“Yes,” Mills said.
“Well he bought it!” Messenger said. “The son of a bitch actually bought it. They’re actually going to make the movie.”
“That’s fine,” George Mills said. “Congratulations.”
“How do you like that?” Messenger said. “How do you like the way things work out? How do you like this idyll vision, this epithalamion style? How do you like it the game ain’t over till the last man is out? How do you like it you can dig for balm? That there’s balm and joy mines, great fucking mother lodes of bower and elysian amenity? How do you like deus ex machina? How do you like it every cloud has a silver lining? What do you make of God’s pastoral heart? How do you like it there’s pots of gold at the end of rainbows and you can’t keep a good man down? How do you like it ships come in, and life is just a bowl of cherries? How do you like it it isn’t raining rain you know, it’s raining violets? What do you make of it every time I hear a newborn baby cry or see the sky then I know why I believe?”
“Audrey,” George Mills said.
“What’s that?”
“Audrey,” he said. “Audrey Binder. Victor’s wife. In the hospital. With the kid who can’t throw. Audrey. Whose shoelaces have to be signed for. Who cries in her sleep. Audrey. Who chews her IV. Audrey! Audrey!”
“Audrey?”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“What?”
“Audrey’s fine. Audrey’s all better.”
“All better,” Mills said.
“Sure,” Messenger said. “She’s out of the loony bin. Audrey’s home.”
“Just like that,” George Mills said. “She’s all better.”
“Sure,” Messenger said. “All the happy endings. All the good news. She snapped out of it. She just cheered right up when she heard,” Messenger said. “Oh yeah,” Messenger said, “the horror, the horror, hey Mills?”
2
About a year after he had become convinced of his salvation George Mills delivered his sermon to the hundred or so people in Coule’s congregation at Virginia Avenue Baptist.
They had not consulted about a date. One Sunday morning in September Mills had simply appeared and, after Coule led them through the formal parts of the service — the opening prayer, some announcements, a hymn, the offering, another hymn, some prayers for the sick, and a scripture — the preacher seemed suddenly to spot Mills among the congregation and, probably without their knowing anything of the impromptu circumstances, so seamless was his conduct — this is how he must have done it on television, George Mills thought, told to hurry it along or to stretch by his director — introduced George, and invited him to come up to the pulpit.
Brother Mills — it was Coule’s term — eased past his wife’s knees and came down the aisle to where the big preacher stood behind his deconsecrated lectern. Coule shook Mills’s hand and retired to an empty chair on the platform.
“I’m a little nervous,” he began, surprised by the amplification of his voice when he spoke. It was the first time he had ever heard the vaguely metallic sound of his amplified voice, and for just a moment he thought that perhaps his voice was going out over the radio or was somehow being beamed to other churches.
“I’m here to testify,” he said. And looked out over the congregation as if he might almost be searching for someone in particular, some latecomer yet to arrive. He recognized a handful of neighbors. They smiled their encouragement at him, as did others he did not recognize, raising some Sunday morning umbrella of benevolence and good will, inviting him to step in under it, kindhearted and tender, well meaning and fraternal as hippies. But he was not encouraged. Indeed, he had a sad sense of intricacy. He told them that. He told them he supposed that would be his text.
And started, for reasons that were also intricate and sad, to tell them a story about charity. “I used to watch the telethons,” he said. “One of the first to call and make my pledge when the poster kid pled. One time — it was the Jerry Lewis, Muscular Dystrophy — I phoned in and got to speak to Ed McMahon. Someone told me to turn down my set, Big Ed wanted to speak to me on the air. I’d gone into the bedroom to phone. Our TV’s in the living room. I couldn’t hear it. Before I understood what was happening Ed McMahon was already talking to me. He asked my name and I told him. ‘I want to pledge five dollars,’ I said.
“ ‘Where are you calling from, Mr. Mills?’
“ ‘St. Louis. I called the number at the bottom of the screen. I thought it was a local call.’
“ ‘They patched you through to Vegas. Jerry and I want to find out what gets the average viewer involved enough to get off the dime. What was it with you, Mr. Mills? Can you tell us?’
“I told him it was the kid.
“ ‘Stu? Great kid, isn’t he?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said.
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘I want to pledge five dollars. Do you take my name and address?’
“ ‘One of our lovely volunteers will do that.’
“Then, forgetting I was on the air, and because I had someone on the phone who probably knew, I asked what had happened to the little girl, how she was coming along, last year’s poster child. Mr. McMahon was embarrassed. He told me she’d died.
“My wife was watching in the living room. She’d seen it all. Ed McMahon had been stunned, she told me. There were tears in his eyes. It was an affecting moment, she said.
“I never sent in my five dollars, I never watched another telethon.”
It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. It hadn’t anything to do with the sad intricacy of things. I’m grandstanding, he thought. I’m not in the right place, he thought. He should be seated in the congregation. He shouldn’t have come. He glanced at Louise, who remembered the story and seemed to nod in agreeable confirmation. He knew she was pleased to have made it into his anecdote. George wanted to cry.
Then he tried to tell them who he was, how there had been a George Mills since the time of the First Crusade. He told them about the curse they lived under, the thousand years of blue collar blood. He told about the Millses’ odd orphanhood, their queer deprivation of relation.
“I mean Coule called me ‘brother.’ That’s the last name we go by. We don’t have brothers. We’re brothered to fathers, brothered to sons.”
He told them of their alliances, their long, strange allegiance to class.
He couldn’t explain it, he said.
He knew he was failing, knew that if Coule were sitting where he could see him he would not see the God panic in his eyes he put so much stock in. And though he could not see the preacher either, he knew that if he could, he would see himself bathed in waves of tolerance, some queer smug tide of forgiveness. Not love, not even gloating, but a sort of neutral recognition of his, of all failure, a patience with it, good temper, composure, even acquiescence, even compliance.
And now he stood apart from his inability to deliver, cool as the preacher. Whatever of urgency or nervousness he’d felt had dissipated and he felt he could go on forever, like each Mills before him, filibustering his life. He could say anything to them, tell them anything.
“Years ago,” he said, “I saw the double helix. I saw it thrashing around on the floor of the Delgado Ballroom refracted from the light of a chandelier. I didn’t know what it was. I never followed through. I recognized it many years later in a photograph.
“I don’t know anything. I mean I drank it for years but I can’t tell you what Ovaltine is. What is Ovaltine? Why is it good for us?”