George Mills by Stanley Elkin Page A

latter, not since Coule’s time, and the Virginia Avenue Baptist Church was a large, almost theaterlike building which had been a Catholic church until its chiefly German congregation had moved to more affluent areas of South St. Louis. One or two of the old families, with no place else to go, continued to come not to attend services—the church had been deconsecrated by the Cardinal himself—but to pray in its familiar pews, crossing themselves timidly, rather like people adjusting their clothing with rapid, feathery movements. These people, mostly women, were like folks caught short in the streets. They felt that way themselves, and Coule thought Louise one of them when he saw her sitting by herself in a pew in the dark, empty church. He was turning to go when Louise saw him and waved. He still didn’t recognize her. He might not have recognized her even if she had been one of his regulars. It was the old business—though his congregation was smaller now, numbering about two hundred or so where once it had been in the thousands—of not remembering the faces of the people he served.
    “I don’t come often, Minister,” she said. “We’re Baptists here, but we don’t come often. Well George doesn’t come at all. He does sometimes, you know, at Christmas, like that. He’s not much of a church-goer.” She told him about George, about his salvation, then wondered why she’d come at all. Salvation would be a run-of-the-mill event for a minister. Here she was, she said, going on about nothing. She had seen him on television, she said. She giggled.
    “What?”
    “I was almost going to ask for your autograph. You’re the only famous person I know.” Then she did something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She vaguely curtsied. Embarrassed, she made the same exiguous gestures the scant handful of Catholics did who still came by from time to time. She touched her hands to her hair as if she were wearing a hat. Everything she did suggested imaginary items of clothing to Coule—pushing up on the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other as if she wore gloves, lightly brushing her throat as if a scarf were there. He walked outside with her through the big church doors.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t guess being saved’s such a big deal to a man in your line.”
    “Of course it is. I just don’t know what you want me to do.”
    “I wish you would see him.”
    “Certainly,” Coule said. “Have him call my office, we’ll make an appointment.”
    “Oh, he wouldn’t come here,” she said.
    “But if he’s saved——”
    “He says he’s saved. That he’s in a state of grace and doesn’t have to do anything.”
    “Tell me,” he said, “did I save him?”
    “Nobody saved him.”
    Coule waited for Mills’s call, though Louise had told him not to. He looked for them on Sunday morning. They weren’t there. They weren’t there the following Sunday. He was bothered by the woman, by her face, which recalled to him the face of the husband and had about it that same sense of wounded reciprocity. Marriage is terrible, he thought.
    What bothered him most was his question. “Did I save him?” he’d asked. He, Coule, famous from coast to coast for what had seemed like wrath—he’d edited his shows himself, purposely building them around his furious disclaimers—had not let her leave until he’d asked it. And imagined the look on his face, the coast-to-coast wrath crestfallen, declined to disappointment, acknowledging, if only to himself, what the husband and Mills’s wife had never acknowledged—though what did he know about hearts?—the nonreciprocity of desire, its utter pointlessness.
    There was currently a campaign on to bring people into the church. It was the membership’s doing, Coule pretty much staying out of it for he had rather renounced proselytizing when he left Ohio. When the chairman of the committee reported to him he could not help himself. “Has anyone