George Mills Part 17

" 'Debit: He would have no father to play with or take him to ball games.

" 'Debit: He would want toys.

" 'Debit: These are hard times. With two extra children to provide for, a man would think twice before asking a woman to marry him.

" 'Debit: He's so much like his father.

" 'Debit: He'd have to be told some story about why we left Milwaukee, why I no longer ever even talk about taking him to visit his relations there. I couldn't tell him the truth. I'd have to lie. I'm basically an honest person. I'd probably tell bad lies.

" 'Debit: If I do do meet someone George might blurt out that I'm still married to a man in Wisconsin. meet someone George might blurt out that I'm still married to a man in Wisconsin.

" 'Credit: He's my son, after all.' "

"She's going to leave me."

"No," Wickland said. "The debits were chiefly contingency debits, things well into the future, things that might never happen. She might never meet anyone who would want a woman with even one child. She was a person who required maids for those references she had never stopped making up in her head. You could do things around the house, you could help with the baby. She wasn't going to leave you. She was going to take you."

"So she could watch me. So she could make up references for me."

"It was almost the eighth month now. This pregnancy hadn't been as easy as her first. She was frequently in pain. It was a first-floor apartment but she had difficulty with the stairs, feeling each step in her gut, a pregnancy like appendicitis. She couldn't do laundry. She couldn't cook or clean or make beds. She took to her bed.

"And now she had had maids, all she could want. They were girls from the buildings, not just from the building they lived in now or from Mrs. Simon's building or even the building where they had first lived, the one with the famous storage locker (retired now, withdrawn forever from the category of lease, freehold and shelter, vacated, vacant, not exactly condemned nor quite yet memorialized as lovers' lane, bower, star-crossed grottic coze, but doing a brisk business in necking, heavy petting, nakedness, with the now almost adolescent kids whose bicycles and sleds your father had once pulled up the cellar steps, the flowered oilcloth walls still up, unfaded and still redolent of the mysterious janitor and the exiled maid), but from maids, all she could want. They were girls from the buildings, not just from the building they lived in now or from Mrs. Simon's building or even the building where they had first lived, the one with the famous storage locker (retired now, withdrawn forever from the category of lease, freehold and shelter, vacated, vacant, not exactly condemned nor quite yet memorialized as lovers' lane, bower, star-crossed grottic coze, but doing a brisk business in necking, heavy petting, nakedness, with the now almost adolescent kids whose bicycles and sleds your father had once pulled up the cellar steps, the flowered oilcloth walls still up, unfaded and still redolent of the mysterious janitor and the exiled maid), but from all all Mindian's buildings, girls out on loan not just from the tenants who had lived there during the glory but from those who had come later, who had only heard about the glory and who wanted a piece of the consequences, the promissory moral catastrophic denouement. And not just on Thursday afternoons either, but every day, practically around the clock, making the apartment s.h.i.+ne, eagerly doing your mother's bidding, antic.i.p.ating that bidding, getting you ready for school, making breakfast, making lunch, making dinner, Mindian's buildings, girls out on loan not just from the tenants who had lived there during the glory but from those who had come later, who had only heard about the glory and who wanted a piece of the consequences, the promissory moral catastrophic denouement. And not just on Thursday afternoons either, but every day, practically around the clock, making the apartment s.h.i.+ne, eagerly doing your mother's bidding, antic.i.p.ating that bidding, getting you ready for school, making breakfast, making lunch, making dinner, doing the shopping! doing the shopping!

"All this in deference to what they had been, to the now slipshod memory of what they had been, not a willfully world-shy young janitor and a fired, forlorn, loose-ended country girl, but defiant lovers who took their love into the ground and closed the door after them, like people waiting for the end perhaps, or folks buried alive.

"In any event, Nancy and George did not want for help, nor Nancy for characters to define and read, as my co-spiritualists in Ca.s.sadaga read auras, handwriting, palms, gazing crystals, making of life, the future and past, a kind of immense, customized calendar of personality. Though to tell the truth, she wasn't quite up to her opportunities now. She was uncomfortable and all these helpers seemed to have been cut out of the same cloth. She knew distinctions were always to be made but she was tired; she couldn't make them.

"One size fits all. These girls are very willing but they are very trying. It isn't so much that I have to tell them what to do but that I have to entertain them. Evidently they want to be my friends, to be on personal terms with me. They want to know about our lives.

"It's all very well to have an amicable relations.h.i.+p with the help but something else entirely when they feel they can take liberties with you. It shows a want of respect and leads to a breakdown of the employer-servant relations.h.i.+p.

"But her heart wasn't in it. She rarely composed these characters now. She was too tired, too weak. All she could really think about was when the baby would be born, when she could move to New Jersey. She was constantly nauseous and couldn't even think about food, not even to plan the menus she had once taken such pride in, the carefully conceived shopping lists with their attention to taste and nutrition and that cunningly shaved economy the proceeds of which were to go toward the purchase of your half-fare ticket to Paterson, New Jersey."

"She's not going to take me," George Mills said, "she's not going to take me."

" 'There's never enough change, change, George. They spend every nickel you give them. There's food rotting in the pantry.' George. They spend every nickel you give them. There's food rotting in the pantry.'

" 'Just relax, darling,' her husband told her. 'Just lie here and try to get your appet.i.te back. Don't worry about the food bills. Don't worry about a thing. The food isn't rotting. All the work they do around here, these girls are ent.i.tled to a little something to eat. Please don't worry, dear. Your friends are taking care of everything.'

"The baby wasn't even premature. One Tuesday while you were at school your father came in and heard her screaming. Or heard her screaming at Bernice, whose eleven-to-noon s.h.i.+ft was just ending and who was waiting to be relieved by Louisa, whose lunch s.h.i.+ft was about to begin.

" 'No, you foolish girl. I cannot cannot get dressed. The doctor will have to come here. It is impossible that I get up.' get dressed. The doctor will have to come here. It is impossible that I get up.'

" 'But Mrs,' Bernice objected. (Which is how your mother preferred to be called. Not Mrs. Mills, and certainly not Nancy, but Mrs, as though the girls were incapable of learning her name, only her distance. That she got them to agree-she told them it was a pretty game-is a measure of the awe in which they still held her.) " 'What is it? What's happening?' your father shouted.

" 'It's the baby, George. I think I'm having the baby.'

" 'She's in just horrible pain,' Bernice said.

" 'What does the doctor say?'

" 'The doctor is a fool.'

" 'She says the doctor must come to the apartment. I told him how it was with Mrs, but he says these things is best handled in the hospital.'

" 'Then we'll just take her to the hospital. Take it easy, dear. Take it easy, sweetheart.'

" 'I cannot get dressed.'

" 'That's all right. I'll wrap you in a blanket. I'll carry you.'

" 'Do you want me to have the baby in the hallway? Do you want me to have it in the street? Is that what you want?'

" 'Bernice? Bernice?' Louisa called. 'I'm here, Bernice. You can go now. I'll fix lunch and bring it in.' "

"Did this happen? I was at school. I remember those girls. There were a bunch of them there when I got home."

"Because n.o.body had two two maids," Wickland said. "Because n.o.body had two maids, let alone five. She wouldn't let any of them leave. Not that they wanted to. Or maybe she did it for your father. Whom she had made a kind of squire, laird, gent, swell. Who suddenly found himself Duke of Milwaukee. maids," Wickland said. "Because n.o.body had two maids, let alone five. She wouldn't let any of them leave. Not that they wanted to. Or maybe she did it for your father. Whom she had made a kind of squire, laird, gent, swell. Who suddenly found himself Duke of Milwaukee.

" 'Call that doctor again. Say that it is impossible that I get out of this bed. Say that he is the one who confined me to it. Ask how it may be that at the moment when we are most precarious we should quit it. No, George, you stay. Rosalie will call.'

"Perhaps it was the screaming, but they were coming all at once now and not waiting upon their designated times.

" 'Louisa,' your mother said, 'stand at the door. Admit no one but those girls who are trusted.'

" 'How will I know?'

" 'Pa.s.s in the names. We'll let you know.'

"He thought she was hysterical, that to move her by force would rupture not only the female mechanism which had caused her difficulties but his life, too. He couldn't lose her. He couldn't. He had already quit Corinth once and even gotten away with it. He didn't want to give fate a second chance to nail him.

" '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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 s.e.x 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 don't it smell smell awful!' 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 G.o.d, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 m.u.f.fed 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 appet.i.te 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 embarra.s.sment.

" 'Why shouldn't I?' he demanded. 'Why shouldn't 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? h.e.l.l, it may even be part of the bargain. Maybe they actually 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? h.e.l.l, it may even be part of the bargain. Maybe they actually want want me p.i.s.sed. 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 me p.i.s.sed. 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 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!' 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 sp.a.w.n. They f.u.c.king 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 rea.s.sured 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 d.a.m.ned 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. Push.'

" 'It hurts.'

" 'Of course it hurts. Pus.h.!.+ Pus.h.!.+'

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

" 'I knew she was dead. knew she was dead. I 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 G.o.d, my dead Janet like so many shards of busted girlbone. Help me, Janet. Help 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 G.o.d, my dead Janet like so many shards of busted girlbone. Help me, Janet. Help meee! 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 trespa.s.s 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. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 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.' 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?'