Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“I’m not in this,” George said sweetly. “I’m not in any of this.”

They were descending three abreast on a widely winding staircase that circumscribed a lavish keyhole of space. George had seen nothing like this house. Greatest Grandfather Mills hadn’t, nor had most Millses in between. “Listen,” he would have told his son, “I’ve been to Architecture the way some have been to France. In rooms measured as philosophy. The furniture like pieces settled in nature, unremarkably there as trees. And the fabrics, George, the fabrics! Fabric like foliage or high husbandry’s bumper crops. And woodwork like the sounding boards on stringed instruments. Paneling from panel mines, the oldest forests, all wilderness’s concentric rings like the tracery of nerves in vitals.”

Cornell saying “I’ve got to speak to you. I’ve really got to speak to you.”

And so, it turned out, did others. The aunt, the sisters-in-law, had been emissaries, actual agents. In the manor’s great drawing room with its brackets of wing and armchair and parentheses of sofa, its Oriental carpet deep and wide as infield tarpaulin, its armoires and marquetried escritoires checkered as gameboard, they were waiting for him.

“Did you enjoy your tour, Mrs. Mills?” the aunt asked. She sat in a large, curving wing chair of upholstered silk, her long, thin forearms and mottled, arthritic hands arranged over twin tracks of tight gold fringe, her large purse open and settled beside her like a queen’s. Her fine, crossed legs were clear, firm as a dancer’s, and her expression as she waited for Louise’s answer, layered, a cool palimpsest of serenity, indifference and concern. Like several of the senior members of the family George had noticed at the funeral, she did not wear mourning. Indeed, her light woolen coat dress, exactly the color of fleshtone in a black and white photograph, seemed more the clothing of the owner of an odds-on Derby favorite in her special box than it did of someone who had just buried a niece. Mills noticed her long, misshapen, ringless fingers and wondered whether she had ever been married or if she had had her jewelry cut from her painful, blistered joints.

“Oh yes,” Louise said, “oh yes, indeed. It may not be proper etiquette to say so, but this has been a very special and exciting day for us. I never expected to be invited to a house like this. Goodness, it’s like something in picture books. Or what I imagine palaces in the old country must look like. George knows more about these things but I can tell he’s as thrilled as I am. Aren’t you, George?”

He sweltered for Louise in her black mourning dress, for himself in his dark suit. “Yes,” he said.

“I know,” his wife said. “And we want to thank you for having us. And the children are darling. I only hope that it had to be on such a sad occasion. I mean…”

“Of course,” the aunt said, smiling. “But surely you needn’t go yet, Mrs. Mills. My nieces-in-law want to show you the miniature railroad that Judith’s father built for her to ride in when she was a child.”

“You mean like the little train that takes you around the zoo?”

“Quite like that, yes. I’ll tell Grant to organize a ride for you. My nieces will go with you.”

“Oh, George, did you hear? We’re going for a ride on a little train.”

“Well, Mrs. Mills, I thought you and the girls might make do on your own. This might be a good time for Mr. Mills to speak with Mr. Claunch.”

“Oh,” Louise said.

“I go with Lulu on the choo-choo?” Cornell said.

The aunt — George was not sure of her name, though he knew that the rich did not always give their names, that they lived unlisted lives — glared at Cornell. “Yes,” said the aunt, “of course. I should have thought to ask.”

Mr. Claunch, as it turned out, was not Harry, but Harry’s father.

The builder of the miniature railroad and the splinter-free ballet studio was waiting for him in a kind of trophy room. Plaques the shape of arrowheads hung next to framed oval photos of horses and riders, of dogs and handlers. There were mounted blue ribbons that fell away from inscribed rosettes big and round as clocks in schoolrooms, like pressed pants. Leather straps with tiny bronze horseshoes dangled from them, the sculpted heads of horses snugged into their curves. Silver bowls rested on bric-a-brac shelves next to porcelain animals, and everywhere, no larger than pocket watches, bas-relief medallions were pressed onto the walls like an equine coinage. Along another wall, high up, were prep school banners large as pillowcases, college pennants, the guidons of military academies like a felt heraldry. Beneath these were columns of framed team photographs — football, baseball, hockey, swimming, soccer, track — oddly like the Won and Lost listings in newspapers. Mary and Milly, in ice skating costumes, their arms spread, dipped toward the camera in clumsy arabesques. There were pictures of golfers and tennis players, and slalomers on skis kicking their bodies past gates like conga dancers. There were queer, high-altitude photographs of people on the summits of mountains. They seemed shy as foot shufflers, scuffers of shoes.

Claunch was seated beside a writing table with his legs crossed and his left hand resting lightly on the surface of the table. He wore a dark blazer and bright plaid trousers lustered as kilt. He had a large face, and thick black horn rims — dated as Mills’s mood ring — hung on his eyes like shiners. Though he was smoking, Mills saw no ashtray in the room. Here and there thin columns of smoke rose from the silver trophy bowls into which Claunch Sr. dropped unextinguished cigarettes.

“You’re here,” he said glumly. “All right, come in. Beat it please, Aunt.” Was she his aunt? George wondered. “I look,” he said gloomily when the woman had gone, “like a past president of an International Olympic Games Committee.”

“I’m Mills,” Mills said meekly, “and I just want to say how sorry I am about Mrs. Glazer.”

“All torn up, are you?”

“She was very nice,” George said. “She went through a lot.”

“I know what she went through,” Mrs. Glazer’s father said. “She went through all of us. She went through all of us like a high wind. Trailer courts arse over tip, dozens left homeless. I know what she went through.” He leaned suddenly forward, like Milly and Mary in their ice skating costumes. “Was I missed? At my daughter’s funeral, was I missed? What was the dark, black-ass buzz?”

“I didn’t hear anything, sir.”

Claunch closed his palms rapidly over his eyes, ears and mouth, and Mills shifted uneasily. “Oh come on, Mills,” Claunch said, “she called me from Mexico. She called collect like some kid off at college. The things she said to me.” He shook his head. “I tell you, George,” he went on, “at first I thought that pancreatic cancer was a blessing. Not a blessing in disguise, but the outright, up-front, stand-tall stuff itself. Some no-strings cancer, three to four months at the outside and the patient so stuffed with pain, medication and final things she wouldn’t have time for her dotty trouble campaigns. Even after she decided on her last-ditch stand, her hundred percent final effort, and went off for fruit therapy in old Mexico, I still thought blessing! Blessing, godsend, favorable balance of payments!

“It didn’t occur to me until after I stopped accepting her calls and began to hear from two or three of her hot-lunch clients that even if there’s no God the devil sure exists. And something else became clear, too. That the weight of those charges she continued to press even in extremis took on something of a deathbed power, that even a poor old bunch of poor old bastards in their own extremis would hear her out and make vows, pledges. Deathbed calling to deathbed in perseverant, unfaltering howl. The nerve of that woman! Intruding on their desuetude, enlisting the worn-out in her worn-out life.”