“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.”
“A promise?”
“That you were never to be told about the Millses. That the buck stopped there.
“But nothing changed. And your mother was forced into a position people seldom find themselves in. She was forced, that is, to make plans.
“It is an astonishing fact, George, but the truest thing I know. Our lives happen to us. We don’t make them up. For every hero who means to cross an ocean on a raft, there are a hundred men fallen overboard, a thousand, who find themselves in the lifeboat by accident.
“Not Nancy. Nancy had plans. What she planned was a new life. She meant to take you and the baby—she was pregnant again—and to leave your father, to get as far from the apartments and basements of Milwaukee as possible, not to divorce him, because she didn’t want your father to know where you would be, and once she brought the law into it—separation agreements, court decrees, visitation formulas—there would be no hiding from him. She planned, you see, to disappear in America.
“ ‘Maybe it’s a good thing that I have no references, that I’m one of those for whom there is no record. Look at my husband. He is all references. The trouble is he believes them. They are all he believes. I will have to write home less often. One day I shall have to stop altogether. They don’t know yet I’m pregnant with Georgie’s sister. It was a mistake to tell them about Georgie. I didn’t know. Oh well. Live and learn. They won’t find out about baby Janet. Leaving George I leave them all.
“ ‘And if I meet a man? On my travels? Wherever it is I’m going. New Jersey! I shall go to New Jersey! If I meet a man in New Jersey and he wants to marry me and give me maids, what does it matter if he thinks me a widow? How would he ever find me out? My kind is free.’
“She found out the coach fare to New Jersey and began to save for it by not spending all the money George gave her for food. She hid what she was able to put aside in their storage locker off the laundry room in the basement of the apartment where they now lived. She hid it under the thin mattress at the bottom of the stroller you had now outgrown and which was being kept for your sister.
“The handwriting in her head now:
“
Nancy. Nancy is a basically honest person. Forced by circumstance to deceive her husband by withholding money specifically budgeted for household expenses, she carefully saw to it that she and she alone did the stinting. This, incidentally, is evidence of her organizational abilities, her initiative and growing skill with detail. She planned nutritious, comprehensive menus, carefully subtracting from her own portions what would look to the casual observer like hearty enough breakfasts, quite appetizing lunches, full-course dinners. She knew down to the unpurchased potato and unsqueezed orange, she knew to the slice of toast, to the egg and very fraction of stew or knifeload of peanut butter, the exact cost of what she would
not
be eating that day. Her hunger was her bankbook, and if she carefully managed to set aside from seventy-five cents to a dollar or so a week toward the price of her railroad tickets, George her husband and George her son were not only none the wiser but not a bit less comfortable for it. (Nor did she, as some might, add to the nest egg by telling her husband that hen’s meat and produce were inferior and could she have a little more money
—
fifty cents a week would do it
—
in order to shop at Hilton’s.)
“She was trying to save three lives——hers, yours, your sister’s. By the sixth month she had socked away most of the cash for her tickets—the baby, of course, would ride free—and had even selected a place to go to, Paterson, a small industrial city in north-eastern New Jersey, about seventeen miles from New York. She had gone to the library. She even knew what they did there——textiles, cotton and silk. (She had always sewn, she knew material; she didn’t think the big treadles and looms of Paterson, New Jersey, would be that much more difficult to handle than the Singer she was already accustomed to.) So it was all planned out, not only where she would go and what she would do but—she got hold of the Paterson newspaper—where she would live. All this from a woman who when she had been fired, sent away a few years before, could think of nowhere farther off to go than just downstairs.
“It wasn’t just the money for your ticket, George, that gave her second thoughts.
“ ‘George can almost read now. He’ll be writing in a year. He knows his address. Suppose he wants to get in touch with his daddy? How could I stop him from writing a letter? If I can prevent that, how do I keep him from running back in three or four years with
my
address? And there’s his ticket. I’ll have put away only enough to pay for our fares. There’ll be nothing left to start over with when we get to Paterson.’ ”
“She was going to leave me? She was going to
leave
me?”
“
Nancy. Nancy is devoted to her family. She is determined that her children remain with her no matter what. I should add that this is not a decision arrived at lightly, or reached on the basis of emotion alone. (Though a naturally warm and loving person, the young woman in question doesn’t allow her heart to interfere with the facts. Nancy can be depended upon to look at all sides of an issue and to take decisive action only after her judgment has been thoroughly consulted.)
“She counted the cost. She counted the cost as she had estimated not only the price of the meat the others would consume in a week but the value to the penny of the two and a half or three slices of red beef she would not.”
“She was going to leave me?”
“Forcing herself to post the debits and credits involved if she took you.
“ ‘Debit: He would have no father to play with or take him to ball games.
“ ‘Debit: He would want toys.
“ ‘Debit: These are hard times. With two extra children to provide for, a man would think twice before asking a woman to marry him.
“ ‘Debit: He’s so much like his father.
“ ‘Debit: He’d have to be told some story about why we left Milwaukee, why I no longer ever even talk about taking him to visit his relations there. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I’d have to lie. I’m basically an honest person. I’d probably tell bad lies.
“ ‘Debit: If I
do
meet someone George might blurt out that I’m still married to a man in Wisconsin.
“ ‘Credit: He’s my son, after all.’ ”
“She’s going to leave me.”
“No,” Wickland said. “The debits were chiefly contingency debits, things well into the future, things that might never happen. She might never meet anyone who would want a woman with even one child. She was a person who required maids for those references she had never stopped making up in her head. You could do things around the house, you could help with the baby. She wasn’t going to leave you. She was going to take you.”
“So she could watch me. So she could make up references for me.”
“It was almost the eighth month now. This pregnancy hadn’t been as easy as her first. She was frequently in pain. It was a first-floor apartment but she had difficulty with the stairs, feeling each step in her gut, a pregnancy like appendicitis. She couldn’t do laundry. She couldn’t cook or clean or make beds. She took to her bed.
“And now she
had
maids, all she could want. They were girls from the buildings, not just from the building they lived in now or from Mrs. Simon’s building or even the building where they had first lived, the one with the famous storage locker (retired now, withdrawn forever from the category of lease, freehold and shelter, vacated, vacant, not exactly condemned nor quite yet memorialized as lovers’ lane, bower, star-crossed grottic coze, but doing a brisk business in necking, heavy petting, nakedness, with the now almost adolescent kids whose bicycles and sleds your father had once pulled up the cellar steps, the flowered oilcloth walls still up, unfaded and still redolent of the mysterious janitor and the exiled maid), but from
all
Mindian’s buildings, girls out on loan not just from the tenants who had lived there during the glory but from those who had come later, who had only heard about the glory and who wanted a piece of the consequences, the promissory moral catastrophic denouement. And not just on Thursday afternoons either, but every day, practically around the clock, making the apartment shine, eagerly doing your mother’s bidding, anticipating that bidding, getting you ready for school, making breakfast, making lunch, making dinner,
doing the shopping!
“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.