George Mills (26 page)

“But one day he just did. He said it. And she said ‘I did too, Larry,’ and that was that.”

“Was it?” Wickland said.

“Well sure,” George said. “Oh, you mean what would he do now? I mean about telling her he was in the business. He’d still have to tell her. You’re right, she’d have to know. He had to come up with something fast because he had to go to work that night. He didn’t have the excuse anymore that he was just going around the corner to the seance, and she’d be free, too, of course, so whatever he told her he’d have to tell her right off. Yes, I see. But he couldn’t. He’d just told her he’d said good-by to the specter. There wasn’t anything he could say that could put all those lies he’d told her in a good light. I mean he was so
small.
He was already at all the disadvantage he could afford. There was nothing he could say. Unless…” Yes, he thought again. I
do
have powers. It’s all these psychics. Maybe they’re carriers. “Unless she already knew. Sure,” George said, “she knew. But not that he was a control. These were the olden days. Controls were lowered on ropes from the ceilings or rose from the cellars like organs in theaters. That was the old style. They didn’t have sound effects or trick lighting. They didn’t sit up on chairs like I do. So she already knew. But he
wasn’t
a control. He was the medium. And she wasn’t a customer. You don’t fall in love with the customers. Most of the time you don’t even respect them. You certainly don’t let them know you’re human!”

Even to himself he didn’t sound like any kid who’d ever lived. He’d picked up their lingo, the conversational Urgent they spoke. He used to be the only kid in Cassadaga. Now there were none.

“Why couldn’t they already have been married?” Wickland asked.

“That’s so,” George said angrily, “they could.” He kicked at one of the fallen palm pods. “
Damn,
” he said, “they could.” And he wondered what he was going to say next, then he was saying it, his voice raised in that High Urgent that had no proper names in it, the trees and people and animals pronoun’d and anonymated into the clairvoyant’s confrontational style. “No,” he said, “no they couldn’t. You said he was born here. She was pregnant. You don’t make a big move like that until after the baby is born. They weren’t married when they came. When they came they——
They?
There wasn’t any they to it.
They
didn’t come.
He
did, the midget. Because he
was
a midget. A midget and a medium both. Where else could he go?
He
came! She was already here! Or in De Land!

“He said he had letters. She must have saved them. Of course. She
would
have had letters and some would even have been marked
Personal,
because people who are upset want to make sure that their mail gets through and probably they figure that if they’ve put down
Personal
and drawn a line under it they’ve warned the authorities and the busybodies at the circus that they mean business. Maybe they even think there’s something official about it, that it’s an actual aid in sorting the mail and seeing that it goes where it’s directed, like sticking on the extra postage that buys special handling. So that wasn’t why she saved it. If all she wanted was letters that said
Personal
on the envelope she could have had a hope chest full of them. Haven’t I read enough mail down here in Cassadaga to know that people will say anything if they’ve pencil and paper and a few cents for stamps? That they address letters to the dead or particular saints or even to God Himself because they’ve heard and even believe that we’re this clearing house for the extraordinary? It wasn’t the
Personal
that made her keep this one out of all the crazy correspondence that had come her way. It was what was inside. Not the expression of sympathy, because every last letter she ever got would have started with that. That would have been as regulation as the salutation. Even the madmen who wished her an even worse life than the one which had already been visited upon her would first have showered her with their declarations of pity, waiting until all that was out of the way before ever taking up the matter of reproach, blasting her with what would not even occur to them was ill-nature and ill will and citing her ‘condition’ as evidence that a retributive Lord not only existed but was at all times on His toes, no procrastinative, Second Coming Lord who put off till tomorrow what could just as easily be done today, but an eager beaver early bird God who didn’t care to wait till even today, who did His stuff retroactively, smiting you if He had a mind to in the cradle, in the womb. So it wasn’t the sympathy. Maybe she even skipped that part. Probably she wasn’t interested until she came to the stuff about the writer’s credentials, and maybe she was relieved when she saw that it wasn’t a doctor this time because she’d heard from the doctors before, so interested in her ‘case,’ so sure a particular pill or course of some special serum or amazing, recently discovered diet was just the thing to fix her up. Doctors were quacks, and reverends were worse, because when all was said and done the reverends were usually on the same side as the madmen and believed that the Lord had made her what she was, and that rather than flaunt it she would do better either to hide it away or send it on tour as a warning to others. Proceeds to charity.”

“Yes,” Wickland said. “Proceeds to charity is a good touch.”

“But a
professor,
” George said, “a professor was different. She had never even
seen
a professor. She knew about them though. They were the ones who followed truth as if it was a river in New Guinea, who looked for it to come out only where the river itself comes out.” He’s making me say these things, Mills thought. He puts these words in my mouth. “And this one was going to get to the bottom of things. Or no, if all he had promised was just to get to the bottom of things, she’d probably have disposed of this letter as she’d disposed of the others. What he really said was that
together
they would get to the bottom of things. He needed her help. Which already was not only twice as much as what the others had asked for but something she could actually give.

“But I don’t think that even then she would have taken it upon herself to write back ‘Sure, come on down.’ She would have wanted certain things cleared up first, certain nagging doubts put to rest that this time had nothing whatever to do with the age-old question ‘Why me?’ For one thing, she’d have wanted to know what a
lusus naturae
was before they went any further.

“ ‘My dear lady,
lusus naturae
is Latin for freak. I myself am a
lusus naturae.
’

“So,” George said, “not only a professor but a fellow
lusus naturae
as well! And one, furthermore—though she’d noted this before it still touched her—who signed his name to his mail and provided a return address. What could she
do
but write back?

“ ‘What sort of
lusus naturae?
’

“
‘I am a tiny fellow, dear lady, a midget.’

“So not only a professor and fellow
lusus naturae
but a
lusus naturae
who for all his smallness stood at the upper levels and very heights of
lusus naturae
respectability.

“Until the letters—sure he has letters, of course he has letters—made quite a tidy correspondence, thick as a book perhaps, or a packet of love letters. Which is what they were. Probably she never even got the chance to write the one that said ‘Sure, come on down.’ Or their letters crossed in the mail, his, the one that said he was on his way, the one in which he proposed. They might even have been married by the time hers had been returned to sender.

“I don’t know if she ever worked with him as a control or not. All I know is that ‘
the young fourteen-year-old girl with the gray hair and withered body of an old woman
’ must have been the one who gave Jack Sunshine his height!”

“Is that what you see?” Wickland asked.

“Boy oh boy,” George said. “I do. I really enjoyed our chat.”

He was pleased with himself. He had raised the dead, momentarily held them aloft on the energy of concentration, argument and the polar shifts of alternative. He was convinced and wondered if he had convinced Wickland. But Wickland
knew
what had happened and was beyond his arguments. And suddenly, simply by knowing something George didn’t, the reverend seemed smug, and George began to understand something about the nature of the place he had lived in for over two years now. Nowhere he would ever live would be so
theoretical.
Cassadaga was a sort of stump, a kind of congress. It was somewhere one could orate, a neighborhood of debate. (Perhaps that was why there were no stores or restaurants, no schools or hotels, only this little square of the civic.) All, all longed to be heroes of life, even Wickland, even himself. Now the reverend would show him his sister. She would go up like fireworks and now he’d be wowed. It was simple, really. One lived by sequence, by a sort of
Roberts’ Rules of Order.
Cassadaga was only a kind of conversation.

“Your mother,” Wickland began, “is very nice.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why she’s so quiet though.”

“She talks.”

“She’s most polite.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“She is not
wild,
George.”

“I don’t want a wild mother.”

“Isn’t it interesting that she is not interesting?”

“Sunshine’s mother was interesting,” George said. “My mother is good.”

“I gather from what you’ve told me that all the women in your family have been good.”

“I never told you about all the women in my family. I hope they’ve been good.”

“Otherwise we should have heard,” Wickland said slyly. “Don’t be defensive, George. I’m not going to insult your mother. I’m not going to call you a son of a bitch.”

“Hey,” George said.

“That bristle you feel is not pride,” Wickland said. “It’s breeding. Ten hundred years of doggy antagonism and the biological bitters of instinct.”

“Here we go,” George said.

“Indeed,” Wickland said, “for isn’t it curious that you Millses, servants and dog soldiers of the domestic, think Honor only on the occasion of its aspersion and only when the distaff takes the slur?

“You were not bankers or lawyers or politicians or even merchants. A millennium of benchwork. That’s your tradition, George. A thousand years. And your women the same.”

“Hey!”

“A thousand years in the typing pool.”

“Hey.”

“Have you never wondered how you’ve managed to last so long, how there could be this unbroken thousand-year streak of George Millses? It’s your women, George, your nice, quiet, polite, unwild women.”

“You keep my mother out of——”

“Look at you.
Look
at you! I see your gums and balled fists, your hard-on hackles. Don’t worry, you won’t. You won’t have to. This is the seance now. I’m only explaining. You won’t have to.

“Not bitch, not bitch anyway. Hen. Sow. Cow. Not bitch, not even filly. Mare! Not wench, not even lady. Virgin, maiden! Certainly not dame or broad or bimbo. Mother, parent, housewife, spouse——all the feminized, maidenly matronics of passive womaninity.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. It’s what kept you alive. It’s what killed your sister.”

“Hey!”

“Because you don’t last a thousand years in this dispensation unless you’ve got something special going for you. Luck couldn’t account for it. It wouldn’t.

“A thousand years of benchwork, ten centuries of day labor. Not even clerks, though you’d an eye for the clerical, the file folder heart, the women who would prove in motherhood what they’d already testified to by the filing cabinet, their gift for organization, their prim loyalties like a lesson to passion. They’d spend a lifetime as mothers and would die old maids.

“No wonder they bore male children only! It was only more deference, birth a sort of muscle control like the swift bows, nods and courtesies of a maitre d’. (Alphonse and Gaston must have been women, too.) They had minds like Miss America. (Don’t tell me ‘Hey!’ I’m being kind.) We’re talking marriage like motherhood in guitar songs, we’re talking self-denial, devotion. (No wonder you guys bristle. It isn’t your women you’re defending, it’s your moms.) And maybe when your sister died it was just intuition. Maybe stillbirth is just the female Millses’ way of saying ‘No thanks, I gave at the office!’

“You know why she goes to the crystal gazers and tarot dealers? Because we don’t read breakfast cereal, because we don’t read laundry. Because women like her don’t
have
daughters!

“I tell you, George, these women were wonders. The cookbooks of obligation, the flannel of duty, the curlers of love!

“But why are they so dowdy, eh?

“Because dowdy is what you choose them for. Because dowdy is part of the package, part of their heritage, like the cheekbones of Scandinavians or the dark skin of belly dancers. Have you ever seen them dolled up? They look, in their make-up, as if they’ve been crying, in their white shoes and cheap dresses like hicks at matinees. Do you see your sister?”

“No.”

“Because your mother is different,” Wickland said. “Nancy is different.” And it was true what Wickland had been saying. He
did
want to hit him. He
did
bristle, enmity crawling his skin like a contact rash and his saliva a rich soup in his jaw. He felt actual aversion, fear, the cornered, grating grudge of opponents in nature. This man is my rival, he thought. I’ve been reckless, he thought. I’ve told him too much.

“Your father knew beans about plumbing,” Wickland said. “He could use a plunger and work the shutoff valve with his wrench, but the scaffolding of pivots, shafts and pipes and the improbable ball that floated at the top of the tank like a lesson in leverage were about as meaningful to him as airplane engines. Also, he was squeamish. The black rubber plug at the bottom was something he didn’t have to hold to feel. His greatest grandfather had shoveled manure for a living and your father suspected that was where his antipathy came from, not custom and acclimation catching in his genes but the original shock and revulsion themselves.