Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

by Walker Percy

  The doctors nod silently, pat the foot of the bed, and move on.

  But today at Natchez-under-the-Hill the priest is his old self, sits fully clothed and in his right mind, a gray-faced gray-haired gray man with flat hairy forearms like Ricardo Montalban. He looks at his wristwatch and, explaining that it is time for him to go into the confessional, makes as if to rise.

  “Don’t go on my account, Father,” I say, noticing no other penitents.

  “No?” Sighing, he sits down again.

  “I’m sorry, Father, but you could not give me the sacrament of penance. One of the elements is missing.”

  “Which element?”

  “Contrition. To say nothing of firm purpose of amendment.”

  “I understand. I’ll pray for you.”

  “Good.”

  “Um, pray for me.”

  “I haven’t prayed much lately. But excuse me, Father.”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought you wanted to see me about something.”

  “See you? Oh yes. Right. It occurred to me the other day,” says the priest, working his expansion band around his wide hairy wrist (a Spanish athlete’s futbol wrist), “that it would be a good idea for you to move out of your house.”

  I look at him curiously. “Why should I do that?”

  “I am not at liberty to tell you why.”

  “You mean someone told you something under the seal of the confessional?”

  “I am just telling you that it would be better for you to leave. Now. Today.”

  “Is something going to happen, Father?”

  The priest shrugs.

  “Father, if my life is in danger, I think you’re obliged to tell me.”

  “You should move. Say, why don’t you move down here with me? You know, it’s quite cool down here.” He nods toward the restored slave quarters, a long brick row house already engulfed by creeper and swamp cyrilla.

  “But, Father—”

  He rises. His parishioners are arriving. They’re an odd lot, a remnant of a remnant, bits and pieces, leftovers, like the strays and stragglers after a battle. I know most of them. They recognize me and so signify by noncommittal nods. Am I one of them?

  They are:

  Three old-style Roman Catholics, the sort who are going to stick with the Roman Pope no matter what—let’s hear it for the Pope!—Knights-of-Columbus types, Seven-Up Holy-Name Prudential Western-Auto types, and their wives, good solid chicken-gumbo and altar-society ladies.

  A scoffing Irish behaviorist, the sort in whom irony is so piled up on irony, jokes so encrusted on jokes, winks and nudges and in-jokes so convoluted, that anticlericism has become anti-anticlerical, gone so far out that it has come back in as clericism and comes down on the side of Rome where he started.

  An old scold, a seventy-year-old lady sacristan, the sort who’s been lurking in the shadows of the tabernacle since the prophetess Anna.

  A love couple from the swamp, dressed in rags and sea-shells, who, having lived a free life, chanted mantras, smoked Choctaw cannab, lain together dreaming in the gold-green world, conceived and bore children, dwelled in a salt mine—chanced one day upon a Confederate Bible, read it as if it had never been read before, the wildest un-likeliest doctrine imaginable, believed it, decided to be married and baptized their children.

  An ordinary Knothead couple recently transferred from Jackson, he the new manager of Friendly Finance, they having inquired after the whereabouts of the local Catholic church and being directed here, perhaps as a joke, and now standing around, eyes rolled up in their eyebrows, wondering: could this be the right church, a tin-roofed hut in a briar patch? They’re in the wrong place.

  Two freejacks, light-skinned sloe-eyed men of color, also called “Creoles” by other Negroes but generally called freejacks ever since their ancestors were freed by Andy Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans.

  Two nuns who refused either to get married, quit, or teach in all-white Knothead schools and so have no place to go.

  Three seminarians, two lusty white fellows, lusty Notre Dame types, the sort who run up and down basketball courts swinging sweaty Our Lady medals, and one graceful black youth, face set in a conventional piety, who reminds me of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, the Jesuit boy-saint who was reputed never to have entertained an impure thought.

  Two secretaries from the Center, you know the sort, good Catholic girls thirty-one or -two and not exactly gorgeous, one dumpy and pudding-faced, the other an Olive Oyl.

  Everyone stands around at sixes and sevens, eyeing each other and wondering if he’s in the right place. The love couple look at the K.C. types swinging their fists into their hands. The Friendly Finance couple look at the free-jacks and wonder if they are black or white.

  Father Rinaldo Smith sighs and mounts the steps. The others follow silently.

  “You coming, Tom?” he asks.

  “Not today.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a good old bell to summon the faithful and ring the angelus?”

  “Yes. I believe I know where a good old plantation bell might be found.”

  “Grand.”

  4

  In my “enclosed patio.”

  I decide to skip the fish fry and spend the afternoon sipping toddies and reading Stedmann’s account of Verdun.

  At six o’clock on the morning of May 23, 1916, the French Thirty-fourth Infantry attacked the fort at Douaumont. The Germans had 2,200 artillery pieces, of which 1,730 were heavy. The French division advanced to the fort, losing four out of five men. The survivors reached the roof of the fort but could not get in. They were soon killed by artillery.

  The slaughter at Verdun was an improvement over the nineteenth century, in which, for example, Grant lost 8,000 men, mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants named Smith, Jones, and Robinson, in forty minutes at Cold Harbor to Lee’s army, also mainly Anglo-Saxon, white, and Protestant, named Smith, Jones, Robinson, and Armstrong.

  Here’s the riddle. Father Smith speaks of life. Life is better than death. Frenchmen and Germans now choose life. Frenchmen and Germans at Verdun in 1916 chose death, 500,000 of them. The question is, who has life, the Frenchman now who chooses life and will die for nothing or the Frenchman then who chose to die, for what? I forget.

  Or a Pennsylvanian. This afternoon during the assault on Fort Douaumont, I heard a sportscaster listing the football powers of the coming season. Number one on his list were the Nittany Lions of Penn State. I do not care to hear about the Nittany Lions. But what would it be like to live in Pennsylvania and every day of your life hear sports-casters speak of the prospects of the Nittany Lions?

  With my lapsometer I can measure the index of life, life in death and death in life. It is possible, I suspect, to be dying and alive at Verdun and alive and dying as a booster of the Nittany Lions.

  An example of life in death: for fifty years following the Battle of Verdun, French and German veterans used to return every summer to seek out the trench where they spent the summer of 1916. Why did they choose the very domicile of death? Was there life here? Afterwards they would sit for hours in a café on the Sacred Way.

  But I must prove my case. I must be present with my lapsometer in circumstances where the dying are alive and the living are dead. Observe, measure, verify: here’s the business of the scientist.

  Outside my “enclosed patio” the weeds are sprouting through the black pebbles Doris brought back from Mexico. Virginia creeper has taken the $500 lead statue of Saint Francis she ordered from Hammacher-Schlemmer. The birdbath and feeder Saint Francis holds are empty. Tough titty for the titmice.

  Sunday night: awake till 5 a.m. Reading Stedmann on Verdun, listening to a screech owl crying like a baby in the swamp, assaulted by succubi, night exaltations, morning terror, and nameless longings; sipped twelve toddies.

  But why should I be afraid? Tomorrow—today—I meet with the Director and hear the triumphant news about my lapsometer, the first caliper of th
e soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.

  JULY THIRD

  At the Director’s office to hear the good

  news about my article and invention

  11:00 A.M. / MONDAY, JULY 3

  THIRTY MINUTES EARLY FOR MY APPOINTMENT. Quite nervous. But why? My article speaks for itself. The evidence is there. My invention works.

  There is time to go the roundabout way through Love Clinic in hopes of catching a glimpse of Moira, my love.

  No one is in but Father Kev Kevin, who is sitting at the vaginal computer reading a book, Christianity Without God.

  “Is it good?”

  “What? Oh. Yes, this is where it’s at.”

  He jumps up and greets me with suspicious cordiality, flashing his handsome Pat O’Brien grin and shaking my hand with both of his just as he used to when he was chaplain for the Knights of Columbus. He must have bad news. He does.

  “Are you looking for Miss Schaffner?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid she’s no longer with us,” said Father Kev Kevin, rocking back on his heels in his old clerical style.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s working over in Geriatrics with Dr. Brown.”

  “Very good,” I say, but my heart gives an ugly leap sideways. But really, why should I be jealous? Buddy Brown is a licentious man, but Moira knows this. Undoubtedly it is the hapless old folk who interest her and whom she wants to help.

  “Thank you. Goodbye, Father,” I say absently.

  Father Kev Kevin frowns and returns to the vaginal computer. At the same moment Lonesome Lil enters the clinic, lines up her Lucite fittings on the table, and begins taking off her good gray suit.

  It does not help matters when I run into Buddy Brown in the hall. He greets me even more effusively.

  “See you in The Pit this afternoon,” he says, coming close and pinching my flank in a loving kind of hate.

  “The Pit?”

  “At two o’clock. Me and you. Let’s give them a real show, what do you say?”

  “Yes. But just now I have an appointment with the Director.”

  “It’s a good case. You saw him first, then I saw him. We both know him backwards and forwards.”

  “Which case? Oh, Mr. Ives.”

  “Which case! Ho ho.” Buddy twists my flank a bit too hard for comfort. “Son, this time I got you by the short hairs.”

  “Perhaps. What do you think is wrong with him?”

  “I know what’s wrong with him.”

  “And you’ve got him down for the Happy Isles.”

  “What would you do with him?”

  “I don’t know.” I am gazing down at Buddy’s tanned bald head and lustrous spaniel eyes. His jaw muscles spread up like a fan under the healthy skin. Could Moira like him? There is to commend him his health, strength, brains, and cleanliness. He is very clean. His fingernails are like watch crystals. His soft white shirt and starched clinical coat sparkle like snow against his clear mahogany skin. Burnished hairs sprout through the heavy gold links of his expansion band.

  Buddy is winking at me. “I understand that you diagnosed uh no pathology in Mr. Ives.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean you think there’s nothing wrong with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how come he can’t walk or talk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me and you going to have it.”

  “All right.”

  “This time you’re wide open.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because you have allowed nonscientific considerations to affect your judgment.”

  “Nonscientific considerations?”

  “Religious considerations.”

  “I? Religious? How’s that?”

  “Tell the truth. You oppose in principle Happy Isles and the Euphoric Switch.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t want Mr. Ives to be sent there.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you disapprove?”

  I fall silent.

  “Tom, you and I don’t disagree,” says Buddy in an earnest friendly voice.

  “We don’t?”

  “It’s the quality of life that counts.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the right of the individual to control his own body.”

  “Well—”

  “And above all a man’s sacred right to choose his own destiny and realize his own potential.”

  “Well—”

  “Would you let your own mother suffer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you. I know you too well and know that you place a supreme value on human values.”

  “Yes.”

  “We believe in the same things, differing only in the best way to achieve them.”

  “We do?”

  “See you in The Pit!”

  One last squeeze—we are good friends now—and off he goes, white skirts sailing.

  The Pit is a curious institution, a relic of medieval disputations and of doctors’ hankering for horseplay, satiric verse, heavy-handed clinical jokes, and such. Once a month a clinical-pathological conference is held in the student amphitheater, before four hundred odd students, professors, nurses, and staff members. Local physicians are invited and sometimes come, if only to see what the Leftpapasan psychiatrists and behaviorists are up to. Today’s Pit is the grand finale of the arduous ten-month school year. The seats of The Pit slope steeply to a small sunken arena, a miniature of the bullring at Pamplona. The Pit is popular with students because it is the one occasion when the Herr Professors try publicly to make fools of each other and the students can take sides (perhaps it is an Anglo-Saxon institution: no German Herr Professor would put up with it). They can clap, cheer, boo, point thumbs down, scrape their feet on the concrete. Contending physicians present and defend their diagnoses. Opponents are free to ridicule, even abuse each other. One doctor, none other than Buddy Brown in fact, routed an opponent who had diagnosed the “typical red butterfly rash of Lupus” by demonstrating that he, the opposing doctor, was colorblind.

  Buddy exaggerates when he says I have my “following.” My one small success in The Pit might be compared to a single well-executed estocada by an obscure matador. I was able to demonstrate that a lady suffering from frigidity and morning terror and said to have been malconditioned by her overly rigid Methodist parents was in truth terrified by her well-nigh perfect life, really death in life, in Paradise, where all her needs were satisfied and all she had to do was play golf and bridge and sit around the clubhouse watching swim-meets and the Christian baton-twirlers. She woke every morning to a perfect husband, perfect children, a perfect life—and shook like a leaf with morning terror. All efforts to recondition her in a Skinner box failed. I thought they had got it backward, that the frigidity followed from the terror, not vice versa. How can a lady quaking with terror make love to her husband? For the first time I produced my lapsometer in The Pit—yes, the students know about my invention but are not sure whether it is a serious diagnostic tool or a theatrical prop. It registered normal readings in both the erogenous and interpersonal zones. The lady had a loving heart Ah, but what to do about it? How to demonstrate it in The Pit? An idea came to me. Sizing her up, noting her suggestibility—she was one of those quick slim ash-blondes whose gray eyes are onto you and onto what you want before you know it yourself and are willing to follow your lead: a superb dancing partner—I gambled on a quick hypnosis, put her under and implanted the posthypnotic suggestion that she had nothing to worry about, that as soon as possible she should make an excuse and leave in search of her husband. Whereupon she did, waking up, rising with parted lips and a high color, patting the back of her hair and looking at
her watch: “Good heavens, I’m late. I’ve got to meet Harry. This is his day off and if I hurry, I’ll be home before he finishes his nap.” Exit, blushing. The students cheered and sang “I’m Just Wild about Harry.”

  My little triumph, of course, was more theatrical than medical. As you well know, medical colleagues, and as Freud proved long ago, hypnosis is without lasting benefit.

  2

  Five minutes to eleven. Time for a last visit to the men’s room. Why am I so nervous? The Director has to be on my side. Else how would Art Immelmann have found out about my invention?

  Speak of the devil. A man takes the urinal next to me though there are six urinals and mine is at the end. I frown. Here is a minor breach of the unspoken rules between men for the use of urinals. If there are six urinals and one uses the first the second man properly takes the sixth or perhaps the fifth, maybe the fourth, tolerably the third, but not the second.

  This fellow, however, hawks and spits in the standard fashion, zips and pats himself and moves to the washstand, again the next washstand. In the mirror I notice it is Art Immelmann, the man from the Rockefeller-Ford-Carnegie foundations who looks like a drug salesman.

  “Well well, Doc.”

  When I turn to speak, I notice another minor oddity. In the mirror, which reverses things, there was nothing amiss. But as Art adjusts his trousers, I notice that he “dresses” on the wrong side. He dresses, as tailors say, on the right, which not one American male in a thousand, ask any tailor, does. In fact, American pants are made for left-dressing. A small oddity, true, but slightly discommoding to the observer, like talking to a cross-eyed man.

  “Well, Doc,” says Art, turning on the hot water, “have you thought about our little proposition?”

  “It’s out of the question.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “I wouldn’t want my invention to fall into the wrong hands. It could be quite dangerous.”

  “Don’t you trust the National Institute of Mental Health and the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations?”

  “No. Besides, my invention is not perfected yet. I haven’t finished with it.”