by Walker Percy
Now Aunt Emily, fingernails clicking over the keys, comes back to the tune, the sweet sad piping of the nineteenth century, good as it can be but not good enough. To protect myself, I take one of the photographs from the mantel.
“Is she coming?” asks my aunt during the pause.
“Kate? No.”
“Well. No matter.”
Again I hold the picture to the light. The sky is darkening and a fresh wind has sprung up.
“Why didn’t you get into the picture, Sweetie?” I ask her. “Weren’t you there?”
“No indeed. Do you know what they wanted to do?”
“What?”
“Go gallivanting off to Hungary to shoot quail. I said, My God, you can shoot quail in Feliciana Parish. Anyhow I heard that something queer was going on in München. There was some kind of putsch and I didn’t like the smell of it. So off they went to hunt quail in Hungary and off I went to my putsch.” She watches me replace the picture. “We’ll not see their like again. The age of the Catos is gone. Only my Jules is left. And Sam Yerger. Won’t it be good to see Sam again?”
This is absurd of course. Uncle Jules is no Cato. And as for Sam Yerger: Sam is only a Cato on long Sunday afternoons and in the company of my aunt. She transfigures everyone. Mercer she still sees as the old retainer. Uncle Jules she sees as the Creole Cato, the last of the heroes—whereas the truth is that Uncle Jules is a canny Cajun straight from Bayou Lafourche, as canny as a Marseilles merchant and a very good fellow, but no Cato. All the stray bits and pieces of the past, all that is feckless and gray about people, she pulls together into an unmistakable visage of the heroic or the craven, the noble or the ignoble. So strong is she that sometimes the person and the past are in fact transfigured by her. They become what she sees them to be. Uncle Jules has come to see himself as the Creole member of the gens, the Beauregard among the Lees. Mercer is on occasions not distinguishable from an old retainer. Truthfully I do not know, and Mercer does not know, what Mercer really is.
The storm which has been brewing since noon now breaks over our heads. Thunder rattles the panes. We walk out on the gallery to watch it. A rushing Gulf wind slashes the banana leaves into ribbons and blows dead camellia blooms across the yard. Veils of rain, parted for a second by the house, rush back together again. Trash from the camphor trees rattles on the roof. We stroll arm in arm up and down the lee gallery like passengers on a promenade.
“After Germany I insisted on going back to England. I wanted to see the Lake Country again.”
“Did Father go?”
“Jack? Heavens no. He met two of his buddies from Charlottesville and Princeton and they took off helter-skelter up the Rhine. Off he went with a bottle of Liebfraumilch under one arm and Wilhelm Meister under the other.” (But they do not fit, I think for the hundredth time: your student prince and the ironic young dude on the mantel.)
“Jack,” she says in a different voice and immediately the Black Forest is two thousand miles away and forty years ago.
“Yes ma’am.” My neck begins to prickle with a dreadful-but-not-unpleasant eschatological prickling.
We take up our promenade. My aunt steps carefully, lining up her toe with the edge of the boards. She presses a finger against her lip, but it is not possible to tell whether she is smiling or grimacing.
“I had a brainstorm last night. It still looked reasonably good this morning. How does this strike you?”
“What?” My neck prickles like a bull terrier.
“Last week at Great Books I had a chat with old Dr Minor. I didn’t bring your name up. He did. He asked me what you were doing with yourself. When I told him, he said it was a shame because—and there was no reason for him to say this if it weren’t true—you have a keen mind and a natural scientific curiosity.”
I know what she is going to say. My aunt is convinced I have a “flair for research.” This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I’m not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded—and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else—I am a genius whom ordinary professions can’t satisfy. I tried research one summer. I got interested in the role of the acid-base balance in the formation of renal calculi; really, it’s quite an interesting problem. I had a hunch you might get pigs to form oxalate stones by manipulating the pH of the blood, and maybe even to dissolve them. A friend of mine, a boy from Pittsburg named Harry Stern, and I read up the literature and presented the problem to Minor. He was enthusiastic, gave us everything we wanted and turned us loose for the summer. But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads—now here is a fellow who does have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. By the middle of August I could not see what difference it made whether the pigs got kidney stones or not (they didn’t, incidentally), compared to the mystery of those summer afternoons. I asked Harry if he would excuse me. He was glad enough to, since I was not much use to him sitting on the floor. I moved down to the Quarter where I spent the rest of the vacation in quest of the spirit of summer and in the company of an attractive and confused girl from Bennington who fancied herself a poet.
But I am mistaken. My aunt is not suggesting that I go into research.
“I want you to think about entering medical school this fall. You know you’ve always had it in the back of your mind. Now I’ve fixed up your old garçonnière in the carriage house. Wait till you see it—I’ve added a kitchenette and some bookshelves. You will have absolute privacy. We won’t even allow you in the house. No—it is not I doing something for you. We could use you around. Kate is going through something I don’t understand. Jules, my dear Jules won’t even admit anything is wrong. You and Sam are the only ones she’d ever listen to.”
We come to the corner of the gallery and a warm spray blows in our faces. One can smell the islands to the south. The rain slackens and tires hiss on the wet asphalt.
“Here’s what we’ll do. As soon as hot weather comes, we’ll all go up to Flat Rock, the whole family, Walter included. He’s already promised. We’ll have a nice long summer in the mountains and come back here in September and buckle down to work.”
Two cars come racing abreast down Prytania; someone shouts an obscenity in a wretched croaking voice. Our footsteps echo like pistol shots in the basement below.
“I don’t know.”
“You think about it.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She does not smile. Instead she stops me, holds me off.
“What is it you want out of life, son?” she asks with a sweetness that makes me uneasy.
“I don’t know’m. But I’ll move in whenever you want me.”
“Don’t you feel obliged to use your brain and to make a contribution?”
“No’m.”
She waits for me to say more. When I do not, she seems to forget about her idea. Far from holding my refusal against me, she links her arm in mine and resumes the promenade.
“I no longer pretend to understand the world.” She is shaking her head yet still smiling her sweet menacing smile. “The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears. The things we hold dear are reviled and spat upon.” She nods toward Prytania Street. “It’s an interesting age you will live in—though I can’t say I’m sorry to miss it. But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the evening land. That’s us all right. And I can tell you, my young friend, it is evening. It is very late.”
For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense. She understands the chaos to come. It seems so plain when I see it through her eyes. My duty in life is simple. I go to medical school. I live a long useful life serving my fellowman. What’s wrong with this? All I have to do is remember it.
“—you have too good a mind to throw away. I don’t quite know what we’re doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”
She is right. I will say yes. I will say yes even though I do not really know what she is talking about.
But I hear myself saying: “As a matter of fact I was planning to leave Gentilly soon, but for a different reason. There is something—” I stop. My idea of a search seems absurd.
To my surprise this lame reply is welcomed by my aunt.
“Of course!” she cries. “You’re doing something every man used to do. When your father finished college, he had his Wanderjahr, a fine year’s ramble up the Rhine and down the Loire, with a pretty girl on one arm and a good comrade on the other. What happened to you when you finished college? War. And I’m so proud of you for that. But that’s enough to take it out of any man.”
Wanderjahr. My heart sinks. We do not understand each other after all. If I thought I’d spent the last four years as a Wanderjahr, before “settling down,” I’d shoot myself on the spot.
“How do you mean, take it out of me?”
“Your scientific calling, your love of books and music. Don’t you remember how we used to talk—on the long winter evenings when Jules would go to bed and Kate would go dancing, how we used to talk! We tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. Don’t you remember discovering Euripides and Jean-Christophe?”
“You discovered them for me. It was always through you that—” All at once I am sleepy. It requires an effort to put one foot in front of the other. Fortunately my aunt decides to sit down. I wipe off an iron bench with my handkerchief and we sit, still arm in arm. She gives me a pat.
“Now. I want you to make me a promise.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Your birthday is one week from today.”
“Is that right?”
“You will be thirty years old. Don’t you think a thirty year old man ought to know what he wants to do with his life?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Then?”
“Yes. Next Wednesday afternoon—after Sam leaves. I’ll meet you here at this spot. Will you promise to come?”
“Yes ma’am.” She expects a great deal from Sam’s visit.
Pushing up my sleeve to see my watch, she sucks in her breath. “Back to the halt and the lame and the generally no ’count.”
“Sweetie, lie down first and let me rub your neck.” I can tell from her eyes when she has a headache.
Later, when Mercer brings the car around to the front steps, she lays a warm dry cheek against mine. “m-M! You’re such a comfort to me. You remind me so much of your father.”
“I can’t seem to remember him.”
“He was the sweetest old thing. So gay. And did the girls fall over him. And a mind! He had a mind like a steel trap, an analytical mind like yours.” (She always says this, though I have never analyzed anything.) “He had the pick of New Orleans.”
(And picked Anna Castagne.)
Mercer, who has changed to a cord coat and cap, holds the door grudgingly and cranes up and down the street as much as to say that he may be a chauffeur but not a footman.
She has climbed into the car but she does not release my hand.
“He would have been much happier in research,” she says and lets me go.
6
THE RAIN HAS STOPPED. Kate calls from under the steps.
She is in the best of spirits. She shows me the brick she found under linoleum and the shutters Walter bought in a junkyard. It bothers her that when the paint was removed the shutters came somewhat frayed from the vat.
“They will form a partition here. The fountain and planter will go out here.” By extending the partition into the garden, a corner of the wall will be enclosed to form a pleasant little nook. I can see why she is so serious: truthfully it seems that if she can just hit upon the right place, a shuttered place of brick and vine and flowing water, her very life can be lived. “I feel wonderful.”
“What made you feel wonderful?”
“It was the storm.” Kate clears the broken settee and pulls me down in a crash of wicker. “The storm cut loose, you and Mother walked up and down, up and down, and I fixed myself a big drink and enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Are you ready to go to Lejiers?”
“Oh I couldn’t do that,” she says, plucking her thumb. “Where are you going?” she asks nervously, hoping that I will leave.
“To Magazine Street.” I know she isn’t listening. Her breathing is shallow and irregular, as if she were giving thought to each breath, “Is it bad this time?”
She shrugs.
“As bad as last time?”
“Not as bad.” She gives her knee a commonplace slap. After a while she says: “Poor Walter.”
“What’s the matter with Walter?”
“Do you know what he does down here?”
“No.”
“He measures the walls. He carries a little steel tape in his pocket. He can’t get over how thick the walls are.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your mother thought it was the accident that still bothered you.”
“Did you expect me to tell her otherwise?”
“That it did not bother you?”
“That it gave me my life. That’s my secret, just as the war is your secret.”
“I did not like the war.”
“Because afterwards everyone said: what a frightful experience she went through and doesn’t she do remarkably well. So then I did very well indeed. I would have made a good soldier.”
“Why do you want to be a soldier?”
“How simple it would be to fight. What a pleasant thing it must be to be among people who are afraid for the first time when you yourself for the first time in your life have a proper flesh-and-blood enemy to be afraid of. What a lark! Isn’t that the secret of heroes?”
“I couldn’t say. I wasn’t a hero.”
Kate muses. “Can you remember the happiest moment of your life?”
“No. Unless it was getting out of the army.”
“I can. It was in the fall of nineteen fifty-five. I was nineteen years old and I was going to marry Lyell and Lyell was a fine fellow. We were driving from Pass Christian to Natchez to see Lyell’s family and the next day we were going up to Oxford to see a game. So we went to Natchez and the next day drove to Oxford and saw the game and went to the dance. Of course Lyell had to drive home after the dance. We got almost to Port Gibson and it was after dawn but there was a ground fog. The Trace was st
ill dark in low spots. Lyell passed a car in one of the dips. It was a coupe with the word Spry painted on the door.” Kate tells this in her wan analytic voice and with something of a relish for the oddness of it. “Spry was the last thing I saw. Lyell ran head on into a truckful of cotton-pickers. I must have been slumped down so low that I rolled up into a ball. When I woke up I was lying on the front porch of a shack. I wasn’t even scratched. I heard somebody say that the white man had been killed. I could only think of one thing: I didn’t want to be taken to Lyell’s family in Natchez. Two policemen offered to drive me to a hospital. But I felt all right—somebody had given me a shot. I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper. (I can still remember what good coffee it was.) When the blouse came back, I put it on, walked over to the station and caught the Illinois Central for New Orleans. I slept like a log and got off at Carrollton Avenue early in the evening and walked home.”
“When was the happiest moment?”
“It was on the bus. I just stood there until the door opened, then I got on and we went sailing along from bright sunshine down through deep clefts as cool and dark as a springhouse.”
Kate frowns and drums her fingers on the wicker. A diesel horn blows on the river. Overhead a motor labors. Mercer thinks he has to bear down on the waxer—I have noticed that Negroes do not have an affection for motors. “Pardon,” says Kate, rising abruptly and leaving. The little Yankee word serves her well: she leaves in disguise. A water pipe sings and stops with a knock. When Kate returns, she cranes around and smacks her arm cowboy style. The light glimmers in the courtyard and the empty house above us roars like a seashell.
“Does this mean you’re not going to marry Walter?”
“Probably not,” says Kate, yawning at a great rate.
