by Walker Percy
“Yes?”
“I know I can count on you to help me see to it that Mrs. LaFaye gets the best care we can give her.”
“You can.”
“Thanks, hoss. What say to the Ein und Zwanzig and a flick?” That’s old P&S talk for let’s go to Twenty-One to eat and then to the movies at Radio City.
“Thanks, but I got a junior dog.” I got a date with a student nurse.
“Oh shit. Tom?”
“Yes?”
“I almost forgot. This is not a favor. This is something I’m sure you’d want to do because it involves an old friend of yours.”
“Who’s that?”
“I spoke to you about Father Smith and Father Placide over at St. Michael’s?”
“Yes?”
“Well, it seems the good fathers have a problem. Father Placide called me a couple of weeks ago. Incidentally, he’s a hell of a nice guy—we served on a couple of committees together. He’s got a little problem and frankly I think you’re in a better position to handle it than I.”
“What’s the problem?”
“The problem is Father Smith. It has to do with his behavior. Ha ha, I’m sorry, Tom, but I’m quoting Father Placide. Frankly, Tom, I’m a little out of my element here. I believe you’ve known Father Smith for some time, that you knew him well in, ah, Alabama.”
“Yes. What’s wrong with him?”
“I’m not clear on that—something about him flipping out, not coming down from a fire tower. Anyhow, I’d appreciate it if you would talk to Placide. I’d take it as a personal favor.”
“All right.”
He looks at his watch, a curved gold wafer. “Could you drop by there this afternoon?”
“Well—”
“Tom, just hear what Father Placide has to say. Then I want you to take a look at Father Smith and give me a DX. Okay?”
“All right,” I say, looking around for Lucy.
“Great,” says Bob, giving me a strong pronated handshake and a long level-eyed look. “You know something, hoss. If the creek don’t rise, I think we’re going to make it. Right?”
“Right,” I say, wishing he’d let go of my hand and wondering what he wants from Father Placide.
4. LUCY CATCHES ME IN the parking lot. She’s got two sandwiches and two Cokes. We sit in her old pickup, a true farm vehicle spattered to the windows with cream-colored mud. The truck bed is loaded with a tractor tire and a cutter blade from a combine.
My two-toned Caprice, even older, is alongside. Beyond, in the far corner of the lot, a Cox Cable van is parked facing out. Later I remember wondering what a cable van was doing here. The hospital has a dish antenna.
“You look underfed. Eat,” says Lucy, eating. She still wears her white coat.
But I don’t eat. I sit hands on knees. The hot October sun pours through the windshield. The vinyl seat is torn. Stuffing extrudes through the tear.
Lucy lights up one of her Picayunes, plucks a grain of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, pointing her tongue. I remember her doing this before.
“You and Bob seem to have patched things up,” says Lucy, watching me. She is sitting in the corner, half facing me, white coat open, bare knee folded on the seat. A splendid knee.
“What? Yes.” A déjà vu has overtaken me. It began when she unlocked her door, got in, and I, waiting at the other door, watched her lean almost horizontally, holding the wheel with her left hand and with two fingers of her right, palm up, lift the latch. She’s done this before for me, hasn’t she?
It is the smell of hot Chevy metal and the molecules of seat stuffing rising in my nostrils and the rustling of her starched coat. I’ve been here before.
“You were testing her for a cortical deficit, weren’t you?”
“Yes. I’m glad you were there.”
“I made it my business to be there. Did you find it?”
“What? Oh, the deficit. Yes, I think so.”
“I wanted to tell you why Bob Comeaux was so angry.”
Lucy is telling me something about Comeaux and his interest in Mickey LaFaye and her ranch. It is difficult to listen.
The déjà vu has to do with sitting in a car with a girl, woman, with her swiveled around, bare knee cocked on the seat, with the smell of hot Chevy metal. We’ll sit there for a while, then we’ll—
She touches my arm. I give a start. She is leaning toward me. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Why?”
“You’ve been sitting there for five minutes, not saying a word.”
“I’m all right.”
“My God.” She has made a sharp cluck in her teeth, pulling back the corner of her mouth like a country woman, leaned over, and taken hold of the lapel of my jacket. “Did they give you that suit when you got out of jail?” With a curious rough gesture, like a housewife fingering goods, she rubs the seersucker between thumb and forefinger, gives it a yank and a brush back. “You’re very pale. I’d like to have a look.”
“A look?”
“With this.” She’s taken her ophthalmoscope from her breast pocket. “I’ve gotten very good with eyegrounds. I can tell more about you with one quick look than with a complete physical.”
“I believe you. All right.”
“Not here. Too much sun. In my office.”
Her office in the hospital has a small desk, two chairs, and an examining table. I sit on the table, knees apart. With me sitting and her standing we’re of a height. I make as if to get my knees out of her way, but she’s already between them. She examines my eyegrounds. The lance of the brilliant blue-white light seems to probe my brain. When she changes from my right eye to my left, we are face to face. Her coat rustles. I feel the radiation of heat from her cheek and once the touch of down. She doesn’t wear perfume. Her breath is sweet. She smells like a farm girl, not a doctor.
“All right,” she says, with a slight blush, I think, and backs away. “Your arteries look good. No narrowing, no plaques, no pigment, no hypertension, I would suppose.”
“Did you think I’d had a stroke?”
“You were absolutely motionless.”
I look at her. I don’t think I’d ever taken a good look at her before. I used to think of her as a convent-school type, St. Mary’s-of-the-Woods, good-looking in a hearty Midwestern way, good legs, black bobbed hair, handsome squarish face with a bruised ripe freckled effect under the eyes—the sort who might become a nun or marry a Notre Dame boy, and live in Evanston. But of course she’s not. She’s none of these. She’s old local Episcopal gentry. She went not to St. Mary’s in Indiana but to St. Elizabeth’s in Virginia.
A lot happened to her. She married, not a Notre Dame boy, but Buddy Dupre, Ed’s brother, a pleasant Tulane DKE, not merely pleasant but charming, the sort of Southern charmer who drinks too much. He had that sweetness and funniness which alcoholic Southern men often have, as if they cannot bear for the world not to be as charming as they are. He farmed a little at Pantherburn, Lucy’s family’s place, charmed everybody, got elected to the state legislature, began to spend most of his time at the Capitol Motel in Baton Rouge, did not so much separate from Lucy as drift pleasantly away, got investigated by the house ethics committee for taking a bribe from a waste-disposal contractor, got exonerated by the legislature ethics committee, which has never found a legislator unethical, drifted farther, to New Orleans, where he divorced Lucy and married the contractor’s daughter, leaving Lucy high and dry at Pantherburn, but intact, herself intact, and Pantherburn and its two thousand acres intact. She farmed it herself, planted and harvested soybeans in the not so rich loess loam, with only day labor. Then out of the blue and in her late twenties she went to medical school. She still farms Pantherburn, not with the two hundred slaves who used to pick the indigo or cut the sugar cane, or the one hundred sharecroppers who used to pick the cotton, but with two tractor drivers and two John Deeres and a leased combine for harvesting the soybeans.
I take a good look at her. She’s sitting at her desk, clicking thumbnail to
tooth, not looking at me. She is somehow both stronger-looking and more feminine. There’s this odd dash of gamin French about her face, bruised cheek, and almost black boy’s hair. She reminds me of Southern women in old novels: “a splendid vivacious girl, not beautiful, but full of teasing, high spirits.”
It is as if she had only just now decided to become a woman, but not entirely seriously. Having failed at marriage, she has succeeded in farming and doctoring and has discovered that succeeding at anything is a trick, a lark. She’s enjoying herself. She is also exhilarated by my failure and disgrace. Now she can “take care” of me with her brisk tugs and brushings. We are kin; I am old enough to be her father, yet she’s more like a mother, might any moment spit on her thumb and smooth my eyebrows. She feels safe and can give herself leave with me.
She cocks her head. “Are you coming out to Pantherburn this afternoon?”
“If you want me to.”
“Do you remember coming out to Pantherburn years ago and examining my uncle? and committing him to Mandeville? when he was hiding out in the woods or the attic and wouldn’t talk to anyone?”
“Yes. How is he?”
“He’s all right. I remember how you talked to him and got him to talk. I remember how you listened to him. You looked as if you knew everything there was to know about him.”
“As it turned out I didn’t, did I?”
She cocks her head. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I think you got yourself in trouble on purpose.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I think you wanted out of here, even if it meant going to prison. It wasn’t bad, was it?”
“I’m glad to be out. I’ve got to go now.”
“I know. To Father Placide about your old friend Father Smith.”
“You seem to know what’s going on around here.”
“And you seem not to.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me.”
“About Bob Comeaux? He wants Mrs. LaFaye’s place, her horses and probably her money, and will even take Mrs. LaFaye to get them.”
“You told me that. What does he want from Father Placide?”
She explains patiently. “It’s no secret. Bob Comeaux wants to buy old St. Margaret’s—you know, where Father Smith’s hospice is, or was. He wants it for a private nursing home, a real moneymaker, you know. Actually that building would be a marvelous investment. Imagine a hundred nuns living out there! And it just so happens the hospice has folded up and Father Smith has too, he’s not at all well. The bishop would like to get rid of it, he needs the money. Placide would like to get rid of it so Father Smith can come back and help him with the parish. You’re supposed to talk Father Smith out of the fire tower and into coming back to St. Michael’s. Then the bishop can sell the place to Bob Comeaux and everybody will be happy. Do you understand?”
“No.” I am thinking about the déjà vu. I think I know what it was about. It was about cars, women, girls, youth, the past, the old U.S.A., about remembering what it was like to be sitting in a car with a girl swiveled around to face you, her bare knee cocked up on the vinyl, with four wheels under you, free to go anywhere, to the Gulf Coast, to Wyoming. It, the déjà vu, came from the smell of hot Chevy metal and vinyl and seat stuffing tingling in the nostrils and radiating up into the hippocampus of the old brain and into the sights and sounds of the new cortex, which gathers into itself a forgotten world, bits and pieces of cortical memory like old snapshots scattered through an abandoned house.
I rise. She takes hold of my lapel again. “You come on out to Pantherburn later. I have something to show you. I know you can come. Your wife’s gone.”
I laugh. “I’m not surprised. You know everything else.”
“You don’t have much luck with women, do you?”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Only that you could use somebody right now to look after you.”
“And you’re going to look after me.”
“Somebody had better.”
“Why is that?”
“You’re a mess. Look at you. You may be smart, but you’re a mess.”
“That’s true.”
“Eat your BLT. I put it and the Coke in your car.”
“All right.”
“Eat.”
She grabs my lapel again, both lapels. We are almost face to face.
“You’re coming out to Pantherburn later?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“What?”
“How many cases have you got of this—ah—syndrome?”
“Oh, a dozen, I guess.”
“Could you bring the case histories with you?”
“I know the case histories.”
“Okay. Then bring their social security numbers.”
“What for?”
“Trust me.”
“All right.”
5. I FIND FATHER PLACIDE in the rectory of St. Michael’s. Mrs. Saia, the housekeeper, lets me in. It is his living quarters, but the living room looks like an untidy business office. There are desks, file cabinets, typewriters, a photocopier, a computer, stacks of bulletins and collection envelopes, and a coin-counting machine.
A man dressed in a business suit, probably a deacon, is seated at a desk in the hall sorting out different-colored cards. He greets me amiably. I try to remember his name.
St. Michael himself is still there, a three-foot bronze archangel brandishing a loose sword, bent at the tip, which I used to fiddle with while attending meetings of the St. Vincent de Paul Society years ago. The sword got lost. They must have found it. I seem to remember that—
Father Placide is nowhere to be seen. The next room, connected by an arched doorway, is a kind of parlor furnished with old-fashioned mohair sofas. Half a dozen women are sitting there. It is some kind of meeting, perhaps the altar society, perhaps the Blue Army, perhaps the Legion of Mary. I recognize three of them: Mrs. Saia, a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman with perfect dark satiny skin; Mrs. Ernestine Kelly, wife of councilman Jack Kelly, an old fisherman friend of mine and sometime barmate at the Little Napoleon, a very pretty grayhaired woman with a solemn, even sad, expression, whom one thinks of as pious in the old sense, who still observes the old Catholic devotions, still makes First Fridays, sends vials of Lourdes water to sick friends, and from time to time mails me a holy card with a saint’s picture and always the same note: Praying for you and your intentions, on which occasions I always wonder what she is praying for, my doing time in Alabama? mine and Jack’s drinking? my loss of faith? Ellen’s neglect of me for duplicate bridge? And Jan Greene, a youngish, intense blade of a brunette, ex-New Orleanian, wife of a gynecologist colleague and an old-style Catholic who wants to rescue the Church from its messing in politics and revolution, from nutty nuns and ex-nuns, from antipapal priests and malignant heterodox Dutch theologians, and so revive the best of the old Church, that is, orthodox theology, without its pious excesses, meaning Ernestine’s holy pictures and First Fridays.
The women see me and give me guarded greetings, with half nods, smiling. They can’t decide how disgraced I am, so charitably give me the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps Father Placide is at the meeting, but no, here he comes breezing in behind me. He greets me cordially, paying no attention to the meeting.
Father is a thin, young, pale, harassed priest. Except for his black dickey with clerical collar attached, which he wears over a T-shirt, he looks like an overworked intern. His face has a greenish pallor and the speckling of a stubble, the look of a man who has forgotten to shave. There is a rash where the collar irritates his neck.
Though I hardly know him, he greets me as warmly as if I were a faithful parishioner, but it may be that he is too harried to remember. He takes the easy confidential tone of one professional consulting another: Look, Dr. More, we have a little problem here—
We are sitting side by side at a broad table holding the coin count
er and covered by papers and cloth coin bags. He speaks easily, alternately rubbing and widening his eyes like a surgeon who has finished a six-hour operation and has flopped in a chair to discuss the case.
The women in the parlor resume their meeting.
The case is Father Smith. He, Father Placide, has his troubles. The main trouble is that the pastor, Monsignor Schleifkopf, has departed, returned to the Midwest, some say to join the conservative schismatics in Cicero, some say to join the liberal Dutch schismatics in South Bend. St. Michael’s Church here is still Roman Catholic; that is, it still recognizes the authority of the pope as the lawful successor to St. Peter. Young Father Placide was left with the burden of running the parish until a replacement could be found. This would not have been a problem since the other assistant, Father Smith, though not a young man, was a vigorous one. And he seemed well when he came back from Alabama, no longer a boozer. Between the two of them they could and did take up the slack. Father Smith ran the hospice out by the fire tower and the little mission “under the hill” and helped out at St. Michael’s with Masses, meetings, confessions, CYO, and such. Now, it seems, Father Smith has conked out, leaving Placide holding the bag.
“Doctor,” says the priest, his hollow white eyes not quite focused, “I can’t do it all. We’ve been promised a pastor this month. We were promised a pastor last month and the month before. It would be very helpful if Father Smith would help out here. I understand y’all are old friends, so I was wondering if you might see him, talk to him, give him—ah—whatever therapy he might need, tell him I need him. The deacons here, they’re fine, they’re doing a tremendous job, but they can’t do Masses, confessions, funerals, weddings, and suchlike. Doc, I’m going to tell you something, listen: I’ll serve the good Lord and His people as long as I can, but, Doc, I’m going to tell you, they ’bout to run this little priest into the ground.”
“What’s wrong with Father Smith? Has he started drinking?”
“No.” Father Placide gives a great shrug, holds it, looks right and left. “Who knows? He says he’d like nothing better than to help out but he can’t.”