The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  On the other hand, Jimmy always had stuff between his teeth and came too close, breathed on you, and touched you when he talked. No wonder he got along with Arabs.

  Then Jimmy had been kind to him in Long Island City, ministering to him among strangers.

  Now here is Jimmy again, coming too close and telling jokes and making deals with Arabs.

  Did this mean that lifelines were back to normal, that is, nonconverging and parallel to infinity? Or had something happened and their lifelines had bent together?

  They were waiting for Bertie to hit a fairway wood. Jimmy stopped the cart a little too close to him. Why would Jimmy not know that ten feet is too close and fifteen is not?

  Bertie shot. His body remained still and erect as a post while his arms swung and his legs jerked. The ball shanked, rustled like a rat through the thick grass. Bertie actually said pshaw.

  A club flashed above the deep far bunker, sand sprayed, and a ball arced high over the green and back down into the ravine. Lewis Peckham clucked and cocked his head a sympathetic quarter inch. “He sculled it.” Ed Cupp was at least six feet eleven inches tall but only his shining blond head showed above the bunker lip. He climbed out cheerfully and went striding off, swinging his sand-iron like a baseball bat. He played golf like a good athlete who had just taken it up, with a feel for the game and a toleration for his mistakes. Though he was in his late forties, he looked like a UCLA forward—which he had been—swinging across campus. Do native Californians stay blond and boyish into old age? Yet when he spoke—and he spoke often, mostly about a warranty problem with his Mercedes which had broken down in Oklahoma—it was with the deliberation of an old man, a ninety-year-old sourdough telling you the same long story about the time somebody jumped his claim.

  Lewis Peckham looked at his, Will Barrett’s, two-iron shot which lay hole-high and three feet from the pin. He nodded twice. “That was a good golf shot.”

  In the cart Jimmy leaned close and again put a thumb in his back, signifying Kitty.

  “Do you remember when Kitty was queen and you presented her at the Fall Germans?” he whispered.

  “Ah—”

  “She was—still is—the best-looking white girl I ever saw-she’s certainly been lovely to me and I really appreciate it. Don’t you remember? I got Stan Kenton.”

  Strangely, he had forgotten about Kitty being queen but not about Stan Kenton. In college Jimmy quickly learned the ropes. He had gotten to be manager of this and that, manager of stadium concessions, of the yearbook, of the cap-and-gown business, manager in charge of decorating the dance hall and hiring an orchestra. Jimmy was making money long before the Arabs.

  “What I am saying is this,” said Jimmy and the thumbnail turned like a screw, not unpleasantly, into his spine. “Kitty is going to rely on you for something. She has enormous respect for you, you know. We all do.” The eye gleamed and the thumbscrew went in a little too hard. “You old rascal, you did it, didn’t you?”

  “Did what?” He smiled. He frowned. He was almost surprised. The thumbnail going in so hard and the “rascal” was not like Jimmy.

  “Nothing. You just sat back like you always did and picked up all the marbles. That’s what I call class.”

  “Class?”

  “You made it in the big apple, you married a nice Yankee lady who owns half of Washau County, you retired young, you came down here and you helped folks, poor folks, old folks, even built them a home, helped the church, built a new church, did good. Now your lovely daughter is getting married. Joy and sorrow, that’s life. But yours seems mostly joy. You know what you did.”

  “No, what?”

  “You won. That’s what you did, you old—” The eye glittered and the thumbnail screwed into his back. “You won it all, you son of a bitch, and I love you for it.”

  The thumbnail signified love and hatred.

  Through the not unpleasant pain of the thumbnail he wondered where Jimmy had picked up these expressions, “big apple,” “class,” “I love you for it.” He sounded like an old Broadway comic. Playing Long Island City.

  Jimmy Rogers loved him and hated him. This kind of love-hate, pleasure-pain, had not happened to him for a long time. After you grow up, you stop having fistfights, cursing, getting drunk, and talking about women. You begin to banter. He had bantered for thirty years.

  But now, with Jimmy coming at him with thumbnail screwing into his back, coming close as a lover, eye glittering with love-hatred, it was difficult to pay attention. He could not bring himself to be aware of more than a mild stirring of curiosity, like the prickling that Jimmy’s thumbnail sent up his neck. A little something or other was happening, but no more than that. It was as if he had been living in a prison cell for so long that he had come to believe that nothing was really happening anywhere—when one day he heard a footstep. Someone was coming.

  It was at this moment that he saw the bird. A small cloud passed over the sun, the darkness settling so quickly it left the greens glowing. A hawk flew over, a dagger-winged falcon, its flight swift and single-minded and straight over the easy ambling golfers. When it reached the woods it folded its wings as abruptly as if it had been shot and fell like a stone.

  3

  He stood in the glade, both hands resting on top of the three-iron. The blade of the iron pressed hard enough into the wet moss to make bubbles come up. There was no sound except the distant power saw. He must have stood so and perfectly still for a long time because a tiny bird, no larger than his thumb, lighted on a twig not three feet away, stared at him with a single white-goggled eye, then turned its head clean around to look with its other eye. Deeper in the pine forest, beyond the chestnut fall, the poplar made an irregular cone of sunlight and leaves. He had been gazing at a figure behind the poplar. Was someone standing there or, more likely, was it a trick of light, a pattern in the dappled leaves? It did not matter. Not caring who it was or even if anyone was there, he gazed vacantly and, unaware that he did so, changed the grip on the club. Idly, like a golfer practicing, he took hold of the grip with both hands interlocked, right little finger overlapping left forefinger, and began a backswing. Then, turning the club head up and fitting it against his shoulder, he sighted along the shaft as if it were a gun barrel and swung it a few degrees laterally to and fro.

  The figure moved behind the poplar, or perhaps a bream of air stirred the leaves. He went on gazing but could not bring his eyes to focus. Something distracted him. Though his gaze was fixed, it was unseeing. He seemed to be listening, head slightly cocked.

  Something was close. He knew it as surely as if he had been carrying a Geiger counter and it had begun to click. There is a moment of discovery when the discoverer is so certain of his find that his only thought is to keep still for a moment, wait and watch, before taking it. When Maggie the pointer pointed a covey dead ahead, his father would stop too, raise a hand toward him: Just hold it, his lips said silently.

  Until today he had not thought of his father for years.

  Now he remembered everything his father said and did, even remembered the smell of him, the catarrh-and-whiskey bream and the hot, quail reek of his hands.

  And, strange to say, at the very moment of his remembering the distant past, the meaning of his present life became clear to him, instantly and without the least surprise as if he had known it all along but had not until now taken the trouble to know that he knew.

  Of course, he said, holding the three-iron across his arm like a shotgun and smiling at the figure dappled by sunlight beyond the poplar, of course. Ever since your death, all I ever wanted from you was out, out from you and from the Mississippi twilight, and from the shotguns thundering in musty attics and racketing through funk-smelling Georgia swamps, out from the ancient hatred and allegiances, allegiances unto death and love of war and rumors of war and under it all death and your secret love of death, yes that was your secret.

  So I went away, as far as I could get from you, knowing only that if I could turn 180 degree
s away from you and your death-dealing there would be something different out there, different from death, maybe even a kind of life. And there was.

  I went as far as I could go, married a rich hardheaded plain decent crippled pious upstate Utica, New York, woman, practiced Trusts and Estates law in a paneled office on Wall Street, kept a sailboat on the North Shore, played squash, lived at 76th and Fifth, walked my poodle in the park, went up an elevator to get home, tipped three doormen and four elevator men at Christmas, thought happily about making money like everyone else (money is a kind of happiness), made more money than some, married a great deal more money than most, learned how to whistle down a cab two blocks away and get in and out of “21” in time for the theater, began to enjoy (thanks to you) Brahms and Mozart (no thanks to you). Music and making money is to New Yorkers what music and war was to the Germans. And I was never so glad of anything as I was to get away from your doom and your death-dealing and your great honor and great hunts and great hates (Jesus, you could not even walk down the street on Monday morning without either wanting to kill somebody or swear a blood oath of allegiance with somebody else), yes, your great allegiance swearing and your old stories of great deeds which not even you had done but had just heard about, and under it all the death-dealing which nearly killed me and did you. God, just to get away from all that and live an ordinary mild mercantile money-making life, do mild sailing, mild poodle-walking, mild music-loving among mild good-natured folks. I even tried to believe in the Christian God because you didn’t, and if you didn’t maybe that was what was wrong with you so why not do the exact opposite? (Imagine, having to leave the South to find God!) Yes, I did all that and succeeded in everything except believing in the Christian God—maybe you were right about one thing after all—what’s more even beat you, made more money, wrote a law book, won an honorary degree, listened to better music.

  Now Marion is dead and I can’t believe I spent all those years in New York in Trusts and Estates and taking dogs down elevators and out to the park to take a crap.

  In two seconds he saw that his little Yankee life had not worked after all, the nearly twenty years of making a life with a decent upstate woman and with decent Northern folk and working in an honorable Wall Street firm and making a success of it too. The whole twenty years could just as easily have been a long night’s dream, and here he was in old Carolina, thinking of Ethel Rosenblum and having fits and falling down on the golf course—what in God’s name was I doing there, and am I doing here?

  He gazed at the figure which seemed to come and go in the trembling dappled light of the poplar.

  You were trying to tell me something, weren’t you?

  Yes.

  That day in the swamp you were trying to tell me that this was what it was going to come to, not only for you but in the end for me, weren’t you?

  Yes.

  You did it because you hoped that by having me with you when you did it you would show me what I was up against and that if I knew about it that early, I might be able to win over it instead of it winning over me, didn’t you?

  Yes.

  Then it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that after all this time here I am back where we started and you ended, that there is after all no escaping it for us. At least I know that, thanks to you, you tried, and now for the first time since that day you cursed me by the fence and grabbed my gun, I don’t hate you. We’re together after all.

  Silence.

  Very well. At least I know why I feel better holding a shotgun than a three-iron.

  He walked through the chestnut fall to the poplar. The figure changed in shape, disappeared, returned as a solid of darkness bounded by gold leaves, then vanished altogether. Glass winked in the sunlight. The leaf shook violently as he went under it.

  Once he cleared the screen of leaves the sun behind him suddenly went down and came up in front, blazing into his eyes. Holding one hand against the light, he sidestepped into the shade of the pines until he could see. The sun behind him was reflected from a bank of windows. It was a house of glass. He went on circling until he reached the darkness of a great pine and the house came into such an angle with his eye that no part of it reflected the sun.

  It was a greenhouse, such as he had never seen before, freestanding but sheltered at one end by the ridge, with a wall of lichened concrete and a tall gambrel roof. It looked as big as an ark. The sun, sunk behind the pines, had come straight off the lower, more vertical of the glass slopes. A steep copper hood, verdigrised green-brown, shaded the front door like a cathedral porch. Iron spikes and fleurs-de-lis sprouted from the roof peak. Virginia creeper and saplings thrust through broken windows. The glazing on the lower tier was intact. The dusty glass was gilded by the sun and he could not see inside. The greenhouse, he judged, was a good fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. As he watched it, his head moved slightly as if he were appraising the width of a green or the length of an iron shot. A single huge pine near the porch towered over the whole forest.

  “Are these yours?”

  One heart-jump not from surprise but from anger at being taken by surprise, for in his circling he had, without thinking about it, backed into the fork of cloven pine, a vantage point from which he could see without being seen. He turned, frowning.

  The youth held out two golf balls. He took them, still frowning and inattentive as if it were no more than he expected, a caddy retrieving lost balls, and thanked the youth—no, not a youth he noticed now, another miscalculation: he had at first thought long-haired youth with unchanged voice but no, it must be short-haired girl with woman’s voice—and still frowning, examined the balls.

  “Yes. Spalding Pro Flite and Hogan four. Yes, that’s them all right. Thanks.” He held out a dollar. Nice going, youth-girl caddy. But the slender hands which had given him the golf balls didn’t move.

  Frowning still—he was still off-balance—he shrugged and turned to leave.

  “This one woke me up.”

  “What?”

  “Hogan woke me up.”

  “Hogan woke you up?”

  “It broke my window.” She nodded toward the greenhouse.

  “Which one?”

  “Not those. At the end of my house, where I was sleeping. The surprise of it was instigating to me.”

  “Okay okay. Will five dollars do it?” He fumbled in his pocket.

  No answer. Eyes steady, hands still.

  “Did you say your house?”

  “Yes. It is my house. I live there.”

  There was a window broken in the lower tier. His slice could hardly have carried so far. On the other hand, he had hit the first drive very hard, too hard (Was that it, his anger, that was causing the slice? Never hit a golf ball or a child in anger, said Lewis Peckham), and it went high, curving very foul, and did not hit wood. A real banana ball, said Lewis the first time.

  “Okay. How much do I owe you?”

  “It was peculiar. I was lying in my house in the sun reading this book.” She had taken a book from the deep pocket of the jacket and handed it to him, as if to prove—prove what?—and as he examined it, a rained-on dried-out 1922 Captain Blood, he was thinking not about Captain Blood but about the oddness of the girl. There was something odd about her speech and, now that he looked at her, about her. For one thing, she spoke slowly and carefully as if she were reading the words on his face. The sentence “I was lying in my house” was strange. “The surprise of it was instigating.” Though she was dressed, like most of the kids here, in oversize men’s clothes, man’s shirt, man’s jacket, there was something wrong—yes, her jeans were oversize too, not tight, and dark blue like a farm boy’s. Yet her hair was cut short and brushed carefully, as old-fashioned as the book she was reading. It made him think of the expression “boyish bob.”

  “I was lying in my house in the sun reading that book. Then plink, tinkle, the glass breaks and this little ball rolls up and touches me. I felt concealed and revealed.” Her voice was flat and measure
d. She sounded like a wolf child who had learned to speak from old Victrola records. Her lips trembled slightly, not quite smiling, her eyes not quite meeting his yet attentive, sweeping his face like a blind person’s.

  Oh well. She was one of the thousands who blow in and out every summer like the blackbirds, nest where they can, in flocks or alone. Sleep in the woods. At least she had found a greenhouse.

  As he turned away, gripping the three-iron with a two-handed golfer’s grip and with a frowning self-consciousness which almost surprised him, she said: “Are you—?”

  “What?” He cocked the club for a short chip shot and hung fire.

  “Are you still climbing on your anger?”

  “What?”

  When he swung around, she was closer, her eyes full on him, large gray eyes set far apart in her pale (Yes, that was part of the oddness, not the thinness of her face but its pallor. Her skin was as white as a camellia petal yet not unhealthy) face. Her gaze was steady and unfocused. Either she was not seeing him (Was she blind? No, or she’d have never found the Hogan let alone the Spalding Pro Flite) or else she was seeing all of him because all at once he became aware of himself as she saw him, of his golf clothes, beltless slacks, blue nylon shirt with the club crest, gold cap with club crest, two-tone golf shoes with the fringed forward-falling tongues, and suddenly it was he not she who was odd in this silent forest, he with his little iron club and nifty fingerless glove.

  Where had he seen her before? For one odd moment she was as familiar to him as he himself. He who remembered everything remembered those fond hazed eyes from Alabama twenty years ago. But maybe she wasn’t born then.

  Oh well. She was on something and couldn’t focus her eyes.

  He gave her the book. My God, what a nutty world, she zonked out on something, reading Rafael Sabatini and holed up alone in a ruined greenhouse, while grown middle-aged men socked little balls around a mountain meadow and hummed along in electric carts telling jokes about Jews and Germans and niggers. Atlanta and Carolina invaded by Arabs. No wonder my father wanted out.