The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  Here is my mother, before she took to her bed in her own nursing home, pitching to a client, more likely than not a West Texas oilman or a Massachusetts account executive removed to New Orleans, frightened by the blacks, bugging out to the country, looking for a weekend place on the water and what he conceived to be authentic historical Louisiana quaintness. Mother: “Notice the walls, authentic slave brick, eighteen inches thick, handmade by the slaves—many were magnificent artisans, you know—from local clay from claypits right up the bayou— it’s all gone now, the clay and the art, a lost art, notice that odd rosy glow. You hardly need air conditioning with these walls— they didn’t live so badly, did they? You see that bootscrape by the steps? Do you know what that is? an authentic brick form handwrought by the slaves. We think The Quarters combines the utility of a New York townhouse with the charm of a French Quarter cottage, don’t you?” As a matter of fact, they did.

  This is the real thing, she told them—and it was—and it makes Chateau Isles, Belle-this, and Beau-that look phony, don’t you agree? Yes, they did. The Quarters sold out at three hundred thousand per unit.

  While I, a disgraced shrink, was doing time in Alabama, my wife and mother were getting rich selling slave quarters.

  I am anxious to see Ellen. I’ve seen her once since she got back from Trinidad late last night, but she was so tired we hardly exchanged ten words. She slept like a child, on her stomach, mouth mashed open on the pillow, arm hanging off the bed. I put her arm up. It’s still splendid, her arm, as perfectly round and firm as a country girl’s.

  There’s noise above—the kitchen is upstairs. I go up the tight spiral of a staircase, heart beating, but not with effort. Ellen’s not there. There’s only the help and the kids.

  Hudeen’s at the stove. She’s eighty and infirm and gets to the kitchen by an outside elevator. She likes to come to work for a few hours. Ellen has installed her in a tiny square bounded by stove, fridge, sink, table, and stereo-V mounted in a bracket so that she need never take more than two steps in any direction, mostly sits, need never take her eye from the daytime drama that unfolds for four hours, precisely the four hours she’s here.

  “Where’s Miss Ellen?” I ask her.

  “Miz Ellen she still piled up in the bed!” says Hudeen in a soft shout, doing me the courtesy of touching the volume control of the stereo-V but not turning it down. “You talk about tired,” she says, still keeping an eye on the screen. “But she be down directly.”

  Chandra, a young, very black woman, is playing Monopoly at the breakfast table with Margaret. Neither looks up.

  Tommy is standing in the middle of the room, hands at his side, standing in place but footling a soccer ball, toeing, slicing, ankling, caroming the ball from foot to foot, idly and without effort.

  I give Margaret and Tommy a hug. My children don’t know what to say to me. Margaret is still hot and sweaty from the school bus. She gives me her cheek and a swift sidelong look. She has straight black Ella Cinders hair and is secretive and knowing, twice as smart as a boy will ever be. In her thin brown body, sweet with the smell of hot cotton and schoolgirl sweat, there is both a yielding and a resistance. She’s a swift brown blade of a girl.

  “Why you standing around?” Chandra asks me. Chandra is abrupt and unmannerly, but is the only one who will speak to me. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  I sit down.

  “You looking good, healthy for a change,” says Chandra to me. “Roll, Margaret.”

  Tommy and Margaret are on an easy footing with old black Hudeen and young black Chandra. They look and talk past me, as if I were still a drunk, a certain presence in the house which one takes account of, steps around, like a hole in the floor. Are all fathers treated so by their children, or only disgraced jailbird fathers?

  “Hudeen, what time is Miss Ellen coming down?” I ask, wondering whether to go upstairs.

  “She be fine!” cries Hudeen softly, shelling peas and keeping an eye on the stereo-V. “She be down!” Is she telling me not to go up?

  Long ago Hudeen gave up ordinary conversation. Her response to any greeting, question, or request is not the substance of language but its form. She utters sounds which have the cadence of agreement or exclamation or demurrer. Uhn-ohn-oh (I don’t know?); You say!, You say now!, Lawsymussyme (Lord have mercy on me?); Look out!—an all-purpose expression conveying both amazement and good will.

  Hudeen is barely literate, but her daughter went to college and became a dental hygienist. She married a dentist. They are as industrious, conventional, honest, and unprofane as white people used to be. They have five children, three girls named Chandra, Sandra, and Lahandra, and twin boys named Sander and Sunder.

  Chandra is smart, ill-mannered, discontent, but not malevolent. She graduated in media and newscasting at Loyola, interned at a local station, worked briefly as a street reporter. She wants to be an anchorperson. The trouble is, she hasn’t the looks for it; she doesn’t look like a tinted white person, what with her Swahili hair, nose, lips, and skin so black that local light seems to drain out into her. Said Hudeen once, talking back to the TV as usual when somebody mentions black—Hudeen, who still has not caught up with the current fashion in the proper race name: colored? Negro? black?—“Black?” she said to the TV. “What you talking about, black? That woman light. Sunder he light. Sandra bright; Chandra now—we talking black!”—hee hee hee, cackling at the TV.

  At first it worried me, Chandra’s anger and her rash goal, aiming for anchorperson, perhaps even hoping someday, this being America, to replace good gray Dan Rather, and finding herself instead doing what? back in the kitchen feeding white children. Good Lord, such exactly might her remote ancestor have done, living in these very quarters—if she were lucky enough to get out of the indigo fields and up in the kitchen of the big house. Mightn’t Chandra blow up one of these days, I used to think, change one diaper too many and pitch Margaret into the bayou?

  As a matter of fact, no. So much for the wisdom of psychiatrists. Maybe this is what I might have done in her place, but not Chandra. Having observed them carefully, Chandra and Margaret, I long ago concluded that women don’t work that way. At least Chandra doesn’t. Chandra has nothing but good nature and patience and—dare a white Southerner say it?—affection for Margaret. Margaret loves Chandra.

  Instead, she, Chandra, takes it out on me. She goes out of her way to be pert with me, perter than I’m used to from people black or white. At first I took it for sass and felt the old white gut tighten: one more piece of lip and you’re out on your ass, and so on.

  Right now, for example:

  I: “How’ve you been, Chandra?”

  Chandra, frowning as she lands on Park Place with her little token, a flat iron: “Nothing wrong with me! Anything wrong with you?”

  Shocked murmurings from Hudeen, who overhears this—not real shock but conventional, socially obligatory shock: “Lawlaw ainowaytawpeepuh,” eyes not leaving the TV. Translation: Lord, Lord, that ain’t no way to talk to people, that is, white people.

  The other day Chandra gave me a lecture: “You want to know your trouble, Doc?”

  “What’s my trouble, Chandra?”

  “You too much up in your head. You don’t even pay attention to folks when they talking to you. How you act in your office? Psychiatrists are supposed to be sensitive to the emotional needs of their patients, aren’t they?”

  “That’s true.”

  Chandra’s speech is a strange mixture of black Louisiana country and Indiana anchorperson. It’s because she was brought up by Hudeen when her super middle-class mother was going to college, and then took courses at Loyola in standard U.S. TV speech. She sounds like Jane Pauley fresh out of a cotton patch.

  “Doc, you know what you do?”

  “No, what do I do?”

  “You walk around like this, hands in your pockets, your eyes rolled back in your head like this. Somebody asks you something and you don’t even ack like you hear. You just nod like thi
s.” Chandra has gotten up and is walking around, eyes rolled back. Hudeen is making deprecating sounds but is laughing despite herself. Tommy and Margaret laugh outright. I have to laugh too. Note that she says asks—with effort—not aks. But then says ack.

  “No, Doc, I’m kidding. I know you’re a highly trained psychiatrist, the best around here. I know some of your patients and what you’ve done for them. I know you’re people-oriented in your practice.”

  People-oriented! Only from an Indiana anchorperson.

  Ed Dupre, a proctologist colleague, heard Chandra talk pert to me one day when we came in for a drink after fishing.

  “You know what I would do if she worked for me and talked to me like that?”

  “I think I do.”

  “I would lay one right upside her head.”

  “I know you would.”

  Once when she was particularly sassy with me and my short-comings—though by then I knew it wasn’t sass, it was directness—I told her as directly, “Chandra, you know what you ought to do?”

  “No, what I ought to do?” she asked quickly, frowning.

  “You ought to go to charm school.”

  “What you talking about, charm school?” She looked at me sharply, thinking at first I’m getting even, sassing her back, then seeing that maybe I’m not.

  “No, I’m serious. You’re a very smart professional woman but you lack certain social skills.” I can get away with saying that but not “bad manners.” “You have to have these skills to get ahead in your profession. You can’t walk into a studio and talk to a program director or producer, white or black, the way you talk to me.”

  “Uhmmhmm!”—fervent noises of agreement from Hudeen. “What it is, this charm school?” Chandra wanted to know. She knew I was leveling.

  I told her. She listened. Of course there are such places where you go to get coached for job interviews, how to walk, sit, carry on a conversation, eat.

  “Chandra”—I told her to get away from the old black-white business—“it’s the current equivalent of the old finishing school.”

  “Finished is right,” she said, but she was eyeing me shrewdly. “No kidding?”

  “No kidding.”

  Thoughtfully she spooned stuff into Margaret—and went to charm school, and got a job—for a while.

  Who knows? She might make it yet. As the Howard Cosell of anchorpersons.

  “Tell Miss Ellen I’ll be downstairs,” I tell Hudeen.

  “She be down!” cries Hudeen softly, inattentively.

  “Chandra,” I say, “where is St. Louis?”

  “What you talking about, where is St. Louis!” cries Chandra, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Tell Doctor where is St. Louis!” says Hudeen, hardly listening.

  “St. Louis is on the Mississippi River between Chicago and New Orleans,” says Margaret, my daughter, Miss Priss, smartest girl in class, first to put up her hand.

  “Right,” I say.

  They’re all right.

  “My other daughter, she live in Detroit,” says Hudeen to the TV.

  Two strange thoughts occur to me in the ten seconds it takes to spiral down the iron staircase.

  One: how strange it is that we love our children and can’t stand them or they us. Love them? Yes, for true. Think of the worst thing that could happen to you. It is that something should happen to your little son or daughter, he get hurt or killed or die of leukemia; that she be raped, kidnapped, get hooked on drugs. This is past bearing. Can’t stand them? Right. When we’re with them, we’re not with them, not in the very present but casting ahead of them and the very present, planning tomorrow, regretting yesterday, worrying about money and next year.

  Counselors counsel parents: Communicate! Communicate with your kids! Communication is the key!

  This is ninety percent psycho-crap and ten percent truth, but truth of a peculiar sort.

  I don’t communicate with Tommy and he doesn’t with me, beyond a single flick of eye, a nod, and a downpull of lip. If I sat Tommy down and said, Son, let’s have a little talk, it would curdle him and curdle me, and it should.

  Imagine Dr. Sarah Smart, popular syndicated columnist and apostle of total communication, showing up one night and saying to her daughter, Let’s have a little talk. I hope daughter would tell Mom to shove off.

  Second thought on last iron step: It occurs to me that, except for the drink I took after Donna’s visit, I haven’t had a drink or a pill for two years, except for the drink at the Little Napoleon on the way home.

  I sit down. I am able to sit still and notice things, like a man just out of prison, which I am, and glad of it. I sit in a chair, feet on the floor, arms on the arms of the chair, and watch the reflection of the late-afternoon sun off the bayou. I had never noticed it before. It makes parabolas of light on the ceiling which move and intersect each other.

  I’ve gotten healthy. For two years I was greenskeeper of the officers’ golf course at the Fort Pelham air base. They made use of my history as a golfer. But instead of worrying about putting and chipping, hooking and slicing, I ran a huge John Deere tractor with a gang of floating cutters fore and aft, raked the sand traps, swung down the rough, manned the sprinklers, kept the greens like billiard tables.

  Here’s the mystery: Why does it take two years of prison for a man to be able to sit still, listen, notice his children, watch the sunlight on the ceiling?

  8. DIXIE MAGAZINE IS on the coffee table next to the fireplace, which bristles with wrought-iron hooks and pots.

  Van Dorn is on the cover.

  I pick it up and hold it in the sunlight. Under Van Dorn’s picture is a list of captions:

  RENAISSANCE MAN

  NEW OWNER AND RESTORER OF BELLE AME

  NUCLEAR WIZARD

  MITSY’S TROUBLESHOOTER

  INTERNATIONAL BRIDGE CHAMPION

  OLYMPIC SOCCER COACH AND EDUCATOR

  Van Dorn is wearing a yellow safety helmet and holding rolled-up blueprints in one hand and socking the end of the roll with the other. He’s standing in front of the house at Belle Ame and gazing at the great cooling tower of Mitsy. He’s a bit thick in the neck, but quite handsome, handsomer in the picture than in fact he is. His expression as he looks at the cooling tower is condescending, if not contemptuous. In his helmet he reminds me of a German officer standing in the open hatch of a tank and looking down at the Maginot Line.

  There’s a noise above me, a breath of air? I look up.

  Ellen comes whirling down the staircase. She’s wearing her Trinidad outfit, a bright orange-and-black print wound around her like a sari. It flares as she descends, showing her strong bare brown legs. She’s gained weight. The muscle on her shin curves out like a dancer’s. In her hair she’s woven a bit of the same cloth in a bright corona of color.

  She’s effusive, gives me a hug and a kiss, as if she hadn’t seen me since Trinidad. Maybe she was too sleepy to remember me last night.

  “Good God,” she says, frowning and backing off, eyeing me up and down in her old canny Presbyterian style. “Where did you get that suit? Throw it away. Burn it.”

  Her skin is as clear as ever, almost translucent, transmitting a peach glow of health, her skin faintly crimsoned, like flesh over light. She’s put on weight but not too much. Her tightly wrapped Trinidad sari becomes her.

  An idea occurs to me.

  “You’re looking extremely well.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “The tan is very becoming. Moreover—”

  “It ought to be. I worked on it. I usually peel.”

  “Do you remember how nice it used to be in the afternoon?”

  “What? Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  “What do you say if we go in there for a while?” I nod to the downstairs bedroom.

  “That’s the best proposal I’ve had all week!” she says, too heartily.

  “Well?”

  “Dummy, we’ve got to go to the awards dinner in thirty minutes.”

 
; “This will only take fifteen.”

  “Oh, for—! That’s Chandra’s bedroom now.”

  “Chandra won’t mind. Do you remember the Sears Best?” Sears Best was a king-size mattress on a big brass bedstead.

  “What? Oh, I certainly do. And it certainly was!”

  I look at her. She is both hearty and preoccupied. She taps her tooth.

  “Do you remember standing at the sink and being approached from behind?”

  “What? Oh.” She blushes. For half a second I could swear she remembered love in the afternoon and was on the very point of heading for Sears Best. But she frowns, looks at her watch, makes her clucking sound. “Oh, God, I forgot. I have to call Sheri Comeaux about tonight. What—a—pain!”

  “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “Why the hell not?” Her fists are on her hips.

  “I’m not much for school functions—” I begin.

  “Well, hear this. You damn well better be. This happens to be important to Tommy and for his future. It just so happens that Tommy is getting an award for summer soccer, the award, and that he is Olympic material. It also just so happens that if Tommy and Margaret are going to Belle Ame Academy, an honor in itself, you had damn well better show some interest, because Van is already breaking the rules taking them this late.”

  And so on. Instead of letting me lay her properly on a kingsize bed, she picks a king-size argument. Van Dorn, it seems, has started up a private school at Belle Ame on the English model, with tutors, proctors, forms, and suchlike. Ellen has yanked Tommy and Margaret out of St. Michael’s—it’s possible because school has just started. It’s all right with me, I’ve already agreed, but for some reason she wants to pick a religious argument. This is, in a sense, funny. It is as if I were still a Catholic and she a Presbyterian, when in fact I am only a Catholic in the remotest sense of the word—I haven’t given religion two thoughts or been to Mass for years, except when Rinaldo said Mass on the Gulf Coast, and then I went because it was a chance to get out of the clink—and Ellen is now an Episcopalian. She’s become one of those Southern Anglicans who dislike Catholics—Romans, she calls them—and love all things English.