George Mills Part 33

" 'I was a sickaroony.'

" 'You're well now.'

" 'Eleven years. Hardly the nick of time, wouldn't you say?'

" 'Eleven years. That's how long we were together, Judith.'

" 'Should auld acquaintance,' she said.

" 'You're getting discharged next week. Then I guess you'll get together with that graduate student who's been visiting you. I don't know what I'm going to do.'

" 'You? Eleven years at seventy thousand dollars a year? That's more than three quarters of a million dollars. Why, you're almost a rich man, Doc.'

" 'It's the transference,' I said.

" 'Yeah, I know,' Judy said. 'It was a h.e.l.l of a transference. Thanks, Doc.'

"She thanked me. For the transference. I think it's what cured her. That I was the only man the patient knew who had loved the patient all those years."

The recessional! Trumpets and organ music! A bright bang of reverberant bliss! Out of the psychiatrist's, Breel's, gawky silence, his b.u.mpkin shuffle. The big breakthrough as foolish grin, lopside heart. While the Meals-on-Wheelers, no longer charity cases so much as a special-interest group, invited observers, say, from some neutral but not indifferent commission, took, under cover of the music, collective liberties with the doings of their hosts, disputing intent and motive and all the ways of doing business that were not their ways, feeling had, the more religious among them, deprived of some final settlement and solace, who had ceremoniously come to grieve for the strange woman who for years now, rain or s.h.i.+ne, had fed them lunch. Chatty in her way too, of course, but like some cheery columnist of the wide world whose tales of the fabulous had been, or so they'd thought, mere bedtime stories, meant to entertain or distract, told neither to enlist nor support sympathies, but out of the goodness of an enraged and generous heart, and not, or so they'd thought, to be taken seriously. Postcard information and detail. That there might have been a picture of the death camps on the face of the card had not struck them as unusual since they never expected to see such places themselves.

Now they stood in their pews, their faces turned toward the center aisle as first the thurifer and then the crucifer went by, followed by the acolytes and clergy. It was only when the immediate family pa.s.sed that they struggled to put names to faces, placing individuals in the context of Judith Glazer's now heartfelt, retroactive gossip.

Dr. Breel had long since climbed down from the pulpit. Where he had seemed at once both faltering and certain. Now he was again hesitant, trying to decide whether to wait for those peripheral members of the family-cousins (he recognized them easily enough; he'd read the book), pals from childhood, the coaches, cooks, servants and tutors of Cornell Messenger's speculations-or to plunge himself into mourning's mainstream. He seemed ready to plunge, determined, deferential only to some graduated kins.h.i.+p principle of his own ordering. Wavering, he thrust himself behind Sam's sister from California and in front of the dead woman's first lover.

Last came the casket supported by the six pallbearers in paced and stately lockstep behind the ragged, difficult parade of the Meals-on-Wheels people.

Only Cornell Messenger still lingered in a row of pews. He waited for George Mills, whose right hand grasped and forearm supported half a yard of Judith Glazer's casket handle, and who was concentrating all his will on the task. When Mills was almost abreast of him Messenger winked and leaned forward. "The horror, the horror, hey Mills?" he said.

[Later it was Louise who called Harry to apologize for the bill that the Meals-on-Wheels people had run up at Stouffer's. "It was their idea of a wake," she told him. "They didn't mean harm," she said. "They were a little upset by what that doctor said. They knew your sister for years. Maybe they thought he dishonored her memory."

[Harry, who was not quite certain who Louise was but who had a vague memory of her having come back to the house after the burial, attempted to rea.s.sure her. "That was my sister's favorite charity. I'm sure Judith would have been pleased that they enjoyed themselves." She did not tell him that, from what she gathered, from what George had told her of what Cornell Messenger had told him, it had not been an entirely joyous occasion.

[Stouffer's round, gla.s.sed-in restaurant, "The Top of the Towers," offered a view of the city from twenty-eight floors up, its outer perimeter of tables revolving almost imperceptibly, 360 degrees in just under an hour. Those of Judith Glazer's guests who had to excuse themselves to go the toilet could not find their tables when they returned. They were a little drunk. Some stumbled trying to cross from the restaurant's fixed, stationary center to its revolving rim. Scenes were made. They reported purses missing, hats, entire complements of the handicapped. One old woman turned herself in to the hostess. "I'm lost," she moaned. "Everything's mixed up. There's tall buildings where the river was and a river where there used to be a stadium. You're the usher that seated me. Get me back." And a tipsy lady who had filched a bouquet of flowers from among the floral decorations at St. Michael and St. George reported to the manager that her friends were missing. "They was a dead person's flowers. I took them from the church because I was a good friend of the corpse. If they should fall into the wrong hands, if the wrong noses should smell them, that person could die, and no one could ever prove whether it was the flowers or your fancy food that took them off." Two or three, feeling themselves genuinely abandoned, had wept. At the last minute one man refused to let the driver pay for his lunch and insisted on settling with the cas.h.i.+er himself. ("The decent clothes," George had said. "What?" Messenger asked. "Those decent clothes," Mills said. "He looked presentable even to himself. Of course he wasn't going to let some chauffeur pay for his lunch in front of a woman who took cash at a register. These were your men-of-the-world poor. They didn't grow up up in beds with hospital sides. They hadn't in beds with hospital sides. They hadn't always always pushed themselves around behind walkers." "So?" "So she knew," Mills said, who was a little tipsy himself. "Who? What did she know?" "She knew everything." "The mischief maker? Judy?" "Call her however you like," Mills said, "she knew everything." "Sure," Messenger said. "What?" Mills asked. "Sure," Messenger said. "The revolving restaurant. It was her last giveaway, the ultimate Meals-on-Wheels lunch.") "Almost three hundred dollars," Louise said, "and I can almost hear their backbiting." "Mnh," George said. "They must have said plenty," Louise said. "They don't know anything, Louise."] pushed themselves around behind walkers." "So?" "So she knew," Mills said, who was a little tipsy himself. "Who? What did she know?" "She knew everything." "The mischief maker? Judy?" "Call her however you like," Mills said, "she knew everything." "Sure," Messenger said. "What?" Mills asked. "Sure," Messenger said. "The revolving restaurant. It was her last giveaway, the ultimate Meals-on-Wheels lunch.") "Almost three hundred dollars," Louise said, "and I can almost hear their backbiting." "Mnh," George said. "They must have said plenty," Louise said. "They don't know anything, Louise."]

Messenger drove with them to the Claunch home after the burial.

Invited to return to west county with the family afterward, Mills and Louise had hesitated. A delegation of women had come to them. Sisters-in-law, an aunt. Mills knew they had been put up to it by men, that Judith Glazer had been the only one of her s.e.x to have any real power in the family, that someday-he didn't know how he knew this; it wasn't anything her mother had spoken of-Mary might have the same sort of authority.

"No, really," a widowed sister-in-law had said. "You were with Judith all that terrible time in Mexico. It would be a comfort to know certain things."

"Well," Mills said.

"It would make Mary feel so much better," the other sister-in-law said softly, almost whispering. "It would make all all of us feel better." of us feel better."

"Gee," Mills said, "I don't..."

"Perhaps Mr. Mills would have to miss work," the aunt said. "It could cost him a day's wages to come with us."

"Oh that's awful," the first sister-in-law said. "Of course the family would..."

"No no," Mills said, "I'm not, I wouldn't be..."

"Oh splendid," she said, "it's settled then."

Cornell rode with the Millses in the Buick Special. "No guts," he told Louise. "Those folks are real moguls. The elect hoity-toity of earth. I recognized a couple of university trustees. The chancellor was there. That guy Sam was squiring around. G.o.d, he never let him out of his sight...If they saw me light up," he said, taking a joint from a package of low tar cigarettes. "You do pot, Louise?" He offered the pack. "Thanks but no thanks, eh? Ri-ight. I do it to enhance the ride. It already enhanced the funeral. But no kidding, Louise. There are some great houses out here. The stately homes of Missouri. Keep your eyes open, kiddo. Enjoy, enjoy."

But to Mills, who had never been in this part of the county, it had already begun to look familiar. It was not deja vu. It was history. The hundred tales he'd heard. Their marked Marco Polo life. He seemed to recognize hedges, birds, the iron verticals of their rich men's fencing, their curving driveways like the packed, treated surfaces of tennis courts, the trees that lined them, their rare rich wood. He sensed porters' lodges, cunning, low-ceilinged s.p.a.ce within thick stone gateways, and smelled, far off, stocked ponds, game, posted woods and sculpted rivers.

Magically, he seemed even to know the way. Instinct working in him now, not grace. His own instinct merged with that calculating one of whatever inceptive, raw, original Claunch it had been who had seen not just the tract's possibilities but its already inplace, on-stream, on-line de facto advantages.

"My goodness but it's a way," Louise said.

"Maybe we ought to get back to a main drag and stop over at a motel," Messenger said. "Would you like that, Louise?"

"We're almost there," Mills said. Who had noticed, miles back, that they had pa.s.sed the last of the prettified Lanes, Drives, Roads, Courts and Places with their scrolled, artisan'd address. Squire country, he had thought dismissively over Cornell's easy admiration.

As they were past address itself now, on privatest property, still located of course, but in some geography of extraordinary jurisdiction where armed gillies and deputized gamekeepers enforced not law but custom, usage, tradition, folklore. Here they could be murdered for poaching, trespa.s.s. And not even instinct now but-his mood ring glows like ember, it sizzles his finger like a paper cut-his goofy, loyal, Mills-primed imagination: slain for a plucked wildflower or wrongly chosen bait. And suspects that what is operative here cuts deeper than statute, goes beyond compact and the legislative, sc.r.a.ping some raw nerve of the established ecological, their presence intrusive, pus.h.i.+ng against a nature as fitfully balanced as a zoo, within striking distance, as Millses always were, of their oppressors' murderous pet peeves. And is somehow gloomily proud that such power, chipped at and chipped at, nickel-and-dimed by revolution and reform, still manages to hold on, hold out, continues to exist in such culs-de-sac as the one he drives past now at twenty and twenty-two miles an hour, watching for deer crossing, bridle paths, grazing stock. And is as certain that the Buick Special is observed, its position called out from walkie-talkie to walkie-talkie, as he is of the existence of the power itself. Who knows that he is this sn.o.b of history, this anachronistic partisan? Lancaster's man, York's? (He himself has forgotten which.) Louise, who has had his c.o.c.k in her mouth, doesn't. She thinks, if she thinks about it at all, that he is Laglichio's man, or the late Mrs. Glazer's, or her own.

"Another couple miles," George said.

"Jesus!" Cornell Messenger said when they had entered the main gate and turned into the driveway. "There ought to be a drawbridge. It's a f.u.c.king G.o.dd.a.m.n castle!"

"They're not checking plates today," George explained. "There's often open house when someone dies."

"I never expected anything like this," Cornell said. "I'll tell you something. I bet Sam himself ain't ever been here."

Messenger could have been right. It was the girls, Mary and Milly, who took them on a tour of the house-though George felt, so familiar was he with its Platonic floor plan that he might have been able to do it himself-Sam and a few others following them about like visitors shy at the White House say, told it's their home, but knowing better of course, hanging well back of their minds' velvet ropes, not smoking and taking no pictures, their normal speaking voices lowered decibels.

"Hey," Messenger said, whose enjoyment of the house had been enhanced one last time before climbing out of Mills's car, "you think there's a gift shop?"

"Here's where I take ballet and fencing," Mary said. "Grandpa had the mirrors and warm-up bar put in when Mother was a little girl. It's special wood. You can't get splinters." She ran to the practice bar, turned to them, and carelessly raised her leg. They could see over the tops of her stockings.

"I don't think someone should dance after a funeral," Milly said.

"Your sister's right, sweetheart," Sam said.

"Oh, Daddy," Mary said.

"I have to speak to you," Cornell whispered in George's ear.

"You have a lovely home," Louise was telling the two girls. "Really lovely. You must be so proud. I suppose in a house as big as this one each of you probably has her own room."

"We have our own lady's maids, too," Mary said. "We have separate cooks and our own private gardeners. We even have our own special milkman. And a postman who does nothing but just deliver our mail. Isn't that right, Milly?"

"Mary is teasing," Milly said. "We don't even live here. We come out sometimes on weekends."

"The really amazing, astonis.h.i.+ng, wonderful thing is that Milly isn't even spoiled. I am, but old Milly is just like everyone else even if she does have just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in her own private savings account."

"It's in trust," Milly said. "I can't touch it till I'm twenty-one."

"Mary," Sam said more forcefully, "Milly. That's enough now."

"It's pretty urgent," Cornell Messenger said.

The psychiatrist, down from the catharsis in which he had taken refuge, frowned. "I'm cras.h.i.+ng," he said. "I'm actually cras.h.i.+ng. I'm sorry. I had no idea I was going to say all that stuff. I made a d.a.m.n fool of myself, a stupid a.s.s."

"Hey," Cornell said, "hey come on. on. It's what she would have wanted." It's what she would have wanted."

"You shut up," Sam said, "you just shut up."

"We ought to start back now, Louise," George said.

"You got it, Sammy," Cornell said. "My lips are sealed, Dean."

"Thank you, young ladies," Louise said. "It was awful nice meeting you, Doctor. I'm sorry about your wife, Mr. Glazer. She was very kind to my father when he was alive." Louise turned to go.

"I've got to speak to you, Mills," Cornell said, following him.

"I'm not in this," George said sweetly. "I'm not in any of this."

They were descending three abreast on a widely winding staircase that circ.u.mscribed a lavish keyhole of s.p.a.ce. George had seen nothing like this house. Greatest Grandfather Mills hadn't, nor had most Millses in between. "Listen," he would have told his son, "I've been to Architecture the way some have been to France. In rooms measured as philosophy. The furniture like pieces settled in nature, unremarkably there as trees. And the fabrics, George, the fabrics! Fabric like foliage or high husbandry's b.u.mper crops. And woodwork like the sounding boards on stringed instruments. Paneling from panel mines, the oldest forests, all wilderness's concentric rings like the tracery of nerves in vitals."

Cornell saying "I've got to speak to you. I've really got to speak to you."

And so, it turned out, did others. The aunt, the sisters-in-law, had been emissaries, actual agents. In the manor's great drawing room with its brackets of wing and armchair and parentheses of sofa, its Oriental carpet deep and wide as infield tarpaulin, its armoires and marquetried escritoires checkered as gameboard, they were waiting for him.

"Did you enjoy your tour, Mrs. Mills?" the aunt asked. She sat in a large, curving wing chair of upholstered silk, her long, thin forearms and mottled, arthritic hands arranged over twin tracks of tight gold fringe, her large purse open and settled beside her like a queen's. Her fine, crossed legs were clear, firm as a dancer's, and her expression as she waited for Louise's answer, layered, a cool palimpsest of serenity, indifference and concern. Like several of the senior members of the family George had noticed at the funeral, she did not wear mourning. Indeed, her light woolen coat dress, exactly the color of fleshtone in a black and white photograph, seemed more the clothing of the owner of an odds-on Derby favorite in her special box than it did of someone who had just buried a niece. Mills noticed her long, misshapen, ringless fingers and wondered whether she had ever been married or if she had had her jewelry cut from her painful, blistered joints.

"Oh yes," Louise said, "oh yes, indeed. It may not be proper etiquette to say so, but this has been a very special and exciting day for us. I never expected to be invited to a house like this. Goodness, it's like something in picture books. Or what I imagine palaces in the old country must look like. George knows more about these things but I can tell he's as thrilled as I am. Aren't you, George?"

He sweltered for Louise in her black mourning dress, for himself in his dark suit. "Yes," he said.

"I know," his wife said. "And we want to thank you for having us. And the children are darling. I only hope that it had to be on such a sad occasion. I mean..."

"Of course," the aunt said, smiling. "But surely you needn't go yet, Mrs. Mills. My nieces-in-law want to show you the miniature railroad that Judith's father built for her to ride in when she was a child."

"You mean like the little train that takes you around the zoo?"

"Quite like that, yes. I'll tell Grant to organize a ride for you. My nieces will go with you."

"Oh, George, did you hear? We're going for a ride on a little train."

"Well, Mrs. Mills, I thought you and the girls might make do on your own. This might be a good time for Mr. Mills to speak with Mr. Claunch."

"Oh," Louise said.

"I go with Lulu on the choo-choo?" Cornell said.

The aunt-George was not sure of her name, though he knew that the rich did not always give their names, that they lived unlisted lives-glared at Cornell. "Yes," said the aunt, "of course. I should have thought to ask."

Mr. Claunch, as it turned out, was not Harry, but Harry's father.

The builder of the miniature railroad and the splinter-free ballet studio was waiting for him in a kind of trophy room. Plaques the shape of arrowheads hung next to framed oval photos of horses and riders, of dogs and handlers. There were mounted blue ribbons that fell away from inscribed rosettes big and round as clocks in schoolrooms, like pressed pants. Leather straps with tiny bronze horseshoes dangled from them, the sculpted heads of horses snugged into their curves. Silver bowls rested on bric-a-brac shelves next to porcelain animals, and everywhere, no larger than pocket watches, bas-relief medallions were pressed onto the walls like an equine coinage. Along another wall, high up, were prep school banners large as pillowcases, college pennants, the guidons of military academies like a felt heraldry. Beneath these were columns of framed team photographs-football, baseball, hockey, swimming, soccer, track-oddly like the Won and Lost listings in newspapers. Mary and Milly, in ice skating costumes, their arms spread, dipped toward the camera in clumsy arabesques. There were pictures of golfers and tennis players, and slalomers on skis kicking their bodies past gates like conga dancers. There were queer, high-alt.i.tude photographs of people on the summits of mountains. They seemed shy as foot shufflers, scuffers of shoes.

Claunch was seated beside a writing table with his legs crossed and his left hand resting lightly on the surface of the table. He wore a dark blazer and bright plaid trousers l.u.s.tered as kilt. He had a large face, and thick black horn rims-dated as Mills's mood ring-hung on his eyes like s.h.i.+ners. Though he was smoking, Mills saw no ashtray in the room. Here and there thin columns of smoke rose from the silver trophy bowls into which Claunch Sr. dropped unextinguished cigarettes.

"You're here," he said glumly. "All right, come in. Beat it please, Aunt." Was she his his aunt? George wondered. "I look," he said gloomily when the woman had gone, "like a past president of an International Olympic Games Committee." aunt? George wondered. "I look," he said gloomily when the woman had gone, "like a past president of an International Olympic Games Committee."

"I'm Mills," Mills said meekly, "and I just want to say how sorry I am about Mrs. Glazer."

"All torn up, are you?"

"She was very nice," George said. "She went through a lot."

"I know what she went through," Mrs. Glazer's father said. "She went through all of us. She went through all of us like a high wind. Trailer courts a.r.s.e over tip, dozens left homeless. I know know what she went through." He leaned suddenly forward, like Milly and Mary in their ice skating costumes. "Was I missed? At my daughter's funeral, was I missed? What was the dark, black-a.s.s buzz?" what she went through." He leaned suddenly forward, like Milly and Mary in their ice skating costumes. "Was I missed? At my daughter's funeral, was I missed? What was the dark, black-a.s.s buzz?"

"I didn't hear anything, sir."

Claunch closed his palms rapidly over his eyes, ears and mouth, and Mills s.h.i.+fted uneasily. "Oh come on, Mills," Claunch said, "she called me from Mexico. She called collect like some kid off at college. The things she said to me." He shook his head. "I tell you, George," he went on, "at first I thought that pancreatic cancer was a blessing. Not a blessing in disguise, but the outright, up-front, stand-tall stuff itself. Some no-strings cancer, three to four months at the outside and the patient so stuffed with pain, medication and final things she wouldn't have time for her dotty trouble campaigns. Even after she decided on her last-ditch stand, her hundred percent final effort, and went off for fruit therapy in old Mexico, I still still thought blessing! Blessing, G.o.dsend, favorable balance of payments! thought blessing! Blessing, G.o.dsend, favorable balance of payments!

"It didn't occur to me until after I stopped accepting her calls and began to hear from two or three of her hot-lunch clients that even if there's no G.o.d the devil sure exists. And something else became clear, too. That the weight of those charges she continued to press even in extremis took on something of a deathbed power, that even a poor old bunch of poor old b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in their own extremis would hear her out and make vows, pledges. Deathbed calling to deathbed in perseverant, unfaltering howl. The nerve of that woman! Intruding on their desuetude, enlisting the worn-out in her worn-out life."

"Meals-on-Wheels people phoned? I never heard this. She must have called them when I wasn't in the room."

"She gave away all my unpublished numbers. She put it out on the highest authority-her word as somebody terminal-that I was their absentee landlord, the s...o...b.. who wouldn't pay for their crumbled plumbing or fix their faulty wiring, that I darkened their hallways and stairs and put governing devices on their water and electric. She told them that she became involved with Meals-on-Wheels when she discovered who owned those rat traps. She said it was to make moral rest.i.tution."

"They called you up?"

"They're poor, Mills. Do you know what poverty is? Real poverty? It's not having any conception of how rich the rich really are. They don't know doodly squat about us. Sure they called. I set them straight of course. Judith wasn't crazy enough to believe her campaign would fly. But she did her damage. She got what she wanted."

"What did she want?"