by Walker Percy
5.
“A pretty links, isn’t it? You know, I was one of the first people to be brought up in a suburb. Aren’t you Will Barrett?”
He had been watching the golfers from the patio and he turned around quickly, irritably, not liking to be surprised. There stood a woman he first took to be a Salvation Army lass and he was about to refuse her alms even more irritably. But then he noticed she was a Vaught. She must be Val.
“In the past,” she went on before he could answer, “people have usually remembered their childhood in old houses in town or on dirt farms back in the country. But what I remember is the golf links and the pool. I spent every warm day of my girlhood at the pool, all day every day, even eating meals there. Even now it doesn’t seem right to eat a hamburger without having wrinkled fingers and smelling chlorine.” She didn’t laugh but went on gazing past him at the golfers. Her musing absent-mindedness, he reckoned, was one of the little eccentricites nuns permitted themselves. He had never spoken to a nun. But perhaps she was not a proper nun after all, wearing as she did not a proper habit but a black skirt and blouse and a little cap-and-veil business. But beyond a doubt she was a Vaught, though a somewhat plumpish bad-complexioned potato-fed Vaught. Her wrist was broad and white as milk and simple: it was easy for him to imagine that if it was cut through it would show not tendon and bone but a homogenous nun-substance.
“I’ve been looking for you, Barrett. Once I heard your father make a speech to the D.A.R. on the subject of noblesse oblige and our duty to the Negro. A strange experience and a strange bunch of noblewomen. Not that I know much about noblesse oblige, but he gave them proper hell. He was right about one thing, of course, character. You don’t hear much about that either nowadays.”
“Is that why you became a nun?” he asked politely.
“Partly, I suppose. I drove up to see Jamie and now I want to see you.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Jamie looks awful.”
“Yes.” He was about to enter with her onto the mournful ground of Jamie’s illness, but she fell away again. John Houghton’s scissors came snicker-sneeing along the brick walk behind her and flushed a towhee out of the azaleas, a dandy little cock in tuxedo-black and cinnamon vest She gazed down at the bird with the same mild distracted eye.
“Does John Houghton still run after school girls?”
“Ma’am? Oh. Well, yes.”
Now freed by her preoccupation with the forgotten trophies of her past, the sentient engineer swung full upon her. What to make of it, this queer casualness of hers? Was it Catholic, a species of professional unseriousness (death and sin are our affair, so we can make light of them), almost frivolity, like electricians who make a show of leaning on high-voltage wires? Or was it an elaborate Vaught dialectic, thus: Rita and the rest of you are going to be so serious about Jamie, therefore I am not, etc. His radar boggled and couldn’t get hold of her. He was obscurely scandalized. He didn’t like her much.
“How long does Jamie have?”
“Eh? To live— Oh, Rita said months, four months I think she said. But I think longer. Actually he is much better.”
“Jamie tells me you and he are good friends.” Her gaze was still fixed on the tiny amber eye of the towhee, which crouched with its head cocked, paralyzed.
“Yes.”
“He says that you and he may go somewhere together.”
“Jamie changes his mind about that. He was talking earlier about living with Sutter or going down to stay with you.”
“Well, now he wants to go somewhere with you.”
“Do you mean, leave school?”
“Yes.”
“He knows I’m ready to go any time.” Presently he added: “I can understand him wanting to go away.”
“Yes. That was what I want to speak to you about.”
He waited.
“Mr. Barrett—”
“Yes ma’am.”
“It may well happen that it will be you and not one of us who will be with Jamie during the last days of his life and even at his death.”
“I suppose that is true,” said the engineer, taking note of a warning tingle between his shoulder blades.
“Everyone thinks very highly of you—though for strangely diverse, even contradictory reasons. I can’t help noticing. You are evidently quite a fellow. That’s hardly surprising, considering whose son you are.”
“Ah—” began the engineer, frowning and scratching his head.
“Though I can’t say that I agree with your father on his reasons for treating Negroes well rather than beating them up, still I’d rather that he’d won over the current scoundrels even if he’d won for the wrong reasons.”
“Perhaps,” said the engineer uneasily, not wanting to discuss either his father’s “reasons” or her even more exotic reasons.
“But in any case I too can perceive that you are a complex and prescient young man.”
“I certainly appreciate—” began the engineer gloomily.
“Clearly you would do right by Jamie even if you had no affection for him, which I have reason to believe you do have.”
“Yes,” said the other warily. It was still impossible to get a fix on her. He had known very few Catholics and no nuns at all.
“Mr. Barrett, I don’t want Jamie to die an unprovided death.”
“Unprovided?”
“I don’t want him to die without knowing why he came here, what he is doing here, and why he is leaving.”
“Ma’am?” The engineer felt like wringing out his ear but he did not.
“It may fall to you to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“About the economy of salvation.”
“Why don’t you tell him?” He was watching her as intently as the towhee watched her. There was no telling what she might do.
She sighed and sat down. The towhee, released from its spell, flew away. “I have told him.”
The engineer, though standing erect, began to lean about five degrees away from her.
“It is curious, Mr. Barrett, but what I told him was absolutely the last thing on earth he would listen to. It was not simply one of a great number of things he might have listened to more or less indifferently. It was, of all things, absolutely the last thing. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“I couldn’t say. But if you can’t tell him what you believe, you his sister, how do you expect me to tell him what I don’t believe?”
But she was at it again, her trick of engaging him then slipping away. “They didn’t ride in carts the last time I was here,” she said, gazing past him at the golfers. Do all nuns banter about salvation? “And yet, there he was, reading all that guff with relish.”
“What guff?”
“That book about radio noise from the galaxies, noise which might not be noise. Did you give it to him?”
“No.”
She ignored his irritation. “I’ve noticed,” she said gloomily and not especially to him, “that it is usually a bad sign when dying people become interested in communication with other worlds, and especially when they become spiritual in a certain sense.”
“Don’t you believe in other worlds and, ah, spirits?”
“It is strange, but I’ve always distrusted so-called spiritual people,” she muttered, mostly ruminating with herself. “You know how women talk about such and such a priest being spiritual?”
“No.” How could he know any such thing?
“I always steer clear of those birds. But no, actually I owe spiritual people, ladies, a great deal—they’re very generous with me when I beg from them. It’s a strange business, isn’t it? The most unlikely people are generous. Last week I persuaded the local Klonsul of the Klan to give us a Seven-Up machine. Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?”
“I couldn’t say,” said the sleepy engineer.
She brought herself up and looked at
him for the first time. “Mr. Barrett, Jamie’s salvation may be up to you.”
“Eh? Excuse me, but apart from the circumstance that I do not know what the word ‘salvation’ means, I would refuse in any case to accept any such commission, Miss, ah—, that is, Sister—”
“Val.”
“Sister Val.”
“No,” she said laughing. “Just Val. I am Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”
“Is that right?”
His refusal, he noticed, was delivered with a tingle of pleasure, both perverse and familiar. Familiar because—yes, he remembered his father refusing a priest and taking some satisfaction in it even though he, his father, took the Catholics’ side in their troubles with the Klan. “Mr. Barrett,” the priest asked him with the same jolly gall, “I don’t think you realized it but you just fired one of my parishioners, heh-heh, and I want to ask you if you will take her back. She has a family and no husband—” “And who could that be,” said his father, his voice ominously civil. “Souella Johnson.” Souella Johnson, who, being not merely a winehead but, failing to find Gallo sherry in the house, had polished off as a poor substitute some six cases of twenty-year-old bourbon over the years. “I will not, sir,” said his father and bang, down went the telephone.
“I will not,” he told Val with the same species of satisfaction. Perhaps we are true Protestants despite ourselves, he mused, or perhaps it is just that the protest is all that is left of it. For it is in stern protest against Catholic monkey business that we feel ourselves most ourselves. But was her request true Catholic gall, the real article, or was it something she had hit upon through a complicated Vaught dialectic? Or did she love her brother?
He read in her eyes that he looked odd. “What is it?” she asked him smiling. For a split second he saw in her his Kitty, saw it in her lip-curling bold-eyed expression. It was as if his Kitty, his golden girl of summertime and old Carolina, had come back from prison where she had got fat and white as white and bad-complexioned.
“What?” she asked again.
“I was wondering,” said the engineer, who always told the truth, “how you manage to come to the point where you feel free to make requests of people.”
She laughed again. “Jamie was right. You’re a good companion. Well, I can ask you, can’t I?”
“Sure.”
“It’s like the story about the boy who got slapped by quite a few girls but who—well. But it’s extraordinary how you can ask the most unlikely people—you can ask them straight out: say, look, I can see you’re unhappy; why don’t you stop stealing or abusing Negroes, go confess your sins and receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ—and how often they will just look startled and go ahead and do it. One reason is that people seldom ask other people to do anything.”
“I see.”
“Now I have to go see Sutter.”
“Yes ma’am.”
He began nodding in ancient Protestant fuddlement and irony, not knowing whether to bow, shake hands, or look down his nose. But it didn’t matter. She had left without noticing.
6.
Jamie was not in the apartment. There were voices in the room next door. That would be Sutter and Val, he calculated, and perhaps Jamie. The old itch for omniscience came upon him—lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here—but he resisted the impulse to eavesdrop. I will not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.
He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.
The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter’s room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.
Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.
“—found him in New York,” Val was saying. “He’s Ed Barrett’s son. Have you met him?”
“I saw him in the garden.” Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer’s head.
“What did you think of him?”
Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.
“Yes,” said Val.
“—nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”
“Yes.”
My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!
“Put that thing up,” said Val.
“Why?”
“Some day you’re going to blow your fool head off—by accident.”
“That would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn’t it?”
“And it would please you, wouldn’t it, to die absurdly?”
The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.
He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter’s door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter’s outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.
The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.
“You must be Barrett.”
Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.
“Excuse me,” said the reeling engineer. “I thought I heard a noise.”
“Yes.”
“It sounded like a shot.”
“Yes.”
He waited but Sutter said no more.
“Did the pistol go off accidentally?”
“No. I shot him.”
“Him?” The engineer suddenly feared to turn around.
Sutter was nodding to the wall. There hung yet another medical picture, this of The Old Arab Physician. The engineer had not seen it because his peephole was some four inches below the frame. Moving close
r, he noticed that the Arab, who was ministering to some urchins with phials and flasks, was badly shot up. Only then did it come over him that his peephole was an outlying miss in the pattern of bullet holes.
“Why him?” asked the engineer, who characteristically, having narrowly escaped being shot, dispatched like Polonius behind the arras, had become quite calm.
“Don’t you know who that is?”
“No.”
"That’s Abou Ben Adhem.”
The engineer shook his head impatiently. “Now that I’m here I’d like to ask you—”
“See the poem? There in a few short, badly written lines is compressed the sum and total of all the meretricious bullshit of the Western world. And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest Why did it lead all the rest?”
“I don’t know,” said the engineer. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the dismantled gun barrel. The fruity steel smell of Hoppe’s gun oil put him in mind of something, but he couldn’t think what.
“There it is,” said Sutter, loading the clip, “the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man’s sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou’s effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news—the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt.”
“Who?” repeated the engineer absently, eyes glued forever to the Colt Woodsman.
“If I were a Christian, I shouldn’t hesitate to identify the Anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt.”
“Leigh Hunt,” said the engineer, rubbing his eyes.
“I’m glad you came down with Jimmy,” said Sutter. “Come sit over here.”