The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  Her hands were open on her knees. She turned them over. There were fingernail marks in both palms, not severe enough to break the skin but deep enough to cause bruising. They were the sort of marks one might make waiting a long time, fists clenched, for something frightening to happen.

  At that moment something inside her relaxed. A muscle, which had been clenched so long she had forgotten it, suddenly unclenched. It let go and she closed her eyes and took a breath of air into a new part of her lungs.

  It became possible, she noticed, to look at things rather than watch out for things. A line of ants crawled past her foot. She picked out one ant which carried a neatly cutout section of a green leaf, holding it vertically aloft like a sail, and followed it as it made its way over the coarse granules of the sidewalk. As the sun warmed her, she studied the clothes of the passersby. Many people, she noticed, seemed to dress as they pleased. Nobody paid much attention. Had this always been the case? Surely it had been different the last time she was in a street, one, two, three years ago.

  What year was it? Nineteen seventy-nine? eighty? eighty what?

  The sidewalk was crowded. When she made her forays, she was afraid of running into someone. Then she realized that she was not accustomed to seeing people going somewhere or doing something. It seemed more natural for people to be sitting silently or standing and gazing or being taken somewhere. What if she ran straight into someone? But oncoming people seemed to know without looking at her exactly when to veer slightly and miss her. The veering occurred when the other person was about five feet away, a turn of a degree or so to the right or left. It must be a trick, an exchange of signals which she must learn. Otherwise, she might find herself confronting a person, step to the right with him, to the left, and so on. What then? What she feared was a breakdown in the rules of ordinary living which other people observed automatically. What if the rules broke down? Suddenly she remembered that she had once been an A student. But what if she flunked ordinary living?

  Just before she reached home base, the bench, a young woman approached and did not veer. They stopped, facing each other. Oh my, she thought, this is it. But the woman was smiling, for all the world as if she knew her. Oh my, she thought, perhaps she does and I am supposed to know her. Indeed, she seemed to belong to a past almost remembered. She was dressed in the old style, skirt, blouse, cardigan sweater, shoulder bag, penny loafers. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and framed her oval face like a madonna’s. Seen close, she was not so young. Her face was chapped. Evidently the woman had something to say to her or expected her to say something, for she did not step aside. As she watched the woman’s radiant smile and cast about in her mind for where she might have known her, she noticed that the woman held a sheaf of pamphlets in one hand and that her fingers were ink-stained. From the pressure of the strap of the shoulder bag on the wool of the sweater, she judged that the bag was heavy. Perhaps it was filled with more pamphlets. The woman, still smiling, was handing her a pamphlet. Anxious to make up for not being able to recognize the woman, she began to read the pamphlet then and there. The first three sentences were: Are you lonely? Do you want to make a new start? Have you ever had a personal encounter with our Lord and Saviour? While she was reading, the woman was saying something to her. Was she supposed to listen or read?

  Later, from the bench, she observed that other people dealt with the woman differently. Some ignored her, veered around her. Others took the pamphlets politely and went their way. Still others stopped for a moment and listened (but did not read), heads down and nodding. But for her, questions asked were to be answered, printed words were to be read.

  Facing the woman, she considered the first sentences of the pamphlet. “Yes,” she said, “there is a sense in which I would like to make a new start. However—”

  But the woman was saying something.

  “What?”

  “I said, are you alone? Do you feel lonely?”

  She considered the questions. “I am alone but I do not feel lonely.”

  “Why don’t you come to a little get-together we’re having tonight? I have a feeling a person like yourself might get a lot out of it.”

  She considered that question. “I’m not sure what you mean by the expression ‘a person like yourself.’ Does that mean you know what I am like?”

  But the woman’s eyes were no longer looking directly at her, rather were straying just past her. The smile was still radiant but in it she felt a pressure like the slight but firm pressure of a hostess’s hand steering one along a receiving line.

  “Won’t you come?” said the woman but steering her along with her eyes. “The address is stamped on the back. I promise you you won’t regret it.” Her voice was still cordial, but the question did not sound like a question and the promise did not sound like a promise.

  Sitting down again, knapsack beside her, she reflected that people asked questions and answered them differently from her. She took words seriously to mean more or less what they said, but other people seemed to use words as signals in another code they had agreed upon. For example, the woman’s questions and commands were evidently not to be considered as questions and commands, then answered accordingly with a yes, no, or maybe, but were rather to be considered like the many signboards in the street, such as Try Good Gulf for Better Mileage, then either ignored or acted upon, but even if acted upon, not as an immediate consequence of what the words commanded one to do.

  Such a code, she reflected, may not be bad. Indeed, it seemed to cause people less trouble than words. At one time she must have known the code. It should not be hard to catch on to.

  A man sat down on the bench beyond her knapsack. She couldn’t tell if he was twenty-five or thirty-five. On the one hand, he was as slender as the first youth, but the curly hair which hugged his scalp was as dry and crinkled as a thirty-five-year-old’s. A blue vein throbbed in his slightly hollow temple. He wore matching red sweatshirt and pants, with a white stripe running along the seam of the pants, and odd shoes which were like sneakers except that the sole ran up the back of the heel. He was breathing heavily. These details she had observed in one glance. Now from the corner of her eye she became aware that he was looking at her and wished to speak. It was also clear to her, though she could not have said how, that ordinarily he was shy but that some unusual circumstances had given him leave to speak to her.

  “I just ran eighteen miles.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been into running for three months.”

  “You’ve been what?” What was the meaning of the expression “into running”? Perhaps he was in trouble. He was on the run.

  “It’s changed my life.”

  She didn’t understand him but it was clear that he was speaking of something commonplace, something she might be expected to understand if she had not been away for a long time.

  “How has it changed your life?”

  “It got me out of my head.”

  “You mean—” She was not certain what he meant. Had he gone crazy?

  “In another three weeks I expect to be up to twenty-six.”

  “Why twenty-six?”

  “That’s the marathon distance. But this is no ordinary marathon.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. I’m getting ready for the Richmond marathon, but I’m doing it by running on the Long Trail—that’s what it was originally called and is still called in Vermont. I like that better than the Appalachian Trail, don’t you? You can run it from here north because once you get up it’s mostly flat, but very high. You’re right on the crest of a ridge, with nothing but valleys and clouds on either side. By the way, I’m Richard Rountree.” He held out his hand. She took it. It was very slender, dry, and fibrous. He seemed to be all gristle and bone.

  “I’m—” She began and stopped. She wanted to look at her driver’s license.

  He didn’t notice. “Would you like to go to Hattie’s tonight?”
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  “Hattie’s?”

  “You know, down the hill. It’s nothing but a barn but the food’s not bad. The music is country and Western. Runners hang out there.”

  While he was talking, she was planning a declarative sentence. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, uttering one word after another. The sentence sounded flat but she finished it and her voice did not go up into a question. “I don’t know where I’ll be staying tonight.”

  Though her voice sounded flat to her, like a person recovering from a stroke, like Rip coming down from the mountain and speaking to a villager, he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he drew closer, crowding the knapsack, and crossed one thin leg over the other toward her. As his eyes dropped, showing the damp bluish skin of his eyelids, she seemed to remember something from her girlhood. It was the way her mother had of talking to her about “a boy” and “a girl,” “when a boy does such-and-such” or “leading a boy on.” Perhaps something she had said had led him on, because he yawned, laced his fingers together, and bent them backwards in a way that seemed familiar to her.

  “Look,” he said, stretching out his laced-together hands. “I know a shelter on an unused spur of the trail, the spur to Sourwood Mountain. In fact, it’s closed, the spur, that is. In fact, that’s where I stayed last night. It’s not used at all. It’s clean and when the clouds break there’s a lovely view through the pines. Would you like to crash there tonight? You’d be welcome.”

  Though she had not heard the expression “crash” before, she could tell that he was using it in a way that was not natural to him. Suddenly she saw that he thought it was the sort of expression she would use. “Lovely” in “lovely view” sounded natural in him, though she couldn’t remember a young man saying “lovely.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “It sounds good. But I have a great many things to do. For example, I have to locate and take possession of a house. I had planned to go to a motel but I don’t think I will. I have here a set of instructions on how to locate the house, things to buy, and so forth.”

  Her words sounded strange and formal to her, as if she were reciting them from memory. She found herself taking out notebook and wallet as if to prove something to him.

  “Like a treasure hunt,” he said, sounding disappointed.

  “Treasure hunt,” she repeated.

  “Richard Rountree,” he said again, unlacing his fingers and holding out his hand. She took it again. He gave her a strong grip. His hand was as fibrous as a monkey’s. Had he forgotten he had shaken hands already, or did she only imagine he had shaken hands before? It occurred to her that he was more uneasy than she.

  Maybe he had been running too much. They seemed to have something in common, having been alone in the mountains too long and feeling strange in the village. Then why wasn’t she attracted to him?

  At that moment she was looking down at her driver’s license in her open wallet.

  “I’m Allison,” she read, then remembered something. “Allie,” she said suddenly and smiled, looking up at him.

  “Allie,” he said. He let her hand go. “Will you be coming back here, Allie? I mean to the bench.”

  “Very likely.”

  “This time of day?”

  “Probably.” Something else her mother told about “boys” came back to her. Don’t ever turn down a boy completely. Keep your options open. You never know. Her mother called this “keeping a boy on your string.”

  But he did not look much like a “boy” with his dry crinkled hair coming forward in the middle to make a W-shaped hairline, and his dry narrow fibrous hands.

  “I’ll see you, Allie.”

  As he walked quickly away, the broad white stripes on his running pants flashed like scissors. His back looked as if he knew she was watching him.

  The sun was high. She felt warm and drowsy. Perhaps it was noon. For some time, perhaps five minutes, perhaps twenty minutes, she had been watching the column of ants. They traveled past the toe of her boot. Most but not all carried cutout pieces of green leaves. They followed the same path, climbing over the same granules of concrete, then descending into a crack at the same place, then climbing out of the crack at the same place.

  The ants were headed toward the curb at the corner where the policeman stood. His thick yellow-gray hair was creased at the back from wearing a hat or cap. Did his not wearing a hat or cap mean he was off duty? He had a large high abdomen. From a wide black cartridge belt a heavy revolver in a holster was suspended. The belt crossed his abdomen just below its fullest part. The position of the belt and the weight of the pistol created in her a slight discomfort. She wished he would hitch up his pants. How old was he? Forty-five? Fifty-five? Sixty-five?

  She opened the spiral notebook.

  INSTRUCTIONS FROM MYSELF TO MYSELF (PART 2)

  When you read this, you should feel better, rested at least and not so sore. Feel your jaw and your teeth. Are they sore?

  She felt her jaw and her teeth. They were sore.

  Your memory will not be good, but that varies. Test it. Do you remember your name?

  Only after I read it.

  Do you remember how old you are?

  Yes. No. Eighteen? Twenty-one?

  Do you remember how long you were in the sanatorium?

  Three years, I think. Or perhaps two. Possibly four.

  You will have forgotten most very recent events, but they should come back. You should now begin to remember events that happened long ago. What can you remember?

  I can remember skating on summer evenings. This coarse-grained sidewalk reminds me of it. I could feel the vibration come through the steel wheels and up into the bones of my legs. The concrete of the sidewalk on Prince Avenue was coarse. I would skate until it was dark enough for the lightning bugs to come out. The cement of McWhorter’s driveway was smooth and turning into it was like turning onto silk. The skate wheels were silent and my legs were still, yet I went raster and faster through the lightning bugs.

  Don’t worry. Your memory will improve. But even if it does not, it won’t matter a great deal. There is not a great deal that is worth remembering. What information you need you will find here or in your wallet.

  My own memory as I write this is far from perfect. There are, however, a few things of recent memory that you will need to know when you read this.

  One thing in particular is important. You will have to know it to know what to do next. Do you remember Miss Sally Kemp? Aunt Sally?

  No. Yes.

  She died. I found out this morning, a week before you read this.

  She left you her estate, which is much larger than anyone expected. In her will she said I was nice to her. This meant that I listened to her. Nobody else did. This is true. I, you, always listen closely to people.

  It, the estate, is some money (I don’t know how much), an island off the Georgia coast, and a piece of land with an old house on it, I think, near Linwood. Do you remember her joking about her island which was nothing but a sandspit and three pine trees and worthless unless the treasure Captain Kidd was supposed to have buried there was ever dug up and which nobody took seriously enough even to try, yet which you thought of often, not so much to get the treasure but to find it, to find a sign or a gold bug or a map?

  Treasure. Yes.

  Well, there’s no Captain Kidd’s treasure, but the Arabs want to buy it.

  The place near Linwood should not be far from where you are presently reading this.

  Find out where it is.

  Walk there.

  Move in.

  Take possession. It is yours.

  Live there.

  Don’t tell your parents or Dr. Duk where you are. They will find you soon enough.

  Don’t tell anybody where you are.

  Find a lawyer you can trust. This is a problem. I’ve thought about this a lot. Aunt Sally died at home, so the will will be probated (?) there. There will be the question of your legal competence and whether or not Mother and Fathe
r should be your guardians. I’ve thought about this a lot. You could just walk into the first lawyer’s office on the street. But it would be better to ask someone’s advice. You could ask a doctor. Go see a doctor with a minor complaint (muscle soreness—tell him you fell off a mountain, in a way you did) and ask him what lawyer he trusts.

  Don’t be angry at Father and Mother. They love you as well as they understand that word, or as well as most people love. Come to think of it, who or what do you “love”? Do you “love” them? What is “love”? I am saying the word aloud. It sounds like something dark and furry which makes a lowing sound.

  There is one thing you must not forget, or if you have forgotten, be reminded of it here and now. It is the discovery I made last week (you made? we made?). Do you remember?

  It took me (you? us?) all my life to make the discovery. Why so long? And then I (you, we) had to go crazy to do it. Why was the discovery so difficult? Because it is the very nature of the thing to be discovered and the very nature of the seeking that it could not be found by asking somebody or by reading a book. Imagine being born with gold-tinted corneas and undertaking a lifelong search for gold. You’d never find it.

  What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could act. I was free to act. Is this something everyone knows or thinks he knows or, if he knows, knows in the wrong way? With gold-tinted corneas everything looks like gold but it’s fool’s gold.

  Here was the kind of gold-tinted corneas I had: Dr. Duk told me many times I should be free to act for myself. I believed him. Just as I believed him when he suggested I take up bird-watching. So, clever straight-A student that I was, I set forth to act for myself. Which, of course, is not doing so at all. I was following instructions. Then how does one ever make the discovery that one can actually be free to act for oneself? I don’t know. I don’t even know how many people, if any, do it.