Stanley Elkin - George Mills

(And how did he know, this George Mills in rare and tandem connection to privilege, his alliance occasional and metered as astronomy? Where did he even get off knowing? How had he known of the tuxedos and jodhpurs, spats and top hats that would be in their wardrobes? How had he intuited their pallbearer’s customized gloves, the mother-of-pearl buttons like milk gems? What gave him his outsider’s inside information?)

So he looked for the white gloves — his own pair taken from the very carton he knew they would neither avoid nor wave off but were simply unaware of.

Then he was helpless. Having turned himself and Louise over to an usher, having followed the young fellow to a pew neither conspicuously close to nor far removed from the principal mourners, he relinquished himself to some principle of sheer minstrelsy, searching the laps of the men for white-gloved hands, looking over his shoulder, rubbernecking occasion and the congregation like some complacent proprietor of worship. He saw nothing. (Blinders on his intuition here, totally without knowledge of the tailor’s contrivances, the special spaces that could be built into space, the secret concealing depths of bespoke pockets, ignorant of the reinforced material that could clothe a wallet or hide car keys without revealing a bulge or wrinkle.)

Someone came up. It was Messenger, the Meals-on-Wheels man, and George turned to him. “Excuse me,” he said, “do you think you could point out the pallbearers?”

“Nice tan,” Messenger said, “ ni-ii-ce tan.” He was stoned.

“The pallbearers,” George said again.

But Messenger was enjoying himself. He indicated women, kids, some of his clients from Meals-on-Wheels, several with canes, walkers. “She loved her mischief,” he said.

George mentioned names he recalled from the correspondence he’d seen in Mexico. “My God, man,” Messenger said, “one owns the damned newspaper, and another introduced branch banking into this state. What’shisname just bought a franchise in the NFL, though he’s probably never been to a game or even watched ‘Monday Night Football.’ Those other names I don’t even recognize. You’re here for the autographs, am I right? You want them to sign the psalms in your program.”

“George is a pallbearer,” Louise said.

“We all got our pall to bear,” Messenger said.

So he looked for their tans, the special signals they radiated of wealth and leadership, all the lights of influence and pulled-string, procurate agency. But he had forgotten the decent suit in everyone’s closet, appearance got up like a made bed, hospital corners. Why, even the Meals-on-Wheels group looked distinguished, their walking aids and wheelchairs lending them the look of pampered cranks. One old man in a lap robe might have been their line’s coddled, consanguinitic first cause.

So he looked for the stalwart, for stamina, recalling the beefy first and second mates and ordinary seamen who had been sent by the Barge and Shipper’s Union to carry his father-in-law’s casket. He looked for the powerhouse honor guard of the rich.

Sam approached him. He leaned across Louise and whispered in his ear. “Professor Messenger said you were uncertain about the other pallbearers, that you weren’t sure where to go.”

“Nobody told me. Nobody told whoever I’m supposed to replace I’m supposed to replace him. I didn’t know anything about any of this, Mr. Glazer. Mr. Harry sprung it on me on the plane.”

“If you’re uncomfortable,” Sam said quietly. “If you’re the least bit uncomfortable…”

“Well,” George said, “Mr. Harry said it was what Mrs. Glazer wanted.”

“All right,” he said softly, “talk to the gentlemen in this row. This is the pallbearers’ bench.”

He looked down the aisle. “Gee,” he said, “I never even gave my name. I wonder how the ushers knew.” (Thinking even as he said it that the nieces and nephews had his number, that Mr. Claunch — Harry — had given it to them. Like a psychological profile of hijackers and bombers which even the girls at the airport metal detectors knew, the maintenance men in the public toilets.)

“Well,” Sam whispered, “if you’re all squared away.” He started to leave, looking at the men and women on the aisles as he walked to the front of the church, accepting their handshakes, bending to receive the women’s hugs. He was at once solemn and oddly hospitable, a flexibly expansive man.

Mills excused himself to the lady on his right — they were seated boy-girl, boy-girl, as if it were a formal dinner party — and asked if he might say something to the gentleman. The man smiled at him. “Pardon, sir,” Mills said, producing his white gloves, “I took care of Mrs. Glazer down there in Mexico for a while and it seems she asked for me to replace one of the real pallbearers, but she didn’t specify which real pallbearer I was supposed to stand in for. If you’re…”

“Sure,” the man said, “Judy was the coach. The coach calls the shots.”

My God, Mills thought, it’s what’shisname, the guy with the franchise.

(Because he knew nothing about obsequy, understanding well enough from his yokel’s back bench condition the ins and outs of grief and loss — hadn’t Mr. Mead, his father-in-law, a man he both respected and liked, died within the season? hadn’t Mrs. Glazer? — reassured by the hang of his gut, the small, packed, sorrowful nausea there like a darning egg or some discrete, comfortable orthodoxy which fondled his sentiment and vouchsafed his heart. But nothing at all, not even curiosity, about the stately weights and measures of public ceremony — which may have explained the muddy color of the mood ring plugged to his mild, even-tempered boredom — the organ solos and responsive readings, the bishop’s ringing exhortation of Heaven, his official encouragement of the immediate family, and his feeling denial of death, Mills in a way not even present, a time server, a clock watcher, waiting for whatever signal he knew must come when his pallbearing colleagues would rise and arrange themselves at the big, silver-handled box — and in what order? would the funeral director line them up, drill-sergeanting precedence, their disparate seniorities? or had Mrs. Glazer, who, Mills knew, called the shots here, called this one too, choreographing the last detail of all, the procession to and from the back door of her hearse, Mills’s presence sheer habit by this time, as if the dead woman had become accustomed to his assisting her in and out of rental cars? — George ready to go it alone if there should be a hitch, prepared to throw his studied leverages into one final, mighty eviction.

(Listening again only when a chubby, acne’d, middle-aged man rose from where he had been sitting behind Sam and the two girls and took a position in the empty pulpit.)

The man waited for the anthem that had accompanied him (or that, rather, he had accompanied, his bearing gradually enhanced by the music) to finish. Then, glancing first at McKelvey and then at the Glazers, he started to speak in a voice that was almost conversational, almost offhand.

“Well,” he began, “the patient insisted that everything have meaning. That’s familiar enough, I guess. Once they’re into it I don’t suppose there’s been a dozen analysands in the history of analysis who haven’t brought their dreams and even the least encounters of their day to their analysts for examination. Believe me, I’ve seen them come like cats with birds in their jaws, like kids with swell report cards. That’s not what I’m talking about. Lots of people are like that. You don’t have to be neurotic. I guess not.

“I mean the patient demanded that everything have meaning. She had no tolerance for things that didn’t. ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons drove her up the wall and she couldn’t understand why ice cream came in so many flavors. Let’s see…Symptoms. She could be phobic about fillers in newspapers. As a matter of fact, during her worst years, she wouldn’t even read a paper. She couldn’t take in why the stories weren’t connected, and it terrified her that an article about a fire could appear next to a piece on the mayor. She was the same about television. She couldn’t follow a story once it was interrupted by a commercial. Variety shows, the connection between the acts. So that was one of her symptoms.