George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  But something was up.

  One night the senior partner—he was the man who’d indicated an interest in Mills’s car the day of the funeral—in the law firm that was handling things for the Claunches, called George at home.

  “Still got that car, old man?”

  “What car?”

  “That snazzy Special of course.”

  “Oh yeah,” Mills said, “sure.”

  “You’ll come round. You will.”

  “Make me an offer.”

  The lawyer chuckled. “You make me one.”

  “Four thousand dollars,” George said, not knowing what it might be worth but certain he’d asked too little.

  The lawyer laughed into the phone. “Oh that’s a good one,” he said heartily. “It really is. Never mind. I’m a patient man, you’ll come round. Actually I guess I deserved that,” the lawyer said, “trying to mix business with pleasure.”

  “Business?”

  “Well, it’s just that we’d like you to drop by the firm. At your own convenience of course. We’d like to take an affidavit from you.”

  “What for?” Mills asked nervously.

  “No real reason,” the lawyer said, “we’d just like to have it on file in case anything comes up. We’d like your statement that Judith was in unexceptionable health when you were caring for her in Mexico.”

  “She was sick as a dog.”

  “No no.” The lawyer laughed. “I mean her mental health.”

  “I can’t give any affidavit,” George said. “I can’t come down at my convenience. My boss would dock me.”

  Then Sam Glazer called.

  “I understand they’re trying to pressure you,” he said. “Listen, you hung in there. I’m grateful for that.” Mills didn’t know what he was talking about. “No kidding, George—may I call you George?—I really am. I’d just like your assurance that you’ll continue to resist them when they start turning the screws on you.”

  “No one’s going to turn the screws on me.”

  “That’s the way,” Sam said, “that’s the way to handle it.”

  When he called again he sounded as distraught as Messenger.

  “She must have been crazy, George. She must have been out of her head. I blame myself. I’m at fault. Partially. Partially I am. Poor Judith. Poor, poor Judith. God knows what she must have suffered. All that pain and anger, all that mental anguish.”

  “No, no,” George said, trying to reassure him. “Her spirits were good.”

  “How can you say that?” Glazer demanded furiously. “Is that what you said? Is that what you told them? Her spirits were good?”

  “Hey,” George said.

  “What about the pesos? What about all those pesos she gave away? What about the time she tried to get herself murdered? What about that funeral service? Her psychiatrist’s ruined. You know that, don’t you? Being made to say that stuff in public. Judith washed him up with her crazy arrogance. You call that cheerful, you call that good spirits?”

  “Listen, Mr. Glazer …”

  “Listen? Listen? No I won’t listen. You listen! What about heredity? What about our daughter Mary? You call her sane? She’s crazy as hell. All she thinks about is sex. She doodles genitalia in her geometry book. She doodles fellatio. The men have embouchures like symphony musicians. She draws gleaming wet pussy in her Latin text. The labia are tattooed with boys’ names. She does tits, stiff, ugly little hairs coming up out of the nipples. She says she’s engaged to be married. Some squirt at school she says she’s been sleeping with since fifth grade. She tells me this! She says ‘He can’t come yet, Daddy. I got my orgasm even before my periods started, but Stevie still can’t come. I tell him to be patient,’ she says, ‘that he’ll probably be in puberty by the time we’re married and it’ll all work out.’

  “This is sane? What about heredity? These are good spirits? The kid’s a nympho. That stuff has to come from somewhere. It comes from her mother.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” George said.

  “It comes from her mother, the madwoman! How’d they get to you, Mills? Just tell me what they promised.”

  “Nobody promised anything. Nobody got to me.”

  “You swear you didn’t give them your affidavit?”

  “I didn’t,” George said.

  “Jesus,” Sam Glazer said, “you scared me there, George. You really had me going for a time.”

  It was crazy, George thought. As if by saying his wife had been in good spirits he had somehow slandered her. Glazer was calm now. He was calm when he spoke to George about the possibility of something opening up in buildings and grounds, calm when with practically no transition he asked Mills for his affidavit, calm when George turned him down, calm, even smooth, when he told him that all he really wanted was for George to keep an open mind, not to say anything to the Claunches until he’d had another chance to speak with him.

  “You’re in the catbird seat, you know,” Sam Glazer said pleasantly before ringing off. “You’re the only eyewitness.”

  The senior partner called again.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve given more thought to what you asked for your Special. You did say it’s the original grille, didn’t you?”

  Even Laglichio. He was impressed, he said, with Mills’s apparent ability to deal with blacks. He wanted, he said, his input on some schemes he’d been developing.

  Then there was Coule. The minister wanted to know when Mills was going to make good on that sermon he’d promised.

  “What sermon I promised?”

  “Testimony then.”

  “Oh yeah,” George said, “sure thing.”

  “You’re not saved, are you?” Coule demanded. “You made all that up about grace. Boasting.”

  “Who’d brag anything small potatoes as salvation?”

  “You’re outrageous.”

  “Yeah? Am I? You’re this man of the cloth, this cloth man. It rumples your tail feathers, don’t it, Reverend, I got grace, you got shit? Sure. I’ll fill in for you. I’ll give you my affidavit on holiness. Name the day. Easter? Christmas?”

  As if they were waiting for him to pounce, as if he were some blackmailer. As if all they ever thought about was that whatever he’d learned in Mexico would be used against them. Or not a blackmailer at all——a sort of cop. George Mills, the arresting officer, their prosecutor, the law, the state. Their rights read at them like charges, boredom and cynicism built into their inner ear, hearing fair warning, the rattler’s obligatory sizzle——then sock! pow! blammo! and all bets off.

  Mills unable to reassure them, unable to convince them they had nothing to worry about.

  “Why did you let me take her to Mexico?” he asked Harry Claunch.

  “She was inoperable,” Harry said. “Even the oncologist said the chemotherapy was tearing her guts out. Under the circumstances, could we deny her her long shot?”

  “But why me?”

  “Why not you? She would have laid it all out for the woman who brought her bedpan.”

  So he had his legacy too. Their secrets like so many pieces of costume jewelry, like so many hand-me-downs. The repository now not only of Mills history but everyone’s. And he’d told Coule he was saved.

  But mostly Messenger. Messenger’s hang-ups, Messenger’s circle, Messenger’s kid.

  “Yeah,” Cornell, high, told him one day over a ham and ravioli sandwich, “I take the cake. Here I sit, enhanced and laid back as some California surfer—want a drag? no? it’s sinsemilla, two hundred fifty bucks a lid—and … What was I on about then? Oh yeah, the cake. It’s Chocolate Mint Heart today, Lulu. I’m going to tell you something, George. You think it’s because I’m enhanced I say this. But I was telling whoosis, my paraplegic lady, Gert. She thinks so too.” He fell silent. The rusts from his ham and ravioli sandwich smeared the corners of his mouth and lips, turning them down like the sad-face expression on a clown. “It’s the applesauce. Meals-on-Wheels puts out a great applesauce, maybe th
e best in the world.” And he tore into the applesauce, shoveling it into his mouth with his plastic spoon. “You got a slice of bread, Lulu, I can soak up the juice? Hey,” he said giggling, “don’t bother. I’ll use a Kleenex. The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” He grinned at them. “I’m bold,” he said. “What the hell, what’s there to hide? Judy G. told you all about me. She gave you my mantra. Well, her mantra. I can’t get the goddamn thing to work. Did you know they were her last words? Big-deal holy lady, big-deal saint. Pain up to here and her brother bending down over her bed for, for God knows what——instructions probably. ‘Do thus and so with the kids. Give Sammy my love. Tell the Mex to leave the room and smother me with the fucking pillow.’ God knows what! ‘Christ’s a redhead. He wears designer jeans.’ And what does he hear? ‘Mahesvaram, mahesvaram, mahesvaram.’ The born-again son of a bitch off to Heaven on a wave of transcendental meditation, at one with her cancer, the lint on her pesos. That lady could have been buried out of the Ethical Society, the Automobile Association. I tell you, George, she left me a haunted mantra. She squeezed the blood out of it, Lulu. I can’t even levitate. The horror, the horror.”

  “You can’t levitate? You’re high as a kite.”

  “Because I’m in pain, George and Lulu. Because I’m in pain. Because the griefs ain’t leaking no more, they’re whelming. There’s flash-flood griefs, man overboard. Let me just tell you a few of the things that have been happening in my neighborhood. Oh, look at Lulu, she likes it when I talk Despair. Despair’s her turn-on.”

  Louise did enjoy Messenger’s visits. The man was a crybaby and blabbermouth, and Mills saw that Louise took the same comfort from him that Mrs. Glazer had taken from Maria’s sad adventures on Mexican television. Because she knew most of the people involved—the Claunches had invited her to return to the estate and bring some of the Meals-on-Wheels people with her; Sam Glazer had called and asked them to dinner; she’d met his girls; she’d met Messenger’s dyslexic son when Cornell brought Harve to the house one day; she had even spoken to Losey, Messenger’s surgeon friend, about George’s bad back, had met Nora, his wife, when the failing student of architecture had come to South St. Louis with a classmate on an assignment to study the city’s “vernacular architecture” (Cornell had given Nora Losey Mills’s name; neither Louise nor Nora knew at the time that the classmate was the girl with whom the surgeon was having an affair, George didn’t)—they’d taken on an immediacy and importance in her life which George Mills resisted but could do little to discourage.

  Meanwhile Louise was thrilled with other people’s bad news, tried to catch Mills’s eye and nod at him knowingly each time Cornell delivered himself of some new heartache in the portfolio.

  “We don’t have it so bad,” Louise told her husband one night.

  “No sir,” George said. “We’ve got it made.”

  “When are you going to play your China card, George?”

  This was Messenger’s phrase. George had told him about the calls——the dean’s job offer, Claunch’s lawyer’s bid on the Buick Special. He thought Mills beyond bribery and did not know that the only reason George had mentioned the calls was to get some idea of what his affidavit was actually worth to them. Either side could have it for top dollar. He had liked Judith but Judith had died, convinced of her salvation as he was of his. Nothing he said about her now could alter either of their conditions.

  She was absolutely sane, solid as a rock. I swear it by all that’s holy!

  I was with her day and night for more than a month and had plenty of opportunity to observe her. She tried to get us killed. She was bats, nutty as a fruitcake. So help me God. Amen.

  But he was no good as an examiner, was without subtlety, could not lead his witness, could not trap him—it’s the blood, Mills thought, it’s my thousand-year-old blue collar blood—could, in the end, only ask outright his cruel, crucial question.

  Messenger, surprised, looked at him.

  “These are my friends,” Messenger said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Mills said.

  “I mean both sides.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sam’s a colleague.”

  “Yes.”

  “However difficult Judith may have been, I always respected her.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was nobody’s fool.”

  “No.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “There’s a buck to be made.”

  “Come on.”

  “Operation Bootstrap.”

  “You’re too late, George,” Messenger said sympathetically.

  “Maybe not.”

  To stall him he told him something else.

  “Victor couldn’t take it anymore,” Messenger said softly. “He had Audrey committed. They took her belts away. He had to sign for her shoestrings. Restraints, the whole shtick. She won’t swallow pills, so they have to force-feed her. When they put her on an IV she tried to chew through the tube and jimmy an air bubble into her vein. They can’t use an IV. They’re afraid she’ll try to turn on it and impale herself. A male nurse who used to be her student gives her shots in her arms, in her ass. Two men hold her down. She’s black-and-blue from these euphorics, so dry from drugs her tongue is chafed, the roof of her mouth. She can’t close her mouth for the pain. She cries even when she’s sleeping and the salt tears run into her mouth. There are lesions inside her cheeks, all the soft tissue. They slake her from eyedroppers like you’d feed a sick bird. When he visited her last time she signaled him over to the side of the bed. She could barely talk. He had to lean down. Even then he could hardly understand her. She was smiling. The first time he’d seen her smile in almost a year.

  “ ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘The shore? What about the shore? You want to go to the shore? Get better, sweetheart. When you get well. I promise. When you get well we’ll go to the shore.’ They have this place on Cape May. He patted her forehead and promised to take her.

  “He says you’d have thought he’d given her a jolt of——”

  “This is——” Mills said.

  “——electricity,” Messenger said. “That’s how fast she jumped away from his touch. Her loathing was that clear. ‘Well, what about the shore?’ he said he said angrily. ‘You don’t want me to come? Swell,’ he said he said hurt, ‘get well. Go by yourself. I won’t stop you.’

  “She shook her head and now he said he could see that it wasn’t loathing at all. He said it was a different thing entirely, and while she wasn’t smiling the expression on her face was almost a sane one and some——”

  “This is all——” Mills said.

  “——thing else he hadn’t seen in almost a year. It was just sane, ordinary, angry, outraged human frustration, and he realized he’d misunderstood her. He apologized and leaned down again over her pillows. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What?’

  “ ‘Not shore,’ she said. ‘Bedshore. Bedshore.’

  “ ‘What?’

  “ ‘Bedshore!’

  “She was telling him about her bedsores, that she meant to kill herself by poisoning her bedsores, by peeing on her bedsores and infecting them, by rolling her sores in shit. He told her doctor he wanted her catheterized. He demanded she be rigged to her bedpan.

  “All right,” Messenger said, “what is it?”

  “The public record, the sunshine laws. They write this stuff down on her chart,” Mills said coolly. “They say things like this at the nurses’ station. They’d tell me this crap if I called the front desk.”

  He thought Messenger was going to hit him.

  “It’s gossip, Cornell. A king told my ancestor that gossip’s horizontal, that nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin.”

  “What am I, a traitor to my class? I ain’t even high. This is my best stuff.”

  “I don’t want gossip,” Mills said.

  “What, what do you want?”

  “The goods. I want the goddamn
goods on them!” George Mills exploded.

  Which he was not to have for a while, Messenger feeding him as he might have fed the Meals-on-Wheelers, in installment, moiety, some awful, teasing incrementality, telling him what Mills did not care to hear not because he enjoyed, as Judith Glazer might, the damage of the thing, the tightening, dangerous coil of consequence he could not keep his hands off and wound and wound like the stem of a watch, but because of the flashy, reflexive, ricochet’d attention and glory, perhaps his melodramatist’s or bad gambler’s hole-card hope——the same thing that kept him glued to the telethon, that drew him to “20/20,” “Sixty Minutes,” the news, that made the Watergate years—how he envied Deep Throat!—the best of his life.

  “He can’t stand what he’s done. I think Victor’s gone nuts. Losey says so too. The man’s a surgeon but he sees plenty of this emergency room guilt. Sure. When they sign the papers. To lop off a leg, to hacksaw crushed fingers or take away tits.

  “He thinks he should have sent the kid off instead. He could have sent his son to aunts in Pittsburgh, to a brother-in-law in Maine.”

  “What happened?” Mills asked. (Because he was asking questions now. Because he knew that Messenger would tell him what he needed to know but that first he would have to hear all of it, Messenger’s scandals like the devised sequences and routines of the Cassadagans. Because he was something of the straight man now too, the old Florida Follies Kid. Thinking: You don’t ever grow up. Nothing changes, nothing. Certainly not your character.) “What happened?”

  “She wasn’t suicidal. Even the psychiatrist said so. She wasn’t suicidal. She just wanted to die.