’

“ ‘Certainly,’ Mindian said. ‘Until they’re on their feet. Certainly.’

“Your father groaned.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” George Mills said. “What did he think—”

“He’d spilled the beans by this time,” Wickland said. “Nancy knew as much of the family history now as he did. Even he knew how interested she’d been. He figured she’d tell the child the story anyway, out of spite if nothing else. But he knew how good a scholar she was, that she wouldn’t even have needed spite, that she would have told it out of the simple love of truth, out of innocent deference to the fact that history had been one of her favorite subjects.”

“No,” George said, “I mean about the baby.”

“You were the baby.”

“Then about me. What about me? I would have been in the picture anyway. Whether they got married or not. Whether Mindian took care of Mother and me or not. Or did he want Mother to have—”

“I don’t think he even thought about it,” Wickland said. “I think he simply trusted his bad luck. That he believed his bad luck had gotten her pregnant. You see he loved her now. He believed his bad luck would kill her.”

“But that doesn’t—”

“It does if you believe you’re a myth victim. If you believe a thousand years have been up to nothing but shaping the fate of a single man. Expediency. Flee Corinth, kill a man, fall in love, marry. Tell yourself your hands are tied.

“They were married in the basement on a Thursday afternoon in front of the maids and janitors and other tenants.

“Even Mrs. Simon was there. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re married now. Is there anything you particularly want for a wedding present, doll?’

“ ‘Could I have a reference?’ your mother asked.

“But I believe the community would have preferred it if your father had abandoned your mother. They wanted their darlings, you see, and if they couldn’t have their passionate darlings whom pregnancy and the realities had taken away from them, then they would have been quite content to have their victim darlings, substituting without turning a hair a wronged girl and a baby for a hero and heroine of love. Married, and with a baby on the way, they were just like everybody else.