The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  “All right.”

  When they had finished counting, Sutter said: “You say you believe I know something about you. Now you will also do what I tell you.”

  “All right.”

  “When you leave this room, you will go to your room and sleep soundly for nine hours. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now when you do get up tomorrow, something is going to happen. As a consequence, you are going to be in a better position to decide what you want to do.”

  “All right.”

  “For the next few days you may have a difficult time. Now I shall not tell you what to do, but I will tell you now that you will be free to act. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you find yourself in too tight a spot, that is, in a situation where it is difficult to live from one minute to the next, come and see me and I’ll help you. I may not be here, but you can find me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. Good night.” Sutter yawned, pushed back his chair, and began to scratch his head with both hands.

  “Good night.”

  In his cold bed, the engineer curled up like a child and fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  13.

  He awoke to a cold diamond-bright morning. Jamie’s bed was empty. When he crossed the courtyard, the Thigpens were leaving for the game. Lamar gave John Houghton a drink, which he drained off in one gulp, little finger stuck out. In return John Houghton did a buck-and-wing, swooping down with tremendous swoops and fetching up light as a feather, clapping his hands not quite together but scuffing the horny parts past each other. The engineer, standing pale and blinking in the sunlight, was afraid Lamar was going to say “Get hot!” or something similar, but he didn’t. In fact, as the little caravan got underway and the three servants stood waving farewell on the back steps, Lugurtha fluttering her apron, Lamar shook his head fondly. “There’s nothing like the old-timey ways!” he said. The Vaught retainers seemed to remind Lamar of an earlier, more gracious time, even though the purple castle didn’t look much like an antebellum mansion and the golf links even less like a cotton plantation.

  Kitty was eating batter cakes in the pantry. She eyed him somewhat nervously, he thought. But when later he kissed her mouth, not quite cleared of Br’er Rabbit syrup, she kissed him back with her new-found conjugal passion, though a bit absent-mindedly.

  “Rita wants to see you,” she told him as she led him through the dark dining room. “Something has happened.”

  “Where’s Jamie?”

  “I’m afraid that’s what it’s about.”

  “Come over here a minute,” he said, trying to pull her behind a screen of iridescent butterfly wings. He felt like a sleepy husband.

  “Later, later,” said Kitty absently. For the first time he saw that the girl was badly upset.

  As they entered Rita’s tower bedroom, Kitty, he noticed, became all at once pudding-faced and hangdog. She looked like Jamie. She hung back like a fourteen-year-old summoned to the principal’s office. Her noble matutinal curves seemed to turn to baby fat.

  Rita, dressed in a heavy silk kimono, lay propped on a large bed strewn with magazines, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and opened mail. She was reading a book, which she set face down on the bed. From force of habit and by way of getting at someone, he set his head over to see the title. It was The Art of Loving. The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.

  Getting quickly out of bed and holding an unlit cigarette to her lip, Rita strode back and forth between them. So formidable was it, this way she had of setting the side of her face into a single ominous furrow (something was up all right), that he forgot all about the book.

  “Well, they’ve done it up brown this time,” she said at last, stopping at the window and rubbing her chin in the web of her thumb. “Or rather he has.”

  “Who?” asked the engineer.

  “Sutter,” she said, turning to face him. Kitty stood beside him as flat-footed and button-eyed as Betty Jo Jones in Ithaca Junior High. “Sutter has left and taken Jamie with him,” said Rita quietly.

  “Where, Ree?” Kitty cried, but somewhat rhetorically, her eyes in her eyebrows. The surprise was for his benefit.

  Rita shrugged.

  “I have an idea where they might be headed,” said the engineer.

  Rita rolled her eyes. “Then for pity’s sake tell us.”

  “Jamie was determined to go either out west or to Val’s.”

  “Then I suggest that you jump in your little truck without further ado and go get him.”

  “What I can’t understand,” said the engineer absently, putting his fist to his forehead as if to cudgel his poor wits, “is why Dr. Vaught left when he did. He told me— Well, I had no idea he was planning to make a change.”

  “It seems a change was made for him,” said Rita dryly.

  He became aware that Kitty was woolgathering. Something had happened and she knew about it

  “What change is that?” he asked.

  “Sutter has been discharged from the hospital staff.” Removing her glasses, she thrust them into the deep pocket of her kimono sleeve. Her pale rough face looked naked and serious and justified, like a surgeon who comes out of the operating room and removes his mask. “It was understood that if he left, he would not be prosecuted.”

  “Prosecuted for what?” Up to his usual tricks, the engineer took her import not from the words she said but from the signals. That the import was serious indeed was to be judged from her offhandedness, the license she allowed herself in small things. She lit a cigarette and with a serious sort of free-and-easiness cupped it inward to her palm like a Marine and hunkered over an imaginary campfire between the three of them.

  “What were they going to prosecute him for?” asked the engineer again. Within himself he was fighting against the voluptuousness of bad news. Would the time ever come when bad was bad and good good and a man was himself and knew straight up which was which?

  “Sutter,” said Rita, warming her hands at the invisible embers and stamping her feet softly, “persuaded a ward nurse to leave her patients, some of whom were desperately ill, and accompany him to an unoccupied room, which I believe is called the terminal room. There they were discovered in bed by the night supervisor, and surrounded by pictures of a certain sort. Wynne Magahee called me last night—he’s chief of medicine. He told me, he said: ‘Look, we wouldn’t care less what Sutter does with or to the nurses on his own time, but hell, Rita, when it comes to leaving sick people—and to make matters worse, somebody on the ward found out about it and is suing the hospital.’ I had to tell Wynne, ‘Wynne it is not for you to make explanations to us but rather for us—’”

  Beside him, Kitty had gone as lumpish and cheeky as a chipmunk. “They were not desperately ill, Ree,” she said wearily as if it were an old argument. “It was a chronic ward.”

  “Very well, they were not desperately ill,” said Rita, eyeing the engineer ironically.

  Kitty’s lower lip trembled. Poor Kitty, it remained to her, one of the last, to be afflicted. “Poor Sutter,” she whispered, shaking her head. “But why in the world did he—”

  “However unfortunate the situation might be,” said Rita grimly, “Sutter’s being discovered was not purely and simply a misfortune, that is to say, bad luck. As it happens, Sutter set the time for his rendezvous a few minutes before the night supervisor made her rounds.”

  “Do you mean Sutter wanted to get caught, Ree?” cried Kitty.

  “There are needs, my dear,” said Rita dryly, “which take precedence over this or that value system. I suspect, moreover, that our friend here knows a good deal more about the situation than we do.”

  But though Kitty turned to him, he felt fretful and sore and would not answer. Anyhow he didn’t know what Rita was talking about. Instead he aske
d her: “When did this happen?”

  “Thursday night.”

  “Then when I spoke to him last night, he already knew that he had been discharged?”

  “Yes. And he also knew that he and Jamie were leaving this morning.”

  “But he told me I could find him if—” The engineer broke off and fell silent. Presently he asked: “Do Mr. and Mrs. Vaught know?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Poppy threw up his hands over his head, you know, and rushed out of the room, Dolly took to the bed.”

  He was silent.

  “I had supposed that your responsibilities as his tutor and companion might include a reasonable concern for his life. The last time he went off with Sutter he was nearly killed.”

  The hearty thrust of her malice made him want to grin. He thought of his aunts. Malice was familiar ground. It was like finding oneself amid the furniture of one’s living room. He looked at his watch. “I can leave in ten minutes. If he’s in Tyree County, I’ll be back tomorrow. If they’ve gone to New Mexico, and I think they have, it’ll take longer. I’ll look in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Kitty?” He waited in the doorway without looking at her.

  When she did not move, he looked up. The girl was stricken. She was wringing the fingers of one hand. He had never seen anyone wring his hands.

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “I can’t,” she said, open-mouthed and soundless like a fourteen-year-old talking past the teacher.

  “Why not?”

  “Bill,” said Rita, brow gone all quirky, “you can’t ask this child to travel with you. Suppose you do have to go to New Mexico.”

  “We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow. My uncle lives there and can arrange it.”

  She shook her head fondly. “Listen, kids. Here’s what you do. Bill, go find Jamie. Then stay with him or bring him home. In either case I guarantee this girl will come a-running as fast as her little legs will carry her. Kitty, I assure you he is coming back. Look at her, Lance Corporal.”

  But he looked at Rita instead.

  She was daring him! If you leave, said the fine gray eyes, you know that I know that you won’t come back. I dare you!

  And Kitty: by some queer transformation the girl, his lordly lioness of a Kitty, had been turned into a twittering bird-girl with little bitty legs.

  “Kitty, I have to go to my room for a minute. Then I’m leaving.”

  “Wait.” Soundless as a little dove, she flew up to him, and still could not speak.

  “What?” he said, smiling.

  Rita linked arms with them and drew them together. “If it is of any interest to you, dearie,” she said to Kitty, “my money is on him. Lance Corporal?”

  “What?” said the puzzled engineer.

  “Idiot,” said Rita, giving him a dig in the ribs with her silken elbow. “The poor girl is wondering whether you are coming back.”

  Then, registering as he did a fine glint of appraisal in Rita’s eye, he saw the two of them, Kitty and Billy, as doll-like figures tumbling before the magic wand of an enchantress. Nor, and here was the strangest part of it, did he really mind.

  A note was clipped with a bobby pin to the ignition switch of the Trav-L-Aire.

  Meet me in one hour. Go out 81—

  Did she mean north or south 81?

  Turn right near top of ridge—

  Lord, which ridge and which side of it?

  Watch for For Sale sign and Mickle mailbox—

  Before or after turning off?

  Pull up out of sight of the highway and wait for me. K.

  Who was she afraid of?

  There was time then for a stop at Sutter’s apartment. For two reasons: to make sure Sutter had in fact left (for Rita was a liar), and if he had, maybe to find a clue or sign (Sutter might just leave one for him).

  Straight up and over the mountain and down through deserted streets—what day was this, a holiday? No, the game! Everybody had gone to the game or in to their TVs, and the streets and cars and the occasional loiterer had the look of not going to the game—to the Kenilworth Arms, an ancient blackened stucco battlement, relic of the baronial years of the twenties. He went up in an elevator with a ruby glass in the door and down a narrow tile corridor hollow as a gutter. The silence and emptiness of Sutter’s apartment met him at the open door, which had also been fitted with a ruby window. The apartment had a sunken living room and looked like Thelma Todd’s apartment in the Hollywood Hills of 1931. There was open on the floor an old black friable Gladstone bag with a freshly ruptured handle and in the bathroom a green can of Mennen’s talc. In a bureau drawer he found enclosed in a steno pad an Esso map of the Southeastern United States. A light penciled line ran southwest to an X marked in the badlands just above the Gulf Coast, turned northwest, and ran off the map past Shreveport. He cranked open a casement window. The faint uproar of the city below filled the tiled room like a sea shell. He sat on the steps of the balcony foyer and looked down into the littered well of the living room. It had an unmistakably sexual flavor. The orange candle flame bulbs, the ruby glass, the very sconces on the walls were somehow emblems of sex but of a lapsed archaic monkey-business sort of sex. Here, he reckoned, one used to have parties with flappers and make whoopee. Why did Sutter pick such a place to live in, with its echoes of ancient spectral orgies? He was not, after all, of that generation. The engineer opened the steno pad. It seemed to be a casebook of some sort, with an autopsy protocol here and there and much scribbling in between.

  Sutter wrote:

  A w.d. and n. white male, circa 49.

  Eyes, ears, nose, mouth: neg. (upper dentures).

  Skin: 12 cm. contusion rt. occipital region

  Pleura: Neg.

  Lungs: Neg.

  Pericardium: 10 cc. pink frothy fluid

  Heart: infarcted anterior wall right ventricle; coronary artery: moderate narrowing, occasional plaque; recent occlusion anterior descending branch, right c.a.

  Abdomen: neg. except moderate cirrhosis of L. with texture fibrous to slice; central areas of lobules visible macroscopically.

  Police report: subject found rolled in room above Mamie’s on 16th St. behind old L & N depot. Traced to Jeff Davis hotel. Here from Little Rock on opticians’ convention. Traced from hotel to men’s smoker in warehouse (girl performer plus film, neither on opticians’ schedule), thence to Mamie’s, thence to room upstairs, wherein slugged or rolled; but head injury not cause of death. Mamie off hook.

  Lewdness = sole concrete metaphysic of layman in age of science = sacrament of the dispossessed. Things, persons, relations emptied out, not by theory but by lay reading of theory. There remains only relation of skin to skin and hand under dress. Thus layman now believes that entire spectrum of relations between persons (e.g., a man and woman who seem to be connected by old complexus of relations, fondness, fidelity, and the like, understanding, the comic, etc.) is based on “real” substratum of genital sex. The latter is “real,” the former is not. (Cf. Whitehead’s displacement of the Real)

  Scientist not himself pornographer in the practice of his science, but the price of the beauty and the elegance of the method of science = the dispossession of layman. Lewdness = climate of the anteroom of science. Pornography stands in a mutual relation to science and Christianity and is reinforced by both.

  Science, which (in layman’s view) dissolves concrete things and relations, leaves intact touch of skin to skin. Relation of genital sexuality reinforced twice: once because it is touch, therefore physical, therefore “real”; again because it corresponds with theoretical (i.e., sexual) substrata of all other relations. Therefore genital sexuality = twice “real.”

  Christianity is still viable enough to underwrite the naughtiness which is essential to pornography (e.g., the pornography of the East is desultory and perfunctory).

  The perfect pornographer = a man who lives both in anteroom of science (not in research laboratory) and who also lives in twilight
of Christianity, e.g., a technician. The perfect pornographer = lapsed Christian Southerner (who as such retains the memory not merely of Christianity but of a region immersed in place and time) who presently lives in Berkeley or Ann Arbor, which are not true places but sites of abstract activity which could take place anywhere else, a map coordinate; who is perhaps employed as psychological tester or opinion sampler or computer programmer or other para-scientific pursuit. Midwestern housewives, look out! Hand-under-dress of a total stranger is in the service both of the theoretical “real” and the physical “real.”

  I do not deny, Val, that a revival of your sacramental system is an alternative to lewdness (the only other alternative is the forgetting of the old sacrament), for lewdness itself is a kind of sacrament (devilish, if you like). The difference is that my sacrament is operational and yours is not.

  The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., we might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

  But I am not a pornographer, Val, like the optician, now a corpse, i.e., an ostensible liver of a “decent” life, a family man, who fancies conventions with smokers and call girls. I accept the current genital condition of all human relations and try to go beyond it. I may sniff like a dog but then I try to be human rather than masquerade as human and sniff like a dog. I am a sincere, humble, and even moral pornographer. I cultivate pornography in order to set it at naught.

  Women, of course, are the natural pornographers today, because they are not only dispossessed by science of the complexus of human relations (all but the orgasm) but are also kept idle in their suburban houses with nothing to do but read pseudo-science articles in the Reader’s Digest and dirty novels (one being the natural preamble of the other). U.S. culture is the strangest in history, a society of decent generous sex-ridden men and women who leave each other to their lusts, the men off to the city and conventions, abandoning their wives to the suburbs, which are the very home and habitation of lewd dreams. A dirty deal for women, if you ask me.