George Mills (41 page)

“You’d better leave now,” Mills said. “Her stomach hurts badly. Your voice grates her ears. There’s this indescribable itch in her left shoulder blade, and when she tries to ease it by rubbing it against the sheet a horrible pain shoots through her calves and jaw.”

And he knew, too, when the narcotic caught hold, when the nerves relaxed, aligned themselves and fit once more into their sockets. He did not feel these things himself but knew she felt them. And knew, at one that morning, the immanence and alarm she’d felt in her sleep—it was not a dream, no vision or prophecy, neither Shekinah nor rapture, but information, disclosure, some red message of the blood—that her body was done with its phases, that death was by.

He called St. Louis but at the last moment withheld his news.

“Who’s this——Mary? Hi, Mary. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m still mixed up about the time difference. It’s me, Mills. Is your daddy there? May I speak with him, please?” Rushing the words because all the time he was watching Mrs. Glazer. Who seemed momentarily to have quieted. “Who’s this? Isn’t this Mr. Glazer? Who?——Cornell Messenger?——What about your son? I don’t know your son. Where’s Mr. Glazer? Never mind. Listen, she’s waking up, I’ve got to go.”

“Marco,” she said.

He rushed to her side. She was feverish, so covered with sweat she seemed to lie under a thin layer of magnification. Her yellow wig had slipped off her head and her skull gleamed. The thin scuzz of gray fringe about her temples had turned dark with moisture. George bailed at the perspiration with towels that said Juarez Palace Motel. She was so thin she gave an impression of incredible flexibility.

“I’ve called the doctor,” he said, and watched the pains arc and register along all the fronts of her body as if pain were almost some repressed geological flaw, and her skin, joints, bones and orifices the weathered, levered, earthen flash points and levees of prepped vulnerability.

“Marco,” she whispered.

“I’m going to give you some morphine. An injection would hurt too much right now. You’ll have to take these by mouth.”

“Marco?”

He took her jaw in his fingers and pried it open. He tried to roll the morphine capsules they used now down her throat. Her mouth, for all the moisture on the surface of her body, was dry as fire. Some of the gelatin casing stuck to the inside of her cheek, and he had to tear it free, like cigarette paper caught on the surface of a lip.

“Marco,” she said.

He pulled the two halves of the capsule apart and powdered her mouth with morphine. Her pain was so great it had doused her sense of taste. The stuff lay in her mouth neutral as teeth.

“You’ve got to swallow,” Mills said. “Please swallow. I’m going to wet your mouth.” He dipped a teaspoon with some congealed dessert still on it into a water glass and tamped the water into the corners of her mouth, sprinkling it there as if he were ministering to a bird. The drug turned to paste. He took up the glass of water and began to pour it into her mouth a little at a time until some vestigial reflex took over and she gulped.

“Marco,” she said, her eyes wide, terrorized, the irises fleeing inside her head. “
Marco!
” she screamed. “
Marco! Marco!
”

“Polo,” Mills answered.

“Marco,” she called, lowering her lids.

“Polo.”

“Marco.”

“Polo.”

They called the challenge and response from the old game and it seemed to soothe her heart that, blind and maddened as she was, she was not alone in the water.

6

I
told her,
I
don’t know the matter with me. I suppose I love the neighborhood. I’m no native son, I didn’t even grow up there, but I—most folks—recognize home when I see it. Something old shoe in the blood and bones, at ease with the brands of lunch meat in the freezers and white bread on the shelves. At one with the barber shops, the TV and appliance repair. The movie houses in my precincts still do double features. Those that don’t do evangelists, I mean, those that don’t sell discount shoes or ain’t political headquarters or furniture stores by now, the little marquees fanned out over the front of the buildings like a bill on a cap. We still have bakeries, and there are mechanics in the gas stations who can break down your engine in the dark. I root for our neighborhood banks, the local savings and loans, you know?

Stable, we’re a stable neighborhood. How many areas are there left in the city—the city? Missouri? the country? the world?—that still have a ballroom and live dance bands that play there three nights a week? And even the discos bleed an old romantic box step, the generations still doing the stable dances under the revolving crystal. We have a saying in South St. Louis——“We’re born out of Incarnate Word and buried out of Kriegshauser.” The stable comings and goings of hundreds of thousands of people.

They cross the river from Illinois and come from far away as west county to eat the immutable old ice creams and natural syrups at Crown’s, less flavor, finally, than the cold and viscid residuals of produce and sweetness themselves. A kind of Europe we are.

I knew all this back in ’47 when I first saw this section of town, recognizing at first glance that what the cop was walking was a beat, the grooved stations of vocation carved like erosion into the pavement, the big dusty shop windows with their brides and grooms and graduating seniors in their dark marzipan robes balanced on the topmost layer of the cake as if they were going to stand there forever. Something already nostalgic in the framed portraits in the photographic studio window, in the crush of the sun on the low two- and three-story commercial buildings up and down Gravois and Chippewa Avenues, something daguerreotype, a thousand years old, mint and lovely as a scene on money. I was nineteen but the Millses were a millennium. Here was somewhere I could hang my hat, here was a place I could bring our history.

I found three rooms in one of the blood brick apartment buildings on Utah, and there I began my life as a free man.

Where do we go wrong? How does joy decline? What rockets us from mood to mood like a commuter? So that, years later, in Mexico, that stable neighborhood of restlessness and revolution, I perfectly understood Mrs. Glazer’s valedictory. She could have been speaking for all of us.

She was in the hospital by then. Dr. Gomeza had withdrawn from the case. And she was no longer a patient, not in the sense that what she had was treatable, not in the sense that what she had had ever been treatable.

“I don’t live here anymore. I feel like something in a warehouse. Oh, Mills,” she said, “it’s not so bad to die.

“Weather. I’ve never liked weather. Too cold in the winter, in the summer too hot. Wood too damp to build a fire and the picnics rained out.

“The bad hands and heavy losses and clothes off the rack that never quite fit. Shoes pinch and the hairdo sags and the roast’s overdone. The news is bad in the paper and one’s children fail. I’m disappointed when the show isn’t good I’ve heard so much about, and hats never looked right on me.

“My cats are run over. Moving men chip my furniture and the help steals. You can never get four people to agree on a restaurant.

“Wrong numbers, mismanaged mail and wasted time. Car pools and jury duty. Pain, fallen expectations and the fear of death.

“Who would fardels bear, Mills? The proud man’s contumely?

“Mary is jealous of Milly’s skill at piano, Sam’s salary was too low years. No one loved me enough, and I never had all the shrimp I could eat.”

Mostly all I could do was sit on the side of the bed and hold her. Like people in a waiting room we looked, Mrs. Glazer swaddled as a sick kid. Worn out, embraced as infant, loomed over, dipped in a dark dance.

Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom, my shirt size determined years, my waistline fixed and what length pants I wore. No youth but callow still, the city hick, a sort of pleasantry. (You will understand that I played softball with what I still called “the men” on Sunday mornings in the schoolyards and parks, everyone, me too, in a yellow T-shirt and baggy baseball trousers, beer on the sidelines and packages of cigarettes and the equipment in someone’s old army duffel.) We bloom late into our mildness, or some do, our character only a deference, a small courtesy to the world.

We played softball——slow pitch, the high and lazy arc of the big ball so casual the game seemed to go on over our heads. Softball is a pitcher’s medium, slow pitch especially. I thought the pitchers rich, or anyway leaders, privileged, gracious. They gave us our turn, permitted us to stand beneath the big, deceptive, graceful ball, shaking into our stance like dogs throwing off water, seeking purchase, hunching our shoulders, planting our feet, hovering in gravity as the softball hovered in air. Neutral gents, those pitchers neither smiled when they struck us out nor frowned when we connected. Good sports acknowledging nothing, neither the hoots of their opponents nor the pepper encouragements of their mates. Captains of cool benevolence, trimmer than the beefy Polacks and Krauts, all those swollen, sideburned others who were always talking.

In that league if you weren’t married you were engaged. Engagements seemed to generate themselves almost spontaneously. There wasn’t, except for myself, a fellow who wasn’t already, or who wouldn’t within the year become, a fiancé. Every girl on the bus wore a ring. Rings, or at least high school graduation pins, were an article of clothing, a piece of style, as much a part of ordinary human flourish as a cross on a chain. They were serious people, with their scouts’ eyes peeled for the sexual or domestic talent. It was a world of starter sets, registered taste, the future like a lay-away plan.

Those pitchers, I’m thinking of those pitchers, the men chosen to get the blessings. Maybe because I didn’t grow up there, maybe because when I came they were already doing their lives. Maybe it’s having to come from behind (who came from behind history itself; oh, Greatest Grandfather, why didn’t you rise up and smite Guillalume and the merchant? why didn’t you kill Mills’s horse when you had the chance?) which blights possibility and poisons will.

What I wanted to tell her about was the Delgado Ballroom——soft romance’s dark platform, that marble clearing, that courtyard of the imagination, that dance hall of love. No playground or rec room, no nightclub or fun house. Consecrate as confessional, the priests came there, marriages were performed, girls confirmed, classes graduated.

I saw it first in the daytime when it had that odd, off-season calm of deserted amusement parks, unoccupied classrooms, restaurants with the chairs bottom up on the tables, all the wound-down feel of an energy absent or gone off to catch different trains. Maybe I was moving a piano. (This was what I knew of the high life, my stage door connection to the extraordinary, who brought cargoes of sand to the carpeted shores of the country clubs and filled the deep ashtrays there. George Mills, high placed as a head waiter, situate as a man in an honor guard. George Mills, the Velvet Rope Kid.) Or buffing the dance floor. Or installing the Coke machine. It was darker in the morning than it would have been at night, the windowless room cool as a palace. The manager gave me two passes. “Here,” he said. “Bring your girl.”

I went the following Saturday, who not only had no girl but who had never danced, whose music—the tuner on my little Philco was busted, the dial stuck just off key of a station that broadcast the Browns games, so that the play-by-play seemed to occur in a shrill wind, the star-of-the-game interview overseas—was mostly whatever people happened to be whistling, the pop tunes reaching me downwind, degraded, in a sort of translation, the melodies flattened, the high notes clipped. But I was twenty-seven years old, my Sunday mornings squandered in playgrounds with “the men,” those imaginary big brothers of my heart. I didn’t even own a suit. (And what
did
I own? Not my furniture, not my knives and dishes, not my sheets and pillowslips. I think I had bought—let’s see—a shovel, a hammer, a tape measure and hand saw, my fielder’s mitt of course, my baggy baseball pants and spiked shoes, my cap and my T-shirt, a Louisville Slugger, a sixteen-inch softball. Even the Philco was furnished. I honestly can’t think of anything else. Yeah, the mismatched clothes in my drawers and closets.)

I went to Famous and Barr to be outfitted for my free passes, and when the salesman in Men’s Furnishings asked if he could help me I think I told him just that, that it was for the free passes I’d come, to be outfitted, done up like the box steppers in the Delgado Ballroom. I didn’t even understand about alterations, you see, and thought the trousers and jackets he had me try on cut for bigger, taller men. “I can’t buy this,” I told him, glancing at myself in the three-paneled mirror (and the first time, too, I had seen myself in profile, in holograph, maybe the first time I understood I had sides, a back). “I already told you it was for dancing. I’d trip on the whaddayacall’em, the cuffs.”

The tailor told me I could pick the suit up Thursday. (And that was something, I tell you, the dapper Italian with pins in his mouth, chalking my crotch. “Stand still,” he demanded. And the century’s squirming, woebegone hick replied, “I can’t, I can’t.”) “But I need it tonight. Tonight is the dance.”

“Tonight? Tonight is impossible. On Special Rush maybe late Wednesday morning. Wear something else.”

And I had to tell him I had nothing else, only my work clothes, only my work boots, only my softball gear, only my cleats. Only not entirely the hick. The hick is without my margin of peremptory foreboding, my self-serving ingenuousness. He does not throw himself so easily on the mercy of the court.

“It’s for tonight, you see. The dance at the Delgado. The manager invited me. He said to bring a girl. I could meet one. I don’t own the right clothes.”

“Hey, Albert,” the tailor said.

“Yeah, Sal?” said the salesman.

“Thirty-two years in the business and Cinderella here thinks I look like a fairy godmother.”

“You going to fix him up, Sal?”

“What the hell, Albert, I’m going to put it on Super Special Crash Rush and see to the alterations personally.”