“She sought him out in the basement of the building where he lived, going up to the oilcloth-rigged room where he was chewing the bread and raw, whole vegetables, the carrots and tomatoes and green beans and lettuce which he bought as he needed them and kept in their original paper bags.
“ ‘Are you in there?’ she asked.
“ ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’
“ ‘It’s Nancy. From Mrs. Simon’s.’
“ ‘Wait a minute.’
“He drew back the bolt on the inside of the storage locker. It was all that made it a room. Not the spurious oilcloth walls nailed to the random, jerry-built joists, not the ruined, odd-lot furniture. The oilcloth was only a kind of screen, and the very nature of the furniture seemed to signify the little area’s storage function, as exposed bedsprings or wheel rims or empty oil drums signify a dump. Only the thin, four-inch bit of metal lifted it into the margins of architecture at all.
“ ‘Yes?’ he said.
“She did not say, ‘You’re eating. It’s your lunchtime. I’ll come back.’ Not because she didn’t understand that she was intruding but because she still didn’t believe that this was where he lived, where he dressed and slept and ate and spent the time when he wasn’t working. She would not even say, ’Is this really where you live?’ She was squeamish, too, recall, and she knew that if it was where he lived it didn’t have to be, and that by asking outright she would be demanding reasons of him that she wouldn’t want to know.
“But she had hurt his feelings, and she had never hurt anyone before. And, too, something happened that morning that made her anxious for her honesty.
“She said she was sorry if she’d done anything to make him uncomfortable but that she had found something of Mrs. Simon’s that had been missing since just after she had come to work for her and that — she didn’t want to ask him about himself so she couldn’t stop herself from telling him about everything that had led up to the insult — she had become too excited and had suddenly gotten the urge.
“ ‘The urge?’
“ ‘I had to go to the bathroom,’ she said.
“He didn’t really follow.
“ ‘That’s her bathroom,’ she said, ‘Mrs. Simon’s. I’m not supposed to use it. I have my own I’m supposed to use. But I’d just found Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch. She never accused me of stealing it, but of course she thinks I did. She took me without references, you see. It’s my first job. I’m seventeen. I didn’t have references. But she said she’d give me a chance if I would let her read a letter I was sending to my folks.
“ ‘When I found her watch this morning I knew it would look more than ever like I was the one who’d taken it. I thought I’d leave it somewhere she could find it herself, you see. Then I realized she’d know I’d put it there or I’d have found it when I was cleaning. That’s when I was caught short, when I had to go to the washroom, and’—she was blushing but it was too dark for your father to see—‘as luck would have it, that’s when it busted. She’d told me not to use hers. So, what with the wrist watch and the broken washroom and all, I didn’t know what to do. I was only trying to do everything right when I offered you the shot.’
“Your father understood. She couldn’t have said anything that would have made him more certain that he’d just found someone so like himself that they might already have been related. He believed in relations. No one living set more stock in them than he. He’d come to Milwaukee when he had heard the history of his family, the same long history you’ve been hearing. He heard the story and exiled himself to that basement, that strange room.
“Because Nancy was right. No one had to live that way. It wasn’t Mindian’s, the landlord’s, idea, it was his own, and he was not so much living as sulking there, feasting on his role as outcast, protecting his heritage in that stick fortress as if it had been a reign, some government in exile, signaling God knows who that, well, what could you expect, he was a Mills. Millses lived in the ground, a whole story below other people’s lives.
“And Nancy had heard of him. Everyone in the neighborhood had heard of him — and not just the people in his buildings either, the two hundred or so men, women and children in the forty-eight units, in the eight apartment houses, on the two blocks, but all the people along Prospect and Kenwood Avenues. And not just the tenants who spoke his language, but the janitors who didn’t. He was famous, as the hermit is famous, as the savage who moves to town is, as anyone distinguished by mythology or distanced by dream.
“He was famous. Nancy had heard of him. Only she was surprised that he was so young, so beardless, so cute. Tales had gone round. People who knew better told them, the tenants who had actually seen him, whose garbage cans he had carried down the back stairs to the alley, whose busted locks he had replaced, whose paint-fastened windows he had opened, whose sprung doors he had planed. And the housemaids in the building where he actually lived, who used the laundry room that was, in effect, his patio, his front yard. The children brave enough to ask his help in pulling their bicycles out of the storage lockers and carry them up the stairs to the street.
“ ‘It was the way,’ she said, ‘I’d seen Mrs. Simon wash out those glasses. It wasn’t because I heard you live down here all by yourself like some old bear.’
“ ‘You heard that?’ He was genuinely surprised. He truly did not know of his fame. His act had been for his own entertainment; he didn’t realize others had been enjoying it as well. ‘What else did you hear?’ Nancy blushed again, this time so deeply that even in the dimness he saw it, even felt its heat perhaps. ‘No, go on,’ he said, ‘what do they say?’ She’s stalling, he thought. He could just imagine what people told one another. That he’d been cut off, that he’d cut himself off without a penny, the monk of modern times. People’s imaginations! ‘What?’
“ ‘That you’re not right.’
“He exploded. ‘Of course I’m right! I didn’t come down here without thinking about it. What do they know! It was a carefully thought-out decision. I weighed the pros and cons. Not even my fath—’
“ ‘That you’re not right in the head.’
“ ‘That I’m crazy?’
“ ‘That you’re not smart enough to be crazy. That you’re slow.’
“‘Hey!’
“Because already they were talking about him! Not five minutes into the courtship and already they were talking about him! The slight to his pride in the kitchen explained, Nancy forbidden access to certain toilets forgotten if it had ever registered in the first place, the wrist watch back-burnered. Maybe he wasn’t right in the head, not crazy but slow. Here he had just found out that he had what he didn’t even know he wanted — fame, notoriety — and all he could think to do was quibble with its nature. He set Nancy straight, you bet!
“ ‘You just go back to those biddies and tell them to mind their business. If they have nothing better to do than talk about people, the least they can do is get the facts right.’
“Which was really the official beginning of the courtship, your father laying out his reasons and justifications for the bewildered girl as if they were stunning chess moves or winning hands in poker, reeling off his history like debater’s points or telling arguments in a letter to the editor. And indeed it had just that quality of pent righteousness such letters have, that same burst, off-the-chest violence of nourished grudge.
“She had never met anyone with anything so fancy as a fate before. She couldn’t even follow him.
“ ‘No,’ he said, summing up, ‘I won’t kill myself. That’s not the scheme. It’s to hide out for the fifty or so years I have left to live, go about my business and accomplish by myself in a single lifetime what all my family haven’t been able to pull off in a thousand years — the extinction of my long, bland, lumpish line.’