by Walker Percy
Truthfully, it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance which constrains me from mentioning the object of my search. For, to begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?
On my honor, I do not know the answer.
As the bus ascends the overpass, a concrete hill which affords a fine view of New Orleans, I discover that I am frowning and gazing at a noble young calf clad in gun-metal nylon. Now beyond question she is aware of me: she gives her raincoat a sharp tug and gives me a look of annoyance—or do I imagine this? I must make sure, so I lift my hat and smile at her as much as to say that we might still become friends. But it is no use. I have lost her forever. She flounces out of the bus in a loud rustle of cellophane.
I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.
Today I am in luck. Who should come out of Pirate’s Alley half a block ahead of me but William Holden!
Holden crosses Royal and turns toward Canal. As yet he is unnoticed. The tourists are either browsing along antique shops or snapping pictures of balconies. No doubt he is on his way to Galatoire’s for lunch. He is an attractive fellow with his ordinary good looks, very suntanned, walking along hands in pockets, raincoat slung over one shoulder. Presently he passes a young couple, who are now between me and him. Now we go along, the four of us, not twenty feet apart. It takes two seconds to size up the couple. They are twenty, twenty-one, and on their honeymoon. Not Southern. Probably Northeast. He wears a jacket with leather elbow patches, pipestem pants, dirty white shoes, and affects the kind of rolling seafaring gait you see in Northern college boys. Both are plain. He has thick lips, cropped reddish hair and skin to match. She is mousy. They are not really happy. He is afraid their honeymoon is too conventional, that they are just another honeymoon couple. No doubt he figured it would be fun to drive down the Shenandoah Valley to New Orleans and escape the honeymooners at Niagara Falls and Saratoga. Now fifteen hundred miles from home they find themselves surrounded by couples from Memphis and Chicago. He is anxious; he is threatened from every side. Each stranger he passes is a reproach to him, every doorway a threat. What is wrong? he wonders. She is unhappy but for a different reason, because he is unhappy and she knows it but doesn’t know why.
Now they spot Holden. The girl nudges her companion. The boy perks up for a second, but seeing Holden doesn’t really help him. On the contrary. He can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own shadowy and precarious existence. Obviously he is more miserable than ever. What a deal, he must be thinking, trailing along behind a movie star—we might just as well be rubbernecking in Hollywood.
Holden slaps his pockets for a match. He has stopped behind some ladies looking at iron furniture on the sidewalk. They look like housewives from Hattiesburg come down for a day of shopping. He asks for a match; they shake their heads and then recognize him. There follows much blushing and confusion. But nobody can find a match for Holden. By now the couple have caught up with him. The boy holds out a light, nods briefly to Holden’s thanks, then passes on without a flicker of recognition. Holden walks along between them for a second; he and the boy talk briefly, look up at the sky, shake their heads. Holden gives them a pat on the shoulder and moves on ahead.
The boy has done it! He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s, by refusing to be stampeded like the ladies from Hattiesburg. He is a citizen like Holden; two men of the world they are. All at once the world is open to him. Nobody threatens from patio and alley. His girl is open to him too. He puts his arm around her neck, noodles her head. She feels the difference too. She had not known what was wrong nor how it was righted but she knows now that all is well.
Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it. Now everyone is aware of him. He creates a regular eddy among the tourists and barkeeps and B-girls who come running to the doors of the joints.
I am attracted to movie stars but not for the usual reasons. I have no desire to speak to Holden or get his autograph. It is their peculiar reality which astounds me. The Yankee boy is well aware of it, even though he pretends to ignore Holden. Clearly he would like nothing better than to take Holden over to his fraternity house in the most casual way. “Bill, I want you to meet Phil. Phil, Bill Holden,” he would say and go sauntering off in the best seafaring style.
It is lunch hour on Canal Street. A parade is passing, but no one pays much attention. It is still a week before Mardi Gras and this is a new parade, a women’s krewe from Gentilly. A krewe is a group of people who get together at carnival time and put on a parade and a ball. Anyone can form a krewe. Of course there are the famous old krewes like Comus and Rex and Twelfth Night, but there are also dozens of others. The other day a group of Syrians from Algiers formed a krewe named Isis. This krewe today, this must be Linda’s krewe. I promised to come to see her. Red tractors pulled the floats along; scaffoldings creak, paper and canvas tremble. Linda, I think, is one of half a dozen shepherdesses dressed in short pleated skirts and mercury sandals with thongs crisscrossed up bare calves. But they are masked and I can’t be sure. If she is, her legs are not so fine after all. All twelve legs are shivery and goosepimpled. A few businessmen stop to watch the girls and catch trinkets.
A warm wind springs up from the south piling up the clouds and bearing with it a far-off rumble, the first thunderstorm of the year. The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints. Am I mistaken or has a fog of uneasiness, a thin gas of malaise, settled on the street? The businessmen hurry back to their offices, the shoppers to their cars, the tourists to their hotels. Ah, William Holden, we already need you again. Already the fabric is wearing thin without you.
The mystery deepens. For ten minutes I stand talking to Eddie Lovell and at the end of it, when we shake hands and part, it seems to me that I cannot answer the simplest question about what has taken place. As I listen to Eddie speak plausibly and at length of one thing and another—business, his wife Nell, the old house they are redecorating—the fabric pulls together into one bright texture of investments, family projects, lovely old houses, little theater readings and such. It comes over me: this is how one lives! My exile in Gentilly has been the worst kind of self-deception.
Yes! Look at him. As he talks, he slaps a folded newspaper against his pants leg and his eye watches me and at the same time sweeps the terrain behind me, taking note of the slightest movement. A green truck turns down Bourbon Street; the eye sizes it up, flags it down, demands credentials, waves it on. A businessman turns in at the Maison Blanche building; the eye knows him, even knows what he is up to. And all the while he talks very well. His lips move muscularly, molding words into pleasing shapes, marshalling arguments, and during the slight pauses are held poised, attractively everted in a Charles Boyer pout—while a little web of saliva gathers in a corner like the clear oil of a good machine. Now he jingles the coins deep in his pocket. No mystery here!—he is as cogent as a bird dog quartering a field. He understands everything out there and everything out there is something to be understood.
Eddie watches the last float, a doubtful affair with a squashed cornucopia.
“We’d better do better than that.”
“We will.”
“Are you riding Neptune?”
“No.”
I offer Eddie my four call-outs for the Neptune ball. There is always the pr
oblem of out-of-town clients, usually Texans, and especially their wives. Eddie thanks me for this and for something else.
“I want to thank you for sending Mr Quieulle to me. I really appreciate it.”
“Who?”
“Old man Quieulle.”
“Yes, I remember.” Eddie has sunk mysteriously into himself, eyes twinkling from the depths. “Don’t tell me—”
Eddie nods.
“—that he has already set up his trust and up and died?”
Eddie nods, still sunk into himself. He watches me carefully, hanging fire until I catch up with him.
“In Mrs Quieulle’s name?”
Again a nod; his jaw is shot out.
“How big?”
The same dancing look, now almost malignant. “Just short of nine hundred and fifty thou.” His tongue curves around and seeks the hollow of his cheek.
“A fine old man,” I say absently, noticing that Eddie has become as solemn as a bishop.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Binx. I count it a great privilege to have known him. I’ve never known anyone, young or old, who possessed a greater fund of knowledge. That man spoke to me for two hours about the history of the crystallization of sugar and it was pure romance. I was fascinated.”
Eddie tells me how much he admires my aunt and my cousin Kate. Several years ago Kate was engaged to marry Eddie’s brother Lyell. On the very eve of the wedding Lyell was killed in an accident, the same accident which Kate survived. Now Eddie comes around to face me, his cottony hair flying up in the breeze. “I have never told anybody what I really think of that woman—” Eddie says “woman” as a deliberate liberty to be set right by the compliment to follow. “I think more of Miss Emily—and Kate—than anyone else in the world except my own mother—and wife. The good that woman has done.”
“That’s mighty nice, Eddie.”
He murmurs something about how beautiful Kate is, that next to Nell etc.—and this is a surprise because my cousin Nell Lovell is a plain horsy old girl. “Will you please give them both my love?”
“I certainly will.”
The parade is gone. All that is left is the throb of a drum.
“What do you do with yourself?” asks Eddie and slaps his paper against his pants leg.
“Nothing much,” I say, noticing that Eddie is not listening.
“Come see us, fellah! I want you to see what Nell has done.” Nell has taste. The two of them are forever buying shotgun cottages in rundown neighborhoods and fixing them up with shutterblinds in the bathroom, saloon doors for the kitchen, old bricks and a sugar kettle for the back yard, and selling in a few months for a big profit.
The cloud is turning blue and pressing down upon us. Now the street seems closeted; the bricks of the buildings glow with a yellow stored-up light. I look at my watch: one is not late at my aunt’s house. In an instant Eddie’s hand is out.
“Give the bride and groom my best.”
“I will.”
“Walter is a wonderful fellow.”
“He is.”
Before letting me go, Eddie comes one inch closer and asks in a special voice about Kate.
“She seems fine now, Eddie. Quite happy and secure.”
“I’m so damn glad. Fellah!” A final shake from side to side, like a tiller. “Come see us!”
“I will!”
2
MERCER LETS ME IN. “Look out now! Uh oh.” He carries on in a mock astonishment and falls back limberkneed. Today he does not say “Mister Jack” and I know that the omission is deliberate, the consequence of a careful weighing of pros and cons. Tomorrow the scales might tip the other way (today’s omission will go into the balance) and it will be “Mister Jack.”
For some reason it is possible to see Mercer more clearly today than usual. Ordinarily it is hard to see him because of the devotion. He worked for my grandfather in Feliciana Parish before Aunt Emily brought him to New Orleans. He is thought to be devoted to us and we to him. But the truth is that Mercer and I are not at all devoted to each other. My main emotion around Mercer is unease that in threading his way between servility and presumption, his foot might slip. I wait on Mercer, not he on me.
“Didn’t nobody tell me you was coming!” cries Mercer, feeling the balance tilt against me. “I was just commencing to make a fire.”
Mercer is a chesty sand-colored Negro with a shaved head and a dignified Adolph Menjou mustache. Behind the mustache, his face, I notice, is not at all devoted but is as sulky as a Pullman porter’s. My aunt brought him down from Feliciana, but he has changed much since then. Not only is he a city man now; he is also Mrs Cutrer’s butler and as such presides over a shifting menage of New Orleans Negresses, Jamaicans and lately Hondurians. He is conscious of his position and affects a clipped speech, pronouncing his Rs and ings and diphthonging his Is Harlem-style.
Despite the gray day outside, the living room is bright, but it is not snug. The windows are open to the ceiling and the gray sky comes pouring in.
Mercer puts coal on the blazing kindling. His white coat, starched stiff as armor, creaks and rustles. A welt and a tuck form at the base of his skull. He places the coals carefully, his hand passing slowly and imperviously through the flame. Head thrown back, he breathes heavily through his mouth, holding his breath as he places a coal, then expelling it in a hiss.
We might be back in Feliciana. Here is the very sound of winter mornings in Feliciana twenty years ago when cold dark dawns were announced by the clatter of the handle on the scuttle and Mercer’s strangled breathing.
The room is a beautiful room and by every right a cheerful room, with its walls of books, its bokhara glowing like a jewel, its blackening portraits. The prisms of the chandelier wink red in the firelight. Scattered over the satinwood table is the usual litter of quarterlies and rough-paper weeklies and, as always, the great folio The Life of the Buddha. My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice.
Mercer is speaking to me.
“—but they still hasn’t the factories and the—ah—producing set-up we has.”
So Mercer wants to talk about current events. I do so willingly though I am certain he knows more about the subject than I do. He stands facing neither me nor the fire but in a kind of limbo. He holds the coal scuttle and puts one foot toward the door but neither quite stays nor leaves.
Mercer has dissolved somewhat in recent years. It is not so easy to say who he is any more. My aunt truly loves him and sees him as a faithful retainer, a living connection with a bygone age. She tells about Mercer’s devotion to Dr Wills, how he went around for days after Dr Wills’ death, his face streaming with tears. I do not doubt this. Yet I know for a fact that Mercer steals regularly from her by getting kickbacks from the servants and tradespeople. But you can’t call him a thief and let it go at that. Mercer has aspirations. How does he see himself? When he succeeds in seeing himself, it is as a remarkable sort of fellow, a man who keeps himself well-informed in science and politics. This is why I am always uneasy when I talk to him. I hate it when his vision of himself dissolves and he sees himself as neither, neither old retainer nor expert in current events. Then his eyes get muddy and his face runs together behind his mustache. Last Christmas I went looking for him in his rooms over the garage. He wasn’t there but on his bed lay a well-thumbed volume put out by the Rosicrucians called How to Harness Your Secret Powers. The poor bastard.
While Mercer speaks of current events, I edge closer to the mantelpiece. There are the Cutrers in their “grand slam” year. Uncle Jules was Rex, Kate was queen of Neptune, Aunt Emily won the Picayune cup for her work with the Home Service. Everyone said that Kate was a lovely queen, but she wasn’t. When Kate gets her hair waved and puts on an evening gown, she looks frumpy; the face in the picture is plain as a pudding.
One picture I never tire looking at. For ten years I have looked at it on this mantelpiece and tried to understand it. Now I take it down and hold it again
st the light from the darkening sky. Here are the two brothers, Dr Wills and Judge Anse with their arms about each other’s shoulders, and my father in front, the three standing on a mountain trail against a dark forest. It is the Schwarzwald. A few years after the first war they had gotten together for once and made the grand tour. Only Alex Bolling is missing—he is in the third frame: an astonishingly handsome young man with the Rupert Brooke-Galahad sort of face you see so often in pictures of World War I soldiers. His death in the Argonne (five years before) was held to be fitting since the original Alex Bolling was killed with Roberdaux Wheat in the Hood breakthrough at Gaines Mill in 1862. My father is wearing some kind of fraternity blazer and a hard katy straw. He looks different from the brothers. Alex too is much younger, yet he is still one of them. But not my father. It is hard to say why. The elder Bollings—and Alex—are serene in their identities. Each one coincides with himself, just as the larch trees in the photograph coincide with themselves: Judge Anse with his drooping mustache and thin cold cheeks, the hard-eyed one who is still remembered for having publicly described a Louisiana governor as a peckerwood son of a bitch; Dr Wills, the lion-headed one, the rumpled country genius who developed a gut anastomosis still in use; and Alex, serene in his dream of youth and of his hero’s death to come. But my father is not one of them. His feet are planted wide apart, arms locked around an alpenstock behind him; the katy is pushed back releasing a forelock. His eyes are alight with an expression I can’t identify; it is not far from what his elders might have called smart-alecky. He is something of a dude with his round head and tricky tab collar. Yet he is, by every right, one of them. He was commissioned in the RCAF in 1940 and got himself killed before his country entered the war. And in Crete. And in the wine dark sea. And by the same Boche. And with a copy of The Shropshire Lad in his pocket. Again I search the eyes, each eye a stipple or two in a blurred oval. Beyond a doubt they are ironical.
