“And your father. Have we not already seen how he repudiated women? And do we not know from his actions that it wasn’t women he meant but only the entailments pursuant to liaison, nervous not about his responsibilities to a real wife and a material son but to a hypothetical posterity which was even then fifty to sixty years off? Your father was an intellectual. He believed, that is, in the palpable reality of any idea or event which had not yet come to pass in his own lifetime. That’s why, squeamish as he was, he hid out in basements and cheerfully shouldered other people’s garbage——to subdue allure and retract hope. He was a victim of myth and handled himself as other myth victims have, finding his solutions in amateur and immediate expediency, rarely reading between the lines, which is where fate always has its way with you. Told, say, that he would murder his father and marry his mother, he would quit Corinth; or that no man born of woman could harm him, he would confidently chum even his enemies.
“ ‘I’m your landlord. Marry or leave.’
“ ‘We can stay if we get married?’ your mother asked.
“ ‘Hey,’ your father said.
“ ‘Not down here,’ Mindian said. ‘The Board of Health would condemn my basements.’
“ ‘I can’t marry,’ your father said.
“ ‘Then I shall have to fire you,’ Mindian said. And then, more passionately, with a concern that was the measure of how your parents had touched the life of this landlord, he asked your father if he really meant to abandon the girl.
“ ‘It’s the kid I’m abandoning, not Nancy.’
“ ‘You needn’t worry,’ Mindian told your mother. ‘You and the child will be taken care of. There’s a vacant apartment in one of my buildings. It’s one of the apartments reserved for the janitors. You may have it. The tenants and I will see that you and the baby are provided for.’
“ ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ your father said. ‘You mean there’ll be all right anyway? Nancy and the kid, too?’
“ ‘Certainly,’ Mindian said. ‘Until they’re on their feet. Certainly.’
“Your father groaned.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” George Mills said. “What did he think——”
“He’d spilled the beans by this time,” Wickland said. “Nancy knew as much of the family history now as he did. Even he knew how interested she’d been. He figured she’d tell the child the story anyway, out of spite if nothing else. But he knew how good a scholar she was, that she wouldn’t even have needed spite, that she would have told it out of the simple love of truth, out of innocent deference to the fact that history had been one of her favorite subjects.”
“No,” George said, “I mean about the baby.”
“You were the baby.”
“Then about me. What about me? I would have been in the picture anyway. Whether they got married or not. Whether Mindian took care of Mother and me or not. Or did he want Mother to have——”
“I don’t think he even thought about it,” Wickland said. “I think he simply trusted his bad luck. That he believed his bad luck had gotten her pregnant. You see he loved her now. He believed his bad luck would kill her.”
“But that doesn’t——”
“It does if you believe you’re a myth victim. If you believe a thousand years have been up to nothing but shaping the fate of a single man. Expediency. Flee Corinth, kill a man, fall in love, marry. Tell yourself your hands are tied.
“They were married in the basement on a Thursday afternoon in front of the maids and janitors and other tenants.
“Even Mrs. Simon was there. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re married now. Is there anything you particularly want for a wedding present, doll?’
“ ‘Could I have a reference?’ your mother asked.
“But I believe the community would have preferred it if your father
had
abandoned your mother. They wanted their darlings, you see, and if they couldn’t have their passionate darlings whom pregnancy and the realities had taken away from them, then they would have been quite content to have their victim darlings, substituting without turning a hair a wronged girl and a baby for a hero and heroine of love. Married, and with a baby on the way, they were just like everybody else.
“They even lived like everybody else. In a first-floor apartment in one more of Mindian’s buildings. They took the youth bed, but they were just another couple now, just more neighbors. That’s not she.”
“Who?” George said.
“Your sister.”
“Where?”
“Never mind. It isn’t she.
“Your father wanted a girl. He hoped for a girl. Though he knew that no Mills in a thousand years had put forth any but male children only, he even
expected
a girl. That was at the back of his mind all along, of course. That’s why he’d agreed to marry her. If you’d been a girl he thought he would still have been able to dodge his fate. He still believed in his fate, you see, still saw himself in the myth victim’s delicious position, squeezed dry of force to change his life, with, at the same time, his eye on all the eleventh-hour opportunities that could change it for him. Almost, as it were, on fate’s side, confident he’d broken the code, taking the position that destiny has its fine print, oracle its double entendre, that whatever happens to people is a trick——God’s fast one. If she could find me all the way down there, he thought, in these conditions, living like someone on the lam, and if she not only stood still for what we did to each other but didn’t even once get up on her high horse or stand on her rights or read me the riot act when I put a bun in her oven or call in the Marines to shotgun the wedding and Mindian himself practically saying no harm done even if I didn’t marry her, well, it’s been too easy for all concerned, I think, for me and the grand George Mills design, and for Nancy, too. There’s a dozen ways I could have blocked it, stymied circumstance, and I’m still only twenty, I haven’t known this crap but a year yet, I wasn’t even trying, or shown them my stuff, or seen theirs. Hell, I practically didn’t put up no fight at all, I’m hardly winded and nothing I seen yet, nothing they thrown at me and nothing I been forced to take, could have busted the will of a child. It’s been too easy for all concerned so there’s got to be a catch. We’ll name the little tyke Nancy.
“But he named it George because it was a boy, because you were a boy. He named it George who wanted the character of a rebel without any of the expense.
“Because if he’d been really serious he could have stopped it right then, asked your mother to marry him like a proper gent and never used Mindian as a broker at all. If he’d really been serious he could have called you Bill or Steve or anything at all, or teased what he thought he had for nemesis with the very initial ‘G,’ calling you Gill or Giles or Greg or God knows what. The point is it was always in his power to break the chain, as it was in the power of any of his ancestors before him, back to and including the first George Mills. But he didn’t. None of them did. (Because people are suckers for fate, for all the scars to which they think they’re entitled.) The point is he never wanted to.
“Though by the time of the second pregnancy Nancy did. Look sharp. She’s coming. She’s almost here.”
The boy looked up. It was an ordinary afternoon. He could not have told by looking if it were Thursday or Monday, March or November. He was only twelve years old. There were people who believed he carried messages from the dead, that when he spoke their loved ones used his voice, that he knew things they would have to die to find out, that he had power, dread gifts. It was an ordinary afternoon. He knew his place in history and was waiting to be shown an infant ghost whom he would not be able to question because she had no vocabulary. It was an ordinary afternoon in his life. In Cassadaga. Where ego did not exist. Where it merged with bereavement, where grief was the single industry. Where children grieved. And soon his sister would be there. To give him a message. Which he thought he had already guessed. That there were no ordinary afternoons. That not just houses but the world itself was haunted. That death was up the palm tree. On the hoarding. In the square. It was an ordinary afternoon.
“Quite simply, she was bored. Fed up. She was the myth victim’s victim and, now she had heard the whole story and was actually a part of it, wanted nothing more to do with a man who saw everything that happened to him as a decree, a doom, whose every action, no,
activity,
whose every activity was part of some ritual of resignation, who believed, and performed
because
he believed, that history was looking. Or not history, autobiography, diary, home movies and scrapbook and family album——all self-absorbed church rolls and records, deeds and registers: ‘Now I am taking out the garbage.’ ‘Now I am shoveling coal.’ ‘Now I am fixing a toilet.’ ‘Now my sweat stinks of the lower oils and grimes, all the menial silts.’ ‘Now my back’s stiff and there’s a cramp in my leg.’ ‘Now I’m thirsty, now I’m hungry.’ ‘Now I am fucking my wife whose people are country people, farm people, and who has no references.’ He was not even serving God, only some image of his own abasement, his soul gone groveling beneath the thousand top-heavy lean years of his second-fiddle fate.
“While all she wanted was to be like Mrs. Simon. To learn bridge. Mah-jongg. The ladyfied games and graces. Gossip and shopping and haggling with tradesmen not over price but quality. Learning pot roast and studying chop, a fruit wisdom and a vegetable cunning. Now that she was no longer a lover she yearned to be a wife, Mrs. Simon’s kind of wife, not George Mills’s, to decide menu and judge drape, to fuss furniture and worry hors d’uvre. To run her house like some Wisconsin geisha and know the neighbors. She even looked at those manuals—God knows where she got them—that explain what goes where and when, and set up the secret asiatic pleasures like a blueprint or a diagram for wiring houses, the simple line drawings, about as erotic as the illustrations in gymnastic texts. (Though she knew your father would never have permitted these refinements, declining them not on moral grounds but on aesthetic and class ones, as he would have refused to eat cold soups and high-faluting breads if she had prepared them.)
“To be like Mrs. Simon, who had become in even the short time Nancy worked for her a kind of heroine to the country girl. Not resenting for a moment that the master bath was off limits to her but, on the contrary, made a little weak in the knees in the presence of such contrived disdain, for, give her credit, she had it on the evidence of Mrs. Simon’s underwear that the disdain and distancing were entirely willed. That’s what
she
wanted. That complete, casually indifferent and solidly confident social hypocrisy. Not, you will see, to make herself over—that’s too hard, it can’t be done anyway—so much as to make others over, to get them to accept at least a little her judgment of them. That’s what
she
wanted. You will see that it was the exact opposite of what your father wanted. Who
lived
by other people’s judgment of him. Who refused to live otherwise.
“Above all, she wanted to write references. (If she wanted a maid it wasn’t so someone else might do her work for her, it was so she could always have someone around who would feel the force of her judgments.) In the absence of a maid of her own she borrowed other people’s, the girls she saw in the laundry room, or the ones who came to their apartment to report things that required the janitor’s attention. She watched them in the park with their charges, the children of the other tenants, who would never quite be neighbors, when she wheeled you in your carriage, when she pushed you in your stroller—both, not gifts exactly, hand-me-downs from those strange storage lockers which had served first your father, then your mother, and now yourself, like some queer furniture and appliance mine (so that in a way you were already sister’d, brother’d, not just because older children had outgrown the baby and toddler implements which you yourself would outgrow and which would be held in a kind of brotherly escrow for the child your mother would bear dead, but because they came up out of those same dampnesses and darknesses where you yourself were conceived, the ground of your being in the ground)—and carefully noted how attentive or inattentive they were, whether they exceeded their authority by abusing children who did not mind, and observed them marketing, whether they watched the scales when meat was weighed, produce, whether they counted their change. Discovering what she could of their personal habits, whether they were clean, whether they flirted.
“But mostly she talked with them. (And they with her, her mystery and whatever of aura and cachet she possessed for them dissolved by the marriage they had so fiercely supported.) Asked leading questions and closely considered their answers, grading them, listening, the janitor’s wife, to their grammar, discovering what interest they had in history, current events (though intelligence and knowledge were the least of what she looked for, only seeking to get by these methods some clue to their intentions, their loyalties and commitments).
“ ‘You said you have a fellow back in Menomonee Falls.’
“ ‘Oh yar. Pete. Pete’s all right. He’s real cute, but he’s awrful shy.’
“ ‘Shy.’
“ ‘Well, he ain’t like Roger, my other beau. Roger’s a scamp. He don’t hardly give a girl time to say yar even if she’s of a mind to. Roger just goes ahead and makes all the big decisions hisself.’
“ ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’
“ ‘Why? Roger ain’t never yet took me no place I didn’t really want to be.’
“And Nancy, the handwriting flourished, almost sculptured, more elaborate than any she’d ever used, would make a note:
Molly. Molly is a cheerful, healthy girl of doubtful morals. She has at least two boyfriends, and has hinted at her willingness to go ‘all the way’ with both of them. While Molly’s personal life is her own affair, she strikes me as sexually careless. She could become pregnant at any time, leaving her employers high and dry.
“ ‘Mrs. Faber’s dishes seemed very beautiful when I saw them that time.’
“ ‘I should say so! They’re
ever
so expensive. Forty dollars a place setting and they have service for
twelve.
I don’t know what they’d do if a plate were to break. They don’t even make that pattern anymore.’