“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.
“Which was why he hoped to God it was a big job when Mindian sent for him, something they would have to tear the walls out to get to. Mindian had authorized him to call in a plumber for the big jobs. He climbed the back stairs and pressed the buzzer by the back door. The pretty cleaning girl opened the door.
“ ‘I’m the janitor,’ he said. ‘I hear you got big trouble with your WC.’
“There are three things you should know about your father. I’ve already told you he was squeamish, and perhaps you already know that at this time, at the time he met your mother, he lived in a basement, in a room in the cellar of one of the buildings he serviced. The third thing is that he was thoroughly versed in the family history.
“The room in which he lived was not a real room at all. It was a wooden-slatted storage locker, one of several that had been set aside for the tenants, where they could put odd bits of furniture, old mattresses, castoff stoves, the children’s bicycles, busted lamps, cartons of outgrown clothes, derelict chairs and beds, whatever was remnant in their households, whatever they could find no use for yet could not bring themselves to throw away, whatever they had forgotten they still owned. Not for safekeeping — the locks that went through the flimsy hinges were ceremonial rather than effective; often they were not even fastened; any burglar who cared to take the trouble could have come into the basement and browsed the equivocal possessions there like a window shopper; the dark, six-by-ten-foot cells were slatted, the thin boards not carpentered so much as slapped together like so many kids’ tree- or clubhouses — perhaps not for keeping — except possibly for the bicycles — at all. A place where possession was not so much protected as simply resolved, defined, where one family’s cargo left off and the next one’s took up.
“Your father’s cubicle had walls of oilcloth nailed to the slats for privacy and it was furnished with what the tenants let him have. He had a youth bed, a lamp which was plugged into an extension cord that went into an outlet near the zinc washtubs, a broken card table chair, and two cartons, one for his clothes and personal possessions, one for his dirty laundry. Heat was provided by what slipped off the coal furnace your father stoked, and he used the spigots by the gray tubs for his water and the lidless toilet behind the furnace for his needs. Yes?”
“How do you know this?”
“He was almost twenty. He had no family in Milwaukee, no friends even among the other janitors in the neighborhood, immigrants whose Polish and Lithuanian and Sicilian had not yet lapsed into even broken American speech. He was old enough. Certainly he was lonely enough. You’d think he would have seen that she was weeping.
“ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘What did you say?’
“ ‘I’m the janitor. I’ve come to fix the WC.’
“That was how they met. She was the maid. He was the man who came to fix the toilet. She was as ignorant as he was. Afterward, because she was in from the country less than a month — this was her first job; she’d been hired when the new tenants moved in — and had heard Mrs. Simon make the same offer to the painters and moving men and delivery people who carried the new Frigidaire up the three flights of stairs, she asked him if he cared for a shot. She took a whiskey bottle from the liquor cabinet in the living room and poured a jigger of rye into a water glass which she left for him on the kitchen table.
“ ‘Your drink is in the kitchen,’ she said and your father nodded. He sat by himself in the kitchen and looked absently at all the food, the canned goods and condiments and boxes of cereal in the pantry. He barely tasted the whiskey, which he drank down in one swallow. Though he didn’t see Nancy she must have been watching him, because as quickly as he was done she came back into the kitchen and began actually to scour the glass from which he had just drunk.
“ ‘Why don’t you just break it and throw it away?’ he said.
“He didn’t drink; he may not even have been sober. Certainly Nancy didn’t think he was. When she had offered him what she had heard Mrs. Simon call a shot he believed she was going to join him, at least sit down with him. She didn’t know what to say when he asked his question about the glass. She had merely been following what she thought were the forms, embarrassed about offering the drink but offering it anyway because she thought he expected it. She began to cry and he believed she was afraid of him.
“Squeamishness lives neither in the gut nor in the head but in the entire organism. It’s a sort of constriction of the self, a physical pulling back, as if the hand has been offered fire or the soul affront. They were both squeamish, both embarrassed, both hurt. It was only your father, however, who had somewhere to go, so he was the one who left.
“This was a Thursday. So tenuous is life, so random, it needs all the help it can get, and enters into conspiracy with everything, with all that’s trivial and all that isn’t. If that toilet hadn’t broken down on a Thursday you wouldn’t exist. This was a Thursday. Everywhere in middle class life Thursday afternoon is the maid’s day off, like some extra, fractional Sabbath.