The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  When he heard the sound behind him, he slid the switch of the flashlight and stepped four feet to the side (out of the line of fire?) and waited.

  “Bill?”

  A wall switch snapped on, lighting a row of bulbs in the peak of the roof. The girl, hugging her wrap with both arms, moved close to him and peered into his face. Her lips, scrubbed clean of lipstick, were slightly puffed and showed the violet color of blood.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you outside.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I heard something.”

  “You heard something up here from the garage?”

  “I didn’t know where it came from. I thought it might be from the attic.”

  “Why?”

  “Is there a room up here?”

  “A room?”

  “A room closed off from the rest of the attic?”

  “No. This is all.”

  He said nothing.

  “You don’t know where you are, do you?”

  “Where I am?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I know.” He did know now but he didn’t mind her thinking he didn’t. She was better, more herself, when he was afflicted.

  “You were sleepwalking, I think.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Come on. I’ll take you back.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know I don’t.”

  He made her stay in the pantry. She was sweet and loving and not at all antic. It is strange, he thought as he stood in his own and Jamie’s room a few minutes later: we are well when we are afflicted and afflicted when we are well. I can lie with her only if she tends my wounds.

  “Was there a shot?” he asked her as he left.

  She had shaken her head but smiled, signifying she liked him better for being mistaken.

  The square of moonlight had moved onto Jamie’s face. Arms folded, the engineer leaned against his bed and gazed down at the youth. The eye sockets were pools of darkness. Despite the strong black line of the brow, the nose and mouth were smudged and not wholly formed. He reminded the engineer of the graduates of Horace Mann, their faces quick and puddingish and acned, whose gift was the smart boy’s knack of catching on, of hearkening: yes, I see. If Jamie could live, it was easy to imagine him for the next forty years engrossed and therefore dispensed and so at the end of the forty years still quick and puddingish and childlike. They were the lucky ones. Yet in one sense it didn’t make much difference, even to Jamie, whether he lived or died—if one left out of it what he might “do” in the forty years, that is, add to “science.” The difference between me and him, he reflected, is that I could not permit myself to be so diverted (but diverted from what?). How can one take seriously the Theory of Large Numbers, living in this queer not-new not-old place haunted by the goddess Juno and the spirit of the great Bobby Jones? But it was more than that. Something is going to happen, he suddenly perceived that he knew all along. He shivered. It is for me to wait. Waiting is the thing. Wait and watch.

  Jamie’s eyes seemed to open in their deep sockets. But they gazed back at him, not with their usual beamish expression, casting about for recondite areas of agreement in the space between them, but mockingly: ah, you deceive yourself, Jamie seemed to say. But when the engineer, smiling and puzzled, leaned closer, he saw that the eyes had not opened.

  A bar of yellow light fell across the room. A figure was outlined in the doorway of the kitchenette. It beckoned to him.

  It was Rita.

  As soon as he was inside the tiny room, she closed the door and whispered: “Is Jamie asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  Sutter stood gazing into the sink. The sink was dusty and still had a paper sticker in the basin.

  “We want you to settle a little point,” said Rita.

  Sutter nodded. The engineer sniffed. The kitchenette had the close expired air of impasse. Now as if they were relieved by the diversion, its occupants turned toward him with a mild, unspecified interest.

  “I want to know whether you are still prepared to go somewhere with Jamie,” Rita said.

  The engineer rubbed his forehead. “What time is it?” he asked no one in particular. Was this the true flavor of hatred, he wondered, this used, almost comfortable malice sustained between them, with its faint sexual reek? They turned as fondly to him as spent lovers greeting a strange child.

  “Two thirty,” said Sutter.

  “What about it, Bill?” asked Rita crisply.

  “What? Oh, Jamie,” he repeated, aware that Sutter watched him. “Why, yes. But you knew all along that I would go with him. Why do you ask?”

  “I have reason to believe that Jamie is getting restless and that he may ask Sutter to go off somewhere with him. I think this is too much to ask of Sutter.”

  He stole a glance at Sutter, but the latter’s expression was still fond and inattentive.

  “You are very much in demand, Bill,” said he at last. “Jimmy wants you, not me.”

  “Then what’s the difficulty?” asked the bemused engineer, feeling their apathy steal into his bones.

  “The difficulty,” said Sutter, “is that Rita wants to make sure Jimmy doesn’t go anywhere with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s a good question, isn’t it, Rita,” said Sutter, but still not quite looking at her (couldn’t they stand the sight of each other?). “Why don’t you want Jimmy to go with me?”

  “Because of your deliberate cultivation of destructiveness, of your death-wish, not to mention your outhouse sexuality,” said Rita, still smiling, and addressing Sutter through the engineer. “Every man to his own taste but you can bloody well leave Jamie out of it.”

  “What do you think I would do?” Sutter asked.

  “I know what you have done.”

  “Jamie also spoke of going down to Val’s,” said the engineer for reasons of his own. He could not quite make this pair out and wished to get another fix on them. Val was his triangulation point.

  “Val,” said Rita nodding. “Yes, between the two of you, Sutter and Val, you could dispose of him very nicely. You’d kill him off in three weeks and Val would send his soul to heaven. If you don’t mind I shall continue to minister to the living.”

  “Kill him off?” Sutter frowned but still could not tear his vacant eye from the engineer. “I understood he was in a remission.”

  “He was.”

  “What’s his white count?”

  “Eighteen thousand.”

  “How many immature forms?”

  “Twenty percent.”

  “What’s he on?”

  “Prednisone.”

  “Wasn’t he on Aminopterin?”

  “That was a year ago.”

  “What’s his red count?”

  “Just under three million.”

  “Is his spleen palpable?”

  “That’s what I like about you and your sister,” said Rita.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your great concern for Jamie, one for his body, the other for his soul. The only trouble is your interest is somewhat periodic.”

  “That’s what interests me,” said Sutter. “Your interest, I mean.”

  “Put up your knife, you bastard. You no longer bother me.”

  They quarreled with the skillful absent-minded malice of married couples. Instead of taking offense, they nodded sleepily and even smiled.

  “What is it you want this young man to do?” Sutter asked, shaking his head to rouse himself.

  “My house in Tesuque is open,” said Rita. “Teresita is there to cook. The Michelins are next door. I have even determined that they could transfer to the college in Santa Fe without loss of credit—at the end of this semester.”

  “Who are the Michelins?” asked the engineer.

  “A duo piano team,” said Sutter. “Why don’t you take him out yourself, Ri
ta?”

  “You persuade him to go and I will,” said Rita listlessly.

  “Rita,” said Sutter in the same mild temper which the engineer had not yet put down to ordinary friendliness or pluperfect malice, “what do you really care what happens to Jimmy?”

  “I care.”

  “Tell me honestly what difference it makes to you whether Jimmy lives or dies.”

  The engineer was shocked but Rita replied routinely. “You know very well there is no use in my answering you. Except to say that there is such a thing as concern and there is such a thing as preference for life over death. I do not desire death, mine, yours, or Jamie’s. I do not desire your version of fun and games. I desire for Jamie that he achieve as much self-fulfillment as he can in the little time he has. I desire for him beauty and joy, not death.”

  “That is death,” said Sutter.

  “You see, Bill,” said Rita, smiling but still unfocused.

  “I’m not sure,” said the engineer, frowning. “But mainly what I don’t understand is what you are asking me to do since you already know I will go anywhere Jamie wants to go and any time.”

  “I know, Bill,” said Rita mournfully. “But apparently my former husband thinks you have reasons for staying.”

  “What reasons?” he asked Sutter.

  “He cannot conceive that everyone is not as self-centered as he is,” Rita put in before Sutter could reply.

  “No, I can’t, that’s true,” said Sutter. “But as to reasons, Bill, I know you are having some difficulties and it was my impression you wanted me to help you.” Sutter was opening and closing cabinet doors, searching for the bottle which was in plain sight on the counter. The engineer handed it to him.

  “What’s number two?”

  “Number two: I would not suppose that you were anxious to leave Kitty.”

  “Kitty?” The engineer’s heart gave a queer extra thump.

  “I could not help but observe her kissing you in the garden as you lay under a Governor Mouton.”

  He stopped his hand, which had started up to touch his lips. Then someone had kissed him, not Alice Bocock in his dream, but Kitty herself, warm and flushed from the sun, tiny points of sweat glistening in the down of her lip. He shrugged. “I don’t see what that has to do—”

  “The question is not whether you would stay but whether Kitty would go with you.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the engineer, blushing with pleasure at the prospect. It had not occurred to him.

  “The further question is, ahem, whether in case all three of you go, Rita might not go along with you after all.”

  “You can’t reach me any more, you bastard,” said Rita, but not, it seemed, angrier than before.

  “You’re right, of course,” said Sutter cheerfully and earnestly, facing her for the first time over his drink. “You were right before and I was wrong. I couldn’t stand prosperity. We were good, you and I, as good as you wanted us to be, and in the end I couldn’t stand it. You were productive and so, for the first time in years, was I, and thanks to you. As you say, we were self-actualizing people and altogether successful, though somewhat self-conscious, in our cultivation of joy, zest, awe, freshness, and the right balance of adult autonomous control and childlike playfulness, as you used to call it. Though I don’t mind telling you that I never really approved your using technical terms like ‘penis envy’ in ordinary conversation—”

  “Excuse me,” said the engineer, setting a foot toward the door. But Rita was squarely in the way and gave no sign of seeing him.

  “I confess,” Sutter went on, “that in the end it was I who collapsed. Being geniuses of the orgasm is the hardest of tasks, far more demanding than Calvinism. So I couldn’t stand prosperity and had to mess around with Teresita. I longed for old-fashioned humbug in the same way other men long for the dear sights of home. You never really forgave me. And yet, now at this moment I forgive you for—”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Rita in a strangled whisper, advancing upon Sutter and at the same time, fortuitously, upon the engineer, who saw his chance and made his escape. As he left he heard Sutter say:

  “You always said I knew you backwards. Well, I’m telling you now that you are wrong about yourself and wrong about what you think you want. There is nothing wrong with you beyond a certain spitefulness and pride and a penchant for a certain species of bullshit. You’re a fine girl, a fine Georgia girl—did you know Rita was from Georgia, Bill?—who got too far from home. Georgia girls have no business at Lake Chapala. Come on here—”

  “Oh foul, foul, foul—” said Rita as he shut the door.

  It is proof that the engineer was not in any ordinary sense an eavesdropper or a Peeping Tom that not only did he not head for the closet when he reached his room but instead closed the closet door and jumped into bed and pulled the pillow over his head so he could not hear a door close and so could not tell whether Rita stayed or left.

  9.

  On the way to school Friday morning, Jamie leaned over and began to fiddle with the ashtray of the Lincoln. “I—ah—” said he, smiling a bit—they hardly ever spoke during this hour, the engineer drove, brother and sister watched the road as they would have from a schoolbus—”I’ve decided to quit school and go out west. Or rather transfer.”

  “How soon would you like to go?” asked the engineer.

  “I’m ready now.”

  “Have you asked if it is all right with your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a dewy bright haunted October morning. The silvery old Rock City barns leaned into the early sunlight. Killdeers went crying along the fallow fields where tough shallow spiderwebs were scattered like saucers. Now and then the Lincoln crossed deep railroad cuts filled with the violet light of ironweed.

  “Then it would be in June,” said Kitty carelessly, putting her chin back to catch sight of the pledge pins on her cashmere sweater. “Could I go with you? Let’s open up Rancho Merced,” she cried, but in a standard coed cry, eyes going away.

  But the engineer was already turning the Lincoln around. It was Mrs. Vaught’s car, a good solid old glossy black four-door, rounded fore and aft in the style of the fifties and smelling inside of wax like a ship’s saloon.

  “What in the world,” cried Kitty. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to get the camper.”

  “The camper. What for?”

  “Jamie said he wanted to go out west. The camper would be better than this car.”

  “My God, he didn’t mean now!”

  “I thought he did.”

  They had gotten as far as Enfield. Even after the few weeks of their commuting, each inch of the way had become as familiar to them as their own back yard: this was the place where they always ran afoul of an unlucky traffic light which detained them at an empty crossing for an endless forty-five seconds. Always when they passed at this hour a line of sunlight and shade fell across the lettering of an abandoned storefront, salomon, whose middle o had fallen off, leaving its outline on the brick. Enfield was a defunct coal depot on the L & N Railroad.

  “Jamie, tell him to turn around. I have an eight o’clock and so do you.”

  But Jamie only went on with his smiling and his fiddling with the ashtray.

  The engineer was smiling too, but from the pleasure of having her next to him and touching him at arm, hip, and calf. What a lovely fine fragrant Chi Omega she was in her skirt and sweater. A beautiful brown-kneed cheerleader and it was cheer to sit beside her. She saved them both from this decrepit mournful countryside. Without her he’d have jumped straight into one of these lonesome L & N gorges where old train whistles from the 1930’s still echoed.

  “The Tennessee game is tomorrow,” she said laughing, truly shaken because now she believed them. Overnight she had turned into a fierce partisan for the Colonels, who were now ranked number two in the United States. “Tennessee is number four and if we beat them—”

  “That’s right,” said Jami
e, who, now that it was settled, sat back and took notice of the countryside. It was very different now, fifteen minutes later and what with them not going but returning with the sun in their faces. The hamlets seemed to be stirring with ordinary morning enterprise.

  “How long will it take you to get ready?” Jamie asked him.

  “I can have the camper stocked in thirty minutes!”

  “O.K.”

  “I have never in my life,” said Kitty, tapping her Scripto pencil on the world anthology.

  He saw that she was angry. If Jamie had not been with them, he would have stopped then and there and kissed her pretty pouting lips and pressed her lovely cashmered person against him, Chi O pin and all. It was the sisterly aspect of her which excited him, big sister sweetheart at eight o’clock in the morning, her mouth not yet cleared of breakfast butter and molasses.

  “Of course you’re going with us,” he said to her, sending the Lincoln swooping along on its limber old springs.

  “Hah. Not me, boy,” she cried, casting about her huffy coed glances.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m serious too.”

  “Is it all right with you, Jamie, if your sister goes?”

  “I don’t care who goes. But I’m going.”

  “Why for God’s sake?” For the first time she spoke directly to her brother.

  “What do you mean, why?” he asked her irritably. “Does there have to be a why?”

  When Kitty did not answer and in fact began to blink back tears Jamie said: “I am not interested in seeing the Tennessee game.”

  “And I happened to know how much you like Chem 2. Bubba Ray Ross was telling me. I’ll bet you’ve heard too, haven’t you Billy?”

  “No.”

  “I am not interested in Chem 2,” Jamie said, “or 3 or 4.”

  “Well, what in the world are you interested in?” Kitty was smiling angrily and busily tucking her skirt under her knee and squaring away the world anthology on her lap.

  “I—ah. I just want to take this trip. No, to tell you the truth I’m going to transfer. I’ve already spoken to—it can be done.”