Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  There in the straight chair across the desk from me sat a woman I seemed to know, or at least seemed to be expected to know. She knew me. I started guiltily, smiled, and nodded to cover my lapse of manners. Christ, you remember, Percival; there must have been forty women in that parish of a certain age who look more or less alike, who have a certain connection with one’s family, but whose names one never gets straight. They are neither old nor young. They could be thirty-five or fifty-five. They look the same for thirty years. Was this Miss Irma or Cousin Callie or Mrs. Jenny James? They are dark-complexioned, have full figures and a certain reputation from the past. Something had happened to them but we did not speak of it—one’s father had got them out of trouble. Oh, you remember what happened to Callie. Perhaps she had run off with an older married man. For the next forty years they do well enough. Often they hold down a small political job at the courthouse, or sell Tupperware—perhaps Cousin Callie has been Judge Jones’s mistress for twenty years. At any rate, they outlive everybody. They are healthy. They show up at funerals, weddings, and New Year open houses. One can’t imagine what they do between times.

  The only thing I could be certain of was that this person seemed to have every right to be there in my pigeonnier.

  And that she knew me and I was expected to know her. She smiled at me with perfect familiarity. No doubt she had come to seek shelter from the hurricane at Belle Isle, the strongest building hereabouts.

  She sat bolt upright yet gracefully, smoothing down her dress into her waist, showing her figure to good effect. It was a knit dress which perfectly fitted her full breasts and hips.

  Now she arched her back and sat even more bolt upright. It would never have occurred to me to ask: “Who are you and what do you want?”

  Her hair was dark, perhaps a bit gray, heavy, long, and looped around her head in a not unattractive way. It had not been recently washed. I caught a whiff, not unpleasant, of unwashed woman’s hair.

  I looked at her. She smiled at me, a winning smile, but her eyes glittered. She was the sort of woman, Percival, you remember from childhood, who was extraordinarily nice to you, who spoke well of your parents, who said how nice they were, how handsome you were. Yet at the mention of her name your parents exchanged glances and fell silent.

  She was also the sort you might well remember if you remember how a voluptuous forty-year-old woman attracted a fifteen-year-old youth, how if we were playing football and lounging on the grass at a time-out, sweaty, tired, and cheerfully obscene, and she passed by in the street, erect, heavy in the thigh and small in the waist, we’d fall silent until the inevitable: How would you like some of that?

  Then I noticed the camellia pinned at her shoulder—and at the same moment it came to me that this was not yet the season for camellias—a large open flesh-colored bloom with a sheaf of stalks sprouting from the center bearing stamens, pistils, pollen, pods, ovules.

  She was real enough, I think, though I cannot explain the camellia. The slight embarrassment of not being able to remember her name was all too familiar and not like a dream. She’d come for shelter, she said (doesn’t this prove she was real, in dreams explanations are not required), but she’d changed her mind. She didn’t want to impose on us. Maybe she’d better stay with a relative in town, Cousin Maybelle.

  But where did she get the camellia?

  She still spoke well of everyone. “Your father was such a perfect gentleman. What perfect tact and understanding!”

  “Understanding?”

  “Of Lily. Your mother. Oh, Lily. What a lovely delicate creature. Like a little dove. Not like me. I’m more a sparrow. Plain but tough.”

  “A dove?”

  “Maybe more like a lovebird. She lived for love. Literally. Unless she was loved, she withered and died. Maury understood that. God, what understanding he had! And he also understood his own limitations and accepted them. He understood her relationship with Harry and accepted that. That man was a saint.”

  “What was her relationship with Harry?”

  “You’re joking. La, it was not secret.”

  “They were lovers?”

  “For years. Everybody knew. So romantic! They were like Camille and Robert Taylor.”

  Everybody but me. Does everybody know everything but me?

  “That was after my father’s—uh—indictment?”

  “Yes. Poor Maury was crushed, even though it was all just dirty politics and nothing was proved. I’ve always thought his illness had something to do with what he thought of as his disgrace. Pooh, men are ridiculous. And he was too—tenderhearted. But so aristocratic!”

  I was looking in my father’s sock drawer for the small change he kept in the fitted scoops for collar buttons and caught sight of something under the argyle socks. There it was, the ten thousand dollars, dusky new green bills in a powdered rubber band neat and squared away like a book, and there it was, the sweet heart pang of horror. I counted it. The bills felt like stiff petals, not like paper, like leaves covered by pollen. My heart beats slowly and strongly. Strange: I was aware that my eyes were doing more than seeing, that they were unblinking and staring and slightly bulging. They were “taking it in,” that is, devouring. For here was the sweet shameful heart of something, the secret. For minutes there was an awareness of my eyes devouring the money under the socks, making little scanning motions to and fro, the way the eye takes in a great painting. Dishonor is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret. There is no secret in honor. If one could but discover the secret at the heart of dishonor. …

  Harry Wills was undressing, taking off his duke’s costume in the auditorium locker room after the ball. There was the usual drinking and horsing and laughing. No Robert Taylor, he was oldish, blue-jowled, big-nosed, hairy-chested, strong-bellied, thin-shanked, not a Realsilk salesman any more but a Schenley distributor: a traveling salesman! Wet rings from the glass of whiskey shimmered on the bench beside him. Except for his green satin helmet, sword sash, and red leatherette hip boots, he was naked. His genital was retracted, a large button over a great veined ball. As he caught sight of me, I watched him, gazed into his eyes, and saw his brain make two sluggish connections. One was: Here I was, a young Comus knight, the very one who had run 110 yards against Alabama. The other: here was I also, the son of Lily. (Jesus, was I also his son?) The two revelations fused in a single great rosy Four Roses whiskey glow of fondness, perhaps love. (A father’s love?) Rising unsteadily, he grabbed me around the neck and announced to the krewe: “You know who this is! This is Lancelot Lamar and you know what he did!” They knew and their knowing confirmed the terrible emotion swelling within him. He told them anyway. “This boy not only ran back that punt 110 yards. He was hit at least once by every man on the Alabama team—twice by some. Haven’t y’all seen the film?” The other dukes nodded solemnly. They had. They drank and gave me a drink and shook my hand. Hugging my neck, Harry sat down, pulling me down into a heavy air of lung-breathed bourbon, cigarette smoke, and genital musk.

  “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head at the wonder of it and cursed from the very inchoateness of the terrible unnamed feeling. “Have a drink! Goddamn … !”

  Do you remember my mother? I never thought of her as “beautiful” or “good-looking” but rather as too pale, with wide winged unplucked eyebrows which gave her a boy’s look. You thought she was beautiful? Perhaps I don’t remember her after she began to drink. Later she became sly and even a little voluptuous. After years of secret drinking, there came to be a tightness and glossiness about her face. Her chin receded a little. Her eyes became brilliant and opaque and mischievous as if she knew a joke on everybody. You know, I’ve since known several genteel lady drunks who develop this same glossy chinless look. Is that a facial syndrome of woman alcoholics? Or a certain kind of unhappy Southern lady? Or both?

  I remember her earlier not as “beautiful” but as thin-boned, quick, and sporty. There was a kind of nervous joking aggressiveness about her. She liked to “g
et” me. On cold mornings when everyone was solemn and depressed about getting up and going off to work or school, she would say, “I’m going to get you,” and come at me with her sharp little fist boring away into my ribs. There was something past joking, an insistence, about the boring. She wouldn’t stop.

  Uncle Harry, jovial Schenley salesman and third cousin once removed, family friend and benefactor who brought me presents—even presents on ordinary weekdays, imagine a glass pistol loaded with candy on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon or a Swiss army knife with twenty-two blades—who was not only nice to me but took Lily, who was delicate then and had to rest a lot, for “joyrides” to False River—“Get her out of the house, Harry!” my father said—leaving him, my father, to his beloved quiet. Once he, my father, painted a mystical painting of our alley of live oaks showing the perpetual twilight filling them even at noon, and above, great domed spaces shot through by a single stray shaft of sunlight, a picture he entitled “O sola beatitudo! O beata solitudo!” He wrote a poem with the same title. Poet Laureate he was of Feliciana Parish, so designated by the local Kiwanis, lying on his recliner on the deep shaded upper gallery dreaming over his history manuscript, dreaming not so much of a real past as what ought to have been and should be now and might be yet: a lovely golden sunlit Louisiana of bayous and live oaks and misty green savannahs, Feliciana, a happy land of decent folk and droll folkways and quiet backwaters, the whole suffused by gentle Episcopal rectitude.

  Uncle Harry then and Lily entering a tourist cabin on False River of a sunny wintry afternoon, the frost-bleached levee outside, the raw soughing gas heat striking at leg and eyes, the gracious cold still trapped in Lily’s fur, the sheets slick-cold and sour.

  But now, in the pigeonnier and in the eye of the storm, the sense at last of coming close to it, the sweet secret of evil, the dread exhilaration, the sure slight heart-quickening sense of coming onto something, the dear darling heart of darkness—ah, this was where it was all right.

  You always got it backward: you don’t set out looking for clues to God’s existence, nobody’s ever found anything that way, least of all God. From the beginning you and I were different. You were obsessed with God. I was obsessed with—what? dusky new graygreen money under interwoven argyle socks? Uncle Harry and Lily in the linoleum-cold gas-heat-hot tourist cabin?

  The rising moon grew brighter and smaller. The great bastion of cloud wheeled slowly. Andes peaks and mesas and glaciers revolved slowly past my window. My mouth was open. I became aware of a difficulty in breathing as if I had asthma. I don’t have asthma. I looked at my Abercrombie & Fitch desk weatherstation, Christmas present from Margot. The barometer read 28.96. I went to the open door. Children and youths in their teens were playing in the bright moonlight on the levee. They were exhilarated by the stillness of the great wheeling storm. Some worked seriously on the bonfires, adding willow logs and rubber tires to make smoke. Some somersaulted or lay flat and rolled down the levee. A young girl in a long white dress danced alone a French version of the square dance, a Fais do-do, mincing forward and backward, holding her head first to one side then to the other, curtsying, her hands spreading wide the folds of her skirt. Their cries came to me through the thin dead air, muffled and faraway. I became aware that it was the girl’s voice. She was singing. Her voice carried in the hushed air. It was an old Cajun tune I used to hear at Breaux Bridge.

  Mouton, mouton—et où vas tu?

  A l’abatoire.

  Quand tu reviens?

  Jamais—Baa!

  That was curious. There were no Cajun families here on the English Coast, only a few light-colored Negroes with French names, whom we called freejacks because they were said to have been freed by General Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans.

  Where did she come from?

  In 1862 my great-great-grandfather Manson Maury Lamar, infantry captain with the 14th Virginia, struck up the Shenandoah Valley in A. P. Hill’s corps, which invested Harper’s Ferry, took thirteen thousand prisoners, got news of McClellan’s assault on Lee at Sharpsburg seventeen miles away, hit a jog for the seventeen miles, and arrived just as Lee’s right was giving way, took his company into battle at a dead run. It was the bloodiest day of the war. He would never talk about it, they said. But he would also never talk about anything else. He said nothing. My uncle fought in the Argonne. He said it was too horrible. But he also said he never again felt real for the next forty years.

  My son refused to go to Vietnam, went underground instead in New Orleans, lived in an old streetcar, wrote poetry, and made various sorts of love. Was he right, or was I right, or are you right?

  I went to see Anna this morning. We spoke. She sat in a chair. She’s going to be all right. She speaks slowly and in a monotone, choosing her words carefully like someone recovering from a stroke. But she’s going to be all right. She had combed her hair and wore a skirt and sat on her foot and pulled her skirt over her knee like a proper Georgia girl. I told her I would be leaving the hospital soon and asked her to come with me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see.”

  After a while she said: “And you want me to come with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t that enough? I want you to come with me.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I’m not sure what that means. But I need you and you need me. I will have Siobhan with me.”

  “I see.” She seemed to know all about Siobhan. Did you tell her? She nodded. “A new family. A new life.”

  That’s all she said. She kept on nodding. But I wasn’t sure she was listening. Do you think she meant she would come?

  Do you hear the sound of music faraway? No? Perhaps I only imagined it, no doubt it is the echo of a dream or rather a vision which has come to me of late. But I swear I could hear the sound of young men marching and singing, a joyful cadenced marching song. A Mardi Gras marching band over on St. Charles? No. You’re right, it’s November, nowhere near Mardi Gras. Besides, it wasn’t like a high-school band. It was young men singing and marching. It was both a great deal more serious and joyful than a high-school band.

  Anna got bad news today. Her father died of a heart attack. Now she like me is alone in the world. He left her nothing but a cabin and a barn and fifty acres in the Blue Ridge not far from Lexington, Virginia. Well, that settles it. No Big Sur after all and perhaps it’s just as well. In fact it is a kind of sign. It is Virginia where we’re supposed to be. I see that clearly now.

  Virginia?

  Yes, don’t you see? Virginia is where it will begin. And it is where there are men who will do it. Just as it was Virginia where it all began in the beginning, or at least where the men were to conceive it, the great Revolution, fought it, won it, and saw it on its way. They began the Second Revolution and we lost it. Perhaps the Third Revolution will end differently.

  It won’t be California after all. It will be settled in Virginia, where it started.

  Virginia!

  Don’t you see? Virginia is neither North nor South but both and neither. Betwixt and between. An island between two disasters. Facing both; both the defunct befouled and collapsing North and the corrupt thriving and Jesus-hollering South. The Northerner is at heart a pornographer. He is an abstract mind with a genital attached. His soul is at Harvard, a large abstract locked-in sterile university whose motto is truth but which has not discovered an important truth in a hundred years. His body lives on Forty-second Street. Do you think there is no relation between Harvard and Forty-second Street? One is the backside of the other. The Southerner? The Southerner started out a skeptical Jeffersonian and became a crooked Christian. That is to say, he is approaching and has almost reached his essence, which is to be more crooked and Christian than ever before. Do you want a portrait of the New Southerner? He is Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week. He calls on Jesus and steals, he’s in
business, he’s in politics. Everybody in Louisiana steals from everybody else. That is why the Mafia moved South: because the Mafia is happier with stealing than with pornography. The Mafia and the Teamsters will end by owning the South, the pornographers will own the North, movies, books, plays, the works, and everybody will live happily ever after.

  California? The West? That’s where the two intersect: Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Las Vegas, drugs, pornography, and every abstract discarnate idea ever hit upon by man roaming the wilderness in search of habitation.

  Washington, the country, is down the drain. Everyone knows it. The people have lost it to the politicians, bureaucrats, drunk Congressmen, lying Presidents, White House preachers, C.I.A., F.B.I., Mafia, Pentagon, pornographers, muggers, buggers, bribers, bribe takers, rich crooked cowboys, sclerotic Southerners, rich crooked Yankees, dirty books, dirty movies, dirty plays, dirty talk shows, dirty soap operas, fags, lesbians, abortionists, Jesus shouters, anti-Jesus shouters, dying cities, dying schools, courses in how to fuck for schoolchildren.

  The Virginian? He may not realize it yet, but he is the last hope of the Third Revolution. The First Revolution was won at Yorktown. The Second Revolution was lost at Appomattox. The Third Revolution will begin there, in the Shenandoah Valley.

  Now I remember where I heard the music. Do you believe in dreams? That is, do you believe that a dream can be prophetic? You smile. Christ, don’t you believe anything any more? You smile. Your God used to send messages in dreams, didn’t he? No, this was not a message sent to me by God but my own certain vision of what is going to happen. I know what is going to happen. I dreamed it, but it is also going to happen.

  A young man is standing in a mountain pass above the Shenandoah Valley. A rifle is slung across his back. He is very tan. Clearly he has been living in the forest. Though the day is very hot, he stands perfectly still under a sour-wood tree as the sun sets in the west. He is waiting and watching for something. What? A sign? Who, what is he? WASP Virginian? New England Irish? Louisiana Creole? Jew? Black? Where does he live? It is impossible to say. He is dark, burned black as an Indian. He could be a Sabra from a kibbutz. All one can say for certain is that he is careful, that he has something in mind, and that he is watching and waiting. For what? For this: presently he sees something, a mirror flash from the last sun rays from the mountain across the North Fork. Still he waits. The sun goes down. Quickly it grows dark. He faces northeast watching the faint green luminescence from the great dying cities of the North, Washington to Boston.