George Mills (53 page)
“Yes?” Mills said. “What?”
“Don’t mean to hold you up,” the man said, approaching the car. “Your Special?”
“Yes,” Mills said.
“Sixty-three?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so,” the man said. “Spotted it when you drove up to St. Michael and St. George this morning. Recognized the grille straight off. Dead giveaway. Had that lovely grille on her the year she was introduced and then they went to a different design the following year. Why’d they do that? Any idea?”
“No,” Mills said.
“Could be birds. Scooped in birds. Some aerodynamic thing. You think?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s mine. Over there. The Studebaker.”
“Very nice.”
“Thank you,” the man said. “Felt a
bit
odd about driving it to her funeral but if that’s what old Judy wanted, why, hell, what the hell, eh?”
“What the hell,” George said.
“Look,” the man said, “take my card, will you? I know it’s a long shot, but if you ever
do
want to sell, give me a call. If I’m not at the office call me at home. The number’s unlisted but I’ve jotted it down on the back.”
Mills told him he wasn’t thinking of selling his car.
“I know,” the man said. “I’d feel the same way if I were you. But call anyway. We’ll do lunch at the club.” He looked in the car window and tipped an imaginary hat.
“Sir,” he said. “Madam.”
I
t wasn’t religious this time, it was political and historical.
And maybe if I wasn’t the thinking man’s George Mills was the vocal one’s one. A witness, in a dynasty of witnesses, one more chump who crewed history, whose destiny it was to hang out with the field hands, just
there,
you see, in range and hard by, but a little out of focus in the group photographs, rounded up when the marauders came, feeding the flames, one more wisp of smoke at the Inquisitions, doing all the obligatory forced marches, boat folks from the word go, but nothing personal on anybody’s part. Not the government’s, not the rebels’. Certainly not our own.
My own taling meant for more than just the story hour, that kid’s garden of lullaby and closed circle of our family tradition. Your father-to-son disclosures I mean, all archived confidence and my spooked clan’s secret recipes. And if I was different it’s because I seemed to clamor for audience as well as style. Because we Millses have always had the latter. The former, too, if you come right down to it. Maybe
particularly
the former, even if it always turns out to be, as it always does turn out to be, some knee-jounced, lap-settled, thumb-sucking babe child who can’t get over any of it, who takes it all in, who takes it, terrified and relieved too that nothing, nothing whatsoever, is all that will ever be expected of him. That the only thing he has to do is remember that primal incident in the Polish forest when Guillalume fixed forever the Millsian parameters and gave us—never mind revolution, never mind reform bills, modern times or the inchworm creep of hope—our Constitution. And one thing other of course: to be ready to spill it all out when the babe child was on the other knee as it were, meanwhile perfecting
his
style—which we Millses have always had—rendering the story to his own inner ear if he were still without issue, perfecting his nuance as another might perfect his French for a trip abroad, and taking care to get the magic parts pat.
Because we’re not even a joke. After all these years, all these centuries. Not fabled in song and story, not even a joke. Our name, till I came along, never even in the papers. Our eyewitness unrecorded, our testimony not so much ignored as never even overheard, the generations sworn to secrecy, or if not actually sworn at least inclined that way. Content enough with our secret handshakes and coded bearing, our underground railway ways.
Which is just as well could be. Or so the story goes. Our version of it anyway, the way I heard it, how it came down to me, our baton-passed history apostolically successioned. Tag, and you’re it.
Maybe we should have tried America, put in some time in the New World. Or maybe not. It’s all new world for our kind anyway, ain’t it? See why I began by implying I was the thinking man’s George Mills? Not because I was any smarter than those other guys, God knows, but because I was capable of all this alternative, but-on-the-other-hand understood like some spiffy grammatical usage. My lot calls that thinking. Your lot too probably. (There I go again.) And if I had this Millsian perspective that lends detachment and magnanimous neutrality, perhaps it’s really because…This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.
It wasn’t religious this time, it was political, historical. Perhaps the King himself opened the door.
I don’t say answered. Opened. Perhaps he was on his way out as I was already knocking. Anyway, now I think of it, I must have startled him (despite his size, which was immense, he was big around as a kiosk) a good deal more than he startled me. I had the advantage, you see, of not knowing he was the King. (What advantage did he have? The man about to step out, nothing on his mind, to judge from his whistling, but his mood, calling, as was
his
destiny, all the shots of his daily round, and submissive at details as a tool, the arrangements already delegated, assigned, giving over his entire person like a horseman a heel for a hoist. And there I was, blocking
his way,
stuck in the doorway like an insurrectionist, a man, to look at me, to judge from my seedy clothes and peasant’s seamy appurtenances, the countryman’s straw helmet still on my head, the loose smock that could have concealed weapons, the rude boots like someone’s who might have been in his mutiny suit, for rebellion dressed, a far-flung Jacobin say, some Luddite-come-lately uniformed for sedition and putsch.) Advantage to the hick. (Because what really alarmed him, I learned later, too late, was not my crummy clothes or savage bearing—he was King of Great Britain and Ireland, King of Hanover; he knew our homespun, had closets of the stuff made to order for the bumpkin balls and bog-trots, the hayseed hoedowns and rustic masquerades of his youth—but my simple failure to bow and scrape, to make a leg or flat out kneel. What did
I
know? My fourth day in town. To me he looked like any other fat, well-groomed London gentleman of breeding. Where were his crown and sceptre? His sash and ribbons? His sword? The feather in his cap no higher than any other man’s. [Indeed, he was bareheaded.] And where, for that matter, were all the King’s men? Some of them? Any? One? His appearance less regal finally than a footman’s. Less regal than the livery of the men who drove the carriages in the streets. [Which was what I’d thought
I’d
do, why I’d come to London, with no weapons but only my letter of introduction greasy and rumpled under my smock that explained my presence at that particular door—it was not even the front door—at the very time when the man I did not yet know was my sovereign was about to emerge from it.] Dressed in long trousers, the plain style that had just come in, vestless, his neck unadorned save for a wide black circle of cloth that served as cravat.)
So we did this mutual side shuffle, feinting and parrying like swordsmen, like men before mirrors. I
would
have bowed if he’d given me a chance, displayed nape like a white flag, bobbed and bowed, ducked and dithered. Why not? It costs nothing to give way to squires, even when they’re coming out servants’ entrances, and it pleases them so.
“Stand still, damn ye,” the old fellow said.
And I did, recovering my balance like a tumbler. He looked me over, asked my name.
“It’s George,” I said.
“George,” he mocked.
“Aye,” I said. Then, haughtily, as he’d been scornful: “George, son of George. Son of George, son of George, son of George. George, son of George to the forty-second or forty-third power if it comes to that.”
“And
does
it come to that?”
“It sure does.”
“British?”
“As the day is long.”
“Bow to the King,” hissed the aging dandy.
“What?
Where? Here?
” Startled, reflexive, bent as in cramp. Taking, before him, a kind of cover, as if shells had gone off, rockets, explosives, sunbursts of majesty. (A Mills first, an historical highlight, whose eight and a half centuries had been a kind of preparation for just such a moment. The subject is subjects.
The subject is subjects!
Who’d lived always in monarchical climes the low-liege life. Assured of kings as a Christian of God but who’d yet to see one. Never mind been in one’s presence, had actual audience. Glimpsed his coach I mean, spotted retainers. Living centuries on a small island since practically the
invention
of kings, ringed by their circumstance and circumscribed by their ordinance, hemmed by decree, paying the rates and loyal at the levy, doing the death duties and making good on the ransoms, prizing the special commemorative coins and celebratory postage like heirloom, and coming up with the surtaxes and VAT’s, the excise and octroi, all tolls all told and the taxes on war and peace and all the royal expeditions. Excused from nothing yet and exacting from ourselves what they’d tax collectors to exact. Among the poorest of their subjects and withal over the years and down through the reigns and dynasties—how we told time—contributing to their collective, cumulative well-being at least one gold spoke on at least one golden wheel that turned the coach we had yet to see.) I grabbed the sleeve of the old guy’s coat and yanked.
“Get down, Guv! Get
down
for the sovereign!”
And, groveled as spider, did this dance of good citizenship. Palace farce. For the handkerchief that came off in my hand when I’d grabbed his wrist was embroidered with a silken seal of majesty, his royal monogram in king’s tailored cursive, HMGIV like Roman numerals of state. By this time, too, recognizing elements of the declined, devalued handsomeness in the aging face from the mint, intact perfection of his image on my coins. (Thinking: Not merely a man, not merely even an important man, but actual animate money.)
We aren’t stupid. It was so unexpected. Indeed, I got the picture before the King did, and made my adjustments, all my Kentucky windage reassignments of perception, the King himself still preoccupied with a king’s terrors——mutiny, red menace, rout and regicide. It was my
duty
to calm him.
Practically prostrate, I called soothingly to him. “Sire,” I crooned. Calling him autarch, calling him dynast, calling him King, my mind all over him with all the stored-up honorifics of a captive race.
“Guv?” he said. “
Guv?
”
“A figure of speech, Father.”
“To the forty-third power?”
“Or forty-second. More likely forty-second. Almost assuredly forty-second.”
“Gee,” he said wistfully, “we’re only George the Fourth. Great Great Grandfather wasn’t born till 1660.”
No. It was my
duty
to comfort him. And still obeisant, my body language spelling Kick Me, I proceeded to betray a couple dozen generations just like that, appropriating his figures, confiscating for my low use his own long, lazy, highborn inherited primogenitive courtship patterns—their kings’ prerogatives of annulment and divorce, eschewing girl children, all the extended foreplay and monkeyshine monarchics that come with reign, their fiat history and command performance arrangements—thereby appending years to, and actually doubling, our own regulation Mills-size generations. But for all my extemporized mathematics I could only squeeze us to the twenty-second or so power, a figure unacceptable to the parvenu Hanoverian. (Do I sound too larky? Wait. Have patience. I get mine.)
“You’re some upstart pretender, ain’t you?” His Majesty said.
“No, sir. I swear it.”
“Yes you are. You’re one of those wicked, wretched claimants.”
“Me? In
these
rags?”
“A clever disguise.”
“I’m your loyalest subject.”
“My closest follower?” the King asked slyly.
“Sir?”
“Come come, you’re not stupid. You’re a spy.”
“I never am,” I told him forcefully. But you don’t disagree with a king, and added, “Your Royal Highness.”
“Oh yes,” he said disconsolately. “Our Royal Highness indeed. Our Real Whoreness. Our Rogue Whoness.”
“I may not listen to treason, sire.”
“Treason,” the King said miserably.
“Who disparages my king treasons my country.”
Then, changing his mood once again: “How did you find the safe house?”
“The safe——?”
“Whom did you bribe? The neighbors, was it?”
“Sir, I don’t even know the neighbors.” And I looked around. We were standing in the kitchen. Or what would have been the kitchen if there’d been a stove, cooking implements, even a kitchen table. It was without furnishings. Through the open door at the back of the room I could glimpse other vacant rooms. “Would this be your castle then?” I asked, trying to keep the misgivings and nervousness out of my voice, for the place I’d seen from the outside was barely larger than the croft cottages at home, and I’d begun to suspicion that the gentleman was some mad imposter. George IV, or whoever he was, studied me a moment.
“Restored,” he said. “What do you think? Not too busy?”
“Sir,
I
don’t think so.”
“We’re so pleased.”
Well we’re
not
stupid. And of course I knew that it wasn’t Buckingham House and that the King—if he was the King, for by this time I had more than doubts—was bantering with me, but how do you banter with royalty, or with madmen either, if that’s what it came to? I haven’t the gift of humoring people. (Or of hiding motives either, wearing my interiority on my sleeve like kings their handkerchiefs. I had actually taken a penny out of my purse and was glancing from it to the “king” as a man might check a map against the very landscape he stands in.) And now the man who claimed to be George IV had drawn a pistol and was pointing it at me. I could see that the handle was encrusted with jewels that formed the same same seal I’d seen on his kerchief.
“Who gave us away?” he asked sadly.
“But no one did,” I said, and tried to explain what I was doing there and told him of my desire to drive carriages. “I’m here to guide coaches, sir. To handle traps and landaus, phaetons and broughams and tilburies. To make my profession in curricles, cabriolets, all the gigs and all the buggies. All the buckboards and berlins. I mean to follow my star in whitechapels, in shays and clarences, in shandrydans and charabancs. I would take my place behind the horses.” The man watched me carefully. “I’m into traffic,” I said shyly. And told him nothing of my having no destination of my own, just my vague wish to go where other men went. And breathed no word about my hackman’s heart. But mentioned Squire’s letter in my behalf which I carried under my blouse, offering to show it to him, already beginning to raise the loose garment when he extended the pistol, thrusting it forward in the close quarters, aiming as if it were his turn in a duel.