George Mills

1

Laglichio sued the black furniture removal company and obtained a restraining order. His lawyer argued that Laglichio’s civil rights had been violated, that he was being prevented from doing business in the projects and black neighborhoods strictly on the basis of race. The judge agreed and, in addition to issuing the restraining order, awarded Laglichio damages.

“Landmark decision, Prince,” Laglichio remarked to Bob, the dashiki’d warrior who had tried to bust his truck. “What do you say, George? The system works.”

So Mills was once again employed full time, though he found that, having been away from it so long, he was no longer in shape. His back troubled him, his breath was short.

“You wouldn’t think,” he told Louise, “such shabby stakes and sticks could weigh so much.”

“Get out of it, George,” Louise said. “Why don’t you talk to some of your new contacts? You could ask Mr. Claunch if he’s got anything for you. Even Cornell could probably put you in the way of something. And Sam, Mr. Glazer, is settled as dean now at the university. He probably has lots of influence. I’m sure he could get you a position with maintenance or housekeeping.”

“Buildings and grounds. He already offered.”

“Buildings and grounds,” Louise said. “He offered?”

“He said I could work indoors in winter and keep warm, and outdoors in summer and get my fresh air.”

“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.

She was absolutely sane, solid as a rock. I swear it by all that’s holy!

I was with her day and night for more than a month and had plenty of opportunity to observe her. She tried to get us killed. She was bats, nutty as a fruitcake. So help me God. Amen.

But he was no good as an examiner, was without subtlety, could not lead his witness, could not trap him — it’s the blood, Mills thought, it’s my thousand-year-old blue collar blood — could, in the end, only ask outright his cruel, crucial question.

Messenger, surprised, looked at him.

“These are my friends,” Messenger said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Mills said.

“I mean both sides.”

“Sure.”

“Sam’s a colleague.”

“Yes.”

“However difficult Judith may have been, I always respected her.”

“Yes.”

“She was nobody’s fool.”

“No.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“There’s a buck to be made.”

“Come on.”

“Operation Bootstrap.”

“You’re too late, George,” Messenger said sympathetically.

“Maybe not.”

To stall him he told him something else.

“Victor couldn’t take it anymore,” Messenger said softly. “He had Audrey committed. They took her belts away. He had to sign for her shoestrings. Restraints, the whole shtick. She won’t swallow pills, so they have to force-feed her. When they put her on an IV she tried to chew through the tube and jimmy an air bubble into her vein. They can’t use an IV. They’re afraid she’ll try to turn on it and impale herself. A male nurse who used to be her student gives her shots in her arms, in her ass. Two men hold her down. She’s black-and-blue from these euphorics, so dry from drugs her tongue is chafed, the roof of her mouth. She can’t close her mouth for the pain. She cries even when she’s sleeping and the salt tears run into her mouth. There are lesions inside her cheeks, all the soft tissue. They slake her from eyedroppers like you’d feed a sick bird. When he visited her last time she signaled him over to the side of the bed. She could barely talk. He had to lean down. Even then he could hardly understand her. She was smiling. The first time he’d seen her smile in almost a year.

“ ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘The shore? What about the shore? You want to go to the shore? Get better, sweetheart. When you get well. I promise. When you get well we’ll go to the shore.’ They have this place on Cape May. He patted her forehead and promised to take her.

“He says you’d have thought he’d given her a jolt of—”

“This is—” Mills said.

“—electricity,” Messenger said. “That’s how fast she jumped away from his touch. Her loathing was that clear. ‘Well, what about the shore?’ he said he said angrily. ‘You don’t want me to come? Swell,’ he said he said hurt, ‘get well. Go by yourself. I won’t stop you.’

“She shook her head and now he said he could see that it wasn’t loathing at all. He said it was a different thing entirely, and while she wasn’t smiling the expression on her face was almost a sane one and some—”

“This is all—” Mills said.

“—thing else he hadn’t seen in almost a year. It was just sane, ordinary, angry, outraged human frustration, and he realized he’d misunderstood her. He apologized and leaned down again over her pillows. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What?’

“ ‘Not shore,’ she said. ‘Bedshore. Bedshore.’

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘Bedshore!’

“She was telling him about her bedsores, that she meant to kill herself by poisoning her bedsores, by peeing on her bedsores and infecting them, by rolling her sores in shit. He told her doctor he wanted her catheterized. He demanded she be rigged to her bedpan.

“All right,” Messenger said, “what is it?”

“The public record, the sunshine laws. They write this stuff down on her chart,” Mills said coolly. “They say things like this at the nurses’ station. They’d tell me this crap if I called the front desk.”

He thought Messenger was going to hit him.

“It’s gossip, Cornell. A king told my ancestor that gossip’s horizontal, that nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin.”

“What am I, a traitor to my class? I ain’t even high. This is my best stuff.”

“I don’t want gossip,” Mills said.

“What, what do you want?”

“The goods. I want the goddamn goods on them!” George Mills exploded.

Which he was not to have for a while, Messenger feeding him as he might have fed the Meals-on-Wheelers, in installment, moiety, some awful, teasing incrementality, telling him what Mills did not care to hear not because he enjoyed, as Judith Glazer might, the damage of the thing, the tightening, dangerous coil of consequence he could not keep his hands off and wound and wound like the stem of a watch, but because of the flashy, reflexive, ricochet’d attention and glory, perhaps his melodramatist’s or bad gambler’s hole-card hope — the same thing that kept him glued to the telethon, that drew him to “20/20,” “Sixty Minutes,” the news, that made the Watergate years — how he envied Deep Throat! — the best of his life.

“He can’t stand what he’s done. I think Victor’s gone nuts. Losey says so too. The man’s a surgeon but he sees plenty of this emergency room guilt. Sure. When they sign the papers. To lop off a leg, to hacksaw crushed fingers or take away tits.

“He thinks he should have sent the kid off instead. He could have sent his son to aunts in Pittsburgh, to a brother-in-law in Maine.”

“What happened?” Mills asked. (Because he was asking questions now. Because he knew that Messenger would tell him what he needed to know but that first he would have to hear all of it, Messenger’s scandals like the devised sequences and routines of the Cassadagans. Because he was something of the straight man now too, the old Florida Follies Kid. Thinking: You don’t ever grow up. Nothing changes, nothing. Certainly not your character.) “What happened?”

“She wasn’t suicidal. Even the psychiatrist said so. She wasn’t suicidal. She just wanted to die.

“That’s what she kept telling the boy. That she wanted to die. Can you imagine? How old can he be? Eleven? Twelve? The kid home from school and making chocolate milk, Horlick’s, his Ovaltine. Slopping sardine sandwiches together and nibbling Fritos off some cleared portion of the dining room table. (Because the kitchen table’s overflowing. Not from breakfast, understand. Or anyway not from that morning’s breakfast, or even yesterday’s, but the cumulate dishes, spoons, knives and egg-tined forks of maybe three days’ meals. And more in the sink. Sure. There’s three in the family. Say they’ve got two sets of dishes, for dinner parties, for everyday. Service for twelve, say. The cleaning lady comes once a week. That’s four days of meals on the everyday. Another two or three on what they’d serve to their guests. But be fair. Audrey’s not eating. But be fair. They fill up her plate. Even she don’t eat they got to dirty a dish. And suppose the girl calls in sick? I mean she’s seen that mess. She hired on as a cleaning lady, not a pearl diver. Suppose she calls in sick. In eight days they have to take their meals on the coffee table in the living room. In two more they’re taking them separately. On the back porch, the stairs. The kid’s fixing his snack on the ironing board in the basement.)

“So there’s, what’shisname, Danny, trying to make a simple sardine or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and drinking now out of the jelly and yahrtzeit glasses and actual Corky the Clown mugs from the old highchair days, wolfing it down because though he’s not athletic and is normally a housebound child content to stay home and read, do homework, it breaks his heart to hear his mom cry and he can’t stand absolutely to hear her complain how if there was a God she’d be a goner by now, and he’s got to get out of there, back to the playground to get in a game which he knows he’s not only bad at but hasn’t even learned the rules of yet, even the goddamn object. Not go for a walk, kick leaves, ride bikes with a pal, read books on a bench, but back to the playground where he doesn’t like to be even at recess, back to the actual goddamn playground where he knows damn well they’ll choose him, even choose him early, before the better players, the ones who’ve got it together, whose reflexes hum like gears in fine machinery, whose timing and power and speed and concentration make them good up at bat, who wear their fielders’ mitts as naturally and comfortably as Dan wears scarves, coats; who’ll choose him early for the simple good fun of just making them laugh, giving them by simple dint of picking him for their side the right — the right—to denounce his errors, mock his play, him. To call him bad names and nudge him with elbows and push him around.

“Not, Victor says, as you’d suspect, to take his mind off things but to get it back on them. To see just what his mother meant when she told him each morning when he went to school that she hoped noon would find her stricken and when school let out dead.

“ ‘I’m destroying it, Danny. I’m ruining your life, sweetheart,’ Victor says she’d tell him, remind him, in her soiled robe, over the greasy dishes and scummed silverware and smeared cups and glasses which by this time served as their everyday, almost unrecognizable now, almost, under the three- or four-day growth of mold, indistinguishable from the good stuff, the sterling and Aynsley china, the dirty novelty mugs and glasses, six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other, with the cups and crystals of sanity. Because that’s why Victor, who’d prepare the meals but wouldn’t do the dishes, who’d put fresh sheets on Danny’s bed every five days — the girl came every week but couldn’t get out of the damn kitchen — but wouldn’t change the ones he’d been sleeping on with Audrey for almost eleven, allowed the house to get in such a state in the first place.

“Not, Victor says, out of narrow principle say, you-made-your-bed, lie-in-it say, not out of that principle at least. (He’s ridden with guilt, George. He tells me this, not the front desk.) As an object lesson, a lesson in objects.

“ ‘I was trying to show her how easily the world is reclaimed by jungle. How simple it is to go mad. I thought I could shame her back into her senses. See? “See,” I’d have had that house scream, “see?” What makes you so special? I’ve gone bats too, the furniture has, the dishes and linen. Look at Dan, look at Danny. His clothes have gone nuts. It’s 80 degrees, he’s dressed for the winter!’

“She must, Victor says, have thought he was crazy. She didn’t know where she was. There was soup in her bowl. She hadn’t made it. If she’d been paying attention to what he was saying she might have thought he’d lost his mind in some swell restaurant.

“But then Victor came home one day from the office and the house was clean. Spotless. The living room had been cleared, the dining room, everything had been picked up, all the carpets vacuumed. There wasn’t a dish in the sink. This was a Monday. The cleaning lady wasn’t due till Wednesday. Victor says his heart turned over. He raced upstairs. Audrey was in bed, asleep on clean sheets.

“ ‘I didn’t wake her. How could I? She must have been exhausted. Anyone would have been exhausted.

“ ‘So I didn’t wake her. I just sat by the bed and cheered on her sleep. I sat there two hours. When she finally woke up she gave one of those great yawning stretches you imagine Rip Van Winkle must have given, or Sleeping Beauty, or someone recovered from coma. She blinked a few times to get her bearings and looked at me.

“ ‘ “Oh,” she said, “hi. You home from work? God, it’s almost dark out. I’m sorry. I lay down for a nap. I must have fallen asleep.”

“ ‘ “Who wouldn’t?” I said. “You worked like a horse. Are you feeling better?”

“ ‘ “No,” she said.

“ ‘ “You tried to do too much. You should have saved a little for tomorrow. Then Dorothy comes on Wednesday.”

“ ‘ “Oh God,” she said, “what are you talking about now? Leave me alone, will you? Or kill me. I just want to die.” ’

“Because he’d done the dishes. Danny. The boy. He’d cleaned the place up. Victor knew it as soon as he heard him and turned, and saw him standing there, in the doorway, whimpering, sucking his thumb.

“He made the arrangements that night and packed her off to the asylum the next day.

“ ‘Now,’ Victor says, ‘we’re just another broken family in July, me and the kid, driving back from Burger Chef in a blue K Car.’ ”

“Poor kid,” George Mills said.

“Who?” Messenger said. “Danny? The hell. He’s in the ninety-ninth percentile. The little fag reads six years above his grade level.”

“That doctor’s wife was over, that student, Mrs. Losey?”

“Nora,” Messenger said. “Yes?”

“She was over to the house. Some sort of homework for her school. She took pictures.”

“There’s this rehab project.”

“She the one flunking out?”

“On academic probation, right.”

“Whose husband’s having the affair?”

“With Jenny Greener, yes.”

“A girl was with her. That was her name I think.”

“They’re classmates,” Messenger said. “Nora introduced them.”

“Then what happened?”

Because he was listening now. Because there were only reruns on television anyway and he was listening now. Salvation or no salvation. Listening despite himself. Because they could almost have been more Millses.

“He goes out of town,” Messenger said. “He’s much in demand. Symposiums. Universities. He’s an expert in the new microsurgical stuff. Sutures finer than spider web. Instruments no bigger than computer chips. He can sew on your fingerprints, he can take out your germs. Like the little cobbler in fairy tale. He’s much in demand. Sun Valley and Aspen, Fiji, the Alps. All the pricey climes of the medical — Palm Springs Memorial, the Grosse Point Clinic, Monaco Mercy, Grand Cayman General.

“He goes out of town. He lectures his colleagues. He screws their wives. Never the nurses, never the help.

“He says ‘I won’t touch a student. And my patients — forget it. If I touch a patient I’ve already scrubbed. I’m not talking what’s ethical, what’s professional or ain’t. None of this has fuck-all to do with my Hippocratic oath. It’s just I still think it’s kicky I’m invited places. Maybe I’m spoiled. I won’t cross a street if it’s not on the arm. I won’t take a vacation. I’ve this thing for doctors’ wives.

“ ‘Country club country. I love being made over, wined and dined, fussed. I never get used to it. I don’t think I will.

“ ‘Lunch turns me on. Tennis-togged women, ladies in tank tops. I like to take off their sweat bands. I love those little bracelets of the untan, the wrist hair where it’s been pressed down under the elastic. I love the way it smells, sweat running with perfume and the better soaps. I like their jewelry, their diamond rings and great gold chains. I love the way their jewelry smells. You know what, Cornell? I can make out the karats, the troy grains in pearls. You believe me? It’s true. The expensive like a whiff of sachet. I can smell money in a purse, coins, even checkbooks, the stamps in their passports, plastic on charge cards, a Neiman-Marcus, a Saks.

“ ‘Christ I’m a bastard. I cheat on my wife. If I had a dollar …’ he tells me. (And I listen to this stuff, who got lucky maybe a dozen or so years ago, and that with a drunk, a woman under the influence, who may have been a little crazy behind the alcohol. But who celebrates the occasion — March 19—like some dear anniversary.) He tells me this shit. Me. So I tell you. You can’t cheat on your wife, you cheat on your friends.

“ ‘We’ll have left early,’ he says, ‘gone separate ways to the parking lot. She gets in my rental car or I get in hers, but I love when they drive, when they take me ’cross bridges and she grabs the toll. When she picks the place, where we can go. Listen, it’s Cairo, what do I know? It’s Cairo, it’s Russia, it’s somewhere South Seas. It isn’t the money, you know that, Cornell. I’m the one being fussed. I’ve published the paper, made the keynote address.

“ ‘And maybe they are nurses, or were before they married their husbands and became doctors’ wives. Hell, I suppose lots of them were nurses, most of them maybe. But up from the nursery and doctors’ wives now. So it’s all right, it’s okay.

“ ‘Because I’m this snob of betrayal, this rat of swank. Your fop of collusion, your paste asshole. And nothing against their husbands. On the contrary. They’re pals, I like them. Every professional courtesy. I second their opinions. We wave on the slopes.’ ”

So Messenger told Mills of Losey’s code.

“Code?” George said. “He’s got fuckall to do with the Hippocratic oath, he’s got a code?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Messenger said. “He goes out of town. He makes love on the beaches, on cruises, off shore. Everything handled, you know, discreet. Shit, Mills, I don’t know. Maybe there are gentlemen’s agreements. Maybe they don’t go to each other’s papers. I don’t know how it’s done. A guy tells me he’s been with a groupie I don’t ask to see the matchbook from the restaurant. I’m an old-fashioned guy. People get laid it’s a wonder to me you don’t read about it in the paper. It’s amazing there’s no extra or the programs ain’t interrupted. Someone makes love … But that’s just the point. That’s Losey’s code. You can wing it like birdies, do anything, everything. Just don’t fall in love. Though that’s the part I don’t understand. I’d wonder who’s kissing them now.

“ ‘The family,’ Losey says. ‘The family comes first. The home.’

“It’s the long view, you see. The long view he takes. Marriage like principal. Not to be disturbed. He’s a doctor, a surgeon. He hates a complication. Side effects spook him, they give him the willies. Sure, that’s got to be it. The principles of science carried over into life. Well, why not? What the hell? I’m glad we had this chat, George. It’s clearer to me now.”

But not to Mills.

“Well,” Messenger said, “he has trucks.”

“Trucks.”

“And an interest in freight cars.”

“I don’t—”

“That he bought with some guys, that he leases back to the railroad.”

“I don’t—”

“Because a lot of this shit must have been in her name, joint tenancy, something sufficiently complicated so that even if he’s audited and they find against him it’s probably a judgment call. And, oh yes, meanwhile he gets the use on the money, the interest compounding against the penalty even if there is one. A divorce could … Well, you can see for yourself. And maybe that’s what he means by ‘home.’ Maybe it’s only his pet name for tax shelter. The horror, the horror, hey Mills?”

Who wanted names and dates, the places of these horrors, whose own interest was compounding now too, but in a different direction, so that when he again asked “Then what happened?” Messenger only looked at him. “What happened?” he repeated.

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know, that it got out of hand.”

“It was his idea that Nora become a graduate student.”

“I see,” Mills said, but didn’t.

“He even picked the discipline. And picked it mercilessly, pitilessly. Architecture. She’d need math, she’d need mechanics. She’d need drawing skills. She’d need calculus and physics, statics and dynamics, and a knowledge of mechanical systems. She’d need to know stresses. She’d need acoustics and drafting, axonometrics and isometric projections. She’d need to know project financing. She’d need a knowledge of real estate and whose palm you greased to get round the zoning codes. So she’d need political science, and a little law too. You see?”

“But—”

“Medical school would have been a breeze, compared.”

“But why did—”

“Because he really is your paste asshole, your rat of swank. Only I didn’t know he was so clever. Christ, he must have studied the catalogue like a doting daddy. He must have pored over that fucker. He must have laughed his ass off when he had to look a term up.

“But I don’t know. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe it was only that same hierarchical predilection for profession that put nurses off limits but drove him into their arms once they were doctors’ wives. Maybe that’s why he married her in the first place, maybe it’s why he loved her. Maybe he was just showing off. Because once he got his license to practice he could, by the simple act of marrying her, take any girl off the street and turn her into a doctor’s wife. Any girl. A typist, a beautician, someone in trade school.

“Maybe excitement quits on you. Maybe it pales. Maybe pride is the least complacent of the qualities, and it’s true what the songs say — the thrill is gone, the blush off the rose. Passion like the seasons, like land that gives out.”

“Maybe he didn’t want her around at those doctor conventions,” George said.

“Symposiums, conferences,” Messenger said. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think he’s better than that. I take him at his word. I believe he really is this rat of swank, that he has this toney, back-of-the-book vision. The couple — she’s a brain surgeon, he sits on the Supreme Court; she skydives for relaxation, he’s into archeology; they swig tiptop scotch and lie around listening to old 78’s — that has it made. The best condo at the fanciest address, who weave great salads and whip up Jap foods which they eat off the carpet before great open fires. (He gets closed-circuit TV, pulls big Vegas bouts from his dish in the yard.) Because he really thinks like that. And what I think, what I think, is that he was honestly trying to make her over. Take this perfectly nice, ordinary girl whom he’d already turned into a doctor’s wife pretty as any he screws in Europe, well dressed as any, tricky as any in bed, well heeled and knowing as any, and go for it. That’s why he chose architecture to be her fate. Out of love and an honest pleasure and pride in just more gracious living. And that could explain Jenny Greener, too.” Mills looked at him. “Think about it.” Mills shrugged. “They’re classmates. They’re classmates, George. She came to your house. What did you think?”

“I didn’t think anything. Why? What should I think?”

“Did you notice anything special about Jenny?”

“Jenny?”

“Jenny Greener, yes.”

“I’m trying to remember.”

“That’s right. Do you?”

Mills tried to recall the polite, somewhat nervous young woman who’d come with the doctor’s wife that day. She was, he’d thought, ill at ease, and had given him the impression — stiff, unmoving, perched on the edge of their sofa, holding herself carefully, almost tenderly, as if she were sore, as if she held a saucer and teacup in her lap, a napkin, invisible cakes — of restrained fidgets. She hadn’t talked much. He couldn’t remember that she’d said anything. She hadn’t asked questions, as Nora had, about the house, the neighborhood. Louise had said afterward that Nora had taken Polaroids of the house, flashes, three or four rolls. That she’d gone around shooting one picture after another, of the cellar steps, the ceiling, the basement, their closets and doorways, their small backyard. “I tell you, George, she could have been from the insurance,” Louise said, “taking pictures of water damage, busted pipes.” He couldn’t remember Jenny Greener having a camera.

“I think she was embarrassed,” George told Cornell. “I don’t recall what she looked like.”

“Plain?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Nora Pat. Mrs. Losey. What did Mrs. Losey look like?”

“Oh, she was beautiful. Very well dressed. She had on this linen suit. Boots. She had beautiful boots. Sort of a blonde. I don’t know. I can’t describe people’s looks. She was very pretty. I remember she was very pretty.”

“A smasher?” Messenger said. “A knockout?”

“Yes,” George Mills said. “She was very beautiful.” He remembered that when they were introduced she’d taken his hand and held it in both her own.

“You were with Judy,” she said. “You’re the man with the back.” And she’d touched Mills there, where his back ached, and her touch had radiated comfort through his shirt, warming him.

“I suppose if you thought about it you could remember the boots, how they laced up the side, the way they were tooled, the particular purchase they gave to her stance?”

“She stood,” George Mills said, “like someone poised on a diving board. Jenny Greener was plain.”

“Nora wouldn’t let her alone once she found out how smart she was. She kept inviting her over to the house. (She introduced them.) After a while Jenny couldn’t figure out how to turn her down anymore. She had this way of explaining things. Formulas, principles. Better than professors. So that for as long as she could keep Jenny talking even Nora believed she’d get the stuff. She could even give it back, work out the problems, solve them, get round the doglegs and sand traps of architecture, cracking all the difficult ciphers of the discipline Losey had chosen for her. That’s what they talked about. This was their dinner table conversation. Housing, the redevelopment of downtown, the drawbacks of solar.

“And her husband beaming, beaming, ready to bust his buttons. Proud as a pop with a kid on the dean’s list — on the arm at the ball park, management’s, the home team’s straight-A’d, honor-roll’d guest. (Listen, listen, I know how he’d feel! I don’t blame him, I don’t even apologize for him. This isn’t sublimation, reflected glory, suspect, vicarious motive. I’m not talking about pride of ownership, I’m not even talking about pride. Love. I’m talking about love, all simple honor’s good will and best wishes. So I know how he’d feel!)

“Losey may have been having second thoughts. He must have had them. Thinking — I don’t know — thinking, Gee, maybe I made a mistake, maybe there’s something harder than architecture, higher. (Not better paid, because, be fair, he didn’t give a damn whether his wife ever earned back from the profession even half what it had cost him to get her into it in the first place. What could he do with more money? Figure new ways to hide it? He was still busting his hump on the old ways, which, face it, be fair, were only his accountant’s ideas anyway, only the tried and true evasive actions of sheltering dough. Because he’s right. When he says ‘You know me, Cornell, it isn’t the money.’ He’s right, it isn’t. It’s just another way of having and doing what others in those brackets have and do.) Thinking: Gee, maybe I should have pushed her into astronomy, aeronautical engineering. Maybe I should have run her for governor.

“Till that damned letter came. It was addressed to Losey. It could have been an honest mistake. It could have been the chairman’s joke; I hope it was Nora’s. But it was actually very nice, very sympathetic and concerned. Like those letters company commanders write next of kin when the news is bad.

“It said that while Nora gave every indication she was trying, really trying, and was extremely cooperative and obviously bright, and, oh yes, especially gifted as a draftsman and quite clearly imaginative, there was this problem with her math, this basic flaw on the scientific side. He was sorry, he said, but he was afraid that if she couldn’t bring that part of it up, Dr. Losey, his daughter was in danger of going on academic probation.

“Losey was furious. ‘Does that son of a bitch actually think I’m old enough to be your father?’

“But be fair, give him credit. He would get her a tutor. She could bring up her statics and dynamics, she could bring up her knowledge of mechanical systems. She was extremely cooperative and obviously bright. Even that pompous prick of a chairman thought so. He’d get a licensed architect to help her, maybe a partner in one of the big firms downtown. He’d pay his fee, whatever those highway robbers charged when a house was commissioned. She wasn’t to worry. All she had to concentrate on was bringing up her axonometrics and isometric projections.

“ ‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘If you’d told me earlier maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

“I’m not her confidant. I’m not even his. I mean he won’t talk about this stuff. I had no idea either. If I asked how Nora was doing in architecture school he’d mumble something vague and tell me all about some doctor’s wife he’d screwed in the islands.

“She told Judy. Judy told the Meals-on-Wheelers. The Meals-on-Wheelers told me. I tell you.

“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘spilled milk. I’ll ask around. Don’t worry, I’ll be discreet. I’ll speak to the head of the architectural firm that’s doing our hospital annex.’

“ ‘Jenny Greener,’ she said.

“ ‘Jenny Greener?’

“ ‘Only she’s already working for you.’

“ ‘Working for me?’

“ ‘I pay her to explain the stuff. I pay her to eat supper with us.’

“ ‘Jenny Greener? The mutt?’

“ ‘She’s the head of our class. She’s the one with the grade point average. She’s the one you want.’

“She was right of course. But he didn’t trust her now. How could he? She’d kept everything to herself. All he knew was what he’d heard at the dinner table, and now he thought all the bright chatter was just some scam.

“So he checked up on her. On Jenny Greener. He called the chairman and told him he was Dr. Losey.

“ ‘Who’s top of that class?’

“ ‘Our students’ records are confidential, Dr. Losey. I’m sure you can understand that.’

“ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m so concerned about Nora. I thought maybe if I talked to him he could give her some tips. Maybe not. I guess you’re right. Maybe women just don’t have it in the thinking department, maybe they’re just not cut out to be architects. I guess you have to accept them. Some affirmative action thing.’

“ ‘We don’t have to accept anyone,’ the chairman said. ‘Women do quite as well as men.’

“ ‘Sure,’ Losey said. ‘I guess you were only kidding when you wrote that letter about Nora. I’ll tell her you said she’s a shoe-in. That you don’t put girls on academic probation.’

“ ‘As a matter of fact, Doctor,’ the chairman said, steamed, ‘it’s a “girl,” as you put it, who’s head of that class.’

“But he wouldn’t say which girl so Losey still didn’t know.

“He got the names of her teachers and saw them during their office hours. He’d mention Jenny Greener and their eyes would light up. ‘Jenny Greener,’ one prof said, ‘Jenny Greener’s a genius.’

“ ‘A genius? Really? A genius?’

“And another told him she was the most promising student he’d ever had. And one showed him sketches. They were plans for the hospital annex. Even Losey could see how beautiful they were.

“ ‘Beautiful?’ the man said. ‘This is an actual project you know. Many of the problems we set for our students are. This is being built. Oh, I don’t mean this, I don’t mean Jenny’s, but the building, the building’s already under construction.’ The professor laughed softly. ‘Though they would have done better to use Jenny’s plans. I told McTelligent.’ McTelligent was the name of the head of the firm of architects, the one Losey was going to speak to. ‘Not only more beautiful but more cost-effective too. Do you know anything about materials?’

“ ‘I’m a surgeon,’ Losey said.

“ ‘Then perhaps you’d be interested in these,’ and showed him sketches of the new operating theaters. ‘What’s your professional opinion?

“ ‘I’m sorry,’ the professor of architecture said, ‘I didn’t quite hear you.’

“Because he was swallowing so hard. Because his pulses were pounding. Because his heart rate had taken away his voice.

“ ‘I said they’re revolutionary,’ he said.

“He showed Jenny the chairman’s letter. And even made his proposal in front of Nora. Because he knew they were friends, and because he certainly knew a thing or two about the strategy of seduction and that’s what he was up to now. So he asked in front of Nora.

“ ‘You can see how it is,’ he told her. ‘My wife’s flunking out.’

“ ‘I understand, Mr. Losey. Some of these things are awfully difficult. I guess I didn’t pay enough attention to the basics. I should never have agreed to be her tutor. I’d like to return the money.’

“ ‘Are you saying Nora’s too stupid to learn? I thought you were friends.’

“ ‘We are friends,’ Jenny said. ‘We are friends. Nora knows that. She’s my best friend,’ she said. ‘I love Nora. I feel terrible about this.’

“Which was what he’d counted on of course.

“And slapped the side of his head. ‘Do you think I showed you that letter because we want to fire you? On the contrary, Miss Greener. What you say makes perfect sense. She does need more preparation in the basics. That’s what the fellow says in his letter. That’s what we’re asking of you. We don’t want to fire you. We want to hire you full time. It was silly of Nora to think you could do the job on an hourly basis.’

“ ‘Full time?’ she said. ‘I’m going to school myself.’

“She was a scholarship student, from Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He’d learned that at the university. But all he really had to do was look at her. Her frumpy clothes and hick hairdo. Her country girl’s astonishment in his gorgeous house.

“ ‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘I’m gone much of the time. Nora gets lonely. She doesn’t complain much, but she does.’

“ ‘I know,’ Jenny said.

“ ‘Then you know she’d like you to move in with us. You’re the architect. You can see for yourself we’ve plenty of room. We’d still pay you, of course. I couldn’t think of it otherwise.’ He’d been prepared to name an outrageous sum, almost as much as the fee he said he’d pay that now not-so-hypothetical architect to design a house, but something in Jenny’s face told him she’d turn that down flat and walk out. So he actually lowered the hourly rate she’d already been getting. ‘And your own work comes first. That goes without saying. But if you could see Nora through …’

“Nora didn’t speak out because she figured it was her only chance. Thinking — I don’t know — thinking, The bastard, the bastard! Maybe he could make me a hairdresser, a hostess in restaurants, a girl at the checkout, a clerk in a store. Thinking, Maybe she can see me through. Maybe she’s the only one who will.

“He never so much as kissed her. (The family, the family comes first.) He never said anything out of the way. If he ever tried to get fresh I don’t think she knew it. At the time knew it.

“One night, after dinner, Nora was in the kitchen. Jenny was clearing the dessert dishes. She had leaned down to take Losey’s and he put his hand on her arm. Not even his hand. Some fingers. ‘I’ve seen your sketches of the operating rooms,’ he said in a low voice so his wife wouldn’t hear. ‘I think you may have some respect for my judgment as a surgeon. They’re wonderful. The best I’ve ever seen,’ he told her passionately.

“So that’s where it stands.

“She’s still on probation but her grades have improved. She’ll never make Dean’s List but she’s still hanging on. But she isn’t a dummy. She can read the handwriting on the wall. Both of them can. All three of them. She may even get her degree, but that’s not what it says.

“He’s in greater demand than ever but he doesn’t travel so much as he used to. He turns down invitations. He stays home more. He’s writing, publishing papers. He likes to sit in his study while the women are off in theirs. (He’s converted one of their six bedrooms into a study for Jenny.) He likes to sit there, thinking about the future, thinking about the time she graduates next spring and the divorce has gone through.

“Thinking, They can do wonders with hair. With exercise and cosmetics. With diet, haute couture. Under their tans, behind their high fashions and starved, high-relief cheekbones, those broads in Barbados I went down on and vice versa might have been frumpy as Jenny once. As inexperienced as she probably is in bed.

“Because he really is a surgeon. Anything can be excised. Anything put back. He can sew on your fingerprints, he can take out your germs. Everything is remediable. It better be. Everything is remediable or your patient dies. She’ll just need some coaching.

“It’s a griefhouse, George. It’s a goddamn griefhouse. I can almost hear them, make out the tripled, separated weepings of the house’s tripartite griefs. Grieving for status, grieving for lifestyle. Grieving for bastards, for fops of collusion, for paste assholes. Mourning best friends and all fall guys.”

Messenger paused. Then said what George expected him to say. “The horror, the horror, hey Mills?”

“Yes,” George Mills said. “Yes!”

Messenger, enhanced, was sitting in Mills’s living room weeping when George came in.

“Hey,” George Mills said, “hey now. Hey don’t.”

Cornell looked up, surprised. He wiped his eyes with his fingers, licked them. “You know that’s delicious?” he said.

“I know,” Mills said.

“You lick your tears, George?”

“I chew my nails. I nibble the hair on my arms.”

“Really?”

“Millses have always had pica.” (Because he was interested now. Because Messenger had him. As he’d had Louise the first time he opened his mouth. And whatever might become of his own battered case, he was interested in theirs. Enough to talk, to tell him of his.)

“In me under control, arrested, marked down. But, you know, still there. I still have a piece of this sweet tooth in my mouth.”

“This sweet tooth, George?”

“A loose appetite sort of.”

“Clay? You eat chalk?”

“The flavor’s okay. I don’t care for the texture.”

“You’re a connoisseur.”

“Certain flowers, the stems on fruit. Newsprint. Erasers.”

“I chewed erasers,” Cornell said.

“No no, from the blackboards. I’d lick dust from their fur.”

“Better than a connoisseur. You’re a gourmet.”

“I sucked on stones. When I could get it I put sand in my mouth.”

“When you could get it?”

“You know, still wet. After the tide had gone out. A sand bouillabaisse. When I was a kid. Most all of this when I was a kid. Not now not so much.”

“You don’t do this stuff now?”

“I watch what I eat. Sometimes I binge. You know, fall off the wagon.”

“You’re not kidding me now?”

“No. I’m not kidding.”

“Well, what do you eat?”

“I eat cigarette ash. I like to get the juice out of cotton.”

“Are you kidding me, George?”

“No,” he said, “I already said. Not now not so much.”

“A meat-and-potatoes man,” Messenger said.

“Only the gristle, only the peels.”

Messenger watched him through his still red, still puffy eyes.

“Rust,” George said wistfully, “I used to like the taste of rust. And rotten, discolored wood from trees fallen in forests.”

“That’s good?”

“Brown water in puddles. Autumn leaves like a breakfast cereal. Sweat like a summer drink.”

“Insects? Dead birds?”

George Mills made a face. “No, of course not,” he said. “Things only declined from the ordinary sweets and seasonings, things gone off, the collapsed cheeses, sour as laundry.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” Messenger said.

“This is how I used to be. It’s mostly all changed. I like stale bread. I don’t really mind it when the milk turns, the butter. A hint of the rancid like a touch of hors d’œuvre.” And then, already missing his own old straight man’s circumstances, “You were crying.”

“Me?” Messenger said, his nose and eyes still a little swollen. “Hell no.”

“You were. You were crying.”

“I was making lunch.”

“Is it Harve?” George Mills asked. “Were you crying about Harve?”

“Harve’s my kid,” Messenger said. “I don’t talk about my kid.”

“All right,” George Mills said.

“Fourteen his last birthday,” Messenger said.

“Yes,” George Mills said, and sat back.

“He doesn’t get the point of knock-knock jokes.”

“No,” George Mills said, and felt stirrings of appetite, his pica curiosity making soft growls in his head.

“I’m no woodsman,” he said. “I can’t tie a fly, I don’t know my bait.”

“No,” George Mills said.

“I can’t build a fire or assemble a toy. I haven’t much, you know, lore. I was never much good at the father-son sports. We don’t go out camping. I don’t take him to circuses or watch the parades. We don’t tan shirtless in bleachers or root for the teams. He doesn’t sip from my beer. I can’t name the stars, I don’t show him the sky. We didn’t play catch. I never taught him to ride. We didn’t do float trips or go to the zoo.

“I like to wrestle, show him the Dutch rub, Indian burns, but the kid thinks I’m angry. His eyes fill with tears.

“I don’t, you know, I don’t set an example. I don’t teach him, well, morals. Whatever it is they say has to start in the home — respect, I don’t know, good manners, how you have to appreciate the value of a dollar, that sort of thing — never started in ours.”

Uncle Joe, Mills thought, he means Uncle Joe.

“Fourteen years old and he doesn’t get the point of damned knock-knock jokes!

“I thought we’d go on a trip. This was a couple of years ago. I thought I’d take him on a trip. Just the two of us. We’d just load up the old bus … I mean the car, we’d drive in the car. We’d stay in motels. We’d order from room service. I had to promise we’d stay in a place with a Holidome.”

Mills looked at him.

“You know. One of those places, they’re enclosed, like a penny arcade. It has a swimming pool, it has a whirlpool and sauna, it has indoor-outdoor carpeting, it has swings and seesaws, computer games.”

Mills nodded.

“I had to promise. Otherwise he wouldn’t come. I had to promise to give him money for the machines. I had to promise he could choose what we’d watch on TV.

“We wouldn’t wait for a weekend. We’d make it special, go during school.

“I woke him at six. ‘We’ll catch breakfast on the highway,’ I told him. He was very cranky. He went to sleep in the back.

“ ‘Harve,’ I said, ‘we’re crossing the river, you’re missing the sunrise. Wake up, sleepyhead.’

“ ‘Why’d you wake me? I’m nauseous, I may have to throw up.’

“ ‘Anything you want, scout,’ I told him in the restaurant when the waitress came over. ‘What do you want?’

“He was angry as hell. He can’t read a menu. His mother says, ‘You want a hamburger, Harve? You want french fries and Coke, son?’ Me, I don’t do that. I want him to sound it out. He gets so impatient.

“ ‘What’ll it be?’ the waitress said, and I gave her my order. ‘What’ll it be?’ she said to the boy.

“ ‘Can you come back? I’m not ready.’ He glared at me.

“ ‘Anything you want, Harve. What do you want?’

“When she brought me my breakfast she turned to the kid. ‘Have you made up your mind yet?’ and stood poised with her pad.

“ ‘Yeah, I’m not hungry. I can’t eat a thing.’

“When I paid at the counter he pointed to candy, he pointed to gum.

“ ‘Why don’t you come up in front, Harve? Why don’t you put that airplane down and sit here with Dad? Goddamn it, Harve, I’m not your chauffeur.’ But we drove on in silence, the both of us sore.

“We’d gone a hundred miles maybe, Harve back there sulking, me sulking in front. He’d make sound-effect noises. With his planes, with his cars. A mimic of engines, impressions of speed. He’d imitate crashes, do disasters, explosions, ships lost at sea.

“ ‘Knock knock,’ I said when we’d driven another hour. ‘Knock knock, Harve.’

“And stopped for lunch. Harve not glaring at me over his menu this time, Harve equable, placid, almost benign. Don’t I know that kid? Because I’d figured it out in the car, knew what he’d do, knew he’d figured it out too — don’t I know him? don’t I? — knew it wasn’t even me he was mad at anymore. No, angry at himself for not thinking of it at breakfast. So I knew what he’d do. When the waitress came over I was ready for him.

“ ‘Have you decided?’

“ ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘actually I haven’t. Why don’t you ask the boy?’

“And, triumphant, looked at him, saw the smile leave his face. No, not leave it, but hanging there crooked, like make-up mismanaged, like cosmetics deranged. But I had to hand it to him. I did. I had to take off my hat. I could have kissed him.

“ ‘Two eggs,’ he said slowly, remembering, getting it perfect, ’scrambled. Orange juice. Toast. Coffee,’ he said.

“ ‘Wouldn’t you rather have milk, Harve?’

“ ‘Sure.’ He grinned. ‘Milk.’

“ ‘Sounds good,’ I told her. ‘Bring me the same.’

“We stopped off for ice cream, stopped off for Coke. When we filled up in Kentucky I gave Harve three bucks. He offered me candy when he came out with the bag. I told him, ‘No thanks, Harve.’ You know what kids eat. Crap from the space age — sugar fuels, fizz. Candy with noises, a licorice that whistles, a licorice that whips. Panes of sugar so brittle like cracked glass in your mouth. Pop drops and doodads, candy like toys. ‘Your mother would kill me, she saw what you got.’ I made him promise to save some, not to fill himself up.

“He was sitting up front now. More like it, you know? We got into Nashville just after five.

“ ‘This is Nashville,’ I told him, ‘where they make all the country-and-western records. Nashville is famous.’

“ ‘Sure,’ Harve said, ‘Motown.’

“ ‘No, Motown’s in Michigan, Motown’s Detroit.’

“ ‘Where they got all the niggers.’

“ ‘Christ, where do you get that stuff? Your mother doesn’t talk like that, I certainly don’t. Black people are just like everybody else.’

“ ‘They’re poor,’ Harve said.

“ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘many of them, many of them are.’

“ ‘Chicken George, Kunte Kinte. Slavery’s bad.’

“ ‘That’s right, Harve.’

“ ‘That’s why they kill us. That’s why they steal. That’s why they set fires and rape old white ladies and take our bicycles. That’s why they’re lazy and cheat on welfare.’

“ ‘Harve, that’s bullshit. You’re a bigot, you know that?’

“We were downtown now, stopped at a light. Some people were waiting on line for a bus.

“ ‘Your mama!’ Harve called from the car.

“ ‘Roll up that window! Goddamn it, Harve!’ ” George Mills was giggling. “We could have been killed,” Messenger said. “We could have been jabbed in the eyes with their hatpins, we could have been slashed in the guts with their shivs.” Enhanced, he began to laugh. “They could have pulled us out of the car and OD’d our asses with bad skag. They could’ve done us an injury with their Saturday Night Specials. Oh Jesus!” He wiped his eyes, licked his fingers. “Delicious,” he said. “Weeping delicious and laughter delicious too. All, all of it delicious.”

“Did you find the place?” Mills asked.

“The Holidome?”

George nodded.

“Oh sure,” Cornell said. “But we didn’t order from room service. Harve decided he’d rather eat in the restaurant.

“I was ready for him. I mean things had gone better. He’d been sitting up front with me, and cooled it on the sound track. Things had gone better, but I was ready for him. Before she even came over I laid down the ground rules.

“ ‘All right, Harve,’ I told him, ‘that was a cute one you pulled at lunch. I give you that one. Anything you want, anything.’

“ ‘Anything?’ he said. He had this sly, shit-eating grin on his face.

“ ‘Absolutely,’ I said, and dropped the big one. ‘But you can’t have eggs! You can’t have toast or juice. You can’t wait for me to order and tell her “Same here.” What I did this afternoon was a gesture. Ordering eggs, ordering juice. Do you understand me, Harve? It was a little salute from me to you because you used your head and you tricked me. That was smart, Harve, but it’s not helping you read. Sound it out. When the girl comes over and gives us the menus we’ll just tell her we need more time. Sound it out. I don’t care how long you take, Harve.’

“ ‘Not out loud,’ he said. ‘I’m ashamed.’

“ ‘Not out loud,’ I agreed. ‘To yourself. Whatever you want.’

“So when the waitress came over and left us the menus he knew where he stood. I have to admit. He certainly studied the thing. He touched each letter with his finger as if the menu were printed in a kind of Braille.

“She asked if we were ready.

“ ‘How about it, Harve? Are you?’

“ ‘You go first,’ he said.

“ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘sure.’ I drew it out, chose, changed my mind, talked it over with the waitress, asking in Opryland, ’is your swordfish fresh, your poached salmon?’ Not wanting it even if it was, you understand, just giving Harve time, not wanting to embarrass him in public. Just giving him time, letting him rehearse whatever it was he’d so painfully sounded out. Harve finally looked up. I smiled at the waitress.

“ ‘Shrimp cocktail to start, please. Bring lime, not a lemon. You can get a wedge from the bartender,’ I told her decisively. ‘Kansas City strip. Medium rare. Baked potato. Have the chef remove the aluminum foil in the kitchen. You have a house dressing?’ She nodded. ‘House dressing. Coffee. We’ll see about dessert later.’ I looked over at my son. ‘The ball’s in your court, Harve,’ I told him.

“ ‘Milk,’ he said. ‘I’ll have milk.’

“I was staring at him, but sure enough there it was, his finger under the beverages at ‘Milk,’ pressing his finger down on the page, holding on to the word as if, if he let go, it would take him forever to find it again.

“ ‘Anything for starters? What for a main course?’ the waitress asked. Harve looked over at me.

“ ‘The lady wants to know if you feel up to an appetizer, Harve. She’s waiting for your decision vis-à-vis the entree.’

“ ‘Milk,’ he said, ‘just milk.’

“The waitress looked at him sympathetically. ‘Too much Opryland, sweetie?’ she asked. ‘You swallow too much chlorine in the Holidome?’

“Harve shrugged.

“ ‘Where you from, darlin’?’

“ ‘St. Louis,’ Harve said.

“ ‘You drive all that distance with your daddy today?’

“Harve nodded.

“ ‘That’s a long drive,’ she said. ‘No wonder your tummy’s all sour. How about two nice soft-boiled eggs and some unbuttered toast? The chef don’t like to do that this time of night, but maybe if I tell him it’s for you he’ll make an exception. Tell you what, if he puts up a stink I’ll do it myself.’

“Now I really have to give him credit. He could have made me the hard guy, I might have had to take this fall. I mean all he had to do was look over at me for permission, for God’s sake. Because I wouldn’t have given it to him. He knew that. I wouldn’t have given it to him. I’d have looked like a shit in that nice waitress’s eyes with her damned Southern hospitality. There I am, George. Practically praying to God that the kid wouldn’t do it, that he’d start making his F-15 noises again instead, that he’d dive-bomb, strafe the fucking civilians, drop the big one on the niggers, anything. But I have to hand it to him. I do. He never took his eyes off that waitress’s face. He never even blinked them. And when he spoke, which was at once, he was as southernly hospitable as the waitress herself, as gracious and charming, giving it back to her in spades who couldn’t read a menu but who’d picked up in five minutes at the registration desk the actual idioms and inflections, perfect pitch not just for machinery but for the United States of America, maybe for the whole world.

“ ‘No, ma’am, no thank you. I don’t really crave eggs this evening. I’ll just have that milk if it’s all the same to you and that chef don’t mind pouring it.’

“ ‘Sure, sugar,’ she said, and smiled at him and scrambled his hair with her hand. ‘Why do they ever have to grow up?’ she asked when I gave back her menu.

“And me thinking the same, Mills. Why do they? Why do they have to grow up? Why do they have to learn to read? And had already relented, and wanted to thank him, say, ‘That was nice, Harve.’ But thinking, No, talk is too cheap, I won’t spoil it by saying anything. Thinking, The kid must be starving. After the food comes, after the food comes and she’s left us alone I’ll take a bite and sigh and tell him I’m not as hungry as I thought I was, and push my plate across the table at him. Thinking, Yes. That’s just what I’ll do.

“I couldn’t even look at him yet, Mills. I couldn’t even look at him I loved him so much. I didn’t want to see his fine hair, his slight body, his soft, perfect skin.

“She brought my shrimp cocktail. She brought Harve his milk.

“I arranged the napkin in my lap and lifted my shrimp fork. I didn’t squirt lime on the shrimp because I didn’t know if Harve would like it. Most people don’t. I still couldn’t look at him. I heard a kind of noise, Harve’s ventriloquized conversation, but low, almost under his breath, sounds no one could spell. Which even I realized was perhaps why he made them. I didn’t recognize this one. It wasn’t, well, mechanical. It didn’t have that special gift of speed and divided, juggernauted air he was so good at. It didn’t rumble like avalanche or crackle like fire. I couldn’t recognize it at all. It had none of the crisp rasp and bristle of Harve’s natural disasters, forests coming down, the earth quaking like a stutterer. They weren’t the nasal trills of siren and emergency. It wasn’t the rapid fire of war. It was a kind of long-drawn-out sliding, a soft rubbing noise like something being slipped out of a package.

“ ‘Here, Harve,’ I said, ‘these are good, but you eat the rest. I’m not nearly as hun—’

“It was the paper bag. It was the paper bag with the candy I’d made him promise not to eat all at once. It was the paper bag he was sliding out of his pocket, that he overturned on the table letting the bars and confections rain down on the cloth like bombs from a bomb bay and then covered with his napkin so the waitress wouldn’t see it when she came by with my steak.

“ ‘You put that—’

“ ‘You said I could eat anything I want. I even asked you. I said “Anything?” and you said I couldn’t have eggs.’

“Because he was waiting, setting me up. Because he knew, you see. Knew in Kentucky when he spent his three bucks. Because he was ready for me before I was ever even close to being ready for him. Because he’s hawk through and through. Because that megaton noise, those sounds that he makes, are war games, maneuvers, some worst-case scenario he has by heart in his head.

“ ‘If you’re so smart,’ I taunted, ‘if you’re so smart why can’t you read? Knock knock. Hey, knock knock, Harve.’ ”

Messenger’s hands were shaking. “Do you get this? Do you see what I mean?” he asked George. “Big deal I don’t take him hunting, big deal I never taught him to fish.

“His suits,” Messenger said suddenly, leaning toward Mills, fervent. “The power of my father dressed! His suits. Their ample lapels, their double-breasted plenitude. The fabrics like a gabardine energy, their sharkskin suppleness, the silk like a spit-and-polish swank. His trousers riding his hips like holsters and giving off not an illusion of bagginess but some natty, rakish quality of excess, bolts, cloth to burn. Full at the calves, full at the shins, and spilling over his shiny shoetops, fabric rolling over him like water. He stood in his clothing like a man swaggering in the sea. His suits, my father’s suits, the power of my father dressed. The fierce force of that middle-aged man!

“In shorts, George. In pajamas the same. His thighs spread in swim trunks, on beach chairs, in hammocks, his long old balls hanging out. An old testicle prophet my pop!”

“I don’t—”

“Did he teach me engines? Did he teach me to drive? You pass on what you can. He sold costume jewelry. He taught me a gross is a dozen dozen. A hundred forty-four rhinestone necklaces, a hundred forty-four pairs of earrings. Term insurance a better deal than straight life. That you pay cash you lose the interest on your money. His traveling salesman’s weights and measures.”

“I don’t—”

“Wait, wait. I gave Harve five dollars to play the video games. He was back in an hour with a kid half his age.

“ ‘This is my friend, Dad. This is my dad.’

“ ‘Hi.’ The kid giggled. ‘Let’s splash my sister, let’s go run around.’

“ ‘We found the secret tunnel,’ Harve said, ‘where they keep the machinery. Where they keep all the chlorine, where they keep the equipment that works the whole pool.’

“ ‘Mister, Harve turned off the lights. He shut off the games.’

“ ‘Could you step out for a minute? I want to speak to my son.’

“ ‘The janitor’s after us, that guy who makes change.’

“ ‘Please,’ I said, little boy.’

“ ‘I’ll be in the tunnel,’ the kid said to Harve. ‘Unless I’m captured.’

“ ‘Don’t get captured, Pete. Gas him. Unscrew the caps off the chlorine.’

“ ‘You know how old that kid is?’ I thundered. ‘Christ, Harve, he’s six! There must be half a dozen boys out there your own age. Why choose babies to play with?’

“ ‘He’s eight.’

“ ‘He’s a fucking baby. He’s crazy as you are.’

“ ‘I’m not crazy,’ Harve said. ‘Don’t call me crazy.’

“ ‘I don’t understand you. Why can’t you find someone closer to your age?’

“ ‘They’re boring.’

“ ‘You’re boring! All you do is run around and make trouble. All you do is run around and act wild.’ He started to leave. ‘Forget it. You’re not going out. Where’s my change from the machines? You’re not stuffing yourself with any more candy.’ He threw down some quarters. Tick those up! Pick them up!’

“He undressed in the bathroom. When he came out he switched channels. A movie with airplanes, another with spies. He flipped back and forth during commercials. He bit off his nails. It wasn’t even eight-thirty.

“ ‘Mom packed your suit, Harve. Want to go for a swim?’

“He wouldn’t speak to me.

“ ‘Want to go for a ride, Harve? See what Nashville is like?’

“Paula says I overreact.

“ ‘Harve, are you hungry? They could send in fried chicken, a burger, some fries. What do you say, Harve? How does that sound? Harve, answer me, damn it, I’m talking to you! Harve? Harve?’

“I’m not his enemy, Mills. He thinks I’m his enemy. I love watching television with him. I love it when he falls asleep next to me.

“ ‘I’m watching a movie. You took back the quarters. I can’t eat what I want or play with my friend.’

“I snapped off the TV.

“ ‘Sulk now I’ll smack you, I’ll break you in half!’

“ ‘I’m watching my program. I suppose I can’t watch my program?’

“When I sat down on the edge of his bed he moved away. I pulled the chair over from the desk. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m going to tell you some jokes.’

“I told him the one about Johnny Fuckerfaster. I told him the one about the three kinds of turds — mustard, custard and you, you dumb shit. I told him book-and-author jokes—The Panther’s Revenge by Claude Balls, The Spot on the Mattress by Mister Completely. I told him all the jokes I could remember from when I was Harve’s age, the age of the kid Harve had brought to the room. I did maybe twenty minutes. He looked at me as if I was crazy.

“Then I told him the one about the whore and the rooster and I had him, really had him. He screamed, he howled, he doubled over with laughter. There were tears in his eyes, snot ran from his nose.

“ ‘Tell it again.’

“ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s the difference between a rooster and a whore?’

“ ‘I don’t know, Daddy. What?’ He was already laughing.

“ ‘The rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo. The whore says any cock’ll do.’

“ ‘One more time. The last. Please, Dad, I promise.’

“ ‘I’ve already told it twice.’

“ ‘Go ahead. Ask me.’

“ ‘What’s the difference, Harve, between a rooster and a whore?’

“ ‘I know, I know,’ he said. He was waving his hand.

“ ‘Harve?’ I called on him, Mills. I called on the kid.

“ ‘The whore say—’

“ ‘The rooster says, Harve.’

“ ‘The rooster says—’

“Mills, I was praying. I swear to you. Praying. I was holding my breath.

“ ‘—cock-a-doodle-doo. The whore says—’

“My mouth, my lips were moving. The way they move when you’re feeding a baby, the way you might breathe by the guy that they work on that they pull from the sea.

“ ‘—any cock’ll do!’

“I screamed, I howled, I doubled over with laughter. There were tears in my eyes, snot ran from my nose. The kid thought he was Bob Hope, the Three Stooges. I thought so myself. I praised his delivery. I made over his timing.

“ ‘Again,’ he said, ‘let me try it again.’

“I let him try it again. He was letter perfect.

“ ‘Letter perfect,’ I told him.

(“Because they’ve got to have confidence. Isn’t that what they say? Because they’ve got to have confidence, believe in themselves? Because they must be encouraged, ain’t that the drill?”)

There were tears in Messenger’s eyes now too. And now he was weeping openly. Snot ran from his nose.

“ ‘I want to tell a different one this time.’

“ ‘Go ahead, Harve.’ “

George Mills could barely understand him.

“ ‘Once more?’

“ ‘Not that one again. Tell another.’

“ ‘Please, Dad, I promise.’

“ ‘All right, but this is the last time.’

“ ‘Can I tell it again?’

“ ‘Harve, you promised.’

“ ‘Claude Balls,’ he snickered. ‘Mister Completely,’ he roared. ‘Do I have to go to sleep now?’

“ ‘Of course not,’ I said. But I got into bed. I turned off the bedlamp.

“I could hear him giggling. ‘Will you tell me more jokes, Dad?’ Harve asked in the dark. ‘Please?’

“ ‘Wouldn’t you rather watch television?’

“ ‘I’d rather tell jokes.’

“ ‘All right,’ I told him, and waited till he’d calmed down. ‘Knock knock,’ I said.

“ ‘Who’s there?’ Harve asked me.

“Shit, George, you pass on what you can.”

Again Mills had difficulty understanding him.

“I said it’s the confidence,” Messenger said. “I’m crying for the confidence, all that Special Olympics confidence, all that short-range, small-time, short-change, small-scale, short-lived, short-shrift, small-potato, small-beer fucking confidence. I’m weeping for the confidence.”

“Hi, Lulu,” Messenger said, pecking her cheek. He’d taken to kissing her when he greeted her, giving her hugs. Mills knew Cornell was attracted to his wife. He’d seen him negotiate proximity, caught him watch her do housework, wash windows, scrub the floors on her knees. He touched her arm when he spoke, he patted her shoulder. Mills knew he had some vagrant fix on her, that she popped into his head, that he speculated about her as he soaped himself in showers, as he jerked off in bed, as he came in his wife. The Louise of Messenger’s imaginings who might finally actually have had a thing or two to do with the real Louise. She may have appealed to him as a woman of great sexual reserves, the farmer’s grown daughter, the unsatisfied wife. There was much talk of needs. Women spoke openly on radio call-in shows of their sexuality, asking the experts, showing, even proclaiming, a side of their natures that had not been known. Mature women, ordinary women, the women you saw in supermarkets, the women you saw in discount department stores, the women you saw in the streets. Not theatrical beings, not movie stars, glamor girls, chippies in bars. Not great beauties whose beauty was only some cautionary flag of the genital — Mills had always had his theories — but housewives, mothers and matrons you’d have thought had calmed down. It was this sense of her energies, undepleted and compounding, that attracted Cornell. He could probably have had her. She probably would have let him, though he doubted she had. He was glad of his grace.

“The horror, the horror, hey Mills?” Messenger greeted George cheerfully. And Mills had forgotten whose turn it was, who was up for today. Because they might almost have been in his repertoire now, his bumper crop company, his cache of familiars. They could have been in the inventory, the muster, the record. Not forebears but precursors. Not that fat trousseau of antecedents, that thick portfolio of kin, but a sort of harbinger. They might have been Millses, but cousins, say, in-laws this or that many times removed. Grateful for the information he could take in with no view of ever having to render it. And if he asked questions, how they were making out, what they were up to, he asked with an expansive detachment, a loose, uncommitted laze. As you might question a barber or talk on a train. He wasn’t indifferent. He was just glad of his grace.

“Well,” Messenger said, dropping down on the sofa, “it’s gone, the car’s gone. I was over there yesterday, I drove by today. It’s gone. The little puddle of litter has been swept away. I think something’s up.”

“Max and Ruth,” George said. “The ones who live in that car.” They might have been Millses. He was that certain of whom Messenger was speaking.

“You know they take a paper?” Messenger said. “I don’t know how they got the guy to agree to deliver it, but they take the paper. They keep up.”

“Are you going to tell us about people who live in a car, Cornell?” Louise asked.

“Max and Ruth? I don’t know a thing about Max and Ruth. No one does. Max and Ruth are a mystery. All I know is their car’s gone. Something’s happening. I’d bet on it. They keep up.”

Two days later he was back. “He’s in disgrace,” Messenger said pleasantly from his unreachable enhancement, the fleeting grace that made him kin.

“Sam Glazer,” George Mills said.

“Look,” Cornell said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff. I know George has an interest, that’s why I do it.”

“I’m interested, Cornell,” Louise said.

“No, I mean he has to make up his mind. Decide which way to go. It’s only rumors anyway. No one’s talking, least of all Sam. Even the Meals-on-Wheelers are in the dark about this one. It’s very hush-hush. You’d need a fucking clearance to get to the bottom of this thing. Actually, I wasn’t the first to notice the car was gone. Jenny Greener mentioned it last week. I was in the neighborhood so I checked it out. Hell, it’s all neighborhood anyway, ain’t it? Three or four blocks or the next county over. The way I figure it’s all neighborhood.”

Yes, Mills thought. Yes.

“Probably nothing will happen till the end of the term. But nobody’s talking. This is just, you know, dispatches, news from the front. Buzz and scuttlebutt. You’ll have to take it from there, George. You’d have to start from that premise.”

“What does he mean, George?” Louise said.

George hadn’t heard her. He was watching Cornell.

“What’s known for certain is that the chancellor gave this party for the board of trustees. What’s known for certain is the guest list. The trustees of course, the higher-ups in the administration — the provost and deans, a handful of chairmen from the important departments. All the wives and husbands. One or two coaches, even some students — the editor of the campus newspaper, the president of the student council, kids like that.”

“Harry Claunch Sr.,” George Mills said.

“You heard this story, George?” Messenger said.

“Go on,” Mills said, not just interested now but, as Messenger had said, with an interest.

“What’s known for certain is the menu.”

“The menu?”

“Melon and prosciutto,” Messenger said. “Salmon mousse. Sorbet. Provimi veal with artichoke sauce. Fiddlehead fern as a veggie and cold fresh lingonberry soup for dessert. Piesporter Gold Tropchen was the white wine, a ’7 °Cheval Blanc was the red. They didn’t sit down to dinner, you understand. This was buffet the servants brought round.”

“How do you know all this?” George Mills asked.

“The editor of the student paper ran an editorial. He won’t be asked back but what the hell, he’s graduating.”

“We used to serve fiddlehead,” Louise said. “We used to do salmon mousse.”

“In the school cafeteria?” Cornell said.

“Sure,” Louise said, “at the end of the month. We did all sorts of gourmet meals. It’s how we saved money. The dietician would spend thirty or forty dollars on this fancy food. She knew darn well the kids wouldn’t touch it.”

Messenger shook his head. “That’s truly astonishing, Lulu.”

“It was a trick of the trade,” Louise said modestly.

“What happened? What’s known for certain?” Mills asked impatiently.

“I’ve got George’s attention,” Messenger said.

“You’ve got my attention too, Cornell,” Louise said.

“I hope so, Lulu,” Messenger said. “All right,” he said. He turned to George Mills. “Nothing’s known for certain. I already told you.”

“The car is gone. Where’s it parked now?”

Messenger shrugged.

“Did you think to call the paper boy?”

“Hey,” Messenger said, “that’s an idea. No,” he said, “he delivers to a license plate. We’d never be able to track them down.”

“What’s all this about?” Louise asked.

“Sam Glazer’s been fired,” George Mills said. “He’s lost his job.”

“Offered to resign,” Messenger said.

“Asked to resign,” Mills said.

“You could be right. His friends say offered.”

Because they were bargaining now, haggling. Negotiating over fact like a rug in the bazaar.

“None of this came from that other paper boy,” Mills said, “the one that edits the student paper?”

“He published the guest list, he published the menu.”

“The kid sounds like a go-getter. Why do you suppose he’d stop there?”

“Shit, I don’t know, George. That’s not even important. They can come down pretty hard on these kids if they have to. What you have to understand is power, campus politics. Take my word for it, George. I’m the professor here.”

“I’m the butler,” Mills said. “No,” he said, “all you have to understand is that guest list. He wasn’t there.”

“Who?”

“The paper boy.”

“Of course he was there.”

“For the meat and the fish. For the soup for dessert. He wasn’t there then.”

“When?”

“When he was asked to resign. When he did whatever it was Claunch said he did and then nailed him for. Practically nobody was.”

“Some butler,” Messenger said. “No one may leave before the king. A lot you know.”

“The king gave the party. It was the king’s own house.”

“Yes?” Messenger said.

“Because it works in reverse. Because that’s protocol too. Ask, what’shisname, Grant.”

“So the students would have left first? Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s right,” Mills said.

“Then the chairmen and coaches?”

“That’s right.”

“Then the lesser deans. The dean of the night school, the dean of the—”

“That’s right.”

“No,” Messenger said. “The provost outranks him. According to your own protocols he’d have been on his way out before the provost, before the trustees and all those wives.”

“That’s right,” George Mills said. And felt as Wickland must have felt when he’d shown him his sister in the square in Cassadaga during their seance forty years earlier. As he’d felt himself when he’d shown Wickland Jack Sunshine’s father and the fourteen-year-old girl with the withered body of an old woman who’d given Jack Sunshine his height.

“But if he’d already gone home …”

“I didn’t say that,” George Mills said.

Messenger looked at him. “Been on his way out?”

“That’s right,” Mills said.

“All right,” Messenger said impatiently, “been on his way out. What difference does …” He stared at Mills.

“That’s right,” George said.

“You know you’ve got a nasty mind?” his friend said. “You know you’re one heavy-duty son of a bitch?”

“What?” Louise asked. “What? Are you following any of this, George?”

“Following? Shit, Lulu honey, he’s leading the goddamn band.” He put his arm around her shoulder. “Nothing like this is in the black buzz,” Messenger said. “I mean this isn’t the way they’re talking on the Rialto. What they’re saying up there is much milder. ‘Offered to resign’ is the worst of it.”

“What are they saying?”

“Well, it’s a joke really. It started when it got out that Max and Ruth had taken their car away from the front of his house.”

“Yes,” Mills said.

“Max and Ruth? You’re crazy. You actually think they were invited?”

“No,” George Mills said.

“They’d have been thrown out. They’d have called the cops on them if they dared crash that dinner party. And don’t tell me they helped serve. They don’t have uniforms. Even if they did, do you think the chancellor would let them? Run a downer on his guest by having those two characters get close enough to pass out actual food? People who live in a fucking jalopy, a beat-up, stale-aired old clunker that probably looked used when it came off the goddamn assembly line? Who take baths in the rest room sinks of gas stations? Moochers with freeload cookie crumbs in their scalp and bits of old poetry-reading cheese stuck to the creases of their clothing? With Gallo like mouthwash on their breath? Jesus, George, they’d be lucky if they got as far as the back door for a handout.”

“That’s right,” George said.

Messenger was stunned. “Is that what you think? Jesus, is that what you think?”

“Is what what he thinks?” Louise said.

“Your husband just said they were in the kitchen eating above-their-station leftovers when it happened. He says the chancellor’s residence is so huge that they had to have been shouting loud enough for Max and Ruth to hear every word all the way in the back of the house. He says that whatever it was they heard must have been so damning it scared even them off, that they just climbed into their house and drove it away and never returned.”

“He said that?”

“That’s right,” Mills said. “Yes,” he said, and turned back to George, “but how would they even know about that dinner party?”

George Mills smiled at him.

“All right,” Messenger said, “so he was dressed to kill, so he had on his best bib and tucker. All right, so it was the dinner party hour when they saw him come out of his front door and get into his car. All right, so they followed him. That still doesn’t explain what he was supposed to have done.”

“You never told me what they say he’s done.”

“Well they don’t know,” Messenger said. “The usual stuff when a dean offers his resignation.”

“Is told to resign.”

“You said ‘asked.’ ”

“You said ‘disgrace.’ ”

“All right, all right. That he’s made some mistakes, been highhanded with tenure, let good people get away, worked the buddy system, kept people on that he likes, allowed salary discrepancies between favored and unfavored departments to get out of hand, not been aggressive enough raiding other schools, made too many enemies.”

“Has he done these things?”

“I don’t know. Some. Any dean does some. It’s not an easy job. Sam’s record is as good as most. He’s only been in the job a year. He wouldn’t have had time to do all of them.”

“He lost his wife,” Mills said. “They’re gentlemen. They wouldn’t have been shouting if he had.”

“They’re princes of industry,” Messenger said. “Soft-spoken guys.”

“That’s right,” Mills said. “They’d have had to be outraged.”

“It was the last week of August for God’s sake. A mild, beautiful night.”

“That’s right.”

“He wouldn’t have had a topcoat with him. He wouldn’t have had a raincoat. So what did he put it in? Tell me that.”

George Mills looked disgusted.

“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on,” Louise said.

“Damn it, Lulu,” Messenger said, “haven’t you heard a word he’s been saying? Your husband thinks Sam is a thief.”

“He likes souvenirs.”

“What do you suppose it was?”

“I don’t know. Houses like that,” Mills said dreamily, “it could be almost anything. Something with the university’s crest, I suppose. A slim gold lighter. A pen. A letter opener. A paperweight or ashtray. Sugar tongs. Stationery even. Anything.”

“And Claunch fingered him?”

“He never took his eyes off him,” George Mills said. “He counted his drinks. He toted up the hors d’œuvres he ate.”

“That’s right,” Messenger said.

“He hates him.”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about the will, Cornell.”

“Jesus, George,” Messenger said, “I have some loyalties here. I—”

And that’s when Mills chose to play his China card. He stormed out of the house.

Leaving Louise and Messenger staring after him on the couch next to each other.

Because it wasn’t a will she signed in Mexico but an inter vivos trust. Because she’d left no will. Because if she had there’d have been an instrument for the widower to set aside, renounce, by simply filing a paper, a paper, not even anything fine-sounding as an instrument. He could have written it on a scratch pad, on the back of his marriage license, and been awarded his widower’s aliquot third. It was that inter vivos trust. Because if she left no will and had had the grace or just simple good conjugal sportsmanship to die intestate he wouldn’t even have had to trouble himself about the scratch pad. Half the hereditament would have come to him by sheer right of descent and succession. Half, not a third. It was the numbers, it was the arithmetic.

Cornell figured Sam figured it had to be enmity. She was essentially a lazy woman. Cornell figured Sam figured she was jealous of his health. Hadn’t it been held up to him on more than one occasion not that he was free of cancer while she carried hers to term like some malignant pregnancy, but that he’d been sane the whole eleven years she’d been nuts? So it had to be enmity. She was lazy. Intestacy wouldn’t have caused her to lift a finger. But there were those numbers to deal with, the difference between that half and that third she was screwing him out of by lifting the finger, by painfully crabbing all her suffering fingers around the uncongenial Mexican motel pen and laboriously writing out the inter vivos trust that either her father or brother — Cornell figured Sam figured — had dictated to her over the phone and that left everything to the girls with Harry as trustee, and that she had to be at pains just to get the handwriting right, probably working from actual memory to recall the once free-flowing cursive, the idiosyncratic flights and loops of her own signature.

“I feel sorry for the guy,” Cornell told Mills on the telephone. (He hadn’t seen him since the night George had walked out of his home leaving Messenger alone with his wife.)

“Yes?”

“She put him through hoops. The hoops were on fire. There were prenuptial agreements, did you know that?”

“Prenuptial agreements,” George Mills said evenly.

“He didn’t have a pot to piss in. What was he? Some poor graduate student. Maybe he had a typewriter and a ream of paper to do his assignments on. Maybe he had a few dollars’ worth of dictionaries and a handful of those composition manuals and examination copies they hand out to TA’s to look over.

“The poor bastard was marrying big bucks. I told you. There were prenuptial agreements. He had to sign to go the distance. If the marriage broke up before they got through the first fifteen years he wouldn’t get a penny. He was on probation, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes,” George Mills said.

“They were married seventeen years,” Messenger said. “She did him anyway.”

“Yes,” George Mills said. He sounded distant even to himself. “What does he have to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“To fight it. To break the trust.”

“I don’t know, George. I’m no lawyer.”

“Victor’s a lawyer,” George Mills said. “Find out. Call me back.”

“He says he’s got three ways to go,” Messenger said when he called back the next day. “If he can prove fraud, undue influence or mental incapacity.”

“There was no undue influence,” George Mills said.

“No,” Messenger said slyly, “but there may have been fraud.”

“I don’t see it,” Mills said.

“The prenuptial agreement, the numbers. If she left everything to the girls in a will he could set aside, he’d have taken a third, half if she left no will at all. He thinks it could be fraud because she didn’t leave him anything to set aside. Not a bad will or a nonwill either. There was malice and intent. He served more than his time, those fifteen-year articles of apprenticeship. Those fifteen-year articles of apprenticeship and then some. He was entitled to his expectations.”

“Thank you for your trouble,” he said. “She was crazy,” George Mills said flatly.

“It’s good I’m enhanced,” Messenger said. “I don’t owe you shit. I never fucked your wife.”

“I know that,” George Mills said. “All you ever did was want to.”

Messenger called again instead of coming over.

“You might as well have all the facts,” he said.

“Yes?” George Mills said.

“Grant’s dead.”

“Mr. Glazer?” Mills said.

“Who’s this?”

“George Mills,” George Mills said.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“Yes?”

“It’s my back, sir. I’m afraid what might happen to it this winter.”

“Yes?”

“If that job in buildings and grounds is still open, I wouldn’t be out in the weather.”

“I’m not sure it’s available,” Sam Glazer said.

“That’s too bad,” Mills said. “Oh, Mr. Glazer?”

“What?”

“That senior partner called. After I spoke to you last? But I’m doing just what you said.”

“Oh?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good.”

“I’m keeping an open mind.”

“Look,” Sam Glazer said, “I want to be frank.”

“Sure,” George Mills said, “me too. Absolutely.”

“I’d be looking around for something else if I were you.”

“I’m hanging in there,” Mills said, hoarsely rushing the message into the mouthpiece. But at the other end the line had already gone dead.

He decided he would go in person. He wore his suit, the one he had worn to the funeral. He was going to take a hat he could hold in his hands but decided that would be too much. A receptionist passed his name in and in five minutes a young man Mills had never seen came out to greet him. The young man walked briskly over to where George was seated on the edge of a deep leather couch and stuck out his hand. Mills started to rise, but by pushing his handshake at him the young man managed to keep George off balance and shoved him further back into the couch.

“Good to meet you, sir,” the young man said. “What can I do for you?” George Mills realized that the kid meant for him to state his business there in the outer office. He hesitated and the young man’s smile became even wider. He’s going to sit down next to me, George Mills thought. That’s what happened. The young lawyer leaned toward him and lowered his voice. “They’ve painted my office,” he said. “It’s a relief to get away from those fumes for a minute.” Mills smelled cologne. The receptionist smiled.

“I asked to see your boss,” George Mills said. “My business is with your boss.”

“Hey, pal, give me a break,” the kid said. “Harvard ’80, editor of the Law Review, two summers clerking at the Supreme Court. Why do you want to make me feel so bad? Don’t you think I can handle it?” The receptionist was grinning.

“This isn’t a law thing,” George Mills said. “It’s about a car.”

The young man looked at the receptionist, who shook her head.

“This is the automobile department,” the kid said.

“Give him a message,” Mills said, speaking past the young man to the receptionist huskily. “Tell him the price of the Buick Special is negotiable.”

“I’ll let him know that, George,” the receptionist said.

“Tell him,” and now he was standing, “tell him I just heard about the terrible tragedy and …”

“The terrible tragedy, George?” the receptionist said.

“Grant’s death,” George Mills said.

The receptionist and the guy exchanged puzzled looks.

“Ask him to extend my condolences to the Claunches, and to tell Mr. Claunch Sr. that if there’s anything I can do …” But he couldn’t finish. He walked past the snotnose kid and the girl at the desk and out the suite into the hall.

It was a good building but not a new one. An operator was still required to drive the elevator. He wore a uniform like a doorman’s but much more subtle. He called George “sir” and greeted many of the passengers personally as they got on at their floors. About George’s age, his name was George too, and several passengers passed the time of day with him while they descended.

“How’s it going, George?” a tall gentleman said. “Your wife’s cold any better?”

“She’s fine, Mr. Brooks.”

“Get that yard work done this weekend?”

“No ma’am, Miss Livingston,” the elevator operator said. “My brother-in-law never brought my mower back.”

“How were those seats, George?”

“Considerably better than the Cardinals, Judge.”

The judge chuckled. “I think I can get two more for you for the Dallas game.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“George, if you see Mr. Reynolds would you hand him this for me? The mailman left it in our office by mistake.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Kafken.” They were at the lobby floor. “All you folks have a fine lunch now, hear?” the elevator operator said. “Anything wrong, sir?” he asked the sobbing George Mills.

“Allergies,” Mills said, and blew his grief and envy into his handkerchief.

He called Claunch directly. He didn’t beat around the bush. He asked if the lawyers had passed on his message.

“What message was that?”

Mills told him.

“Oh, that message.” The old man laughed.

He was just wondering, Mills said, if Mr. Claunch was pressed for good, loyal help at the compound till he could find a suitable replacement for Grant.

“Someone to play with the trains?”

“To take over his duties,” Mills said softly.

“Well,” he said, “my sister normally hires the staff.”

It was just that he’d gotten along so well with Mrs. Glazer, Mills said, had been so close to her that last month, had grown so fond of her and respected her so much. He said he felt he knew the family almost as well as he knew the daughter.

He tried to say the rest of it lightly as he could. He realized, he said, that it wasn’t usually the place of the employee to furnish the employer with “character references,” but his feelings about Mrs. Glazer were so strong that he’d be happy to testify to them.

“You mean swear an affidavit?”

“If that’s what’s required.”

“Uh huh,” Claunch said. “I already got seven hundred seventy thousand dollars in tax-deductible affidavits lying around the house signed by a psychiatrist. I don’t think I need another one. Everyone knows what Judy was. Anything else I can do for you, Mr. Mills?”

Look, George Mills, he knew no one owed him anything, that he’d been paid well for his services, but his back was acting up, he was getting on, feeling his age. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to horse furniture around. Would Claunch help him?

“You want me to move furniture?”

“I want you to get me a job as an elevator operator in one of your buildings.”

“Why?”

“I think it might be interesting work. You get to know all those people. They give you tickets to the games. You get to exchange the time of day with them. There’s probably pretty fair money in it. Tips, gifts at Christmas. I never thought about it before. It’s not the loftiest goal in the world, but I think it’s something I’d enjoy doing.”

Claunch considered for a moment. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so. I don’t want to help you. Tell you what though,” he added amiably, “hold on to the job you got. Because if you lose it you won’t be collecting any unemployment insurance. Not in this state you won’t. You’re still a few years away from Social Security, am I right?”

“Yes,” George Mills said.

“That’s good,” Claunch said. “Because I’m making a note. I’m having you jerked off the Social Security rolls.”

“Can you do that?” George Mills asked. “Why?”

“Sure I can do it. As to why, I don’t know. You’re a guy gets a kick out of other men’s power. Maybe I’m doing you a favor by showing you mine. Now don’t bother me again. Stop calling my lawyers. There’s unsolved capital crimes. You bother me or my people I’ll see to it you get convicted of some of them. Nice to hear from you.”

Laglichio said he was just the man he wanted to see. He was starting a new service he said. Federal law required that trucks that hauled food be thoroughly scrubbed down before a new load could be placed in them.

“It’s this nuisance, make-work, government-on-our-backs sort of thing, but shit, kid, the job’s yours if you want it. I’d kind of like to see you in the crew.”

“The crew,” George Mills said.

“The bucket brigade in the trailer,” Laglichio said.

“And the pay?”

“Every bit as good as you make right now.”

“I see,” George Mills said.

“Money isn’t everything. There are other advantages,” Laglichio said.

“Yes?”

“The niggers would see your white ass and think you’re foreman. I wouldn’t tell them otherwise, George,” Laglichio said. “Look,” he said, “it’s up to you what you do with your life.”

Messenger phoned. “It was this roll of fast color film they do in Japan,” he said. “It was this roll of super fast film he brought back with him. It’s not on the market here in the States. It retails for maybe three or four dollars,” he said, something manic in the edge of his voice. “Talk about your mess of pottage, hey Mills? The horror, the horror, huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well you were wrong,” Messenger said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well it wasn’t any gold goddamn lighter, it wasn’t any pen-and-pencil set. He didn’t touch the place settings. He never stole the silver.”

“I don’t—”

“It was film,” he said. “It wasn’t any damn souvenir. It didn’t have any damn royal crest on it. That was just your idea. It was this roll of fast film with an ASA rating of several thousand. On a cloudy day you take sharp color pictures of the dark side of the moon or something.”

“He stole the chancellor’s film?”

“No,” Messenger said. “That was your idea too. It was Claunch, Sr.’s film. He was passing it around. He saw Sam pocket it.”

“That’s why he was shouting!” Mills said, everything clear to him. “The son of a bitch set him up!”

“No,” Messenger said, “that’s your idea too. What is he, a mastermind? How could he know Sam would slip the roll of film into his pocket? You’re one of these conspiracy suckers, Mills. Things happen, that’s all. This was just simple, honest, innocent rich man’s show and tell. And Sam, Sam was so mad at how they’d been treating him he pulled this dumb kid’s trick. It wasn’t even theft. It was vandalism.”

“He was caught red-handed. They were shouting. They made him resign.”

“Yeah, well,” Messenger said, “they worked it out.”

“The trust,” George Mills said.

“The works,” Messenger said gleefully. “The car is back.”

“It’s Harve,” he said when he phoned again.

“What is it?” Mills asked. “Has something happened to your son?”

“Who is it?” Louise asked. “Is it Cornell?”

Mills nodded. “It’s his kid,” he told her.

“Oh my God,” Louise said, “what happened?”

“No, no,” Messenger said. “Tell her it’s all right.”

“What is it, George?” Louise asked.

“I don’t know,” George Mills said. “He says it’s all right.”

Messenger was laughing and talking at once. Mills could barely understand him.

“But he says he’ll be all right?” Louise said.

Mills handed his wife the telephone. “You talk to him. I can’t carry on two conversations at once.”

“Cornell, it’s Lulu,” she said. “George tells me Harve’s going to be all right. That’s the important thing. Listen,” she said, “kids that age have incredible powers of recovery. I saw it all the time in the lunchroom. They’d bang their heads open on the slippery floors, get into fights. A few days later they were completely — What? Oh,” she said. “—Oh. — Oh.”

“What?” George Mills said. “What?”

Louise looked at him crossly and shook her head. She put her finger to her lips. “What? What’s that, Cornell? Oh,” she said smiling, and began to nod. George Mills watched her nod and smile into the telephone. Messenger might have been courting her. She looked seductive, almost coy. “That’s wonderful,” she said at last. “I certainly will.” She replaced the phone.

“What?” George Mills said. “What?”

“It was the alphabet,” she said.

“The alphabet,” Mills repeated. “The kid’s learned the alphabet.”

“That’s just it,” she said, “he never did.”

“That’s what’s so wonderful?”

“Well yes,” she said, “in a way. I mean they didn’t know he hadn’t learned it. He sang that song when he was a little kid.”

“What song?”

“You know,” she said. Louise started to sing. “ ‘ABCDEFG, HIJKLMNOP.’ You know,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” George Mills said.

“I mean Cornell says that was practically his favorite song when he was a kid, so naturally they assumed …They didn’t know he didn’t understand the connection between the sounds and the letters. Now they think that when they taught it to the kids in preschool that must have been the month he had strep throat. And that when they reviewed it in kindergarten that was when he had his tonsils out.” Mills stared at her. “They just caught it,” she said. “After all those years. Can you imagine? They just caught it.”

“Was he high?” Mills asked.

“Cornell? No. I can tell.”

“You can?”

“A woman knows,” his wife said.

“I see.”

“He’s been sight reading,” Louise said. “All these years. He’s been sight reading. Do you know how hard that is? Cornell says it’s as if we were set down in Japan or Russia or anywhere else they have those peculiar alphabets, and could read only the words we’d had some experience with. Stop signs or the word for ‘bakery’ if we see cakes in the window.”

George Mills nodded.

“Once they caught it they were able to do something about it. He learned it in a day and a half. You know Cornell says he’s been through two readers this week? They’re color-coded. He finished the orange, he finished the red. He starts on the blue one, Let’s Read five, tomorrow. Cornell says it’s confidence. Isn’t it queer, George? Isn’t it queer how things work out?”

Messenger dropped in again at the house. He had phoned first to make sure that George would be home. “You don’t have to phone,” Mills told him at the door. “Just come when you feel like. I acted a little crazy is all.”

“No no,” Messenger said. “That’s all right. I want to see the both of you.”

“You want something to eat? Lulu’s fixing lunch.”

“How’s the back?”

George shrugged. “Comes and goes. Comes and comes, comes and stays. You know how it is. It acted up some today so I knocked off early.”

Messenger nodded.

“Say, that’s great news about the kid,” Mills said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”

“Thanks,” Messenger said. He smiled.

Louise came into the living room carrying a tray. “Oh hi, Cornell.”

“Louise,” Cornell said.

“I thought it was you. It’s good to see you again. I opened a large can of Spaghetti-O’s.”

“You’ll love it,” George Mills said.

“No, you two go ahead. I’m not much on Italian cuisine.”

“Hey,” George Mills said, “ain’t you enhanced?”

“Me?” Messenger said. “No.” He looked embarrassed.

“I’ll fix you a sandwich,” Louise said.

“No thanks, Louise. I’m not very hungry.”

“What’s new?” George asked. “Are Max and Ruth still parked in front of the dean’s house?”

“Well, for the time being,” Messenger said. “Jenny Greener told them they’ll have to find someplace else.”

“Jenny Greener?”

“When she moves in with Sam. When they’re married next month.”

“Jenny Greener and Sam?”

“It surprised all of us,” Messenger said.

“Jesus,” Mills said, “your friend must be devastated.”

“Losey?”

“The doctor, the paste asshole. Yeah, Losey.”

“No, he’s taking it very well.”

“He is?”

“Very well.”

“I thought he loved her so much.”

“He loved her grade point, he loved her blueprints.”

“Well still,” George Mills said.

“She dropped out,” Messenger said.

“She dropped out of school? Nora?”

“Jenny Greener. Sam says she felt guilty.”

“Guilty? About the love affair.”

“Well, that too, I suppose. But mostly about Nora. Going to school, she couldn’t devote enough time to Nora.”

“Her own schoolwork came first. Even Losey said so.”

“That’s right. Losey said so. Jenny didn’t feel right about that.”

“This isn’t clear.”

“They’re best friends. She wasn’t satisfied just to get Nora off academic probation. Now she’s able to spend more time with her. Losey doesn’t mind. Already there’s been incredible improvement. She’s shown Nora certain tricks. Well, she says they’re tricks. But you know? Nora has as much to do with it as anyone. She’s making tremendous strides. Jenny’s dropping out must really have motivated her.”

“But what a sacrifice,” George Mills said, shaking his head. “A brilliant career down the drain.”

“Down the drain?” Messenger said. “No, I don’t think so. She’s, what, seven or eight years younger than Nora? When Nora graduates next semester Jenny can just pick up where she left off.”

“She’ll have been out of school a year.”

“Sure. Getting a fresh slant on things. With the pressure off she’s come up with all sorts of new ideas. Helping Nora, she’s been able to rethink basic principles. Sam says her concepts are better than ever.”

“I see,” Mills said.

“She’s never been happier,” Messenger said.

“Jenny.”

“Jenny of course. The business with Losey only confused her. She says Sam’s the only man she’s ever really loved. So Jenny, too, of course. And Sam. Sam’s a new man. With the dean thing settled and Jenny in his life he looks fifteen years younger. But Nora. Nora too. She’s quite proud of herself. You can guess how her husband must feel.”

“Losing a genius?”

“I told you. The man’s a surgeon. He fixed up his marriage. Jenny would only have been a transplant. But Nora, Nora’s a whole new scientific reconstruction. Some from-scratch Galatea.”

“It must be tough on the kids,” George Mills said, “their daddy taking a new wife so soon after their mother died.”

“Oh,” he said, “Sam’s kids. That’s a whole other story. Gee,” he said, glancing at his watch, “I’ve got to run. Nice to see you, Louise. George, I hope your back feels better.”

“That’s a kick in the ass about Ruth and Max!” Mills shouted after him. “Getting booted into traffic!”

George Mills was in bed. Again Messenger had phoned first. Louise had taken the call. “Is he high?” Louise shook her head. “Let me get dressed first,” Mills said.

Messenger rapped lightly on the closed bedroom door.

“Jesus,” Mills whispered.

“Come in, Cornell,” Louise said.

“Hello,” Cornell said. “Louise said you were indisposed. There were a couple of extra trays. I brought them over for your lunches.”

“We’ve eaten our lunches,” Mills said.

“Sure,” Messenger said. “You can warm them for dinner.”

“That’s sweet, Cornell,” Louise said.

Messenger pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. “You were right,” he said. “They were upset. At least Milly was. Mary too, I suppose, but Milly made the rumpus. She called her grandfather. She’s the one who caught them in bed together.”

“Really?” George Mills said. “At her age that sort of thing can get to you for life.”

“When Milly told him what happened, Claunch did some hard thinking.”

“This is the part that gets me,” Louise said. “Oh,” she said, “I heard some of this on the phone.”

“He’d been squeezing him pretty hard. Sam written off by his wife, by the family. Having to claim Judy was nuts, having to claim fraud because of those prenuptial agreements he’d lived up to to the letter of the law. The incident at the chancellor’s dinner party, Claunch calling him out in front of all those people, screaming for his resignation over a three-dollar roll of film.

“When Milly told him she caught him screwing some schoolgirl — Jenny’s textbooks were at the foot of the bed — Claunch figured Sam was determined to disgrace them, get back at him and the rest of the family by forcing them to step in and take the girls away from him too.”

“Is that what he’s up to?” Mills said, brightening.

“That’s what Claunch thought he was up to. It was the last thing Claunch wanted. He’s not a young man, after all. He hadn’t had all that much luck with his own daughter. The idea of two adolescent girls around the place, one of them not the most stable kid in the world — Well, you can imagine. That’s when he knew they’d have to sort things out. That’s when he thought he had to buy him off. He tore up the resignation himself. He had his son reassign his trusteeship to Sam.”

“Still,” George Mills said, “stuck with a stepmother they never bargained for.”

“This is the part that gets me,” Louise said.

“But they did bargain for her,” Messenger said. “At least Milly did.”

“Milly?”

“Because Milly’s the respectable one,” Messenger said. “You saw her, Mills. The day of the funeral. You saw how she acted.”

Mills recalled the little girl conducting them on the tour of Claunch’s home, then later, alone, sitting well back in the trains, prim as a spinster.

“Because Milly’s the respectable one,” Messenger repeated. “She always has been. She couldn’t abide her father’s disgrace. She couldn’t stand it that he’d taken a mistress. She couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t going to have money. She couldn’t stand it that he wasn’t going to be dean. That he thought of challenging her mother’s sanity in a court of law. If Claunch did some hard thinking it was about ideas Milly herself had put in his head.

“Because once everything was restored to him it was all right again. She’s the one who actually spoke to them.”

“Spoke to them,” George Mills said.

“Well questioned them.”

“Questioned them.”

“Well lectured them then. About their intentions. She told Jenny that what she was doing was wrong, her father that if he had to have a woman they’d all be better off if he married her. She’s the one who set the date.”

“Now her life’s okey-dokey,” George Mills said.

“Milly’s happy as a clam, George,” Messenger said pleasantly.

“Sure,” Mills said.

“She’s throwing the shower.”

“I see.”

“She’s organized the wedding. She’s worked out the arrangements, she’s made out the guest list. She hasn’t decided if the bride should wear white. She’s leaning toward white but she hasn’t decided.”

“What about the other one?” George asked hopelessly. “What about Mary?”

“George, you wouldn’t recognize her.”

“She’s a changed person,” Mills said.

“You remember how oversexed she used to be?”

“Used to be,” the straight man said.

“How she’d doodle all this really raunchy stuff in her school-books, put it all around her separators like a kind of embroidery, work it into her biology papers so that even her teachers couldn’t tell if she were a scientist or kinky?”

“This is the part that gets me,” George Mills said.

“She started sketching the stuff on her bedroom walls.”

“Fouled her own nest, did she?”

“Jenny saw it. Well she was meant to. Mary left her books all over the place. She never bothered to shut her bedroom door.”

“It was a cry for help,” George Mills said.

Messenger looked at him. “Well it was,” he said. “I mean there’s Milly and Sam yelling their heads off, shouting how sick she was, how a kid her age ought to get her head up out of the gutter. Then Jenny came along. Jenny has a trained eye, you know. You’ll never guess what happened. Jenny thinks she’s terrific, that she’s this anatomical savant or something. I mean no one noticed how really good the kid was till Jenny saw what she was up to. You know what she did when she first saw the stuff?”

“What did she do?”

“Stripped for the kid. Right then and there. Took off her dress, pulled down her panties, ripped off her bra. ‘Draw me,’ she told her. ‘Get all my details.’

“She tried to get her enrolled in a life class at the university but they’ve got this rule that no one under sixteen—”

“Get on with it,” Mills said.

“She’s having her own show. When she gets a few more drawings together she’s having a show at this really important gallery. She draws her boyfriend, the kid she used to fuck. She poses him straining on the pot, she poses him whacking off. Sam shows them around, the sketches. The kid doesn’t mind. Nora’s agreed to pose for her, Jenny has. Even Sam.”

“Her father? Her father poses for her?”

“Even her sister,” Messenger said. “Even Milly. Even the respectable one.”

“Isn’t it queer, George?” Louise asked. “Isn’t it queer how life works out?”

“My back is killing me,” George Mills said. “Why are you telling me this stuff?”

“Because,” Messenger said. “Because it is queer how life works out. And because,” he said, “because I’m the epilogue man, George!” He rose to go, turned at the door to their bedroom. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t guess I’ll be dropping by anymore. I won’t be in the neighborhood much. I’ve given up my Meals-on-Wheels route.”

“Oh,” Louise said, “we’ll miss you, Cornell.”

“I turned it over to Max and Ruth. They’ve got a car. Meals-on-Wheels will pay for their gas. They qualify for free meals themselves. Meals-on-Wheels will provide them.”

Mills sprang out of bed and raced toward Messenger. Louise had to hold him. She forced her husband back to his bed, his feet sliding backward on the bare floor. He waved his raised fist at Cornell, who stood his ground in the doorway.

“They jumped at the chance,” Messenger said calmly. “It turns out they never really liked cheese. It turns out cookies were a stopgap. It turns out they don’t care much for poetry. It turns out lectures bore them. It turns out they’ve tin ears and won’t even miss the recitals.”

It turned out it was not the last time he was to hear Messenger’s news. He saw him again about a week later. Louise was in bed with a sore throat and George had stopped off at a supermarket to pick up some things for their dinner — canned soup, a frozen pizza. It was not one of the places they usually shopped. Mills was in the express lane waiting to be checked out. The store had installed scanners to read the universal product code stamped on the labels and packages like cramped, alternating thicknesses of wood grain in cross section, or marks on rulers, or passages of spectography, or like boxes of pencils, like awning, like pin stripes on shirts. The lines and numbers could have been ciphers, hieroglyphs, but when the checkout girl brushed the mysterious little blocks of code across a glass plate, a vaguely digital readout appeared in a banner like a red headline above the customer’s head. It registered the name of the item, the quantity, its cost. Mills had never seen the machine operate before. He had no idea how it worked and was so absorbed that at first he was unaware that someone was talking to him, saying his name. It was Messenger.

“I was going to call you,” he said. “There’s some loose ends to tie up.”

“Sure,” Mills said.

“The name Albert Reece mean anything to you?”

“Arthur Reece?” Mills said absently. He wasn’t paying close attention. A woman he thought he recognized from the neighborhood had come into the supermarket. She wore a man’s loose-fitting khaki trousers and a tan jacket. She wore a fedora and carried a big leather drawstring bag. A heavy key ring on a retractable steel cord hung from her belt loop.

“Albert Reece. One of the Meals-on-Wheelers. A sour-hearted old bastard. I told you about him.”

The woman had taken the key ring and stretched it out as far as it would go. She slipped a key into a lock in the copy machine at the front of the store, turned the key and pulled out the cash drawer where the change collected. She dumped the money into the bag. When she replaced the drawer she took a rag and a bottle of Windex from her jacket pocket and proceeded to polish the glass facing plate where the customers set the originals they wanted copied.

“Sure, I told you about him,” Messenger said.

“Probably,” Mills said. “You told me about everyone else.”

“He won a hundred thousand dollars,” Messenger said. “He’s going to be on the six o’clock news.”

“A hundred thousand dollars?”

“In one of those contests. Some sweepstakes thing. Reader’s Digest, Publishers’ Clearing House — something. He was so excited I couldn’t get it straight.”

The woman was cleaning the money out of the bubble gum machines, the dime and twenty-five and fifty-cent candy and toy vending machines with their miniature NFL helmets and tiny major league baseball caps folded like fetuses inside their clear globes. She took about twenty dollars from the plastic pony. She owns them, he thought. She owns them, they’re hers. She makes a fortune. I’ll be, he thought.

“He says he’s going to buy a house with it,” Messenger said, “that any Meals-on-Wheelers on his route who want to can move in and live with him.”

“I’ll be,” Mills said.

“How do you like that?” Messenger said.

“I’ll be.” But he was staring at the woman from the neighborhood who owned the machines. She was talking to a man Mills guessed was the manager, who was checking the money with her from her drawstring bag and who accepted a percentage of the receipts from the machines and wrote out a check to her in exchange for the rest of the coins.

And that still wasn’t the last time. The last time was a few days later. Messenger phoned.

“Did you see him?” Messenger asked. “On TV? Did you see him?”

“Yes.”

“Did I lie?”

“No.” He could barely speak.

“Well there’s something else,” Messenger said.

“Yes.”

“Remember I told you about that story I wrote? The only one I ever published in The New Yorker? The one Amos Ropeblatt took out an option on? That he’s been renewing every year for eleven or twelve years now for five hundred dollars a year?”

“Yes,” Mills said.

“Well he bought it!” Messenger said. “The son of a bitch actually bought it. They’re actually going to make the movie.”

“That’s fine,” George Mills said. “Congratulations.”

“How do you like that?” Messenger said. “How do you like the way things work out? How do you like this idyll vision, this epithalamion style? How do you like it the game ain’t over till the last man is out? How do you like it you can dig for balm? That there’s balm and joy mines, great fucking mother lodes of bower and elysian amenity? How do you like deus ex machina? How do you like it every cloud has a silver lining? What do you make of God’s pastoral heart? How do you like it there’s pots of gold at the end of rainbows and you can’t keep a good man down? How do you like it ships come in, and life is just a bowl of cherries? How do you like it it isn’t raining rain you know, it’s raining violets? What do you make of it every time I hear a newborn baby cry or see the sky then I know why I believe?”

“Audrey,” George Mills said.

“What’s that?”

“Audrey,” he said. “Audrey Binder. Victor’s wife. In the hospital. With the kid who can’t throw. Audrey. Whose shoelaces have to be signed for. Who cries in her sleep. Audrey. Who chews her IV. Audrey! Audrey!”

“Audrey?”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“What?”

“Audrey’s fine. Audrey’s all better.”

“All better,” Mills said.

“Sure,” Messenger said. “She’s out of the loony bin. Audrey’s home.”

“Just like that,” George Mills said. “She’s all better.”

“Sure,” Messenger said. “All the happy endings. All the good news. She snapped out of it. She just cheered right up when she heard,” Messenger said. “Oh yeah,” Messenger said, “the horror, the horror, hey Mills?”

2

About a year after he had become convinced of his salvation George Mills delivered his sermon to the hundred or so people in Coule’s congregation at Virginia Avenue Baptist.

They had not consulted about a date. One Sunday morning in September Mills had simply appeared and, after Coule led them through the formal parts of the service — the opening prayer, some announcements, a hymn, the offering, another hymn, some prayers for the sick, and a scripture — the preacher seemed suddenly to spot Mills among the congregation and, probably without their knowing anything of the impromptu circumstances, so seamless was his conduct — this is how he must have done it on television, George Mills thought, told to hurry it along or to stretch by his director — introduced George, and invited him to come up to the pulpit.

Brother Mills — it was Coule’s term — eased past his wife’s knees and came down the aisle to where the big preacher stood behind his deconsecrated lectern. Coule shook Mills’s hand and retired to an empty chair on the platform.

“I’m a little nervous,” he began, surprised by the amplification of his voice when he spoke. It was the first time he had ever heard the vaguely metallic sound of his amplified voice, and for just a moment he thought that perhaps his voice was going out over the radio or was somehow being beamed to other churches.

“I’m here to testify,” he said. And looked out over the congregation as if he might almost be searching for someone in particular, some latecomer yet to arrive. He recognized a handful of neighbors. They smiled their encouragement at him, as did others he did not recognize, raising some Sunday morning umbrella of benevolence and good will, inviting him to step in under it, kindhearted and tender, well meaning and fraternal as hippies. But he was not encouraged. Indeed, he had a sad sense of intricacy. He told them that. He told them he supposed that would be his text.

And started, for reasons that were also intricate and sad, to tell them a story about charity. “I used to watch the telethons,” he said. “One of the first to call and make my pledge when the poster kid pled. One time — it was the Jerry Lewis, Muscular Dystrophy — I phoned in and got to speak to Ed McMahon. Someone told me to turn down my set, Big Ed wanted to speak to me on the air. I’d gone into the bedroom to phone. Our TV’s in the living room. I couldn’t hear it. Before I understood what was happening Ed McMahon was already talking to me. He asked my name and I told him. ‘I want to pledge five dollars,’ I said.

“ ‘Where are you calling from, Mr. Mills?’

“ ‘St. Louis. I called the number at the bottom of the screen. I thought it was a local call.’

“ ‘They patched you through to Vegas. Jerry and I want to find out what gets the average viewer involved enough to get off the dime. What was it with you, Mr. Mills? Can you tell us?’

“I told him it was the kid.

“ ‘Stu? Great kid, isn’t he?’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said.

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘I want to pledge five dollars. Do you take my name and address?’

“ ‘One of our lovely volunteers will do that.’

“Then, forgetting I was on the air, and because I had someone on the phone who probably knew, I asked what had happened to the little girl, how she was coming along, last year’s poster child. Mr. McMahon was embarrassed. He told me she’d died.

“My wife was watching in the living room. She’d seen it all. Ed McMahon had been stunned, she told me. There were tears in his eyes. It was an affecting moment, she said.

“I never sent in my five dollars, I never watched another telethon.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. It hadn’t anything to do with the sad intricacy of things. I’m grandstanding, he thought. I’m not in the right place, he thought. He should be seated in the congregation. He shouldn’t have come. He glanced at Louise, who remembered the story and seemed to nod in agreeable confirmation. He knew she was pleased to have made it into his anecdote. George wanted to cry.

Then he tried to tell them who he was, how there had been a George Mills since the time of the First Crusade. He told them about the curse they lived under, the thousand years of blue collar blood. He told about the Millses’ odd orphanhood, their queer deprivation of relation.

“I mean Coule called me ‘brother.’ That’s the last name we go by. We don’t have brothers. We’re brothered to fathers, brothered to sons.”

He told them of their alliances, their long, strange allegiance to class.

He couldn’t explain it, he said.

He knew he was failing, knew that if Coule were sitting where he could see him he would not see the God panic in his eyes he put so much stock in. And though he could not see the preacher either, he knew that if he could, he would see himself bathed in waves of tolerance, some queer smug tide of forgiveness. Not love, not even gloating, but a sort of neutral recognition of his, of all failure, a patience with it, good temper, composure, even acquiescence, even compliance.

And now he stood apart from his inability to deliver, cool as the preacher. Whatever of urgency or nervousness he’d felt had dissipated and he felt he could go on forever, like each Mills before him, filibustering his life. He could say anything to them, tell them anything.

“Years ago,” he said, “I saw the double helix. I saw it thrashing around on the floor of the Delgado Ballroom refracted from the light of a chandelier. I didn’t know what it was. I never followed through. I recognized it many years later in a photograph.

“I don’t know anything. I mean I drank it for years but I can’t tell you what Ovaltine is. What is Ovaltine? Why is it good for us?”

He listened for Coule to clear his throat, shift in his chair, offer some signal that enough was enough. Coule was silent. They all were.

From time to time his eyes swept the congregation. From time to time he searched the church. He did this covertly, like an agent, like an actor peering out from behind a curtain examining the house. He couldn’t himself have said what he was looking for. Not old Messenger Merlin, the epilogue man. He’d broken with Messenger, though it may have been Cornell’s compulsions which served him now, which drove him to breach secrecy and decorum, which drove him, he realized, to stall. Then he didn’t want to go on forever. He told them more or less what he’d promised Coule he would tell them. He told them he was saved. He told them he had grace. That nothing could happen to him, that he was stuck in his grace like a ship sunk in the sea.

“Amen,” someone called, startling him. George looked up. All over the church people were calling out their amens, not patient now, neither considerate nor tolerant so much as dutiful, not even fervent, nothing so much as accustomed, almost like actors answering promptings. “Amen, amen,” they called.

“Amen,” a woman in Louise’s aisle said in her print dress, in her hat, in her gloves and white shoes.

Which was why he hadn’t recognized her, the woman from the supermarket. Because she’d been in men’s clothing. Now his bowels ached, now his hands sweated, now his heart labored, now his tongue thickened and his mood ring ignited like the mirrored ball on the Delgado ceiling, running with color, bruised with light. Now his pulses leapt and things closed in, his ideas rushing him, swarming, his words issuing from, crowding from, rudely shoving from his head and throat and mouth and lips, jostling for priority as if head, throat, mouth and lips were on fire.

Now he felt shaken, blasted by the truth of his life. Which he found himself delivering in this public place in messages so Pentecostal and private they might have been the jumbled, contradictory tongues and bulletins of disaster.

She’s dressed up! No wonder! He laughed.

“Because I never went home. Because I never went back to—” And held his tongue. Thinking: I can’t say that. I mustn’t say Cassadaga, I mustn’t even say Florida. I can’t even say that what I’d seen in that supermarket was not just a lady in men’s pants but the actual sister I might by now actually have, and that what I saw in her, who might in that jacket and those trousers and that hat have been an honest-to-God brother, who was I thought then, and not just that masculine businesswoman got up in drag I see now she didn’t mean and wasn’t doing for fun but out of some necessity of the vending machine trade, protecting herself from the dark oils and thick greases much as I myself wear my eviction habit, the heavy furniture pads, not, as I’d once thought, out of deference to the furniture of the poor, but, as Laglichio says, the illusion of deference, keeping myself safe from splinters, blood poison, the rough, unvarnished and nail-studded underneaths of a black man’s dining room suite.

“Because I never went home to see, to find out.

“And who may by then and certainly by now, as all Mills kids do, have already left home herself, quit the roost, split, gone off not to make their fortune but simply to repeat it.

“Hell, it’s a long shot. Don’t I know it’s a long shot? I know that. Could it be any longer than a thousand years of George Millses?

“Hey,” he said, “it isn’t plausible. What long shot is? They’re all sucker bets.”

(And he thought of long shots, numbers so high they were beyond mathematics, beyond odds, outside hope. What Magaziner had told George XLIII just before that old campaigner had found the Valide Sultan’s body on one of the two or three days out of all the year when she was in residence at the seraglio, and that had enabled him to say the words that turned the keys that moved the tumblers that released the bolts that sprung the locks that opened the doors of Yildiz. And not just her body, and not just on the two days — three at the outside — she came to pour tea, but rather on the one day — she was seventy-one years old — out of the twenty-five thousand, nine hundred and fifteen — at the inside, the inside; there would be eighteen leap year days, plus the days she had already lived beyond her seventy-first birthday — that body would be dead and available for him to find! So he wasn’t even talking about long shots. He was talking about out-and-out miracle!)

“But no Mills made her up,” he said. “She’d be—” He couldn’t say Wickland. “She’d be named something else. Not Mills. She’d never even heard the name Mills. Our mother wouldn’t have told her, and the man who would have been her stepfather would have been long gone once he saw she was a girl. Millses didn’t make girls. His wife was unfaithful. So he’d have been long gone. Just a few months behind his son, just five or six months behind me.

“She’s about the right age,” he added quickly, but they were beginning to stir, to make what was not yet noise.

“We never had children. The line’s played out, watered.” Louise was crying into her handkerchief, the others merely shifting, easing themselves, seeing what he saw himself, that what he spoke in was not tongues but incoherencies. Coule would stop him, he would come up beside him and take him by the elbow and lead him off gently. Coule would certainly stop him. Fuck him, Mills thought, if he wants me to shut up he’ll just have to make me.

Because he knew what his testimony was now, and was prepared to make it.

“I was kidding you,” he said. “I ain’t saved. I spent my life like there was a hole in my pocket, and the meaning of life is to live long enough to find something out or to do something well. It ain’t just to put up with it.

“I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “It wasn’t a curse,” he said, into his text now, “it was a spell, an enchantment, a thousand years of Sleeping Beauty, a thousand years of living on the dole.

“Hell, I ain’t saved,” he said, oddly cheered. “Being tired isn’t saved, sucking up isn’t grace.”

Now he was certain he would hear it, the peremptory cough, the dangerous premonitory shuffle of feet, and he began to move away from the microphone, to start back to his seat. Coule had him before he could leave the platform. Mills flinched, but all the big preacher meant to do was shake his hand.

“Thank you,” Coule said. “Thank you,” he repeated, still pumping his hand. “That was very interesting.”

Mills stared at him. “You’re welcome,” he said. He moved toward Louise.

“Amen, brother,” his sister said, rising in the aisle to let him pass. She touched him on the shoulder.

So she wasn’t his sister. Because she’d have had to have one. Born in Florida, raised there. Because she’d have had to have one. But there was no more trace of a Southern accent in her voice than in Laglichio’s or Messenger’s, than in Sam’s or Judith Glazer’s, or any of the rest of them.

Of course she’s not my sister, he thought, but was convinced now that he had one, and that wherever she was she would be doing well. Of course she isn’t, he thought, only some stand-in in red herring relation to the real one, who captured my attention for a while and led me by what grace I got to believe it was all over.

So he stood there, in what grace he had, relieved of history as an amnesiac.

“Amen,” some of the others were still saying. “Amen, amen.”

George Mills looked at them in wonder. “Brothers and sisters,” he acknowledged lightly.