by Walker Percy
The five o’clock whistle at Ethyl blew. I put the book down face up on my desk. It was the plantation desk Margot had given me, built high so a planter in a hurry could write a check standing up. I don’t think those fellows ever sat down and wrote a letter or read a book. She had the legs cut off to make an ordinary desk. My eyes fell off the print to a piece of paper beside the book. I remember everything! I even remember the passage in the Chandler novel. Marlowe was looking for a man named Goodwin. He walked into a house in a canyon between Glendale and Pasadena. An English bungalow! in Pasadena! Don’t you like that? A pleasant incongruity absolutely congruous in Los Angeles. Goodwin was living there alone. Where could Goodwin have come from? I was trying to imagine Goodwin’s childhood, Goodwin twelve years old in Fort Wayne before his parents moved to California. Try to imagine someone in Los Angeles with a childhood. Inside the house Goodwin was dead, a bullet through his forehead. My eye slid off his name—I remember it because his first name was Lancelot like mine—onto the paper next to it. It was my daughter’s application to a horse camp in West Texas. Margot had filled it in and left it for me to sign. Siobhan I thought was too young for a horse camp—yes, my daughter is named Siobhan. My wife Margot was born Mary Margaret Reilly of Odessa, Texas, so our daughter was named Siobhan. This was a special Montessori horse camp and Margot insisted (“I was raised on a ranch in West Texas and I am not about to have her miss it”). I didn’t like the idea of her fooling with horses, great stupid iron-headed beasts, but I always gave in to Margot. I reached for the pen to sign the application and the medical waiver and my eye slid over the page to the letter O. No, it was not the letter O but the number 0, cipher, zero. It was her blood type, I-0. I read the medical examination. At the least the camp people were careful. In case a child got kicked in an artery, they had her blood type. I-0.
I was looking at it idly. The thunder machine stopped. My head felt a little giddy but not unpleasant, as if I were dislocated and weightless in space—sliding instantaneously from an English bungalow in a Los Angeles canyon to an artificial hurricane to an absolutely still cool clear day in Louisiana. Once in a while an empty sugar-cane truck rumbled down the River Road.
Then it was that the worm of interest turned somewhere near the base of my spine. Curious. What was curious? The star dot was slightly out of place. But what was out of place here? I didn’t know yet. Or did I? At any rate, I found myself climbing the iron staircase to the pigeon roost proper. There I kept my regular office equipment, file cabinets, typewriter, and so forth, which Margot didn’t like downstairs where she liked to think of me as Jeff Davis writing his memoirs. Not having much to do over the years, I’d kept perfect records of what little I had done. Would you believe that I became meticulous? I’d have made a good C.P.A. Better a good C.P.A. than a half-assed lawyer. There in the file cabinet I found what I had not until that moment quite realized I was looking for: my medical discharge from the army. Sir Lancelot, as you called me, Percival, discharged from the army not bloody and victorious and battered by Sir Turquine but with persistent diarrhea. The army gave me the shits and couldn’t cure me. Three months in Walter Reed, the best doctors in the world, twenty thousand dollars worth of medical care, and they couldn’t cure the simple shits. So I came home to Louisiana, in August, sat in the rocking chair on the gallery of Belle Isle, downed a great slug of bourbon, and watched the river boats. Sweat popped out on my head and I felt fine.
Ah, here it was. My blood type. IV-AB. Again the worm of interest turned in my spine. I sat down in my metal swivel chair at my metal desk in the pigeon roost. It took Fluker two weeks to shovel out 150 years of pigeon shit, scrape the walls, and reveal what Margot was after, the slave brick of the walls and the three-inch cypress floor, not only not rotted but preserved, waxed by guano.
The sun was setting behind the levee and shafts of rosy light from the glazed pigeonholes pierced the dim roost like laser beams.
I began writing formulae on a pad of yellow legal foolscap. Isn’t it a fact that blood types are hereditary and that when the genes or chromosomes split, the A goes one way, the B the other, but never the A and B together?
There was an unknown in the equation. I did not know Margot’s blood type, but did I have to? Let Margot’s gene equal X. My gene had to be A or B. Two equations were possible.
X + A = O
X + B = O
The equations do not solve. X does not have a value. My blood type and Siobhan’s blood type did not compute.
So I telephoned my cousin Royal in New Orleans. You remember him. Royal Bonderman Lamar? No? You know, Raw Raw, little bitty towheaded sapsucker from Clinton, Kappa Sig, trip manager for the team the last year? Used to stand around at dances, hands in his gabardines, grinning like an idiot, stuff between his teeth? Yes? Actually he was smart as hell, is now an excellent surgeon, makes three hundred thousand a year.
I put the question hypothetically.
“You got a paternity case?” asked Royal. “I thought all you did was look after Margot’s money and help niggers.”
“That’s what I’m doing.” The worm of interest was turning. I remember listening for something in his voice, a note of superiority. In college I was the big shot, Phi Beta Kappa and halfback, and Royal carried the water bucket. Ever since, downhill all the way for me and up for him. While I was sitting under the levee sweating in my seersuckers, musing and drinking, he invented a heart valve. So I listened for the note of superiority which God knows he was entitled to. It wasn’t there. Same Royal, simply cheerful, grinning over the phone, stuff between his teeth.
“You mean you got a nigger paternity suit? I never heard of such a thing.”
“Just tell me. Royal.”
“Tell you what? Oh.” He was still the same Royal in a way. agreeable and willing. The horsing around and even the “nigger” business was not quite as it sounded though, but part of a new broad manner he’d hit upon, found possible, just as he’d found it possible to be grave and loving at weddings in the family and even unsmiling, put his arm around a niece, and, not quite as tall as she, kiss her and wish her every happiness and mean it. Not even the “nigger” business was as it sounded because he operated on blacks and whites alike and didn’t call them niggers or even by their first names and sat them down together in his waiting room and did more for them than I did. He outdid me in the race thing. He did more and talked less.
“No. A type IV-AB cannot beget a type O no matter who or what the mama is.”
“I see.”
“What you got is a nig—”
“I know, I know.”
“—ger in the woodpile.”
“I know.”
The thunder machine started up again.
“My God, what’s that, Lance?”
“A thunder machine.”
“A what? Never mind.”
“Thank you. Royal.”
“Give my love to Margot.”
“Right, right,” I said and almost forgot to say, Give mine to Charlotte. “Give my love to Charlotte.” I hung up.
Give my love. I thought of something and called Royal again.
“Is the period of pregnancy exactly nine months?”
“It depends on what you mean by month. Average gestation for a full-term infant is ten lunar months. Two hundred and eighty days. But why—”
“What’s the average weight of a full-term infant?”
“Male or female?”
“Female.”
“Seven pounds.”
“Thanks. Royal.”
“Okay, Tiger.”
Tiger. Did he call me that in school? Or was there a note of condescension?
“Thanks.”
My records were very good. In seconds I can, could—Jesus, the place burned to the ground, didn’t it?—no, still can. The pigeonnier didn’t burn and I guess the records are still there. I could look up any given day’s receipts of the tourist take at Belle Isle.
I made calculations. This time the equat
ions were simpler. In fact there were no equations because there were no variables. It was arithmetic. I needed four pieces of data. I had two: Siobhan’s birthday, April 21, 1969, and birth weight, 7 lbs. Subtract 280 days from April 21, 1969. I looked at my feedstore calendar. The remainder is July 15, 1968. I could remember nothing. Can you remember where you were in the summer of ’68? You can? Yes, you would. You didn’t keep records but you always had a nose for time and places. I remember you stone drunk here in New Orleans, on the ground in the weeds, on the levee, peaceable and not quite unconscious, sniffing the soil and saying “What place is this?” Is that why you chose the god you did, the time-place god?
My third and indispensable item came from a shot in the dark. The dark of the dead file where I kept old income tax data and work sheets. A shot in the dark, not really a lucky—unlucky?—shot, but rather the only shot I had. My worm of interest tingled and guided me like a magnet to a manila folder neatly lettered DEDUCTIONS, 1968. I’m sure you don’t have to worry about deductions but it’s a good way to remember where you were and what you did ten years ago. A hundred years from now histories will be written from the stubs of Exxon bills. Bastardy will be proved by Master Charge. There was a chance I could find out where I spent the summer or at least hit on enough clues to remember the summer. Suppose Margot and I had gone to Williamsburg to talk to the National Heritage people about Belle Isle (we did one summer). A possible deductible. It would show: Coach-and-Four motel bill, Delta Air Lines carbon. Suppose I had spent two weeks in Washington with the Civil Rights Commission (I did that in the 1960’s). A deductible: receipted Shoreham Hotel bill. Suppose I spent a month in England buying antiques to show and sell at Belle Isle (I did that in the bad years). A clear deductible: Pan Am or Amex card. But where was I in the summer of 1968?
I found out. Not where I was but where Margot was. Was that the significance of the tingling of the worm of interest? that actually I already knew but did not know that I knew or would not admit it, had even suppressed the knowledge so thai it might then be properly discovered, just as the astronomer already knows in his heart of hearts that that dot will have moved but won’t even think about it until the photographic plate is in his hand and he can see the dot in the right-wrong place—all this in order to do what? In his case savor the superiority of the real over the imaginary? In my case to do what? postpone the interesting horror the way a person will turn an unopened telegram over and over in his hand?
Here it was. Amex stub and customer’s copy and receipted bill from the Arlington. Texas. Roundtower Motor Lodge for $1,325.27. A clear deductible. Not for me but for Margot, who at the time was still technically an actress, never a very good one but an Equity-card-carrying one and clearly engaged in the practice of her profession, that was why we deducted it, not acting but attending Robert Merlin’s workshop at the famous Dallas-Arlington Playhouse. The entire month of July. Eastern Airlines tickets for June 30 and return August 1. She had not come home and I had not visited her. I knew because all at once I remembered the summer of ’68. The courts had just caught up with Feliciana Parish and a few of us moderate and peace-loving persons of good will of both races had our own workshops, with the schoolboard and teachers and PTA’s, so people wouldn’t get killed when school opened. We succeeded. Nobody got killed. On the contrary. New life was conceived.
Siobhan then was conceived on or about July 15, 1968, give or take a few days. How many days? a week? ten days? two weeks? As Royal said, biology is not an exact science but a matter of averages and probabilities. So put July 15 at the summit of a probability curve and add or subtract two weeks in either direction along the x axis and, as I discovered later, the curve is so flat and close to the axis that breathing under it is difficult and conception damn near impossible.
A fact then: Siobhan was fathered in Texas in July 1968 and not by me.
The thunder machine started and stopped again. Someone was tinkering with it. A door slammed, the heavy front door of Belle Isle. I looked down through a pigeonhole. Margot and Jacoby and Merlin got in the station wagon and drove away. I’d have known it was Margot by the way she drove. Her hand made an arc through the green windshield. She turned the car like a man, or a Texas girl, not push-pulling with two hands but palming the wheel around with one hand. Looking down into the car from the pigeon roost, I could see her bare knees. When she got into a car she hiked up her dress like a man does his pants. They were headed, I knew, for the Holiday Inn on I-10 where the film company stayed and the manager let them have a conference room so Merlin could view the rushes.
The three of them sat on the front seat. Merlin in the middle next to Margot. Merlin was one of the few men I ever knew who couldn’t drive. There used to be more such people when I was a child, often quite gifted, intelligent men. Especially creative people. Picasso and Einstein never learned to drive, did they?
The girl in the next room and I communicated yesterday! She has not said a word for months, not since her terrible experience, but we communicated!
At six o’clock, when they brought us coffee, I knocked once as usual: good morning! To my astonishment, after a minute or two there came a timid little knock back: good morning.
I could not believe my ears. Perhaps it was not a reply at all. Perhaps she had turned over her chair.
So I knocked again. It was a tentative knock, a knock with a question mark. In thirty seconds, it came back. Knock. No mistake.
Yet was it a communication? If so, what kind? Two chimpanzees could do as well.
Still the question: Is that communication or imitation? Monkey see, monkey do. Perhaps the girl is lying there, a hopeless idiot, her eyes vacant, her knuckles straying against the wall, like a two-year-old child lying in bed.
So I tried the simplest code of all: One knock = A, two = B, and so on.
But how to propose it to her as a code? Not as easy as you might think. I spent the morning thinking it over. It became clear that the only way to avoid imitation is to ask a question and the only way to establish a code is repetition. After all, we have all the time in the world.
It is very awkward, of course. For example, my question began with a W, which requires twenty-three knocks. But no matter. Once the idea of a code is established, once she catches on, we can simplify.
I sent this message: 23 knocks pause 8 pause 15 double pause 1 pause 18 pause 5 double pause 25 pause 15 pause 21.
Who are you?
I knocked at about a one-second rhythm knowing she wouldn’t get it at first but thinking she might catch on and get a pencil and start counting.
No reply.
Repeat.
No reply.
Repeat.
No reply.
I tried ten times and quit.
Ah well. Tomorrow I will try again.
I must communicate with her. According to my theory, she may be a prototype of the New Woman. It is no longer possible to “fall in love.” But in the future and with the New Woman it will be.
You’re curious, I see. I haven’t told you my sexual theory of history? You smile. No, I’m serious. It applies to both the individual and mankind.
First there was a Romantic Period when one “fell in love.”
Next follows a sexual period such as we live in now where men and women cohabit as indiscriminately as in a baboon colony—or in a soap opera.
Next follows catastrophe of some sort. I can feel it in my bones. Perhaps it has already happened. Has it? Have you noticed anything unusual on the “outside”? I’ve noticed that the doctors and guards and attendants here who are supposed to be healthy—we’re the sick ones—seem depressed, anxious, gloomy, as if something awful had already happened. Has it?
Catastrophe then—yes, I am sure of it—whether it has happened or not; whether by war, bomb, fire, or just decline and fall. Most people will die or exist as the living dead. Everything will go back to the desert.
Do you believe that dreams can foretell the future? After all, your Bible speaks
of it. I used not to, but I had a dream the other night and I cannot forget it. It was not about Belle Isle or my past life at all but about my future life. I’m sure of it. I was living in an abandoned house in a desert place, a ghost town which looked like one of those outlying Los Angeles neighborhoods Raymond Chandler describes.
I was in a room and strangely immobilized. I don’t know why but I could not move. Outside there were trees and other houses and cars but nothing moved. There was perfect quiet. Yet I was not alone in the house. There was someone else in the next room. A woman. There was the unmistakable sense of her presence. How did I know it was a woman? I cannot tell you except that I knew. Perhaps it was the way she moved around the room. Do you know the way a woman moves around a room whether she is cleaning it or just passing time? It is different from the way a man moves. She is at home in a room. The room is an extension of her.
She came out of the house. We were having a picnic, sitting on the tailgate of a truck. It was not the desert now. The land plunged almost straight down into the blue ocean. A breeze had sprung up and there was a tinkle of wind chimes. We had been working hard and were very hungry. We ate in silence, looking at each other. There was much to be done. We were making a new life. It was not the Old West and there was no frontier but we were making a new life, starting from scratch. There was no thought of “romance” or “sex” but only of making a new life. We knew what we were doing.
The New Woman is the survivor of the catastrophe and the death of old worlds—like the woman in the next room. The worst thing that can happen to her has happened. The worst thing that can happen to me has happened. We are both survivors.
What do survivors do?