Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“ ‘Call that doctor again. Say that it is impossible that I get out of this bed. Say that he is the one who confined me to it. Ask how it may be that at the moment when we are most precarious we should quit it. No, George, you stay. Rosalie will call.’

“Perhaps it was the screaming, but they were coming all at once now and not waiting upon their designated times.

“ ‘Louisa,’ your mother said, ‘stand at the door. Admit no one but those girls who are trusted.’

“ ‘How will I know?’

“ ‘Pass in the names. We’ll let you know.’

“He thought she was hysterical, that to move her by force would rupture not only the female mechanism which had caused her difficulties but his life, too. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t. He had already quit Corinth once and even gotten away with it. He didn’t want to give fate a second chance to nail him.

“ ‘Look babe,’ he pleaded, whispered in her ear. ‘We’re just like everyone else now. George don’t know a thing. I’m these folks’ janitor because that’s the agreement, the bargain I made, but this is America here. There ain’t any kings or princes sitting on his face. He could grow up and, I don’t mean be president, it’s only America, not fairyland, but go to work for some fellow, mind his P’s and Q’s, get raises, responsibilities, and one day maybe do all right for himself, the only Mills with enough guts ever to break the chain letter. Don’t die, kid. Jesus, don’t die. You’d make me out some kind of hero to these people. Christ, sweetie, I ain’t but twenty-five. I’d be their haunted young widower, Georgie their orphan. They’d pull us to pieces. I’m weak, Nance, I’m weak, babe. We’d be a goddamn folk song in a month. Don’t die, kid. Please don’t. I love you, Nancy. Georgie has his chance now. You die and I’ll blow it for him. I know I will.’

“ In my judgment Nancy was always rather a sensible girl. At the moment when more attention was being paid to her than she had ever received in her life, when Bernice, Louisa, Rosalie, Irene, and Vietta were waiting on her hand and foot, and fane, Frances, Mattie, Joan, and I can’t recall the names of all the girls turned away by Louisa, she never, sick as she was and feeling as bad as she did, for a moment believed that the attention they paid her came her way as a mark of respect either to her person or to her position. Rather, she recognized it for what it was — base curiosity. These girls were, most of them, maiden, virgin. What they knew of sex and life they knew by report rather than experience. What they knew of Romance they had by legend. Nancy concluded, and concluded under stress and concluded correctly, that there was not a little animus in their affiliation. Without wishing her any personal harm, they were nevertheless pleased to have some physical confirmation of their own old wives’ prejudice that you can’t get away with it, you can’t go off to a tree house and live for love without there being some heavy price to pay, you can’t lord it over others and have them attend your every whim and make it understood that you can call them Bernice or Mattie or Joan or sometimes get their names mixed up altogether while they must call you Mrs, without your being dealt severe blows or taking heavy losses. Nancy is sensible. She manages to keep not just her own but other people’s priorities straight.

“ ‘Oh, I heard them. Even through my distraction and pain I heard them. George out of the room, gone to watch for the doctor. Oh, I heard them. Through the sedative the doctor phoned in that Rosalie fetched from the drugstore. As they lathered and shaved me. And scalded the water. And laid by the sheets — you’d have thought it was a laundry in there — and fluttered about, positively gay now, their tongues loosened in direct ratio to what they thought was my pain and semiconsciousness.’

“ ‘She did it in a stall. She wants straw, not sheets.’

“ ‘This is the youth bed where she surrendered her youth.’

“ ‘Never mind her youth. I’m shaving her youth back for her.’

“ ‘ Ooh, don’t it smell awful!’

“ ‘Mrs’ cooze is all stinky.’

“ ‘Ain’t it though!’

“ ‘They say that’s why Mrs. Simon didn’t want her sitting on her toilet.’

“ ‘Haw! That’s not why. She was afraid Mrs would steal it like she did her watch.’

“ ‘I heard them.’

“ Such girls should never be entirely trusted. I would say this: Have them if you can afford them. But despise them always. Never forget how things stand.

“ ‘Dear God, help get me to New Jersey.’

“ ‘What’s that, sweetheart?’

“ To Whom It May Concern: I should like to add that while I understand that such considerations have no immediate bearing on the specifics of your needs, and muddy the waters without altering the circumstances and, in a way, smack of special pleading and may even beg the question (a question which I daresay I have already answered: she had been loose; she married a man she did not approve of; she made plans, though the less kind but perhaps finally more accurate statement would be that she plotted), it may nevertheless be of some use to you to know something of Nancy’s mind at this time. (Mind and attitude are character, too.)

“ I should like to say, then, that she was always fully in control of the ironies. Even then, pampered as she certainly was, hurt as she certainly was, no longer in any way in control of her circumstances, having every reason to give over the ironies; indeed, having every reason to let happen whatever was going to happen and to solace herself with a warming hatred for those who hated her, she nevertheless continued to command them, to command the ironies:

“ If I die I leave as estate the value of one one-way, full-fare coach ticket to Paterson, New Jersey, plus that portion of Georgie’s fare which I have already saved. If the baby dies, nothing is gained, since Janet would have traveled on my ticket free.

“ If I don’t die — and this, I rather think, must be the case — there would still be the remainder of Georgie’s fare to get, but I don’t think I could do that now. I would not, I think, be too weak to continue to save, put by money for an event that now seems pointless even to me, but too dispirited. Yes, and too weak too, for if flight is pointless if Janet dies, surely it is a pointlessness for which I have been the chief agent. (My husband is wrong. There is no fate where there is no character. We are what happens to us.) As first my discomfort and now my danger were caused by the very plans I had made to escape discomfort and danger, too. I doomed myself by trying to save myself. I muffed my pregnancy by starving myself. I was too honest to eat for two. And too dishonest to eat for one. If I really wanted to get to New Jersey, I should have given the Georges the smaller portions. If I had had real appetite for my salvation, I should have stinted on theirs. It’s all ironic, all of it. If I had told the girls to hold back just thirty-five or fifty cents from what George gave them to buy food, I could have had both our tickets by now. Even if Janet dies there is nothing to do but just go.

“The doctor was there now.”

“I was there,” George Mills said. “My father was there.”

“Your father was drunk.”

“He was crying. He was talking to me. He was trying to tell me something.”

“He wasn’t talking to you, he was making a speech. Like the best man at a wedding. He had found his audience and pinned it to attention by its own captive courtesy and embarrassment.

“ ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he demanded. ‘Why shouldn’t I drink? What do they give me all those bottles of scotch and bourbon for Christmas for if they don’t expect me to get pie-eyed? Hell, it may even be part of the bargain. Maybe they actually want me pissed. It’s not even bad booze. Only the best. Don’t they tell me that themselves as if maybe I couldn’t read the grand ads in the fine magazines that they save up for me and give me two and three months past their dates? Oh oh, my hand-me-down perks! Liquor twice as old as my son. Where is that rascal? Here, boy, you want a drink? Here. I think I’ve been remiss with you, behindhand in the instruction. Maybe even the doomed have to be trained up to their doom. So they can think about it, turn it over in their minds, connoisseur it like booze for the janitor so it won’t be wasted on someone who can’t appreciate it. Bottoms up, son. Here’s mud — Look out, stomach, here she comes! Drink, lad. Drink for the hair on your chest. Drink to low ways!’