Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  “We could commute,” said the engineer.

  “Then you’ll go?”

  “Sure. We’ll get up early in the morning.”

  “What will you take?”

  “I need some mathematics. What about you?”

  “Yes, me too,” nodded the youth, eyes focused happily on the bright mote of agreement in the air between them.

  It suited them to lie abed, in the Trav-L-Aire yet also in old Carolina, listening to baseball in Cleveland and reading about set theory and an Englishman holed up in Somerset. Could a certain someone be watching the same Carolina moon?

  Or they joined the Vaughts, as they did in Charlestown, where they visited the gardens even though there was nothing in bloom but crape myrtle and day lilies. Evil-tempered mockingbirds sat watching them, atop tremendous oily camellias. Sprinklers whirled away in the sunlight, leaving drops sparkling in the hairy leaves of the azaleas. The water smelted bitter in the hot sun. The women liked to stand and talk and look at houses. They were built for standing, pelvises canted, and they more or less leaning on themselves. When the men stood still for thirty minutes, the blood ran to their feet. The sun made the engineer sick. He kept close to the women, closed his eyes, and took comfort in the lady smell of hot fragrant cotton. A few years from now and we’ll be dead, he thought, looking at tan frail Jamie and nutty old Mr. Vaught, and they, the women, will be back here looking at “places.”

  It was like home here, but different too. At home we have J. C. Penney’s and old ugly houses and vacant lots and new ugly houses. Here were pretty, wooden things, old and all painted white, a thick-skinned decorous white, thick as ship’s paint, and presided over by the women. The women had a serious custodial air. They knew the place was theirs. The men were not serious. They all but wore costumes. They plied their trades, butcher, baker, lawyer, in period playhouses out in the yard.

  Evenings the Vaughts sat around the green chloriniferous pools of the California motels, Rita and Kitty swimming and minding their bodies, Mr. Vaught getting up often to monkey with his Cadillac (he had installed a top oiler and claimed he got the same mileage as a Chevrolet), Mrs. Vaught always dressed to the nines and rocking vigorously in the springy pool chair and bathing her face with little paper pads soaked in cologne. When she was lucky, she found some lady from Moline who shared her views of fluoridation.

  Kitty avoided him. He sought her out, but she damped him down. She must think badly of him, he decided, and quick as he was to see as others saw, was willing to believe she was right. Was it simply that she took the easy way: she was with Rita and not with him and that was that? At any rate, if she didn’t love him, he discovered he loved her less.

  When they met by chance in motel passageways they angled their shoulders and sidled past like strangers. At Folly Beach they collided at the ice dispenser. He stood aside and said nothing. But when she filled her pitcher, she propped it on the rim of her pelvis and waited for him, a somewhat abstracted Rachel at the well.

  “It’s a lovely night,” she said, stooping to see the full moon through the cloister of the Quality Court.

  “Yes,” he said politely. He didn’t feel much like waiting upon her. But he said, “Would you like to take a walk?”

  “Oh yes.”

  They put their pitchers in the chest and walked on the beach. The moonlight curled along the wavelets. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He squeezed back. They sat against a log. She took her hand away and began sifting sand; it was cool and dry and left not a grain on the skin.

  He sat with his hands on his knees and the warm breeze flying up his pants leg and thought of nothing.

  “What’s the matter, Bill?” Kitty leaned toward him and searched his face.

  “Nothing. I feel good.”

  Kitty shifted closer. The sand under her sheared against itself and made a musical sound. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  “You act mad.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why are you different then?”

  “Different from what?”

  “From a certain nut who kissed a very surprised girl in the automat.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m different because you are different,” said the engineer, who always told the exact truth.

  “Me! How?”

  “I had looked forward to being with you on this trip. But it seems you prefer Rita’s company. I had wanted to be with you during the ordinary times of the day, for example after breakfast in the morning. I did not have any sisters,” he added thoughtfully. “So I never knew a girl in the morning. But instead we have become like strangers. Worse, we avoid each other.”

  “Yes,” she said gravely, conscious, he could not help but notice, of saying it so: gravely. “Don’t you know why?” she said at last.

  “No.”

  She sifted the cool discrete sand into her palm, where it made a perfect pyramid, shedding itself. “You say you never had sisters. Well, I never had a date, boyfriends—except a few boys in my ballet class who had foreheads this low. Rita and I got used to living quietly.”

  “And now?”

  “I guess I’m clinging to the nest like a big old cuckoo. Isn’t that awful?”

  He shrugged.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked him.

  “What do I want you to do?”

  “Tell me.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “How do you feel? Do you still love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you? Oh, I love you too.”

  Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?

  One thing I’m sure of, thought he as he held her charms in his arms: I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.

  But when he kissed her and there she was again looking at him from both sides at once, he had the first inkling of what might be wrong. She was too dutiful and athletic. She worked her mouth against his (is this right, she as good as asked).

  “Wonderful,” she breathed, lying back. “A perfect setting.”

  Why is it not wonderful, he wondered, and when he leaned over again and embraced her in the sand, he knowing without calculating the exact angle at which he might lie over against her—about twenty degrees past the vertical—she miscalculated, misread him and moved slightly, yet unmistakably to get plainly and simply under him, then feeling the surprise in him stopped almost before she began. It was like correcting a misstep in dancing.

  “What is it?” she whispered presently.

  “Nothing,” he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she, Kitty, was no such thing. She didn’t know any better than he. Love, she, like him, was obliged to see as a naked garden of stamens and pistils. But what threw him off worst was that, sentient as always, he found himself catching onto how it was with her: he saw that she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing. There were even echoes of a third person: what, you worry about the boys as good a figure as you have, etc. So he was the boy and she was doing her best to do what a girl does. He sighed.

  “What?” she asked again.

  “Nothing,” he said, kissing her eyes, which were, at any rate, like stars.

  He sighed again. Very well, I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlf
riend, lover and father. If it is possible.

  They stirred in the musical sand. “We’d better go back,” said the gentlemanly engineer and kissed her somewhat lewdly so she wouldn’t feel she had failed. It seemed to be his duty now to protect her non-virtue as best he could. After all, he mused, as he reckoned girls must have mused in other ages, if worst comes to worst and all else fails I can let her under me—I shan’t begrudge her the sacrifice. What ailed her, him, them, he wondered. Holding her hand as they returned to the Quality Court, he flexed his wrist so that he could count his pulse against her bone.

  Mainly their trouble—or good fortune, as the case might be—was that they were still out of phase, their fervors alternating and jostling each other like bad dancers. For now, back at the cooler and she then going ahead of him with her pitcher on the rim of her pelvis, desire like a mighty wind caught him from behind and nearly blew him down. He almost fainted with old motel lewd-longing. “Wait,” he whispered— oh, the piercing sorrow of it, this the mortal illness of youth like death to old age. “Wait.” He felt his way along the blotting-paper wall like a blind man. She took his outstretched hand.

  “What is it, dearest?”

  “Let’s go in here,” he said, opening the door to a closet which housed a giant pulsing Fedders.

  “What for?” she asked. Her eyes were silvery and turned in.

  “Let us go in the service room.” For it is here and not by moonlight—he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.

  “There you are,” said Rita, opening the door opposite. “Where in the world was the ice machine?”

  And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.

  The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.

  6.

  One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.

  The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his Theory of Sets. The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.

  “—but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!”

  “Then go to a good one.”

  He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.

  Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out—had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.

  “Have I told you what I want to be?”

  “I’m afraid you have.”

  “I want to be an ordinary silly girl who has dates and goes to dances.”

  “You’re in a fair way to do it.”

  “I love to dance.”

  “Then work harder at it. You’re lazy.”

  “You know what I mean. I mean dancing cheek to cheek. I want to be broken in on.”

  “They don’t dance like that now.”

  “I want to have beaus.”

  “You can have beaus in Tesuque or in Salamanca and not ruin your mind while you do it”

  “I want to be Tri Delt.”

  “Good God!”

  “I want to go to dances and get a tremendous rush. That’s what my grandmother used to say: I went to such and such a dance and got a tremendous rush. Did you know my grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer?”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “I want to talk the foolishness the girls and boys at home talk.”

  “You’re on your way.”

  “I want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater.”

  “Very well.”

  “I want to go to the Sugar Bowl.”

  “Christ.”

  “But you’re going to stay with us. I need you!”

  Rita was silent.

  “Remember our bargain, Ree.”

  “What bargain?” said Rita in a muffled voice. She had turned away from the window.

  “That you stay till Christmas. By then I’ll know. I could easily have flunked out by then just as I flunked out before. But even if I don’t I’ll know. I’ll know whether to go with you or not.”

  “We’ll see,” said Rita absently.

  7.

  They reached the Golden Isles of Georgia in time for the first tropical storm of the year. The wind whipped over the gray ocean, out of kilter with the slow rhythm of the waves, tore up patches of spume, and raised a spindrift. Georgians had sense enough to go home and so the Vaughts had the hotel to themselves, an honorable old hacienda of wide glassed-in vestibules opening into conservatories and recreation rooms, and rows of brass pots planted with ferns, great cretaceous gymnosperms from the days of Henry Grady, dry and dusty as turkey wings. They looked at stuffed birds and group photographs of Southern governors and played mahjong.

  A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you. In a day’s time they had a standing joke going as if you had been there a month. One bold fellow noticed the engineer take out his red book and read a few maxims as he waited for the elevator. “Now he’s gon’ be the smart one!” he announced to the hotel and later meeting him in the hall would therefore holler: “You got your book with you?” with a special sort of boldness, even a recklessness, which he took to be his due by virtue of the very credential of his amiability. The engineer laughed politely and even cackled a bit in order to appear the proper damn fool they would have him be.

  By four o’clock the afternoon had turned yellow and dark. The engineer and Jamie found some rook cards and played a game in the conservatory, which still had a magic lantern from the days when lectures were delivered to vacationers on birds and sea shells. When the wind picked up, the engineer decided to go see to the Trav-L-Aire. Jamie wouldn’t come. He went out of his way to tell the engineer he was going to telephone his sister Val.

  “What for?” the engineer asked him, seeing that the other wanted him to ask.

  “When I feel bad, I call her and she makes me feel better.”

&nbs
p; “Is she the sister who joined the religious order?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “No.”

  “Then what good can she do you?” They had fallen into the abrupt mocking but not wholly unserious way of talking which people who spend a lot of time together get into.

  “She is not religious either, at least not in the ordinary sense.”

  “What is she doing in a religious order?”

  “I don’t know. Anyhow that is not what I’m interested in.”

  “What are you interested in?” asked the engineer, sniffing the old rook cards. They smelled like money.

  “I thought she might give me a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Anything. Teaching, minor repairs. I am feeling very good physically.”

  “I’m sure it’s a wonderful work she is doing.”

  “I’m not interested in that either,” said Jamie irritably. “I’m not interested in the Negroes.”

  “What are you interested in?”

  “Anything she wants me to do. Her place is down in Tyree County in the piney woods, ten miles from nowhere. I thought it wouldn’t be bad to live there as we have been living, in the camper. We could teach, give her a hand. You may not want to. But I am feeling very strong. Feel my grip.”

  “Very good.”

  “I can put you down hand-wrestling.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Let’s see.”

  The engineer, who never faked with Jamie, put him down quickly. But Jamie was surprisingly strong.

  “Why don’t we work out together, Bill?”

  “O.K.”

  “What do you think of going down to Tyree County?” asked Jamie, hiding behind his rook cards.

  “I thought you wanted to go to college.”

  “What I don’t want is to go back home to the same thing, see Mother and Poppy every morning, watch the same golfers pass on number 6 fairway.”

  “O.K.” Then he’s changed his mind about Sutter, thought the engineer.

  “O.K. what? You mean you’ll go?”

  “Sure,” said the engineer, who in truth saw how it stood with Jamie and did not think it such a bad idea himself, going to the end of nowhere, parking in the pines and doing a few humble tasks.