Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

by Walker Percy

  14

  The back doors of the Little Napoleon and my father’s old office let on to the ox-lot in the center of the block. It is getting dark. The thunderhead is upon us. A sour rain-drop splashes on my nose. It smells of trees. The piles of brickbats scattered in the weeds are still warm. A dusty trumpet vine has taken the loading ramp of Sears and the fire escape of the old Majestic Theater. In the center of the ox-lot atop a fifteen-foot pole sits my father’s only enduring creation: a brass-and-cedar martin hotel with rooms for a hundred couples. Overhead the martins wheel and utter their musical burr and rattle. They are summer residents. Already they are flocking with their young, preparing for their flight to the Amazon basin.

  I sit at my desk and listen to Don Giovanni and watch the martins through the open door. From the lower desk drawer, where I also keep the free samples of Bayonne-rayon Skintone organs, I fetch a fresh bottle of Early Times.

  My office is exactly as my father left it twenty years ago: three rooms, one behind the other like a shotgun cottage, but with a hall alongside, my office at the rear, treatment room in the middle, and at the front the waiting room furnished with the same sprung green wicker and even the same magazines: the Ford Times, National Geographic, the Knights of Columbus magazine, and the S A E Record (my father was an S A E).

  The offices are dark. No sign of Ellen, my nurse, and no patient in the waiting room. A sigh of relief and a long happy evening.

  No such luck.

  A half hour of happiness, the fresh sour evening, the gathering storm, a warm toddy, and the singing god-like devilish music of Don Giovanni and—bang.

  Bang up front, the door slams, and here comes Ellen clop-clopping down the hall.

  It seems I’ve got not one but three patients. They went away all right, but they’ve come back. Ellen told them: don’t worry, she’d find me.

  I sigh and console myself: I should be able to polish them off in thirty minutes—and do right by them, Ellen! Leroy! Hippocrates!—and get back to my researches. I’ve the strongest feeling that the second breakthrough is imminent, that if I wait and be still and listen, it will come to me, the final refinement of my invention that will make it the perfect medicine. I’ve the strongest feeling that the solution is under my nose, one of those huge simple ideas that are so big you can’t see them for being too close.

  “Good heavens, Chief, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you all day.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why have you been looking for me? Today is Saturday.”

  I lean back in my chair and watch Ellen sadly as she picks up the fifth of Early Times and puts it back in the drawer of organs. Then she rinses out my toddy glass, closes the back door, turns off Mozart, pops a chlorophyll tablet in my mouth, wets her thumb with her tongue and smooths my eyebrows with firm smoothings like a mother. My eyebrows feel wet and cool.

  Ellen Oglethorpe is a beautiful but tyrannical Georgia Presbyterian. A ripe Georgia persimmon not a peach, she fairly pops the buttons of her nurse’s uniform with her tart ripeness. She burgeons with marriageable Presbyterianism. It somehow happens that the strict observance of her religion gives her leave to be free with her own person. Her principles allow her a kind of chaste wantonness. She touches me, leans against me, puts spit on me. I shudder with horrible pleasure and pleasurable horror. Caught up by her strong female urgings, one to mother, one to marry, one to be a girl-child and lean against you, she muses and watches and is prodigal with herself—like an eleven-year-old who stands between your legs, eyes watching your eyes, elbows and knees engaging you in the lap, anywhere, each touch setting off in you horrid girl-child tingles. She doesn’t know how close is close.

  Now she stands in front of me even closer than usual, hands behind her. I have to look up. Her face is tilted back, the bones under her cheeks winged and wide as if the sculptor had spread out the alar ridges with two sure thumb thrusts. The short downy upper lip is lifted clear of the lower by its tendon. Her face, foreshortened, is simple and clear and scrubbed and peach-mottled, its beauty fortuitous like that of a Puritan woman leaning over her washtub and the blood going despite her to her face.

  “Look, Ellen, it’s Saturday. What are you doing here?”

  “Not an ordinary Saturday.”

  “No?”

  “It’s your birthday.”

  And what she’s hiding behind her is a present. She hands it to me. I feel a prickle of irritation. My birthday is but one more occasion for her tending to me, soliciting me, enlisting me. Yes, it is my birthday. I am forty-five. As I unwrap it, she comes round and leans on my chair arm and breathes on me.

  It is the sort of present only a woman would buy. A gift set of Hell-for-Leather pre-shave and after-shave lotion. Through the chair arm comes the push of her heedless body weight. Her sweet breath comes through her parted lips. There is nothing to do but open a bottle. It smells like cloves.

  “We’ve got customers, Chief.”

  Though she is an excellent nurse, I wish she would not call me Chief and herself my girl Friday.

  Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic sexual-religious longing I woke with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same.

  The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.

  Ellen pats some Hell-for-Leather on me.

  “How do you like it, Chief?”

  “Very much,” I say, eyes watering with cloves.

  Ellen, though she is a strict churchgoer and a moral girl, does not believe in God. Rather does she believe in the Golden Rule and in doing right. On the whole she is embarrassed by the God business. But she does right. She doesn’t need God. What does God have to do with being honest, hard-working, chaste, upright, unselfish, etcetera. I on the other hand believe in God, the Jews, Christ, the whole business. Yet I don’t do right. I am a Renaissance pope, an immoral believer. Between the two of us we might have saved Christianity. Instead we lost it.

  “Are you ready now, Chief?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “You’ve got two patients. Or rather three. But two are together.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s Mr. Ives and Mr. and Mrs. Tennis.”

  “Good God. Who is Mr. Ives?”

  “You know. He’s an old patient of yours.”

  “Wait a minute. Isn’t he from Gerry Rehab over in Fedville?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “He wanted to see you.”

  “He’s the patient who’s up for The Pit Monday, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “I still don’t understand how he got here.”

  “He wanted to see you. I brought him.”

  “You?”

  “Don’t forget, Chief, I used to work over there.”

  She did. She even took care of me in the acute ward when I was strung out, bound by the wrists, yet in the end free and happy as a bird, by turns lustful and exalted, winging it like a martin, inducing scientific theories, remembering everything, quoting whole pages of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

  Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

  For rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

  Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;

  and inviting her into my bed, her of all people.

  Nevertheless, when I left the hospital, she came with me and set up as my nurse. Toward me she feels strong Presbyterian mother-smoothings.

  “Did Mr. Ives want to come or was it your idea?”

  “My idea?”

  “Did you think I needed a little briefing before appearing in The Pit?”

  “Tch. What do you mean?”


  “Are you afraid Dr. Brown is going to beat me?”

  “He can’t hold a candle to you as a doctor.”

  “But you were afraid?”

  “Afraid? Oh yes, I’m afraid for Mr. Ives. Oh, Chief, do you think he’ll be sent to the Happy Isles?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do they really throw the Switch there?”

  “Yes.”

  “No!”

  “You don’t think they ought to?”

  “Oh no, Chief!”

  “Why not?” I ask her curiously.

  “It’s not right.”

  “I see.”

  “I think Mr. Ives is putting on.”

  “But if he were not?”

  “Oh, Chief, why do you have anything to do with those people?”

  “What people?”

  “Those foul-mouthed students and that nasty Dr. Brown.”

  “It’s all in good fun. End-of-year thing.”

  “You’re much too fine to associate with them.”

  “Hm. Well, don’t worry. I have other fish to fry.”

  “You mean you’re not going to The Pit?”

  I shrug. “What difference does it make? By the way, what’s Brown’s diagnosis of Mr. Ives?”

  She reads: “Senile psychopathy and mutism.”

  “And his recommendation?”

  “The Permanent Separation Center at Jekyll, Georgia. Doesn’t that mean the Happy Isles?”

  I nod.

  “And the Euphoric On-Switch?”

  “Yes. But you think the diagnosis is wrong?”

  “Because you did.”

  “I did? Well, let’s see him.”

  She wheels him in. Mr. Ives sits slumped in a folding chair, a little bald-headed monkey of a man, bright monkey eyes snapping at me. His scalp is a smooth cap of skin, heavily freckled, fitted over his low wrinkled brow. The backs of his hands are covered with liver spots and sun scabs. His eyes fairly hop with—what? rage or risibility? Is he angry or amused or just plain crazy? I leaf through his chart. He was born in Sherwood, Tennessee, worked for forty years as controller in a Hartford insurance company, lost his wife, retired to Louisiana, lived in the woods in a camper, dug up potsherds in a Choctaw burial mound, got sick, was transferred to a Tampa Senior Citizens’ compound, where he misbehaved and was referred to Gerry Rehab here. I remember him from the old days. He used to call me for one complaint and another and we’d sit in his camper and play checkers and through the open door watch the wild turkeys come up and feed. He was lonely and liked to talk. Now he’s mute.

  I get up and open the back door. Ellen frowns.

  “What’s the trouble, Mr. Ives?”

  He doesn’t reply but he’s already looking past me at the martins scudding past and turning upwind for a landing. Gusts of warm air sour with rain blow in the open doorway.

  “Ecccc,” says Mr. Ives.

  The old man can’t or won’t speak but he lets me examine him. Physically he’s in good order, chest clear, abdomen soft, blood pressure normal, eyegrounds nominal. His prostate is as round and elastic as a handball. Neurological signs normal.

  I look at his chart “… Did on August 5 last, expose himself and defecate on Flirtation Walk.” Hm. He could still suffer from senile dementia.

  I look at him. The little monkey eyes snap.

  “Do you remember playing checkers out at the mound?”

  The eyes snap.

  “You never beat me, Mr. Ives.” I never beat him.

  No rise out of him. His eyes slide past me to the martins rolling and rattling around the hotel.

  “He doesn’t look senile to me,” I tell Ellen. I take out my lapsometer and do a complete profile from cortex to coeliac plexus. Ellen jots down the readings as I call them out.

  “No wonder he won’t talk,” I say, flipping back through his stack of wave patterns.

  “Won’t or can’t?” Ellen asks me.

  “Oh, he can. No organic lesion at all. Look at his cortical activity: humming away like a house afire. He’s as sharp as you or I.”

  “Then why—?”

  “And he’s reading me right now, aren’t you, Mr. Ives?”

  “Ecccc,” says Mr. Ives.

  “You asked me why he won’t talk,” I tell her loudly. “He’s too damn mad to talk. His red nucleus is red indeed. Look at that.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean he doesn’t trust you or me or anybody.”

  “Who’s he mad at?”

  “Who are you mad at?” I ask Mr. Ives.

  His eyes snap. I focus the lapsometer at his red nucleus.

  “At me?” No change.

  “At Communists?” No change.

  “At Negroes?” No change.

  “At Jews?” No change.

  “At students?” No change.

  “Hm. It’s not ordinary Knothead anger,” I tell Ellen.

  “How do you know he understands you at all?” asks Ellen.

  “Watch this.” I aim in at the medio-temporal region, near Brodmann 28, the locus of concrete memory. “Do you remember our playing checkers in your camper ten years ago on summer evenings like this?”

  The needle swings. The eyes snap, but merrily now.

  “Chief!” cries Ellen. “You’ve done it!”

  “Done what?”

  “You’ve proved your point!”

  “I haven’t proved anything. He still won’t talk or can’t, won’t walk or can’t. All I’ve done is make a needle move.”

  “But, Chief—! You’re a hundred years ahead of EEG.”

  “I can’t prove it. I can’t treat him. This thing is purely diagnostic and I can’t even prove that.” Mr. Ives and I watch the last of the martins come home. “I feel like a one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.”

  “You’ll prove it, Chief,” says Ellen confidently. She tells me a story about a famous Presbyterian (she said) named Robert the Bruce who sat discouraged in a cave and watched a spider try seven times to span the cave with its web before it succeeded. “Remember Robert the Bruce!”

  “O.K. Who’s the next patient?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Ted Tennis.”

  “Are you going to take Mr. Ives back to the hospital?”

  “No. They’ll send for him.”

  “Very well. Goodbye, Mr. Ives. Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.”

  He takes my hand with his old wiry grip. I can’t understand why he won’t talk. His prefrontal gyrus is as normal as mine.

  Ted ’n Tanya are next. They must have come directly from Love. It is a bit of a surprise that they’ve come here, since his former complaint of impotence had been pretty well cleared up by my prescription of an occasional tramp through the swamp, so successfully in fact that only today I’ve learned that Ted ’n Tanya have become star performers in Love.

  They come in together and sit opposite me across the desk. Ellen closes the door and turns on the lights and leaves discreetly. Hm. Have they come to gloat, to tell me of the superiority of Love Clinic to the swamp? But no. They look glum.

  But Ted is more than ever the alert young crop-headed narrow-necked Oppenheimer. Tanya is an angular brunette who has smoldering violet eyes, one of which is cocked, and wears a ringlet of hair at each temple like a gypsy. They love each other, do Ted ’n Tanya, and, though heathen, are irrevocably monogamous and faithful.

  That much I know. Ted brings me up to date. The swamp treatment of impotence did indeed work for a while but wore off after a few months, as I had told Ted it might. Whereupon they applied for treatment at Love, where they were put in a Skinner box and conditioned so successfully that they became one of the first volunteer couples in the new program of “multiple-subject interaction.” A breakthrough. Here too, encouraged by Stryker, Dr. Helga Heine, and Father Kev Kevin, they succeeded admirably.

  “I understand that. The only thing that puzzles me is why you’re here at all.” Making sure Ellen is up front, I open the drawer of organs a
nd recover my Early Times. Ted ’n Tanya don’t mind my drinking.

  “I know,” says Ted glumly.

  “Weren’t you over at Love today?” I ask them, pouring a little toddy.

  “Yes,” whispers Tanya, one lovely violet eye fixed on me, the other drifting out a bit as if it were keeping track of my second self, my pneuma.

  “Well?” They’re sitting side by side on a bench, like children in the principal’s office. “How did it go today in Love?”

  Ted ’n Tanya look at each other. “It didn’t,” says Ted.

  “It hasn’t for weeks,” whispers Tanya.

  “Hm. I expect the effect of the conditioning is wearing off too, though to tell you the truth I’ve always suspected that the good results came more from the sympathetic third party, the observer, rather than—”

  “Exactly!” cries Ted.

  Puzzled, I wait.

  Again Ted ’n Tanya exchange glances. “Shall we tell him, Tanya?” She nods.

  “Tell me what?”

  Ted leans forward, big Oppenheimer head bobbing on its slender neck. “That we never did succeed at home.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean even at the peak of our performances at Love, we were never able to achieve orgasm at home, except after floundering around the swamp, but even that wore off.”

  “Pity. Would you care for a drink?”

  “No thanks, Tom.”

  We fall silent. The storm is closer. Thunder rumbles.

  I sigh and open the drawer. “Well, I suppose you’re here for a Bayonne-rayon member.”

  But Ted is shaking his head. “That’s not the idea, Tom.”

  “You don’t want a member?”

  “No.”

  “Then what can I do for you?” I am genuinely puzzled.

  Ted leans forward. “Tom, you were right in thinking that it was the presence of the sympathetic observer that was crucial.”

  “Yes?”

  “The trouble with the observers in Love Clinic is precisely that, that they are too clinical.”

  “Yes?”

  “We thought perhaps if we could enlist the services of an observer-therapist team who were more sympathetic and in surroundings less clinical.”

  “Hm.”

  “When we put the two ingredients together, friend plus professional, naturally our thoughts turned in this direction.”