The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

“Thank you, Poppy,” said Kitty, kissing him.

  The checks were passed around among family, nurses, and internes.

  Once again Kitty left and once again the engineer tried to follow her, but Jamie stopped him.

  “Bill.”

  “Yes?”

  “Come here.”

  “What?”

  “Did Poppy speak to you?” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “We didn’t get down to terms.”

  “That’s Poppy. But what do you say in general?”

  “I say O.K., if I can be of use to you.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Where do I want to go?”

  Jamie waved the check. “Name it.”

  “No sir. You name it. And I think you’d better name a school.”

  “O.K.,” said Jamie immediately and cheerfully.

  9.

  During the next week he set about putting his life in order. He ate and slept regularly, worked out every day, went down to Brooks Brothers like his father and grandfather before him and bought two ten-dollar pullover shirts with a tuck in the back and no pocket in the front, socks, ties, and underwear, and dressed like a proper Princetonian. At work he read business maxims in Living.

  The only way people are defeated by their problems is by refusing to face them.

  One day, some years ago, a now famous industrial counselor walked into the office of a small manufacturing concern. “How would you like to increase sales 200% the first year?” he asked the president. The latter of course tried to get rid of him. “O.K., I’m leaving,” said the counselor. “But first lend me your scratch pad.” He wrote a few lines and handed the pad to the executive. “Read this. Think about it. If you put it into practice, send me a check a year from now for what it was worth to you.” One year later the counselor received a check in the mail for $25,000.

  The counselor had written two sentences:

  (1) Make a list of your problems, numbering them in the order of priority.

  (2) Devote all your time, one day, one month, however long it takes, to disposing of one problem at a time. Then go to the next.

  Simple? Yes. But as a result this executive is now president of the world’s third largest corporation and draws a salary of $400,000 a year.

  It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments. Back to the South, finish his education, make use of his connections, be a business or professional man, marry him a wife and live him a life. What was wrong with that? No more pressing against girls, rassling around in elevators and automobiles and other similar monkey business such as gives you stone pains and God knew what else. What was wrong with a good little house in a pretty green suburb in Atlanta or Birmingham or Memphis and a pretty little wife in a brand-new kitchen with a red dress on at nine o’clock in the morning and a sweet good-morning kiss and the little ones off to school and a good old mammy to take care of them? The way to see Kitty is not not to see her but to see her.

  But it didn’t work. Kitty’s phone didn’t answer. Outside in the park the particles were ravening and singing. Inside he went careening around the dark Aztec corridors of the Y.M.C.A. wringing out his ear and forgetting which floor he lived on. When he lay in bed, one leg defied gravity and rose slowly of itself. His knee began to leap like a fish.

  Once when he called Kitty, someone did pick up the telephone but did not speak. “Hello, hello,” he said. “Who’s there?” But there came only the sound of breathing and of the crepitation of skin on plastic. Presently the telephone was replaced softly.

  Nor did he hear from Mr. Vaught. He went once more to visit Jamie and, coming face to face with the older man, waited upon him smilingly. But the old man pulled out his gold watch, mumbled an excuse, and was off down the hall like the white rabbit.

  Very well then, said he to himself, good day. If they wanted him, let them send for him.

  Wednesday when he came home from work he was handed a message with his key. It was from Kitty. Meet me in the park, at the zoo, at four thirty. He went and waited until five thirty. She did not come.

  Meanwhile he was getting worse. Thursday morning he slipped another cog. It came, he hoped, from working a double shift and not eating. The day man, a fellow named Perlmutter who had a sick wife, did not show. Like an idiot, he offered to stay on, figuring, what with his new plans and his expenses at Brooks Brothers, that he needed the money.

  After sixteen hours underground he came staggering out into the gorge air of Seventh Avenue. For some ten minutes he stood, finger to nose, in the thunderous blue shadow of Pennsylvania Station. A bar turned in his head. Now let me see, said he, and taking out Living from his pocket, read a few maxims. Hmm. The thing to do is make a list.

  Somewhere in the smoky vastness of the station lanced through with late slanting cathedral beams of sunlight—late or early? was it evening or morning—and haunted by old déjà vus of Here-I-am-up-from-Charlotte-or-Chattanooga-or-Tuscaloosa-and-where-do-I-go-from-here, he got turned around good and proper and came down on the wrong platform, headed in the wrong direction, and took the wrong train. He must have dozed off, for when he woke up he was in New Lots Avenue, or perhaps it was Far Rockaway.

  What woke him? Something. His heart was thumping, making a regular commotion. Now he knew! A pair of eyes had been looking at him, gazing into his even as he slept with eyes open. Who? Rita. Or did he dream it? The train had stopped. He looked around but there was no one. Yet somebody was following him. He knew that. Goofy as he was, his radar still swung free and there was a prickling between his shoulder blades. Somewhere in Brooklyn he changed to an old local with straw seats and came out at a seaside station.

  It was dark. He found himself in a long street which was nearly black between the yellow street lights at the corners. The sea was somehow close. There was a hint of an uproar abroad in the night, a teeming in the air and the sense of coming closer with each step to a primal openness. He walked six blocks in the empty street and there it was. But it was nothing like Wrightsville or Myrtle Beach or Nag’s Head, lonesome and wide and knelling. It was domesticated. There were notion shops right up to the sand and the surf was poky, came snuffling in like lake water and collapsed plaush on a steep little old brown beach.

  He looked behind him. No one followed him in the street. The drowsiness came again. He had to sleep then and there. He lay down in the warm black sand of a vacant lot and slept two hours without moving a muscle. He woke in his right mind and went back to the Y.

  10.

  Jogging home from the reservoir the next morning, he spotted Rita two hundred yards away, sitting on a bench next to the milk-fund booth, the toilet-shaped telescope case under her hand. All at once he knew everything: she had come to get rid of him. She hoped he would take his telescope and go away.

  But she was, for the first time, as pleasant as could be and patted the bench next to her. And when he sat down, she came sliding smack up against him, a bit too close for comfort. He humped himself over in his sweat suit and tried to smell as good as he could.

  Her fist came softly down on his knee; she looked him in the eye and spoke not eight inches away. He couldn’t hear for listening.

  “But you and I know better,” she was saying. “He’s got no business going home.”

  “Jamie?”

  Looking into her eyes was something of a shock. Every line of her face was known to him. Yet now, with her eyes opening into his, she became someone else. It was like watching a picture toy turned one degree: the black lines come and the picture changes. Where before her face was dark and shut off as a gypsy, now her eyes opened into a girlishness.

  “Bill—”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Oh come on. Rita.”

  “O.K., Rita.”

  Again the fist came down sof
tly on his knee.

  “I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “The Vaughts are very fond of you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “The extraordinary part of it is that though you are a new friend—perhaps because you are a new friend—you have more influence with them than anyone else.”

  “I doubt it. I haven’t heard from them in several days.”

  “Oh, they carry on about you something awful. They plan to take you home with them, don’t they?”

  “When did you hear that?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Did Mr. Vaught tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “But never mind about Poppy. Right now it’s Jamie who needs us.” As gravely as she spoke, he noticed that she cast her eyes about, making routine surveys of Eighth Avenue. There was about her the air of a woman who keeps busy in a world of men. Her busyness gave her leave to be absent-minded. She was tired, but she knew how to use her tiredness.

  “Why?”

  “Jamie can’t go home, Bill.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let me tell you something.”

  “All right.”

  “First—how much do you care for Jamie?”

  “Care for him?”

  “Would you do something for him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you do anything for him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he were in serious trouble, would you help him?”

  “Of course.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “What is it?” he asked after a moment.

  Rita was smoothing out her skirt until it made a perfect membrane across her thighs. “Our Jamie is not going to make it, Bill,” she said in a low thrilling voice and with a sweetness that struck a pang to the marrow.

  There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?

  “So it’s not such a big thing,” she said softly. “One small adolescent as against the thirty thousand Japanese children we polished off.”

  “How’s that?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear.

  “At Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  “I don’t, ah—”

  “But this little guy happens to be a friend of mine. And yours. He has myelogenous leukemia, Bill.”

  Oh, and I’m sick too, he thought anxiously, looking at his hands. Why is it that bad news is not so bad and good news not so good and what with the bad news being good, aye that is what makes her well and me sick? Oh, I’m not well. He was silent, gazing at his open hands on his knees.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” said Rita after a moment.

  “I knew he was sick,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?” she asked quickly. He saw she was disappointed by his listlessness. She had wanted him to join her, stand beside her and celebrate the awfulness.

  “Why shouldn’t he go home?” he asked, straightening up.

  “Why shouldn’t he indeed? A very good question: because just now he is in a total remission. He feels fine. His blood’s as normal as yours or mine. He’s out of bed and will be discharged tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “So. He’ll be dead in four months.”

  “Then I don’t see why he shouldn’t go home or anywhere else.”

  “There is only one reason. A tough little bastard by the name of Larry Deutsch up at the Medical Center. He’s got a drug, a horrifyingly dangerous drug, which incidentally comes from an herb used by the Tarahumaras.”

  To his relief, Rita started on a long spiel about Jamie’s illness. He knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn’t have to listen.

  “—so Larry said to me in the gentlest voice I ever heard: ‘I think we’re in trouble. Take a look.’ I take a look, and even knowing nothing whatever about it, I could see there was something dreadfully wrong. The little cells were smudged—they looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns shining through a fog. That was over a year ago—”

  Instead he was thinking of wars and death at home. On the days of bad news there was the same clearing and sweetness in the air. Families drew closer. Azaleas could be seen. He remembered his father’s happiness when he spoke of Pearl Harbor—where he was when he heard it, how he had called the draft board the next morning. It was not hard to see him walking to work on that Monday. For once the houses, the trees, the very cracks in the sidewalk had not their usual minatory presence. The dreadful threat of weekday mornings was gone! War is better than Monday morning.

  As his sweat dried, the fleece began to sting his skin.

  “—fact number two. Jamie has the best mind I ever encountered. Better even than Sutter, my charming ex-husband. It’s really quite funny. His math teacher in New Hampshire was glad to get rid of him. ‘Get him out of here,’ he told me. ‘He wants to argue about John von Neumann’s Theory of Games—’”

  It was her silences, when they came, that he attended.

  “So what is the problem?” he asked.

  “He’s remitted on prednisone. Poppy and Dolly refuse to admit that he is going to die. Why not give him another pill, they say. Well, there are no more pills. He’s been through them all.”

  He was silent.

  She regarded him with a fond bright eye.

  “Somehow you remind me of the lance corporal in Der Zauberberg. Do you mind if I call you lance corporal?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “What would you like to do if you had your choice?”

  “I do have my choice. Go with Jamie.”

  “No, I mean if Jamie hadn’t showed up.”

  “Oh, I’d go see Kitty.”

  “Leave all of us out of it. And suppose, too, money is no object.”

  “I guess I’d finish my education.”

  “In what?”

  “Oh, metallurgy, I expect.”

  “What school would you pick?”

  “Colorado School of Mines.”

  “You’d like to go out there?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Suppose Jamie would want to go too.”

  “That’s up to him.”

  “Take a look at this.”

  He found himself gazing at a curled-up Polaroid snapshot of a little white truck fitted with a cabin in its bed. The truck was parked on a stretch of meager shingly beach. Kitty, in long shorts, leaned against the cabin, wide-brimmed hat in hand in a burlesque of American-lady-on-safari.

  “What is this?”

  “Ulysses.”

  “Ulysses?”

  “He was meant to lead us beyond the borders of the Western world and bring us home.”

  “I see.”

  “But seriously now, here’s the proposition,” she said. And he found that when she gave him ordinary directions he could hear her. As of this moment you are working for me as well as for Poppy. Perhaps for both of us but at least for me. Keep Jamie up here long enough for Larry to give him a course of huamuratl. You two rascals take my apartment here in the city and here are the keys to the shack on Fire Island. Now when you get through with Larry, take Ulysses and take off. Go home. Go to Alaska. In any event, Ulysses is yours. He has been three hundred miles, cost me seven thousand dollars, and is as far as I’m concerned a total loss. Here is the certificate of ownership, which I’ve signed over to you and Jamie. It will cost you one dollar. Jamie has coughed up. She held out her hand. “I’ll take my money, please.”

  “I don’t have a dollar.”

  The articles, papers, keys, photograph she lined up on his thigh. He looked closely at the snapshot again.

  “What did you get it for?” he asked her.

  “To camp in Europe. Isn’t that stupid? Considering that I’d have to buy gas for that monster Ulysses by the liter.”

  “You’ve
already told Jamie?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mr. Vaught agrees to this?”

  “He will if you ask him.”

  “What about Kitty?”

  “My friend, allow me to cue you in. Perhaps you have not noticed it, but our young friend Jamie is sick to death of the women in the family. Including me. Kitty and I made him the same deal: the three of us for Long Island and the camper (it sleeps three) and he laughed in our faces and I can’t say I blame him. Let me put it to you straight out.”

  “All right.”

  “Just suppose you asked him—you said, Jamie, I got Ulysses parked outside in the street—come on now, let’s me and you hit the road. What would he say?”

  “He wouldn’t like the Ulysses part.”

  “Dear God, you’re right.” Her fist came down on his knee and stayed there. “You’re right. You see, you know. All right, leave out the word ‘Ulysses.’ What then? What would he do?”

  “He’d go.”

  “You know something: you’re quite a guy.”

  “Thank you.” He plucked at his sweat suit. It came away from him like old skin. “Then you mean Kitty will go to Europe, after all?”

  “My dear young friend, hear this. I do believe you underestimate yourself. I do not believe you realize what a hurricane you’ve unleashed and how formidable you yourself are. You’ve got our poor Kitty spinning like a top. Not that I blame her. Why is it some men can sit like Achilles sat and some men can’t? But I propose to you, my lordly young sir, that we give our young friend her year abroad, which is the only one she’ll ever have. Seriously, Kitty saved my life. She is the sister of that son of a bitch I married. She bucked me up when I needed it and by God I’m returning the favor. Do you have any idea what it would be like to be raised by Poppy and Dolly, who are in their own way the sweetest people in the world, but I mean—God. You have no idea what it’s like down there these days, the poor bloody old South. I’ll tell you what. Give her her year in Florence and then if you haven’t forgotten all about her, I’ll send her home as fast as her little legs will carry her. Or better still, when you and Jamie get through with Larry, come on over and join us!”

  The next thing he knew, she was thrusting something into his pocket, but he didn’t have a pocket, then inside the drawstring of his sweat suit, tucked it with a fierce little tuck like an aunt at Christmas. “Your first month’s salary in advance,” she said, and was on her way.