“So they knew they were there. The housemaids even agreed, it may even have been without conferral, upon a suitable genealogy for the pair. They had it that your mother and father were the daughter and son of Polish and Italian janitors in the neighborhood, that not only could they not speak English, even though they had heard them speak it, but could not even speak to each other, even though they had heard them.
“The neighborhood, still without conferral, knew it had a problem. (They really didn’t want anything to change.) It knew it was not enough not to rock the boat or simply to maintain silence. If they ignored the principals to their faces, wouldn’t this be taken as a sign of disapproval? The lovers — though God knows that whatever they were it wasn’t lovers, highly developed animals, perhaps, of two entirely different species, each the last of its kind, who took their comfort from each other only because there was no one else in the world they could get it from; lovers? they were too far gone in despair, too lonely to love; lovers? they were the King and Queen of cuddle is all — needed reassurance they thought.
“The maids and housewives sometimes took Nancy with them when they went shopping. In the stores they would hold up ripe tomatoes, crisp stalks of green celery, fruits of the season, candy, for God’s sake, whatever was accommodate to that heatless, iceless larder in which they lived, whatever could be consumed raw. (Or left treats for them on the cellar steps, fresh-baked cookies, hard-boiled eggs, leftover meats which even your doggy daddy and puss mom understood were scraps.) Using Nancy’s (George’s) money of course, but giving it to the grocer themselves, the lovers’ middlemen and agents, and counting the change, too — though who had ever heard of them would have ever shortchanged them? — before handing it over. As if Nancy were a child perhaps, or handicapped. And who knows, maybe they did need help. How many pounds of tomatoes and grapes do you need when you’re shopping for two and tomatoes and grapes are all that you’re buying? But the food was the single overture they made. They never attempted to add anything to, or alter anything in, the room itself. As if your parents really were animals and it was understood that animals knew best how to furnish their lairs and nests and dens. (If your father’s light bulb had burned out, I don’t think anyone would have thought to offer the loan of a spare for so much as a night.)
“George had his chores, his work. He rose at 5:00 A.M. to climb the twenty-four flights of back stairs in Mindian’s eight buildings to take down the forty-eight garbage cans. He had his furnaces to tend, the small repair jobs, the sleds that he carried up from the basement for the smaller children, the three or four emergencies a day that he could absolutely count on. (People locked themselves out of their apartments, they ran out of fuses, they let their bathtubs spill over.) I say count on because he counted on them for tips. (They tipped him now. All the world loves a lover.)
“When he got out of their narrow bed in the fifty-degree room (the temperature of a cave) he told her to stay where she was and she did. While he dressed in the dark. She could just make him out, his naked body. And wondered: What is happening to me? What has already happened? Wondering not who this stranger was who had taken her virginity and with whom she had committed acts that had been reserved in her head not for some future when she was safely married but for other people altogether. Not questioning, as you might think, her own, or even George’s, character so much as marveling at her luck. She loved it. She even loved the little room, their unicorn position in other people’s imaginations. She too believed they brought luck to the neighborhood. She believed that she and George were a blessing to all of Milwaukee, a feather in the cap of the United States of America.
“And your father had barely got going. Having given her an overview of George Mills history, he had not yet unburdened himself of more than two hundred years of particulars. She loved it. History had been one of her favorite subjects in high school. Your father did not know he was wooing her and she didn’t know she was being wooed. And that’s what was happening to her.
“She loved it. Whether the lovemaking—”
“Hey,” George Mills said.
“—was an adjunct to the history lessons, or the history lessons a subscript to the lovemaking was a matter of indifference to her, as was, as you already know, the tininess of the room, which could have been, and in effect was, like a kind of carrel in a library. Even the narrowness of the diminutive youth bed — it was a time when as many undergraduates as could squeezed themselves into flivvers, phone booths, changing rooms at beaches — had an air of the makeshift collegiate. Your mother and father matriculated on that little, cotlike bed.”
“Hey,” George Mills said, “hey.”
“Maybe she even expected to. It was the sort of virginal, celibate, nunnish, monkish bed she had slept in all her life. If she was at all romantic, the serf prince who was to free her would have come and ultimately joined her there. She would not have anticipated that it could have been otherwise. She may even have thought that that was part of the lovemaking, part of the act itself, that that crimped, cramped, rush-hour press of person, that closely close-quartered, neck-and-neck propinquity was concomitant with the conditions and moods of penetration. She may even have thought that that stall-like storage room in the basement of that apartment building was an out-and-out bower. And perhaps that was why she had been so offended the first time she had seen your father’s living arrangements, not because she knew that no one had to live that way but because she knew that no one was entitled to occupy a bower by himself! Perhaps she even moved in with him out of a sense of decorum and decency, out of some innate knowledge of how architecture was intended to be filled up and used.
“Mindian came.
“ ‘Be right with you, sir,’ your father said. ‘Just give us a moment, sir, if you would.’
“He slid the bolt back and opened the door, exposing the bright, flower-print oilcloth walls. Nancy was behind him. ‘Yes sir?’ your father said.
“ ‘It looks like a kitchen table exploded in here,’ he said. ‘Step out from behind George for a moment please, Nancy. I want to look at you.’
“She did as she was told. Mindian regarded her as he had regarded the interior of the room. ‘So it’s true,’ he said.
“ ‘True?’ George said.
“ ‘This woman is pregnant,’ Mindian said. ‘How far along are you? Four months? Five?’
“ ‘Not five I don’t think, Mr. Mindian.’
“ ‘The maids told me. My tenants did.’