“Though by the time of the second pregnancy Nancy did. Look sharp. She’s coming. She’s almost here.”
The boy looked up. It was an ordinary afternoon. He could not have told by looking if it were Thursday or Monday, March or November. He was only twelve years old. There were people who believed he carried messages from the dead, that when he spoke their loved ones used his voice, that he knew things they would have to die to find out, that he had power, dread gifts. It was an ordinary afternoon. He knew his place in history and was waiting to be shown an infant ghost whom he would not be able to question because she had no vocabulary. It was an ordinary afternoon in his life. In Cassadaga. Where ego did not exist. Where it merged with bereavement, where grief was the single industry. Where children grieved. And soon his sister would be there. To give him a message. Which he thought he had already guessed. That there were no ordinary afternoons. That not just houses but the world itself was haunted. That death was up the palm tree. On the hoarding. In the square. It was an ordinary afternoon.
“Quite simply, she was bored. Fed up. She was the myth victim’s victim and, now she had heard the whole story and was actually a part of it, wanted nothing more to do with a man who saw everything that happened to him as a decree, a doom, whose every action, no, activity, whose every activity was part of some ritual of resignation, who believed, and performed because he believed, that history was looking. Or not history, autobiography, diary, home movies and scrapbook and family album — all self-absorbed church rolls and records, deeds and registers: ‘Now I am taking out the garbage.’ ‘Now I am shoveling coal.’ ‘Now I am fixing a toilet.’ ‘Now my sweat stinks of the lower oils and grimes, all the menial silts.’ ‘Now my back’s stiff and there’s a cramp in my leg.’ ‘Now I’m thirsty, now I’m hungry.’ ‘Now I am fucking my wife whose people are country people, farm people, and who has no references.’ He was not even serving God, only some image of his own abasement, his soul gone groveling beneath the thousand top-heavy lean years of his second-fiddle fate.
“While all she wanted was to be like Mrs. Simon. To learn bridge. Mah-jongg. The ladyfied games and graces. Gossip and shopping and haggling with tradesmen not over price but quality. Learning pot roast and studying chop, a fruit wisdom and a vegetable cunning. Now that she was no longer a lover she yearned to be a wife, Mrs. Simon’s kind of wife, not George Mills’s, to decide menu and judge drape, to fuss furniture and worry hors d’œuvre. To run her house like some Wisconsin geisha and know the neighbors. She even looked at those manuals — God knows where she got them — that explain what goes where and when, and set up the secret asiatic pleasures like a blueprint or a diagram for wiring houses, the simple line drawings, about as erotic as the illustrations in gymnastic texts. (Though she knew your father would never have permitted these refinements, declining them not on moral grounds but on aesthetic and class ones, as he would have refused to eat cold soups and high-faluting breads if she had prepared them.)
“To be like Mrs. Simon, who had become in even the short time Nancy worked for her a kind of heroine to the country girl. Not resenting for a moment that the master bath was off limits to her but, on the contrary, made a little weak in the knees in the presence of such contrived disdain, for, give her credit, she had it on the evidence of Mrs. Simon’s underwear that the disdain and distancing were entirely willed. That’s what she wanted. That complete, casually indifferent and solidly confident social hypocrisy. Not, you will see, to make herself over — that’s too hard, it can’t be done anyway — so much as to make others over, to get them to accept at least a little her judgment of them. That’s what she wanted. You will see that it was the exact opposite of what your father wanted. Who lived by other people’s judgment of him. Who refused to live otherwise.
“Above all, she wanted to write references. (If she wanted a maid it wasn’t so someone else might do her work for her, it was so she could always have someone around who would feel the force of her judgments.) In the absence of a maid of her own she borrowed other people’s, the girls she saw in the laundry room, or the ones who came to their apartment to report things that required the janitor’s attention. She watched them in the park with their charges, the children of the other tenants, who would never quite be neighbors, when she wheeled you in your carriage, when she pushed you in your stroller — both, not gifts exactly, hand-me-downs from those strange storage lockers which had served first your father, then your mother, and now yourself, like some queer furniture and appliance mine (so that in a way you were already sister’d, brother’d, not just because older children had outgrown the baby and toddler implements which you yourself would outgrow and which would be held in a kind of brotherly escrow for the child your mother would bear dead, but because they came up out of those same dampnesses and darknesses where you yourself were conceived, the ground of your being in the ground) — and carefully noted how attentive or inattentive they were, whether they exceeded their authority by abusing children who did not mind, and observed them marketing, whether they watched the scales when meat was weighed, produce, whether they counted their change. Discovering what she could of their personal habits, whether they were clean, whether they flirted.
“But mostly she talked with them. (And they with her, her mystery and whatever of aura and cachet she possessed for them dissolved by the marriage they had so fiercely supported.) Asked leading questions and closely considered their answers, grading them, listening, the janitor’s wife, to their grammar, discovering what interest they had in history, current events (though intelligence and knowledge were the least of what she looked for, only seeking to get by these methods some clue to their intentions, their loyalties and commitments).
“ ‘You said you have a fellow back in Menomonee Falls.’
“ ‘Oh yar. Pete. Pete’s all right. He’s real cute, but he’s awrful shy.’
“ ‘Shy.’
“ ‘Well, he ain’t like Roger, my other beau. Roger’s a scamp. He don’t hardly give a girl time to say yar even if she’s of a mind to. Roger just goes ahead and makes all the big decisions hisself.’
“ ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’
“ ‘Why? Roger ain’t never yet took me no place I didn’t really want to be.’
“And Nancy, the handwriting flourished, almost sculptured, more elaborate than any she’d ever used, would make a note: Molly. Molly is a cheerful, healthy girl of doubtful morals. She has at least two boyfriends, and has hinted at her willingness to go ‘all the way’ with both of them. While Molly’s personal life is her own affair, she strikes me as sexually careless. She could become pregnant at any time, leaving her employers high and dry.
“ ‘Mrs. Faber’s dishes seemed very beautiful when I saw them that time.’
“ ‘I should say so! They’re ever so expensive. Forty dollars a place setting and they have service for twelve. I don’t know what they’d do if a plate were to break. They don’t even make that pattern anymore.’
“Or: Helen. Helen is a very serious young woman who knows the value of her employers’ things and has a respect for them which is admirable. She displays concern for their safety which leads me to believe she would care for the goods of a household as if they were her own.
“But something sad and pathetic about the characters she was always perfecting in her head. She never actually wrote them down, knowing that as long as she was married to your father she would never have the opportunity to give a genuine reference. She knew more. She knew that if she had a son nothing would change. Your father wouldn’t change. She made a promise to herself.”