George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

“What’s that?”

  “Audrey,” he said. “Audrey Binder. Victor’s wife. In the hospital. With the kid who can’t throw. Audrey. Whose shoelaces have to be signed for. Who cries in her sleep. Audrey. Who chews her IV. Audrey! Audrey!”

  “Audrey?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “What?”

  “Audrey’s fine. Audrey’s all better.”

  “All better,” Mills said.

  “Sure,” Messenger said. “She’s out of the loony bin. Audrey’s home.”

  “Just like that,” George Mills said. “She’s all better.”

  “Sure,” Messenger said. “All the happy endings. All the good news. She snapped out of it. She just cheered right up when she heard,” Messenger said. “Oh yeah,” Messenger said, “the horror, the horror, hey Mills?”

  2

  About a year after he had become convinced of his salvation George Mills delivered his sermon to the hundred or so people in Coule’s congregation at Virginia Avenue Baptist.

  They had not consulted about a date. One Sunday morning in September Mills had simply appeared and, after Coule led them through the formal parts of the service—the opening prayer, some announcements, a hymn, the offering, another hymn, some prayers for the sick, and a scripture—the preacher seemed suddenly to spot Mills among the congregation and, probably without their knowing anything of the impromptu circumstances, so seamless was his conduct—this is how he must have done it on television, George Mills thought, told to hurry it along or to stretch by his director—introduced George, and invited him to come up to the pulpit.

  Brother Mills—it was Coule’s term—eased past his wife’s knees and came down the aisle to where the big preacher stood behind his deconsecrated lectern. Coule shook Mills’s hand and retired to an empty chair on the platform.

  “I’m a little nervous,” he began, surprised by the amplification of his voice when he spoke. It was the first time he had ever heard the vaguely metallic sound of his amplified voice, and for just a moment he thought that perhaps his voice was going out over the radio or was somehow being beamed to other churches.

  “I’m here to testify,” he said. And looked out over the congregation as if he might almost be searching for someone in particular, some latecomer yet to arrive. He recognized a handful of neighbors. They smiled their encouragement at him, as did others he did not recognize, raising some Sunday morning umbrella of benevolence and good will, inviting him to step in under it, kindhearted and tender, well meaning and fraternal as hippies. But he was not encouraged. Indeed, he had a sad sense of intricacy. He told them that. He told them he supposed that would be his text.

  And started, for reasons that were also intricate and sad, to tell them a story about charity. “I used to watch the telethons,” he said. “One of the first to call and make my pledge when the poster kid pled. One time—it was the Jerry Lewis, Muscular Dystrophy—I phoned in and got to speak to Ed McMahon. Someone told me to turn down my set, Big Ed wanted to speak to me on the air. I’d gone into the bedroom to phone. Our TV’s in the living room. I couldn’t hear it. Before I understood what was happening Ed McMahon was already talking to me. He asked my name and I told him. ‘I want to pledge five dollars,’ I said.

  “ ‘Where are you calling from, Mr. Mills?’

  “ ‘St. Louis. I called the number at the bottom of the screen. I thought it was a local call.’

  “ ‘They patched you through to Vegas. Jerry and I want to find out what gets the average viewer involved enough to get off the dime. What was it with you, Mr. Mills? Can you tell us?’

  “I told him it was the kid.

  “ ‘Stu? Great kid, isn’t he?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said.

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘I want to pledge five dollars. Do you take my name and address?’

  “ ‘One of our lovely volunteers will do that.’

  “Then, forgetting I was on the air, and because I had someone on the phone who probably knew, I asked what had happened to the little girl, how she was coming along, last year’s poster child. Mr. McMahon was embarrassed. He told me she’d died.

  “My wife was watching in the living room. She’d seen it all. Ed McMahon had been stunned, she told me. There were tears in his eyes. It was an affecting moment, she said.

  “I never sent in my five dollars, I never watched another telethon.”

  It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. It hadn’t anything to do with the sad intricacy of things. I’m grandstanding, he thought. I’m not in the right place, he thought. He should be seated in the congregation. He shouldn’t have come. He glanced at Louise, who remembered the story and seemed to nod in agreeable confirmation. He knew she was pleased to have made it into his anecdote. George wanted to cry.

  Then he tried to tell them who he was, how there had been a George Mills since the time of the First Crusade. He told them about the curse they lived under, the thousand years of blue collar blood. He told about the Millses’ odd orphanhood, their queer deprivation of relation.

  “I mean Coule called me ‘brother.’ That’s the last name we go by. We don’t have brothers. We’re brothered to fathers, brothered to sons.”

  He told them of their alliances, their long, strange allegiance to class.

  He couldn’t explain it, he said.

  He knew he was failing, knew that if Coule were sitting where he could see him he would not see the God panic in his eyes he put so much stock in. And though he could not see the preacher either, he knew that if he could, he would see himself bathed in waves of tolerance, some queer smug tide of forgiveness. Not love, not even gloating, but a sort of neutral recognition of his, of all failure, a patience with it, good temper, composure, even acquiescence, even compliance.

  And now he stood apart from his inability to deliver, cool as the preacher. Whatever of urgency or nervousness he’d felt had dissipated and he felt he could go on forever, like each Mills before him, filibustering his life. He could say anything to them, tell them anything.

  “Years ago,” he said, “I saw the double helix. I saw it thrashing around on the floor of the Delgado Ballroom refracted from the light of a chandelier. I didn’t know what it was. I never followed through. I recognized it many years later in a photograph.

  “I don’t know anything. I mean I drank it for years but I can’t tell you what Ovaltine is. What is Ovaltine? Why is it good for us?”

  He listened for Coule to clear his throat, shift in his chair, offer some signal that enough was enough. Coule was silent. They all were.

  From time to time his eyes swept the congregation. From time to time he searched the church. He did this covertly, like an agent, like an actor peering out from behind a curtain examining the house. He couldn’t himself have said what he was looking for. Not old Messenger Merlin, the epilogue man. He’d broken with Messenger, though it may have been Cornell’s compulsions which served him now, which drove him to breach secrecy and decorum, which drove him, he realized, to stall. Then he didn’t want to go on forever. He told them more or less what he’d promised Coule he would tell them. He told them he was saved. He told them he had grace. That nothing could happen to him, that he was stuck in his grace like a ship sunk in the sea.

  “Amen,” someone called, startling him. George looked up. All over the church people were calling out their amens, not patient now, neither considerate nor tolerant so much as dutiful, not even fervent, nothing so much as accustomed, almost like actors answering promptings. “Amen, amen,” they called.

  “Amen,” a woman in Louise’s aisle said in her print dress, in her hat, in her gloves and white shoes.

  Which was why he hadn’t recognized her, the woman from the supermarket. Because she’d been in men’s clothing. Now his bowels ached, now his hands sweated, now his heart labored, now his tongue thickened and his mood ring ignited like the mirrored ball on the Delgado ceiling, running with color, bruised with light. Now hi
s pulses leapt and things closed in, his ideas rushing him, swarming, his words issuing from, crowding from, rudely shoving from his head and throat and mouth and lips, jostling for priority as if head, throat, mouth and lips were on fire.

  Now he felt shaken, blasted by the truth of his life. Which he found himself delivering in this public place in messages so Pentecostal and private they might have been the jumbled, contradictory tongues and bulletins of disaster.

  She’s dressed up! No wonder! He laughed.

  “Because I never went home. Because I never went back to——” And held his tongue. Thinking: I can’t say that. I mustn’t say Cassadaga, I mustn’t even say Florida. I can’t even say that what I’d seen in that supermarket was not just a lady in men’s pants but the actual sister I might by now actually have, and that what I saw in her, who might in that jacket and those trousers and that hat have been an honest-to-God brother, who was I thought then, and not just that masculine businesswoman got up in drag I see now she didn’t mean and wasn’t doing for fun but out of some necessity of the vending machine trade, protecting herself from the dark oils and thick greases much as I myself wear my eviction habit, the heavy furniture pads, not, as I’d once thought, out of deference to the furniture of the poor, but, as Laglichio says, the illusion of deference, keeping myself safe from splinters, blood poison, the rough, unvarnished and nail-studded underneaths of a black man’s dining room suite.

  “Because I never went home to see, to find out.

  “And who may by then and certainly by now, as all Mills kids do, have already left home herself, quit the roost, split, gone off not to make their fortune but simply to repeat it.

  “Hell, it’s a long shot. Don’t I know it’s a long shot? I know that. Could it be any longer than a thousand years of George Millses?

  “Hey,” he said, “it isn’t plausible. What long shot is? They’re all sucker bets.”

  (And he thought of long shots, numbers so high they were beyond mathematics, beyond odds, outside hope. What Magaziner had told George XLIII just before that old campaigner had found the Valide Sultan’s body on one of the two or three days out of all the year when she was in residence at the seraglio, and that had enabled him to say the words that turned the keys that moved the tumblers that released the bolts that sprung the locks that opened the doors of Yildiz. And not just her body, and not just on the two days—three at the outside—she came to pour tea, but rather on the one day—she was seventy-one years old—out of the twenty-five thousand, nine hundred and fifteen—at the inside, the inside; there would be eighteen leap year days, plus the days she had already lived beyond her seventy-first birthday—that body would be dead and available for him to find! So he wasn’t even talking about long shots. He was talking about out-and-out miracle!)

  “But no Mills made her up,” he said. “She’d be——” He couldn’t say Wickland. “She’d be named something else. Not Mills. She’d never even heard the name Mills. Our mother wouldn’t have told her, and the man who would have been her stepfather would have been long gone once he saw she was a girl. Millses didn’t make girls. His wife was unfaithful. So he’d have been long gone. Just a few months behind his son, just five or six months behind me.

  “She’s about the right age,” he added quickly, but they were beginning to stir, to make what was not yet noise.

  “We never had children. The line’s played out, watered.” Louise was crying into her handkerchief, the others merely shifting, easing themselves, seeing what he saw himself, that what he spoke in was not tongues but incoherencies. Coule would stop him, he would come up beside him and take him by the elbow and lead him off gently. Coule would certainly stop him. Fuck him, Mills thought, if he wants me to shut up he’ll just have to make me.

  Because he knew what his testimony was now, and was prepared to make it.

  “I was kidding you,” he said. “I ain’t saved. I spent my life like there was a hole in my pocket, and the meaning of life is to live long enough to find something out or to do something well. It ain’t just to put up with it.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “It wasn’t a curse,” he said, into his text now, “it was a spell, an enchantment, a thousand years of Sleeping Beauty, a thousand years of living on the dole.

  “Hell, I ain’t saved,” he said, oddly cheered. “Being tired isn’t saved, sucking up isn’t grace.”

  Now he was certain he would hear it, the peremptory cough, the dangerous premonitory shuffle of feet, and he began to move away from the microphone, to start back to his seat. Coule had him before he could leave the platform. Mills flinched, but all the big preacher meant to do was shake his hand.

  “Thank you,” Coule said. “Thank you,” he repeated, still pumping his hand. “That was very interesting.”

  Mills stared at him. “You’re welcome,” he said. He moved toward Louise.

  “Amen, brother,” his sister said, rising in the aisle to let him pass. She touched him on the shoulder.

  So she wasn’t his sister. Because she’d have had to have one. Born in Florida, raised there. Because she’d have had to have one. But there was no more trace of a Southern accent in her voice than in Laglichio’s or Messenger’s, than in Sam’s or Judith Glazer’s, or any of the rest of them.

  Of course she’s not my sister, he thought, but was convinced now that he had one, and that wherever she was she would be doing well. Of course she isn’t, he thought, only some stand-in in red herring relation to the real one, who captured my attention for a while and led me by what grace I got to believe it was all over.

  So he stood there, in what grace he had, relieved of history as an amnesiac.

  “Amen,” some of the others were still saying. “Amen, amen.”

  George Mills looked at them in wonder. “Brothers and sisters,” he acknowledged lightly.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF STANLEY ELKIN

  Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.

  Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including The Rabbi of Lud (1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.

  Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel The Dick Gibson Show (1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.

  In 1953, he married Joan Jacobson, with whom he would have three children. Elkin’s postgraduate studies were interrupted in 1955 when he was drafted to the U.S. Army. He served at Fort Lee in Virginia until 1957 and then returned to Illinois to resume his education. In 1960, Elkin began teaching in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

  Elkin’s novels were universally hailed by critics. His second novel, A Bad Man (1967), established Elkin as “one of the flashiest and most exciting comic talents in view,” according to the New York Times Book Review. Despite his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 1972, Elkin continued to write regularly, even incorporating the disease into his novel The Franchiser (1976), which was released to great acclaim. Elkin won his first National Book Critics Circle Award with George Mills (1982), an achievement he repeated wi
th Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). His string of critical successes continued throughout his career. He was a National Book Award finalist two more times with Searches and Seizures (1974) and The MacGuffin (1991), and a PEN Faulkner finalist with Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1994). Elkin was also the recipient of the Longview Foundation Award, the Paris Review Humor Prize, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Even though he was confined to a wheelchair toward the end of his life, Elkin continued teaching classes at Washington University until his passing in 1995 from congestive heart failure.

  A one-year-old Elkin in 1931. His father was born in Russia and his mother was a native New Yorker, though the couple raised Stanley largely in Chicago.

  Elkin in Oakland, New Jersey, around 1940. His parents, Philip and Zelda, originally met in this camp in Oakland, which lies at the foot of the Catskills.

  Elkin as a teenager in Oakland, New Jersey. Throughout his childhood, Elkin and his family retreated to Oakland for the hot summer months, spending July and August with a group of family friends. His time there would later inform much of his writing, including the novella “The Condominium” from Searches & Seizures.

  Elkin at a typewriter during college. Throughout his time as an undergraduate, Elkin was routinely praised by his English professors for the intelligence and wit of his work.

  Stanley and Joan on their wedding day in 1953. The county clerk who signed their marriage license was Richard J. Daley, who would go on to become the mayor of Chicago as well as one of the most notorious figures in American politics during the 1960s.

  Elkin with his son Philip in Urbana, Illinois, in August of 1959. Philip, who was named after Elkin’s father, was adopted in 1958.

  The first page of Elkin’s debut novel, Boswell, marked with editorial notes. The book was published in 1964 while Elkin was an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.