Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  “I got to get back to the party.” And then to Kitty’s ass. “I promised Marion to get Leslie married up proper.”

  “Yes. What a lovely girl. That reminds me. This may make you laugh but it’s something I promised Marion.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Before she died Marion asked me to tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Funny she wouldn’t tell you. You and Marion didn’t communicate much, did you?”

  “No, we didn’t communicate much. We had what you call a communication breakdown.”

  Lewis laughed, himself again despite himself. “Marriage is hell, ain’t it? Cindy is a wonderful wife but she hasn’t grown.”

  “That’s too bad.” Grown to what? “What was it you were supposed to tell me?”

  “Oh, Marion said: just make sure he gets to the wedding and all, that if he wants to pull one of his little fade-outs, she’s not going to be there to cover for you.” Lewis laughed. “She knew you pretty well, Will.”

  “Yes.”

  “I told her, shit, Will will be there, don’t worry about it.”

  “You didn’t say shit to Marion.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Right.”

  “You won’t come down later to crack a bottle and listen to some music? I just got the whole Ring.”

  “No.” Jesus, no.

  “Or shoot doves. Or sit in the cave. Or whatever.”

  “The cave? Shoot doves?” A strange thought flew into his head. He looked at Lewis. “Okay. I will.”

  After Lewis left, he stood for a moment looking down at the Greener. For the second time in a week, he remembered a movie actor he had only heard of once. No, he didn’t even remember the actor. He remembered his father remember the actor as they were driving in Hollywood in 1950. After the Georgia hunt they had gone West. At the end of the continent they found themselves driving down Sunset Boulevard in his father’s big black 4-hole Dynaflow Buick. His father, who had not spoken for a thousand miles, said: “You see that corner?” “Yes sir.” “Once I was here before.” “Is that right?” “I was here for the Olympics of 1932. On that corner I saw an actor by the name of Ross Alexander. It was before his death.” “Is that so?” “One night he was giving a party at his house. In the middle of the party he got up and said I think I’ll go outside and shoot a duck. No one thought anything of this announcement. He went outside to the garage and shot himself. No one thought much of that either. Similar events were occurring in Rome in 450 before its sack by the Vandals.” “Is that right?”

  Will Barrett snapped the leather case of the Greener and put it away in the closet behind the Electrolux.

  5

  “What a wonderful person your wife was,” said Kitty.

  “Yes, she was.”

  They were watching his daughter Leslie as she talked with Mr. Arnold from the nursing home. Despite his stroke he could get around with a walker. One fierce eye gazed around the room under a small bald head white as an onion. One side of his face was shut down. Eyelid, cheek, lip fell like a curtain.

  “Marion was a saint in this world,” said Kitty.

  “Yes.”

  “And you were so wonderful with her. I’ve seen you pushing her in the A & P, helping her in and out of the car.”

  “Yes.”

  “If she hadn’t been so heavy, she would have been a lovely woman.”

  “Yes.”

  No. Marion was not lovely, even before she got “heavy,” never had been lovely except for her good gray eyes and heavy wide winged eyebrows.

  Why had he married her? It was not, was it? because she was Bertie’s sister and Bertie owned the firm and Marion owned forty million dollars?

  No, he married her, hadn’t he? because she was touching, with her not too bad polio limp, and even pretty in a gawky Yankeefied way—even now when he thought of her at Northport, he saw her in a blue middy blouse—middy blouse? was such a thing possible, was it in a photograph, or did he imagine it?—and her direct gray-eyed gaze a whole world removed from a Sweetbriar girl or a Carolina coed who had six different ways of looking at you and with all six had seen you coming before you saw her.

  No, he married her because he pleased her so much. It is not a small thing to be able to make someone happy so easily.

  No, he married her for the very outlandishness of it, marrying her in Northport being as far as he could get from where he had come from.

  No, he married her because she was such a good cheerful forthright Northern Episcopal Christian and wanted him to be one too and he tried and even imagined he believed it—again for the very outlandishness of it, taking for his own a New York Episcopal view of an Anglican view of a Roman view of a Jewish Happening. Might it not be true for this very reason? Could anybody but God have gotten away with such outlandishness, contriving to have rich Long Island Episcopalians who if they had no use for anything had no use for Jews, worship a Jew?

  No, he married her for none of these reasons and for all of them. Marry her for money and the firm? Yes and no. Marry her because he could make her happy? Yes and no. Marry her because she was as far away as he could get from Mississippi? Yes and no. And from you, old mole? Yes. And get Jesus Christ in the bargain? Why not?

  Yes, it was all of these but most of all it was the offhandedness and smiling secret coolness with which he did it, getting it all and even going the Gospels one better because the Gospels spoke of the children of this world and the children of light and set one against the other and he was both and had both and why not? Why not marry her?

  Wasn’t it possible to believe in God like Pascal’s cold-blooded bettor, because there was everything to gain if you were right and nothing to lose if you were wrong?

  For a while it seemed that it was possible.

  Then it seemed not to matter.

  In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.

  After he married Marion, she seemed happier than ever, gave herself to church work, doing so with pleasure, took pleasure in him—and suddenly took pleasure in eating. She married, gave herself to good works, heaved a great sigh of relief, and began to eat. She ate and ate and ate. She grew too heavy for her hip joint already made frail and porous by polio. The ball of her femur drove into the socket of her pelvis, melted, and fused. She took to a wheelchair, ate more than ever, did more good works. She spent herself for the poor and old and wretched of North Carolina. She was one of the good triumphant Yankees who helped out the poor old South. In and out of meetings flew her wheelchair, her arms burly as a laborer’s. Fueled by holy energy, money, and brisk good cheer, she spun past slack-jawed Southerners, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, paid the workers in her mills a living wage, the very lintheads her piratical Yankee father had despoiled and gotten rich on: a mystery. Another mystery: her sanctity and gluttony. She truly gave herself to others, served God and her fellow man with a good and cheerful heart—and ate and ate and ate, her eyes as round and glittering as a lover’s.

  It had been a pleasure for him to please and serve her. Only he, she said, had the strength and deftness to lean into the Rolls, take her by the waist while she took him by the neck, and in one quick powerful motion swing her out and around and into the wheelchair. Yamaiuchi was strong enough to do it but she wouldn’t let him. That’s why Yamaiuchi hates me, he thought. Had she promised him something in her will and hadn’t come through? To the A & P, then push her by one hand and the cart by the other while she snatched cans off the shelves, Celeste pizzas, Sara Lee cream pies, bottles of Plagniol, brownies, cream butter, eggs, gallons of custard ice cream. For her the pleasure came from the outing with him and from her “economizing” by doing her own shopping.

  Twice a week he took her also to St. Mark’s Home, where he wheeled her down the halls and she knew every resident
by name and visited, wheelchair to wheelchair. Looking down, he could see her welted forehead and cheeks foreshortened and her burly forearms, resting now, while he pushed.

  She ate more. She grew bigger, fatter, but also stronger. She ate more and more: Smithfield hams, Yamaiuchi’s wife’s shirred eggs, Long Island ducks. Cholesterol sparkled like a golden rain in her blood, settled as a sludge winking with diamonds. A tiny stone lodged in her common bile duct. A bacillus sprouted in the stagnant dammed bile. She turned yellow as butter and hot as fire. There was no finding the diamond through the cliffs of ocherous fat. She died.

  Both Marion and Leslie his daughter were religious in ways which were both admirable and daunting. He could not disagree with them nor allow himself the slightest distance of irony. How could he disagree with them? Both seemed to be right or at least triumphantly well-intentioned. It was odd only that though he had no quarrel with them, they quarreled with each other.

  Marion had been an old-style Episcopalian who believed that one’s duty lay with God, church, the Book of Common Prayer, family, country, and doing good works.

  Leslie, his daughter, was a new-style Christian who believed in giving her life to the Lord through a personal encounter with Him and who accordingly had no use for church, priests, or ritual. She believed this and Jason believed a California version of this. They got along well together, did good works, and seemed to be happy. How could one find fault with Leslie?

  Leslie was leaning forward, speaking slowly to Mr. Arnold. She was helping him with his speech. She was a speech therapist. When he tried to say something, his lips on the slack side blew out like a drape. Leslie grimaced impatiently.

  Now Leslie was arguing with Jack Curl, the minister. The three Cupps stood by silent and agreeable, tall as trees. The argument was not disagreeable, there were smiles and laughter, but it was an argument nevertheless. He could tell by the arch of Leslie’s back and by Jack Curl’s terror. Serious arguments, especially theological arguments, terrified Jack. They were probably arguing about the wedding. Marion had wanted a traditional ceremony. Leslie and Jason wanted to write their own ceremony.

  Marion had been a conservative Episcopalian and had no use for the changes in the church.

  Leslie and Jason were born-again Christians and had no use for anything, liturgy or sacrament, which got in the way of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

  Ed and Marge Cupp were Californians.

  Jack Curl, the minister, had no strong feelings about woman priests or the interim prayer book. He had been terrified that Marion, who had found him through her search committee and who considered the interim prayer book an abomination, would fire him. He attended ecumenical councils in the Middle East and Latin America. He had even visited a Russian bishop in Odessa and had started a collection of ikons. He wore jump suits.

  Kitty believed in astrology.

  Yamaiuchi was a Jehovah’s Witness. He believed he was one of the 144,000 who would survive Armageddon and actually live in their bodies on this earth for a thousand years—and reign.

  Yamaiuchi’s wife, the cook, was a theosophist, who believed in reincarnation. She believed she had once been a priestess on Atlantis before it sank.

  Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?

  The only unbelievers he knew in Linwood were Lewis Peckham and Ewell McBee, and they were even more demented than the believers.

  Leslie, who was sitting bolt upright on the couch, legs folded under her, took off her glasses to clean them, a habit she’d always had, leaving her eyes naked and hazed. Looking at her, his daughter, he found himself thinking not about her or the wedding or the argument but, strangely enough, about how the girl in the woods might see her. In her nutty way with words, she would have seen Leslie in her name Leslie and now he too could see her, had always seen her as a Leslie, the two syllables of the name linked and hinged and folding just as her legs folded under her and the stems folded against her glasses, the whispering of her panty hose and the slight clash of the glasses connoted by the s in Les and the Leslie itself with its s and neuterness signifying both prissiness and masculinity, a secretarial primness which indeed Leslie had and which was all the more remarkable what with her being born-again. It was impossible to envision her personal encounter with Christ as other than a crisp business transaction.

  Yet once he saw her at the end of a prayer meeting when everyone smiled and cried and hugged each other. She had removed her thick glasses. It made her look naked and vulnerable. She smiled and hugged and cried too. It struck a strange pang to his very heart to see her like that. For some reason, tears sprang to his eyes too. What to make of all this melting belief? Did he like her better cool and distant behind her glasses? What was wrong, he asked himself, with opening up and loving everybody? What was wrong with their loving Jesus? I don’t know. Something.

  Marge Cupp cupped her hands and made swimming motions. An ex-Olympic swimmer, she was telling Jack Curl how she taught children to swim before they walked. Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion, and what’s more make it credible. It was easy to believe her and see her in the surf, a blond not-so-young Juno, waves foaming at her knees, her swim-coach tank suit well worn and dry, the hem slightly frayed over her strong dark marbled legs, launch happy babes into the Pacific, the Aquarians of a new age. Who knows? Maybe she was right: going back where we came from, back to the primal sea. That was her California principle, leaving the sad failed land life behind and leaving it soon enough and young enough before it screwed you up for good, and going back to the original environment, the ocean (which had the same salt content as blood and the amniotic fluid where we were happy), and, age ten months to ten years to a hundred, frolic like porpoises in the warm Cretaceous sea.

  Jack Curl was trying to listen but he was terrified. Jump suit or no jump suit, he was terrified. Wouldn’t he have been better off rid of his genteel Virginia Episcopal tight-assed terror if Marge had got hold of him age six months and pitched him into the ocean?

  Ed Cupp bunched the fingers of his left hand (which was big enough to hold a basketball from the top) and drove them up into his right. He was describing to Lewis Peckham the proper insertion of a Mercedes oil filter. There was a warranty problem with his car, whose engine had burnt up in Oklahoma City, where the Mercedes dealer had refused to honor the warranty, claiming that the oil filter had been inserted improperly. It was impossible to insert the filter improperly, said Ed Cupp, German engineering had seen to that. It was all he could think about. He too was credible. Listening to him, one shared his outrage and wished him well in his lawsuit against the Oklahoma dealer.

  Leslie, leaning forward, smiling yet intense, was giving Mr. Arnold speech lessons, making a p by compressing her lips and puffing out the p against her hand, then holding her hand to Mr. Arnold’s mouth, but when he tried to say p, his slack lips blew out on the left side. Mr. Arnold looked around angrily and made motions toward his mouth. He was hungry. Leslie was angry with him.

  The tree was disappearing. There was a ripple in a glass windowpane. He knew that particular ripple. Sitting in a certain chair, not reading, not talking, not listening to music, he had discovered that the ripple lined up with the far rim of the gorge so that when he moved his head a wave seemed to run along the rocky ledge.

  Something was happening. Suddenly, with a little surge of satisfaction under his belt, he knew what it was. Everything had the look about it of coming to an end. There was nothing more he wished to say to the Cupps. There was nothing more for them to say to him. Things do come to an end. There was an end to this room. It was impossible for him to imagine entering this whited-out room tomorrow and lining up the ripple in the glass with the rim of the gorge. The tree was vanishing for good into the cloud.

  For
at least a hundred times in past years he had lined up ripple of glass with rim of gorge. A novel thought occurred to him. Sooner or later there comes along a lining up which is the last—number 101 or 102. Ordinarily one does not keep track and does not imagine that there will be a last lining up. But why not decide which lining up will be the last? Very well. This one. He lined up ripple with the beginning of the gorge rim like the two points of a gunsight and moved his eye. The ripple ran along the rim until it came to the scarlet oak which hid the target like the tree in front of the Texas Book Depository. Anyhow, the tree had almost vanished in the fog.

  Suddenly he knew why he remembered the triangular patch of woods near the railroad tracks where he wanted to make love to Ethel Rosenblum. It was the very sort of place, a nondescript weedy triangular public pubic sort of place, to make a sort of love or to die a sort of death.

  The silence of the cloud seemed to press in upon the house like cotton.

  Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?

  Silence.

  Very well, old mole, you win.

  6

  Kitty touched him, jostled him with her hip, shoulder, elbow. She looked at him. “You look as though you just made up your mind to do something, decided what you wanted, and know just how to get it.”

  “Ah.”

  “What is it, Will?” She moved closer.

  “Ah.”

  Her eyes widened. “Is it me?”

  “Ah—”

  Kitty laughed, put her arm around his waist, and said she had a favor to ask of him. He smiled and nodded, noting with curiosity that everywhere she touched him a welt rose to meet her.