George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

“Once they caught it they were able to do something about it. He learned it in a day and a half. You know Cornell says he’s been through two readers this week? They’re color-coded. He finished the orange, he finished the red. He starts on the blue one, Let’s Read five, tomorrow. Cornell says it’s confidence. Isn’t it queer, George? Isn’t it queer how things work out?”

  Messenger dropped in again at the house. He had phoned first to make sure that George would be home. “You don’t have to phone,” Mills told him at the door. “Just come when you feel like. I acted a little crazy is all.”

  “No no,” Messenger said. “That’s all right. I want to see the both of you.”

  “You want something to eat? Lulu’s fixing lunch.”

  “How’s the back?”

  George shrugged. “Comes and goes. Comes and comes, comes and stays. You know how it is. It acted up some today so I knocked off early.”

  Messenger nodded.

  “Say, that’s great news about the kid,” Mills said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”

  “Thanks,” Messenger said. He smiled.

  Louise came into the living room carrying a tray. “Oh hi, Cornell.”

  “Louise,” Cornell said.

  “I thought it was you. It’s good to see you again. I opened a large can of Spaghetti-O’s.”

  “You’ll love it,” George Mills said.

  “No, you two go ahead. I’m not much on Italian cuisine.”

  “Hey,” George Mills said, “ain’t you enhanced?”

  “Me?” Messenger said. “No.” He looked embarrassed.

  “I’ll fix you a sandwich,” Louise said.

  “No thanks, Louise. I’m not very hungry.”

  “What’s new?” George asked. “Are Max and Ruth still parked in front of the dean’s house?”

  “Well, for the time being,” Messenger said. “Jenny Greener told them they’ll have to find someplace else.”

  “Jenny Greener?”

  “When she moves in with Sam. When they’re married next month.”

  “Jenny Greener and Sam?”

  “It surprised all of us,” Messenger said.

  “Jesus,” Mills said, “your friend must be devastated.”

  “Losey?”

  “The doctor, the paste asshole. Yeah, Losey.”

  “No, he’s taking it very well.”

  “He is?”

  “Very well.”

  “I thought he loved her so much.”

  “He loved her grade point, he loved her blueprints.”

  “Well still,” George Mills said.

  “She dropped out,” Messenger said.

  “She dropped out of school? Nora?”

  “Jenny Greener. Sam says she felt guilty.”

  “Guilty? About the love affair.”

  “Well, that too, I suppose. But mostly about Nora. Going to school, she couldn’t devote enough time to Nora.”

  “Her own schoolwork came first. Even Losey said so.”

  “That’s right. Losey said so. Jenny didn’t feel right about that.”

  “This isn’t clear.”

  “They’re best friends. She wasn’t satisfied just to get Nora off academic probation. Now she’s able to spend more time with her. Losey doesn’t mind. Already there’s been incredible improvement. She’s shown Nora certain tricks. Well, she says they’re tricks. But you know? Nora has as much to do with it as anyone. She’s making tremendous strides. Jenny’s dropping out must really have motivated her.”

  “But what a sacrifice,” George Mills said, shaking his head. “A brilliant career down the drain.”

  “Down the drain?” Messenger said. “No, I don’t think so. She’s, what, seven or eight years younger than Nora? When Nora graduates next semester Jenny can just pick up where she left off.”

  “She’ll have been out of school a year.”

  “Sure. Getting a fresh slant on things. With the pressure off she’s come up with all sorts of new ideas. Helping Nora, she’s been able to rethink basic principles. Sam says her concepts are better than ever.”

  “I see,” Mills said.

  “She’s never been happier,” Messenger said.

  “Jenny.”

  “Jenny of course. The business with Losey only confused her. She says Sam’s the only man she’s ever really loved. So Jenny, too, of course. And Sam. Sam’s a new man. With the dean thing settled and Jenny in his life he looks fifteen years younger. But Nora. Nora too. She’s quite proud of herself. You can guess how her husband must feel.”

  “Losing a genius?”

  “I told you. The man’s a surgeon. He fixed up his marriage. Jenny would only have been a transplant. But Nora, Nora’s a whole new scientific reconstruction. Some from-scratch Galatea.”

  “It must be tough on the kids,” George Mills said, “their daddy taking a new wife so soon after their mother died.”

  “Oh,” he said, “Sam’s kids. That’s a whole other story. Gee,” he said, glancing at his watch, “I’ve got to run. Nice to see you, Louise. George, I hope your back feels better.”

  “That’s a kick in the ass about Ruth and Max!” Mills shouted after him. “Getting booted into traffic!”

  George Mills was in bed. Again Messenger had phoned first. Louise had taken the call. “Is he high?” Louise shook her head. “Let me get dressed first,” Mills said.

  Messenger rapped lightly on the closed bedroom door.

  “Jesus,” Mills whispered.

  “Come in, Cornell,” Louise said.

  “Hello,” Cornell said. “Louise said you were indisposed. There were a couple of extra trays. I brought them over for your lunches.”

  “We’ve eaten our lunches,” Mills said.

  “Sure,” Messenger said. “You can warm them for dinner.”

  “That’s sweet, Cornell,” Louise said.

  Messenger pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. “You were right,” he said. “They were upset. At least Milly was. Mary too, I suppose, but Milly made the rumpus. She called her grandfather. She’s the one who caught them in bed together.”

  “Really?” George Mills said. “At her age that sort of thing can get to you for life.”

  “When Milly told him what happened, Claunch did some hard thinking.”

  “This is the part that gets me,” Louise said. “Oh,” she said, “I heard some of this on the phone.”

  “He’d been squeezing him pretty hard. Sam written off by his wife, by the family. Having to claim Judy was nuts, having to claim fraud because of those prenuptial agreements he’d lived up to to the letter of the law. The incident at the chancellor’s dinner party, Claunch calling him out in front of all those people, screaming for his resignation over a three-dollar roll of film.

  “When Milly told him she caught him screwing some schoolgirl—Jenny’s textbooks were at the foot of the bed—Claunch figured Sam was determined to disgrace them, get back at him and the rest of the family by forcing them to step in and take the girls away from him too.”

  “Is that what he’s up to?” Mills said, brightening.

  “That’s what Claunch thought he was up to. It was the last thing Claunch wanted. He’s not a young man, after all. He hadn’t had all that much luck with his own daughter. The idea of two adolescent girls around the place, one of them not the most stable kid in the world—Well, you can imagine. That’s when he knew they’d have to sort things out. That’s when he thought he had to buy him off. He tore up the resignation himself. He had his son reassign his trusteeship to Sam.”

  “Still,” George Mills said, “stuck with a stepmother they never bargained for.”

  “This is the part that gets me,” Louise said.

  “But they did bargain for her,” Messenger said. “At least Milly did.”

  “Milly?”

  “Because Milly’s the respectable one,” Messenger said. “You saw her, Mills. The day of the funeral. You saw how she acted.”

  Mills recalled the little girl con
ducting them on the tour of Claunch’s home, then later, alone, sitting well back in the trains, prim as a spinster.

  “Because Milly’s the respectable one,” Messenger repeated. “She always has been. She couldn’t abide her father’s disgrace. She couldn’t stand it that he’d taken a mistress. She couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t going to have money. She couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t going to be dean. That he thought of challenging her mother’s sanity in a court of law. If Claunch did some hard thinking it was about ideas Milly herself had put in his head.

  “Because once everything was restored to him it was all right again. She’s the one who actually spoke to them.”

  “Spoke to them,” George Mills said.

  “Well questioned them.”

  “Questioned them.”

  “Well lectured them then. About their intentions. She told Jenny that what she was doing was wrong, her father that if he had to have a woman they’d all be better off if he married her. She’s the one who set the date.”

  “Now her life’s okey-dokey,” George Mills said.

  “Milly’s happy as a clam, George,” Messenger said pleasantly.

  “Sure,” Mills said.

  “She’s throwing the shower.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s organized the wedding. She’s worked out the arrangements, she’s made out the guest list. She hasn’t decided if the bride should wear white. She’s leaning toward white but she hasn’t decided.”

  “What about the other one?” George asked hopelessly. “What about Mary?”

  “George, you wouldn’t recognize her.”

  “She’s a changed person,” Mills said.

  “You remember how oversexed she used to be?”

  “Used to be,” the straight man said.

  “How she’d doodle all this really raunchy stuff in her school-books, put it all around her separators like a kind of embroidery, work it into her biology papers so that even her teachers couldn’t tell if she were a scientist or kinky?”

  “This is the part that gets me,” George Mills said.

  “She started sketching the stuff on her bedroom walls.”

  “Fouled her own nest, did she?”

  “Jenny saw it. Well she was meant to. Mary left her books all over the place. She never bothered to shut her bedroom door.”

  “It was a cry for help,” George Mills said.

  Messenger looked at him. “Well it was,” he said. “I mean there’s Milly and Sam yelling their heads off, shouting how sick she was, how a kid her age ought to get her head up out of the gutter. Then Jenny came along. Jenny has a trained eye, you know. You’ll never guess what happened. Jenny thinks she’s terrific, that she’s this anatomical savant or something. I mean no one noticed how really good the kid was till Jenny saw what she was up to. You know what she did when she first saw the stuff?”

  “What did she do?”

  “Stripped for the kid. Right then and there. Took off her dress, pulled down her panties, ripped off her bra. ‘Draw me,’ she told her. ‘Get all my details.’

  “She tried to get her enrolled in a life class at the university but they’ve got this rule that no one under sixteen—”

  “Get on with it,” Mills said.

  “She’s having her own show. When she gets a few more drawings together she’s having a show at this really important gallery. She draws her boyfriend, the kid she used to fuck. She poses him straining on the pot, she poses him whacking off. Sam shows them around, the sketches. The kid doesn’t mind. Nora’s agreed to pose for her, Jenny has. Even Sam.”

  “Her father? Her father poses for her?”

  “Even her sister,” Messenger said. “Even Milly. Even the respectable one.”

  “Isn’t it queer, George?” Louise asked. “Isn’t it queer how life works out?”

  “My back is killing me,” George Mills said. “Why are you telling me this stuff?”

  “Because,” Messenger said. “Because it is queer how life works out. And because,” he said, “because I’m the epilogue man, George!” He rose to go, turned at the door to their bedroom. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t guess I’ll be dropping by anymore. I won’t be in the neighborhood much. I’ve given up my Meals-on-Wheels route.”

  “Oh,” Louise said, “we’ll miss you, Cornell.”

  “I turned it over to Max and Ruth. They’ve got a car. Meals-on-Wheels will pay for their gas. They qualify for free meals themselves. Meals-on-Wheels will provide them.”

  Mills sprang out of bed and raced toward Messenger. Louise had to hold him. She forced her husband back to his bed, his feet sliding backward on the bare floor. He waved his raised fist at Cornell, who stood his ground in the doorway.

  “They jumped at the chance,” Messenger said calmly. “It turns out they never really liked cheese. It turns out cookies were a stopgap. It turns out they don’t care much for poetry. It turns out lectures bore them. It turns out they’ve tin ears and won’t even miss the recitals.”

  It turned out it was not the last time he was to hear Messenger’s news. He saw him again about a week later. Louise was in bed with a sore throat and George had stopped off at a supermarket to pick up some things for their dinner——canned soup, a frozen pizza. It was not one of the places they usually shopped. Mills was in the express lane waiting to be checked out. The store had installed scanners to read the universal product code stamped on the labels and packages like cramped, alternating thicknesses of wood grain in cross section, or marks on rulers, or passages of spectography, or like boxes of pencils, like awning, like pin stripes on shirts. The lines and numbers could have been ciphers, hieroglyphs, but when the checkout girl brushed the mysterious little blocks of code across a glass plate, a vaguely digital readout appeared in a banner like a red headline above the customer’s head. It registered the name of the item, the quantity, its cost. Mills had never seen the machine operate before. He had no idea how it worked and was so absorbed that at first he was unaware that someone was talking to him, saying his name. It was Messenger.

  “I was going to call you,” he said. “There’s some loose ends to tie up.”

  “Sure,” Mills said.

  “The name Albert Reece mean anything to you?”

  “Arthur Reece?” Mills said absently. He wasn’t paying close attention. A woman he thought he recognized from the neighborhood had come into the supermarket. She wore a man’s loose-fitting khaki trousers and a tan jacket. She wore a fedora and carried a big leather drawstring bag. A heavy key ring on a retractable steel cord hung from her belt loop.

  “Albert Reece. One of the Meals-on-Wheelers. A sour-hearted old bastard. I told you about him.”

  The woman had taken the key ring and stretched it out as far as it would go. She slipped a key into a lock in the copy machine at the front of the store, turned the key and pulled out the cash drawer where the change collected. She dumped the money into the bag. When she replaced the drawer she took a rag and a bottle of Windex from her jacket pocket and proceeded to polish the glass facing plate where the customers set the originals they wanted copied.

  “Sure, I told you about him,” Messenger said.

  “Probably,” Mills said. “You told me about everyone else.”

  “He won a hundred thousand dollars,” Messenger said. “He’s going to be on the six o’clock news.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars?”

  “In one of those contests. Some sweepstakes thing. Reader’s Digest, Publishers’ Clearing House——something. He was so excited I couldn’t get it straight.”

  The woman was cleaning the money out of the bubble gum machines, the dime and twenty-five and fifty-cent candy and toy vending machines with their miniature NFL helmets and tiny major league baseball caps folded like fetuses inside their clear globes. She took about twenty dollars from the plastic pony. She owns them, he thought. She owns them, they’re hers. She makes a fortune. I’ll be, he thought.

  “He says he’s going to
buy a house with it,” Messenger said, “that any Meals-on-Wheelers on his route who want to can move in and live with him.”

  “I’ll be,” Mills said.

  “How do you like that?” Messenger said.

  “I’ll be.” But he was staring at the woman from the neighborhood who owned the machines. She was talking to a man Mills guessed was the manager, who was checking the money with her from her drawstring bag and who accepted a percentage of the receipts from the machines and wrote out a check to her in exchange for the rest of the coins.

  And that still wasn’t the last time. The last time was a few days later. Messenger phoned.

  “Did you see him?” Messenger asked. “On TV? Did you see him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I lie?”

  “No.” He could barely speak.

  “Well there’s something else,” Messenger said.

  “Yes.”

  “Remember I told you about that story I wrote? The only one I ever published in The New Yorker? The one Amos Ropeblatt took out an option on? That he’s been renewing every year for eleven or twelve years now for five hundred dollars a year?”

  “Yes,” Mills said.

  “Well he bought it!” Messenger said. “The son of a bitch actually bought it. They’re actually going to make the movie.”

  “That’s fine,” George Mills said. “Congratulations.”

  “How do you like that?” Messenger said. “How do you like the way things work out? How do you like this idyll vision, this epithalamion style? How do you like it the game ain’t over till the last man is out? How do you like it you can dig for balm? That there’s balm and joy mines, great fucking mother lodes of bower and elysian amenity? How do you like deus ex machina? How do you like it every cloud has a silver lining? What do you make of God’s pastoral heart? How do you like it there’s pots of gold at the end of rainbows and you can’t keep a good man down? How do you like it ships come in, and life is just a bowl of cherries? How do you like it it isn’t raining rain you know, it’s raining violets? What do you make of it every time I hear a newborn baby cry or see the sky then I know why I believe?”

  “Audrey,” George Mills said.