Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  Knock.

  But she does not reply. Perhaps she did not survive. I’m surer of the catastrophe than I am of her survival.

  3

  YOU WERE ASKING me how I felt when I discovered Margot had been unfaithful to me. Yes, that is very important if you are to understand what happened later.

  First, you must understand that the usual emotions which one might consider appropriate—shock, anger, shame—do not apply. True, there is a kind of dread at the discovery but there is also a curious sense of expectancy, a secret sweetness at the core of the dread.

  I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a “reform” administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state’s insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.

  What I can still remember is the sight of the money and the fact that my eye could not get enough of it. There was a secret savoring of it as if the eye were exploring it with its tongue. When there is something to see, some thing, a new thing, there is no end to the seeing. Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body in the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.

  At the sight of the money, a new world opened up for me. The old world fell to pieces—not necessarily a bad thing. Ah, then, things are not so nice, I said to myself. But you see, that was an important discovery. For if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.

  You nod. But no, wait. The discovery about Margot involved something quite different. There was a sense of astonishment, of discovery, of a new world opening up, but the new world was totally unknown. Where does one go from here? I felt like those two scientists—what were their names?—who did the experiment on the speed of light and kept getting the wrong result. It just would not come out right. The wrong result was unthinkable. Because if it were true, all physics went out the window and one had to start from scratch. It took Einstein to comprehend that the wrong answer might be right.

  One has first to accept and believe what one knows theoretically. One must see for oneself. Einstein had to be sure about those other two fellows before he took the trouble to take the next logical step.

  One has to know for sure before doing anything. I had to be sure about Margot, about what she had done and was doing now. I had to be absolutely certain.

  It was getting dark. The movie crew had gone. Margot, Merlin, Jacoby, and Raine would be back for supper. Elgin came with my toddy on a silver tray. Toddy! We never drank toddies or juleps as you recall, just bourbon straight or maybe with water, but with Margot it was toddies and juleps. She came from West Texas, where God knows what they drank, but she figured at Belle Isle and for Merlin it was toddies and juleps. No, even before Merlin.

  I sat behind my plantation desk. Elgin sat in the slave chair, made by slaves for slaves. Margot claimed, I guess correctly enough, that the work of some slave artisans had the simplicity and beauty of Shaker furniture.

  “Elgin,” I said. I had been thinking. “Did you happen to hear what time they got in last night? The reason I ask is I heard somebody, maybe a prowler, around two.”

  Elgin looked at me. “They didn’t come in till after three.”

  He knew who “they” were. After supper, Margot, Merlin, and the rest would usually go back to the Holiday Inn to view rushes from the past week’s shooting. It took a week because the film had to be flown to Burbank for developing. You have to use the same chemical bath, you can’t just drop it off at the local Fotomat. I invited, rather Margot invited, Merlin and Jacoby and Raine and Dana to stay at Belle Isle. They made so much noise coming in late with all their laughter and film talk that I took to sleeping in the corner bedroom. Then Margot suggested that I would sleep better in the pigeonnier. She fixed it up and I moved in, finally staying in the pigeonnier altogether. Even when the film folk moved back to the Holiday Inn, I stayed in the pigeonnier. Why? I looked around. What was I doing living in a pigeon roost?

  “Elgin, there is something I want you to do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Elgin is, was, the only man, woman, or child I would trust completely outside of you, the more credit to him because it’s required of you, isn’t it? (Christ, what are you looking for down there? the girl?)

  “Is the house empty?”

  “Yes, sir. Mama’s done gone home and there were some late tourists. But they’ve gone. At five-thirty I had to ax them to leave.”

  Elgin, age twenty-two, is a well-set-up youth, slim, café-au-lait, and smart—he went to St. Augustine, the elite Black Catholic school in New Orleans, knew more about chemistry than you and I learned in college. Then got a scholarship to M.I.T. He is well-spoken but to save his life he can’t say ask any more than a Japanese can say an r or a German thank you. If he becomes U.S. Senator or wins the Nobel Prize, which he is more apt to do than you or I. he’ll sure as hell say ax in his acceptance speech.

  “Elgin, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

  “Yes, sir.” He looked at me. It was then that I realized that for a long time I hadn’t asked him or anybody to do anything, because I hadn’t anything to do.

  “You know the ‘hiding hole’ next to the chimney?”

  “Yes, sir.” He relaxed: it is something to do with the house, he thinks, and the tourists.

  The hiding hole was part of Elgin’s spiel to the tourists. That summer Elgin and his sister Doreen took turns leading the tourists through the house. They tell them the usual stuff—that though Belle Isle is indeed a small island now, surrounded by Ethyl pipery, in 1859 it had 3,500 arpents of land, harvested 2,000 hogsheads of sugar, had its own race track and fifty racing horses in the stable.

  —that—and this is the sort of thing Peoria housewives oh and ah at: the marble mantelpiece was delivered from Carrara accompanied by two marble cutters, a right-handed one and a left-handed one, so they could carve the fresh-cut marble at the same time before the marble “hardened” (something marble does).

  —that the solid silver hardware of the doors, locks, hinges, keyholes, taken for steel by the Yankee soldiers, no, not even taken, the metal not even considered, for what Yankee or for that matter who else in the world but Louis XIV would think of a sterling-silver door hinge?

  —that all the rest, brick, column flutings, wavy window glass, woodwork, even iron cookery was made by slave artisans on the place.

  —that finally, the most important to my plan, the hiding hole, no more than a warming oven let into the brick next to the fireplace but actually used as a hiding hole one day when nineteen-year-old Private Clayton Laughlin Lamar home on leave in 1862 hid from a Yankee patrol. This compartment, at any rate, was discovered to run the length of the chimney on both sides for three stories and so was fitted out later by an enterprising Lamar as a dumbwaiter to raise warm food to ailing Aunt Clarisse confined twenty years to a second-story bedroom for complaints real and imaginary, the same bedroom shared until recently by Margot and me and slept in now by her alone. Or did she sleep alone?

  Elgin’s father, Ellis Buell, and I used to play in the dumbwaiter, letting each other up and down from living room to bedroom to attic. If there is something about a concealed hole in the wall wh
ich fascinates Ohio tourists, there is something about traveling in it from one room to another by a magic and unprovided route which astounds children. Children believe that a wall is a wall, that the word says what is and what is not, and that if there is something else there the word doesn’t say, reality itself is tricked and a new magic and unnamed world opens.

  “Does that dumbwaiter still work?”

  “That old rope rotten.” Elgin was excited. Not excited. Mystified. What am I up to? What he gon do next? He doesn’t know, but he’ll go along.

  Late supper as usual. Margot, Merlin, Dana, Raine, and my daughter Lucy. Tex Reilly, Margot’s father, and Siobhan up on the third floor watching Mannix. A happy arrangement for all concerned because it got Tex and Siobhan out of the way without banishing them. Tex made his money by inventing a new kind of drilling “mud” but Margot thought he wouldn’t fit in with this company. She was ashamed of him. The other night they were blasting Hollywood as usual and the grossness of Hollywood types like Chill Wills. Fair enough. Chill may indeed be gross. The trouble is, Tex looks and talks a lot like Chill Wills.

  It was after nine. Nothing was changed, except me. My “discovery” changed everything. I’ve become watchful, like a man who hears a footstep behind him. And sober. For some reason or other, since my “discovery” at 5:01 p.m., more than four hours ago, it had not been necessary to drink.

  Merlin as usual went out of his way to be nice to me. He liked me and I him. His charm was genuine. He deferred to me as his local expert on the Southern upper class and asked good questions: “Was there much socializing between the English plantation society on this side of the river and the French-Catholic on the other?” (Yes, there was. They’d row back and forth across the river and dance all night.) His ear was sharp: “I notice people here, not necessarily the lower classes, saying something like: ‘Why you do me that?’ instead of ‘Why do you do that to me?’ Is that Black, French, or Anglo-Saxon?” (I didn’t know.)

  His blue gaze engaged me with a lively intimacy, establishing a bond between us and excluding the others. Somehow his offense against me was also an occasion of intimacy between us. I felt it too. Things were understood and unspoken between us. It went without saying for example that actors are dumbbells. Not even Margot followed us when he spoke of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and Hemingway’s nastiness to Fitzgerald.

  It was as if we were old hands at something or other. But at what? Why should there be a bond between us? But he listened with total attentiveness, leaning across to me over his folded brown arms. He was lean and fit and old, muscular, thick-chested, heavy shock of yellowed gray hair curling over one eye. He had emphysema, I think: his neck ligaments held his chest up like a barrel. No sign of considerable age except the white hairs sprouting over the zipper of his jump suit and the white fiber around his blue iris.

  Margot had a triumphant night, I remember. They were worried about the “second unit” falling behind schedule. The second unit was supposed to shoot a scene, the opening scene of the film in fact, a flashback where the young son comes home from Heidelberg, steps off the steamboat at the plantation landing. They had rented a steamboat (a New Orleans excursion boat), found a landing in Grand Gulf, but the current was wrong and the boat could not warp into a landing. Days had been wasted, thousands spent.

  “The board is four days out,” said Margot severely. The “board” was actually a board with paper chits stuck onto it like a calendar, showing the exact sequence of scenes to be shot. About Margot there was very much the sense of being a team member. She was in fact Merlin’s “executive assistant.”

  What to do? Build another landing in a place with less current? More time, more money. Raine and Dana couldn’t care less. Lacy, my daughter, didn’t even hear. She was looking at Raine as usual, mouth slightly open.

  Margot knitted her brows and drummed all ten fingers furiously on the table. “Jesus, we can’t lose another day.” She even enjoyed the hassles.

  Margot saved the day. In fact her triumph was complete.

  She snapped her fingers. “Hold it!” she said to no one in particular. “Just hold it. I may have an idea. Let me make one phone call.”

  When she returned, she was flushed with pleasure and excitement, but she kept her voice offhand. “What about this, Bobby?” she asked Merlin, stretching up her arms and yawning. When she stretched up her arms like that, her completely smooth axillae flattened and showed two wavelets of muscle.

  She had remembered there was a steamboat on False River, a cut-off backwater of the Mississippi. “It’s small, almost a miniature, but so are the landings there. And there’s no current. What we could do is a long shot of the boat coming into the Dernier landing, which is tiny, of a scale with the boat. I know the Derniers well. What’s more, the Dernier house even looks like a miniature Belle Isle. You could cut to the roofline over the levee and no one could tell the difference.”

  Merlin thought about it. He nodded. “We’ll go with that,” he said casually, almost curtly, without looking at her. She could have been a pool secretary. “Okay. Call Jacoby.”

  It was the businesslikeness of course which pleased her so much. Now she was not only one of them but a valued one.

  When she was happy or excited, her freckles turned plum-colored. Her pigment darkened with the moon. I could gauge her sexual desire by her freckles.

  Then surely my “discovery” was wrong. She was as happy as a child, so happy she reached over and hugged me, not Merlin. Merlin paid no attention to her. His white-rimmed blue eye engaged mine as usual. He wanted to talk about an article of mine, really no more than a note, about an obscure Civil War skirmish in these parts, published in the Louisiana Historical Journal. He had taken the trouble to look it up.

  As usual I was first to leave the table. It was my custom (all of a sudden I realized how much of my life had become a custom) to leave them to their movie talk, pay a visit to Siobhan and Tex, and arrive at my pigeonnier in time for the ten o’clock news. It had become important to me in recent years to hear the news every hour—though nothing of importance had happened for years. What did I expect to happen?

  But this time I did something different. I left the worn path of my life. Once out of sight, instead of crossing to the stairs. I turned left into the dark parlor next to the dining room, from which it was separated by sliding oak doors. A few minutes earlier I had noticed that the door was open some six inches. It was possible, standing with my back against the door, to hear the diners and by moving from side to side to see their reflection in the dim pier mirror on the opposite wall. The images traveled some fifty feet, thirty feet from diner to mirror, twenty feet back to me. Lucy, my daughter, was at one end of the table. Even from this distance it was possible to see in the small blur of her face how like and unlike her mother she is, Lucy, my first wife. There is the same little lift and lilt when she moves her head but the features are both grosser and more gorgeous, like a Carolina wildflower transplanted to the Louisiana tropics. For her, Lucy. Belle Isle was no more than a place to stay. We were not close. She and Margot didn’t like each other much. My son? I had not seen my son since he quit college and went to live in a streetcar behind the car barn.

  Presently Lucy left.

  Margot, Merlin, and Dana talked. There was the sound in their voices of my not being there.

  Two small events occurred.

  Margot leaned over Merlin to say something to Raine I could not hear, her hair brushing past his face. When Margot spoke, she had a way of swaying against her listener, so that her shoulder and arm touched him. He leaned back, absently, politely, to make room, but as her shoulder rose—is her hand propped on his knee? he took a mock bite of the bare brown flesh at his mouth, not really a bite; he set his teeth on the skin. So perfunctory an act it was, he hardly seemed aware of doing it. His fixed blue gaze did not shift.

  “Okay,” said Merlin presently. “So we’ll use the pigeonnier for Raine and Dana’s fight. I agree. The c
heckerboard lighting pattern would be much more effective than a slave cabin. Still, I like—”

  “What about Rudy?” Dana asked, I think he asked. Rudy? What was Rudy? Did he say Rudy? I don’t think he said Rudy.

  No one seemed to be listening.

  “What?” said Merlin after a minute.

  Raine bobbed her head to and fro, propping and unpropping her cheek with her finger, hair falling away. She was humming a tune.

  Again Margot leaned across Merlin to answer. I could not hear.

  I could hear my absence in Raine’s voice. She was different. There had grown up between us a kind of joking flirtation. She was Dana’s girl, of course. But I could tell her how beautiful she was (she was) and unbend enough to kiss her when we met, kiss on the mouth the way they all do. She could tell me how beautiful I was (am I?). When we were in a room with people, there existed a joking agreement between us that she would be attentive to me, would not turn her back even if she is talking to someone else. It was as if we pretended to be married and jealous of each other. But now without me she was different.

  Rudy? Who is Rudy? Me? Why Rudy?

  Raine was humming a tune, or rather making as if she were humming a tune, a child’s head-bobbing tune, as if it were a signal.

  Was the tune “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

  Is that because I drink and sometimes have a red nose?

  Is it because Rudolph had antlers?

  Did Dana say Rudy? Actually I do not really think he did.

  How strange it is that a discovery like this, of evil, of a kinsman’s dishonesty, a wife’s infidelity, can shake you up, knock you out of your rut, be the occasion of a new way of looking at things!

  In the space of one evening I had made the two most important discoveries of my life. I discovered my wife’s infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life. I saw it and myself clearly for the first time.

  Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe—that’s all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker?