“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.