George Mills (79 page)

“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 conducting 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.

“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

A
bout 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.