by Walker Percy
Sam is spieling in pretty good style, all the while ironing out the tablecloth into shallow gutters with the blade of his knife. A new prefatory note creeps into his voice. It is like a symphony when the “good” part is coming, and I know that Sam is working up to one of his stories. These stories of Sam used to arouse in me an appreciation so keen and pleasurable that it bordered on the irritable. On the dark porch in Feliciana he told us once of the time when he made a journey up the headwaters of the Orinoco and caught a fever and lay ill for weeks. One night he heard an incredibly beautiful voice sing the whole of Winterreise. He was sure it was delirium until the next morning when he met the singer, an Austrian engineer who sang lieder better than Lotte Lehmann, etc. When he finished I was practically beside myself with irritable pleasure and became angry with the others because they were not sufficiently moved by the experience.
“Emily, do you remember the night we saw There Shall Be No Night and you were so moved that you insisted on walking all the way back to the Carlyle?”
But Kate pays no attention. She holds her feathered thumb to the light and inspects it minutely. “Last night everything was fine until I finished the book. Then it became a matter of waiting. What next, I thought. I began to get a little scared—for the first time I had the feeling of coming to the end of my rope. I became aware of my own breathing. Things began to slip a little. I fixed myself a little drink and took two nembutals and waited for the lift.”
It is the first time she has spoken of her capsules. My simplemindedness serves her well.
“You know what happened then? What did Sam say? Never mind. Did you see Merle? No? Hm. What happened was the most trivial thing imaginable, nothing grand at all, though I would like to think it was. I took six or eight capsules altogether. I knew that wouldn’t kill me. My Lord, I didn’t want to die—not at that moment. I only wanted to—break out, or off, off dead center—Listen. Isn’t it true that the only happy men are wounded men? Admit it! Isn’t that the truth?” She breaks off and goes off into a fit of yawning. “I felt so queer. Everything seemed so—no ’count somehow, you know?” She swings her foot and hums a little tune. “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember too well. How strange. I’ve always remembered every little thing.”
“—and you spoke to me for the first time of your messianic hopes?” Sam smiles at my aunt. In Feliciana we used to speculate on the new messiah, the scientist-philosopher-mystic who would come striding through the ruins with the Gita in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other. But today Sam miscalculates. My aunt says nothing. The thumbnail goes on combing the lion’s mane.
Dinner over, Uncle Oscar waits in the dining room until the others have left, then seizes his scrotum and gives his leg a good shake.
I rise unsteadily, sleepy all at once to the point of drunkenness.
“Wait.” Kate takes my arm urgently in both hands. “I am going with you.”
“All right. But first I think I’ll take a little nap on the porch.”
“I mean to Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I go?”
“No.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Could you change it to tonight and get two tickets on the train?”
“Why the train?” I begin to realize how little I have slept during the past week.
“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down and I’ll take care of it.”
“All right.”
“After Chicago do you think there is a possibility we might take a trip out west and stay for a while in some little town like Modesto or Fresno?”
“It is possible.”
“I’ll fix everything.” She sounds very happy. “Do you have any money?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
It is a matter for astonishment, I think drowsily in the hammock, that Kate should act with such dispatch—out she came, heels popping, arm in arm with her stepmother, snapped her purse and with Sam looking on, somewhat gloomily it struck me, off she went in her stiff little Plymouth—and then I think why. It is trains. When it comes to a trip, to the plain business of going, just stepping up into the Pullman and gliding out of town of an evening, she is as swift and remorseless as Delia Street.
Now later, on Prytania, Uncle Oscar hands Aunt Edna into the station wagon—they are bound for their Patio-by-Candlelight tour—and goes huffing around to his door, rared back and with one hand pressed into his side. Sam tiptoes to the screen. “Well now look ahere, Brother Andy. Ain’t that the Kingfish and Madame Queen? Sho ’tis.”
In this vertigo of exhaustion, laughter must be guarded against like retching.
“Brother Andy, is you getting much?”
“No.” My stomach further obliges Sam with a last despairing heave. Oh Lord.
Later there seems to come into my hand—and with it some instructions from Sam of which there is no more to be remembered than that they were delivered in the tone of one of my aunt’s grand therapeutic schemes—a squarish bottle, warmed by Sam’s body and known to my fingers through the ridge of glass left by the mold and the apothecary symbol oz or
2
SURE ENOUGH, THREE hours later we are rocking along an uneven roadbed through the heart of the Ponchitoula swamp.
No sooner do we open the heavy door of Sieur Iberville and enter the steel corridor with its gelid hush and the stray voices from open compartments and the dark smell of going high in the nostrils—than the last ten years of my life take on the shadowy aspect of a sojourn between train rides. It was ten years ago that I last rode a train, from San Francisco to New Orleans, and so ten years since I last enjoyed the peculiar gnosis of trains, stood on the eminence from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one’s privileged progress through the world. But trains have changed. Gone are the uppers and lowers, partitions and cranks, and the green velour; only the porter remains, the same man, I think, a black man with palms the color of shrimp and a neck swollen with dislike. Our roomettes turn out to be little coffins for a single person. From time to time, I notice, people in roomettes stick their heads out into the corridor for some sight of human kind.
Kate is affected by the peculiar dispensation of trains. Her gray jacket comes just short of her wide hips and the tight skirt curves under her in a nice play on vulgarity. On the way to the observation car she pulls me into the platform of the vestibule and gives me a kiss, grabbing me under the coat like a waitress. In celebration of Mardi Gras, she has made up her eyes with a sparkle of mascara and now she looks up at me with a black spiky look.
“Are we going to live in Modesto?”
“Sure,” I say, uneasy at her playfulness. She is not as well as she makes out. She is not safe on a train after all; it is rather that by a kind of bravado she can skim along in the very face of the danger.
The observation car is crowded, but we find seats together on a sofa where I am jammed against a fellow reading a newspaper. We glide through the cottages of Carrollton cutting off back yards in odd trapezoids, then through the country clubs and cemeteries of Metaire. In the gathering dusk the cemeteries look at first like cities, with their rows of white vaults, some two- and three-storied and forming flats and tenements, and the tiny streets and corners and curbs and even plots of lawn, all of such a proportion that in the very instant of being mistaken and from the eye’s own necessity, they set themselves off into the distance like a city seen from far away. Now in the suburbs we ride at a witch’s level above the gravelly roofs.
It gradually forces itself upon me that a man across the aisle is looking at me with a strange insistence. Kate nudges me. It is Sidney Gross and his wife, beyond a doubt bound also for the convention. The son of Sidney Gross of Danziger and Gross, Sidney is a short fresh-faced crinkle-haired boy with the bright beamish look Southern Jews sometimes have. There has always been a special co
rdiality between us. He married a pretty Mississippi girl; she, unlike Sidney, is wary of such encounters—she would know which of us spoke first at out last encounter—so she casts sleepy looks right past us, pausing, despite herself on Kate’s white face and black spiky eyes. But Sidney hunches over toward us, beaming, a stalwart little pony back with his head well set on his shoulders and his small ears lying flat.
“Well well well. Trader Jack. So you slipped up on your plane reservations too.”
“Hello, Sidney, Margot. This is Kate Cutrer.”
Margot becomes very friendly, in the gossipy style of the Mississippi Delta.
“So you forgot about it being Mardi Gras and couldn’t get a plane.”
“No, we like the train.”
Sidney is excited, not by the trip as I am, but by the convention. Leaning across the aisle with a program rolled up in his hand, he explains that he is scheduled for a panel on tax relief for bond funds. “What about you?”
“I think I am taking part in something called a Cracker Barrel Session.”
“You’ll like it. Everybody talks right off the top of their head. You can take your coat off, get up and stretch. Anything. Last year we had this comical character from Georgia.” Sidney casts about for some way of conveying just how comical and failing, passes on without minding. “What a character. Extremely comical. What’s the topic?”
“Competing with the variable endowments.”
“Oh yass,” says Sidney with a wry look of our trade. “I don’t worry about it.” He slides the cylinder of paper to and fro. “Do you?”
“No.”
Sidney suggests a bridge game, but Kate begs off. The Grosses move to a table in the corner and start playing gin rummy.
Kate, who has been fumbling in her purse, becomes still. I feel her eyes on my face.
“Do you have my capsules?”
“What?”
“My capsules.”
“Why yes, I do. I forgot that I had them.”
Not taking her eyes from my face, she receives the bottle, puts it in her purse, snaps it.
“That’s not like you.”
“I didn’t take them.”
“Who did?”
“Sam gave them to me. It was while I was in the hammock. I hardly remember it.”
“He took them from my purse?”
“I don’t know.”
For a long moment she sits, hands in her lap, fingers curling up and stirring a little. Then abruptly she rises and leaves. When she returns, her face is scrubbed and pale, the moisture still dark at the roots of her hair. What has upset her is not the incident of the capsules but meeting the Grosses. It spoils everything, this prospect of making pleasant talk, of having a delightful time, as Sidney would put it (“There we were moping over missing the plane, when Jack Bolling shows up and we have ourselves a ball”)—when we might have gone rocking up through dark old Mississippi alone together in the midst of strangers. Still she is better. Perhaps it is her reviving hope of losing the Grosses to gin rummy or perhaps it is the first secret promise of the chemicals entering her blood.
Now, picking up speed, we gain the swamp. Kate and I sway against each other and watch the headlights of the cars on the swamp road, winking through the moss like big yellow lightning bugs.
The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.
The man next to me is getting off in St Louis. When the conductor comes to collect our tickets, he surrenders a stub: he is going home. His suit is good. He sits with his legs crossed, one well-clad haunch riding up like a ham, his top leg held out at an obtuse angle by the muscle of his calf. His brown hair is youthful (he himself is thirty-eight or forty) and makes a cowlick in front. With the cowlick and the black eyeglasses he looks quite a bit like the actor Gary Merrill and has the same certified permission to occupy pleasant space with his pleasant self. In ruddy good health, he muffles a hearty belch in a handkerchief. This very evening, no doubt, he has had an excellent meal at Galatoire’s, and the blood of his portal vein bears away a golden harvest of nutrient globules. When he first goes through his paper, he opens it like a book and I have no choice but to read the left page with him. We pause at an advertisement of a Bourbon Street nightclub which is a picture of a dancer with an oiled body. Her triceps arch forward like a mare’s. For a second we gaze heavy-lidded and pass on. Now he finds what he wants and folds his paper once, twice and again, into a neat packet exactly two columns wide, like a subway rider in New York. Propping it against his knee, he takes out a slender gold pencil, makes a deft one-handed adjustment, and underlines several sentences with straight black lines (he is used to underlining). Dreaming at his shoulder, I can make out no more than
In order to deepen and enrich the marital—
It is a counseling column which I too read faithfully.
The train sways through the swamp. The St Louisan, breathing powerfully through the stiff hairs of his nose, succeeds in sitting in such a manner, tilted over on his right hip and propped against himself, that his thigh forms a secure writing platform for the packet.
The voices in the car become fretful. It begins to seem that the passengers have ridden together for a long time and have developed secret understandings and old grudges. They speak crossly and elliptically to each other.
Staying awake is a kind of sickness and sleep is forever guarded against by a dizzy dutiful alertness. Waking wide-eyed dreams come as fitfully as swampfire.
Dr and Mrs Bob Dean autograph copies of their book Technique in Marriage in a Canal Street department store. A pair of beauties. I must have come in all the way from Gentilly, for I stand jammed against a table which supports a pyramid of books. I cannot take my eyes from the Deans: an oldish couple but still handsome and both, rather strangely, heavily freckled. As they wait for the starting time, they are jolly with each other and swap banter in the professional style of show people (I believe these preliminaries are called the warm-up). “No, we never argue,” says Bob Dean. “Because whenever an argument starts, we consult the chapter I wrote on arguments.” “No, dear,” says Jackie Dean. “It was I who wrote the chapter—” etc. Everyone laughs. I notice that nearly all the crowd jamming against me are women, firm middle-aged one-fifty pounders. Under drooping lids I watch the Deans, peculiarly affected by their routine which is staged so effortlessly that during the exchange of quips, they are free to cast business-like looks about them as if no one were present. But when they get down to business, they become as sober as Doukhobors and effuse an air of dedicated almost evangelical helpfulness. A copy of the book lies open on the table. I read: “Now with a tender regard for your partner remove your hand from the nipple and gently manipulate—” It is impossible not to imagine them at their researches, as solemn as a pair of brontosauruses, their heavy old freckled limbs about each other, hands probing skillfully for sensitive zones, pigmented areolas, out-of-the-way mucous glands, dormant vascular nexuses. A wave of prickling passes over me such as I have never experienced before.
My head, nodding like a daffodil, falls a good three inches toward the St Louisan before it jerks itself up. Kate sits shivering against me, but the St Louisan is as warm and solid as roast beef. As the train rocks along on its unique voyage through space-time, thousands of tiny thing-events bombard us like cosmic particles. Lying in a ditch outside is a scrap of newspaper with the date May 3, 1954. My Geiger counter clicks away like a teletype. But no one else seems to notice. Everyone is buried in his magazine. Kate is shaking like a leaf because she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot.
The St Louisan reads a headline
SCIENTIST PREDICTS FUTURE IF
NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT MISUSED
Out comes the gold pencil to make a neat black box. After reading for a moment he comes back to the beginning and is about to make a second concentric box, thinks better of it, takes
from his pocket a silver knife, undoes the scissors and clips the whole article, folds it and places it in his wallet. It is impossible to make out any of the underlined passages except the phrase: “the gradual convergence of physical science and social science.”
A very good phrase. I have to admire the St Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no longer eat and sleep regularly or write philosophical notes in my notebook and my fingernails are dirty. The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly. As late as a week ago, such a phrase as “hopefully awaiting the gradual convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences” would have provoked no more than an ironic tingle or two at the back of my neck. Now it howls through the Ponchitoula Swamp, the very sound and soul of despair.
Kate has stopped shivering and when she lights up and starts smoking, I am certain she is better. But I am mistaken. “Oooh,” she says in a perfunctory workaday voice and starts forward again. The car lurches and throws her against Sidney’s chair; there the train holds her fast: for three seconds she might be taken for a rapt onlooker of the gin-rummy game. Sidney rocks the deck against the polished wood until the cards are perfectly aligned. The gold ring on his little finger seems to serve as a device, a neat little fastening by means of which his hand movements are harnessed and made trim.
Half an hour passes and Kate does not return. I find her in her roomette, arms folded and face turned to the dark glass. We sit knee to knee.
