“ ‘A lot of busybodies,’ your father said.
“ ‘Yes,’ Mindian said. ‘The same busybodies who’ve been protecting you for half a year now. Who not only countenanced your dalliance but actively supported it. We’d become fans, you see — I do not except myself — boosters and rooters. You kids were love’s home team. Even the polack, dago and wog janitors were for you. You were everybody’s darlings, apples of eyes, teacher’s pets, America’s sweethearts. I’m your landlord. I’ve come to marry you.’
“You will believe that your mother must certainly have thought about marriage. I tell you she did not. It’s not even certain that she loved George Mills.
“And your father. Have we not already seen how he repudiated women? And do we not know from his actions that it wasn’t women he meant but only the entailments pursuant to liaison, nervous not about his responsibilities to a real wife and a material son but to a hypothetical posterity which was even then fifty to sixty years off? Your father was an intellectual. He believed, that is, in the palpable reality of any idea or event which had not yet come to pass in his own lifetime. That’s why, squeamish as he was, he hid out in basements and cheerfully shouldered other people’s garbage — to subdue allure and retract hope. He was a victim of myth and handled himself as other myth victims have, finding his solutions in amateur and immediate expediency, rarely reading between the lines, which is where fate always has its way with you. Told, say, that he would murder his father and marry his mother, he would quit Corinth; or that no man born of woman could harm him, he would confidently chum even his enemies.
“ ‘I’m your landlord. Marry or leave.’
“ ‘We can stay if we get married?’ your mother asked.
“ ‘Hey,’ your father said.
“ ‘Not down here,’ Mindian said. ‘The Board of Health would condemn my basements.’
“ ‘I can’t marry,’ your father said.
“ ‘Then I shall have to fire you,’ Mindian said. And then, more passionately, with a concern that was the measure of how your parents had touched the life of this landlord, he asked your father if he really meant to abandon the girl.
“ ‘It’s the kid I’m abandoning, not Nancy.’
“ ‘You needn’t worry,’ Mindian told your mother. ‘You and the child will be taken care of. There’s a vacant apartment in one of my buildings. It’s one of the apartments reserved for the janitors. You may have it. The tenants and I will see that you and the baby are provided for.’
“ ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ your father said. ‘You mean there’ll be all right anyway? Nancy and the kid, too?’
“ ‘Certainly,’ Mindian said. ‘Until they’re on their feet. Certainly.’
“Your father groaned.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” George Mills said. “What did he think—”
“He’d spilled the beans by this time,” Wickland said. “Nancy knew as much of the family history now as he did. Even he knew how interested she’d been. He figured she’d tell the child the story anyway, out of spite if nothing else. But he knew how good a scholar she was, that she wouldn’t even have needed spite, that she would have told it out of the simple love of truth, out of innocent deference to the fact that history had been one of her favorite subjects.”
“No,” George said, “I mean about the baby.”
“You were the baby.”
“Then about me. What about me? I would have been in the picture anyway. Whether they got married or not. Whether Mindian took care of Mother and me or not. Or did he want Mother to have—”
“I don’t think he even thought about it,” Wickland said. “I think he simply trusted his bad luck. That he believed his bad luck had gotten her pregnant. You see he loved her now. He believed his bad luck would kill her.”
“But that doesn’t—”
“It does if you believe you’re a myth victim. If you believe a thousand years have been up to nothing but shaping the fate of a single man. Expediency. Flee Corinth, kill a man, fall in love, marry. Tell yourself your hands are tied.
“They were married in the basement on a Thursday afternoon in front of the maids and janitors and other tenants.
“Even Mrs. Simon was there. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re married now. Is there anything you particularly want for a wedding present, doll?’
“ ‘Could I have a reference?’ your mother asked.
“But I believe the community would have preferred it if your father had abandoned your mother. They wanted their darlings, you see, and if they couldn’t have their passionate darlings whom pregnancy and the realities had taken away from them, then they would have been quite content to have their victim darlings, substituting without turning a hair a wronged girl and a baby for a hero and heroine of love. Married, and with a baby on the way, they were just like everybody else.
“They even lived like everybody else. In a first-floor apartment in one more of Mindian’s buildings. They took the youth bed, but they were just another couple now, just more neighbors. That’s not she.”
“Who?” George said.
“Your sister.”
“Where?”
“Never mind. It isn’t she.
“Your father wanted a girl. He hoped for a girl. Though he knew that no Mills in a thousand years had put forth any but male children only, he even expected a girl. That was at the back of his mind all along, of course. That’s why he’d agreed to marry her. If you’d been a girl he thought he would still have been able to dodge his fate. He still believed in his fate, you see, still saw himself in the myth victim’s delicious position, squeezed dry of force to change his life, with, at the same time, his eye on all the eleventh-hour opportunities that could change it for him. Almost, as it were, on fate’s side, confident he’d broken the code, taking the position that destiny has its fine print, oracle its double entendre, that whatever happens to people is a trick — God’s fast one. If she could find me all the way down there, he thought, in these conditions, living like someone on the lam, and if she not only stood still for what we did to each other but didn’t even once get up on her high horse or stand on her rights or read me the riot act when I put a bun in her oven or call in the Marines to shotgun the wedding and Mindian himself practically saying no harm done even if I didn’t marry her, well, it’s been too easy for all concerned, I think, for me and the grand George Mills design, and for Nancy, too. There’s a dozen ways I could have blocked it, stymied circumstance, and I’m still only twenty, I haven’t known this crap but a year yet, I wasn’t even trying, or shown them my stuff, or seen theirs. Hell, I practically didn’t put up no fight at all, I’m hardly winded and nothing I seen yet, nothing they thrown at me and nothing I been forced to take, could have busted the will of a child. It’s been too easy for all concerned so there’s got to be a catch. We’ll name the little tyke Nancy.
“But he named it George because it was a boy, because you were a boy. He named it George who wanted the character of a rebel without any of the expense.
“Because if he’d been really serious he could have stopped it right then, asked your mother to marry him like a proper gent and never used Mindian as a broker at all. If he’d really been serious he could have called you Bill or Steve or anything at all, or teased what he thought he had for nemesis with the very initial ‘G,’ calling you Gill or Giles or Greg or God knows what. The point is it was always in his power to break the chain, as it was in the power of any of his ancestors before him, back to and including the first George Mills. But he didn’t. None of them did. (Because people are suckers for fate, for all the scars to which they think they’re entitled.) The point is he never wanted to.