It’s quiet for a moment. Then, “This one’s finished,” Bernadette calls from the bathroom.
“Oh God,” Ellen Rose shrieks in George Mills’s bed, “
me,
me
tooooo!
”
“Go for it,” Charles urges.
And, in the dark, George Mills can just make out his leer, his wife Ruth’s. Louise is actually touching him now. His flies are in her fist. George’s left hand is under her dress, his fingers snagged in her garter belt, his palm hefting flesh, the hard little button at the top of the strap. “Don’t, you’ll tear it,” she says in his ear wetly. He introduces his fingers beneath the tough edges of her girdle. Where they are baffled by other textures. Elastic, the metal of fasteners, silk, hair, damp, curled as pica
c
’s. She squirms from his hand.
“Easy,” she says, “take it easy. Don’t
hurt
me.”
“It’s all this
stuff,
” he says, and tries to raise her dress, to pull it out from under her behind.
“No,” she says, “don’t,” and moves away from him. This is when he tries to pull her down, when his head falls into Ruth Oliver’s lap, thighs closed prim as pie. He feels a man’s hand at his ear. It’s Charles’. Mr. and Mrs. Oliver are holding hands across his face.
“Aw, he’s suffering,” Louise’s friend Ruth says. “Put him out of his misery, Lu.” And when Ruth’s friend Louise moves her body against him. When his nerves shiver, spasm, when he whimpers his release. Not trumpets, not brazen blares. No boomy bray of barking majesty, but whimper, whine, fret. An orgasm like a small complaint.
The door to Mills’s bathroom opens and Ray and Bernadette come into the living room. They are dressed. When Ray turns the light on in the hall George Mills can see that their hair isn’t even wet.
“Maybe we ought to go,” Charles says.
“What about the lovebirds?” Ray asks, indicating the closed door to Mills’s bedroom.
“Knock on it. Tell them maybe we ought to go.”
“Hey, break it up you guys,” Ray says into the woodwork. “Give it a rest.”
“How about that?” Herb says as he leads Ellen Rose into the living room. “It’s not even midnight. Want to play some strip poker? Where’s your cards, George?”
“Weren’t you mad?” Mary asked.
“What for? To be proved right? She was a virgin. She was only protecting herself. She was a virgin. She wasn’t in nature yet. None of them were.”
“Two of those girls were married. They were pregnant.”
“Yes,” George Mills said, “they were protecting the unborn. It was hygiene is all. Marriage like a sleepover, like a pajama party. If it helped the husbands for the wives to talk dirty, if it helped to be together, to make crank calls, if it helped to excite each other until they didn’t need excitement or protection either anymore, what harm did it do?”
“Ellen Rose wasn’t married. Ellen Rose was whoosis’s, Herb’s, fiancee.”
“His pants were stained.”
“What?”
“Herb. His pants were stained too.”
“You tell me the darndest things.”
“Intimacy.”
“Pardon?”
“Intimacy. Because that’s the real eye-opener. The knockabout slapstick of the heart. Open secret, public knowledge. Those thighs on the sofa, those folks in the bed. Intimacy. Even friendship. Even association. Jesus, Miss, I’d thought my ass was a secret, my pecker hush-hush.”
“I’m going to tell my mother how you talk.”
“Your mother is dying. She’s gorging herself on all the shrimp she can eat.”
“Don’t you say that.”
“You can’t evangelize grace. You can only talk about it. Ballpark figures.”
“You’re crazy. You’re a crazy man.”
“Because I was right. In a way I was right. You
can’t
seduce virgins. Louise and I were practically engaged from the moment she found out I didn’t have cocoa.”
“You shut up,” Mary said. “Take it back about my mother.”
“Your mother is dying,” Mills said calmly.
“Stop that,” Mary said. “I’m just a little girl.”
“Then behave like one. Practice the piano, be nice to your sister, bring up your math.”
“Leave me alone,” Mary cried. “Mind your business. Leave me alone.” She was crying uncontrollably now, her sobs like hiccups, her nose and chin smeared with thin icicles of snot.
“Wipe your eyes,” George Mills said. “Blow your nose. Use your beach towel.”
L
ater George Mills would tell Messenger that he had known, that he’d been certain, that either his experience in Cassadaga as a child or the state of grace, which he’d be the first to admit he’d had no hand in, which he’d caught like a cold, or maybe something in each of us but compounded in Mills, who had a thousand years of history at his command, or anyway disposal, a millennium of what Messenger would call racial memory, hunch all the while increasingly fine-tuned in his stock until by the time it came down to George it was no longer hunch or even conviction so much as pure biological adaptation, real as the equipment of birds or bears.
“You’re a fucking mutation? That it, Mills?” Messenger would ask. “The new man?”
“No no,” Mills would say, “your people are the new men. With your kids and clans, your distaff and branches, all your in-laws and country cousins and poor relations. In me boiled down, don’t you know? What do you call it? Distilled. Spit and polished back to immaculate, what do you call it, mass.”
“Who do you like in the fifth race, George?” Messenger would ask. “What’s to become of us?”
“No no,” Mills would say, realizing it had been a mistake to tell.
But he
had
known. Even as he sped the kid back to the hospital, risking the ticket in the foreign country, the cops’ dangerous Mexican banditry, telling her not to waste time dressing but to bring her clothes with her as they rushed to the deathbed in their bikinis. Even, really, as he’d known that the child could shower, take her time, all the time in the world, eat a leisurely lunch, that that might even be preferable in fact, keeping the kid out of the way while her uncle made all the complicated arrangements with the hospital and government officials. (Which was why, in a way, he’d been glad to see him that morning, felt relieved to have at least
that
bothersome responsibility taken away from him. If her brother hadn’t come, Father Merchant would have been all over him. And George would have listened, capitulating with genuine relief, grateful for the old tout’s tips and counsel. [He was no hand at red tape. Forms and documents scared him.] If Merchant had proposed, as ultimately he actually would to Harry, that the hospital be permitted to perform an autopsy on Mrs. Glazer’s body, Mills would almost certainly have agreed. She would have been returned to St. Louis without organs, all the metastasized Mexican cancer of her body cut away, scraped from her, koshered as a chicken in her casket—which Father Merchant would have picked out—like a Spanish treasure chest. The corpse would wait, the gruesome negotiations between Mary’s uncle and the staff taking up the better part of the afternoon, going on, quite literally, over Mrs. Glazer’s dead body, Father Merchant the go-between and arbiter to the peso’s very fraction of the exact amount of the
pourboire,
the tip——what went to the nurses to wash the body before it could be released to the undertakers, what to the doctor to make the appropriate—and true—remarks on the death certificate in order to forestall the routine investigation demanded by the municipal statutes in the instance of the death of a foreign national, what went by way of pure courtesy and ritual obligation to the company priest who was required by law to administer last rites, whether requested or not, to everyone who happened to die in the hospital, whether Catholic or not, what went to charity, what to the hospital bursar before the deceased could be discharged, what to the death teamsters who would cart the body away, what to the mortician’s assistants who would treat it either gently and respectfully or, as Father Merchant would warn, with secret, invisible desecrations if the family did not take care of them. Officiating impediment too, guiding them through all the intricate bureaucracy of death, advising them which licenses were essential and, of these, which had to be notarized—Merchant was a notary—which merely witnessed.)
Knowing. Knowing in advance. (But not, it turned out, as far in advance as Father Merchant had known. At least a day and a half behind Merchant, maybe more. Perhaps from the time Merchant had first laid eyes on her, on Mills’s ill charge, when they’d left the nightclub together—they’d gone after all—after the show, those terrible mixed doubles, and been tipped, that terrible time he’d seen first the ex-madwoman’s face, then her pocketbook, the sheaves of bank notes, the unsigned traveler’s checks.) (So maybe what he was going to tell Cornell was a boast, not prescience at all but ordinary induction and observed causality.) So that when he whisked the kid to the hospital and risked the speeding ticket it was not because he wanted to get her there in time, but because he knew that Mrs. Glazer was already dead, beyond embarrassment and concern forever, and would not see the brazen, floozy, bimbo kid in her gaudy bikini strips. Or Mills in the street clothes he had thrown on over his bathing suit when they had stopped for a light, the shirt and pants that still looked rolled, grass stains and the juices of crushed flowers about the knees and pockets where his shoe soles had touched them. Their rude parade a ruse, not deliberate at all, finally, but hidden, actually circumspect, broken out like hoard, trove, like the good champagne after the guest has gone, the best cigars and special chocolates.
Speeding not to the deathbed—that’s what Sam would be doing—but to Father Merchant, the usurper retainer himself, and hoping he might yet make it—because Merchant could be wrong for once, because Laglichio might
not
need him, because if he made it he might not need Laglichio—that he could come like the cavalry (after all the hard work had been done, the legal stuff, the quasi-customary bribes dispensed, the extraconventional tips), not too late to play some part in the scene. (Haste hard on a man in grace, unaccustomed to pressure, who hadn’t felt necessity more than two or three times in his entire life, whose family hadn’t felt it eighty or so in a thousand years. Who’d resisted it in his courtship and during all those years of his oddly tame wild oats when he’d shoved dimes in jukeboxes and quietly popped for beers, when he’d neutrally revealed their feelings and explained their climaxes to those distracted women in whose automobiles and bedrooms he’d neither to his wonder nor dismay found himself naked. [Feeling, to the extent that he felt at all, only the mildest curiosity when it came to these women, as he might have been curious about the taste of certain dishes which no one had ever prepared for him.] Who—women—had not much played a role in the Mills history. Sisters rare as birth defects, widows and stepmothers uncommon as distinction. Something to do, perhaps, with that sense of default adaptation which he would speak of to Cornell Messenger, maybe even the random prescience some spilled remnant of neglected intuition. But, whatever, the whole business of having to rush, of there being something at last at stake, disagreeable to someone whose pride it was—and who meant by grace—that nothing could ever happen to him, that he was past it——anticipation and interest and concern and disappointment and injury, and glory too.)
So what he found was what he should have expected to find——a Tuesday afternoon like a lesson in the usual, a child by the Coke machine, nurses on pay phones, a distant relation bored in the waiting room on a worn leather cushion, his behind on the smooth front cover of a newsmagazine, someone sucking on a cigarette he hardly knew was in his mouth, patting his pockets for a match for a stranger, getting the time in return.
Yet the woman was dead. Her uncle stepped from the room and came into the corridor to embrace Mary, his gravity and the soured aromatics of his cologne and wrinkled linen giving it away, the distant early warning signs of worry and death. (This is how the rich attend their dead, Mills thought. Trailing some spoor of the bedside. Come from a deathbed as from a battle in a boardroom. But how had his clothes been mussed? How had his beard grown so fast?) All over her with apologies and explanations, including Mills even.
“Oh,” Harry said, “Good. You got my message. I thought I’d missed you. I had you paged, but when you didn’t come to the phone I thought perhaps you’d taken Mary sightseeing. This is her first time in Mexico and she’s an alert little girl. We even checked with the rental car people to see if you’d returned the car. It crossed my mind that you’d gone to the pictures. I was going to go out looking for you myself, but Señor Merchant advised me to wait another half-hour. It’s fortunate he did. It would have been awful if you’d come back to the hospital and found Mother’s room empty.”
“A small precaution,” Father Merchant said.
“They never paged us,” Mills said. “There was no message. We were by the pool a couple of hours.”
“Two hours? The child could have been badly burned. This is the tropics. Don’t you know what our sun can do?” Father Merchant turned to the girl. “You expose yourself the first day fifteen minutes tops.”
“I was covered up with towels,” Mary said.
“Towels. Oh, that’s all right then. Towels. You showed good sense. I hope they were white towels. White towels reflect the sun.”
“Mama’s dead?”
“Well you knew Mother’s convictions, sweetheart. She was a very spiritual woman. I guess in a sense you could say she’s dead, but she’ll always be with us. She was tired, sweetheart. She was all worn out, dear. She was so glad she’d seen you. It’s all she was waiting for. You remember that, darling. You made it easier for her. Didn’t she, Father Merchant?”
“She was a tonic. That’s my opinion,” said the tout.
“See?” said her uncle. “Even he thinks so.”
“She didn’t see Milly,” Mary said. “She didn’t see Daddy.”
“That would have been too hard, honey. That would have been so hard. Seeing all the people she loved would have upset her too much. Would you have wanted her to pass away while she was so sad? She left messages for everyone. She was at peace when she left us.”