“But a word about your father. It’s one thing to hide out, it’s another to be misrepresented. No sooner did he learn from your mother not only that people thought of him but
what
they thought of him, and no sooner did he understand that Nancy was the very one to set them straight—he was overreacting of course; they knew about him but he was hardly the only thing on their minds—no sooner, that is, did he realize that he had need of Nancy—and we’re talking, too, of how she looked in that little make-believe doorway of his little make-believe room—than he repudiated her.”
It felt good to sit there, George thought, knowing the end of the story, that whatever its complications, it would turn out well, that his father would turn out to be his father, that his mother would turn out to be his mother, and that he himself would eventually be brought to life.
“You see,” Wickland said, “everyone is something of an occasion. Even the kings, even the officials and presidents, those, I mean, whom history has need of. But you’re even more of an occasion than most. You were proscribed. Think about it. Your father said he would never go near women. Your mother believed him.
“So it was up to Esther Simon. She was the deciding factor in your existence.
“ ‘Doll,’ she called when Nancy returned that evening from her afternoon off. ‘Can you come into the master bedroom a sec, doll?’
“I don’t think it ever occurred to Nancy that her employer, the woman who presumed to read her mail in lieu of references, who suspected her of being a thief, who called her doll because she couldn’t always remember her name, who ordered her about, could almost have been a spoiled, slightly older sister. Esther Simon was only twenty-two years old. She had known her husband, Barry, a distant cousin, all her life, since they had been children in adjacent Hyde Park mansions in Chicago. It did not even occur to her as odd that when Mrs. Greene came to visit her daughter and son-in-law in Milwaukee, the Simons were ‘the kids,’ Nancy ‘the woman.’
“ ‘Yes ma’am,’ your seventeen-year-old mother said to her twenty-two-year-old boss.
“ ‘Your sweetie must have dropped this,’ she said. ‘You better not wait till next Thursday to return it.’
“ ‘What?’
“ ‘What indeed? It’s a wrench. I found it in the master bathroom.’
“ ‘That’s not mine,’ Nancy said.
“ ‘Well of course it’s not. It’s
his.
He must have dropped it when he presumed to use my toilet.’
“ ‘Please, Mrs. Simon, you’re making—’
“ ‘A mistake? Of course, doll. It’s probably Mr. Simon’s monkey whoosis, only Mr. Simon’s out of town and it wasn’t there when I left this morning.’
“ ‘It’s the janitor’s.’
“ ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Simon said, ‘I suppose that strange young man has unusual bathroom arrangements and from time to time is compelled to move his bowels above his station, but not in
my
house. Is that clear, doll? Look, your Thursday afternoons are your own affair, but you are not to make appointments in what is after all my home. I shall certainly speak to Mindian about this. Change my sheets.’
“ ‘I changed the sheets—’
“ ‘I know. Yesterday. Unless, of course, you were about to say afterward.’
“ ‘We didn’t do anything, Mrs. Simon.’
“ ‘It’s enough if you so much as sat with him on the side of the bed. Change my sheets.’
“ ‘Look—’
“ ‘Oh no, doll.
You
look. You’re seventeen years old. This is your first employment. You don’t have references. You’re not used to living away from home. Certainly you’re unused to living with your employers. Mr. Simon and I, however, have lived with servants all our lives.
“ ‘Do you know why it’s necessary that you girls have references? Do you know what’s actually
in
those characters we write? Our phone numbers and addresses, doll. So we may telephone each other. So we may visit. So we may say to each other what it would not always be wise to put down on paper.
“ ‘Some girls are sickly, some nasty, some dishonest.’
“ ‘I’m not any of those things,’ your mother said.
“ ‘Oh?’ Mrs. Simon said. ‘But as soon as my back is turned you invite a janitor into my home to use a bathroom you were specifically told was out of bounds. Mr. Mindian will definitely have to be informed.’
“ ‘He didn’t use your toilet. I did.’
“ ‘You let him watch? Oh,’ she said, ‘
loathsome!
’
“
‘No,’ your mother said. ‘Oh my God, you don’t understand. Here.’ And chose just that moment to return Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch, which she took out of her purse, having put it there because she had not yet decided how to tell her she had found it.
“It was almost a formal exchange, trade. Wrist watch for wrench, the two objects changing hands, not returned so much as simultaneously surrendered, restored, like spoils appropriated in a war.
“ ‘I want you out of my house,’ Mrs. Simon said.
“ ‘But where could I go?’
“ ‘Why, to your janitor,’ she said. ‘What, will he want a reference? Very well. You may tell him that you are a lying, quarrelsome young girl who steals watches and permits men to observe her while she sits on toilets. I will vouch for it. Get your things.’
“She kept house for him in the storage locker.
“It was more like a kid’s clubhouse than ever, that tucked snug sense of coze and warm comfy, all of luxury they would ever know, the two of them, the brooding, self-conscious young man and the farmer’s daughter returned to a kind of sybaritic nest condition, some quilted idyll of semiconscious life.
“It wasn’t even sex. It was more like bathing, some long, painless, post-op ease.
“They knew she was there, the maids and tenants and children. Even Mindian knew she was there. No one complained. Why would they? They were fearful of driving off for nothing in return the one absolutely special and spectacular thing that had ever happened to them. It was like having peacocks in your backyard, tamed bears, docile deer. Just knowing they were there lent a sort of glory and luck to the neighborhood. They didn’t even discuss it among themselves——as his catcher and teammates will say nothing even in the seventh and eighth and ninth innings of the pitcher’s no-hit game for fear of jinxing they can barely say what——love
in vitro,
domestic science in the cellar. The freak your father and the freak your mother belonged to all of them, and if they happened to make their queer nest in one of Mindian’s buildings rather than in another, why that was merely the way Nature arranges these things. It was understood, accepted, the way Catholics understand and accept that the Pope must reside in Rome, or a Normandy Frenchman that Paris is his capital. If George, living alone in that storeroom, had been famous, the two of them down there were twice as famous, more. (Yet everyone, even those who were not Mindian’s tenants, understood that they were not to be disturbed——that is to say, stared at; that is to say bothered.)
“So they knew they were there. The housemaids even agreed, it may even have been without conferral, upon a suitable genealogy for the pair. They had it that your mother and father were the daughter and son of Polish and Italian janitors in the neighborhood, that not only could they not speak English, even though they had heard them speak it, but could not even speak to each other, even though they had heard them.
“The neighborhood, still without conferral, knew it had a problem. (They really didn’t want anything to change.) It knew it was not enough not to rock the boat or simply to maintain silence. If they ignored the principals to their faces, wouldn’t this be taken as a sign of disapproval? The lovers—though God knows that whatever they were it wasn’t lovers, highly developed animals, perhaps, of two entirely different species, each the last of its kind, who took their comfort from each other only because there was no one else in the world they could get it from; lovers? they were too far gone in despair, too lonely to love; lovers? they were the King and Queen of cuddle is all—needed reassurance they thought.
“The maids and housewives sometimes took Nancy with them when they went shopping. In the stores they would hold up ripe tomatoes, crisp stalks of green celery, fruits of the season,
candy,
for God’s sake, whatever was accommodate to that heatless, iceless larder in which they lived, whatever could be consumed raw. (Or left treats for them on the cellar steps, fresh-baked cookies, hard-boiled eggs, leftover meats which even your doggy daddy and puss mom understood were scraps.) Using Nancy’s (George’s) money of course, but giving it to the grocer themselves, the lovers’ middlemen and agents, and counting the change, too—though who had ever heard of them would have ever shortchanged them?—before handing it over. As if Nancy were a child perhaps, or handicapped. And who knows, maybe they did need help. How many pounds of tomatoes and grapes do you need when you’re shopping for two and tomatoes and grapes are all that you’re buying? But the food was the single overture they made. They never attempted to add anything to, or alter anything in, the room itself. As if your parents really were animals and it was understood that animals knew best how to furnish their lairs and nests and dens. (If your father’s light bulb had burned out, I don’t think anyone would have thought to offer the loan of a spare for so much as a night.)
“George had his chores, his work. He rose at 5:00 A.M. to climb the twenty-four flights of back stairs in Mindian’s eight buildings to take down the forty-eight garbage cans. He had his furnaces to tend, the small repair jobs, the sleds that he carried up from the basement for the smaller children, the three or four emergencies a day that he could absolutely count on. (People locked themselves out of their apartments, they ran out of fuses, they let their bathtubs spill over.) I say count on because he counted on them for tips. (They tipped him now. All the world loves a lover.)
“When he got out of their narrow bed in the fifty-degree room (the temperature of a cave) he told her to stay where she was and she did. While he dressed in the dark. She could just make him out, his naked body. And wondered: What is happening to me? What has already happened? Wondering not who this stranger was who had taken her virginity and with whom she had committed acts that had been reserved in her head not for some future when she was safely married but for other people altogether. Not questioning, as you might think, her own, or even George’s, character so much as marveling at her luck. She loved it. She even loved the little room, their unicorn position in other people’s imaginations. She too believed they brought luck to the neighborhood. She believed that she and George were a blessing to all of Milwaukee, a feather in the cap of the United States of America.
“And your father had barely got going. Having given her an overview of George Mills history, he had not yet unburdened himself of more than two hundred years of particulars. She loved it. History had been one of her favorite subjects in high school. Your father did not know he was wooing her and she didn’t know she was being wooed. And
that’s
what was happening to her.
“She loved it. Whether the lovemaking—”
“Hey,” George Mills said.
“—was an adjunct to the history lessons, or the history lessons a subscript to the lovemaking was a matter of indifference to her, as was, as you already know, the tininess of the room, which could have been, and in effect was, like a kind of carrel in a library. Even the narrowness of the diminutive youth bed—it was a time when as many undergraduates as could squeezed themselves into flivvers, phone booths, changing rooms at beaches—had an air of the makeshift collegiate. Your mother and father matriculated on that little, cotlike bed.”
“Hey,” George Mills said, “hey.”
“Maybe she even expected to. It was the sort of virginal, celibate, nunnish, monkish bed she had slept in all her life. If she was at all romantic, the serf prince who was to free her would have come and ultimately joined her there. She would not have anticipated that it could have been otherwise. She may even have thought that that was part of the lovemaking, part of the act itself, that that crimped, cramped, rush-hour press of person, that closely close-quartered, neck-and-neck propinquity was concomitant with the conditions and moods of penetration. She may even have thought that that stall-like storage room in the basement of that apartment building was an out-and-out bower. And perhaps that was why she had been so offended the first time she had seen your father’s living arrangements, not because she knew that no one had to live that way but because she knew that
no one was entitled to occupy a bower by himself!
Perhaps she even moved in with him out of a sense of decorum and decency, out of some innate knowledge of how architecture was intended to be filled up and used.
“Mindian came.
“ ‘Be right with you, sir,’ your father said. ‘Just give us a moment, sir, if you would.’
“He slid the bolt back and opened the door, exposing the bright, flower-print oilcloth walls. Nancy was behind him. ‘Yes sir?’ your father said.
“ ‘It looks like a kitchen table exploded in here,’ he said. ‘Step out from behind George for a moment please, Nancy. I want to look at you.’
“She did as she was told. Mindian regarded her as he had regarded the interior of the room. ‘So it’s true,’ he said.
“ ‘True?’ George said.
“ ‘This woman is pregnant,’ Mindian said. ‘How far along are you? Four months? Five?’
“ ‘Not five I don’t think, Mr. Mindian.’
“ ‘The maids told me. My tenants did.’
“ ‘A lot of busybodies,’ your father said.
“ ‘Yes,’ Mindian said. ‘The same busybodies who’ve been protecting you for half a year now. Who not only countenanced your dalliance but actively supported it. We’d become fans, you see—I do not except myself—boosters and rooters. You kids were love’s home team. Even the polack, dago and wog janitors were for you. You were everybody’s darlings, apples of eyes, teacher’s pets, America’s sweethearts. I’m your landlord. I’ve come to marry you.’
“You will believe that your mother must certainly have thought about marriage. I tell you she did not. It’s not even certain that she loved George Mills.