“ ‘I knew she was dead. I knew. It just didn’t feel right. Something dead weight to the pain, to the pain itself. It was nothing to do with me. Like a splinter, say, or a cinder in my eye. Like a bone caught in my throat or brambles stuck to my insides. Like decay in a tooth. Something dead weight, foreign matter about the pain. Something violating me. Like a body blow. Like a wound picked up in a war. And, oh God, my dead Janet like so many shards of busted girlbone. Help me, Janet. Help meee!’
“Perhaps the doctor didn’t really care that a child was watching, that the father was, nor the curious young women, neither nurses nor midwives, not even related to the patient, in what the doctor, distracted as he was, busy as he was, may not even have noticed was not a hospital bed it looked so much like one.
“ ‘Something dead weight, out of place, your tiny daughter-corpse caught trespass in my thousand-year male preserve Mills belly like some spooked purdah.’
“Perhaps he even wanted them there. To watch him. To see what he was doing. To grasp a little of what he was up against some of the time. Not just a go-between between a mother and her infant but occasionally having to do the actual main-force dirty work itself. About as scientific as someone pulling teeth or tearing up the ground. Horsing death around in the dark and trying not to cut anything important. Maybe — had he dared — he would have asked one of them to spell him, like a lifeguard over someone drowned. And when he said, ‘Come on, Nancy, push,’ it was at least a little to get Nancy to spell him.
“ ‘Take him out,’ Nancy said. ‘Take George out.’
“ ’Is that child still here? Go on, sonny. Wait outside.’
“ ‘When Georgie had gone. Then I pushed. Then I did. At last it came free. I had not known I could raise the dead.’
“ ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with my kid?’
“ ‘Give me one of those sheets,’ the doctor said.
“ ‘Here,’ Louisa said.
“ ‘Wrap it in this.’ But Louisa just stood there. The doctor looked at each of the girls, then wrapped it himself. But he was a good doctor really, not finally used to infant mortality. When he swaddled the child he left a little open space for the head. He carried it through the living room on his way out.”
“It was blue,” George Mills said.
“Yes,” Wickland said.
“Behind the blood. Under the blood it was blue.”
“Yes.”
“Like a black eye. I saw her. I—”
“ ‘What?’ your father said. ‘What?’
“ ‘Because if you leave history,’ your mother said, ‘you think you have nowhere to go. That’s why you married me. That’s why you said we had to name him George. That’s why you teased my womb with little-girl bait. Yes, George, teased it, then set all your dependably overwhelming centuries of male Mills history against what was after all only my country-girl biology. That’s why our daughter died.’
“ ‘Oh, Nancy,’ your father said. ‘Oh, Nancy, oh, Nancy.’ He was crying.
“ ‘Rosalie and Vietta,’ your mother said. ‘Bernice, Louisa and Irene and all the others.’
“ ‘What?’ your father said.
“ ‘We’ll have to let them go, won’t we?’
“ ‘Let them go?’
“ ‘I mean they can’t do for us anymore. We can’t keep them. There’s only the three of us. Our apartment isn’t that large. You’re out most of the time. Georgie’s in school all day.’
“ ‘They pitched in,’ Mills said. “They pitched in, Nancy, when you weren’t feeling well.’
“It isn’t what you think,” Wickland said. “It wasn’t what it sounds like. She was mad, not crazy. She was still in control of the ironies. She didn’t want you ever to find out about the Millses. She made him promise. Only then would she agree to stay with him.
“The girls wouldn’t be coming once she was on her feet again. She would have no one to work her judgments on. She had already judged her husband. She had already judged you.”
“Me?” George said. “What did she say about—”
“ ‘This child must have no ancestors. I am on the child’s side in this. If the child is to assign blame it will have to assign it to the near-at-hand, to its own propinquitous, soured operations, its own ordinary faults and weaknesses, errors in judgment, deficiencies of will, the watered cement of its inadequate aspirations and glass-jaw being. I will have done all I could. I will have set it free.’ ”
“She’s going to leave me after all,” George said.
“She’s not even talking about you,” Wickland said harshly.
“But—”
“The girl,” Wickland said. “She’s talking about the girl, she’s referring to Janet.”
“But—”
“Janet starts school in September. I don’t think she knows we’re poor. She knows I have to work of course, and that our little family is dependent upon even what George brings in from working after school. She isn’t a stupid child, but when she asked me that time about her daddy she seemed to accept my answer. She only questioned me that once. Perhaps she’s really rather sensitive. Perhaps she understands more than she lets on. Maybe she speaks to Georgie about it at night in their room in the dark. Up to now, I don’t think he’s told her any more about it than I have, but I’ve noticed that he’s restless and a little angry. Someday he’ll tell her the truth, what he knows about it. Why kid myself? He’s told her already. Of course he’s told her. He’s told her of a grand man, a strong, kind man waiting in Milwaukee, and that if things are ever terrible enough he’ll take her there and then they won’t be terrible anymore. And if he hasn’t written yet, it’s because things aren’t terrible enough yet. He’s afraid of course. It’s his trump card and he’s afraid to play it. Poor Georgie.
“But I hope she’s sensitive. But who knows? She’s so docile. She accepts everything. She’s like everyone else finally. As Georgie is. As I am. As George is like a thousand years of Millses and has never dared not to be.
“We take what comes. Everybody does. Even a little girl. I am certain she has never said, ‘Write him then. You showed me his address. Write him then.’ We take what comes. And if nothing comes we take that. Everybody does. George was wrong. You can’t quit Corinth. There isn’t any Corinth to quit.
“You’re wondering if I shall ever get to the point. But I already have, you see. Must I spell it out for you? Very well then.
“I shall do no more references. There’s no need. In my judgment there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between any of us. There’s no such thing as character. It’s as I said in Milwaukee. One size fits all.
“Now look,” Wickland said. “Can you see her?”
“Yes,” George said, sobbing. “But I don’t want to.”
“It won’t last,” Wickland said. “Nothing lasts.”
“But—”
“Yes?” Wickland said. “Was there something else?”
George didn’t know. That is, he didn’t know what it was. He was certain there was something else and that Wickland would show it to him, and that it would be terrible, worse than anything yet. It had begun by his wanting to know if he had powers. Kinsley had said he had and, for a time, he thought he had. But only Wickland had powers. He was a reverend of reality and George believed that at that moment he could have shown him anything, everything. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know what was left to see or if he wanted to see it, but Wickland had powers and Wickland hadn’t dismissed him yet.