Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  For a long time he sat blinking between the two beds, hands stretched out to the two men as if it were still necessary to keep them apart. Then he rose suddenly, too suddenly, for his brain twisted and he almost fell down.

  “Look out, potner,” said Mr. Arnold, grabbing him with his good hand, which was surprisingly strong.

  “You all right, Mr. Barrett?” said Mr. Ryan.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are. You gon be out of here in no time, ain’t he, Erroll?”

  “Sho,” said Mr. Arnold. “He’s a young feller. And he’s rich too.”

  They both laughed loudly and looked at each other as if they had a secret.

  “Yeah,” he said and left.

  He was in the corridor, leaning against the wall. His head was clear but there was a sharp sweet something under his heart, a sense of loss, a going away.

  He smiled to himself. It no longer mattered that he couldn’t remember everything.

  Later that night he heard Tom Snyder ask someone: “What is your sexual preference?”

  While he leaned against the wall, Kitty assaulted him again. Either she had been waiting for him, or she had left and thought of something else she had wanted to say and had come back.

  “I just wanted to be sure you got one thing straight, big buddy.” She swung a purse, a kind of shoulder bag with a short strap. Had she had it earlier? Did she intend to hit him with it?

  “What?” he said. From nearby rooms came the soft babble of TV sets tuned to different channels.

  “When Allison goes back to Valleyhead, you are not to visit her. Do—you—understand—me?” With each word she jabbed him in the ribs with two fingers. There was a conjugal familiarity between them. He felt as if they had been married and divorced.

  “Yes.”

  “I know all about you and what’s wrong with you. You ought to be grateful you’re alive. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get your hands on my little girl or her property. And I don’t mind telling you I’m grateful they’re keeping you here.”

  “They are?”

  “Now hear this, mister. I’m making it my business to see to it that that child doesn’t spend another night in that dump of a greenhouse. Alistair will be here late this afternoon. He and I are going to pick her up. If she won’t go, the sheriff says all we got to do is call him and he’ll deliver her to Valleyhead. And you better believe for her sake I’d do it.”

  “Alistair?”

  “Dr. Duk.”

  “Oh yes. Dr. Duk.”

  “You know him? Isn’t he wonderful?”

  He was silent.

  “You’re going to pick her up this afternoon?” he asked her.

  “You got it, buster.” She blinked and, relenting a little, leaned toward him. “Now don’t look so—everything’s going to be fine. Now we got that straight. Now let’s get you straight. Listen to me, Will.”

  “Okay.”

  “Leslie knows what she is doing, as usual. You’re in the right place. You just stay here and take care of yourself, take your medicine and you’ll be all right. Take care of these old folks—I understand you’re going to be in charge here.”

  “I am?” There was the not unpleasant sense of great plans being made for him.

  “You’ll do just fine. And we’re not exactly spring chickens ourselves.” She softened and gave him a different kind of poke in the ribs. “When you feel better, come take me for a ride. No, I’ll take you. We’ll park at the golf course and you can hug me up, remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “Hugging me up on the golf course.”

  “Ah—no.”

  He looked at his watch. If he could get away from Kitty, there was time to catch the beginning of the Morning Movie, which this morning was King Solomon’s Mines, which was no great movie, true, but whose beginning, with Deborah Kerr and a saturnine Allan Quartermain played by Stewart Granger, he savored somewhat nevertheless. Deborah was trying to talk him into helping her find her husband in a remote unexplored country.

  Strange. He had not spent a week at St. Mark’s and already he was looking forward to the Morning Movie.

  V

  A PRINCELY BLACK WATUSI who looked seven feet tall stood on a rock holding a staff and gazing to the north. Somewhere beyond lay the treasures of King Solomon.

  On one side of him sat Mr. Ryan, on the other Mr. Arnold. There had been time to prop Mr. Ryan in a wheelchair and push him to the game room with its forty-five-inch giant-screen Sony projector TV. He had invited Mr. Arnold to come along. Mr. Arnold had said nothing but trudged dutifully alongside Mr. Ryan’s chair after tucking a blanket around him lest he topple forward.

  “That’s the biggest nigger I ever saw,” said Mr. Ryan, gazing at the majestic Watusi. “But I can tell you one thing. That ain’t no African chief. That’s a blue-gum nigger from Mississippi. I’d know them anywhere. I had them working for me in crews building condos from Point Clear to Sea Island. They used to be good workers till Roosevelt ruined them.”

  Mr. Arnold stirred in his chair. The curtain of his face lifted a little. Leaning out and looking back, good eye winking, he spoke not to Mr. Ryan but to Barrett in the middle. “I’m here to tell you that Roosevelt was the onliest one ever done anything for us pore folks up in the hills.”

  The old men began to argue about Roosevelt, who had been dead for thirty-five years.

  “Okay, hold it,” he said and the two men subsided in good part to watch the movie.

  All I have to do is tell them, he thought.

  South Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, he thought, watching the great Watusi prince. And my father and his near death in the Georgia swamp and my near death and later his death in Mississippi and my being at his death and his wanting me to be there, his wanting me to see his brain exploded, expanding like the universe and plastering the attic with neurones like stars in the night sky. Why did he want me to be there? To show me what? Now I know. To show me the one sure sweet exodus. Yes, that’s it, that’s what he was first giving me in Georgia, then telling me and finally showing me, and now at last I know.

  Even D’Lo knew. You po little old boy, what you going to do now? What chance you got in this world? Your daddy done kilt hisself and your mama dead and gone and here you come, po little Willie, what chance you got? She shaking her head and socking down the grits spoon, as he watched her narrow-eyed and even smiling a little, knowing she was wrong. Because he was he and they were they and here he was, free and sure and alert and sly. Nothing, no one, would ever surprise him again. Not they. They least of all. He was free of them.

  His father had shot twice in the Georgia swamp, reloaded the Greener, and shot again. But the second shot was a double shot aimed at him. I thought he missed me and he did, almost, and I thought I survived and I did, almost. But now I have learned something and been surprised by it after all. Learned what? That he didn’t miss me after all, that I thought I survived and I did but I’ve been dead of something ever since and didn’t know it until now. What a surprise. They were right after all. He was right. D’Lo was right. What a surprise. But is it not also a surprise that discovering you’ve been dead all these years, you should now feel somewhat alive?

  He killed me then and I did not know it. I even thought he had missed me. I have been living, yes, but it is a living death because I knew he wanted me dead. Am I entitled to live? I am alive by a fluke like the sole survivor of Treblinka, who lived by a fluke, but did not really feel entitled to live.

  Ah, but there is a difference between feeling dead and not knowing it, and feeling dead and knowing it. Knowing it means there is a possibility of feeling alive though dead.

  Very well, he was right, they were right, and I’ve learned at last that I am one of them. But I’m improving on them, am I not? I’ve found a better way than swallowing gun barrels: in short, I can shuffle off among friends and in comfort and Episcopal decorum and with good Christian folk to look after every need. Dear good Christian
blacks eased me into this world, changed my diapers, and here they are again to change my diapers and ease me out, right?

  Wrong.

  So here is the giant-screen Sony projector TV and CBS day and night and some of the programs not half bad either, some of the programs in fact well done and amusing, yes, especially the sports and documentaries, yes? M*A*S*H ain’t bad. No?

  No.

  There was something he had to do. Getting up so quickly that his head spun and he staggered, he found himself caught by strong hands on both sides, Mr. Arnold’s good hand and both of Mr. Ryan’s hands. “You all right, Will?” one asked quickly and as quickly let go and looked away. They were his friends. What delicacy and gentleness they had!

  “I’m fine. I have to go now.”

  “You come back to visit us,” Mr. Ryan said. Mr. Arnold nodded.

  Stooping he looked into their faces. Who said anything about leaving for good? How did they know when he had not quite known it himself?

  He stood for a moment gazing at a tarantula in Deborah Kerr’s tent. Was there a whole world of meaning, of talking and listening, which took place everywhere and all the time and which no one paid attention to, at least not he?

  He looked down at the new navy-blue wool dressing gown Leslie had bought for him and the Brooks Bros, pajamas and the Bean’s moose-hide slippers Marion had given him one Christmas.

  “Yes. I’ll be back.”

  Thirty minutes later he had changed into street clothes, walked to his Mercedes, and was spinning down the highway. The car drove better than ever and he did not see double. Carefully yet absently, without thinking that he did so, he had dressed for the first time in months in suit, shirt, and tie, laced up the plain-toed Florsheims he hadn’t worn since he left New York.

  A pang struck suddenly at his heart. He had not taken his acid for twelve hours! What with the two fights and the movie, he had forgotten to go to the lab. His pH was up and the old heavy molecules were on the move again. Again the past rose to haunt him and the future rose to beckon to him. Things took on significance.

  Parking at the club, he walked hands in pockets down the eighteenth fairway, feeling odd in his city clothes, kicking leaves like a businessman walking home across the Great Meadow in Central Park on a fine fall day. The soft-buttoned collar felt snug around his neck but he felt the cold through his thin socks. The fresh cold air felt good in his face.

  When he came to the fence, he stretched up the top strand of wire to hear the guitar sound. He let it go slack, stretched it again harder, cocked an ear. The wire sang again, creaked, and popped against the musical bridge of the post. He let go. It sounded like a wire stretching against a fence post, no more. The near post was rotten. It broke and swayed toward him. He kicked it down and walked over the fence.

  The girl and the dog were sitting on the stoop of the copper-roofed porch. The girl, holding her hand against the sun, didn’t recognize him at first, but the dog did. Over he came grinning, broad tail swinging his body like an alligator. The dog grinned, swallowed, his lip caught high on a tooth embarrassing him. He looked away. The girl touched her cheek with her fingers as he looked down at her. She was thin and sallow. Perhaps it was the man’s olive-drab parka she wore which looked as if it had been worn in the Aleutians in World War II.

  “It’s you irregardless of who,” she said.

  He laughed. “Irregardless of who what?”

  “Of who I thought you were.”

  “Who did you think I was?”

  “That you were an Atlantean but taller, yet I also knew you by the glancing way, you know, of your face here.” She touched her temple.

  “Atlantean or Atlantan?”

  “Both. Atlantan businesswise with your suit, as I once saw Sarge come down the bullet in the Hyatt with attaché case and suit like that. But Atlantean also because of the way you came through the woods like you were coming from elsewhere not there.”

  “Not where?”

  “There. The golf links and the players. You were not one of them, you never were. I mean it is a question of where you are coming from, a consideration of the reality of it.”

  “You mean where I actually came from this morning, don’t you?” He laughed and she nodded. He laughed because he knew this was her own expression even though it sounded like local gypsy talk: like man, where are you coming from? “I came here from the hospital.”

  She stood up and touched his forehead like a mother checking a child for fever. “You seem fine. Are you?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes. But I’m going back and down again, I think, but that’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. I want a good look at you.” He took off her Aleutian parka and stood her in the sunny warm corner of the porch.

  For a while she gazed straight ahead at his necktie like a child. Then not like a child she put her head to one side in order to see his eyes from the corner of hers.

  “I’m so—” she said, shaking her head. Nothing else moved about her except her hands at her side, which turned out like the beginning of a shrug.

  “Yes,” he said and he was kissing her mouth, she flying up at him and cleaving to him, leaving the ground surely.

  “There is something I need,” he told her.

  “Moi aussi,” she said. “Entirely apart from the needs of society and the family as a unit, or the group.”

  “Yes, apart from that.”

  “The truth is,” he said when they were sitting together in the sun, “I wish to speak to you of several things. To begin with, my pH has been corrected and I feel fine. Secondly, I am in love, I think.”

  “Me too.”

  They kissed again. Her mouth was sweet and tart. His tongue went in her. Her tongue, surprised, was taken aback, then ventured forward, parting his lips shyly. Kissing her was like entering a new and happy land.

  “What have you been eating?” he asked her.

  “Pawpaws. They’re best after a frost.”

  “Let me taste.”

  They kissed again. They were sitting now. He noticed that no matter how they kissed, standing or sitting, her body somehow fronted and flew against him.

  “Kissing you is a delight but not a rounded and closed-off delight,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No, it is an opening-out delight and a wanting. Kissing is like now fine, more is better, and what about it?”

  “I know.”

  “Your tongue is welcome but you, that is, the salient you, would be even more so.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Was there ever such a wanting?” she asked.

  “Not that I remember.”

  “For true?”

  “For true.”

  “Oh say so.”

  “I want you.”

  “Oh fine. The word is go. It is, that is, yes I’m saying.”

  “I understand.”

  “Ah ha, it is more than evident you do,” she said.

  “I know, I know.”

  “Are you fond of me besides?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes. I must be sure you’re all right. Are you?”

  “Similarly and moreover. Do you feel a smiling ease with me as well as a sweetness for me in the deep regions?”

  “Yes, in the deep regions, a sweetness, as well as the smiling ease.”

  “Is it possible that there is such a life?”

  “As what?”

  “As a life of smiling ease with someone else and the sweetness for you deep in me and play and frolic and dear sweet love the livelong day, even at four o’clock in the afternoon turning the old yellow green-glade lonesomeness into a being with you at ease not a being with you at unease?”

  “Yes, it’s possible.”

  “Could such a thing be? What a miracle, and we haven’t even mentioned the nights.”

  “No, we haven’t.”

  “Imagine ten hours of darkness every night!”

  “Yes, imagine.”

  “What wil
l we do?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “Then you are fond of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let us not speak of love yet, I’m not sure of the word.”

  “No, we won’t speak of love, though I feel that in the future we might.”

  “Similarly and moreover.”

  “Moreover what?”

  “Moreover a continuity is beginning for the first time but it is not climbing on me.”

  “Me either. Something else is also clear to me.”

  “Over and beyond.”

  “Yes, over and beyond. It is this. We need each other for different things.”

  “What is the manifestation of the difference?”

  “I need you for hoisting and you need me for interpretation.”

  “Say what?”

  “I fall down from time to time and you are very good at hoisting. It would be pleasant to have you around to give me a hand,” he said.

  “The pleasure would be mine. In short, I’ll do it. I am so happy about your pH.”

  “By the same token, I remember everything and you forget most things. I’ll be your memory. Then too, your language is somewhat unusual. But I understand it. In fact, it means more than other people’s. Thus, I could both remember for you and interpret for you.”

  “Our lapses are not due to synapses.”

  “No, they are as they should be.”

  “The implication of your consideration is that people think I’m crazy.”

  “That is correct. Moreover, for this very reason they are coming for you this afternoon.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “Don’t think you’re crazy? No. Now.”

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s sit here by the dog. There are some things which I think you must do. Moreover, it is a pleasure to sit here beside you. Dear sweet Lord, what a pleasure. There are many things I don’t know. But certain things have become clear to me as far as you are concerned. Therefore, I am taking it upon myself to do what I seldom do, even in the practice of law: tell somebody what to do. I also think you are ready to be told.”

  “The feeling is reciprocal. I am listening.”

  “The pawpaws are very good.”

  “Yes.”