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

by Walker Percy

  Is it the Truth?

  Is it fair to all concerned?

  I squeeze her pliant belted rough-linened waist. The linen reminds me of Doris. Was that why I got it?

  “Let’s stay here a while.” I draw her behind the banner. What an odd thing to be forty-five and in love and with exactly the same pang of longing in the heart as at age sixteen.

  Moira laughs. “Let’s go get a Dr. Pepper.”

  In the arcade, dim and cool as a catacomb, she skips along the bank of vending machines pulling Baby Ruth levers. Pausing in her ballet, she stoops and mock-drinks at a rusted-out watercooler.

  I stoop over her, covering her, wondering why God gave man such an ache in his heart.

  “You’re a lovely girl,” I say.

  CoooooorangEEEEEEEE. The cinderblock at my ear explodes and goes singing off down the arcade. It seems I am blinking and looking at the gouge in the block and feeling my cheek, which has been stung by twenty mosquitoes.

  CooooooRUNK. The block doesn’t sing. But I notice that a hole has appeared in the lip of the basin where the metal is bent double in a flange. I fall down on Moira, jamming her into the space between the cooler and ice machine.

  “You crazy fool! Get off me! You’re killing me!”

  “Shut up. Somebody is trying to kill us.”

  Moira becomes quiet and small and hot, like a small boy at the bottom of pile-on. Craning up, I can see the hole in the lip of the cooler basin but not through the top hole. The second shot did not ricochet. It is possible to calculate that the shot came into the arcade at an angle and from a higher place. No doubt from a balcony room across the pool. Perhaps directly opposite the room where Ellen is.

  My feet feel exposed, as if they were sticking off the end of a bed. My arms tremble from the effort of keeping my weight off Moira.

  The third shot does not come.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I tell her, still covering her. “I think we can squeeze around behind the ice-maker and come out beyond the line of fire. You go first.”

  Moira nods, dumb, and begins to tremble. She has just realized what has happened.

  “Now!”

  I follow her. We wait between Coke machine and ice-maker.

  “Now!”

  We break for the far end of the arcade and the rear of the motel.

  Out to the weedy easement where my water hose runs from the Esso station. The elderberry is shoulder high. We keep low and follow the hose. It turns up the wall to the bathroom window.

  It is an easy climb up the panel of simulated wrought-iron and fairly safe behind the huge Esso oval.

  “I’ll go up first,” I tell Moira, “take a look around and signal you.”

  I climb in the window and run for my revolver in the closet without even looking at Ellen, who is shouting something from the bed.

  “Bolt the door, Ellen.”

  Back to the bathroom to cover Moira, who is looking straight up from the elderberries, mouth open. I beckon her up.

  Turn off the air-conditioner.

  We three sit on the floor of the dressing room. No sound outside. Moira begins to whisper to Ellen, telling her what happened. I am thinking. Already it is hotter.

  “He’s going to kill us all,” says Ellen presently. She sits cross-legged like a campfire girl, tugs her skirt over her knees. “It must be a madman.”

  “A very very sick person,” says Moira, frowning.

  They’re wrong. It’s worse, I’m thinking. It’s probably a Bantu from the swamp, out to kill me and take the girls. It comes over me: why, the son of a bitch is out to kill me and take the girls!

  Presently the girls relax. I stand at the front window and watch the opposite balcony.

  Does the curtain move?

  But there is nothing to be seen, no rifle barrel.

  Ellen is leafing through a directory of nationwide Howard Johnson motels. Moira is clicking her steely thumbnail against a fingernail.

  Whup! Something about the revolver looks wrong. I spin the cylinder. Something is wrong. It’s not loaded. Heart sinks. What to do? Fetch my carbine. But that means leaving the girls. Then I’ll have to take the sniper with me.

  I think of something.

  “Where is your car parked, Ellen?”

  “Beyond the restaurant.”

  “Next to the fence?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Listen, girls. We can’t stay here like this—with him out there. Not for days or weeks.”

  “Weeks!” cries Ellen. “What do you mean?’

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. Who can shoot a pistol?”

  “Not me,” says Moira.

  Ellen takes the empty revolver. It’ll make them feel better.

  “It’s cocked and off safety. Shoot anybody who tries to get in. If it’s me, I’ll whistle like a towhee. Like this. Now lock the bathroom window behind me. I’ll have to undo the hose.”

  “What do you have in mind, Chief?” asks Ellen, all business. She’s my girl Friday again. She’s also one up on Moira.

  “I’m going to get my carbine. I also have to check on my mother. Truthfully I don’t think anybody’s going to bother you here. I’m going to make a lot of noise just in case somebody’s still hanging around, and I think he’ll follow me. He’s been following me for days. Ellen, let’s check the Anser-Phones. Well stay in touch. See what you can find out about what’s going on. Sorry about the air-conditioner, but I think it’s going to rain.”

  The girls look solemn. I take a drink of Early Times and fill my flask.

  4

  A simple matter to follow the weedy easement past the ice-cream restaurant to Ellen’s neat little Toyota electric parked between a rusted hulk of a Cadillac and a broken-back vine-clad Pontiac. No bullet holes in the windows.

  Head out straight across the plaza making as big a show as possible, stomping the carriage bell and zigzagging the tiller—you sit sideways and work a tiller and scud along like a catboat. Ellen’s car is both Japanese and Presbyterian, thrifty, tidy, efficient, chaste. As a matter of fact, Ellen was born in Japan of Georgia Presbyterian missionaries.

  No one follows. Then double back, circle old Saint Michael’s, bang the Bermuda bell—and head out for the pines.

  Someone should follow me.

  Now wait at the fork behind the bicycle shed where the kids parked their bikes and caught the school bus. One road winds up the ridge, the other along the links to the clubhouse. It is beginning to rain a little. Big dusty drops splash on the windshield.

  Here he comes.

  Here comes something anyhow. Rubber treads hum on the wet asphalt. He pauses at the fork. A pang: did I leave tracks? No. He goes past slowly, taking the country-club road, a big Cushman golf cart clumsily armored with scraps of sheet-iron wired to the body and tied under the surrey fringe. The driver can’t be seen. It noses along the links like a beetle and disappears in the pines.

  There is no one in sight except a picaninny scraping up soybean meal on number 8 green.

  Why not take the ridge road and drive straight to my house?

  I do it, meeting nobody, enter at the service gate and dive out of sight under a great clump of azaleas. Then up through the plantation of sumac that used to be the lawn, to the lower “woods” door. It is the rear lower-level door to the new wing Doris added after ten years of married life had canceled the old.

  It occurs to me that I have not entered the house through this door since Doris left. I squeeze past the door jammed by wistaria. It is like entering a strange house.

  The green gloom inside smells of old hammocks and ping-pong nets. Here is the “hunt” room, Doris’s idea, fitted out with gun cabinet, copper sink, bar, freezer, billiard table, life-size stereo-V, easy chairs, Audubon prints. Doris envisioned me coming here after epic hunts with hale hunting companions, eviscerating the bloody little carcasses of birds in the sink, pouring sixteen-year-old bourbon in the heavy Abercrombie field-and-stream glasses and settling
down with my pipe and friends and my pointer bitch for a long winter evening of man talk and football-watching. Of course I never came here, never owned a pointer bitch, had no use for friends, and instead of hunting took to hanging around Paradise Bowling Lanes and drinking Dixie beer with my partner, Leroy Ledbetter.

  The carbine is still in the cabinet. But before leaving I’d better go topside and check the terrain. At the top of a spiral stair is Doris’s room, a kind of gazebo attached to the house at one of its eight sides. An airy confection of spidery white iron, a fretwork of ice cream, it floats like a tree house in the whispering crowns of the longleaf pines. A sun-ray breaks through a rift of cloud and sheds a queer gold light that catches the raindrops on the screen.

  Here sat Doris with Alistair and his friend Martyn whom, I confess, I liked to hear Alistair address not as he did, with the swallowed n, Mart’n, but with the decent British aspirate Mar-tyn. Even liked hearing him address me with his tidy rounded o, not as we would say, Täm, but T?m: “I say, T?m, what about mixing me one of your absolutely smashing gin fizzes? There’s a good chap?” Where’s a good chap? I would ask but liked his English nevertheless, mine having got loosed, broadened, slurred over, somewhere along the banks of the Ohio or back in the bourbon hills of Kentucky, and so would fix gin fizzes for him and Martyn.

  Alistair: half-lying in the rattan settee, tawny-skinned, tawny-eyes, mandala-and-chain half-hidden in his Cozumel homespuns, his silver and turquoise bracelet (the real article with links as heavy and greasy as engine gears) slid down his wrist onto his gold hand, which he knows how to flex as gracefully as Michelangelo’s Adam touching God’s hand.

  Mar-tyn: a wizened Liverpool youth, not quite clean, whose low furrowed brow went up in a great shock of dry wiry hair; Mar-tyn, who gave himself leave not to speak because it was understood he was “with” Alistair; who mystified Doris with his unattractiveness and who when I gave him his gin fizz in a heavy Abercrombie field-and-stream glass, always shot me the same ironic look: “Thanks, mite.”

  Doris happy though, despite Mar-tyn. Here in her airy gazebo in the treetops it seemed to her that things had fallen out right at last. This surely was the way life was lived: Alistair sharing with her the English hankering for the Orient and speaking in the authentic mother tongue of reverence for life and of the need of making homely things with one’s own hands; of a true community life stripped of its technological dross, of simple meetings and greetings, spiritual communions, the touch of a hand, etcetera etcetera.

  “We’re afraid of touching each other in our modern culture,” said Alistair, extending his golden Adam’s hand and touching me.

  “You’re damn right we are,” I said, shrinking away.

  He would discuss his coming lecture with Doris, asking her advice about the best means of penetrating the “suburban armor of indifference.”

  Doris listened and advised breathlessly. To her the very air of the summerhouse seemed freighted with meanings. Possibilities floated like motes in the golden light. Breathlessly she sat and mostly listened, long-limbed and lovely in her green linen, while Alistair quoted the sutras. English poets she had memorized at Winchester High School sounded as fresh as the new green growth of the vines.

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,

  said Alistair, swishing his gin fizz.

  “How true!” breathed Doris.

  “Holiness is wholeness,” said Alistair, holding in his cupped hand a hooded warbler who had knocked himself out against the screen.

  “That is so true!” said Doris.

  Not that I wasn’t included, even after Alistair found out that it was Doris, not I, who had the money. Alistair was good-natured and wanted to be friends. Under any other circumstances we might have been: he was a rogue but a likable one. Mar-tyn was a Liverpool guttersnipe, but Alistair was a likable rogue. We got along well enough. Sunday mornings he’d give his lecture at the Unity church on reverence for life or mind-force, and Samantha and I’d go to mass and we’d meet afterwards in the summerhouse.

  They were a pair of rascals. What a surprise. No one ever expects the English to be rascals (compare Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese). No, the English, who have no use for God, are the most decent people on earth. Why? Because they got rid of God. They got rid of God two hundred years ago and became extraordinarily decent to prove they didn’t need him. Compare Merrie England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nation of rowdies.

  “I greatly admire the Catholic mass,” Alistair would say.

  “Good.”

  “I accept the validity of all religions.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Pity.”

  “Yes.”

  “I say, T?m.”

  “Yes?”

  “We could be of incalculable service to each other, you know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You could help our work on mind-force with your scientific expertise in psychiatry. We’re on the same side in the struggle against materialism. Together we could help break the laws of materialism that straitjacket modern science.”

  “I believe in such laws.”

  “We could oppose the cult of objectivity that science breeds.”

  “I favor such objectivity.”

  “I have unending admiration for your Church.”

  “I wish I could say the same for yours.”

  “You know, Origen, one of the greatest doctors of your Church, was one of us. He believed in reincarnation, you know.”

  “As I recall, we kicked his ass out.”

  “Yes. And the poor man was so burdened with guilt, he cut off his own member.”

  “I might do the same for you.”

  “You’re a rum one, T?m.”

  Mar-tyn laughed his one and only laugh: “Arr arr arr. Cut off ’is ruddy whacker, did he?”

  Doris would have none of this, either Catholic vulgarity or Liverpool vulgarity, and she and Alistair would get back on reverence for life while I grilled rib-eye steaks on the hibachi, my specialty and Alistair’s favorite despite his reverence for steers.

  What happened was not even his fault. What happened was that Samantha died and I started drinking and stayed drunk for a year—and not even for sorrow’s sake. Samantha’s death was as good an excuse as any to drink. I could have been just as sorry without drinking. What happened was that Doris and I chose not to forgive each other. It was as casual a decision as my drinking. Alistair happened to come along at the right time.

  Poor fellow, he didn’t even get the money he wanted. He got Doris, whom he didn’t want. Doris died. God knows what Doris wanted. A delicate sort of Deep-South Oriental life lived with Anglican style. Instead, she died.

  Alistair was right, as it turned out, to disapprove my religious intolerance. I, as defender of the faith, was as big a phony as he and less attractive. Perhaps I’d have done worse than follow Origen’s example, poor chap.

  Feeling somewhat faint from hunger, I return to my apartment in the old wing and fix myself a duck-egg flip with Worcestershire and vodka. Check the phone. Dead. Call into Ellen on the Anser-Phone. The line is already plugged in. The Anser-Phone operator got frightened about something, Ellen said, and left. But all quiet at the motel. She and Moira are playing gin rummy.

  Two lovely girls they are, as different as can be, one Christian, one heathen, one virtuous, one not, but each lovely in her own way. And some Bantu devil is trying to take them from me. He must be dealt with.

  Back in the hunt room, I take the 30.06 from the cabinet. It is still greased and loaded. I pocket an extra clip. Get 38’s for the revolver!

  5

  Take the Toyota onto the links, use cart paths next to the woods, cross the fairway to my mother’s back yard, run under her mountainous Formosa azaleas and out of sight.

  The back door is unlocked. All seems normal hereabouts. Eukie, Mother’s little servant, is sitting in the kitchen polishing
silver and watching Art Linkletter III interview some school children from Glendale.

  “Eukie, where is Mrs. More?”

  “She up in the bathroom.”

  “What’s been going on around here?”

  Eukie is a non-account sassy little black who is good for nothing but getting dressed up in his white coat and serving cocktails to Mother’s bridge ladies.

  Check the phone. Dead.

  For a fact Mother is in the bathroom, all dressed up, blue-white Hadassah hair curled, down on her hands and knees in her nylons, scrubbing the tile floor. Whenever things went wrong, I remember, a sale fallen through, my father down on his luck sunk in his chair watching daytime reruns of I Love Lucy, my mother would hike up her skirt and scrub the bathroom floor.

  “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  “Look at that workmanship!” She points the scrub brush to a crack between tile and tub. “No wonder I’ve got roaches. Hand me that caulk!”

  “Mother, I want to talk to you.” I pull her up, I sit on the rim of the tub. She closes the lid and sits on the john. “Now. What’s going on around here?”

  “Humbug, that’s what’s going on.”

  “Has anybody bothered you?”

  “Who’s going to bother me?”

  “Then why are you scrubbing the bathroom floor in your best clothes?”

  “My car won’t start and I can’t call a taxi. My phone’s dead.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What else?” She is sitting straight up, smoothing her waist down into her hip, wagging her splendid calf against her knee.

  “I mean, have you noticed anything unusual?”

  “People running around like chickens with their heads cut off. You’d think a hurricane was on the way.”

  “What people?”

  “The Bococks down the street. He and the children threw their clothes in the boat and drove away.”

  “Boat? Oh, you mean on the trailer. Is that all?”

  “What else? Then this trash backs up a truck to the Bocock house.”

  “Trash? What trash?”

  “White trash. Black trash. Black men in yellow robes and guns.”