Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  “Let me say this, Will,” said Jack Curl, dancing around and stopping him in a kind of mock confrontation.

  “O.K.”

  “Marion, your dear wife, my friend, the only benefactor these old people had, is gone. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know the last thing she told me before she died?”

  “No.”

  “She wanted to go ahead with the one project closest to her heart.”

  “What was that?”

  “You know. Her idea of a retirement village. A total love-and-faith community.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you think of this for a name? The Marion Peabody Barrett Memorial Community.”

  “Sounds fine.”

  “Does it sound too much like a commune?”

  “No, it sounds fine.”

  “All I ask of you is what you yourself want: to carry out her wishes.”

  All you ask from me is three million dollars. Well, why not?

  How could he not have noticed this about Jack Curl before? that even as he was moving his shoulders around under his jump suit, playing the sweaty clergyman doing good, that Jack too was trying to catch hold of his own life? that in the very moment of this joking godly confrontation—sure, I’m trying to con you out of three million, Will, but it’s a good cause and I’m God’s own con man, okay? and so forth—here was Jack Curl trying to catch hold. And wasn’t he doing it? Wasn’t he doing everything right? Yet when you took a good look at him, this sweaty Episcopal handyman, this godly greasy super, you saw in an instant that he was not quite there. Looking at him was like trying to focus on a blurred photograph.

  But you, old mole, you knew otherwise, didn’t you? You knew the secret. I could see it in your eyes, open and clear and brown, when you were run to ground in a Georgia swamp and looking up at me. You shot yourself, and then we could talk. You knew the secret. But how can that be? How can it be that only with death and dying does the sharp quick sense of life return? For that was your secret, wasn’t it? That it was death you loved most of all and loved so surely that you wanted to share the secret with me because you loved me too.

  One night after the war and during the Eisenhower years the father was taking a turn under the oaks. The son watched him from the porch.

  “The trouble is,” the man said, “there is no word for this.”

  “For what?”

  “This.” He held both arms out to the town, to the wide world. “It’s not war and it’s not peace. It’s not death and it’s not life. What is it? What do you call it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There is life and there is death. Life is better than death but there are worse things than death.”

  “What?”

  “There is no word for it. Maybe it never happened before and so there is not yet a word for it. What is the word for a state which is not life and not death, a death in life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder if it ever happened in history before?”

  “I don’t know.” Where is the word, the girl in the greenhouse would say, and look around.

  Hands in pockets, he looked at the chaplain and past him to the sunlight, which had turned yellow and now shone straight through the front door. I wonder what you would have thought of rich Christian Carolina, old mole.

  “What?”

  “I said what a great lady Marion was to give so unendingly of herself. There was so much to give.”

  “Do you mean because she was so rich or because she was so fat?”

  “Ha ha. That’s a winner. Touché. Marion would have loved that. Yes, Marion was far too heavy. God knows I tried to tell her. She said look who’s talking.” He put his hands on his side, a jolly fat lightfooted friar in a jump suit. “Marion and I had much in common. We loved all the good things God gives us. In a word we like to eat. But no, that’s not what I meant by her heart’s desire. You know what I meant.”

  “What?”

  A clock struck. The sun was setting.

  “I am talking about Marion’s dream of a community of people living out their lives married, together, not burdening anybody, a true love-and-faith community lived according to the rhythm of God’s own liturgical year.”

  God, love, faith, marriage. The old words clanged softly in the golden air around them like the Westminister chimes of St. John’s steeple clock.

  “Actually, Will, it was your other lady I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What other lady is that?”

  “Ha ha. I’m talking about my favorite girlfriend, the apple of your eye, your lovely daughter Leslie, a real sweetheart.”

  Leslie a sweetheart? lovely? the apple of his eye? Leslie, his daughter, was a tall sallow handsome dissatisfied nearsighted girl whose good looks were spoiled by a frown which had made a heavy inverted U in her brow as long as he could remember.

  “What about Leslie? Is she giving you trouble?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “What does she want now?”

  “She wants to write her own wedding ceremony.”

  “Could it be any worse than your new liturgy?”

  “Ha ha. That’s a winner. But what are we going to do?”

  “We?”

  “You don’t have a bishop looking down your throat.”

  “I sure don’t.”

  Jack pulled him close. They were standing outside the open door of a room. Jack almost whispered.

  “I want you to meet our newest couple. Tod and Tannie Levitt. Actually they’re our oldest couple. We’ve stretched a point and allowed them to share the same room. They’re eighty-five and eighty-seven. In the same room! Big deal, right? Bear with me. I have my devious reasons. They’re cute as they can be. You’ll love them. But, more important, I think you’ll see the possibilities of a real couples’ community even in this bareass hospital room. I want you to imagine Tod and Tannie in a rustic setting, a simple but homey apartment with a balcony opening onto the entire Smoky Mountains. Did you know that the hundred twenty-first psalm was Marion’s favorite? I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. And you better believe that’s where hers came from.”

  Tod and Tannie were sitting slumped in their wheelchairs between two beds. The television was mounted on a steel elbow high above them, too high to see. The Crosswits was on without sound. Tod was nodding and both hands in his lap were rolling invisible pills. Tannie was no bigger than a child. Her back was bowed into a semicircle so that she faced her knees. Her eyes were closed. But her bed jacket was a cheerful pink, all silk and ribbons and lace, and her soft white hair was as perfectly combed and curled as a Barbie doll’s.

  “Will,” said Jack Curl loudly. “I want you to meet Tod and Tannie, our first resident couple.”

  Tod went on nodding. Tannie did not open her eyes. A sound like a soft whistle came from her.

  “They’re this week’s winners on the dating game,” said the chaplain, winking at him. “So they’re shacking up with us. Right, Tod?”

  Tod nodded, had not stopped nodding.

  He gazed down at Tannie’s little stick arms. The skin was white and paper dry but a vein, thick and powerful as a snake, coiled on her wrist.

  “Now watch this,” said Jack in a lower voice but not minding if Tod and Tannie overheard him. “This is what I mean by an ongoing couple relationship. Tod!”

  Tod went on nodding and rolling pills.

  “Tannie!” cried the chaplain.

  Tannie went on snoring, chin on her chest.

  “Tod and Tannie! Give us a little song!”

  Tod did not stop nodding but one hand seemed to rise of itself and give Tannie a poke in the ribs. “Sing, Mama!” said Tod in a hoarse whisper.

  As if he had pressed a button, Tannie’s head flew up, her eyes opened, showing milky-blue, and she began to sing in a high-pitched girlish voice. Tod’s hand conducted and his head lilted from side to side instead of nodding. He
came in on every third word or so.

  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.

  I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.

  It won’t be a stylish marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet upon the seat

  Of a bicycle built for two!

  “For two,” said Tod.

  The instant the song was finished, Tannie’s head sank to her chest and she began to snore. Tod stopped conducting and went back to nodding and pill rolling.

  “Well?” asked Jack Curl in the hall.

  “Beats television,” he said vacantly, moving his head to make the yellow light race around the beveled glass of the front door.

  “You better believe it. Now, Will.”

  “Yes?”

  “Now. What I want you to imagine is the two of them, Tod and Tannie, and two hundred couples like them, from sixty-five on up, each with their own little rustic villa, coming back after evensong and lifting up their eyes to the hills. What do you think?”

  “Okay,” he said, unable to move his eyes from the sunlit door.

  “Okay?” Jack Curl rounded, came closer, in excitement. “You mean—”

  “I mean I will do as you say. I will imagine them.”

  “Oh. Good. I think.”

  When an old person died at St. Mark’s, often there was no one to claim the body. Marion would go to great lengths to trace the family and arrange the funeral. Yamaiuchi would chauffeur them in the Rolls, leading the way for the hearse to distant Carolina towns, Tryon or Goldsboro, where after the funeral in an empty weedy cemetery they would head for the nearest Holiday Inn in time for the businessman’s lunch. Marion, animated by a kind of holy vivacity, would eat the $2.95 buffet, heaping up mountains of mashed potatoes and pork chops, and go back for seconds, pleased by both the cheapness and the quantity of food. Like many rich women, she loved a bargain. All the while he gazed in bemusement at the ragged Southern cemetery, empty except for the Rolls, the hearse, Yamaiuchi, and three Asheville morticians (he was usually the fourth pallbearer for the casket light with its wispy burden), and then gazed around the bustling new Holiday Inn and the local businessmen come to eat. Live men and dead men.

  The shotgun lay beside the man on the wet speckled leaves. In his father’s eyes he saw a certitude. He had come into focus. How does it happen that a man can go through his life standing up, not himself and dreaming, eating business lunches and passing his wife in the hall, that it is only when he lies bleeding in a swamp that he becomes as solid and simple as the shotgun beside him?

  “What?” He gave a start. The chaplain was saying something.

  “I said when I come over tomorrow, perhaps you and I and Leslie can have a little powwow. About this ah do-it-yourself wedding.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want to get your old friend Mrs. Huger in on it too. I have a feeling she can handle Leslie. She’s quite a lady.”

  He was looking down at his hand. A shaft of light struck it. The yellow light, refracted by the prism, shaded into blue and red on his skin like a bruise. It was still possible to feel the buck of the Luger in the bones of his wrist.

  “You’re so lucky Mrs. Huger turned up when she did, Will. You’ve no idea how helpful she’s been. Isn’t she an old flame of yours? She’s a doll. Did you know she’s my main contact with Leslie and the groom’s family? Why is it women know so much more than we do?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Huger. Your old—”

  Oh, Kitty. Kitty Vaught Huger. My old flame. What in hell was Kitty doing up here? She and her grinning dentist-husband. They were everywhere, all over the golf course and in his house. Kitty had a woman’s managerial way with her. For a fact she had been helpful. Even Yamaiuchi liked her. Last Saturday when the Cupps flew in from California she and Yamaiuchi had fixed the hors d’oeuvre. What did she want? What did her husband want? Like many people who want something, he had a way of coming at you from the side and grinning back to his eyeteeth. Both came closer than people usually do. When they greeted you, they fell forward and laid hands on you. When Kitty touched him, he felt showers of gooseflesh but not exactly excitement. It was the sort of gooseflesh you feel when a child, not knowing about such things, puts his hands on you.

  Kitty had changed. When he thought of her, he thought of sitting next to her in the Alabama twilight in her father’s Lincoln, her knees together, eyes cast down, silent; crossing lonesome red-clay railroad cuts filled with ironweed and violet light. But now she came shouldering up to him. She was bolder, lustier, better-looking but almost brawny, a lady golfer, brown and freckle-shouldered. Her voice was deeper, a musical whiskey-mellowed country-club voice with a laugh he didn’t remember. When she sat, she straddled good-naturedly, opening her knees. When she leaned toward him, her heavy gold jewelry clunked.

  He was sitting in the Mercedes looking at the Luger. It was getting dark. A few old people were in the Kennedy rockers on the front porch, but most were inside watching giant-screen TV. Mr. Arnold, one of Marion’s patients who had come to the house, spied him and tried to say something, but one side of his face was pulled down and his lips blew out like a curtain. One hand was fisted and held close, cradled like a baby by the other arm.

  The Luger felt good. Its weight and ugliness and beauty made him smile. He shook his head fondly. Why did he feel good? Was it because for the first time in his life he could suddenly see what had happened to his father, exactly where he was right and where he was wrong? Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don’t have to and I won’t. Right, old mole, and if you were here in rich reborn Christian Carolina with its condos and 450 SELs and old folks rolling pills and cackling at Hee Haw, you wouldn’t put up with that either.

  Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn’t even look. That’s the difference between us. I’m going to find out once and for all. You never even looked.

  Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?

  He hefted the Luger. His father took it off an SS colonel, it and the colonel’s black cap with its Totenkopf insignia and some photographs—his father: a captain in the 10th Armored Division, which joined Patton at Saarburg, where he, his father, had his picture taken standing up in the hatch of an M4 Sherman tank, which did not look at all like the snapshot of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank taken in the Ardennes (even though I somehow know it was exactly what he, my father, had in mind when he had his picture taken: the Tiger in all its menacing beauty). Strange that he, my father, often spoke of the Ardennes and the Rhine and Weimar but never mentioned Buchenwald, which was only four miles from Weimar and which Patton took three weeks later, never mentioned that the horrified Patton paraded fifteen hundred of Weimar’s best humanistic Germans right down the middle of Buchenwald to see the sights, Patton of all people, no Goethe he who said to the fifteen hundred not look you sons of Goethe but look you sons of bitches (is not this in fact, Father, where your humanism ends in the end?). Yet he, my father, never mentioned that, even though I read about it in his own book, a history of the Third Army, that the 10th Armored Division was there too. Why did he keep the photographs of the SS colonel standing in the hatch of the Tiger tank which I found in the attic in Mississippi and not one word about Buchenwald? Why did he talk about the SS colonel so much if the Nazis were so bad and why did he think Patton not the SS colonel ridiculous with his chrome helmet and pearl-handled revolvers?

  He talked about the SS colonel as much as he talked about Marcus Flavinius, the Roman centurion. He knew by heart the letter which Marcus had written his cousin Tertullus in Rome, where he, Marcus, had heard things were going badly what with moneygrubbings, plots, treasons, sellouts. He, Marcus, wrote:


  When we left our native soil, Tertullus, we were told we were going to defend the sacred rights of the empire and of the people to whom we bring our protection and civilization. For this we have not hesitated to shed our blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes. We regret nothing. Please tell me the rumors I hear of treachery at home are not true and that our fellow citizens understand us, support us, protect our families as we ourselves protect the might of the Empire.

  Should it be otherwise, Tertullus, should we leave our weary bones to bleach on the tracts of the desert in vain, then beware of the anger of the Legions.

  Marcus Flavinius

  Centurion of the Second

  Cohort of the Augusta Legion

  SPQR

  Anger. That was it! His anger! You were possessed by anger, anger which in the end you turned on yourself. You loved only death because for you what passed for life was really a death-in-life, which has no name and so is worse than death. Is that what you envied the SS colonel, his death’s-head?

  Very well, perhaps you were right, but what if you were not? Did you look?

  What if there is a sign? What about the Jews? Are the Jews a sign? And if so, a sign of what? Did you overlook something? There were the Romans, the Augusta Legion, yes. There was the Army of Northern Virginia, yes. There was the Africa Korps, yes. But what about the Jews? Did you and the centurion overlook the Jews? What did you make of what happened to them?

  What to make, Father, of the Jews?

  He smiled again.

  What to make, reader, of a rich middle-aged American sitting in a German car, holding a German pistol with which he will in all probability blow out his brains, smiling to himself and looking around old Carolina for the Jews whom he imagined had all disappeared?

  Somehow he had got it in his head that all the Jews had either been killed in the Holocaust or had returned to Israel.