“All this in deference to what they had been, to the now slipshod memory of what they had been, not a willfully world-shy young janitor and a fired, forlorn, loose-ended country girl, but defiant lovers who took their love into the ground and closed the door after them, like people waiting for the end perhaps, or folks buried alive.
“In any event, Nancy and George did not want for help, nor Nancy for characters to define and read, as my co-spiritualists in Cassadaga read auras, handwriting, palms, gazing crystals, making of life, the future and past, a kind of immense, customized calendar of personality. Though to tell the truth, she wasn’t quite up to her opportunities now. She was uncomfortable and all these helpers seemed to have been cut out of the same cloth. She knew distinctions were always to be made but she was tired; she couldn’t make them.
“One size fits all. These girls are very willing but they are very trying. It isn’t so much that I have to tell them what to do but that I have to entertain them. Evidently they want to be my friends, to be on personal terms with me. They want to know about our lives.
“It’s all very well to have an amicable relationship with the help but something else entirely when they feel they can take liberties with you. It shows a want of respect and leads to a breakdown of the employer-servant relationship.
“But her heart wasn’t in it. She rarely composed these characters now. She was too tired, too weak. All she could really think about was when the baby would be born, when she could move to New Jersey. She was constantly nauseous and couldn’t even think about food, not even to plan the menus she had once taken such pride in, the carefully conceived shopping lists with their attention to taste and nutrition and that cunningly shaved economy the proceeds of which were to go toward the purchase of your half-fare ticket to Paterson, New Jersey.”
“She’s not going to take me,” George Mills said, “she’s not going to take me.”
“ ‘There’s never enough change, George. They spend every nickel you give them. There’s food rotting in the pantry.’
“ ‘Just relax, darling,’ her husband told her. ‘Just lie here and try to get your appetite back. Don’t worry about the food bills. Don’t worry about a thing. The food isn’t rotting. All the work they do around here, these girls are entitled to a little something to eat. Please don’t worry, dear. Your friends are taking care of everything.’
“The baby wasn’t even premature. One Tuesday while you were at school your father came in and heard her screaming. Or heard her screaming at Bernice, whose eleven-to-noon shift was just ending and who was waiting to be relieved by Louisa, whose lunch shift was about to begin.
“ ‘No, you foolish girl. I cannot get dressed. The doctor will have to come here. It is impossible that I get up.’
“ ‘But Mrs,’ Bernice objected. (Which is how your mother preferred to be called. Not Mrs. Mills, and certainly not Nancy, but Mrs, as though the girls were incapable of learning her name, only her distance. That she got them to agree — she told them it was a pretty game — is a measure of the awe in which they still held her.)
“ ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ your father shouted.
“ ‘It’s the baby, George. I think I’m having the baby.’
“ ‘She’s in just horrible pain,’ Bernice said.
“ ‘What does the doctor say?’
“ ‘The doctor is a fool.’
“ ‘She says the doctor must come to the apartment. I told him how it was with Mrs, but he says these things is best handled in the hospital.’
“ ‘Then we’ll just take her to the hospital. Take it easy, dear. Take it easy, sweetheart.’
“ ‘I cannot get dressed.’
“ ‘That’s all right. I’ll wrap you in a blanket. I’ll carry you.’
“ ‘Do you want me to have the baby in the hallway? Do you want me to have it in the street? Is that what you want?’
“ ‘Bernice? Bernice?’ Louisa called. ‘I’m here, Bernice. You can go now. I’ll fix lunch and bring it in.’ ”
“Did this happen? I was at school. I remember those girls. There were a bunch of them there when I got home.”
“Because nobody had two maids,” Wickland said. “Because nobody had two maids, let alone five. She wouldn’t let any of them leave. Not that they wanted to. Or maybe she did it for your father. Whom she had made a kind of squire, laird, gent, swell. Who suddenly found himself Duke of Milwaukee.
“ ‘Call that doctor again. Say that it is impossible that I get out of this bed. Say that he is the one who confined me to it. Ask how it may be that at the moment when we are most precarious we should quit it. No, George, you stay. Rosalie will call.’
“Perhaps it was the screaming, but they were coming all at once now and not waiting upon their designated times.
“ ‘Louisa,’ your mother said, ‘stand at the door. Admit no one but those girls who are trusted.’
“ ‘How will I know?’
“ ‘Pass in the names. We’ll let you know.’
“He thought she was hysterical, that to move her by force would rupture not only the female mechanism which had caused her difficulties but his life, too. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t. He had already quit Corinth once and even gotten away with it. He didn’t want to give fate a second chance to nail him.
“ ‘Look babe,’ he pleaded, whispered in her ear. ‘We’re just like everyone else now. George don’t know a thing. I’m these folks’ janitor because that’s the agreement, the bargain I made, but this is America here. There ain’t any kings or princes sitting on his face. He could grow up and, I don’t mean be president, it’s only America, not fairyland, but go to work for some fellow, mind his P’s and Q’s, get raises, responsibilities, and one day maybe do all right for himself, the only Mills with enough guts ever to break the chain letter. Don’t die, kid. Jesus, don’t die. You’d make me out some kind of hero to these people. Christ, sweetie, I ain’t but twenty-five. I’d be their haunted young widower, Georgie their orphan. They’d pull us to pieces. I’m weak, Nance, I’m weak, babe. We’d be a goddamn folk song in a month. Don’t die, kid. Please don’t. I love you, Nancy. Georgie has his chance now. You die and I’ll blow it for him. I know I will.’
“In my judgment Nancy was always rather a sensible girl. At the moment when more attention was being paid to her than she had ever received in her life, when Bernice, Louisa, Rosalie, Irene, and Vietta were waiting on her hand and foot, and fane, Frances, Mattie, Joan, and I can’t recall the names of all the girls turned away by Louisa, she never, sick as she was and feeling as bad as she did, for a moment believed that the attention they paid her came her way as a mark of respect either to her person or to her position. Rather, she recognized it for what it was — base curiosity. These girls were, most of them, maiden, virgin. What they knew of sex and life they knew by report rather than experience. What they knew of Romance they had by legend. Nancy concluded, and concluded under stress and concluded correctly, that there was not a little animus in their affiliation. Without wishing her any personal harm, they were nevertheless pleased to have some physical confirmation of their own old wives’ prejudice that you can’t get away with it, you can’t go off to a tree house and live for love without there being some heavy price to pay, you can’t lord it over others and have them attend your every whim and make it understood that you can call them Bernice or Mattie or Joan or sometimes get their names mixed up altogether while they must call you Mrs, without your being dealt severe blows or taking heavy losses. Nancy is sensible. She manages to keep not just her own but other people’s priorities straight.