The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol.

  “Where’re you from,” cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to.

  “Ithaca,” he said, smiling. “Over in the Delta.” He felt himself molt. In the space of seconds he changed from a Southerner in the North, an amiable person who wears the badge of his origin in a faint burlesque of itself, to a Southerner in the South, a skillful player of an old play who knows his cues and waits smiling in the wings. You stand in the posture of waiting on ladies and when one of them speaks to you so, with mock-boldness and mock-anger (and a bit of steel in it too), you knew how to take it. They were onto the same game. Mrs. Vaught feasted her eyes on him. He was nice. (She, he saw at once, belonged to an older clan than Mr. Vaught; she knew ancient cues he never heard of.) She could have married him on the spot and known what she was getting.

  It was just as well he hadn’t pretended to be a doctor, for presently two doctors came in. One, a gaunt man with great damp hands and coiling veins, took the patient’s arm and began massaging it absently. The doctor gave himself leave not to talk and not to focus his eyes. The hand was absent-minded too, felt its way into the boy’s armpit, touched the angle of his jaw. What I am doing is of no importance, said the hand. Nothing was important but an unfocused fondness which seemed to hum and fill the room. Now, while the hand went its way, browsing past bone and artery and lymph node, the doctor leaned over to read the title of the book the boy had closed on his finger.

  “Tractatus Log—” he began, and exchanged glances with his assistant, a chesty little house physician with a mustache and a row of gleaming pencils and penlights clipped in his pocket. The doctors gazed at each other with thunderstruck expressions which made everybody laugh. Again the youth’s eyes narrowed and his legs began to thrash about. Again the big damp hand went about its business, this time gliding to the youth’s knee and quieting him. Why, he’s seriously ill, thought the sentient engineer, watching the monitory hand.

  “It’s not too hard to read,” said the patient, his voice all squeaks and horns. “Sutter gave it to me,” he told the Handsome Woman, who was still gazing dry-eyed and had taken no notice even of the doctors.

  “What a wonderful man,” cried the engineer when the doctors left. “I envy you,” he told the patient.

  “You wouldn’t envy me if you had to live in this room for five weeks.”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all,” said the engineer earnestly.

  They looked at him. “How long have you been up here?” Mrs. Vaught asked.

  “Five years. Seven, including my two years at Princeton. All my immediate family are dead. Do you know this is the first time I have talked to a, ah, family in years. I had forgotten—” he broke off and rubbed his forehead. He saw that he was expected to give an account of himself. “No, really. I don’t think it is bad to be here. It reminds me of a time I was in the hospital—for three months—and it wasn’t bad at all! In fact I felt better in the hospital than anywhere else.”

  “What was the matter with you?” Jamie asked him.

  “I had a nervous condition, nothing very serious, an episode of amnesia, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Amnesia,” said Kitty, looking at him for the first time.

  “Yes. I didn’t know my own name, but I knew enough to put myself in the hospital. It was caused by a toxic condition.”

  “You committed yourself,” said Mrs. Vaught.

  “Yes ma’am. I went to a very expensive place in Connecticut and was soon much better.”

  “How did you recover your memory?” Kitty asked him curiously.

  “That was the strangest thing of all. For two months I remembered nothing. During this time I had gotten into the habit of playing Chinese checkers with another patient, a girl with a more serious condition than mine. She had not spoken to anyone for two years—she had not uttered a single word—even though she had received shock treatment. There was something familiar about her. Perhaps that was why I was attracted to her—that and the fact that I too was shy about talking and since she—”

  They all laughed and he looked startled. “Yes, it’s true. I was shy! I don’t know why I’m not shy now. Anyhow she said nothing and I remembered nothing, and so it wasn’t bad. You asked me how my memory came back. It was very simple. One night as we played Chinese checkers I looked at her and remembered who she was. ‘Aren’t you Margaret Rich?’ I asked her. She said nothing. ‘Didn’t your family have the cottage next to ours in Monteagle ten years ago?’ (That was before we started going to Mentone.) Still she said nothing. ‘Why, I remember the dress you wore to a dance,’ I told her (I always remember the remote past first). ‘It was an orange-colored cotton twill sort of material.’ ‘That was my piqué,’ says she as normally as you please.” For some reason he flushed and fell silent.

  “Do you mean that she spoke normally after that?” asked Kitty presently. She had swung around and was searching his face with her bold brown eyes.

  “No, not normally, but it was a beginning,” he said, frowning, feeling irritated with himself for being garrulous.

  “I don’t understand why she didn’t speak before,” said Jamie, thrashing his legs.

  “I understand it!” cried Kitty. But then she blushed and turned away.

  The others were not as amazed by the engineer’s somewhat disconnected story as one might expect. For, strange to say, it was understood that it was open to him at that moment to spin just such a yarn, half-serious and curious.

  “Yes, I know why your stay in the hospital was not so bad,” said Jamie. “You weren’t really sick.”

  “I’ll trade with you any time,” said the engineer. “Believe me, it is a very uncomfortable experience to have amnesia.”

  At that moment the Handsome Woman whispered something to Kitty and the two of them kissed the patient, said their goodbyes and left. He waited for another brown-eyed look but Kitty had lapsed into vacancy again and did not seem to notice him. The talkative engineer fell silent.

  Presently he roused himself and took his leave. The patient and his mother asked him to come back. He nodded absently. Mr. Vaught followed him into the hall and steered him to the window, where they gazed down on the sooty moraine of Washington Heights.

  “You come on up here and see Jamie again, you heanh me,” he said, drawing him close and exhaling his old-man smell of fresh cotton and sour breath.

  “Yes sir. Sir?”

  “What’s that?” said the old man, giving him a hairy convoluted ear.

  “The lady who just left. Now is that Mrs. Rita Sutter or Miss—”

  “Mrs. Mrs. Rita Vaught. She married my oldest boy, Sutter Vaught. Dr. Vaught. They’re divorced. But I’m going to tell you, we’re closer to her than to Sutter, my own flesh and blood. Oh, she’s a fine woman. Do you know what that woman did?”

  “No sir,” said the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve to get the straight of it.

  “Why, she’s the one who went up to his school when he got sick this time and got him into the hospital. When there was no room. That’s not even a regular hospital room!”

  “And, ah, Kitty?”

  “Kitty is Jamie’s sister. You want to know what she’s done for Kitty?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “She invites Kitty to come up here to New York not for a week but a year, to take ballet. She’s taking her to Europe next month! And she’s not even kin! What are you going to do with a woman like that,” cried the old man, taking the engineer by the blade of muscle at his shoulder and squeezing it hard.

  “All right,” said the engineer, nodding and wincing.

  “And she’s second in command to the third largest foundation in the world!”

  “Foundation,” said the engineer vaguely.

  “She’s executive secretary. She can pick up the tele
phone and spend five million dollars this afternoon.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You come on up here in the morning and see Jamie.”

  “Yes sir.”

  3.

  He did go see Jamie but Kitty was not there.

  “What about Kitty?” he asked Mr. Vaught in the hall. It was not really a bold question since Mr. Vaught had once again set a tone of antic confidence, as much as to say: here we are two thousand miles from home, so it’s all right for me to tell you about my family.

  “Do you know what they’ve had that girl doing eight hours a day as long as I can remember?”

  “No sir.” The other, he noticed, pronounced “girl” as “gull,” a peculiarity he last remembered hearing in Jackson, Mississippi.

  “Ballet dancing. She’s been taking ballet since she was eight years old. She hopes to try out for the New York City Center Ballet Company.”

  “Very good.”

  “Lord, they’ve had her studying up here, in Chicago, Cleveland, everywhere.”

  The engineer wondered who “they” were. Mrs. Vaught? “She must be very good.”

  “Good? You should see her prizes. She won first prize two years in a row at the Jay Cee Festival. Last year her mama took her up to Cleveland to study with the world’s most famous ballet teacher. They lived in a hotel for nine weeks.”

  “It must require a great deal of self-sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice? That’s all she does.” The other’s eye glittered through the billowing smoke. Yet there was something unserious, even farcical, about his indignation.

  “Even now?”

  “I mean all. She dudn’t go out to parties. She dudn’t have, just as to say, dates. If a young man paid a call on her, I swear I don’t think she’d know what to do.”

  “Is that right,” said the engineer thoughtfully.

  “I don’t think it’s worth it, do you?”

  “No sir,” he said absently. He rose. “I think I’ll go in and see Jamie. Excuse me, sir.”

  “That’s all right!”

  4.

  Without quite knowing why he did so—for now he had the Handsome Woman’s name and had looked her up in the telephone book and now knew where Kitty lived—he kept up his vigil in the park.

  Once he went to look at the house they lived in. They had, Kitty and Rita, a charming cottage in a mews stuck away inside a city block in the Village. He had not imagined there could be such a place in New York, that the paltry particles, ravening and singing, could be so easily gotten round. But they were gotten round, by making things small and bright and hiding them away in the secret sunny center of a regular city block. Elsewhere in New York—wherever one stood—there was the sense of streets running a thousand miles in either direction, clear up to 302nd Street and petering out in some forlorn place above Yonkers or running clean to Ontario, for all he knew. They, Kitty and Rita, got out of the wind, so to speak, found a sunny lee corner as sheltered as a Barbados Alley.

  Then why not pick up the telephone and call her up and say, what about seeing you? Well, he could not exactly say why except that he could not. The worst way to go see a girl is to go see her. The best way is not to go see her but to come upon her. Having a proper date with a girl delivers the two of you into a public zone of streets and buildings where every brick is turned against you.

  The next day Rita came to the bench and Kitty joined her. It was not until he saw them through the telescope that he knew why he had kept up his vigil: it was because he did not know enough about Kitty.

  When they left, they turned west. He waited. After five or six minutes they came through the maples and crossed the meadow toward the Tavern-on-the-Green. There they sat not half a mile away but twenty feet, outlined in rainbows and drifting against each other weightless and soundless like mermaids in the shallow ocean depths. Packing his telescope, he walked south past the restaurant and turned back. He found a table against a peninsula of open brickwork where by every calculation—yes: through a niche he caught a glimpse of the gold chain clasping the hardy structures of Kitty’s ankle. He ordered a beer.

  Like all eavesdroppers, he felt as breathless as if the future of his life might depend on what was said. And perhaps, he being what he was, it did.

  “It’s no use,” Kitty was saying.

  “It is use,” said Rita. Her hair stirred. She must be turning her head to and fro against the bricks.

  “What do you think is the matter with me, Ree?”

  “Nothing that is not the matter with all of us.”

  “I am not what I want to be.”

  “Then accept yourself as you are.”

  “I do!” Kitty had a trick of ending her sentences with a lilt like a question. It was a mannerism he had noticed in the younger actresses.

  “What is it?”

  “Everything.”

  “Ah.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Tell me,” said Rita, turning her head to and fro.

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “The truth is, I’m stupid. I’m the stupidest person in the world.”

  “I see.”

  “That doesn’t help.”

  “What would help?”

  “I’m serious. Val and Jamie and you and Sutter are all so smart.”

  “You’re the best of the lot,” said Rita idly, turning her head against the bricks.

  “Sometimes I think other people know a secret I don’t know.”

  “What secret?”

  “The way they talk—”

  “People, what people? Do you mean a man and a woman?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you know, before I meet somebody—”

  “Somebody? Who is somebody?”

  “Before I meet them—if I know I’m going to meet them—I actually have to memorize two or three things to say. What a humiliating confession. Isn’t that awful. And it is getting worse. Why am I like that?”

  “Why say anything?”

  “I keep thinking that it must be possible to be with a person with things natural between us.”

  “A person? What person? I’m a person. Aren’t things easy between us?”

  “Yes—because you’ve spoiled me.”

  “Like hell. Finish your sandwich and get back to work.”

  “Ree, I’m not even a good dancer.”

  “You’re good, but you’re lazy.”

  “No, Can Can.” Or did she say Quin Quin?

  “So now I’m getting old.”

  “No, Ree. But in a particular relationship do you think it is one’s attitude or the other person who counts?”

  “Who is this other person?”

  “Do you remember what Will said yesterday?”

  “Will?”

  “Will Barrett? You know, the boy Poppy brought in.”

  “So now it’s Will.”

  “Didn’t you like him?”

  “You make him sound like Cousin Will from Savannah.”

  “Well.”

  “Honey, I’ve got news for you.”

  “What?”

  “That boy is not well.”

  “Not really.”

  “Really. And I can assure you there is nothing romantic about mental illness.”

  “But he isn’t—”

  “Wait. I suddenly begin to get it. I do believe that it is his symptoms which interest you.”

  “No, I think he’s very nice.”

  “Yes, I see it! You’re the girl who can’t talk. And he can’t remember. That makes you a pair.”

  “No.”

  “So you’re going to remember for him and he’s going to talk for you.”

  “No.”

  “Only it’s more than that, isn’t it? You also believe you can help him.”

  “Help him? Why does he need help?”

  Rita’s reply was not audible. They had gotten up and were moving away.

  H
e sat deep in thought until he finished his beer. My need for eavesdropping is legitimate enough, he said to himself, screwing up an eye. What with the ravening particles and other noxious influences, when one person meets another in a great city, the meeting takes place edge on, so to speak, each person so deprived of his surface as to be all but invisible to the other. Therefore one must take measures or else leave it to luck. Luck would be this: if he saw her snatch a purse, flee into the park pursued by the cops. Then he would know something and could do something. He could hide her in a rocky den he had discovered in a wild section of the park. He would bring her food and they would sit and talk until nightfall, when they could slip out of the city and go home to Alabama. Such a turn of events was unlikely, however.

  5.

  The Vaughts liked the engineer very much, each feeling that he was his or her special sort of person. And he was.

  Each saw him differently.

  Mr. Vaught was certain he was a stout Southern lad in the old style, wellborn but lusty as anyone, the sort who knows how to get along with older men. Back home he would have invited the younger man on a hunt or to his poker club, where he was certain to be a favorite. The second time Mr. Vaught saw him, he took him aside ceremoniously and invited him to Jamie’s birthday party.

  Jamie—who, he was told, had a severe and atypical mononucleosis—saw him as a fellow technician, like himself an initiate of science, that is, of a secret, shared view of the world, a genial freemasonry which sets itself apart from ordinary folk and sees behind appearances. He lent the engineer a tattered offprint of a scientific article which was written by his brother and which he kept under his pillow. It was titled The Incidence of Post-orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students, and divided into two sections, the first subtitled “Genital Sexuality as the Sole Surviving Communication Channel between Transcending-Immanent Subjects,” and the second, “The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence.” The engineer read the article twice and could not make head or tail of it, except a short description of technical procedure in which Dr. Sutter, following some hunch or other, had examined the urethral meatus of some thirty male suicides for the presence of spermatozoa.