George Mills (71 page)

“He knows all you did. It’s nice when people appreciate.”

“I’d push the clocks forward an hour in spring and turn them back again in fall,” Mills said. “There were strings, Louise. I told him no deal.”

All this during the first phase after George Mills returned from Mexico.

When he’d been their whatdoyoucallit, Father Confessor. They were spilling their beans, dumping their crap in his lap. Gossiping, tattling on themselves, one another.

As if he gave good advice. As if he even believed in it.

He gave no advice, put his faith in the insolubility of problems. You never laid a glove on the serious stuff. Disease played for keeps, and though he was no expert on world affairs, he knew that if things as inanimate and impersonal and off to the side of real life as nations could get into difficulties they couldn’t slip, people had no chance at all. Things gone off like butter would never be sweet again. His back would fail him, the shortness of breath he now felt hustling furniture for Laglichio would show up again while he was sitting on the toilet one day, while he was watching TV, when he slept.

In the months following Judith Glazer’s death Messenger continued to keep in touch. Sometimes he phoned, more often he just popped in. He was still driving Judith’s Meals-on-Wheels route. (Rust along the wounds of his notched car like a sort of jam.) “The Judith Glazer Memorial Meals-on-Wheels Luncheon Rounds,” he called it. He brought the Millses news of Mrs. Carey and Mr. Reece and the others on his itinerary and sometimes—you could smell the pot on his breath, his clothes, pungent, sweet as campfire, burning leaves—came to them with covered styrofoam trays of leftovers.

“What am I going to do about my kid, George?” Messenger would ask between mouthfuls of cooling chili-mac. “What do you say, Lulu?”

The Claunches, too, were into him, or their lawyers were. Judith’s sanity was in question. She’d made no eleventh-hour revisions of what they regarded as her cogent, ordinary enough wishes, but her wild, middle-of-the-night calls to her friends, even to some of the Meals-on-Wheels contingent, had prompted some of them to believe that she’d intended to make provision for them. She’d hinted at, and evidently actually promised, small gifts, semiprecious jewelry, shoes, dresses, coats——relics.

No codicils had been formulated, no substantiating notes found. The claimants, though even the lawyers acknowledged that “claimants” was too strong a term—no one had actually made or even threatened a legal claim against the estate—had all rather shyly indicated their limited expectations in condolence letters——to Sam, to Harry Claunch, to Judith’s father on his now public private phone numbers. One or two had appealed directly to Mrs. Glazer’s daughters. The Claunch lawyers were inclined to honor what they called these “nuisance claims” on the dead woman’s estate. (Louise herself, though they’d never met, only spoken to each other once on the phone, had been the recipient of one such gift—a tiny pillbox, purchased during their first days in Mexico, in which Mrs. Glazer had kept her Laetrile. Like the others to whom such tokens had been granted, she’d had to sign a notarized quitclaim.)

But something was up.

One night the senior partner—he was the man who’d indicated an interest in Mills’s car the day of the funeral—in the law firm that was handling things for the Claunches, called George at home.

“Still got that car, old man?”

“What car?”

“That snazzy Special of course.”

“Oh yeah,” Mills said, “sure.”

“You’ll come round. You will.”

“Make me an offer.”

The lawyer chuckled. “You make me one.”

“Four thousand dollars,” George said, not knowing what it might be worth but certain he’d asked too little.

The lawyer laughed into the phone. “Oh that’s a good one,” he said heartily. “It really is. Never mind. I’m a patient man, you’ll come round. Actually I guess I deserved that,” the lawyer said, “trying to mix business with pleasure.”

“Business?”

“Well, it’s just that we’d like you to drop by the firm. At your own convenience of course. We’d like to take an affidavit from you.”

“What for?” Mills asked nervously.

“No real reason,” the lawyer said, “we’d just like to have it on file in case anything comes up. We’d like your statement that Judith was in unexceptionable health when you were caring for her in Mexico.”

“She was sick as a dog.”

“No no.” The lawyer laughed. “I mean her mental health.”

“I can’t give any affidavit,” George said. “I can’t come down at my convenience. My boss would dock me.”

Then Sam Glazer called.

“I understand they’re trying to pressure you,” he said. “Listen, you hung in there. I’m grateful for that.” Mills didn’t know what he was talking about. “No kidding, George—may I call you George?—I really am. I’d just like your assurance that you’ll continue to resist them when they start turning the screws on you.”

“No one’s going to turn the screws on me.”

“That’s the way,” Sam said, “that’s the way to handle it.”

When he called again he sounded as distraught as Messenger.

“She must have been crazy, George. She must have been out of her head. I blame myself. I’m at fault. Partially. Partially I am. Poor Judith. Poor, poor Judith. God knows what she must have suffered. All that pain and anger, all that mental anguish.”

“No, no,” George said, trying to reassure him. “Her spirits were
good.
”

“How can you say that?” Glazer demanded furiously. “Is that what you said? Is
that
what you told them? Her spirits were
good?
”

“Hey,” George said.

“What about the pesos? What about all those pesos she gave away? What about the time she tried to get herself murdered? What about that funeral service? Her psychiatrist’s ruined. You know
that,
don’t you? Being made to say that stuff in public. Judith washed
him
up with her crazy arrogance. You call that cheerful, you call that good spirits?”

“Listen, Mr. Glazer …”

“Listen?
Listen?
No I won’t listen.
You
listen! What about heredity? What about our daughter Mary? You call
her
sane? She’s crazy as hell. All she thinks about is sex. She doodles genitalia in her geometry book. She doodles fellatio. The men have embouchures like symphony musicians. She draws gleaming wet pussy in her Latin text. The labia are tattooed with boys’ names. She does tits, stiff, ugly little hairs coming up out of the nipples. She says she’s engaged to be married. Some squirt at school she says she’s been sleeping with since fifth grade. She
tells
me this! She says ‘He can’t come yet, Daddy. I got my orgasm even before my periods started, but Stevie still can’t come. I tell him to be patient,’ she says, ‘that he’ll probably be in puberty by the time we’re married and it’ll all work out.’

“This is
sane?
What
about
heredity? These are good spirits? The kid’s a nympho. That stuff has to come from somewhere. It comes from her mother.”

“Why are you telling me this?” George said.

“It comes from her mother, the madwoman! How’d they get to you, Mills? Just tell me what they promised.”

“Nobody promised anything. Nobody got to me.”

“You swear you didn’t give them your affidavit?”

“I didn’t,” George said.

“Jesus,” Sam Glazer said, “you scared me there, George. You really had me going for a time.”

It was crazy, George thought. As if by saying his wife had been in good spirits he had somehow slandered her. Glazer was calm now. He was calm when he spoke to George about the possibility of something opening up in buildings and grounds, calm when with practically no transition
he
asked Mills for his affidavit, calm when George turned him down, calm, even smooth, when he told him that all he really wanted was for George to keep an open mind, not to say anything to the Claunches until he’d had another chance to speak with him.

“You’re in the catbird seat, you know,” Sam Glazer said pleasantly before ringing off. “You’re the only eyewitness.”

The senior partner called again.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve given more thought to what you asked for your Special. You did say it’s the original grille, didn’t you?”

Even Laglichio. He was impressed, he said, with Mills’s apparent ability to deal with blacks. He wanted, he said, his input on some schemes he’d been developing.

Then there was Coule. The minister wanted to know when Mills was going to make good on that sermon he’d promised.

“What sermon I promised?”

“Testimony then.”

“Oh yeah,” George said, “sure thing.”

“You’re
not
saved, are you?” Coule demanded. “You made all that up about grace. Boasting.”

“Who’d brag anything small potatoes as salvation?”

“You’re outrageous.”

“Yeah? Am I? You’re this man of the cloth, this cloth man. It rumples your tail feathers, don’t it, Reverend, I got grace, you got shit? Sure. I’ll fill in for you. I’ll give you my affidavit on holiness. Name the day. Easter? Christmas?”

As if they were waiting for him to pounce, as if he were some blackmailer. As if all they ever thought about was that whatever he’d learned in Mexico would be used against them. Or not a blackmailer at all——a sort of cop. George Mills, the arresting officer, their prosecutor, the law, the state. Their rights read at them like charges, boredom and cynicism built into their inner ear, hearing fair warning, the rattler’s obligatory sizzle——then sock! pow! blammo! and all bets off.

Mills unable to reassure them, unable to convince them they had nothing to worry about.

“Why did you let me take her to Mexico?” he asked Harry Claunch.

“She was inoperable,” Harry said. “Even the oncologist said the chemotherapy was tearing her guts out. Under the circumstances, could we deny her her long shot?”

“But why me?”

“Why not you? She would have laid it all out for the woman who brought her bedpan.”

So he had his legacy too. Their secrets like so many pieces of costume jewelry, like so many hand-me-downs. The repository now not only of Mills history but everyone’s. And he’d told Coule he was saved.

But mostly Messenger. Messenger’s hang-ups, Messenger’s circle, Messenger’s kid.

“Yeah,” Cornell, high, told him one day over a ham and ravioli sandwich, “I take the cake. Here I sit, enhanced and laid back as some California surfer—want a drag? no? it’s sinsemilla, two hundred fifty bucks a lid—and … What was I on about then? Oh yeah, the cake. It’s Chocolate Mint Heart today, Lulu. I’m going to tell you something, George. You think it’s because I’m enhanced I say this. But I was telling whoosis, my paraplegic lady, Gert. She thinks so too.” He fell silent. The rusts from his ham and ravioli sandwich smeared the corners of his mouth and lips, turning them down like the sad-face expression on a clown. “It’s the applesauce. Meals-on-Wheels puts out a great applesauce, maybe the best in the world.” And he tore into the applesauce, shoveling it into his mouth with his plastic spoon. “You got a slice of bread, Lulu, I can soak up the juice? Hey,” he said giggling, “don’t bother. I’ll use a Kleenex. The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” He grinned at them. “I’m bold,” he said. “What the hell, what’s there to hide? Judy G. told you all about me. She gave you my mantra. Well,
her
mantra. I can’t get the goddamn thing to work. Did you know they were her last words? Big-deal holy lady, big-deal saint. Pain up to here and her brother bending down over her bed for, for God
knows
what——instructions probably. ‘Do thus and so with the kids. Give Sammy my love. Tell the Mex to leave the room and smother me with the fucking pillow.’ God
knows
what! ‘Christ’s a redhead. He wears designer jeans.’ And what does he hear? ‘
Mahesvaram, mahesvaram, mahesvaram.
’ The born-again son of a bitch off to Heaven on a wave of transcendental meditation, at one with her cancer, the lint on her pesos. That lady could have been buried out of the Ethical Society, the Automobile Association. I tell you, George, she left me a haunted mantra. She squeezed the blood out of it, Lulu. I can’t even levitate. The horror, the horror.”

“You can’t levitate? You’re high as a kite.”

“Because I’m in pain, George and Lulu. Because I’m in pain. Because the griefs ain’t leaking no more, they’re
whelming.
There’s flash-flood griefs, man overboard. Let me just tell you a few of the things that have been happening in my neighborhood. Oh, look at Lulu, she likes it when I talk Despair. Despair’s her turn-on.”

Louise did enjoy Messenger’s visits. The man was a crybaby and blabbermouth, and Mills saw that Louise took the same comfort from him that Mrs. Glazer had taken from Maria’s sad adventures on Mexican television. Because she knew most of the people involved—the Claunches had invited her to return to the estate and bring some of the Meals-on-Wheels people with her; Sam Glazer had called and asked them to dinner; she’d met his girls; she’d met Messenger’s dyslexic son when Cornell brought Harve to the house one day; she had even spoken to Losey, Messenger’s surgeon friend, about George’s bad back, had met Nora, his wife, when the failing student of architecture had come to South St. Louis with a classmate on an assignment to study the city’s “vernacular architecture” (Cornell had given Nora Losey Mills’s name; neither Louise nor Nora knew at the time that the classmate was the girl with whom the surgeon was having an affair, George didn’t)—they’d taken on an immediacy and importance in her life which George Mills resisted but could do little to discourage.

Meanwhile Louise was thrilled with other people’s bad news, tried to catch Mills’s eye and nod at him knowingly each time Cornell delivered himself of some new heartache in the portfolio.

“We don’t have it so bad,” Louise told her husband one night.

“No sir,” George said. “We’ve got it made.”

“When are you going to play your China card, George?”

This was Messenger’s phrase. George had told him about the calls——the dean’s job offer, Claunch’s lawyer’s bid on the Buick Special. He thought Mills beyond bribery and did not know that the only reason George had mentioned the calls was to get some idea of what his affidavit was actually worth to them. Either side could have it for top dollar. He had liked Judith but Judith had died, convinced of her salvation as he was of his. Nothing he said about her now could alter either of their conditions.