Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“She counted the cost. She counted the cost as she had estimated not only the price of the meat the others would consume in a week but the value to the penny of the two and a half or three slices of red beef she would not.”

“She was going to leave me?”

“Forcing herself to post the debits and credits involved if she took you.

“ ‘Debit: He would have no father to play with or take him to ball games.

“ ‘Debit: He would want toys.

“ ‘Debit: These are hard times. With two extra children to provide for, a man would think twice before asking a woman to marry him.

“ ‘Debit: He’s so much like his father.

“ ‘Debit: He’d have to be told some story about why we left Milwaukee, why I no longer ever even talk about taking him to visit his relations there. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I’d have to lie. I’m basically an honest person. I’d probably tell bad lies.

“ ‘Debit: If I do meet someone George might blurt out that I’m still married to a man in Wisconsin.

“ ‘Credit: He’s my son, after all.’ ”

“She’s going to leave me.”

“No,” Wickland said. “The debits were chiefly contingency debits, things well into the future, things that might never happen. She might never meet anyone who would want a woman with even one child. She was a person who required maids for those references she had never stopped making up in her head. You could do things around the house, you could help with the baby. She wasn’t going to leave you. She was going to take you.”

“So she could watch me. So she could make up references for me.”

“It was almost the eighth month now. This pregnancy hadn’t been as easy as her first. She was frequently in pain. It was a first-floor apartment but she had difficulty with the stairs, feeling each step in her gut, a pregnancy like appendicitis. She couldn’t do laundry. She couldn’t cook or clean or make beds. She took to her bed.

“And now she had maids, all she could want. They were girls from the buildings, not just from the building they lived in now or from Mrs. Simon’s building or even the building where they had first lived, the one with the famous storage locker (retired now, withdrawn forever from the category of lease, freehold and shelter, vacated, vacant, not exactly condemned nor quite yet memorialized as lovers’ lane, bower, star-crossed grottic coze, but doing a brisk business in necking, heavy petting, nakedness, with the now almost adolescent kids whose bicycles and sleds your father had once pulled up the cellar steps, the flowered oilcloth walls still up, unfaded and still redolent of the mysterious janitor and the exiled maid), but from all Mindian’s buildings, girls out on loan not just from the tenants who had lived there during the glory but from those who had come later, who had only heard about the glory and who wanted a piece of the consequences, the promissory moral catastrophic denouement. And not just on Thursday afternoons either, but every day, practically around the clock, making the apartment shine, eagerly doing your mother’s bidding, anticipating that bidding, getting you ready for school, making breakfast, making lunch, making dinner, doing the shopping!

“All this in deference to what they had been, to the now slipshod memory of what they had been, not a willfully world-shy young janitor and a fired, forlorn, loose-ended country girl, but defiant lovers who took their love into the ground and closed the door after them, like people waiting for the end perhaps, or folks buried alive.

“In any event, Nancy and George did not want for help, nor Nancy for characters to define and read, as my co-spiritualists in Cassadaga read auras, handwriting, palms, gazing crystals, making of life, the future and past, a kind of immense, customized calendar of personality. Though to tell the truth, she wasn’t quite up to her opportunities now. She was uncomfortable and all these helpers seemed to have been cut out of the same cloth. She knew distinctions were always to be made but she was tired; she couldn’t make them.

“ One size fits all. These girls are very willing but they are very trying. It isn’t so much that I have to tell them what to do but that I have to entertain them. Evidently they want to be my friends, to be on personal terms with me. They want to know about our lives.

“ It’s all very well to have an amicable relationship with the help but something else entirely when they feel they can take liberties with you. It shows a want of respect and leads to a breakdown of the employer-servant relationship.

“But her heart wasn’t in it. She rarely composed these characters now. She was too tired, too weak. All she could really think about was when the baby would be born, when she could move to New Jersey. She was constantly nauseous and couldn’t even think about food, not even to plan the menus she had once taken such pride in, the carefully conceived shopping lists with their attention to taste and nutrition and that cunningly shaved economy the proceeds of which were to go toward the purchase of your half-fare ticket to Paterson, New Jersey.”

“She’s not going to take me,” George Mills said, “she’s not going to take me.”

“ ‘There’s never enough change, George. They spend every nickel you give them. There’s food rotting in the pantry.’

“ ‘Just relax, darling,’ her husband told her. ‘Just lie here and try to get your appetite back. Don’t worry about the food bills. Don’t worry about a thing. The food isn’t rotting. All the work they do around here, these girls are entitled to a little something to eat. Please don’t worry, dear. Your friends are taking care of everything.’

“The baby wasn’t even premature. One Tuesday while you were at school your father came in and heard her screaming. Or heard her screaming at Bernice, whose eleven-to-noon shift was just ending and who was waiting to be relieved by Louisa, whose lunch shift was about to begin.

“ ‘No, you foolish girl. I cannot get dressed. The doctor will have to come here. It is impossible that I get up.’

“ ‘But Mrs,’ Bernice objected. (Which is how your mother preferred to be called. Not Mrs. Mills, and certainly not Nancy, but Mrs, as though the girls were incapable of learning her name, only her distance. That she got them to agree — she told them it was a pretty game — is a measure of the awe in which they still held her.)

“ ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ your father shouted.

“ ‘It’s the baby, George. I think I’m having the baby.’

“ ‘She’s in just horrible pain,’ Bernice said.

“ ‘What does the doctor say?’

“ ‘The doctor is a fool.’

“ ‘She says the doctor must come to the apartment. I told him how it was with Mrs, but he says these things is best handled in the hospital.’

“ ‘Then we’ll just take her to the hospital. Take it easy, dear. Take it easy, sweetheart.’

“ ‘I cannot get dressed.’

“ ‘That’s all right. I’ll wrap you in a blanket. I’ll carry you.’

“ ‘Do you want me to have the baby in the hallway? Do you want me to have it in the street? Is that what you want?’

“ ‘Bernice? Bernice?’ Louisa called. ‘I’m here, Bernice. You can go now. I’ll fix lunch and bring it in.’ ”

“Did this happen? I was at school. I remember those girls. There were a bunch of them there when I got home.”

“Because nobody had two maids,” Wickland said. “Because nobody had two maids, let alone five. She wouldn’t let any of them leave. Not that they wanted to. Or maybe she did it for your father. Whom she had made a kind of squire, laird, gent, swell. Who suddenly found himself Duke of Milwaukee.