George Mills (49 page)

(And how
did
he know, this George Mills in rare and tandem connection to privilege, his alliance occasional and metered as astronomy? Where did he even get off knowing? How had he known of the tuxedos and jodhpurs, spats and top hats that would be in their wardrobes? How had he intuited their pallbearer’s customized gloves, the mother-of-pearl buttons like milk gems? What gave him his outsider’s inside information?)

So he looked for the white gloves——his own pair taken from the very carton he knew they would neither avoid nor wave off but were simply unaware of.

Then he was helpless. Having turned himself and Louise over to an usher, having followed the young fellow to a pew neither conspicuously close to nor far removed from the principal mourners, he relinquished himself to some principle of sheer minstrelsy, searching the laps of the men for white-gloved hands, looking over his shoulder, rubbernecking occasion and the congregation like some complacent proprietor of worship. He saw nothing. (Blinders on his intuition here, totally without knowledge of the tailor’s contrivances, the special spaces that could be built into space, the secret concealing depths of bespoke pockets, ignorant of the reinforced material that could clothe a wallet or hide car keys without revealing a bulge or wrinkle.)

Someone came up. It was Messenger, the Meals-on-Wheels man, and George turned to him. “Excuse me,” he said, “do you think you could point out the pallbearers?”

“Nice tan,” Messenger said, “
ni-ii-ce
tan.” He was stoned.

“The pallbearers,” George said again.

But Messenger was enjoying himself. He indicated women, kids, some of his clients from Meals-on-Wheels, several with canes, walkers. “She loved her mischief,” he said.

George mentioned names he recalled from the correspondence he’d seen in Mexico. “My God, man,” Messenger said, “one owns the damned newspaper, and another introduced branch banking into this state. What’shisname just bought a franchise in the NFL, though he’s probably never been to a game or even watched ‘Monday Night Football.’ Those other names
I
don’t even recognize. You’re here for the autographs, am I right? You want them to sign the psalms in your program.”

“George is a pallbearer,” Louise said.

“We all got our pall to bear,” Messenger said.

So he looked for their tans, the special signals they radiated of wealth and leadership, all the lights of influence and pulled-string, procurate agency. But he had forgotten the decent suit in everyone’s closet, appearance got up like a made bed, hospital corners. Why, even the Meals-on-Wheels group looked distinguished, their walking aids and wheelchairs lending them the look of pampered cranks. One old man in a lap robe might have been their line’s coddled, consanguinitic first cause.

So he looked for the stalwart, for stamina, recalling the beefy first and second mates and ordinary seamen who had been sent by the Barge and Shipper’s Union to carry his father-in-law’s casket. He looked for the powerhouse honor guard of the rich.

Sam approached him. He leaned across Louise and whispered in his ear. “Professor Messenger said you were uncertain about the other pallbearers, that you weren’t sure where to go.”

“Nobody told me. Nobody told whoever I’m supposed to replace I’m supposed to replace him. I didn’t know anything about any of this, Mr. Glazer. Mr. Harry sprung it on me on the plane.”

“If you’re uncomfortable,” Sam said quietly. “If you’re the least bit uncomfortable…”

“Well,” George said, “Mr. Harry said it was what Mrs. Glazer wanted.”

“All right,” he said softly, “talk to the gentlemen in this row. This is the pallbearers’ bench.”

He looked down the aisle. “Gee,” he said, “I never even gave my name. I wonder how the ushers knew.” (Thinking even as he said it that the nieces and nephews had his number, that Mr. Claunch—Harry—had given it to them. Like a psychological profile of hijackers and bombers which even the girls at the airport metal detectors knew, the maintenance men in the public toilets.)

“Well,” Sam whispered, “if you’re all squared away.” He started to leave, looking at the men and women on the aisles as he walked to the front of the church, accepting their handshakes, bending to receive the women’s hugs. He was at once solemn and oddly hospitable, a flexibly expansive man.

Mills excused himself to the lady on his right—they were seated boy-girl, boy-girl, as if it were a formal dinner party—and asked if he might say something to the gentleman. The man smiled at him. “Pardon, sir,” Mills said, producing his white gloves, “I took care of Mrs. Glazer down there in Mexico for a while and it seems she asked for me to replace one of the real pallbearers, but she didn’t specify which real pallbearer I was supposed to stand in for. If you’re…”

“Sure,” the man said, “Judy was the coach. The coach calls the shots.”

My God, Mills thought, it’s what’shisname, the guy with the franchise.

(Because he knew nothing about obsequy, understanding well enough from his yokel’s back bench condition the ins and outs of grief and loss—hadn’t Mr. Mead, his father-in-law, a man he both respected and liked, died within the season? hadn’t Mrs. Glazer?—reassured by the hang of his gut, the small, packed, sorrowful nausea there like a darning egg or some discrete, comfortable orthodoxy which fondled his sentiment and vouchsafed his heart. But nothing at all, not even curiosity, about the stately weights and measures of public ceremony—which may have explained the muddy color of the mood ring plugged to his mild, even-tempered boredom—the organ solos and responsive readings, the bishop’s ringing exhortation of Heaven, his official encouragement of the immediate family, and his feeling denial of death, Mills in a way not even present, a time server, a clock watcher, waiting for whatever signal he knew must come when his pallbearing colleagues would rise and arrange themselves at the big, silver-handled box—and in what order? would the funeral director line them up, drill-sergeanting precedence, their disparate seniorities? or had Mrs. Glazer, who, Mills knew, called the shots here, called this one too, choreographing the last detail of all, the procession to and from the back door of her hearse, Mills’s presence sheer habit by this time, as if the dead woman had become accustomed to his assisting her in and out of rental cars?—George ready to go it alone if there should be a hitch, prepared to throw his studied leverages into one final, mighty eviction.

(Listening again only when a chubby, acne’d, middle-aged man rose from where he had been sitting behind Sam and the two girls and took a position in the empty pulpit.)

The man waited for the anthem that had accompanied him (or that, rather, he had accompanied, his bearing gradually enhanced by the music) to finish. Then, glancing first at McKelvey and then at the Glazers, he started to speak in a voice that was almost conversational, almost offhand.

“Well,” he began, “the patient insisted that everything have meaning. That’s familiar enough, I guess. Once they’re into it I don’t suppose there’s been a dozen analysands in the history of analysis who haven’t brought their dreams and even the least encounters of their day to their analysts for examination. Believe me, I’ve seen them come like cats with birds in their jaws, like kids with swell report cards. That’s not what I’m talking about. Lots of people are like that. You don’t have to be neurotic. I guess not.

“I mean the patient demanded that
everything
have meaning. She had no tolerance for things that didn’t. ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons drove her up the wall and she couldn’t understand why ice cream came in so many flavors. Let’s see…Symptoms. She could be phobic about fillers in newspapers. As a matter of fact, during her worst years, she wouldn’t even read a paper. She couldn’t take in why the stories weren’t connected, and it terrified her that an article about a fire could appear next to a piece on the mayor. She was the same about television. She couldn’t follow a story once it was interrupted by a commercial. Variety shows, the connection between the acts. So that was one of her symptoms.

“Let’s see…

“For a while she was nervous about bedspreads. They gave her the creeps. So did tablecloths, folded napkins. She thought they might be hiding something that wasn’t supposed to be there. That whole business about bedspreads and tablecloths, though, that was a new one on me. Of course they’re
all
new ones. I mean there’s really no such thing as a classic symptom. If there were, madness would be easier to treat than it is. It’s hard to treat. Actually, in a way, the patient’s got to get tired of her disease. Well, that’s
my
theory anyway. A lot of psychiatrists disagree.

“The patient was institutionalized eleven years. That’s a long time. The saddest thing was this terrible fear. She was very intelligent, but because agoraphobia was another of her symptoms, she refused to go out and never quite grasped what was going on outside her window. She was afraid of weather. Autumn nearly killed her. When the leaves turned color. When they dropped off the trees, that gave her the heebie-jeebies altogether. Snow and rain, lightning and ice. You can imagine what spring did to her with its buds and green shoots and all the furry signals trees put out before they go to leaf.

“She couldn’t understand temperature swings, why her windows were open sometimes and shut at others. What am I saying? She couldn’t understand nighttime and daytime. So those were other symptoms.

“Look,” he said, “this is difficult for me. I’m not sure this is even ethical. Strictly speaking, it’s all privileged information. She
asked
me to tell these things. She arranged it with Bishop McKelvey. Well, they’re open secrets anyway. Most of you were her loved ones. You know this stuff. But it’s cat-out-of-the-bag, and it makes me nervous. Probably I seem ridiculous. Under the circumstances, even if I’d just been her orthopedist telling you about her broken leg or bad back, I’d still seem silly. It’s all time and place. She’s put me in a bad situation. I don’t know what she thought she was up to. I suppose that sounds dopey too. I mean I was her psychiatrist, I charted her head like the New World. I’m supposed to know. Anyway, I don’t.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

“A lot of you know I was retained by the family. That I was her very own bought-and-paid-for personal psychiatrist. Like some high-priced music coach or the princess’s astrologer. I lived in.

“I guess you know I wrote a book about her case. Or manuscript. It was never published. Well, that whole business was the patient’s idea. She saw herself as material, subject matter for a book. Maybe you could put that down as another symptom, but if it is, God knows it’s one the patient shared with nine out of ten people alive. I didn’t
have
to write it, I suppose. I was on retainer and the family paid top dollar. (This was just after I’d completed my residency. I couldn’t realistically have expected to make that much money for another five or six years at the inside.) The Claunches made it clear from the outset that I was, well, that I was the doctor. So I didn’t
have
to write it. I guess I went along because I didn’t have much else to do. Madness is a full-time occupation, but only for the madman. (That’s really how the cure works. My notion of it anyway, though most don’t agree with me. If the patient doesn’t do herself an injury and just lives long enough she’ll probably wear herself out.) Anyway, the patient was all the data I had. So I started to write her up about the middle of the third year.

“If you’re interested, I guess I’d have to say that the transference dates from just about this time frame.

“I had my notes. And all those tape recordings of our sessions that I’d play over and over, wearing them out practically. As if they were favorite tunes, the top of the charts, say. Or like those half-dozen old movies in the ship’s library they used to rotate and show us in the Pacific during the war. She really was all the data I had. Never mind my two lousy years’ residency at Cook County Hospital. Those folks were in a clinic, mad on the arm. (Which was how the family got me in the first place. Sure, if a psychiatrist already had a practice he couldn’t just pick up and leave people who were dependent on him. It
had
to be a kid.)

“My notes and hers. The tapes that we made. Her madwoman’s homework——the journals she kept, the bad dreams she wrote down.

“And access, too, to those letters she wrote other patients. Witty—wit was a symptom—funny and malicious, reminding people whose own bad dreams had just been burned out of them by shock therapy of everything they had forgotten, rubbing their noses in their past, bringing them down from the thin, comfortable air of their electric amnesia. Not making it up but piling it on, some ‘Hasty Pudding’ rendition of their loony doings. Which she never showed me, but which their psychiatrists did, outraged as schoolteachers intercepting passed notes. Of course I spoke to her about it. I asked why she wrote them. ‘Six years,’ she said, ‘I’ve been here six years. A bunch of these crazies are my best pals. I’ve made love to some of the men and a few of the women and spoken with the rest like Francis of Assisi making small talk with birds. What happens if they get well?’ ‘Don’t you want them to get well?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you want to get well?’ ‘Craziness ain’t much of a birthright.’ ‘I have to give back the letters.’ ‘Their shrinks will destroy them. Or lock them up in the poor bastards’ files.’ ‘I have to return them.’ ‘Make copies,’ she said. ‘They’re poison pen letters,’ she said, ‘as much a record of my nuttiness as theirs. Make copies. Put them in that manuscript you’re writing about me.’

“Because she said ‘manuscript’ now, not ‘book.’ Knowing that if the letters went in, it could never in either of our lifetimes be any published book, that even if I changed their names the facts would be there, that we’d be hung up in lawsuits the rest of our lives.

“But I did what she asked. The letters became part of the record too. I copied them into what only one of us still thought of even as the manuscript. Though the patient had never even seen it. Now she asked about it every day. ‘You’re some doctor,’ she’d say. ‘Eight years in private practice and you’ve yet to cure anyone. What’s with the manuscript? How’s that going at least?’ ‘There’s a lot of material,’ I’d tell her, ‘I’m up half the night transcribing tapes. Copying those letters you write. I’m losing sleep. When I finally get to bed I toss and turn for an hour.’ ‘What’s with the big deal opus manuscript? Do I get to see it soon or do you plan to take another seven years?’ I think this obsession with the manuscript was probably one of her last symptoms.