Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

  “Did you want to see me, Charley?”

  He cupped his hand to hear. Not that he was deaf, but it was hard to hear in that room. Voices sounded reedy. The vaulted ceiling crossed by simulated hand-hewn beams roared like a conch.

  Charley looked at me.

  “You look like hell, Doc.”

  “I know.”

  “You got a good build. You ought to stay in shape.”

  “You’re right.” I was feeling bad. Samantha was dead and the martins had not come back. It was a bad white winter day.

  “What did you mean when you asked me if I felt strange?” Charley asked me, resuming our conversation of six months earlier.

  “What? Oh. As I recall, it was a routine question.”

  “Why in hell should I feel strange?” Charley’s reedy voice buzzed up into the vaulted ceiling like a cicada. He felt very low, but my own low spirits revived him sufficiently so that he pulled a lever and lay back in the recliner.

  “He loves to talk to you,” said Ramona in a loud drone as if Charley were not talking, were not even present. Discovering that she still had her hat on, she clucked and, feeling for hatpins, stood up and went into the pantry. Her inner calves still had the tender straight undeveloped lines of pretty girls in the Lower Piedmont, the sort who sit drinking Cokes for twenty years. She is from Spartanburg, South Carolina.

  It seemed permissible to slump as low as Charley. Charley and I could talk along the floor while Ramona went sailing through the roaring upper air as if it were her medium.

  Charley was depressed but he didn’t know why. Nothing much had changed in his life, except that his son had dropped out of M.I.T. and taken to the swamp, hardly an uncommon occurrence these days. But he and his son had never been close.

  “So what?” said Charley. “My old man ran me off when I was fourteen.”

  So there seemed to be no external cause for Charley’s distress. On the contrary. Just the week before, the champs had signed up again to play under the arcs on the Moonlight Summer Tour. The new Paradise 36 was finished. A new concept in golf courses, its initial cost of forty million was also its final cost. What with its fleet of carts, elimination of caddies, its automatic sprinkler system with each outlet regulated by a moisture sensor, its new Tifton 451 Bermuda, which required neither mowing nor fertilizing, labor costs were eliminated.

  Then what was the trouble?

  Charley shrugged. “I don’t know, Doc. I mean, what’s the use? You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” Something occurred to me. “When did you see your son last?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “When?”

  “Last month. On his way to Honey Island Swamp.”

  “Did you quarrel with him?”

  “Do you know what that sapsucker wanted to do?”

  “No.”

  “Move the three of them into his old room while he looks for a new cave.”

  “The three of them?”

  “Him and his little yehudi and their cute little bastard. Up they go to bed without a by-your-leave.”

  “Yehudi?”

  “Introduces her as Ethel Ginsberg or Finklestein.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you mean, yes? I mean, don’t you think he could at least have had enough consideration for his mother to pretend they were married?”

  “What happened then?”

  “What do you mean, what happened? I threw his ass out. Wouldn’t you have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I was thinking of my daughter, dead these seven years. Would I have thrown her ass out if she had gone up to bed with a Ginsberg? Yes. No. I don’t know.

  Rising unsteadily, I blew my nose and reached for my lapsometer. What I was curious about was whether his deep pineal reading stayed low during his excitement Charley was so wound up that he didn’t even notice that I was going over his head like a barber. He kept swinging around to tell me something. It was like giving a haircut to a three-year-old.

  (The reading was up: getting mad helped him. Or was it the talking?)

  “Be still, Charley.”

  Charley shut up. But he had to do something, so he started pressing buttons on his recliner. The stereo-V came booming on and stayed on.

  In a minute Ramona came in and turned it down. Her hat was off and her hair was piled up in tiers like a garden-club arrangement.

  “It’s a goddamn lie,” said Charley.

  “What’s a lie?” Was he talking about the news or his son?

  “That’s what he does all day,” Ramona told me, as if Charley were absent. “Fusses about the news and can’t wait till the next. He listens to the news every hour.”

  “Fusses” seemed to be the wrong word for Charley’s anger.

  Then it was that the idea first occurred to me: what would happen if one were able to apply electrical stimulation to the pineal region?

  But the best I could do in those days was a kind of “historical therapy,” as I called it then: a recapture of the past and one’s self.

  Only one thing worked with Charley. After his anger had subsided (something in the news—the Negroes, the Lefts, the love people, I didn’t notice—made him mad), I picked up the glass paperweight and I gave it a shake to set the snow whirling. The scene was the Battle above the Clouds atop Lookout Mountain. “Remember when we got this, honey,” Charley would usually say. “Yes. At Ruby Falls on our honeymoon.”

  But that day Charley was either too angry still or too low to notice the paperweight.

  “Ain’t nobody starving in no swamp,” he muttered.

  I nodded, thinking he meant his son.

  Ramona, who is quick and intuitive, saw my mistake and corrected me (women are smarter than psychiatrists).

  “He”—still the absent he—“was talking about the news. You know, niggers supposed to be starving around here like in Beauford.”

  “I see.”

  Ramona gave me another hint. “He thinks they’re accusing him.”

  “They?”

  “That’s humbug,” said Charley.

  “Guess what he told him,” said Ramona. “He told him it was his fault.”

  He? Him? His? Which he is Charley and which his son and whose fault is it?

  “Well of course,” I said somewhat vaguely, “everyone knows that Charley is a generous—”

  “No! No!” They both turned on me. I hadn’t got the straight of it yet. I felt stupid, but on the other hand some married people, you know, carry on these mysterious six-layered conversations with all manner of secret signs.

  Ramona set me straight. “Why should anyone blame Charley when all he did was build a golf course and invent the arcs? It wasn’t his forty million dollars that filled in the swamp. He was just doing his job. Is it Charley’s fault that Tifton 451 eliminates labor?”

  “Yes. Hm,” I said in the best psychiatric style, pretending I knew all along. “You mean he and Chuck quarreled?”

  “Quarreled, hell,” said Charley. “I kicked his ass out.”

  “You should have heard them,” said Ramona. “Both of them acted ugly.” Ramona tried to put it down to menfolk’s ordinary foolishness. They had a fuss. But it was more than that. So serious was the quarrel that Charley was still worried about not winning it.

  “I told him exactly like I’m telling you now: get your little yehudi and your little bastard and get your ass out.”

  “They used to go hunting together,” said Ramona in her Spartanburg drone. But she was crying. “They never missed a dove season.”

  “You know what he accused me of?” Charley asked me.

  “No.”

  “Starving niggers. You know what he called me?”

  “No.”

  “A hypocritical son of a bitch.”

  “He didn’t actually say—” began Ramona. “That was ugly, though.”

  “You too, Doc,” said Charley.

  “Me?”

  “You were included. All of
us here are hypocritical sons of bitches.”

  “I see.”

  “He told me he knew for a fact that niggers come up from the swamp at night and eat soybean meal off the greens. Now you know that’s a lie.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard—”

  “In the first place, we haven’t used soybean meal since last summer. Tifton 451 doesn’t need it. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a whole barnful left over I’ve got to get rid of.”

  “I see.”

  I shook the paperweight again and in the end succeeded in getting Charley to tell me about his first tour when he had to borrow a hundred dollars to qualify at Fort Worth because Ramona had spent their last money on Sears sport clothes for him so he wouldn’t look like a caddy. But he was a caddy and wore sneakers instead of spiked shoes.

  He told me about placing at Augusta. His deep pineal reading got up to 6 mmv.

  “Doc, have you ever played thirty-six holes on three Baby Ruths?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think I’m a hypocritical son of a bitch?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think I am?”

  What do I think? The mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness. Charley is a good man. Then how did things turn out so badly? What went wrong? I gave the paperweight a shake and sent snow swirling around Lookout Mountain.

  Charley wanted to talk about whether the niggers were starving or not, etcetera, but what interested me and where my duty lay was with Charley. I saw how his life was and what he needed. Charley was a tinkerer, like GM’s famous Charley Kettering, a fellow who has to have one idea to worry with twenty-four hours a day. Without it he’s blown up. Charley’s the sort of fellow who retires to Florida hale and hearty and perishes in six months.

  Here’s what happened.

  Some months later I made my second breakthrough and added the ionizer to my lapsometer. I was able to treat an area as well as “listen” to it. It worked. Accordingly, a few days ago—when was it? a day? two days? dear Lord, how much has happened—I gave him a pineal massage and he came to himself, his old self, and began to have one idea after another. One idea: an electronic unlosable golf ball that sends signals from the deepest rough. Another: a “golfarama,” a mystical idea of combining a week of golf on a Caribbean island with the Greatest Pro of Them All—a week of revivals conducted by a member of the old Billy Graham team, the same revivalist, incidentally, who is in Paradise this weekend.

  The interstate swelters in the sun.

  My eyes are almost swelled shut, breath whistles in my throat, but my heart is full of love. Love of what? Women. Which women? All women. The first night I ever spent on the acute ward, a madman looked at me and said, not knowing me from Adam: “You want to know your trouble? You don’t love God, you love pussy.”

  It might be true. Madmen like possessed men usually tell the truth. At any rate, through a crack of daylight I catch sight of a face, a blurred oval in the window of room 203. Lola.

  The question is: if worst comes to worst, what is the prospect of a new life in a new dead world with Lola Rhoades, to say nothing of Moira Schaffner and Ellen Oglethorpe? Late summer and fall lie ahead, but will they be full of ghosts? That was the trouble with long summer evenings and the sparkling days of fall, they were haunted. What broke the heart was the cicadas starting up in the sycamores in October. Everyone was happy but our hearts broke with happiness. The golf links canceled themselves. Happy children grew up with haunted expressions and ran away. No more of that. Vines sprout in the plaza now. Fletcher Christian began a new life with three wives on faraway Pitcairn, green as green and unhaunted by old Western ghosts. I shall be happy with my three girls. Only Ellen, a Presbyterian, may make trouble.

  Patient #4

  Late last night a love couple crept up out of the swamp and appeared in my “enclosed patio.” This often happens. Even though I am a psychiatrist, denizens of the swamp appear at all hours suffering from malaria, dengue, flukes, bummers, hepatitis, and simple starvation. Nobody else will treat them.

  I saw them from my bedroom window. It was three o’clock. I had been reading my usual late-night fare, Stedmann’s History of World War I. For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.”

  Comes a tap at the door. Is it guerrilla, drughead, Ku Kluxer, Choctaw, or love couple?

  Love couple.

  What seems to be the trouble? It seems their child, a love child, is very sick. I know you’re not a pediatrician but the other doctors won’t come, etcetera. Will I come? O.K.

  Grab my bag, and down through the azaleas and into a pirogue, I squatting amidships, boy and girl paddling as expertly as Cajuns. A sinking yellow moon shatters in the ripples.

  They speak freely of themselves. He’s a tousled blond lad with a splendid fan-shaped beard like Jeb Stuart (I can tell he’s from these parts by the way he says fo’teen for fourteen, Bugaloosa for Bogalusa), gold-haired, gray-jeaned, bare-chested and -footed. She’s a dark little Pocahontas from Brooklyn (I judge, for she speaks of hang-gups). They’ve given up city, home, family, career, religion, to live a perfect life of love and peace with a dozen others on a hummock with nothing else for a shelter in the beginning than an abandoned Confederate salt mine. There they’ve revived a few of the pleasanter Choctaw customs such as building chickees and smoking rabbit cannab, a variety of Cannabis indica that grows wild in the swamp.

  “You don’t remember me, Dr. More.” The boy speaks behind me.

  “No.”

  “I’m Chuck.”

  “Chuck?”

  “Chuck Parker.”

  “Yes of course. I know your father very well.”

  “My poor father.”

  How is it that children can be more beautiful than the sum of their parents’ beauty? Ramona is a stork-legged, high-hipped, lacquer-headed garden-clubber from Spartanburg. Charley is a pocked-nosed, beat-up, mashed-down Gene Sarazen. And here is golden-haired golden-limbed Chuck looking like Phoebus Apollo or Sir Lancelot in hip-huggers.

  When we reach the hummock, the sky in the east has turned sickly and tentative with dawn.

  They’re camping near the mouth of old Empire Number Two, the salt mine that supplied Dick Taylor during the Red River campaign. Except for an ember or two there is no sign of the others. In a swale spring with cypress needles Chuck has built a chickee of loblolly chinked with blue bayou clay.

  As we enter the chickee, fragrant with bayberry smoke, a tall brown-haired girl rises and closes a book on her finger, for all the world like a baby-sitter in Paradise when the folks come home—except that her reading light is a candle made from wax myrtle and bayberries. Chuck stops her and introduces us. Her name is Hester. Instead of leaving, she squats cross-legged on the cypress needles.

  Afterwards Chuck tells me in her hearing, “Hester has her own chickee.”

  “Is that so,” I answer, scratching my head.

  I take a look at Hester’s book, still closed on her finger. A good way to size up people. It is not what you might think, Oriental or revolutionary. It is, of all things under the sun, Erle Stanley Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws.

  The baby, as I had reason from experience to expect and had in fact prepared my bag for, suffers from dehydration. He’s dried up like a prune. The treatment is simple and the results spectacular. Slip a needle in his scalp vein and hang a bottle of glucose from a loblolly twig.

  Mama watched her baby get well before her eyes, reviving like a wilted hydrangea stuck in a bucket of water. I watched Mama. Ethel is a dark, quick littl
e Pocahontas with hairbraids, blue Keds, jean shorts, and sharp soiled knees. She’s not my type, being a certain kind of Smith girl, a thin moody Smithie who props cheek on knee, doesn’t speak to freshmen, doesn’t focus her eyes, and is prone to quick sullen decisions, leaping onto her little basketed bike and riding off without explanation.

  (Hester is my type: post-Protestant, post-rebellion, post-ideology—reading Perry Mason here on a little ideological island!—reverted all the way she is, clear back to pagan innocence like a shepherd girl piping a tune on a Greek vase.)

  When the sun clears the hummock, we sit on the bayou bank feeling the warmth on our backs, Ethel holding the baby, Chuck holding the infusion bottle. Hester sits cross-legged and stare-eyed, looking at nothing, smoothing her calves with her hands.

  “How about that?” murmurs Chuck, as the baby’s wrinkles disappear. What a lordly youth, with a smooth simple chest, simple large golden arms and legs, the large wrists and boxy knees of a tennis player.

  Now the sun, breaking through the morning fog and live oaks, strikes shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Two orange-colored warblers fly at each other in the sunlight, claws upraised like cockerels. A swarm of gnats hangs over the water motionless and furious, like a molecule. I eat a scuppernong. It is fat and tart.

  “It wouldn’t be bad to live here,” I tell Chuck.

  “Why don’t you? Come and live with us.” He turns to Ethel but she gives him her hooded Smithie look.

  “Where would I live?”

  “Here,” says Hester. “There’s my chickee.”

  Does she mean live with her or build my own chickee close by? She’s from Massachusetts or Rhode Island. For car she says c?.

  “What have you got to lose, Doc?” asks Chuck.

  “Well—”

  The glucose bottle is empty. Ethel frowns and takes baby and bottle inside.

  “Are you happy over there?”

  “Happy?”