“No ma’am. Thank you.”
When they heard the blender Mrs. Glazer finally greeted him.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend Mr. Mead’s funeral.”
“Oh that’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. He was a lovely man. We were good friends. I was about to say that I couldn’t attend your father-in-law’s funeral because I was arranging my own. My bishop, Mr. McKelvey, was here that morning with Mr. Crane, my funeral director. We were going over the music I’ve chosen. I also gave Roger the names of my pallbearers, and dictated the letters I had him send them. Most of these people are extremely busy men. There’s no guarantee any two of them will even be in town when the time comes, so I’ve put them on notice. I picked my casket out from photographs, and selected the clothes and shoes I’m to be buried in. Two costumes really, two pair of shoes. My nice tweed if it’s chilly, my linen if it’s mild. Well, I can’t be absolutely sure of the season, can I? I sent the garments with Mr. Crane to be dry-cleaned, and the shoes to the dago to be resoled.
“Well, I would have been unable to attend Mr. Mead’s funeral in any event. A woman in the position of making preparations for her own funeral may be excused certain obligations — though not, I trust, her sacred ones. You may tell Mrs. Mills that we prayed that morning for the repose of Mr. Mead’s soul. McKelvey is a splendid pray-er, even when he does not know the principal, as, I pride myself, I am. Crane didn’t know what to make of it all, but I put in sufficient allusions to Mr. Mead’s connections with water and shipping to make him think he had missed out on a handsome commission. God so loves a good joke, I think. The poor dear loves His laugh.
“Well,” she said, “you must think it strange for someone to take on so about the protocols of her own death, or arrange her funeral as if it were her debut.”
“No.”
“No? Good for you then. But you must forgive my misdoubts. People not themselves under the Lord’s protection frequently asperse the confidence of saints.”
“I’m saved too.”
“Well, maybe,” Mrs. Glazer said, “but do you really think that because you’ve had your five or six seconds down by the riverside, or that your heart keeps time with the tambourine, you know the elegant dismay of God? Or perhaps Jesus spoke to you during a hangover or warned you of a speed trap. Please, Mills, God made the sky blue but He is not flamboyant. If I choose the music for my service it isn’t because the Lord has a favorite tune but because I do. Anyway, organists play better when they know the dead are listening.
“Well. Let’s climb down from this. For all my brave talk about obsequies it turns out that it’s inconvenient for me to die just now. It isn’t that I object to death. Indeed, I’m for it rather. But you saw yourself. There was a cookie in the deathbed. There will be crumbs in the winding sheet. Mary has accidents. She pees her bed and has nightmares. She weeps during recess and suddenly claims not to be able to see blackboards. She says she’s forgotten the multiplication tables, and neither Sam nor I can get her to do her homework. Her periods started over a year ago but stopped when I became ill. In a girl her age her psychiatrist thinks it an hysterical pregnancy on a heroic scale. But there’s nothing heroic about it. She’s simply craven regarding the idea of my death. Nothing I or Sam or her relatives do to distract her distracts her. Several thousand dollars have already been spent on tutoring her pleasure, but how do you distract the distrait? Such grief would be flattering if it was not clearly so self-serving.
“But all that’s beside the point. The point is that I may not die with Mary in such a state. It isn’t that I’d have no peace or that my daughter’s uneasiness would in the least mitigate Heaven’s perfect terms, but that my death just now would destroy her. She could die herself. As she doesn’t yet have the character for Heaven I can’t let that happen.
“Do you see my situation? I need another year. It may even be that Mary is part of God’s plan to fight my cancer. — Did you say something?”
“Why wouldn’t I be spared the ticket?” Mills grumbled.
“What?”
“On that highway, that speed trap. I’m elect as the next guy.”
Mrs. Glazer looked at him a moment, then went on. “The doctors think I’m crazy,” she said, “but as neither Paul nor the oncologist believes he can do anything for me and has given me up, I have their blessing. Sammy was more difficult. He secretly believes it beneath the dignity of a dean to have his doomed wife go lusting after miracle cures or traffic with quacks. When he heard what I was thinking of he urged me to take the money and go to Lourdes instead. He is a Jew and at least believes in the efficacy of psychology. I am Christian and an ex-madwoman, and don’t give a fart for psychology. I already believe. How would it help to drag my piety to a shrine?
“It’s probably hopeless, but I mean to go to Mexico for Laetrile treatments and need someone to accompany me, to assist me. It is impossible that Sam come with me. He will have to stay with the children. This is what I will give you.”
She named a figure which George thought was probably fair, within pennies of what he supposed people in her circumstances paid people in his. Allowing for inflation, it was probably pretty close to what Guillalume had given the first George Mills. It was certainly fair. It may even have been generous, and he saw that grace was not without its opportunities. But he had misgivings. The woman wasn’t easy. Compared to her, Laglichio, who knocked down esteem as easily as George broke down a bed, was a thoughtful, magnanimous person. Whatever Laglichio did, Mills knew, was in the service of angles, bucks. There was nothing personal. She would stand on a thousand ceremonies. But what the hell? It might work out. It might even be pleasant to be at last under the touchy guns of the fastidious. He was in his fifties, and though he was not a bad man — wasn’t he saved? elect as the next guy? — he’d had practically nothing to do with morality. There was no call for it in his neighborhood, not much call for it generally. There were no lovely lives, Mills thought. The world was charming or it wasn’t. He, everyone, paid lip service to righteousness, but only good order quaked their hearts. In Mills’s experience no one shot first and asked questions afterward. First they asked questions.
And then he thought, get down, be low, be low.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Mrs. Glazer looked at him, surprised. “I have cancer,” she said. “I already told you.”
“I figured it must be something like that. My wife’s always examining herself for that stuff, but so far she come up empty-handed.”
Mrs. Glazer stared at him. “Are you a fool?”
“I’m different.”
“Indeed.”
“Look, lady, your proposition sounds like it could be a really sweet deal, but all you told me so far is about your high hopes and funeral arrangements.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m trying to get an idea how sick you are. My kind can be pretty long on loyalty, but there’s a foreign country involved here. That funeral you keep talking about is supposed to take place stateside, but what happens if you die down there? I don’t speak Mexican. Maybe them other applicants do. They look foreign enough.”
“Other applicants?”
“Parked outside. In that car.” He pointed past the living room window and indicated the Chevrolet.
“Oh,” she said, “Max and Ruth. They must have slept late. They’re brother and sister. They live in their car. They’re not applicants.”
“For real? In their car? You let them park there?”
“Whoever is dean,” Mrs. Glazer said. “They park in front of the dean’s house. They’re really quite harmless. They go to all the public lectures at the university. The concerts and poetry readings. They eat the cheese and crackers. They stuff cookies into their pockets and drink the wine. It’s how they live.”