Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Judith had no right—”

“Oh, rights,” she said. “Rights ain’t in it, just needs. Like your pal, the one that’s in love. Losey. And what about his wife, the woman on whaddayoucallit, academic probation? How’s your kid?”

“What about my kid?”

“Well, we don’t know,” she said. “We ain’t sure.”

It was an exquisite situation and Messenger had to admire his dying pal and her still lively genius for humiliation. It was the wackiness, her locked-up years, all that time getting well when, denied the world and everything that was not therapy, everything not grist for her health, from Mrs. Carey’s omelets and cold soups — her digestion in those years (she’d been a long time loony, almost, she’d said, a lifer) a lesson in nutrition (he could imagine her sturdy, high-fibered boweling the consistency and color of Lincoln Logs) — to her family, the ordinary aunts and uncles (though by “ordinary” one did not mean anything bogtrot or rank-and-file: he had seen the men’s distinguished hair, their pewter sideburns, the women like seeded tennis players with their flat behinds and bellies and their hard, suntanned skin) and good-natured cousins — he’d seen them, too, and could not remember whether they were men or women: he supposed that what they had in common with each other and with Judith was not their character or sense of humor but only a frame of reference, the names of headmistresses and masters and coaches and ministers and cooks and servants, their generation itself, he guessed — and the brother almost old enough to be her father. Denied the parents themselves, those daughter-scorned victims who might, if they’d only been ministers or cooks, have gotten off, been dismissed as merely two more names in the lexicon. (And he’d seen them too, and come away impressed, even charmed, by that Chairman of the Board and his meticulously courteous wife, now dead, amazed and astonished as he always was by a wealth that seemed to have no immediate source or, what was even more astonishing, product, that did not burn gas or coal, or supply widgets, or grow food, or win or even just fight wars, or get rolled up and tossed onto your lawn each morning — that was simply, as far as Messenger could see, just pure wealth, pure money, withheld from the planet’s effects entirely, like the invisible original resources of a king or government.) Denied everything that could not induce health, hard news and strong books not permitted her, even, he’d heard, prime-time television, even make-up, even card or board games with the other patients in the common room. Allowed two things only: The first her psychiatrist (hers literally; they paid him seventy thousand dollars a year; he had no other patients), a stickler for every event of her mind who, if she had not already been mad, might have made her so with his endless inquiry — she was, it was said, his unpublished book— Judith: A Study of Causes —into her responses and reactions. And the other her lover, Sammy, the future husband and dean a simple graduate student in those days who may or may not also have been on retainer.

So that her talent for creative abuse, for industrial-strength practical jokes, must have dated from those days. Indeed, she had once said as much at a dinner party.

“When I was being fattened up back there on the farm, when they were getting me ready for the world, I wasn’t permitted drugs. I wasn’t even permitted sleeping pills. Hell, I wasn’t even permitted shock therapy. I can remember looking at the faces of some of the other patients on my wing when they came back from electric shock. They looked as if they had just been jabbed in the eyes with Novocaine. I envied them their dulled wits and hamstrung wills. A crazy is so helpless anyway. No one believes her. That’s the ultimate outrage anyway — that everyone’s always considering the source. I tell you if I had smelled smoke and yelled ‘Fire!’ not a nurse or orderly would have looked up. You had to do grand opera to get a response from those people. I wouldn’t do that. I became a sort of mad politician instead. I schemed constantly. We became pen pals.”

“Pen pals?”

“I wrote them letters. I reminded them of everything I knew about them, all I could think of that had just been jarred loose by the electric company, everything their doctors and the public utilities wanted burned out of them. It was one public service against another. They turned on the juice, I turned on the heat.”

“Did they ever answer?”

“You bet they did! Among all those get well cards and cheery letters from home, I venture to say mine was the only mail with any real news. They answered all right. They told me stuff about themselves their docs didn’t know.”

“Oh, Judy,” Sam said.

“Oh, Sam. What’s so terrible? We believed in trauma then, in dreams and childhood. In the raised voice at the vulnerable moment. It was a sort of astrology. The houses of Jupiter, the cusps of Mars. We believed in everything but character. — And I didn’t do anything with their letters. I didn’t use them for blackmail or flash them for gossip. I was interested in only one thing.”

“Judy, please.”

“Sam, please. — I was interested in only one thing. I was a kind of alchemist. All I cared about was the transubstantiation of dross into mischief.”

The cunt, Messenger thought, and knew something he hadn’t known he’d known. She’d made Sam dean. He didn’t know how, but he couldn’t recall either which were girl cousins, which boy, or where the money came from or if it even was money at the bottom of the family fortune. It could have been anything. It could have been God’s good will. Sam was Judy’s man. Judy was Sam’s friend downtown. He was her dean, her mischief.

And it was still an exquisite situation. Judy was dying, he couldn’t lay a glove on her. Judy was dying, she held all the cards. She was a hell of a foe. She was a hell of a foe with her scorched-earth policies and land mines and booby traps and all the rest of her devastating paraphernalia and time bomb vengeance.

That she had planned this he had no doubt. That she had known who her victims would be was another question. (Excepting the immediate family of course — Sam, the girls, possibly her father.) Was he meant to be a victim? Messenger thought so. “If there’s anything I can do,” he had said. It was what everyone said. Surely he had been saved for the Meals-on-Wheels route. But how could she have known his schedule that semester, that he was conveniently free just those two to two and a half hours she would need him? How could she have known Mrs. Carey would be so cooperative, blurt out the names and disgraces of his friends, accuse Cornell of his habit, and hint at inside information about his children? How, finally, could she have known she would get cancer?

But that was the point, wasn’t it? She couldn’t. Judith made mischief the way some people made money. Not to buy anything with it, just to have it ready to hand. If she was a vague irritant to them while she was alive, how much more of a pain in the ass would she be when she died and there was no stopping her? Who else in the city knew of the griefs in the west county? Messenger saw these now as Mrs. Carey must have seen them — distanced by soap opera, attenuated in a medium of insulate otherness, flattened by the fact that they were not shared in any real way. Judith’s achievement had been to trivialize what was most important to them, what kept them going and made them friends.

He would not eat the next leftover lunch. He would bring it to Judy.

No one has called him Captain in years. He’s Mr. Mead now. He would be Mr. Mead to anyone. To a president, to an enemy or friend, to the public health nurses who have the most intimate knowledge of what remains to Mr. Mead of Mr. Mead’s body. To God Himself perhaps. It seems strange to him, and a little impertinent — for great age alters relation as well as vocabulary — that Louise should call him Dad. He can be no one’s dad.