The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  No wonder he was confused. He had forgotten Kitty and left her at the university and now remembered nothing more than that he had forgotten. There was only the nameless tug pulling him back. But he had also forgotten what Sutter told him the night before—come find me—and recorded only the huge tug forward in the opposite direction. He shrugged: well, I’m not going back because I’ve been there.

  There was nothing to do but go about his business. Taking care to remove the ignition key, he locked himself in the camper and lit the hot-water heater. After a shower in the tiny slot of the stall, he shaved carefully, took three aspirins for his headache, and two spansules for his dislocation. Then donning his Macy’s slacks and Brooks Brothers shirt whose collar ran up into his hair, making him all of a piece, so to speak, and restoring his old Princeton puissance (for strangely he had forgotten the Vaughts and even the Y.M.C.A. and remembered Princeton), he cooked and ate a great bowl of minute grits and a quarter pound of slab bacon.

  When he started up the camper and backed out of the myrtle thicket and went his way down US 87, the G.M.C. faltered and looked back of its shoulder like a horse leaving the barn. “Not that way!—that’s where I came from,” said the rider angrily and kicked the beast in the flank.

  For several hours he cruised south on 87, choosing this route as a consequence of the penciled line on the Esso map. He did not dare examine the contents of his pockets, for fear he would not recognize what he found there, or for fear rather that, confronted with positive proof of himself, he still would not know and would lose the tenuous connection he had. He was like a man shot in the bowels: he didn’t dare look down.

  It was a frosty morn. The old corn shucks hung like frozen rags. A killdeer went crying down a freshly turned row, its chevroned wing elbowing along the greasy disced-up gobbets of earth. The smell of it, the rimy mucous cold in his nostrils, and the blast of engine-warm truck air at his feet put him in mind of something—of hunting! of snot drying in your nose and the hot protein reek of fresh-killed quail.

  In the late morning he slowed and, keeping a finger on the map, turned off the highway onto a scraped gravel road which ran for miles through a sparse woodland of post oaks and spindly pines infected with tumors. Once he passed through a town which had a narrow courthouse and an old boarded-up hotel on the square. There were still wrecks of rocking chairs on the gallery. Either I have been here before, he thought, perhaps with my father while he was trying a case, or else it was he with his father and he told me about it.

  Beyond the town he stopped at the foot of a hill. A tall blackish building with fluted iron columns stood on top. He looked for a sign, but there was only an old tin arrow pointing north to: Chillicothe Business College, Chillicothe, Ohio, 892 miles. Halfway up the hill he stopped again and made out the letters on the pediment: Phillips Academy. Why, I know this place, he thought. Either I went to school here or my father did. It was one of the old-style country academies which had thirty or forty pupils and two or three teachers. Dr. so-and-so who taught Greek and Colonel so-and-so who taught military science. But perhaps it is only a déjà vu. But there is a way of finding out, considered the canny engineer. If he had really been here before, he should be able to recall something and then verify his recollection. Whereas a déjà vu only confers the semblance of memory. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and pondered. It seemed that there was a concrete slab, a court of sorts, behind the school.

  But if there ever had been, there was not now. When he drove up the bill, he was disappointed to find instead a raw settlement of surplus army buildings, Quonset huts, and one geodesic dome, stretching out into the piney woods, each building fed by a silver butane sphere. It looked like a lunar installation. There was no one around, but at last he found a woman dressed in black, feeding entrails to a hawk in a chicken coop. She looked familiar. He eyed her, wondering whether he knew her.

  “Aren’t you—” he asked.

  “Valentine Vaught,” she said, continuing to feed the hawk. “How are you, Bill?”

  “Not too good,” he said, watching to see how she saw him. From his breast pocket he took Sutter’s casebook and made a note of her name.

  “Is that Sutter’s?” she asked, but made no move to take it.

  “I suppose it is,” he said warily, “do you want it?”

  “I’ve heard it all before, dear,” she said dryly. “When he gets drunk he writes me letters. We always argued. Only I’ve stopped.”

  Tell me what is tugging at me, he wanted to say, but asked instead: “Isn’t this old Phillips Academy?”

  “Yes, it used to be. Did you go to school here?”

  “No, it was my father. Or perhaps grandfather. Wasn’t there at one time a tennis court over there or maybe an outdoor basketball court?”

  “Not that I know of. I have a message for you.”

  “What?”

  “Sutter and Jamie were here. They said I was to tell you they were headed for Santa Fe.”

  She seemed to expect him. Had he been on his way here? He took out the map. Who had marked the route?

  “Sutter and Jamie,” he repeated. Again it came over him, the terrific claim upon him, the tug of memory so strong that he broke into a sweat. “I’ve got to go,” he muttered.

  “To find Jamie?” she asked.

  “I suppose,” he said uneasily. But instead of leaving, he watched her. It came to him for the second time that he didn’t like her, particularly her absorption with the hawk. It was a chicken hawk with an old rusty shoulder and a black nostril. She attended to the hawk with a buzzing antic manner which irritated him. It scandalized him slightly, like the Pope making a fuss over a canary. He was afraid she might call the hawk by some such name as Saint Blaise.

  “This is a wonderful work you’re doing here,” he said, remembering a little more, then added, for what reason God alone knew: “I’ve always liked Catholics.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” she said, feeding a kidney to the hawk.

  The task, he mused, was to give shape and substance to time itself. Time was turned on and running between them like the spools of a tape recorder. Was that not the nature of his amnesia: that all at once the little ongoing fillers of time, the throat-clearings and chair-scrapings and word-mumblings, stopped and the tape ran silent?

  “At any rate, your bishop is a very courageous man,” he heard himself say even more recklessly because he didn’t know her bishop from Adam.

  “I think he is chicken-hearted.”

  “Well, I’ll be going,” he said, flushing angrily. Really, he had no use for this prankish perverse manner of hers. As suggestible as ever, he began to feel it take possession of him too, a buzzing glassy-eyed inwardness.

  “Why are you writing everything down?” she asked, looking at him for the first time.

  He frowned. “I may have told you before that I have a nervous condition which affects my memory. Anyhow I only wrote down your name.” And suddenly he remembered her religious name as well: Johnette Mary Vianney: remembered it precisely because it was difficult and barbarous. Taking note of her costume again, he reckoned she must be some sort of off-brand nun, perhaps not yet certified by the higher-ups. That’s why she did not like her bishop!—he hadn’t given her her license or whatever.

  “If you catch up with Jamie,” she said, speaking again to the hawk, “give him a good shaking.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s feeling sorry for himself and has taken to reading Kahlil Gibran, a bad sign even in healthy people. Did you give it to him—I know Sutter wouldn’t.”

  “Who? No.” If he needed a good shaking, Sister, you should have given it to him. But he said: “Do you like your work here?” Without knowing that he did so, he was going through his pockets. Oh my, I’m sure I had something of great value.

  “We are very poor here,” she said, watching him with interest.

  He blushed. “I’m sorry to say that my wallet has been lost or stolen. I—” he began, and felt h
is sore occiput. “Otherwise I’d like very much to make a small contribution to your work.”

  “Say a prayer for us,” she said, he thought, absently.

  “Yes. Where are they now?”

  “Who? Oh. The pupils don’t come on weekends.”

  “Of course not,” he said heartily. He wondered whether it was Saturday or Sunday. Something else came back to him. “I’ve heard the poverty here in Tyree County is abject.”

  “It’s not that so much,” she said carelessly.

  “Not that? What then?”

  “The children are dumb. They can’t speak.”

  “Ah, they are mentally retarded—pellagra, no doubt.”

  “No, I mean they’re dumb, mute. Children eleven and twelve can’t speak. It took me six months to find out why. They’re brought up in silence. Nobody at home speaks. They don’t know thirty words. They don’t know words like pencil or hawk or wallet.”

  “What a rewarding experience it must be to teach them.”

  “Yes, very,” she said, and not ironically, he thought.

  A complex system of scoring social debts kept him from leaving. Since he couldn’t give her money, ransom himself, he had to pay her out by listening to her, since, goofy as he was, he knew two things not many people know. He knew how to listen and he knew how to get at that most secret and aggrieved enterprise upon which almost everyone is embarked. He’d give her the use of his radar.

  “Is that why you came here?” he asked her. “Because of the children, I mean.”

  “Why I came here,” she said vaguely. “No, that wasn’t the reason. Somebody asked me.”

  “Who asked you?” he bent upon the hawk the same smiling unseeing gaze as she.

  “A woman in the library at Columbia.”

  “A woman in the library at Columbia asked you to come down here?”

  “Not directly. That is not what she asked me at first.”

  “What did she ask you at first?”

  “I was writing a paper on Pareto. This nun and I shared the same cubicle in the stacks. She was doing her doctorate on John Dewey, whom she admired greatly—you know how they’ve taken up with the very ones they despised a few years ago.”

  “No, I don’t,” said the engineer. His head was beginning to hurt again.

  She paid no attention. “I was aware that she was eyeing me and that she had her hooks out. The strange thing was that I was not in the least surprised when she did speak.” Again she lapsed.

  “What did she say?” asked the engineer as gently as Dr. Gamow.

  “She said, what’s the matter with you? I said, what do you mean what’s the matter with me? She said, you look half dead.” She shook her head and fed the hawk an intricate packet of viscera.

  “Yes,” said the engineer after a long minute.

  “I said yes, I am half dead. She said why? I said I don’t know. She said how would you like to be alive. I said I’d like that. She said all right, come with me. That was it.”

  “That was what?” asked the engineer, frowning. “What happened?”

  “I went with her to her mother’s house, a hideous red brick building in Paterson, New Jersey.”

  “Then what?”

  “That was it. I received instruction, made a general confession, was shriven, baptized, confirmed, and made my first vows, all in the space of six weeks. They thought I was crazy. The Bishop of Newark required that I get a statement from my doctor that there was no insanity in the family. When all I’d done was take them at their word. They were mostly third-generation Irish from places like Bridgeport and Worcester, Mass. That’s what they would say: I’m from Worcester, Mass.—never Massachusetts. They called me Alabam. You know.” Again she fell silent.

  “How did you get down here?”

  “They asked me how I would like to work with Sister Clare in their mission down in ’Bama. I think they wanted to get rid of me. I kept telling them that I believed it all, the whole business. But try as I might, I couldn’t remember the five proofs of God’s existence on the difference between a substance and an accident. I flunked out. They didn’t know what to do with me, so they figured six months of Sister Clare down in ’Bama would cure me. Sister Clare is a harridan, mean as hell.”

  “Is she here?”

  “No. She had a nervous breakdown, she instead of me, as they had expected. She was sent to our rest home in Topeka. What they didn’t know was that I am mean as hell too. I outlasted her. That’s what I don’t understand, you know: that I believe the whole business: God, the Jews, Christ, the Church, grace, and the forgiveness of sins—and that I’m meaner than ever. Christ is my lord and I love him but I’m a good hater and you know what he said about that. I still hope my enemies fry in hell. What to do about that? Will God forgive me?”

  “I don’t know. Why did you stay?”

  “That was a fluke too.” She draped two feet of gut over the perch and the hawk cocked his eye. The engineer thought about the falcon in Central Park: I could see him better at one mile than this creature face to face. Jesus, my telescope: is it still in the camper? “I think I stayed not so much out of charity as from fascination with a linguistic phenomenon—that was my field, you know. It has to do with the children’s dumbness. When they do suddenly break into the world of language, it is something to see. They are like Adam on the First Day. What’s that? they ask me. That’s a hawk, I tell them, and they believe me. I think I recognized myself in them. They were not alive and then they are and so they’ll believe you. Their eyes fairly pop out at the Baltimore catechism (imagine). I tell them that God made them to be happy and that if they love one another and keep the commandments and receive the Sacrament, they’ll be happy now and forever. They believe me. I’m not sure anybody else does now. I have more influence than the Pope. Of course I’m not even supposed to be here, since I haven’t taken final vows. But they haven’t sent for me.”

  “That certainly is interesting,” said the engineer, who was now leaving, actually setting a foot toward the camper. He had done his duty and was ready to be on his way. He had a fix on her at last. She struck him as an enthusiast of a certain sort who becomes wry as a countermeasure to her own outlandishness, like a collector of 1928 Model-T radiator caps who exhibits his trophies with a wry, rueful deprecation of their very oddness. He understood this. And was it not also the case that her offhandedness was a tactic and that she had her hooks out for him? He didn’t mind if she had, and was even prepared to put on a thoughtful expression, as much as to say: you do give me pause, Sister; that is something to think about. But he was ready to go.

  He was not to escape so easily. Changing her manner completely, she became cordial and brisk and took him on the “ten-dollar tour” of her foundation. For some fifty minutes he was towed helplessly around the outbuildings scattered through the cancerous pines. More than ever, it reminded him of a lunar installation, with silvery globes supplying nourishment to each building, a place of crude and makeshift beginnings on some blasted planet. Later there remained in his poor addled memory only a blurred impression of Seven-Up machines, plastic crucifixes, and worn, gnawed-at woodwork such as is found in old gymnasiums. Life indeed, thought he. Another hour in this gloomy cancerous wood and I’d be laid out stiff as a corpse, feet sticking up.

  But she would not let him go, and when for the second or third time she led him past the wooden privies and the last time opened the door of one so that he might catch a whiff of the acuteness of the need, he got the idea. With trembling fingers he thrust hand into pocket and brought forth a disorderly clutch of bills, leaving him, as he discovered later, $1.36 in silver. “A small donation for your building fund,” he murmured, blushing.

  “I’ll pray for you,” she said absently. “Will you pray for me to receive sufficient grace in order not to hate the guts of some people, however much they deserve it?”

  “Certainly,” said the engineer heartily, who would have consented to anything.

  She took the money wi
th only perfunctory gratitude and, slipping it skillfully into a black-leather pouch she wore at her belt, lapsed instantly into her old smiling thrumming. Papal inwardness, wherein she dispensed herself so that she might take note of God’s creatures, small objects, and such. She went back to the hawk and he left.

  2.

  Down flew the Trav-L-Aire into the setting sun, down and out of the last of the ancient and impoverished South of red hills and Cardui signs and God-is-Love crosses. Down through humpy sugarloaves and loess cliffs sliced through like poundcake. Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women. Down and out at last and onto the vast prodigal plain of the Delta, stretching away misty and fecund into the October haze. The land hummed and simmered in its own richness. Picking was still going on, great $25,000 McCormicks and Farmalls browsing up and down the cotton rows. Bugs zoomed and splashed amber against the windshield; the Trav-L-Aire pushed like a boat through the heavy air and the rich protein smells, now the sweet ferment of alfalfa, now the smell of cottonseed meal rich as ham in the kitchen. There had been the sense ever since leaving New York and never quite realized until now of tarrying in upland places and along intermediate slopes and way stations (My Lord, where had he stopped? Where had he spent the last month? He cudgeled his brain.) and now at last of coming sock down to the ultimate alluvial floor, the black teeming Ur-plain. He stopped the Trav-L-Aire and got out. Buzzards circled, leaning into the heavy mothering air, three, four tiers of buzzards riding round a mile-high chimney of air. A shrike, the Negro’s ghost bird, sat on a telephone wire and looked at him through its black mask. It was a heedless prodigal land, the ditches rank and befouled, weeds growing through the junk: old Maytags, Coke machines, and a Hudson Supersix pushed off into a turnrow and sprouting a crop all its own. But across the ditches and over the turnrows—here they got down to business—stretched the furrows of sifted mealy earth clean as a Japanese garden but forty miles long and going away, straight as a ruler, into the smoky distance. The cotton leaves were a dusky gray-green, as dusky as new money. Cotton wagons were on the road and the gins were humming. The little towns were squalid and rich. From the storefronts, tin roofs sagged across the sidewalk to the muddy Cadillacs. Across the road from a decaying mustard-colored I.C. depot stretched a line of great glittering harvesters and pickers parked in echelon like a squadron of Sherman tanks.