The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  Though he had planned to go into town and there collect his thoughts and begin his sleuthing, it turned out not to be necessary. As the Buick sailed past the Coach-and-Four Motel on the outskirts, he spotted the two vehicles and recognized both, though he had seen neither before: the Trav-L-Aire, glittering and humped up and practical, yet somehow airy and light on its four brand-new Goodyear jumbo treads; cheek to jowl with a squirrel-gray Cadillac which was mean and low and twenty feet long. He hollered to the driver but she wouldn’t let him out. When at last she did stop and he asked them to wait until he could get his firkin from the trunk, they began to hoot again, positively rolling about on the seats. He had a six-block walk back to the motel.

  There was nobody in sight but a pair of listless slothlike children worming over the playground equipment. He had time to take a good look at the Trav-L-Aire. She was all she might be, a nice balance of truck heaviness, steel and stout below and cabined aluminum lightness above. She had just the faintest and lightest quilted look, her metal skin tucked down by rivets like an airplane wing. Vents and sockets and knobs made discreet excrescences, some faired against the wind, others propped out to scoop the wind. The step was down and the back door ajar and he had a peep inside: the coziest little caboose imaginable, somehow larger inside than out, yet all compact of shelf, bunk, galley, and sink.

  Now here surely is a good way to live nowadays, said he and sat down on the firkin: mobile yet at home, compacted and not linked up with the crumby carnival linkage of a trailer, in the world yet not of the world, sampling the particularities of place yet cabined off from the sadness of place, curtained away from the ghosts of Malvern Hill, peeping out at the doleful woods of Spotsylvania through the cheerful plexiglass of Sheboygan.

  “Hullo!”

  It was Mr. Vaught, He had come out of his motel room, scratched his seat, shot his cuff, and, spying the engineer, hailed him over as if he were just the man he was looking for.

  “Got dog, man,” said the old man, cocking his head direfully. “So you thought better of it.”

  “Thought better of what?”

  “You decided to come after all.”

  “Sir,” said the engineer, blinking. Was this the plan all along, that he was to meet them here?

  “You want to see something fine?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Mr. Vaught unlocked the trunk of the Cadillac and showed him a vast cargo of food, Quaker jams, Shaker jellies, Virginia hams. He began to give an account of each package.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the engineer, interrupting him.

  “Yace.”

  “Excuse me but I can’t help but think that explanations are in order. For my part I can say—”

  “That’s all right,” cried the old man hastily. He was actually blushing. “I’m just tickled to death to have you aboard!”

  “Thank you, sir. But I think we’d better clear this up.” He heard himself speak without consulting his memory. His voice had a memory of its own. “My understanding was yall were going to pick me up. I waited for three hours.”

  “No,” cried the old man and coming close seized him under the armpit and took him aside. “Take this apple jelly.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Son, look. If it was a question of money, why didn’t you say so? I’ll tell you this where I wouldn’t just as to say tell most folks: I got more damn money than I know what to do with and if I don’t give it to you the government’s going to get it anyway.”

  “Money,” said the engineer, screwing up an eye.

  “Rita said she asked you to come with us and you refused.”

  “No sir,” he said, remembering. “What she asked was whether I wanted to be employed by her or—”

  “Naturally, when I didn’t hear from you to the contrary, I assumed you didn’t want the job.”

  “No sir!”

  “Son, you know what we really thought? We thought you didn’t want to come with either one of us but that you would be nice enough to come if we asked you, just to help us, and I wasn’t going to do that. Look,” cried the old man joyfully.

  “What?”

  “It’s better this way!”

  “How is that, sir?”

  “Now we know where we stand. Now I believe you want to come with us.”

  “Yes sir, that is true,” said the engineer dryly. “I desire now only to have the same assurance from you.”

  “What! Oh! By George,” said the other, shooting his cuff and calling on the high heavens. “If you’re not your daddy all over again.”

  “Yes sir,” said the engineer gloomily, wondering if the old man was slipping away again like the white rabbit. But this time Mr. Vaught took out his buckeye wallet and counted out five $100 bills, like crisp suede, freshly pollinated from the mint, into the other’s hand. “One month’s salary in advance. Do we understand each other now?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Rita will drive us in the Cadillac. You and Jamie take that thing.” He nodded toward the camper.

  “All right, sir.”

  “Now you and Jamie get on down the road. We’ll see you at home.” He counted out two more bills. “Expenses.”

  “Do you mean you want us to leave now and—”

  But before he could finish, the rest of the family came swarming out half a dozen doors and bore down upon him. His natural shyness was almost made up for by the pleasant sensation of reunion. Perhaps he belonged here after all!

  “Look who’s here!”—“What in the woerrld—!”—“Well I’ll be damned—!” they cried.

  The side of his face was also being looked at by a pair of roguish eyes.

  “Look at him blush,” cried Mrs. Vaught

  For some reason his being there, hands in pockets and eyes rolled up to the eyebrows, began to be funny. They were all laughing at him. All but Kitty. She came close and touched him but at the same time it was as if she couldn’t stand the sight of him. She turned him roughly by the shoulder as if she was another boy.

  “What happened to your nose?” she asked angrily. It was somehow shameful to her that a misfortune should have befallen his nose.

  He waved a hand vaguely toward the north. “A white lady up in New Jersey—” he began.

  “What,” Kitty cried incredulously, curling her lip and calling the others to witness. “What happened?”

  “A lady from Haddon Heights hit me on the nose.”

  The others laughed and the engineer too. Only Kitty went on curling her lip in the most sensual and angry way. Rita laughed but her eyes were wary. She was handsome!

  Jamie stood a little above them, on the motel walk, grinning and shaking his head. He looked brown and fit but a bit sooty-eyed.

  “Wait a minute, Kitty,” said the engineer as the girl turned away.

  “What now?”

  “Hold on! Don’t leave.”

  “All right, what?”

  “It seems I have not been able to make myself understood,” he told them all, “or at least to prevent misunderstandings. I want to be very certain that everybody understands me now.”

  “I told you he wanted to come with us,” said Mrs. Vaught to her husband, her pince-nez flashing.

  “In any case,” said the engineer, “let me state my intentions once and for all, particularly with regard to Jamie and, ah, Kitty.” He almost said Miss Kitty.

  “My God,” said Kitty, turning red as a beet. “What is the man talking about?” She besought Rita, who in turn was watching the engineer like a hawk, her eyes wary and fine.

  “I want to make clear what apparently I failed to make clear in New York, that from the beginning I accepted Mr. Vaught’s offer with great pleasure and that I shall be happy to go to school with Jamie or anywhere else he wants to go.”

  Kitty seemed both relieved and irritated. “That’s why he was fixing to take off for Colorado,” she said loudly to Rit
a, and hollowed out her cheek with her tongue.

  “What’s that?” asked the engineer quickly.

  “He wants to know whose idea Colorado was,” she said, still addressing Rita. She actually jerked a thumb at him, angry as an umpire. What had happened to his love?

  Rita shrugged.

  “Have you already forgotten what you told Rita?” asked the girl, meeting his eye.

  “That’s possible,” said the engineer slowly. The worst of it was that he could have forgotten. “Since it was Rita I told, maybe she could refresh my memory.”

  “Glad to, Lance Corporal,” she said, shrugging and smiling. “Though it is nothing we all don’t already know. What you told me, if you recall, was that what you really wanted to do was attend the Colorado School of Mines.”

  “Without Kitty,” said Kitty.

  “No,” said the engineer.

  “Yes,” said Rita. “Don’t you remember the day I returned the telescope?”

  “Why yes,” said the engineer, remembering something, “but I certainly did not mean that I wasn’t ready and anxious to join the Vaughts. Besides that, I had already committed myself to Mr. Vaught and I always honor my obligations.”

  “So now we’re an obligation,” said Kitty, addressing all Virginia. Her eyes flashed. It crossed his mind that she was what used to be called a noble high-spirited girl.

  “No no, Kitty,” said the poor engineer.

  “You may recall, Lance Corporal,” said Rita dryly, “that I asked you straight out which of us you wanted to work for, me or Poppy. You were unable to give a clear answer and spoke instead of Colorado. Knowing that you were a gentleman and did not like wrangling with women (I don’t blame you), I did not press the issue. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  The trouble was he could not be sure and she knew it. And as he gazed at her he fancied he caught a gleam in her eye. She was skirting with him the abyss within himself and not doing it ill-naturedly: I know, said the gleam, and you know that I know and that you are not quite sure and that I might even be right.

  “Anyhow Poppy is right,” said Rita, rubbing her hands briskly. “We are all here and that is what counts. Why don’t we hit the road?”

  They were all leaving that very day, it turned out. Another two hours and he’d have missed them.

  Mrs. Vaught and Kitty had one more room in the Governor’s Palace to see, one more pewter candle-snuffer to buy. The engineer stayed at the motel to help Jamie pack. But Jamie was tired and went to lie down; the engineer packed for him. Rita found him sitting on the back step of the camper counting his money.

  “You can keep that,” she said. He had come to her post-dated check.

  “No, thanks,” he said and handed it over. Now it was he who eyed her warily, but not disagreeably.

  “Believe it or not, I’m very happy things worked out as they have.”

  “You are?”

  “I’m afraid I was the cause of the misunderstanding.”

  He shrugged.

  “Anyhow you passed your test by ordeal and here is your prize.” For the second time she handed him a little hexagonal General Motors key.

  “Thank you.”

  “You want to know why I’m glad you’re here? Because you’re the only one who can help Jamie. If only you will. You know sometimes I have the feeling, Lance Corporal, that you are onto all of us, onto our most private selves. Or perhaps it is rather that it is you and I who know, who really know; and perhaps it is the nature of our secret that we cannot tell our friends or even each other but must rather act for the good of our friends.”

  The engineer was silent. From force of habit, he looked as if he knew what she was talking about, what their “secret” was, though in truth he had not the least idea.

  “Bill.”

  “Yes?”

  “Take Jamie and get the hell out of here. Take Ulysses and go while the going is good. Go roam the byways and have a roistering good time of it. Find yourselves a couple of chicks. You’re two good-looking fellows, you know!”

  “Thank you,” said the engineer politely.

  “Drink and love and sing! Do you know what I thought as I was standing in the governor’s bedroom yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “Jamie was standing in front of me in the lovely, careless way he gets from you or from somebody, like young golden-haired Sir Tristram, leaning on his sword, and all at once the dreadful thought occurred to me: what must it be like to live and die without ever having waked in the morning and felt the warm mouth of one’s beloved on his?”

  “I couldn’t say,” said the engineer, who had never waked in the morning and found anybody’s warm mouth on his.

  “Bill, have you ever been to the Golden Isles of Georgia?”

  “No.”

  "That’s where we’re headed. You can meet us there or not, as you like. And if you two bums want to detour through Norfolk, that’s all right too.”

  “O.K.”

  5.

  They didn’t, the engineer and Jamie, quite cut loose after all, or detour through Norfolk (did Rita mean he should take Jamie to a whorehouse?) or feel any beloveds’ warm mouths on theirs. But they had a good time and went their own way for a day or two at a time, wandering down the old Tidewater, sleeping in the piney woods or along the salt marshes and rendezvousing with the Cadillac in places like Wilmington and Charleston.

  The camper was everything he had hoped for and more. Mornings on the road, the two young men sat together in the cab; afternoons the engineer usually drove alone. Well as he looked, Jamie tired easily and took to the bunk in the loft over the cab and either read or napped or watched the road unwind. They stopped early in the evening and went fishing or set up the telescope on a lonesome savanna and focused on the faraway hummocks where jewel-like warblers swarmed about the misty oaks.

  Nights were best. Then as the thick singing darkness settled about the little caboose which shed its cheerful square of light on the dark soil of old Carolina, they might debark and, with the pleasantest sense of stepping down from the zone of the possible to the zone of the realized, stroll to a service station or fishing camp or grocery store, where they’d have a beer or fill the tank with spring water or lay in eggs and country butter and grits and slab bacon; then back to the camper, which they’d show off to the storekeeper, he ruminating a minute and: all I got to say is, don’t walk off and leave the keys in it—and so on in the complex Southern tactic of assaying a sort of running start, a joke before the joke, ten assumptions shared and a common stance of rhetoric and a whole shared set of special ironies and opposites. He was home. Even though he was hundreds of miles from home and had never been here and it was not even the same here—it was older and more decorous, more tended to and a dream with the past—he was home.

  A déjà vu: so this is where it all started and which is not quite like home, what with this spooky stage-set moss and Glynn marshes but which is familiar nevertheless. It was familiar and droll and somehow small and curious like an old house revisited. How odd that it should have persisted so all this time and in one’s absence!

  At night they read. Jamie read books of great abstractness, such as The Theory of Sets, whatever a set was. The engineer, on the other hand, read books of great particularity, such as English detective stories, especially the sort which, answering a need of the Anglo-Saxon soul, depict the hero as perfectly disguised or perfectly hidden, holed up maybe in the woods of Somerset, actually hiding for days at a time in a burrow of ingenious construction from which he could notice things, observe the farmhouse below. Englishmen like to see without being seen. They are by nature eavesdroppers. The engineer could understand this.

  He unlimbered the telescope and watched a fifty-foot Chris-Craft beat up the windy Intercoastal. A man sat in the stern reading the Wall Street Journal. “Dow Jones, 894—” read the engineer. What about cotton futures, he wondered.

  He called Jamie over. “Look how he pops his jaw and crosses his legs with the crease of
his britches pulled out of the way.”

  “Yes,” said Jamie, registering and savoring what the engineer registered and savored. Yes, you and I know something the man in the Chris-Craft will never know. “What are we going to do when we get home?”

  He looked at Jamie. The youth sat at the picnic table where the telescope was mounted, stroking his acne lightly with his fingernails. His whorled police-dog eye did not quite look at the engineer but darted close in a gentle nystagmus of recognitions, now focusing upon a mote in the morning air just beside the other’s head, now turning inward to test what he saw and heard against his own private register. This was the game they played: the sentient tutor knowing quite well how to strike the dread unsounded chords of adolescence, the youth registering, his mouth parted slightly, fingernails brushing backward across his face. Yes, and that was the wonder of it, that what was private and unspeakable before is speakable now because you speak it. The difference between me and him, thought the engineer and noticed for the first time a slight translucence at the youth’s temple, is this: like me he lives in the sphere of the possible, all antenna, ear cocked and lips parted. But I am conscious of it, know what is up, and he is not and does not. He is pure aching primary awareness and does not even know that he doesn’t know it. Now and then he, the engineer, caught flashes of Kitty in the youth, but she had a woman’s knack of cutting loose from the ache, putting it out to graze. She knew how to moon away the time; she could doze.

  “Why don’t we go to college?” he said at last.

  “It’s forty miles away,” said Jamie, almost looking at him.

  “We can go where we please, can’t we? I mean, do you want to live at home?”

  “No, but—”

  Ah, it’s Sutter he has in mind, thought the engineer. Sutter’s at home.

  “We could commute,” said the engineer.