Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  “My Uncle Sutter? I remember him.”

  “You do?”

  “What about him?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he crazy and no good like they said?”

  “No. What happened to your sister Val?”

  “She became a nun.”

  “I know that. Is she still a nun?”

  “Yes. The last I heard, which was two or five years ago.”

  “Two or five. I see. Where is she, still in South Alabama?”

  “No, she’s not there.”

  “Where is she?” He was watching her closely.

  “She’s teaching at a parochial school at Pass Christian on the Gulf Coast. The school is run by the Little Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic.”

  He was silent for a long time. He seemed to be watching the rain. He put his hand in the small of her back. Oh my, she thought. Lightning flickered. At last he smiled in the lightning.

  “What?” she said.

  “You remembered it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That outrageous name. The Little Sisters of what?”

  “The Little Eucharistic Sisters of St. Dominic.” She clapped her hands. “I did. I remember all about Val. She came to see me when I first got sick. In her old black nun clothes. She put her hands on my head and told me I was going to be fine.”

  “She was right.”

  “Maybe. No, not maybe. I’m fine. You feel so good. Me too. The good is all over me, starting with my back. Now I understand how the two work together.”

  “What two?”

  “The it and the doing, the noun and the verb, sweet sweet love and a putting it to you, loving and hating, you and I.”

  He laughed. “You do, don’t you? What happens to the two?”

  “They become one but not in the sappy way of the saying?”

  “What way, then?”

  “One plus one equals one and oh boy almond joy.”

  He was laughing. “You’re Sutter turned happy.”

  “I want you to be my guardian,” she said. Even though he was not touching her, his words were a kind of touching. Did he intend them so? When he didn’t answer, she went back over his words for the sense of them. “Will you be my guardian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you go down in the cave?” Now his hand was in the small of her back again, with a light firm pressure as if they were dancing.

  “What?” he said, knitting his brows as if he were trying to remember something.

  “I do that,” she said, “I go round and down to get down to myself.”

  “I went down and around to get out of myself.”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Curious. Now that your memory is better, mine is . . . Anyhow, that’s over and done with. The future is what concerns us.”

  “You seem different. Before, when you climbed through the fence and I saw you, you were standing still a long time as if you were listening. Now you seem to know what to do. Was it the cave?”

  “The cave,” he said. She could hardly hear him over the rising din of the storm. Lightning forked directly overhead and a sharp crack came hard upon it. The dog, discomfited and frowning, got up and walked around stiff-legged. It was an electrical storm. Soon the lightning was almost continuous, ripping and cracking in the woods around them. Facets of glass flashed blue and white. It was like living inside a diamond. He seemed not to notice her or the storm. His eyes were open and unblinking. The hand behind his head was open, the middle finger touched her shoulder, which she bent close to him, still warming him, now a touch, now a jab, but he could have been poking his own knee. The finger moved as if it were conducting music she couldn’t hear. Nor could she hear what he said in the racket. He was talking in a low voice. She strained against him. Was he talking to her?

  “The fence . . . the cave . . .” His voice seemed to be inside her head.

  The finger stopped touching and the hand opened wide, palm up, like a man shrugging. The lightning was getting louder and she was thinking, is it good or bad that the greenhouse has a metal frame? Perhaps good what with the finials sticking up like lightning rods when crackOW it hit. A ball of light rolled toward them down the center aisle of the greenhouse as lazily as a ball of yarn. The dog, lip hung on his tooth, eyed it in outrage and walked stiffly away. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Let’s—” And hushed because he wasn’t listening.

  He held her close. Again as her body came against him, she felt her eyes smiling and going away. Ha, she said to herself, maybe he didn’t find what he was looking for but I did. Ha. Maybe I ‘m nuts and he’s not but I know now what I want. Ha. Kelso, guess what. I did it like you said. I broke out and found my place and “fell in love” and inherited a million dollars. Maybe sixty million, and I don’t care if it’s sixty cents. Guess what. I am in love. Ah ha, so this is what it is, this “being in love.” This is what I want. This him. Him. The money is nice but love is above. Yes yes. Kelso honey, I’m coming back for you. You are going to help me raise hydroponic beans.

  Lightning struck again. The glass house glittered like a diamond trapping light. Jesus, she thought, doesn’t he know we could get killed? But he was humming a tune—the Trout?—and keeping time with his finger on her shoulder.

  The lightning was going away. “What’s going to happen now?” she asked him.

  “Now? I’m going home now.”

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  “What is expected of me. Take care of people who need taking care of. I have to see how my daughter is. I have an obligation to her. I have not been a good father. Then we’ll see.

  “Am I one of those people you’re going to take care of?”

  “Yes.” He sat up. “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too.” Juices spurted in her mouth. “I bought some steaks.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. She put her marine jacket on. He lay quietly, watching her while she cooked. She didn’t mind feeling his eyes on her back and her bare legs. She went outside, to get the beer. It didn’t matter that it was cold and raining and she was barefoot.

  The steaks were good. But he ate absently, as if they were in a restaurant and the steaks were no more or less than he expected. The rain stopped. It was still dark when he left. She didn’t know what time it was.

  She could not have said how long she stood in the doorway thinking of nothing, listening to the dripping rhododendrons, which were like large brooding presences stooping toward her—when he came back.

  He was different. They stood, the candle between them. She didn’t want to look at him.

  “I forgot to tell you something. I will be your legal guardian if that is what you and your parents want. That will involve a fiduciary relationship which I will discharge faithfully, in your interest and to the best of my ability.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Is it enough for you?”

  “Me?”

  “Why do you sound so tired?”

  “Me? It is not an interesting subject. At least not to me. The subject is closed, if not disclosed,” he said, smiling.

  “Ha.”

  “Thank you for taking care of me.” He held out his hand. She did not take it. She hung her head like a mountain girl.

  She did not seem to notice his leaving and stood thinking of nothing until it occurred to her that the dog hadn’t been fed. It was pleasant to think of the dog’s pleasure as she gathered up the steak scraps.

  II

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED but it was still dark when he reached the Mercedes. He did not realize he was cold until he tried to unlock the door. His hand began to shake. Then, as if it had been given permission, his whole body began to shake. He opened the door. The courtesy lights came on. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. After he got under the wheel and closed the door, he waited for the li
ghts to go out. The courtesy lights stayed on long enough to allow the driver to insert his key in the ignition. While the light was on, he was aware of a slight compulsion to do what the German light expected him to do, start the engine. The Mercedes was waiting for him.

  But he did not start the engine. He sat shaking and smelling the car. It smelled of leather and wax and car newness. The shaking came in waves but he paid no attention. Three hundred yards away a naked yellow light bulb shone in the gable of a shed where electric carts were stored, each parked in its stall, plugged in and recharging. The shed hummed. A stray cart had been abandoned in the woods. Its roof supports were tilted at an angle but an empty Coke bottle hung vertically in its gimbel. The shaking stopped. Suddenly he became sleepy. It is possible, he thought, to drive home now, go straight up to the bedroom from the garage, sleep until eight, bathe, shave, dress, and appear for breakfast as usual in the sun parlor. In good weather the morning sun flashed on the polished silver and the soft white napery. Yamaiuchi’s hand came twirling down with a melon, orange juice, shirred egg.

  On the other hand, he was sleepy, as sleepy as he had ever been in his life. Sleep came down around his ears like an iron hat.

  Now sitting on the back seat, he felt for Marion’s lap robe. It was thick, gray, heavy as a rug, smooth on one side and curly with lamb’s wool on the other. It was the “cheap” lap robe, he remembered, which Marion had chosen rather than use the fur robe from the Rolls. Something winked in the feeble yellow light. It was the miniature bar fitted into the back of the front seat. She had given him the “little” Mercedes for their own outings. As she saw it, and as it pleased him to see her seeing it, in the Mercedes they were more or less like other Carolina couples in their Plymouths and Fords, which for a fact did look more and more like a Mercedes. No Rolls, no chauffeur, no fuss. Zip they went up the Blue Ridge Parkway, down to town for shopping, into Asheville to see her attorneys, over to Charlotte, Chapel Hill, and Durham for football and basketball games. What a pleasure for her and him, as much a pleasure for him to show her how the pleasure could be taken as to take it for himself, to set out on a fine football Saturday morning, meet the McKeons and Battles for a picnic at an interstate rest area, swing Marion into her wheelchair, tuck her legs in with the “cheap” lap robe, stand around drinks in hand, hampers open on tailgates, and with that festive fondness and the special dispensation conferred by the kickoff two hours away—and the extra pleasure too of the very publicness of the place, their own sector of clean public concrete staked out amidst the sleeping eighteen-wheelers and Florida-bound Airstreams, we taking pleasure from them, we on our way to the game, they coming and going in the old unheeding public world—tend the tiny bar, pour whiskey into gold-lined silver jiggers, and finally simply stand in the wine-colored Carolina sunlight sleepy and smiling and look at the colors of the leaves and of the bourbon whiskey against gold.

  Now sitting in the back seat in the dark, he switched on the light and opened the bar and lifted the silver flask. It was full. He poured a drink and set it on the rectangle of polished walnut. His hand began to shake again.

  There he sat in the same Mercedes, a 450 SEL 6.9-liter sedan, a badly flawed frazzled shaky American, as hollow-eyed as a Dachau survivor, still smelling of cave crud, in a perfect German machine redolent of leather, polished wood, and fine oil on steel.

  The bar light was still on. By moving over to the right corner, he could see himself in the rearview mirror. How do I look in the face? Like General J. E. B. Stuart, whose last words were: How do I look in the face? Except for the beard, not different from the way I always looked, the same veiled eyes as dark and uncandid as Andrea del Sarto, the same curve of lip, the same sly uptilt of head showing nostril.

  So he had looked thirteen years old when he had driven West with his father in a new Buick convertible. It took a week. It was the summer after the “hunting accident,” as it became known. His father wanted them to be pals. But there was nothing to talk about. He didn’t want to be anybody’s pal. His father put the top down and drove faster and faster. The hot desert air roared in their ears. All day every day they drove in silence watching the center stripe on Texas highways and out old U.S. 66 for a thousand miles, two thousand miles, in silence while the boy watched girls in lonesome towns like Kingman and Barstow and squeezed his legs tight for the good feeling and speculated in amazement and hope that it would come to pass that there was a connection between girls and the good feeling. What wonders the future held in store! In silence they watched the bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns at dusk and in silence rode the mules down into the Grand Canyon from Bright Angel Lodge. While the father drove ten, twelve hours a day, he slept on the back seat and between times sat up and gazed at the girls in Holbrook and Winslow and in the desert gazed at himself in the mirror. What a sly handsome lad you are. What the world must hold in store for you. What? Anything you want. Girls, money, God, fame, whatever you want. On they drove, faster and faster, roaring at ninety miles an hour through Needles, Arizona, where the heat lay puddled like mercury on the pavement. For a week he slept and gazed. His bowels did not move. In Los Angeles they did not see Chester Morris wearing a straw hat and driving down Hollywood Boulevard in a Packard convertible. Ross Alexander was dead. Groucho Marx was alive. Back East they roared in silence, the hot air singing in their ears, the man’s gaze fixed on the highway, the boy’s on girls or the face in the mirror then as now betrayed and victorious and sly. Even the man knew now they couldn’t be pals.

  Well then, does anything really change in a lifetime, he asked the sly sidelong-looking Andrea del Sarto in the Mercedes mirror? No, you are the same person with whom I struck the pact roaring out old U.S. 66 through the lonesome towns and the empty desert. You don’t ever really learn anything you didn’t know when you were thirteen.

  And what was that?

  All I knew for sure then and now was that after what happened to me nothing could ever defeat me, no matter what else happened in this bloody century. If you didn’t defeat me, old mole, loving father and death-dealer, nothing can, not wars, not this century, not the Germans. We beat the Germans, nutty as we are, and now drive perfect German cars, we somewhat frazzled it is true, and shaky, but victorious nevertheless.

  Ah, but what if the death is not in the century but in your own genes, that you of all men are a child of the century because you are as death-bound by your own hand as the century is and you of all men should be most at home now, as bred for death as surely as a pointer bitch to point, that death your own death is what you really love and won’t be happy till you have, what then?

  Then we’ll know, won’t we?

  Grinning and shivering on the back seat thirty years later, teeth clacking, this raddled middle-aged American sat in his German car in the mountains of North Carolina hugging himself and making shoulder movements like a man giving body English to a pinball machine except that he was thinking about J. E. B. Stuart and Baron von Richthofen and World War II and fighting the Germans, which he had not done. Instead, he took two quick drinks from the gold-lined silver jigger and waited until the warmth bloomed under his ribs and the shaking stopped.

  Something occurred to him. Excitedly he jumped out of the car and, paying no attention to the cold drizzle which had started up again, paced back and forth beside the silver Mercedes, smacking his arms around his body and now and then kicking the Michelin radials. If the girl in the greenhouse a few hundred yards away could have seen him, she would have shaken her head. Though it was she who had been the mental patient and he the solidest citizen of the community, early retiree, philanthropist, president of United Way, six-handicap golfer, surely it was he not she who was deranged now, who, after holing up in a cave for two weeks, now paced up and down the parking lot of the Linwood Country Club in the predawn darkness, kicking a German car, while sane folk snored in their beds. Now he snapped his fingers and nodded to himself, for all the world like a man who has hit upon the solution to a problem which had vex
ed him for years.

  Ha, there is a secret after all, he said. But to know the secret answer, you must first know the secret question. The question is, who is the enemy?

  Not to know the name of the enemy is already to have been killed by him.

  Ha, he said, dancing, snapping his fingers and laughing and hooting ha hoo hee, jumping up and down and socking himself, but I do know. I know. I know the name of the enemy.

  The name of the enemy is death, he said, grinning and shoving his hands in his pockets. Not the death of dying but the living death.

  The name of this century is the Century of the Love of Death. Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live. Men love death because real death is better than the living death. That’s why men like wars, of course. Bad as wars are and maybe because they are so bad, thinking of peace during war is better than peace. War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable. Why do men settle so easily for lives which are living deaths? Men either kill each other in war, or in peace walk as docilely into living death as sheep into a slaughterhouse.

  Why do men walk like sheep straight into the slaughterhouse? Why are people content to stand helpless while their lifeblood is drained away?

  Men in this century are no different from the Jews at Buchenwald who did not give themselves leave to resist death.

  I know your name at last, he said, laughing and hooting hee hee hooooee like a pig-caller and kicking the tires, and you are not going to prevail over me.

  Old father of lies, that’s what you are, the devil himself, for only the devil could have thought up all the deceits and guises under which death masquerades. But I know all your names.