George Mills (31 page)

“ ‘Look babe,’ he pleaded, whispered in her ear. ‘We’re just like everyone else now. George don’t know a thing. I’m these folks’ janitor because that’s the agreement, the bargain I made, but this is America here. There ain’t any kings or princes sitting on his face. He could grow up and, I don’t mean be president, it’s only America, not fairyland, but go to work for some fellow, mind his P’s and Q’s, get raises, responsibilities, and one day maybe do all right for himself, the only Mills with enough guts ever to break the chain letter. Don’t die, kid. Jesus, don’t die. You’d make me out some kind of hero to these people. Christ, sweetie, I ain’t but twenty-five. I’d be their haunted young widower, Georgie their orphan. They’d pull us to pieces. I’m weak, Nance, I’m weak, babe. We’d be a goddamn folk song in a month. Don’t die, kid. Please don’t. I love you, Nancy. Georgie has his chance now. You die and I’ll blow it for him. I know I will.’

“
In my judgment Nancy was always rather a sensible girl. At the moment when more attention was being paid to her than she had ever received in her life, when Bernice, Louisa, Rosalie, Irene, and Vietta were waiting on her hand and foot, and fane, Frances, Mattie, Joan, and I can’t recall the names of all the girls turned away by Louisa, she never, sick as she was and feeling as bad as she did, for a moment believed that the attention they paid her came her way as a mark of respect either to her person or to her position. Rather, she recognized it for what it was——base curiosity. These girls were, most of them, maiden, virgin. What they knew of sex and life they knew by report rather than experience. What they knew of Romance they had by legend. Nancy concluded, and concluded under stress and concluded correctly, that there was not a little animus in their affiliation. Without wishing her any personal harm, they were nevertheless pleased to have some physical confirmation of their own old wives’ prejudice that you can’t get away with it, you can’t go off to a tree house and live for love without there being some heavy price to pay, you can’t lord it over others and have them attend your every whim and make it understood that you can call them Bernice or Mattie or Joan or sometimes get their names mixed up altogether while they must call you Mrs, without your being dealt severe blows or taking heavy losses. Nancy is sensible. She manages to keep not just her own but other people’s priorities straight.

“
‘Oh, I heard them. Even through my distraction and pain I heard them. George out of the room, gone to watch for the doctor. Oh, I heard them. Through the sedative the doctor phoned in that Rosalie fetched from the drugstore. As they lathered and shaved me. And scalded the water. And laid by the sheets—you’d have thought it was a laundry in there—and fluttered about, positively gay now, their tongues loosened in direct ratio to what they thought was my pain and semiconsciousness.’

“ ‘She did it in a stall. She wants straw, not sheets.’

“ ‘This is the youth bed where she surrendered her youth.’

“ ‘Never mind her youth. I’m shaving her youth back for her.’

“ ‘
Ooh,
don’t it
smell
awful!’

“ ‘Mrs’ cooze is all stinky.’

“ ‘Ain’t it though!’

“ ‘They say that’s why Mrs. Simon didn’t want her sitting on her toilet.’

“ ‘Haw! That’s not why. She was afraid Mrs would steal it like she did her watch.’

“ ‘I heard them.’

“
Such girls should never be entirely trusted. I would say this: Have them if you can afford them. But despise them always. Never forget how things stand.

“ ‘Dear God, help get me to New Jersey.’

“ ‘What’s that, sweetheart?’

“
To Whom It May Concern: I should like to add that while I understand that such considerations have no immediate bearing on the specifics of your needs, and muddy the waters without altering the circumstances and, in a way, smack of special pleading and may even beg the question (a question which I daresay I have already answered: she had been loose; she married a man she did not approve of; she made plans, though the less kind but perhaps finally more accurate statement would be that she plotted), it may nevertheless be of some use to you to know something of Nancy’s mind at this time. (Mind and attitude are character, too.)

“
I should like to say, then, that she was always fully in control of the ironies. Even then, pampered as she certainly was, hurt as she certainly was, no longer in any way in control of her circumstances, having every reason to give over the ironies; indeed, having every reason to let happen whatever was going to happen and to solace herself with a warming hatred for those who hated her, she nevertheless continued to command them, to command the ironies:

“
If I die I leave as estate the value of one one-way, full-fare coach ticket to Paterson, New Jersey, plus that portion of Georgie’s fare which I have already saved. If the baby dies, nothing is gained, since Janet would have traveled on my ticket free.

“
If I don’t die
—
and this, I rather think, must be the case
—
there would still be the remainder of Georgie’s fare to get, but I don’t think I could do that now. I would not, I think, be too weak to continue to save, put by money for an event that now seems pointless even to me, but too dispirited. Yes, and too weak too, for if flight is pointless if Janet dies, surely it is a pointlessness for which I have been the chief agent. (My husband is wrong. There is no fate where there is no character. We are what happens to us.) As first my discomfort and now my danger were caused by the very plans I had made to escape discomfort and danger, too. I doomed myself by trying to save myself. I muffed my pregnancy by starving myself. I was too honest to eat for two. And too dishonest to eat for one. If I really wanted to get to New Jersey, I should have given the Georges the smaller portions. If I had had real appetite for my salvation, I should have stinted on theirs. It’s all ironic, all of it. If I had told the girls to hold back just thirty-five or fifty cents from what George gave them to buy food, I could have had both our tickets by now. Even if Janet dies there is nothing to do but just go.

“The doctor was there now.”

“I was there,” George Mills said. “My father was there.”

“Your father was drunk.”

“He was crying. He was talking to me. He was trying to tell me something.”

“He wasn’t talking to you, he was making a speech. Like the best man at a wedding. He had found his audience and pinned it to attention by its own captive courtesy and embarrassment.

“ ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he demanded. ‘Why
shouldn’t
I drink? What do they give me all those bottles of scotch and bourbon for Christmas for if they don’t expect me to get pie-eyed? Hell, it may even be part of the bargain. Maybe they actually
want
me pissed. It’s not even bad booze. Only the best. Don’t they tell me that themselves as if maybe I couldn’t read the grand ads in the fine magazines that they save up for me and give me two and three months past their dates? Oh oh, my hand-me-down perks! Liquor twice as old as my son. Where
is
that rascal? Here, boy, you want a drink? Here. I think I’ve been remiss with you, behindhand in the instruction. Maybe even the doomed have to be trained up to their doom. So they can think about it, turn it over in their minds, connoisseur it like booze for the janitor so it won’t be wasted on someone who can’t appreciate it. Bottoms up, son. Here’s mud——Look out, stomach, here she comes! Drink, lad. Drink for the hair on your chest. Drink to low ways!’

“ ‘Come on, George. Hold it down. The doctor can hear you. Your wife can.’

“ ‘Sure, Irene. Sorry, Irene. It’s just that I’m a little nervous. No Mills woman ever had any trouble before with anything low down and natural as just birth. They take their inspiration from the beasts in the field. Mills women don’t just have babies. They litter, they foal. They farrow, they spat. They brood and spawn. They fucking fledge!’

“ ‘You all right, George?’ Vietta said.

“ ‘Hey sure.’

“ ‘Easy there, George.’

“ ‘Right, Bernice.’

“That’s when he took you into the bedroom with him.

“I think the blood reassured him. I think he was right in at least one respect. I think your squeamish father had some instinct for the placentary, for the treacly obstetrical a step up from mud, for caul haberdash like the bonnets of being. For all gynecology’s greasy modes, for its fish bowls of amnion and its umbilicals like ropes down wells.

“ ‘What’s that damned kid doing in here?’

“ ‘He’s my son, Doc.’

“ ‘This man is drunk. Get him out of here. Come on, Nancy, push. I can’t do a Caesarean here in your bedroom. Push.
Push.
’

“
‘It hurts.’

“ ‘Of course it hurts.
Push!
’

“But the doctor knew Janet was already dead, your sister was already dead.

“ ‘
I
knew she was dead.
I
knew. It just didn’t feel right. Something dead weight to the pain, to the pain itself. It was nothing to do with me. Like a splinter, say, or a cinder in my eye. Like a bone caught in my throat or brambles stuck to my insides. Like decay in a tooth. Something dead weight, foreign matter about the pain. Something violating me. Like a body blow. Like a wound picked up in a war. And, oh God, my dead Janet like so many shards of busted girlbone. Help me, Janet. Help
meee!
’

“Perhaps the doctor didn’t really care that a child was watching, that the father was, nor the curious young women, neither nurses nor midwives, not even related to the patient, in what the doctor, distracted as he was, busy as he was, may not even have noticed was not a hospital bed it looked so much like one.

“ ‘Something dead weight, out of place, your tiny daughter-corpse caught trespass in my thousand-year male preserve Mills belly like some spooked purdah.’

“Perhaps he even wanted them there. To watch him. To see what he was doing. To grasp a little of what he was up against some of the time. Not just a go-between between a mother and her infant but occasionally having to do the actual main-force dirty work itself. About as scientific as someone pulling teeth or tearing up the ground. Horsing death around in the dark and trying not to cut anything important. Maybe—had he dared—he would have asked one of them to spell him, like a lifeguard over someone drowned. And when he said, ‘Come on, Nancy, push,’ it was at least a little to get Nancy to spell him.

“ ‘Take him out,’ Nancy said. ‘Take George
out.
’

“
’Is that child still here? Go on, sonny. Wait outside.’

“ ‘When Georgie had gone. Then I pushed. Then I did. At last it came free. I had not known I could raise the dead.’

“ ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with my kid?’

“ ‘Give me one of those sheets,’ the doctor said.

“ ‘Here,’ Louisa said.

“ ‘Wrap it in this.’ But Louisa just stood there. The doctor looked at each of the girls, then wrapped it himself. But he was a good doctor really, not finally used to infant mortality. When he swaddled the child he left a little open space for the head. He carried it through the living room on his way out.”

“It was blue,” George Mills said.

“Yes,” Wickland said.

“Behind the blood. Under the blood it was blue.”

“Yes.”

“Like a black eye. I saw her. I——”

“ ‘What?’ your father said. ‘
What?
’

“
‘Because if you leave history,’ your mother said, ‘you think you have nowhere to go. That’s why you married me. That’s why you said we had to name him George. That’s why you teased my womb with little-girl bait. Yes, George,
teased
it, then set all your dependably overwhelming centuries of male Mills history against what was after all only my country-girl biology. That’s why our daughter died.’

“ ‘Oh, Nancy,’ your father said. ‘Oh, Nancy, oh, Nancy.’ He was crying.

“ ‘Rosalie and Vietta,’ your mother said. ‘Bernice, Louisa and Irene and all the others.’

“ ‘What?’ your father said.

“ ‘We’ll have to let them go, won’t we?’

“ ‘Let them go?’

“ ‘I mean they can’t do for us anymore. We can’t keep them. There’s only the three of us. Our apartment isn’t that large. You’re out most of the time. Georgie’s in school all day.’

“ ‘They pitched in,’ Mills said. “They pitched in, Nancy, when you weren’t feeling well.’

“It isn’t what you think,” Wickland said. “It wasn’t what it sounds like. She was mad, not crazy. She was still in control of the ironies. She didn’t want you ever to find out about the Millses. She made him promise. Only then would she agree to stay with him.

“The girls wouldn’t be coming once she was on her feet again. She would have no one to work her judgments on. She had already judged her husband. She had already judged you.”

“Me?” George said. “What did she say about——”

“ ‘This child must have no ancestors. I am on the child’s side in this. If the child is to assign blame it will have to assign it to the near-at-hand, to its own propinquitous, soured operations, its own ordinary faults and weaknesses, errors in judgment, deficiencies of will, the watered cement of its inadequate aspirations and glass-jaw being. I will have done all I could. I will have set it free.’ ”

“She’s going to leave me after all,” George said.

“She’s not even talking about you,” Wickland said harshly.

“But——”

“The girl,” Wickland said. “She’s talking about the girl, she’s referring to Janet.”

“But——”

“
Janet starts school in September. I don’t think she knows we’re poor. She knows I have to work of course, and that our little family is dependent upon even what George brings in from working after school. She isn’t a stupid child, but when she asked me that time about her daddy she seemed to accept my answer. She only questioned me that once. Perhaps she’s really rather sensitive. Perhaps she understands more than she lets on. Maybe she speaks to Georgie about it at night in their room in the dark. Up to now, I don’t think he’s told her any more about it than I have, but I’ve noticed that he’s restless and a little angry. Someday he’ll tell her the truth, what he knows about it. Why kid myself? He’s told her already. Of course he’s told her. He’s told her of a grand man, a strong, kind man waiting in Milwaukee, and that if things are ever terrible enough he’ll take her there and then they won’t be terrible anymore. And if he hasn’t written yet, it’s because things aren’t terrible enough yet. He’s afraid of course. It’s his trump card and he’s afraid to play it. Poor Georgie.