by Walker Percy
“She’s worried about my safety.”
“We’re perfectly safe here. Besides, I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“It’s not exactly that. She doesn’t think it proper for me to stay here without a chaperone.”
“Good Lord, of all things to worry about now.”
“You know Aunt Ellie.”
“Yes.”
I am wondering whether to mix another gin fizz, eat, nap, or take a shower. Absently I mix a gin fizz.
“Aunt Ellie is something, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Do you know what she’s been telling me for as long as I can remember?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“No?”
“Here I am, twenty-four, and she still takes me aside and says: Ellen, think of yourself as a treasure trove that you’re guarding for your future husband. Can you imagine such a thing?”
“No. Yes.”
“For years I thought she was talking about Mama’s silver service locked in the linen closet.”
“Is that right?” Feeling a slight quilting of the scalp, I take an anti-hives pill. “Well, she’s right, Ellen. And I envy the lucky man.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
“This is your room, by the way.”
“What will your two girl friends say?”
I shrug. “Don’t worry about them. Now. You take your nap. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a shower, put on some clean clothes, and eat your sandwiches. Then I think I’ll feel better.”
“I can’t stand those on you,” says Ellen, buttoning my unbuttoned collar tabs.
She lies on the bed, throwing the tufted chenille spread over her crossed ankles. How ill the chenille suits her! I blush at my summer’s effort of fitting out this room as a trysting place. How shabby Ellen makes it all seem!
Take a shower. The water is hot at first from the sun, two hundred feet of bitter hot hose water between the motel and the Esso station, then suddenly goes cold.
A harsh toweling. Switch to an Early Times today. Eat Ellen’s sandwiches? No, drink two gin fizzes.
Go fetch lapsometer, tiptoeing past Ellen, who sleeps, lips parted.
Now at the mirror, set lapsometer for a fairly stiff massage of Brodmann 11, the frontal location of the musical-erotic.
The machine sings like a tuning fork. My head sings with it, the neurones of Layer IV dancing in tune.
The albumen molecules hum.
Everybody’s talking at me,
I can’t hear a word they saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it from the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October?
Art Immelmann is right. Man is not made for suffering, night sweats, and morning terrors.
Doctor, heal thyself, I say, and give Brodmann 11 one last little buzz.
I feel much better, full of musical-erotic tenderness and gin fizzes and bourbon but fresh and clean and ravenous as well. I eat more of Ellen’s sandwiches.
Time to fetch Lola’s cello from the Rotary dining room.
The motel seems deserted. No activity at the church except for the carols still booming across the empty plaza:
A partridge in a pear tree …
July or not, it all comes back, the old pleasant month-long Santy-Claus-store-window Christmas. It wasn’t so bad really, the commercial Christmas, a month of Christmas Eves, stores open every night, everyone feeling good and generous and spending money freely, handsome happy Americans making the cash registers jingle, the nice commercial carols, Holy Night, the soft-eyed pretty girls everywhere—
The carol stops in mid-phrase. Someone has finally found the control panel.
16
The rain slams in sheets against the windows of Lola’s room. It is a small tropical storm. Lola plays a Dvořák Slavonic dance and ducks her head to its little lilt and halt and stutter and start again.
The only clean place in the room is the mattress, which has been Gulf-sprayed and spread with a fitted sheet snapped over the corners and stretched tight as a drumhead.
I lie on the drumhead sheet in my stocking feet, toddy balanced on my sternum.
Goodbye morning terror and afternoon sadness. Hello love and Anton Dvořák.
Above the racket of the storm and in the reek of warm bourbon and Gulf spray, old Dvorak sings of the sunny fields and twilit forests of Bohemia.
Lola closes her eyes as she plays. Her strong bare knees clasp the cello’s waist, her fingertips creak against the resin, her deltoid swells, the vibrato flutter of her fingering hand beats like the wings of a hawk.
Three French hens, two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree,
shrieks the carillon like a wind in the storm. Some damn fool has started it up again. Lola laughs and puts the cello away.
We lie entwined on the tight sheet, kissing persimmon kisses, Lola twisting down and around in her old Juilliard torque style of kissing. When she loves, even lying down, there is a sense of her stooping to it. The cello is still but music plays on. When we’re not kissing, her tongue cleaves to the back of her teeth and she hisses cello themes in a boy’s way of whistling, a paper-boy hiss-whistling through his teeth on his route.
Her warm callused fingertips strew stars along my flank. My scalp quilts a bit, popping a hair root or two. But I can see well enough. Where are my pills?
She is both heavy and frail.
Now the idiot is fooling with the carillon controls, spinning the tape backward into fall football music. The storm roars but above it I recognize the Tarheel alma mater,
Hark the sound of Tarheel voices
Ringing clear and true,
played five years ago when Tulane played the Carolina Tarheels.
We close our eyes and go spinning back to those old haunted falls, the happy-sad bittersweet drunk Octobers. What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we’ll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we’ll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.
Our heads lie in each other’s arms. My hand explores the tender juncture of her frailty and strength, a piece of nature’s drollery, the flare of ribs from the massive secret paraspinal muscle columns.
“We’ll live at Tara,” says Lola past my arm in the prosaic casting-ahead voice of a woman planning tomorrow’s meals. “While I’m showing horses and playing concerts, you can do your researches. You can have the garçonnière for your laboratory.”
Lying cheek against the warm slump of her biceps, I am perceiving myself as she sees me, an agreeable H. G. Wells nineteenth-century scientist type, “doing my researches” in the handsome outhouse of Tara, maybe working on a time machine and forgetting time the way great inventors do as she has to remind me to eat, bringing a tray of collard greens and corn bread to the lab. “Darling, you haven’t eaten all day!” So I take time off to eat, time off from my second breakthrough and my second Nobel.
Afterwards we sit on the gallery and Lola brings me toddies and plays happy old Haydn, whose music does not brook one single shadow of sadness.
Then we’ll go to bed, not in the bunker to watch the constellations spin in their courses but upstairs to the great four-poster, the same used by Rhett Butler and Scarlett and purchased by Vince Marsaglia at the M-G-M prop sale in 1970.
Perhaps I’ll even work at night. Happy is the man who can do science at midnight, of a Tuesday, in the fall, free of ghosts, exorcised by love and music of all past Octobers. Clasp Lola on Halloween and howl down the yellow moon and go to the lab and induce great s
imple hypotheses.
The rain slackens but still drums steadily on the orange tile roof of Howard Johnson’s.
“You’re so smart,” says Lola, giving me a hug.
“And you’re a fine girl.” I speak into the sweet heavy slump of her biceps. “What a lovely strong back you have. It’s good being here, isn’t it?”
“Lovely.”
“You’re such a good girl and you play such good music.”
“Do you really think I’m good?” She lifts her head.
“Yes,” I say, frowning, realizing I’ve stirred up her Texas competitiveness. She’s told me before about winning regional cello contests in West Texas.
“How good?”
“At music? The best,” I say, hoping to make her forget about it and locking my fingers in the small of her back, a deep wondrous swale.
But her horned fingertips absently play a passacaglia on my spine as her mind casts ahead.
“You know what I think I’ll do?”
“What?”
“Enter Yellow Rose in the Dallas show.”
“Good.” At least she’s off music contests.
“Then take up Billy Sol on his idea of a winter tour.”
“You have a truly splendid back. What a back. It’s extremely strong.”
“That’s nothing, feel this.”
So saying, she locks her legs around my waist in a non-erotic schoolboy’s wrestling hold and bears down.
“Good Lord,” I say, blinking to clear the fog from my eyes.
“What do you think of that?”
“Amazing.”
“Nobody ever beat Lola at anything.”
“I believe you.” Sometimes I think that men are the only single-minded lovers, loving for love, that women love with the idea of winning, winning either at love or cello-playing or what. “Billy Sol? Winter tour?”
“Yes, darl. You want Lola to keep up her music, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“This is Lola’s big chance.” Up and down goes the fingering hand warm as a horn on my backbone.
“Chance to do what?”
Billy Sol, it turns out, is Billy Sol Simpson of the music department at Texas A & M, who has offered her the “junior swing” for starters. It’s a tour of the junior colleges of Texas, of which there are forty or fifty—with himself, Billy Sol, as her accompanist. After that, who knows? Maybe the senior circuit: Baylor, T.C.U., S.M.U., and suchlike.
“Well, I don’t know,” I say, thinking of this guy Billy Sol squiring her around Beaumont Baptist College and West Texas Junior College at Pecos. Should I trust her to a Texas A & M piano player?
“Shoot, you ought to see Billy Sol. Just a big old prisspot, but a real good boy. He’s been wonderful to me.”
“I’m glad.”
“Don’t you be like that—you want me to squeeze you again?”
“No.”
“Anyhow, you’re coming with us. You’ll need a break from your researches.”
“Yes!” All of a sudden I feel happy again.
For a fact, it doesn’t sound bad at all, swinging out through all those lost lonesome Texas towns, setting up in Alamo Plaza motels bejeweled in the dusk under those great empty heart-stopping skies. A few toddies and I’ll sit in the back row of the LBJ Memorial auditorium behind rows of fresh-eyed, clean-necked, short-haired God-believing Protestant boys and girls, many dumb but many also smart, smart the way Van Cliburn was smart, who came from Texas too, making straight A’s at everything and taking the prize in Moscow, while big prissy Billy Sol tinkles away on the Steinway and Lola clasps her cello between her knees and sends old Brahms singing out into the great God-haunted Texas night.
… And afterwards eat a big steak and drink more toddies and make love and watch Japanese 3-D science-fiction late movies. (Dear God, I hope Lola won’t develop an obsession about winning, winning horse shows and music contests, the way Doris got hooked on antiques, Englishmen, and Hindoo religion.)
I must have been shaking my head, for she raises hers and looks at me. “What?”
But I don’t tell her. Instead I remind her that if worst comes to worst this afternoon, there may not be any horse shows or junior swings through Texas.
“Oh. You’re right,” she says, feigning gravity. She doesn’t really believe that anything could go wrong with the U.S.A. or at least with Texas.
Her fingering drifts off my back. She’s asleep. Her breath comes strong and sweet in my neck, as hay-sweet as her sorrel mare’s.
Carefully I ease myself free of her slack heavy-frail body.
What a strong fine girl. If worst came to worst, she and I could rebuild Tara with our bare hands.
17
“Chief, the news is worse.” Ellen watches me as I fix two gin fizzes. “Don’t you think you’re firing the sunset gun a little too early and too often?”
“What has happened now?”
“There are riots in New Orleans, and riots over here. The students are fighting the National Guard, the Lefts are fighting the Knotheads, the blacks are fighting the whites. The Jews are being persecuted.”
“What are the Christians doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Turn on the TV.”
“It’s on. The station went off the air.”
“Then they’ve taken the transmitter,” I say half to myself.
“What’s that, Chief?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you enjoy the concert?”
“What concert? Oh yes.”
“I heard from Dr. Immelmann again.”
“How did you hear from him?”
“On the Anser-Phone.”
“I thought you said it was dead.”
“It was. I don’t understand it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said to tell you ‘it’ was going to happen this afternoon.”
“It?”
“He said you would know what I meant.”
The gin fizz is good. Already the little albumen molecules are singing in my brain. My neck is swelling. I take a pill to prevent hives.
“What else did he say?”
“That if anything happens, we’re to stay here. That we’re safe with you because you can protect us with your lapsometer. He said you should watch and wait.”
“Watch for what?”
“He said you would know. Signs and portents, he said. He told me, don’t go back and get your coat.”
“Hm. Did he say how long we should wait here?”
“He said it might be months.”
“Did you ask him about your aunt and my mother?”
“He said they would be fine. Chief, do you know what is going to happen?”
“No. At least I am not sure.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Right now I have to see how Moira is.”
“Well, excuse me!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Frankly I don’t see what you see in either one of them.”
“They’re both fine girls. I’m very fond of them. I may as well tell you that I’m thinking of marrying again.”
“Congratulations. But don’t you have one girl too many?”
“Things are going to be very unsettled for the next few weeks,” I say vaguely.
“What does that mean?”
I shrug.
Ellen uncrosses her legs and leans forward. “Well, what do you mean? Do you mean you want to—marry both of them?”
“Right now, I’m responsible for all three of you.”
My scalp is beginning to quilt.
Ellen blinks. “I’m not sure I understand you.”
“It’s a question of honor.”
“Honor?”
“I don’t believe a man should trifle with a girl.”
“Well yes, but—!”
“However, if a man’s intentions are honorable—”
“But—”
“I mean if a man intends to marry a girl—
”
“But, Chief, there are two of them.”
“It is still a matter of intentions,” I say, feeling scalp-hawsers pop.
“You mean you’re going to marry both of them?”
“These are peculiar times. Abraham had several wives.”
“Abraham? Abraham who? My God, you couldn’t handle one wife.”
“Never mind,” I say stiffly. “The fact is I am responsible for all three of you.”
“Ho ho. Include me out!”
“Nevertheless—!”
“With those two”—she nods toward the wall—“you need me?”
“That’s right.”
“You need something. Chief, I don’t understand what is happening to you. You have so much to offer the world. There is so much that is fine in you. You’re a fine doctor. And God knows, if the world ever needed you, it needs you now. Yet all you want to do is live here in this motel with three women for months on end.”
“Yes!” I laugh. “You and I will spend the summer reading Calvin and Thomas Aquinas and let those two women squabble.”
“Not me, big boy! I’m leaving this afternoon.”
“You can’t. You heard what Art said.”
“It’s Art who’s picking me up.”
“What?”
“Dr. Immelmann offered me a job.”
“Doing what?”
“As his traveling secretary.”
“What in hell does that mean?”
“He’s going to Sweden to coordinate your MOQUOL program.”
“You and Art Immelmann in Sweden!”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s the goddamnest thing I ever heard.”
“Your cursing doesn’t help the situation.”
“You don’t want to go with him.”
“No, I don’t, Chief,” says Ellen quietly. She sits bolt upright at the desk, starchy as a head nurse on the morning shift, eyes blue as Lake Geneva.
“Stay with me, Ellen. Things will settle down. We’ll go back to work. Somebody will have to pick up the pieces.”
Ellen is silent.
“Well?”
“There would have to be some fundamental changes before I would stay,” she says at last.
“Changes? What changes?”
“You figure it out, Chief.”