“You’re crazy,” Mills said.
“What do you think my father did? For a living? How did he support us?”
“How would I know?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know. He worked for the Claunches. He was in service. I don’t know. You’re the gardener’s boy.”
They were at the station.
“My father was a pharmacist. He owned a drugstore.”
“Guess what?” Louise said, coming out of the train station. She was laughing.
“My daughter programs computers and my son has three shoestores in Kansas City,” the servant said.
“That john’s no bigger than a child’s potty,” Louise said. “The toilet paper’s no wider than a reel of tape. It’s scale. Everything’s scale.”
He opened the door of his Buick Special and was about to get in — Louise was already in the back, Cornell in front — when someone called to him. “Hold on a moment would you?” It was the man who had waved to him, the one who’d been admiring the classic cars when Mills had passed the garages on his way to find Louise.
“Yes?” Mills said. “What?”
“Don’t mean to hold you up,” the man said, approaching the car. “Your Special?”
“Yes,” Mills said.
“Sixty-three?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” the man said. “Spotted it when you drove up to St. Michael and St. George this morning. Recognized the grille straight off. Dead giveaway. Had that lovely grille on her the year she was introduced and then they went to a different design the following year. Why’d they do that? Any idea?”
“No,” Mills said.
“Could be birds. Scooped in birds. Some aerodynamic thing. You think?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s mine. Over there. The Studebaker.”
“Very nice.”
“Thank you,” the man said. “Felt a bit odd about driving it to her funeral but if that’s what old Judy wanted, why, hell, what the hell, eh?”
“What the hell,” George said.
“Look,” the man said, “take my card, will you? I know it’s a long shot, but if you ever do want to sell, give me a call. If I’m not at the office call me at home. The number’s unlisted but I’ve jotted it down on the back.”
Mills told him he wasn’t thinking of selling his car.
“I know,” the man said. “I’d feel the same way if I were you. But call anyway. We’ll do lunch at the club.” He looked in the car window and tipped an imaginary hat.
“Sir,” he said. “Madam.”
PART FOUR
1
It wasn’t religious this time, it was political and historical.
And maybe if I wasn’t the thinking man’s George Mills was the vocal one’s one. A witness, in a dynasty of witnesses, one more chump who crewed history, whose destiny it was to hang out with the field hands, just there, you see, in range and hard by, but a little out of focus in the group photographs, rounded up when the marauders came, feeding the flames, one more wisp of smoke at the Inquisitions, doing all the obligatory forced marches, boat folks from the word go, but nothing personal on anybody’s part. Not the government’s, not the rebels’. Certainly not our own.
My own taling meant for more than just the story hour, that kid’s garden of lullaby and closed circle of our family tradition. Your father-to-son disclosures I mean, all archived confidence and my spooked clan’s secret recipes. And if I was different it’s because I seemed to clamor for audience as well as style. Because we Millses have always had the latter. The former, too, if you come right down to it. Maybe particularly the former, even if it always turns out to be, as it always does turn out to be, some knee-jounced, lap-settled, thumb-sucking babe child who can’t get over any of it, who takes it all in, who takes it, terrified and relieved too that nothing, nothing whatsoever, is all that will ever be expected of him. That the only thing he has to do is remember that primal incident in the Polish forest when Guillalume fixed forever the Millsian parameters and gave us — never mind revolution, never mind reform bills, modern times or the inchworm creep of hope — our Constitution. And one thing other of course: to be ready to spill it all out when the babe child was on the other knee as it were, meanwhile perfecting his style — which we Millses have always had — rendering the story to his own inner ear if he were still without issue, perfecting his nuance as another might perfect his French for a trip abroad, and taking care to get the magic parts pat.
Because we’re not even a joke. After all these years, all these centuries. Not fabled in song and story, not even a joke. Our name, till I came along, never even in the papers. Our eyewitness unrecorded, our testimony not so much ignored as never even overheard, the generations sworn to secrecy, or if not actually sworn at least inclined that way. Content enough with our secret handshakes and coded bearing, our underground railway ways.
Which is just as well could be. Or so the story goes. Our version of it anyway, the way I heard it, how it came down to me, our baton-passed history apostolically successioned. Tag, and you’re it.
Maybe we should have tried America, put in some time in the New World. Or maybe not. It’s all new world for our kind anyway, ain’t it? See why I began by implying I was the thinking man’s George Mills? Not because I was any smarter than those other guys, God knows, but because I was capable of all this alternative, but-on-the-other-hand understood like some spiffy grammatical usage. My lot calls that thinking. Your lot too probably. (There I go again.) And if I had this Millsian perspective that lends detachment and magnanimous neutrality, perhaps it’s really because…This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.
It wasn’t religious this time, it was political, historical. Perhaps the King himself opened the door.
I don’t say answered. Opened. Perhaps he was on his way out as I was already knocking. Anyway, now I think of it, I must have startled him (despite his size, which was immense, he was big around as a kiosk) a good deal more than he startled me. I had the advantage, you see, of not knowing he was the King. (What advantage did he have? The man about to step out, nothing on his mind, to judge from his whistling, but his mood, calling, as was his destiny, all the shots of his daily round, and submissive at details as a tool, the arrangements already delegated, assigned, giving over his entire person like a horseman a heel for a hoist. And there I was, blocking his way, stuck in the doorway like an insurrectionist, a man, to look at me, to judge from my seedy clothes and peasant’s seamy appurtenances, the countryman’s straw helmet still on my head, the loose smock that could have concealed weapons, the rude boots like someone’s who might have been in his mutiny suit, for rebellion dressed, a far-flung Jacobin say, some Luddite-come-lately uniformed for sedition and putsch.) Advantage to the hick. (Because what really alarmed him, I learned later, too late, was not my crummy clothes or savage bearing — he was King of Great Britain and Ireland, King of Hanover; he knew our homespun, had closets of the stuff made to order for the bumpkin balls and bog-trots, the hayseed hoedowns and rustic masquerades of his youth — but my simple failure to bow and scrape, to make a leg or flat out kneel. What did I know? My fourth day in town. To me he looked like any other fat, well-groomed London gentleman of breeding. Where were his crown and sceptre? His sash and ribbons? His sword? The feather in his cap no higher than any other man’s. [Indeed, he was bareheaded.] And where, for that matter, were all the King’s men? Some of them? Any? One? His appearance less regal finally than a footman’s. Less regal than the livery of the men who drove the carriages in the streets. [Which was what I’d thought I’d do, why I’d come to London, with no weapons but only my letter of introduction greasy and rumpled under my smock that explained my presence at that particular door — it was not even the front door — at the very time when the man I did not yet know was my sovereign was about to emerge from it.] Dressed in long trousers, the plain style that had just come in, vestless, his neck unadorned save for a wide black circle of cloth that served as cravat.)