“ ‘What are you going to do?’
“ ‘I just told you. Nothing.’
“ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it sounded as if you were going to do something crazy.’
“ ‘Not crazy, slow. So slow it will amount to nothing. I’m going to remain a bachelor.’
“ ‘You’re never going to get married?’
“ ‘I’m never going to have children. I’m never even going to go near a woman.’
“Which was absurd. He lived in proximity not only to the six housemaids in that very apartment building, but every day except Thursday afternoons and Sundays had to walk the same saucy, laundered, hung-to-dry gauntlet of damp female apparatus, brassieres, corsets, panties and garter belts — all the luscious, silken, sexual bunting of all the mothers, housewives, sisters, maids and daughters in all those eight apartment houses he serviced. It brushed his face like climate, it pierced his skin like itch, and, because it was empty, it could have been filled with anybody, anyone.
“Fate really is a lame way of doing business. It’s a wonder that history ever happens. Your dad said he would never marry, never have anything to do with women. She had no reason not to believe him, so if it had ever crossed her mind that he was an eligible young man, he disabused her of the notion within minutes of her having formed it. What I said about Thursdays notwithstanding, the odds against your ever being born were overwhelming. No, Mrs. Simon was your real fate.
“But a word about your father. It’s one thing to hide out, it’s another to be misrepresented. No sooner did he learn from your mother not only that people thought of him but what they thought of him, and no sooner did he understand that Nancy was the very one to set them straight — he was overreacting of course; they knew about him but he was hardly the only thing on their minds — no sooner, that is, did he realize that he had need of Nancy — and we’re talking, too, of how she looked in that little make-believe doorway of his little make-believe room — than he repudiated her.”
It felt good to sit there, George thought, knowing the end of the story, that whatever its complications, it would turn out well, that his father would turn out to be his father, that his mother would turn out to be his mother, and that he himself would eventually be brought to life.
“You see,” Wickland said, “everyone is something of an occasion. Even the kings, even the officials and presidents, those, I mean, whom history has need of. But you’re even more of an occasion than most. You were proscribed. Think about it. Your father said he would never go near women. Your mother believed him.
“So it was up to Esther Simon. She was the deciding factor in your existence.
“ ‘Doll,’ she called when Nancy returned that evening from her afternoon off. ‘Can you come into the master bedroom a sec, doll?’
“I don’t think it ever occurred to Nancy that her employer, the woman who presumed to read her mail in lieu of references, who suspected her of being a thief, who called her doll because she couldn’t always remember her name, who ordered her about, could almost have been a spoiled, slightly older sister. Esther Simon was only twenty-two years old. She had known her husband, Barry, a distant cousin, all her life, since they had been children in adjacent Hyde Park mansions in Chicago. It did not even occur to her as odd that when Mrs. Greene came to visit her daughter and son-in-law in Milwaukee, the Simons were ‘the kids,’ Nancy ‘the woman.’
“ ‘Yes ma’am,’ your seventeen-year-old mother said to her twenty-two-year-old boss.
“ ‘Your sweetie must have dropped this,’ she said. ‘You better not wait till next Thursday to return it.’
“ ‘What?’
“ ‘What indeed? It’s a wrench. I found it in the master bathroom.’
“ ‘That’s not mine,’ Nancy said.
“ ‘Well of course it’s not. It’s his. He must have dropped it when he presumed to use my toilet.’
“ ‘Please, Mrs. Simon, you’re making—’
“ ‘A mistake? Of course, doll. It’s probably Mr. Simon’s monkey whoosis, only Mr. Simon’s out of town and it wasn’t there when I left this morning.’
“ ‘It’s the janitor’s.’
“ ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Simon said, ‘I suppose that strange young man has unusual bathroom arrangements and from time to time is compelled to move his bowels above his station, but not in my house. Is that clear, doll? Look, your Thursday afternoons are your own affair, but you are not to make appointments in what is after all my home. I shall certainly speak to Mindian about this. Change my sheets.’
“ ‘I changed the sheets—’
“ ‘I know. Yesterday. Unless, of course, you were about to say afterward.’
“ ‘We didn’t do anything, Mrs. Simon.’
“ ‘It’s enough if you so much as sat with him on the side of the bed. Change my sheets.’
“ ‘Look—’
“ ‘Oh no, doll. You look. You’re seventeen years old. This is your first employment. You don’t have references. You’re not used to living away from home. Certainly you’re unused to living with your employers. Mr. Simon and I, however, have lived with servants all our lives.
“ ‘Do you know why it’s necessary that you girls have references? Do you know what’s actually in those characters we write? Our phone numbers and addresses, doll. So we may telephone each other. So we may visit. So we may say to each other what it would not always be wise to put down on paper.
“ ‘Some girls are sickly, some nasty, some dishonest.’
“ ‘I’m not any of those things,’ your mother said.
“ ‘Oh?’ Mrs. Simon said. ‘But as soon as my back is turned you invite a janitor into my home to use a bathroom you were specifically told was out of bounds. Mr. Mindian will definitely have to be informed.’
“ ‘He didn’t use your toilet. I did.’
“ ‘You let him watch? Oh,’ she said, ‘loathsome!’
“ ‘No,’ your mother said. ‘Oh my God, you don’t understand. Here.’ And chose just that moment to return Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch, which she took out of her purse, having put it there because she had not yet decided how to tell her she had found it.
“It was almost a formal exchange, trade. Wrist watch for wrench, the two objects changing hands, not returned so much as simultaneously surrendered, restored, like spoils appropriated in a war.
“ ‘I want you out of my house,’ Mrs. Simon said.
“ ‘But where could I go?’
“ ‘Why, to your janitor,’ she said. ‘What, will he want a reference? Very well. You may tell him that you are a lying, quarrelsome young girl who steals watches and permits men to observe her while she sits on toilets. I will vouch for it. Get your things.’
“She kept house for him in the storage locker.
“It was more like a kid’s clubhouse than ever, that tucked snug sense of coze and warm comfy, all of luxury they would ever know, the two of them, the brooding, self-conscious young man and the farmer’s daughter returned to a kind of sybaritic nest condition, some quilted idyll of semiconscious life.
“It wasn’t even sex. It was more like bathing, some long, painless, post-op ease.
“They knew she was there, the maids and tenants and children. Even Mindian knew she was there. No one complained. Why would they? They were fearful of driving off for nothing in return the one absolutely special and spectacular thing that had ever happened to them. It was like having peacocks in your backyard, tamed bears, docile deer. Just knowing they were there lent a sort of glory and luck to the neighborhood. They didn’t even discuss it among themselves — as his catcher and teammates will say nothing even in the seventh and eighth and ninth innings of the pitcher’s no-hit game for fear of jinxing they can barely say what — love in vitro, domestic science in the cellar. The freak your father and the freak your mother belonged to all of them, and if they happened to make their queer nest in one of Mindian’s buildings rather than in another, why that was merely the way Nature arranges these things. It was understood, accepted, the way Catholics understand and accept that the Pope must reside in Rome, or a Normandy Frenchman that Paris is his capital. If George, living alone in that storeroom, had been famous, the two of them down there were twice as famous, more. (Yet everyone, even those who were not Mindian’s tenants, understood that they were not to be disturbed — that is to say, stared at; that is to say bothered.)