George Mills (51 page)

“I don’t think someone should dance after a funeral,” Milly said.

“Your sister’s right, sweetheart,” Sam said.

“Oh, Daddy,” Mary said.

“I have to speak to you,” Cornell whispered in George’s ear.

“You have a lovely home,” Louise was telling the two girls. “Really lovely. You must be so proud. I suppose in a house as big as this one each of you probably has her own room.”

“We have our own lady’s maids, too,” Mary said. “We have separate cooks and our own private gardeners. We even have our own special milkman. And a postman who does nothing but just deliver our mail. Isn’t that right, Milly?”

“Mary is teasing,” Milly said. “We don’t even live here. We come out sometimes on weekends.”

“The really amazing, astonishing, wonderful thing is that Milly isn’t even spoiled. I am, but old Milly is just like everyone else even if she does have just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in her own private savings account.”

“It’s in trust,” Milly said. “I can’t touch it till I’m twenty-one.”

“Mary,” Sam said more forcefully, “Milly. That’s enough now.”

“It’s pretty urgent,” Cornell Messenger said.

The psychiatrist, down from the catharsis in which he had taken refuge, frowned. “I’m crashing,” he said. “I’m actually crashing. I’m sorry. I had no idea I was going to say all that stuff. I made a damn fool of myself, a stupid ass.”

“
Hey,
” Cornell said, “hey come
on.
It’s what she would have wanted.”

“You shut up,” Sam said, “you just shut up.”

“We ought to start back now, Louise,” George said.

“You got it, Sammy,” Cornell said. “My lips are sealed, Dean.”

“Thank you, young ladies,” Louise said. “It was awful nice meeting you, Doctor. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr. Glazer. She was very kind to my father when he was alive.” Louise turned to go.

“I’ve got to speak to you, Mills,” Cornell said, following him.

“I’m not in this,” George said sweetly. “I’m not in any of this.”

They were descending three abreast on a widely winding staircase that circumscribed a lavish keyhole of space. George had seen nothing like this house. Greatest Grandfather Mills hadn’t, nor had most Millses in between. “Listen,” he would have told his son, “I’ve been to Architecture the way some have been to France. In rooms measured as philosophy. The furniture like pieces settled in nature, unremarkably there as trees. And the fabrics, George, the fabrics! Fabric like foliage or high husbandry’s bumper crops. And woodwork like the sounding boards on stringed instruments. Paneling from panel mines, the oldest forests, all wilderness’s concentric rings like the tracery of nerves in vitals.”

Cornell saying “I’ve got to speak to you. I’ve really got to speak to you.”

And so, it turned out, did others. The aunt, the sisters-in-law, had been emissaries, actual agents. In the manor’s great drawing room with its brackets of wing and armchair and parentheses of sofa, its Oriental carpet deep and wide as infield tarpaulin, its armoires and marquetried escritoires checkered as gameboard, they were waiting for him.

“Did you enjoy your tour, Mrs. Mills?” the aunt asked. She sat in a large, curving wing chair of upholstered silk, her long, thin forearms and mottled, arthritic hands arranged over twin tracks of tight gold fringe, her large purse open and settled beside her like a queen’s. Her fine, crossed legs were clear, firm as a dancer’s, and her expression as she waited for Louise’s answer, layered, a cool palimpsest of serenity, indifference and concern. Like several of the senior members of the family George had noticed at the funeral, she did not wear mourning. Indeed, her light woolen coat dress, exactly the color of fleshtone in a black and white photograph, seemed more the clothing of the owner of an odds-on Derby favorite in her special box than it did of someone who had just buried a niece. Mills noticed her long, misshapen, ringless fingers and wondered whether she had ever been married or if she had had her jewelry cut from her painful, blistered joints.

“Oh yes,” Louise said, “oh yes, indeed. It may not be proper etiquette to say so, but this has been a very special and exciting day for us. I never expected to be invited to a house like this. Goodness, it’s like something in picture books. Or what I imagine palaces in the old country must look like. George knows more about these things but I can tell he’s as thrilled as I am. Aren’t you, George?”

He sweltered for Louise in her black mourning dress, for himself in his dark suit. “Yes,” he said.

“I know,” his wife said. “And we want to thank you for having us. And the children are darling. I only hope that it had to be on such a sad occasion. I mean…”

“Of course,” the aunt said, smiling. “But surely you needn’t go yet, Mrs. Mills. My nieces-in-law want to show you the miniature railroad that Judith’s father built for her to ride in when she was a child.”

“You mean like the little train that takes you around the zoo?”

“Quite like that, yes. I’ll tell Grant to organize a ride for you. My nieces will go with you.”

“Oh, George, did you hear? We’re going for a ride on a little train.”

“Well, Mrs. Mills, I thought you and the girls might make do on your own. This might be a good time for Mr. Mills to speak with Mr. Claunch.”

“Oh,” Louise said.

“I go with Lulu on the choo-choo?” Cornell said.

The aunt—George was not sure of her name, though he knew that the rich did not always give their names, that they lived unlisted lives—glared at Cornell. “Yes,” said the aunt, “of course. I should have thought to ask.”

Mr. Claunch, as it turned out, was not Harry, but Harry’s father.

The builder of the miniature railroad and the splinter-free ballet studio was waiting for him in a kind of trophy room. Plaques the shape of arrowheads hung next to framed oval photos of horses and riders, of dogs and handlers. There were mounted blue ribbons that fell away from inscribed rosettes big and round as clocks in schoolrooms, like pressed pants. Leather straps with tiny bronze horseshoes dangled from them, the sculpted heads of horses snugged into their curves. Silver bowls rested on bric-a-brac shelves next to porcelain animals, and everywhere, no larger than pocket watches, bas-relief medallions were pressed onto the walls like an equine coinage. Along another wall, high up, were prep school banners large as pillowcases, college pennants, the guidons of military academies like a felt heraldry. Beneath these were columns of framed team photographs—football, baseball, hockey, swimming, soccer, track—oddly like the Won and Lost listings in newspapers. Mary and Milly, in ice skating costumes, their arms spread, dipped toward the camera in clumsy arabesques. There were pictures of golfers and tennis players, and slalomers on skis kicking their bodies past gates like conga dancers. There were queer, high-altitude photographs of people on the summits of mountains. They seemed shy as foot shufflers, scuffers of shoes.

Claunch was seated beside a writing table with his legs crossed and his left hand resting lightly on the surface of the table. He wore a dark blazer and bright plaid trousers lustered as kilt. He had a large face, and thick black horn rims—dated as Mills’s mood ring—hung on his eyes like shiners. Though he was smoking, Mills saw no ashtray in the room. Here and there thin columns of smoke rose from the silver trophy bowls into which Claunch Sr. dropped unextinguished cigarettes.

“You’re here,” he said glumly. “All right, come in. Beat it please, Aunt.” Was she
his
aunt? George wondered. “I look,” he said gloomily when the woman had gone, “like a past president of an International Olympic Games Committee.”

“I’m Mills,” Mills said meekly, “and I just want to say how sorry I am about Mrs. Glazer.”

“All torn up, are you?”

“She was very nice,” George said. “She went through a lot.”

“I know what she went through,” Mrs. Glazer’s father said. “She went through all of us. She went through all of us like a high wind. Trailer courts arse over tip, dozens left homeless. I
know
what she went through.” He leaned suddenly forward, like Milly and Mary in their ice skating costumes. “Was I missed? At my daughter’s funeral, was I missed? What was the dark, black-ass buzz?”

“I didn’t hear anything, sir.”

Claunch closed his palms rapidly over his eyes, ears and mouth, and Mills shifted uneasily. “Oh come on, Mills,” Claunch said, “she called me from Mexico. She called collect like some kid off at college. The things she said to me.” He shook his head. “I tell you, George,” he went on, “at first I thought that pancreatic cancer was a blessing. Not a blessing in disguise, but the outright, up-front, stand-tall stuff itself. Some no-strings cancer, three to four months at the outside and the patient so stuffed with pain, medication and final things she wouldn’t have time for her dotty trouble campaigns. Even after she decided on her last-ditch stand, her hundred percent final effort, and went off for fruit therapy in old Mexico, I
still
thought blessing! Blessing, godsend, favorable balance of payments!

“It didn’t occur to me until after I stopped accepting her calls and began to hear from two or three of her hot-lunch clients that even if there’s no God the devil sure exists. And something else became clear, too. That the weight of those charges she continued to press even in extremis took on something of a deathbed power, that even a poor old bunch of poor old bastards in their own extremis would hear her out and make vows, pledges. Deathbed calling to deathbed in perseverant, unfaltering howl. The nerve of that woman! Intruding on their desuetude, enlisting the worn-out in her worn-out life.”

“Meals-on-Wheels people phoned? I never heard this. She must have called them when I wasn’t in the room.”

“She gave away all my unpublished numbers. She put it out on the highest authority—her word as somebody terminal—that I was their absentee landlord, the s.o.b. who wouldn’t pay for their crumbled plumbing or fix their faulty wiring, that I darkened their hallways and stairs and put governing devices on their water and electric. She told them that she became involved with Meals-on-Wheels when she discovered who owned those rat traps. She said it was to make moral restitution.”

“They called you up?”

“They’re poor, Mills. Do you know what poverty is? Real poverty? It’s not having any conception of how rich the rich really are. They don’t know doodly squat about us. Sure they called. I set them straight of course. Judith wasn’t crazy enough to believe her campaign would fly. But she did her damage. She got what she wanted.”

“What did she want?”

“What did she want? I’m an old man. It was those goddamn unpublished numbers. There must have been fifteen of them. It was to annoy me. All that trouble just to annoy me. Think! If I replaced them, tell me, how in hell could a man my age learn the new ones?”

Mills watched the old man, a rich old man who had the sturdy look of one who had had his children late in life, whose spiffy, offhand rich man’s style, his blazers and rakish, researched plaids (and dozens more just like them in hotel suites along prime beach front properties on selected coasts) would be familiar in boardrooms and the cockpits of private jets, at golf classics and aboard presidential yachts, to popes come calling and heads of state dropped in on, to mistresses (they would not be beautiful or even all that much younger than he), to society and the horsy and doggy sets in the capital cities (because surely he liked to get out once in a while, down to Brasilia to see the generals, off to Brussels for cabal and conspiracy with the good old boys of the Trilateral Commission), which were clothes and climate too, serviceable as an Arab’s burnoose. It was just possible, Mills thought, that Claunch alone had no decent suit, and he wondered how he came by his fervid imagination and privy fantasies. And just how rich the rich really are. Poor Mills, Mills thought. For all his serving-man’s history and butler’s genes, there had been no rich men in his life. These little litanies were a sort of crazy faith, the only one the saved, grace-stated man possessed. And was weary of his star-struck inventories which pulled against his nature in ways he did not even begin to understand.

He did not want to hear Claunch out, was suddenly ashamed of the services he’d already rendered. He told himself he listened out of courtesy, as a guest. For Lulu in the choo-choo for whom this day had been an outing. (And Messenger still to be heard out!)

“This,” Claunch said, waving his cigarette about the room, “was my daughter’s dollhouse.”

“Sir?”

“Well she made it up,” he said. “The team photographs were clipped out of yearbooks. The ribbons and trophies came from pawnshops, garage sales. Even the loving cups, the silver bowls.”

“But they’re inscribed,” George said.

“To strangers. To Whom It May Concern.’ “

“What for?”

Claunch shrugged. “She was nuts.”

Mills wasn’t interested. Not in Claunch’s money and power nor in his abrupt, summary ways. There was nothing for him here. He did not need to know anything or have anything. It was astonishing to him that he had ever gone to Mexico, that he had supervised deathbeds so unreluctantly. That his passions had been up. He was tired of all of them—of Breel, the Claunches, the Meals-on-Wheelers, Messenger, the Glazer girls, himself. Amazed he’d consented to be a pallbearer or given a moment’s thought to the character of his suit. Dumbstruck he’d taken any part at all. He had let everyone bully him, everyone. Father Merchant, all his lockstep, aspic’d ancestors. Now he would turn to go and Claunch Sr. would embrace him with one more confidence, one last devastating request. He knew what it might be, knew he would decline. That whatever the disparity in their wealth or power, it was Claunch who was subject to temptation, snarled in gravity and desire, Mills who was free.

So he turned to go. Disengaged as the dead, indifferent as wood.

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing,” Mills said.

“She wasn’t a quiet woman. She wasn’t shy, she wasn’t modest. Anything on her mind burned holes in her pockets. She spent confidence like a drunken sailor.”

“Nothing was on her mind.”