Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“ ‘Hey, come on,’ she said one day when we were driving back from a weekend visit to her home. She was driving. I had just taken the manuscript out of my suitcase. ‘Give us a break,’ she said. ‘I’m getting awfully tired of hearing about that lady. That was some bad news, sad-ass lady. Why don’t you do us both a favor and tear the damn thing up? Just throw it out the car window or deep-six it in the litter barrel when we stop to pee. I don’t want to hear about that crappy lady anymore.’

“ ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Judith.’

“ ‘Why not? I was a jerk.’

“ ‘You were an interesting woman.’

“ ‘I was a sickaroony.’

“ ‘You’re well now.’

“ ‘Eleven years. Hardly the nick of time, wouldn’t you say?’

“ ‘Eleven years. That’s how long we were together, Judith.’

“ ‘Should auld acquaintance,’ she said.

“ ‘You’re getting discharged next week. Then I guess you’ll get together with that graduate student who’s been visiting you. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

“ ‘You? Eleven years at seventy thousand dollars a year? That’s more than three quarters of a million dollars. Why, you’re almost a rich man, Doc.’

“ ‘It’s the transference,’ I said.

“ ‘Yeah, I know,’ Judy said. ‘It was a hell of a transference. Thanks, Doc.’

“She thanked me. For the transference. I think it’s what cured her. That I was the only man the patient knew who had loved the patient all those years.”

The recessional! Trumpets and organ music! A bright bang of reverberant bliss! Out of the psychiatrist’s, Breel’s, gawky silence, his bumpkin shuffle. The big breakthrough as foolish grin, lopside heart. While the Meals-on-Wheelers, no longer charity cases so much as a special-interest group, invited observers, say, from some neutral but not indifferent commission, took, under cover of the music, collective liberties with the doings of their hosts, disputing intent and motive and all the ways of doing business that were not their ways, feeling had, the more religious among them, deprived of some final settlement and solace, who had ceremoniously come to grieve for the strange woman who for years now, rain or shine, had fed them lunch. Chatty in her way too, of course, but like some cheery columnist of the wide world whose tales of the fabulous had been, or so they’d thought, mere bedtime stories, meant to entertain or distract, told neither to enlist nor support sympathies, but out of the goodness of an enraged and generous heart, and not, or so they’d thought, to be taken seriously. Postcard information and detail. That there might have been a picture of the death camps on the face of the card had not struck them as unusual since they never expected to see such places themselves.

Now they stood in their pews, their faces turned toward the center aisle as first the thurifer and then the crucifer went by, followed by the acolytes and clergy. It was only when the immediate family passed that they struggled to put names to faces, placing individuals in the context of Judith Glazer’s now heartfelt, retroactive gossip.

Dr. Breel had long since climbed down from the pulpit. Where he had seemed at once both faltering and certain. Now he was again hesitant, trying to decide whether to wait for those peripheral members of the family — cousins (he recognized them easily enough; he’d read the book), pals from childhood, the coaches, cooks, servants and tutors of Cornell Messenger’s speculations — or to plunge himself into mourning’s mainstream. He seemed ready to plunge, determined, deferential only to some graduated kinship principle of his own ordering. Wavering, he thrust himself behind Sam’s sister from California and in front of the dead woman’s first lover.

Last came the casket supported by the six pallbearers in paced and stately lockstep behind the ragged, difficult parade of the Meals-on-Wheels people.

Only Cornell Messenger still lingered in a row of pews. He waited for George Mills, whose right hand grasped and forearm supported half a yard of Judith Glazer’s casket handle, and who was concentrating all his will on the task. When Mills was almost abreast of him Messenger winked and leaned forward. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” he said.

[Later it was Louise who called Harry to apologize for the bill that the Meals-on-Wheels people had run up at Stouffer’s. “It was their idea of a wake,” she told him. “They didn’t mean harm,” she said. “They were a little upset by what that doctor said. They knew your sister for years. Maybe they thought he dishonored her memory.”

[Harry, who was not quite certain who Louise was but who had a vague memory of her having come back to the house after the burial, attempted to reassure her. “That was my sister’s favorite charity. I’m sure Judith would have been pleased that they enjoyed themselves.” She did not tell him that, from what she gathered, from what George had told her of what Cornell Messenger had told him, it had not been an entirely joyous occasion.

[Stouffer’s round, glassed-in restaurant, “The Top of the Towers,” offered a view of the city from twenty-eight floors up, its outer perimeter of tables revolving almost imperceptibly, 360 degrees in just under an hour. Those of Judith Glazer’s guests who had to excuse themselves to go the toilet could not find their tables when they returned. They were a little drunk. Some stumbled trying to cross from the restaurant’s fixed, stationary center to its revolving rim. Scenes were made. They reported purses missing, hats, entire complements of the handicapped. One old woman turned herself in to the hostess. “I’m lost,” she moaned. “Everything’s mixed up. There’s tall buildings where the river was and a river where there used to be a stadium. You’re the usher that seated me. Get me back.” And a tipsy lady who had filched a bouquet of flowers from among the floral decorations at St. Michael and St. George reported to the manager that her friends were missing. “They was a dead person’s flowers. I took them from the church because I was a good friend of the corpse. If they should fall into the wrong hands, if the wrong noses should smell them, that person could die, and no one could ever prove whether it was the flowers or your fancy food that took them off.” Two or three, feeling themselves genuinely abandoned, had wept. At the last minute one man refused to let the driver pay for his lunch and insisted on settling with the cashier himself. (“The decent clothes,” George had said. “What?” Messenger asked. “Those decent clothes,” Mills said. “He looked presentable even to himself. Of course he wasn’t going to let some chauffeur pay for his lunch in front of a woman who took cash at a register. These were your men-of-the-world poor. They didn’t grow up in beds with hospital sides. They hadn’t always pushed themselves around behind walkers.” “So?” “So she knew,” Mills said, who was a little tipsy himself. “Who? What did she know?” “She knew everything.” “The mischief maker? Judy?” “Call her however you like,” Mills said, “she knew everything.” “Sure,” Messenger said. “What?” Mills asked. “Sure,” Messenger said. “The revolving restaurant. It was her last giveaway, the ultimate Meals-on-Wheels lunch.”) “Almost three hundred dollars,” Louise said, “and I can almost hear their backbiting.” “Mnh,” George said. “They must have said plenty,” Louise said. “They don’t know anything, Louise.”]

Messenger drove with them to the Claunch home after the burial.

Invited to return to west county with the family afterward, Mills and Louise had hesitated. A delegation of women had come to them. Sisters-in-law, an aunt. Mills knew they had been put up to it by men, that Judith Glazer had been the only one of her sex to have any real power in the family, that someday — he didn’t know how he knew this; it wasn’t anything her mother had spoken of — Mary might have the same sort of authority.