by Walker Percy
What was wrong with a Mr. and Mrs. Williston Bibb Barrett living in a brand-new house in a brand-new suburb with a proper address: 2041 Country Club Drive, Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia?
Nothing was wrong, but he got worse anyway. The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.
What was wrong with marrying him a wife and living a life, holding Kitty’s charms in his arms the livelong night?
Nothing, but his memory deteriorated and he was assaulted by ghostly legions of déjà vus and often woke not knowing where he was. His knee leapt like a fish. It became necessary to unravel the left pocket of his three pairs of pants in order to slip a hand down and keep his patella in place.
It was unsettling, too, coming among a people whose radars were as sensitive as his own. He had got used to good steady wistful post-Protestant Yankees (they were his meat, ex-Protestants, post-Protestants, para-Protestants, the wistful ones who wanted they knew not what; he was just the one to dance for them) and here all at once he found himself among as light-footed and as hawk-eyed and God-fearing a crew as one could imagine. Everyone went to church and was funny and clever and sensitive in the bargain. Oh, they were formidable, born winners (how did they lose?). Yet his radar was remarkable, even for the South. After standing around two or three days, as queer and nervous as a Hoosier, he quickly got the hang of it. Soon he was able to listen to funny stories and tell a few himself.
The Vaughts liked him fine of course and did not notice that he was worse. For he was as prudent and affable as ever and mostly silent, and that was what they expected of him. All but Sutter. He had not yet met Sutter. But one day he saw his car, as he and Jamie were sitting in the sunny quarter of the golf shelter just off number 6 fairway in front of the Vaughts’ house.
Jamie was still reading The Theory of Sets. The engineer was pondering, as usual, the mystery of the singularity of things. This was the very golf links, he had reason to believe, where his grandfather had played an exhibition round with the great Bobby Jones in 1925 or thereabouts. It was an ancient sort of links, dating from the golden age of country clubs, with sturdy rain shelters of green-stained wood and old-fashioned ball-washers on each tee and soft rolling bunkers as peaceful as an old battlefield. Deep paths were worn through the rough where caddies cut across from green to fairway. The engineer’s amnesia was now of this order: he forgot things he had seen before, but things he had heard of and not seen looked familiar. Old new things like fifty-year-old golf links where Bobby Jones played once were haunted by memory.
How bad off was he, he wondered. Which is better, to walk the streets of Memphis in one’s right mind remembering everything, what one has done yesterday and must do tomorrow—or to come to oneself in Memphis, remembering nothing?
Jamie had asked him what he was thinking about. When he told him, Jamie said: “You sound like Sutter.”
“Have you seen him?”
“I went to see him yesterday. Yonder he goes now.”
But he saw no more than the car, a faded green Edsel which swung out of the steep driveway and disappeared down the links road. Jamie told him that Sutter drove an Edsel to remind him of the debacle of the Ford Motor Company and to commemorate the last victory of the American people over marketing research and opinion polls. The engineer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. It had the sound of a quixotic type who admires his own gestures.
2.
The Vaughts lived in a castle fronting on a golf links. It was an old suburb set down in a beautiful green valley across a ridge from the city. There were other ridges, the last wrinkles of the Appalachians, which formed other valleys between them, and newer suburbs and newer country clubs.
The houses of the valley were built in the 1920’s, a time when rich men still sought to recall heroic ages. Directly opposite the castle, atop the next ridge to the south, there stood a round, rosy temple. It was the dwelling of a millionaire who had admired a Roman structure erected by the Emperor Vespasian in honor of Juno and so had reproduced it in good Alabama red brick and Georgia marble. At night a battery of colored floodlights made it look redder still.
The Vaught castle was made of purplish bricks which had been broken in two and the jagged side turned out. It had beam-in-plaster gables and a fat Norman tower and casement windows with panes of bottle glass. Mr. Vaught, it turned out, was richer even than the engineer had supposed. He had made his first fortune by inventing and manufacturing a new type of journal box for coal cars. After the second war he branched out into insurance companies, real estate, and auto dealerships. Now he owned and operated the second largest Chevrolet agency in the world. His talent, as the engineer divined it, was the knack of getting onto the rhythm of things, of knowing when to buy and sell. So that was the meaning of his funny way of hopping around like a jaybird with his ear cocked but not really listening to anybody! Rather was he tuned in to the music and rhythm of ventures, himself poised and nodding, like a schoolboy waiting to go into a jump rope. The engineer soon learned to pay no attention to him either: his talk was not talk at all, one discovered, that is, a form of communication to be attended to, but rather a familiar hum such as Lugurtha the cook made when she was making beaten biscuits.
There were other persons living in the castle. The “Myra” of whom Mrs. Vaught often spoke to the engineer as if he knew her, turned out to be Myra Thigpen, Mr. Vaught’s stepdaughter by an earlier marriage. The Thigpens were staying in the Vaught castle while their own house was being built across the golf links. Lamar Thigpen worked for Mr. Vaught as personnel manager. Myra ran a real-estate agency. A handsome woman with strong white arms and a cloud of heavy brown hair, she reminded the engineer of the Business and Professional Women he had seen turning out for luncheons at Holiday Inns from Charleston to Chattanooga. If Mrs. Vaught had thrown him off earlier by acting as if he ought to know whom she was talking about, Myra dislocated him now by acting as if she had known him all along. Had she? “You remember that old boy Hoss Hart from Greenwood who went to Mississippi State and later moved to Ithaca?” she asked him. “You mean Mr. Horace Hart who used to sell for Checkerboard Feed?” asked the engineer, who did in fact perfectly remember such a person, having heard his name once or twice fifteen years ago. “I saw him the other day,” Myra went on, “selling fruitcake for Civitan over at Boys’ State. He told me about when you and he and your daddy went duck-hunting on a houseboat on the White River.” “The White River?” The engineer scratched his head. Had Hoss Hart remembered something he had forgotten? “When you see Hoss,” said Myra, giving him a sisterly jostle such as coeds at Mississippi State give you, “just ask him if he remembers Legs.” “Yes ma’am.” “Don’t say Miss Homecoming of 1950, just say Legs and see what he says.” “Yes ma’am, I will.”
Sutter was nowhere to be seen, but the engineer made sure he would see him when he did come—as he was told Sutter occasionally did to spend the night. Sutter’s old apartment was next to the quarters assigned to the two young men, on the second floor above the great four-car garage. Not two hours passed after his arrival before he explored the apartment and discovered two things. One was a bottle of three-dollar whiskey in the cupboard of the kitchenette between the two apartments. The other thing was a knothole in the wall of his closet which looked straight into Sutter’s bedroom. He hung his Val-Pak over the hole.
I’m not well, reflected the engineer, and therefore it is fitting that I should sit still, like an Englishman in his burrow, and see what can be seen.
It was a good place to live and collect one’s thoughts. In the daytime the valley echoed with the faint far-off cries of the golfers. At night a yellow harvest moon hung over the ridge and the floodlights played on the fat rosy temple of Juno. His duties were light. Indeed he had no duties. Nothing more was said after Sea Island about Jamie’s plans to go live with his sister in the pine barrens or with his brother in the city. The sick youth seemed content to move into the garage apartment. Within three weeks of their arrival the two young men
and Kitty had registered at the university forty miles away and two weeks later the engineer and Jamie had pledged Phi Nu and learned the grip. Kitty realized her ambition and became not a Tri Delt but a Chi Omega.
On the morning of registration they had set out for the university, the three of them, the engineer driving, Kitty in the middle, in Mrs. Vaught’s Lincoln, and came home early enough to sit on the garden grass and leaf through their brand-new textbooks with the glazed glittering pages and fragrant fresh print. The engineer, who had just received his October check from Mr. Vaught, bought a $25 slide rule as thick and slick as a mahjong tile and fitted at the rear with a little window.
Later in the afternoon he played golf, borrowing Jamie’s clubs and making a foursome with Mr. Vaught and two pleasant fellows, Lamar Thigpen and a man from the agency. The engineer’s skill at golf stood him in good stead. (Golf he was good at, it was living that gave him trouble. He had caddied for his father and broke eighty when he was thirteen.) It was not that he was so much better than the others but rather that he was strong and had a good swing. So that when the old man, who somehow knew this, had mumbled something about “my potner” and got his bets down and waved him onto the last tee, after he and Justin and Lamar had driven, he had happened to hit a dandy. The driver sang in the air and the ball went chack, flattening, it seemed like, and took off low, then went high and overdrove the par four green. The two opponents exchanged great droll thunderstruck comical mid-South looks.
“Well now, what is this?” said Justin, the agency man, who was a big slow easy fellow, the sort referred to in these parts as a good old boy.
“Looka here now,” said Lamar.
“Sho,” said Mr. Vaught, already striking out down the fairway. “Come on, potner.”
He hit five more towering drives and scored a lucky-after-the-layoff 36.
“Well now goddamn,” said Lamar.
They called him Bombo, the son of Tarzan, and Mr. Clean. The engineer had to laugh. They were good fellows and funny.
The sixth hole fairway of the second nine ran in front of the castle. It had got to be the custom after teeing off to mark the balls and veer over to the patio, where David, the butler, had toddies ready. Custom also required that the talk, unlike other occasions, be serious, usually about politics but sometimes even about philosophical questions. The tone of the sixth-hole break was both pessimistic and pleasurable. The world outlook was bad, yes, but not so bad that it was not a pleasant thing to say so of a gold-green afternoon, with a fair sweat up and sugared bourbon that tasted as good as it smelled. Over yonder, a respectful twenty yards away, stood the caddies, four black ragamuffins who had walked over the ridge from the city and now swung the drivers they took from the great compartmented, zippered, pocketed, studded, bonneted, golf bags.
The golfers gazed philosophically into their whiskey and now and then came out with solemn Schadenfreude things, just like four prosperous gents might have done in old Virginny in 1774.
“The thing is, you just don’t get integrity where you need it most,” said Lamar Thigpen, a handsome fellow who sat slapping his bare brown arm and looking around. He was maybe forty-five and just going slack and he worried about it, pushing his sleeve up and hardening his biceps against his chest.
“I’m going to tell yall the truth,” Justin might say. “If they want the country all that bad, I’m not all that much against letting them have it”
But even these dire things were not said in ill humor.
“Ain’t nobody here but us niggers anyway,” somebody else would say finally. “Let’s play golf.”
They would get up a little creakily, their sweat having cooled and muscles stiffened, and walk to their lies. Mr. Vaught always took his second shot first because he seldom drove over a hundred yards but that always straight down the middle. And now he wound up with his brassie, drawing back slowly and swaying backward too and with a ferocious deliberation; then, for all the world as if he had been overtaken by some dread mishap, went into a kind of shiver and spasm and, like a toy wound too tight and shooting its springs, came down on the ball from all directions—Poppy drives, Lamar told Justin, like a man falling out of a tree—uttering at the end of it, as he always did, a little cry both apologetic and deprecating: “Voop!”, calculated to conjure away all that was untoward and out of the ordinary—and off he would march, hopping along like a jaybird.
3.
Living as he did in the garage apartment and hanging out as he did in the pantry and not with Mrs. Vaught’s coterie of patriots and anti-fluoridationists who kept to the living room, the engineer met the servants first of all. Met, not got to know. The engineer was the only white man in the entire South who did not know all there was to know about Negroes. He knew very little about them, in fact nothing. Ever since he was a child and had a nurse, he had been wary of them and they of him. Like many others, he had had a little black boy for a friend, but unlike the others, who had enjoyed perfect love and understanding with their little black friends, he had been from the beginning somewhat fuddled and uneasy. At the age of thirteen he was avoiding Negroes like a queasy middle-aged liberal.
No doubt these peculiar attitudes were a consequence of his nervous condition. Anyhow it was the oddest encounter imaginable, that between him and the Vaught servants. He baffled the Negroes and they him. The Vaught servants were buffaloed by the engineer and steered clear of him. Imagine their feeling. They of course lived by their radars too. It was their special talent and it was how they got along: tuning in on the assorted signals about them and responding with a skill two hundred years in the learning. And not merely responding. Not merely answering the signals but providing home and sustenance to the transmitter, giving him, the transmitter, to believe that he dwelled in loving and familiar territory. He must be made to make sense, must the transmitter; must be answered with sense and good easy laughter: sho now, we understand each other. But here came this strange young man who transmitted no signal at all but who rather, like them, was all ears and eyes and antennae. He actually looked at them. A Southerner looks at a Negro twice: once when he is a child and sees his nurse for the first time; second, when he is dying and there is a Negro with him to change his bedclothes. But he does not look at him during the sixty years in between. And so he knows as little about Negroes as he knows about Martians, less, because he knows that he does not know about Martians.
But here comes this strange young man who acts like one of them but look at you out of the corner of his eye. What he waiting for? They became nervous and jumped out of the way. He was like a white child who does not grow up or rather who grows up in the kitchen. He liked to sit in the pantry and watch them and talk to them, but they, the Negroes, didn’t know what to do with him. They called him “he,” just as they used to call the madam of the house “she.” “Where he is?” one might say, peeping out of the kitchen door and as often as not look straight into his eyes. “Uh-oh.”
“He,” the engineer, usually sat in the pantry, a large irregular room with a single bay window. It was not properly a room at all but rather the space left over in the center of the house when the necessary rooms had been built. Mr. Vaught, who also did not know what he did not know, had been his own architect. The ceiling was at different levels; many doors and vestibules opened into the room. David usually sat at one end, polishing silver in the bay. The dark end of the room let into the “bar,” a dusty alcove of blue mirrors and buzzing fluorescent lights and chrome stools. It was one of the first of its kind, hailing from the 1920’s and copied from the swanky bars used by Richard Barthelmess and William Powell in the movies. But it had not been used as such for years and now its mirror shelves were lined with Windex bottles, cans of O-Cedar and Bab-O and jars of silver polish stuffed with a caked rag. It fell out somehow or other that both Negro and white could sit in the pantry, perhaps because it was an intermediate room between dining room and kitchen, or perhaps because it was not, properly speaking, a room at all.
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p; David Ross was different from the other Negroes. It was as if he had not caught onto either the Negro way or the white way. A good-humored seventeen-year-old, he had grown too fast and was as raw as any raw youth. He was as tall as a basketball player and wore summer and winter the same pair of heavy damp tweeds whose cuffs were swollen as if they had a chronic infection. He was supposed to be a butler and he wore a butler’s jacket with little ivory fasten-on buttons but his arms stuck out a good foot from the sleeves. He was always polishing silver, smiling as he did so a great white smile, laughing at everything (when he did not laugh, his face looked naked and strange) a hissing laugh between his teeth, ts-ts-ts. Something about him irritated the engineer, though. He was not cunning enough. He, the engineer, was a thousand times more cunning and he didn’t have to be. He, David, was too raw. For example, he was always answering advertisements in magazines, such as Learn Electronics! Alert Young Men Needed! Earn Fifty Dollars a Day! Send for Selling Kit! And the selling kit would come and David would show it to everybody, but his long black-and-pink fingers could never quite work the connections and the soldering iron. He was like a rich man’s son! The engineer would never have dreamed of spending such money ($10 for a selling kit!). Hell no, David, the engineer told him, don’t send off for that. Damnation, why didn’t he have better sense? He should either be cunning with a white man’s cunning or cunning with a black man’s cunning. As it was, he had somehow managed to get the worst of each; he had both white sappiness and Negro sappiness. Why doesn’t somebody tell him? One day he did tell him. “Damnation, David,” said he as David showed him a selling kit for an ice-cube dispenser which was supposed to fit any kind of refrigerator. “Who do you think you’re going to sell that to?”