The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  “What do you mean, heart block? Is that serious?”

  Sutter shrugged. “Do you mean will he die today or next week?” He eyed the other. “Can you take a pulse?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I can’t get a private nurse. If you are here when he has a syncope, take his pulse. It will almost certainly start up in a few seconds. Now I’ve got—”

  “Wait. Good God. What are you talking about?”

  “If then his pulse is steady, O.K. If it is fibrillating, call the resident.”

  “Good God, what do you mean, fibrillating?”

  "Try to nod your head in time with his pulse. If you can’t, he’s fibrillating.”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sutter eyed him and, shoving his hands in his pockets, began to step off the tiles in an absent-minded hopscotch. With his Curlee pants down around his hips and his long-waisted shirt, Sutter looked like Lucky Lindy in the 1930’s, standing in a propeller wash.

  “I tell you what you do,” said Sutter.

  “What,” said the engineer gloomily.

  “Call Val. Tell her how sick Jamie is. He likes Val and wants to see her but doesn’t want to send for her himself.”

  “Why don’t you—” began the engineer.

  “No, I tell you what you do,” said Sutter, drawing him close in an odd little bantering confidence. “Call Rita.”

  “Rita,” repeated the puzzled engineer.

  “Yes, call Rita and Val and tell them to keep it to themselves and come on out.” He held the younger man by the arm in an awkward little burlesque of Lamar Thigpen’s old-buddy style.

  “Why don’t you call them: after all, you’re the brother of one and the—”

  “Because I’m like Jamie. I don’t want to be the one to call either.”

  “I’m sorry. Jamie asked me not to call them. He trusts me.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Sutter, his eyes going vacant

  “But—”

  But Sutter was already on his way.

  8.

  With Sutter gone, it was possible to restore the golden circle of games. Jamie was dizzy and short of breath but not uncomfortable. His illness was the sort which allows one to draw in closer to oneself. Already Jamie had discovered the small privileges and warmths of invalidism. It was not a bad thing to lie back and blink at the cards lined up on the bed table, heave up on one elbow to make a play, flop down again in simple weariness. He wrapped himself snugly in his fever like a scarf. The next afternoon the engineer sat beside the bed in the sunny corner, which smelled of old wax and honorable ether. Outside in the still air, yellow as butter, the flat mathematical leaves of the aspens danced a Brownian dance in the sunlight, blown by a still, molecular wind. Jamie would play a card and talk, gaze at a point just beside the engineer’s head where, it seemed, some privileged and arcane perception might be hit upon between them. Presently he fell back in the socket of his pillow and closed his eyes.

  “Do me a favor.”

  “All right.”

  “Go get me a copy of Treasure Island and a box of soda crackers.”

  “All right,” said the engineer, rising.

  The youth explained that he had been thinking about the scene where Jim steals the dinghy and drifts offshore, lying down so he won’t be seen, all the while eating soda crackers and looking at the sky.

  “Also go by the post office and see if there’s any mail in general delivery.”

  “Right.”

  But when he returned with the crackers and a swollen fusty library copy of Treasure Island showing hairy Ben Gunn on the frontispiece, Jamie had forgotten about it.

  “There was no mail?”

  “No.”

  “I tell you what let’s do.”

  “What?”

  “Call old Val.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell her I’ve got a crow to pick with her.”

  “All right. Do you want to see any of your family?”

  “No. And I don’t want to see her either. Just give her a message.”

  “All right.”

  “Ask her what happened to the book about entropy.”

  “Entropy? Then you correspond?”

  “Oh, sure. Give her a hard time about the book. She promised to send it to me. Tell her I think she lost heart in the argument. She claims there is a historical movement in the direction of negative entrophy. But so what? You know.”

  “Yes.”

  The youth’s eyes sought his and again drifted away to the point in the air where the two of them found delicate unspoken agreement and made common cause against Val’s arguments.

  “There’s a phone booth downstairs, but let’s finish the game.”

  They didn’t finish the game. Jamie went out of his head with fever, though it was a minute before the engineer realized it.

  “Get me a line,” exclaimed the youth in an odd chipper voice.

  “What? All right,” said the other, rising again. He thought Jamie meant make a phone call: get a long-distance line.

  “A line, a lion,” Jamie called to him at the door.

  “A lion?”

  “Ly-in.”

  Then he perceived that the youth was out of his head and was hearing words according to some fashion of his own.

  “I will.”

  He waited until Jamie closed his eyes and, returning to the bed, pressed the buzzer. This time someone came quickly, a pleasant little brunette student nurse who took Jamie’s temperature and went off, but not too anxiously he was pleased to observe, to get the resident. Jamie was not dying then.

  Perhaps he’d better call somebody though. Beyond a doubt Jamie was sick as a dog and also beyond a doubt Sutter had, in his own fashion, decamped. It was the inconsequence and unprovidedness of Jamie’s illness which distressed him most. For the first time he saw how it might be possible for large numbers of people to die, as they die in China or Bombay, without anybody paying much attention.

  As he passed the nurses’ station, slapping his pockets for change, he met the eyes of the disagreeable blonde. Her malevolent expression startled him. Her bulging eye was glossy with dislike. She hated his guts! Amazing.

  Thoughtfully he stacked money on the metal shelf of the phone booth. As the wires went clicking away to the East, he gazed through the open door and out into the disjunct afternoon with its simple spectrum-yellow and its flattened distances. Was it possible to call Alabama from here?

  No. The line was busy.

  He tried for half an hour and gave up.

  When he returned to the room the pleasant student was giving Jamie an alcohol rub. Afterward the patient sat up in his right mind and began to read Treasure Island and eat soda crackers.

  “Don’t you want me to read to you?” the engineer asked him.

  “No, that’s all right!”

  Jamie was polite but the engineer could tell he wanted to be alone.

  “I’ll be back after supper.”

  “Fine.” The patient smiled his best smile because he wanted the visitor to leave. The book was the safest sunniest most inviolate circle of all.

  9.

  The next morning Jamie was even better. His fever was gone, but he was tired and wanted to sleep. For the first time he spoke seriously of going home, no, not home but to the Gulf Coast, where they could lie in the sand dunes and get in shape for the next semester. “I have the strongest hunch that the combination of cold salt water and the warm sunny dunes would be great!”

  The engineer nodded. Sure enough it might.

  Would the engineer take him?

  “Let’s go,” said the latter rising.

  Jamie laughed and nodded to signify that he knew the other meant it “But I’ll leave tomorrow, no kidding,” he said as the engineer cranked him flat for his nap.

  “We can make it in three days,” the engineer told him. “Your monk’s pad is still on the upper be
rth.”

  Jamie said no more about calling Val.

  But for the present it was the engineer who lay in the upper berth and read:

  Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.

  You say don’t worry about that, first stop fornicating. But I am depressed and transcendent. In such a condition, fornication is the sole channel to the real. Do you think I am making excuses?

  You are wrong too about the sinfulness of suicide in this age, at least the nurtured possibility of suicide, for the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself. But death is as outlawed now as sin used to be. Only one’s own suicide remains to one. My “suicide” followed the breakdown of the sexual as a mode of reentry from the posture of transcendence.

  Here is what happened. I became depressed last summer when I first saw Jamie’s blood smear, depressed not because he was going to die but because I knew he would not die well, would be eased out in an oxygen tent, tranquilized and with no sweat to anyone and not even know what he was doing. Don’t misunderstand me: I wasn’t thinking about baptism.

  The depression made me concupiscent. On a house call to the Mesa Motel to examine a patient in diabetic coma (but really only to collect blood for chemistry—I was little more than a technician that summer). Afterwards spied a chunky blonde by the pool, appraised her eye, which was both lewd and merry. She 41, aviatrix, winner of Powder Puff Derby in 1940’s, raced an old Lockheed P-38 from San Diego to Cleveland. We drank two glasses of straight whiskey. I spoke in her ear and invited her to her room. Afterwards very low. Went to ranch, shot myself, missed brain, carried away cheek.

  Recovery in hospital. The purity of ordeal. The purity of death. The sweet purity of the little Mexican nurse. Did Americans become lewd when they banished death?

  I saw something clearly while I had no cheek and grinned like a skeleton. But I got well and forgot what it was. I won’t miss next time.

  It was the last entry in Sutter’s casebook. When he finished reading, the engineer left the Trav-L-Aire and threw the pad into the trashburner of Alamogordo Motor Park. As he watched it burn, glowering, his head sinking lower and lower, mouth slack and drying, he became aware that someone was speaking to him. It was a fellow Trav-L-Aire owner, a retired fire inspector from Muncie. He and his wife, the man had told him, were in the midst on their yearly swing from Victoria, B.C., to Key West. They kept just ahead of winter on the way down and just behind spring going north. It was a courtesy of the road that camper owners show their rigs to each other. The engineer invited him in. The hoosier was polite enough—the engineer’s was the most standard of all Trav-L-Aires—but it was obvious that the former had a surprise in store. After showing off his cabin, which had a tinted sun-liner roof, he pressed a button. A panel above the rear door flew open and a contraption of aluminum spars and green netting unhinged in six directions. With a final grunt of its hidden motor the thing snapped into a taut cube of a porch big enough for a bridge game. “You take off your screen door and put it here,” the Hoosier told him. “It’s the only thing for west Florida, where you’re going to get your sand flies.”

  “Very good,” said the engineer, nodding and thrusting his hand through his pocket, for his knee had begun to leap.

  Returning to his own modest camper, he became at once agitated and lustful. His heart beat powerfully at the root of his neck. The coarsest possible images formed themselves before his eyes. But this time, instead of throwing a fit or lapsing into a fugue as he had done so often in the past, he became acutely conscious of the most insignificant sensations, the slight frying sound of the Servel refrigerator, the watery reflection on the Formica table, which seemed to float up the motes of dust. His memory, instead of failing, became perfect. He recalled everything, even a single perception years ago, one of a thousand billion, so trivial that it was not even remembered then, five minutes later: on a college field trip through the mangy Jersey woods looking for spirogyra, he had crossed a utility right-of-way. When he reached the farther woods, he had paused and looked over his shoulder. There was nothing to see: the terrain dipped, making a little swale which was overgrown by the special forlorn plants of rights-of-way, not small trees or bushes or even weeds exactly but just the unclassified plants which grow up in electric-light-and-power-places. That was all. He turned and went on.

  Desolate places like Appomattox and cut-over woods were ever the occasion of storms of sexual passion. Yet now when he rushed out into the abstract afternoon to find a maid (but who?) he forgot again and instead found himself picking through the ashes of the trashburner. What was that last sentence? It had a bearing. But the notebook was destroyed.

  Jumping into the cab of the G.M.C., he tore out of the poplar grove, forgetting his umbilical connections until he heard the snappings of cords and the shout of the Hoosier.

  “What the—” yelled the latter like an astounded comic-strip character, Uncle Walt (so that’s where the expression “What the—” comes from—Indiana).

  “I’m going over to Albuquerque,” shouted the engineer as if this were an explanation and as quickly changed his mind, stopped, and strode past the still-astounded Hoosier. “Pardon,” he said, “I think I’ll call Kitty—” and nodded by way of further explanation to a telephone hooked contingently to a telephone pole. Could he call Kitty from such a contingent telephone?

  Perhaps if he could talk to a certain someone he would stop hankering for anyone and everyone, and tender feelings of love would take the place of this great butting billygoat surge which was coming over him again. He clung to the pole, buffeted by an abstract, lustful molecular wind, and might even have uttered a sound, brayed into the phone, for the Hoosier looked astounded again and rushed into his deluxe Sun-Liner.

  10.

  “I remember everything now, Dr. Vaught,” he said calmly, no longer agitated. “You said I was to come and find you. Very well, here I am. What was it you wished to tell me?”

  So distracted had been the engineer in his headlong race across the desert that he had noticed not a single thing on the way and could not have said how he found his way here. Only now as Sutter sighed and sank into himself could he spare time to take a breath and see where he was.

  Sutter was sitting in a sheriff’s chair on the front porch of Doc’s cottage. Doc’s was one of a hundred or more such cottages fronting on a vast quadrangle of rich blue-green winter grass bordered by palm trees, a rectangular oasis in a scrabbly desert of mesquite. The evening rides were over and it was almost suppertime. Doors slammed as the dudes, mostly women, began the slow promenade to the chuck wagon. The sun was already down behind Sandia Mountain but the sky was bright and pure and empty as map space. The dudes smiled and nodded at Doc as they passed but the latter sat slumped and unresponsive, his dried-up Thom McAn shoes propped on the rail and Curlee pants hitched halfway up his skinny legs.

  Sutter didn’t seem to hear him. He slumped further and gazed at the bare mountain. The material of his trousers bunched up between his legs like curtain drapes.

  “Then you have nothing to tell me,” the engineer asked him again.

  “That is correct. Nothing.”

  “But, sir, you wrote many things in—”

  “In the first place I didn’t write them to you. In the second place I no longer believe a word of it. Did you ever read the great philosopher Wittgenstein?”

  “No sir,” said the other gloomily.

  “After his last work he announced the dictum which summarized his philosophy. He said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should keep silent. And he did. He stopped teaching and went to live in a hut and said no more.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “No, I don’t even believe that.”

  They watched the women for a while. Pre
sently the engineer said, “But you told me to come out and find you.”

  “I did?”

  “Therefore you at least owe me the explanation of what happened to make you change your mind.”

  “What has happened?” Sutter looked puzzled.

  “What has happened to you?”

  “Nothing has happened.”

  From the chair beside him, where he must have held it all along and out of the other’s sight, Sutter raised the Colt Woodsman and sighted it at an airliner which sparkled like a diamond in the last of the sunlight.

  “But Val told me that you—”

  “Val.” Sutter smiled as he tracked the airliner.

  “Oh, I know you don’t agree with Val.”

  “Oh, but I do agree with her.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh yes, in every respect. About what has happened to the world, about what God should be and what man is, and even what the Church should be.”

  The engineer sighed. “Yes sir. That is very interesting, but I think you know why I am here.”

  “You see, Barrett, Val had a dream of what the Church should come to. (And I agree! Absolutely!) For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse. She did not even mind that God shall be gone, absent, not present, A.W.O.L., and that no one noticed or cared, not even the believers. Because she wanted us to go the route and be like Sweden, which is not necessarily bad, but to go the route, to leave God out of it and be happy or miserable, as the case might be. She believes that then, if we go the route and run out of Christendom, that the air would be cleared and even that God might give us a sign. That’s how her own place makes sense, you see, her little foundation in the pines. She conceived herself as being there with her Delco and her butane tanks to start all over again. Did you notice how much it looked like one of those surviving enclaves after the Final War, and she’s probably right: I mean, who in the hell would want to bomb South Alabama? But yes, I agree with her. Absolutely! It’s just that nothing ever came of it.”