Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“But mostly she talked with them. (And they with her, her mystery and whatever of aura and cachet she possessed for them dissolved by the marriage they had so fiercely supported.) Asked leading questions and closely considered their answers, grading them, listening, the janitor’s wife, to their grammar, discovering what interest they had in history, current events (though intelligence and knowledge were the least of what she looked for, only seeking to get by these methods some clue to their intentions, their loyalties and commitments).

“ ‘You said you have a fellow back in Menomonee Falls.’

“ ‘Oh yar. Pete. Pete’s all right. He’s real cute, but he’s awrful shy.’

“ ‘Shy.’

“ ‘Well, he ain’t like Roger, my other beau. Roger’s a scamp. He don’t hardly give a girl time to say yar even if she’s of a mind to. Roger just goes ahead and makes all the big decisions hisself.’

“ ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

“ ‘Why? Roger ain’t never yet took me no place I didn’t really want to be.’

“And Nancy, the handwriting flourished, almost sculptured, more elaborate than any she’d ever used, would make a note: Molly. Molly is a cheerful, healthy girl of doubtful morals. She has at least two boyfriends, and has hinted at her willingness to go ‘all the way’ with both of them. While Molly’s personal life is her own affair, she strikes me as sexually careless. She could become pregnant at any time, leaving her employers high and dry.

“ ‘Mrs. Faber’s dishes seemed very beautiful when I saw them that time.’

“ ‘I should say so! They’re ever so expensive. Forty dollars a place setting and they have service for twelve. I don’t know what they’d do if a plate were to break. They don’t even make that pattern anymore.’

“Or: Helen. Helen is a very serious young woman who knows the value of her employers’ things and has a respect for them which is admirable. She displays concern for their safety which leads me to believe she would care for the goods of a household as if they were her own.

“But something sad and pathetic about the characters she was always perfecting in her head. She never actually wrote them down, knowing that as long as she was married to your father she would never have the opportunity to give a genuine reference. She knew more. She knew that if she had a son nothing would change. Your father wouldn’t change. She made a promise to herself.”

“A promise?”

“That you were never to be told about the Millses. That the buck stopped there.

“But nothing changed. And your mother was forced into a position people seldom find themselves in. She was forced, that is, to make plans.

“It is an astonishing fact, George, but the truest thing I know. Our lives happen to us. We don’t make them up. For every hero who means to cross an ocean on a raft, there are a hundred men fallen overboard, a thousand, who find themselves in the lifeboat by accident.

“Not Nancy. Nancy had plans. What she planned was a new life. She meant to take you and the baby — she was pregnant again — and to leave your father, to get as far from the apartments and basements of Milwaukee as possible, not to divorce him, because she didn’t want your father to know where you would be, and once she brought the law into it — separation agreements, court decrees, visitation formulas — there would be no hiding from him. She planned, you see, to disappear in America.

“ ‘Maybe it’s a good thing that I have no references, that I’m one of those for whom there is no record. Look at my husband. He is all references. The trouble is he believes them. They are all he believes. I will have to write home less often. One day I shall have to stop altogether. They don’t know yet I’m pregnant with Georgie’s sister. It was a mistake to tell them about Georgie. I didn’t know. Oh well. Live and learn. They won’t find out about baby Janet. Leaving George I leave them all.

“ ‘And if I meet a man? On my travels? Wherever it is I’m going. New Jersey! I shall go to New Jersey! If I meet a man in New Jersey and he wants to marry me and give me maids, what does it matter if he thinks me a widow? How would he ever find me out? My kind is free.’

“She found out the coach fare to New Jersey and began to save for it by not spending all the money George gave her for food. She hid what she was able to put aside in their storage locker off the laundry room in the basement of the apartment where they now lived. She hid it under the thin mattress at the bottom of the stroller you had now outgrown and which was being kept for your sister.

“The handwriting in her head now:

“ Nancy. Nancy is a basically honest person. Forced by circumstance to deceive her husband by withholding money specifically budgeted for household expenses, she carefully saw to it that she and she alone did the stinting. This, incidentally, is evidence of her organizational abilities, her initiative and growing skill with detail. She planned nutritious, comprehensive menus, carefully subtracting from her own portions what would look to the casual observer like hearty enough breakfasts, quite appetizing lunches, full-course dinners. She knew down to the unpurchased potato and unsqueezed orange, she knew to the slice of toast, to the egg and very fraction of stew or knifeload of peanut butter, the exact cost of what she would not be eating that day. Her hunger was her bankbook, and if she carefully managed to set aside from seventy-five cents to a dollar or so a week toward the price of her railroad tickets, George her husband and George her son were not only none the wiser but not a bit less comfortable for it. (Nor did she, as some might, add to the nest egg by telling her husband that hen’s meat and produce were inferior and could she have a little more money — fifty cents a week would do it — in order to shop at Hilton’s.)

“She was trying to save three lives — hers, yours, your sister’s. By the sixth month she had socked away most of the cash for her tickets — the baby, of course, would ride free — and had even selected a place to go to, Paterson, a small industrial city in north-eastern New Jersey, about seventeen miles from New York. She had gone to the library. She even knew what they did there — textiles, cotton and silk. (She had always sewn, she knew material; she didn’t think the big treadles and looms of Paterson, New Jersey, would be that much more difficult to handle than the Singer she was already accustomed to.) So it was all planned out, not only where she would go and what she would do but — she got hold of the Paterson newspaper — where she would live. All this from a woman who when she had been fired, sent away a few years before, could think of nowhere farther off to go than just downstairs.

“It wasn’t just the money for your ticket, George, that gave her second thoughts.

“ ‘George can almost read now. He’ll be writing in a year. He knows his address. Suppose he wants to get in touch with his daddy? How could I stop him from writing a letter? If I can prevent that, how do I keep him from running back in three or four years with my address? And there’s his ticket. I’ll have put away only enough to pay for our fares. There’ll be nothing left to start over with when we get to Paterson.’ ”

“She was going to leave me? She was going to leave me?”

“ Nancy. Nancy is devoted to her family. She is determined that her children remain with her no matter what. I should add that this is not a decision arrived at lightly, or reached on the basis of emotion alone. (Though a naturally warm and loving person, the young woman in question doesn’t allow her heart to interfere with the facts. Nancy can be depended upon to look at all sides of an issue and to take decisive action only after her judgment has been thoroughly consulted.)