The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  Screwing in the terrestrial ocular fitted with a prism, and focusing quickly on the Englewood cliffs, the engineer stepped aside. The patient had only to prop himself on an elbow and look down into the prism. A little disc of light played about his pupil. The engineer watched him watch: now he, Jamie, would be seeing it, the brilliant theater bigger and better than life. Picnickers they were, a family deployed on a shelf of granite above the Hudson. The father held a can of beer.

  Once Jamie looked up for a second, searched his face for a sign: did he really see what he saw? The engineer nodded. Yes, he saw.

  “What kind of beer is he drinking?” he asked Jamie.

  “Rheingold,” said Jamie.

  The others took their turn, all but Rita, then Moon Mullins, who swung the Tetzlar around to the nurses’ dormitory. There was no talking to Jamie this morning. He must watch the tugs on the river, the roller coaster at Palisades Park, the tollhouse on the George Washington, Bridge, two housewives back-fencing in Weehawken. Now it was Jamie who became the technician, focusing on some bit of New Jersey and leaning away to let the doctors look.

  Mrs. Vaught elder couldn’t get over it. Her pince-nez flashed in the light and she took the engineer’s arm. “Would you look at the color in that child’s face!” She made her husband take a look through the telescope, but he pretended he couldn’t see.

  “I can’t see a thing!” he cried irritably, jostling his eye around the ocular.

  Presently Kitty left with Rita, giving him as she left a queer hooded brown-eyed-susan look. He sat down dizzily and blew out his lips. Why couldn’t he leave with them? But when he jumped up, Mr. Vaught took him high by the arm and steered him out into the hall. He faced the younger man into a corner and for a long time did not speak but stood with his head down, nodding. The engineer thought the other was going to tell him a joke.

  “Bill.” The nodding went on.

  “Yes sir.”

  “How much did that thing cost you?”

  “The telescope? Nineteen hundred and eight dollars.”

  “How much do you make a week?”

  “I take home one forty-eight.”

  “Did your father leave you anything?”

  “Not much. An old house and two hundred acres of buckshot.”

  The engineer was sure he was in for a scolding—all at once the telescope seemed folly itself. But Mr. Vaught only took out his fried-up ball of a handkerchief and knocked it against his nose.

  “Bill”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How would you like to work for me?”

  “I’d like it fine, sir, but—”

  “We have a garage apartment, which Mrs. Vaught did over completely. You’d be independent.”

  “Well, I really appreciate it, but—”

  “You’re Ed Barrett’s boy,” began Mr. Vaught in an enumerating voice.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Dolly knew your mother and said she was the sweetest little lady in the world.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Your mother and daddy are dead and here you are up here fooling around and not knowing what in the hail you are doing. Isn’t that so?”

  “Well, sir, I’m a humidification engineer.”

  “What in the woerrrld is that?” asked the other, his mouth gone quirky and comic.

  The engineer explained.

  “Why, hailfire, man, you mean you’re the janitor,” cried Mr. Vaught, falling back and doing a jaunty little step. For the first time the engineer caught a glimpse of the shrewdness behind the old man’s buffoonery.

  “I guess I am, in a way.”

  “Tell me the truth now. You don’t know what—in—the— woerrrld you are doing up here, do you?”

  “Well now—” began the engineer, intending to say something about his scientific theories. But instead he fell silent.

  “Where did you go to college?”

  “Princeton.”

  “What’s your religion?”

  “Episcopalian,” said the engineer absently, though he had never given the matter a single thought in his entire life.

  “Man, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “No sir.”

  But if there is nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all. “However, I do have a nervous condition—”

  “Nervous! Hell, I’d be nervous too if I lived up here with all these folks.” He nodded down at the moraine of Washington Heights. “All huddled up in the Y in the daytime and way up under a store all night. And peeping at folks through a spyglass. Shoot, man!”

  The engineer had to laugh. Moreover, suggestible as he was, he began to think it mightn’t be a bad idea to return to the South and discover his identity, to use Dr. Gamow’s expression. “What would you want me to do, Mr. Vaught?”

  “All right. Here’s what you do. You come on down with us. Spend a year with Jamie. This will give you time to finish school if that’s what you want to do, or look around for what kind of work you want. Whatever you want to do.”

  “I still don’t exactly know what it is you want—”

  “Bill, I’m going to tell you something.” Mr. Vaught drew him close enough to smell his old man’s sourness and the ironing-board smell of seersucker. “I need somebody to help me out. I’m taking Jamie home”—somebody didn’t want him to!—“and I want you to come down with me.”

  “Yes sir. And then?”

  “Jamie likes you. He dudn’t like anybody else at home but he likes you. (He likes Sutter, but that sapsucker—never mind.) He’s been up here four years and he’s smart as a whip about some things but he doesn’t know enough to come out of the rain about some others. He can’t drive a car or shoot a gun! You know what he and Kitty do at home? Nothing! Sit in the pantry and pick their noses.”

  “How do you know I won’t do the same thing?” asked the engineer, smiling.

  “Do it! But also show him how folks act. I just saw what effect you had on him. That’s the first time I’ve seen that boy perk up since I been up here. Can you drive?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes sir.” He got one to drive the Auchinclosses’ Continental.

  “What do you say?”

  “Do I understand that you would want me to be a kind of tutor or companion?”

  “Don’t have to be anything. Just be in the house.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve had some experience along these lines,” said the engineer and told him about his tutoring stints with his young Jewish charges.

  “You see there! We have some of the finest Jewish people at home you’ll ever find,” he added, as if the engineer were himself Jewish. “Right now the main thing we need is somebody to help me drive home.”

  The proposal was not quite as good as it sounded. Mr. Vaught, he early perceived, was the sort of man who likes to confide in strangers. And the farther he got from home, one somehow knew, the more confidential he became. He was the sort to hold long conversations with the porter on train trips, stand out with him on dark station platforms. “How much do you make, Sam?” he might ask the porter. “How would you like to work for me?”

  “I had this boy David drive us up, ahem,” said Mr. Vaught, clearing his throat diffidently. “I didn’t know we were going to be up here this long, so I sent him home on the bus. He couldn’t drive either. He like to have scared me to death.”

  The engineer nodded and asked no questions, since he understood that the “boy” was a Negro and Mr. Vaught was embarrassed lest it should appear that the engineer was being offered a Negro’s job.

  “Mrs. Vaught is certain you’ll be comfortable in Sutter’s old apartment,” he added quickly (you see it’s not a Negro’s job). For the first time the engineer began to wonder if the proposal might not be serious. “Come on, let’s go get us a Coke.”


  7.

  He followed the older man to a niche off the corridor which had been fitted out as a tiny waiting room with a chrome sofa, a Coke machine, and a single window overlooking the great plunging battleship of Manhattan.

  Mr. Vaught put his hand on the younger man’s knee and gave it a shake. “Son, when you reach my age I hope you will not wake up to find that you’ve gone wrong somewhere and that your family have disappointed you.”

  “I hope so too, sir.” He was sure he would not. Because he had lived a life of pure possibility, the engineer, who had often heard older people talk this way, always felt certain he would not repeat their mistakes.

  “It’s something when the world goes to hell and your own family lets you down, both,” said Mr. Vaught, but not at all dolefully, the engineer noticed. His expression was as chipper as ever.

  The tiny room soon became so thick with cigar smoke that the engineer’s eyes began to smart. Yet, as he sat blinking, hands on knees, he felt quite content.

  “Ah, Billy, there’s been a loss of integrity in the world, all the things that made this country great.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But the bitterest thing of all is the ingratitude of your own children.”

  “It must be.”

  Mr. Vaught sat on the very edge of the sofa and turned around and looked back through the smoke. “Rita’s the only one that’s worth a damn and she’s not even kin.”

  “Sutter’s the oldest,” said the engineer, nodding.

  “The oldest and the smartest and still isn’t worth a damn. Never was and never will be.”

  “He wrote some very learned articles.”

  “I’ll tell you what he did. He went to the bad on liquor and women.”

  “Is that so?” All his life the engineer had heard of men who “went to the bad” on women, but he still didn’t quite know what it meant. “Isn’t he a good doctor?” he asked the older man.

  “He had the best education money could buy and you know what he does?”

  “No sir.”

  “He went to Harvard Medical School and made the second highest grades ever made there. After that he interned at Massachusetts General Hospital. Came home. Practiced four years with wonderful success. Was doing people a world of good. Then he quit. Do you know what he does now?”

  “No sir.”

  “He’s assistant coroner. He makes five hundred dollars a month cutting on dead people in the daytime and chases women all night. Why, he’s not even the coroner. He’s the assistant. He works at the hospital but he doesn’t practice. What he is is an interne. He’s a thirty-four-year-old interne.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You know that boy in there,” Mr. Vaught nodded toward the room.

  “Yes sir.”

  “He is evermore crazy about his big brother and I be dog if I know why. And smart!”

  “Which one?”

  “Both.”

  “—”

  “I’ll tell you what happened, though.”

  “What?”

  “I made a mistake. Three years ago, when my other daughter Val had her twenty-first birthday, I got the idea of giving each of my children a hundred thousand dollars if they hadn’t smoked till they were twenty-one. Why not enjoy your money while you’re living?”

  “That’s true,” said the engineer, who owned $7.

  “Anyway I didn’t want to have to look at the bunch of them tippy-toeing around and grinning like chess-cats, waiting for me to die. You know what I mean.”

  “Yes sir,” said the other, laughing.

  “So what do you think happens? Sutter is older, so he gets his check the same time as Val. So Sutter, as soon as he gets his money, quits practicing medicine, goes out West, and buys a ranch and sits down and watches the birdies. And when he spends the money, do you know what he does? He takes a job at a dude ranch, like a ship’s doctor, only he’s taking care of five hundred grass widows. Oh, I really did him a favor. Oh, I really did him a big favor. Wait. I want to show you something. Today, you know, is Kitty’s and Jamie’s birthday. Kitty is twenty-one and Jamie is only sixteen, but I’m going to give him his money now.”

  The engineer looked at the other curiously, but he could fathom nothing.

  “Maybe you and Jamie would like to take a trip around the world,” said Mr. Vaught without changing his expression. He was fumbling in the back pocket of his seersucker pants and now took out a wallet as rounded off and polished as a buckeye. From it he plucked two checks and handed them to the engineer, watching him the while with a brimming expectation. They were stiff new checks, as rough as a cheese grater, bristling with red and black bank marks and punch-holes and machine printing. A row of odd Q-shaped zeros marched to the east.

  “This one must be for Kitty,” he said, reading the word Katherine. “One hundred thousand dollars.” It seemed to be what the old man expected, for he nodded.

  “You give it to one, you got to give it to all. I hope she dudn’t mess me up too.”

  “Did Val mess you up?”

  “Val? She was the worst. And yet she was my girlie. I used to call her that, girlie. When she was little, she used to have growing pains. I would hold her in my lap and rock her in the rocking chair, for hours.”

  “What did she do?”

  “With the money? Gave it to the niggers.”

  “Sir?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. She gave it to the niggers.”

  “But—” began the engineer, who had formed a picture of a girl standing on the front porch handing out bills to passing Negroes. “I thought Kitty told me she went into a, ah, convent.”

  “She did,” cried the old man, peering back through the smoke.

  “Then how—”

  “Now she’s begging from niggers. Do you think that is right?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Let me ask you something. Do you think the good Lord wants us to do anything unnatural?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said the engineer warily. He perceived it was an old argument and a sore subject.

  “Or leave your own kind?”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean to go spend the rest of your life not just with niggers but with Tyree niggers—do you think that is natural?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “You’ve heard your daddy talk about Tyree niggers?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Not even niggers have anything to do with Tyree niggers. Down there in Tyree County they’ve got three different kinds of schools, one for the white folks, one for niggers, and a third for Tyree niggers. They’re speckled-like in the face and all up in the head. Some say they eat clay. So where do you think Val goes?”

  “Yes sir,” said the engineer.

  “She went to Agnes Scott, then to Columbia and was just about to get her master’s.”

  The engineer perceived that here was one of those families, more common in the upper South, who set great store by education and degrees.

  “So what do I do? Two weeks before graduation I give her her money. So what does she do?”

  “Gave it to the Tyree niggers?”

  “Man, I’m telling you.”

  An easy silence fell between them. Mr. Vaught crossed his legs and pulled one ankle above the other with both hands. The little lobby, now swirling with cigar smoke, was something like an old-style Pullman smoker where men used to sit talking by night, pulling their ankles above their knees, and leaning out to spit in the great sloshing cuspidor.

  “Let’s get us another Coke, Bill.”

  “I’ll get them, sir.”

  Mr. Vaught drank his Coke in country style, sticking out a little finger and swigging it off in two swallows. “Now. Here’s what we’ll do. The doctors say Jamie can travel in a week or so. I aim to start home about Thursday week or Friday. Mama wants to go by Williamsburg and Charleston. Now you going to quit all this foolishness up here and come on home with us. What I’m goi
ng to do is get you and Jamie a little bitty car—you know I’m in the car business. Do you play golf?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Hell, man, we live on the golf links. Our patio is twenty feet from number 6 fairway. You like to sail? The Lil’ Doll is tied up out at the yacht club and nobody will sail her. You’d be doing me a great favor.”

  The engineer wished he would mention a salary.

  “You and Jamie can go to college—or go round the world! Now isn’t that better than being a janitor?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You think about it.”

  “I will. Sir?”

  “What?”

  “Here—I’m going to write down my number here in New York.” Meaning, he hoped: you didn’t mention a figure and when you want to, it is for you to call me.

  “Sho now,” said Mr. Vaught absently, and shoved the slip of paper into the side pocket of his seersucker, a bad enough sign in itself.

  8.

  He stayed only long enough to watch the presentation of the checks. Kitty was back and without Rita!

  Standing between Jamie and Kitty, Mr. Vaught crossed his arms, a check in each hand.

  “When was your last cigarette?” he asked Jamie.

  “There was no last cigarette,” said Jamie, grinning and thrashing.

  “Your last drink?”

  “There was no last drink.”

  “Then go buy yourself a drink.”

  “Yes sir,” said Jamie, taking his check.

  “Kitty?”

  “No cigarette and no drink.”

  “Then go buy yourself one!”

  “I might,” said Kitty, laughing.

  “I mean it! They’re certified. You can cash it right down there at the bar on the corner.”