The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  Jamie surprised him by answering the phone himself.

  “Why didn’t you keep the telescope?” the engineer asked him.

  “We’re leaving, aren’t we? Thanks, by the way.”

  “Rita spoke to me today. Do you know what she wants us to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  Again he heard the slight break in breathing, the little risible and incredulous sound he seemed to call forth from people.

  “What would you do?” asked Jamie after a silence.

  “I’d do what the doctor said.”

  “Me too. But in any case you’re going to bum around with me for a while?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then call Poppy and see what’s what. After all, he’s the boss.”

  “You’re right. I will. Where is he?”

  “At the Astor.”

  “How extraordinary.”

  “It was the only hotel they knew.”

  “Yello, yello.” Mr. Vaught answered the telephone as eccentrically and routinely as a priest reciting the rosary.

  “Sir, this is Billy Barrett.”

  “Who? Billy boy!”

  “Yes sir. Sir—”

  “Yayo.”

  “I would like to know exactly where we stand.”

  “You ain’t the only one.”

  “Sir?”

  “What is it you want to know, Bill?”

  “I would like to know, sir, whether I am working for you or working for Rita or for both or for neither.”

  “You want to know something, Bill.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It would be a crying shame if you didn’t turn out to be a lawyer. You sound just like your daddy.”

  “Yes sir. But—”

  “Listen to me, Bill.”

  “I will,” said the engineer, who had learned to tell when the old man was not fooling.

  “You got your driver’s license?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “All right. You be standing outside on the sidewalk at nine o’clock in the morning. We’ll pick you up. Then we’ll see who’s going where.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “All yall be ready,” he said, like Kitty, somewhat aside from the telephone, to the world around.

  It was not a good sign, thought the engineer as he hung up slowly, that Mr. Vaught spoke both broadly and irritably.

  14.

  The next morning he resigned his position at Macy’s—the chief engineer, who had heard this before and was something of a psychologist himself, nodded gravely and promised the job would be waiting for him when he felt better—checked out of the Y.M.C.A. and sat on his telescope at the curb for three hours. No one came to pick him up. Once he went inside to call the hospital, the hotel, and Kitty. Had he got the directions wrong? Jamie had been discharged, the Vaughts had left the hotel, and Kitty’s telephone did not answer.

  Only then, three hours later, did it occur to him that there must be a message for him. He climbed the steps again. Already the Y reentered was like a place he had lived in long ago with its special smell of earnestness and breathed air and soaped tile, the smell, as he had always taken it but only just now realized, of Spanish Protestantism. Two yellow slips were handed him across the desk. Superstitiously, he took pains to return to his perch on the street corner before reading either. The first was a garbled note, evidently from Mr. Vaught. “If plans are not finalized and you change your mind a job is always waiting. S. Vote.” “Vote” could only be Vaught.

  The second was from Kitty and he couldn’t see for looking. “Europe out,” he finally made out. “Jamie more important. Please change your mind and catch up with us at Coach-and-Four Motel, Williamsburg. Know you had cause to lose patience but please change your mind. Did you mean what you said? Kitty.”

  Change my mind? Mean what I said? What did I say, asked the engineer aloud. He blinked into the weak sunlight. Screwing up an eye, he tried mightily to get the straight of it. It follows, said he, diagramming a syllogism in the air, that they think I changed my mind about going with them. But I told them no such thing. Then it follows someone else did.

  Another twenty minutes of squatting and musing on the telescope, not so much addled as distracted by the curiousness of sitting in the street and having no address, and he jumped suddenly to his feet.

  Why, they have all left, thought he, socking himself with amazement: the whole lot of them have pulled out.

  Early afternoon found him on a southbound bus counting his money. He bought a ticket as far as Metuchen. The bus was a local, a stained old Greyhound with high portholes. The passengers sat deep in her hold, which smelled of the 1940’s and many a trip to Fort Dix. Under the Hudson River she roared, swaying like a schooner, and out onto old US 1 with its ancient overpasses and prehistoric Sinclair stations. The green sky filtered through the high windows. In Elizabeth, when the door opened, he fancied he heard a twittering, ravening noise high in the green sky.

  When the bus got clear of the factories and overpasses, he pulled the cord and alighted on the littered highway. On the corner stood a blackened stucco dollhouse with a pagoda roof, evidently a subdivision field office left over from the period between the great wars.

  It began to rain, a fine dirty Jersey drizzle, and he took refuge in the pagoda, which was empty but for scraps of ancient newspapers, a sepia rotogravure section depicting Lucky Lindy’s visit to Lakehurst in 1928.

  The drizzle stopped but it was a bad place to catch a ride. There were few cars. The concrete underfoot trembled like an earthquake as the great tankers and tractors rolled by. Yet prudence had not failed him. Against such an occasion he had obtained certain materials in Penn Station, and, returning to the pagoda, he lettered a sign which he propped against his telescope: PRINCETON STUDENT SEEKS RIDE SOUTH.

  And now once again, not entirely aware that he did so, he stuck his hands in his pockets a certain way and carried his chin in his throat. In the end he even took off his Macy’s jacket (which looked more like Ohio State than Princeton), uncovering his shirt with the tuck in back and no pocket in front.

  Chapter Three

  1.

  FOR AN HOUR and a half the great trucks rolled past, shaking the earth and exhaling clouds of blue headache smoke. Was it possible that his Princeton placard did more harm than good? He had in fact given up, counted his money for the third time, and resolved to ride the bus and waive eating; had even picked up telescope but not, fortunately, Val-Pak, which supported the placard, when a bottle-green Chevrolet, an old ’58 Junebug, passed and hesitated, the driver’s foot lifting and the carburetor sucking wind, speeded up and hesitated again. As the engineer watched politely lest he presume upon fortune, the Chevrolet pulled off the highway and sat interestingly on the shoulder a good hundred yards to the south. At last it came, the sign, a hand beckoned to him importunately and in a single swoop he caught up Val-Pak and telescope and left placard behind.

  Already, even as he stooped, smiling, to stow his gear through the back door, which had been opened for him, he had registered his benefactor without quite looking at him. The driver was a light-colored high-stomached Negro dressed in a good brown suit, no doubt a preacher or a teacher. Now sitting beside him and taking note of the other’s civil bald bun-shaped head, of the sharp knees and thin ankles clad in socks-with-clocks, he was sure of it: here was the sort to hold converse at a lofty level with instant and prodigious agreement on all subjects. He would belong to a committee on Religion and Mental Health.

  As it turned out, the driver spoke not of religion or mental health but of Princeton and Einstein. The placard had worked.

  “There was a quality of simplicity about him,” said the driver, turning his head and not his eyes sociably toward his passenger, and launched at once into his own pet theory. It was his conviction that there was a balance in nature which was upset by man’s attempt to improve upon it.

  The engineer agreed and, casting his eye abou
t the ruinous New Jersey flats, cited an article he had read about rivers in this very neighborhood which fairly foamed with detergents and chemical wastes.

  “No, no,” said the driver excitedly. He explained that he was not speaking of ordinary pollution but of a far more fundamental principle. Rather was it his conviction that man’s very best efforts to improve his environment, by air-conditioning and even by landscaping, upset a fundamental law which it took millions of years to evolve. “You take your modern office building, as tastefully done as you please. What does it do to a man to uproot him from the earth? There is the cause of your violence!”

  “Yes,” said the sentient engineer, frowning thoughtfully. Something was amiss here. He couldn’t quite get hold of this bird. Something was out of kilter. It was his speech, for one thing. The driver did not speak as one might expect him to, with a certain relish and a hearkening to his own periods, as many educated Negroes speak. No, his speech was rapid and slurred, for all the world like a shaky white man’s.

  Obligingly, however, the engineer, who had become giddy from hunger and his long wait, set forth his own ideas on the subject of good environments and bad environments—without mentioning the noxious particles.

  “Yes!” cried the driver in his damped reedy voice. He was tiring and excited and driving badly. The passenger became nervous. If only he would ask me to drive, he groaned, as the Chevy nearly ran under a great Fruehauf trailer. “That’s your reaction to artificial environments in general! Wonderful! Don’t you see how it dovetails?”

  The engineer nodded reluctantly. He did not see. Back-to-nature was the last thing he had in mind. “Except—ahem—” said he, feeling his own voice go a bit reedy. “Except I would suspect that even if one picked out the most natural surroundings he might carry his own deprivation with him.”

  “Capital,” cried the driver and smote the steering wheel.

  The engineer could all but feel the broad plastic knurls between his knuckles. I could make this old Junebug take off, he thought. But the driver was slowing down again, row-boating badly as he did so.

  “Now isn’t this something,” he said. “Here we are, total strangers, talking like this—” He was fairly jumping out of his skin in his nervous elation.

  They passed an abandoned miniature golf links, the ancient kind with asbestos greens and gutter pipes which squirt out the ball. But no sooner had they entered the countryside of middle Jersey than the driver pulled off the highway and stopped. The hitchhiker sat as pleasant as ever, hands on knees, nodding slightly, but inwardly dismayed.

  “Do you mind if I ask a question?” said the driver, swinging over a sharp, well-clad knee.

  “Why, no.”

  “I like to know what a man’s philosophy is and I want to tell you mine.”

  Uh-oh, thought the engineer gloomily. After five years of New York and Central Park and the Y.M.C.A., he had learned to be wary of philosophers.

  With his Masonic ring winking fraternally, the dignified colored man leaned several degrees nearer. “I have a little confession to make to you.”

  “Certainly,” said the courteous engineer, cocking a weather eye at his surroundings. All around them stretched a gloomy cattail swamp which smelled like a crankcase and from which arose singing clouds of mosquitoes. A steady stream of Fruehauf tractor-trailers rumbled past, each with a no-rider sign on the windshield.

  “I’m not what you think I am,” the driver shouted above the uproar.

  “You’re not,” said the pleasant, forward-facing engineer.

  “What do you think I am? Tell me honestly.”

  “Um. I’d guess you were a minister or perhaps a professor.”

  “What race?”

  “Why, um, colored.”

  “Look at this.”

  To the hitchhiker’s astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.

  “Ah,” said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness.

  “Well?”

  “Sir?”

  “Look at that patch.”

  “Then you’re not—?”

  “I’m not a Negro.”

  “Is that right?”

  “My name is not Isham Washington.”

  “No?”

  “It’s Forney Aiken.”

  “Is that so,” said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

  “Does that name ring a bell?”

  “It does sound familiar,” said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of déjà vus made everything sound familiar.

  “Do you remember a picture story that appeared in July ’51 Redbook called ‘Death on the Expressway’?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies.”

  “As a matter of fact, I think I do—”

  “Do you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?”

  “Who?”

  “Or the article in Liberty: ‘I Saw Vic Genovese’? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese.”

  “You’re Forney Aiken the—”

  “The photographer.”

  “Yes, I think I do,” said the engineer, nodding but still wary. This fellow could still be a philosopher. “Anyhow I certainly do appreciate the ride.” The singing hordes of mosquitoes were coming ever nearer. He wished Forney would get going.

  “Forney,” cried the other, holding out a hand.

  “Will. Will Barrett.”

  The green Chevrolet resumed its journey, taking its place shakily among the Fruehauf tractors. Breathing a sigh of relief, the engineer spoke of his own small efforts in photography and took from his wallet a color snapshot of the peregrine falcon, his best.

  “Tremendous,” cried the photographer, once again beside himself with delight at having fallen in with such a pleasant and ingenious young man. In return he showed his passenger a tiny candid camera concealed under his necktie whose lens looked like the jewel of a tie clasp.

  It, the candid camera, was essential to his present assignment. The photographer, it turned out, was setting forth on an expedition this very afternoon, the first he had undertaken in quite awhile. It was something of a comeback, the engineer surmised. He had the shaky voice and the fitful enthusiasms of a man freshly sober.

  The nature of his new project accounted for his extraordinary disguise. He wished to do a series on behind-the-scene life of the Negro. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night: why not be a Negro? To make a long story short, he had persuaded a dermatologist friend to administer an alkaloid which simulates the deposit of melanin in the skin, with the difference that the darkening effect could be neutralized by a topical cream. Therefore the white patch on his forearm. To complete the disguise, he had provided himself with the personal papers of one Isham Washington, an agent for a burial insurance firm in Pittsburgh.

  This very afternoon he had left the office of his agent in New York, tonight would stop off at his house in Bucks County, and tomorrow would head south, under the “cotton curtain,” as he expressed it.

  The pseudo-Negro was even more delighted to discover that his passenger was something of an expert on American speech. “You were my first test and I passed it, and you a Southerner.”

  “Well, not quite,” replied the tactful engineer. He explained that for one thing you don’t say insur-ance but in-surance or rather in-shaunce.

  “Oh, this is marvelous,” said the pseudo-Negro, nearly running under a Borden tanker.

  You don’t say that either, mahvelous, thought the engineer, but let it go.

  “What do you think of the title ‘No Man an Island’?”

  “Very good.”

  Tomorrow, the pseu
do-Negro explained, he planned to stop in Philadelphia and pick up Mort Prince, the writer, who planned to come with him and do the text.

  “But hold on,” exclaimed the driver, smacking the steering wheel again. “How stupid can you get.”

  For the third time in a month the engineer was offered a job. “Why didn’t I think of it before! Why don’t you come with us? You know the country and you could do the driving. I’m a lousy driver.” He was. His driving was like his talking. He was alert and chipper and terrified. “Do you drive?”

  “Yes sir.”

  But the engineer declined. His services were already engaged, he explained, by a family who was employing him as tutor-companion to their son.

  “Ten dollars a day plus keep.”

  “No sir. I really can’t.”

  “Plus a piece of the royalties.”

  “I certainly appreciate it.”

  “You know Mort?”

  “Well, I’ve heard of him and read some of his books.”

  “You know, it was Mort and I who first hit on the idea of the Writers’ and Actors’ League for Social Morality.”

  The engineer nodded agreeably. “I can certainly understand it, considering the number of dirty books published nowadays. As for the personal lives of the actors and actresses—”

  The pseudo-Negro looked at him twice. “Oh-ho. Very good! Very ironical! I like that. You’re quite a character, Barrett.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Joking aside, though, it was our idea to form the first folk theater to travel through the South. Last summer it played in over a hundred towns. Where are you from—I bet it played there.”

  The engineer told him.

  “My God.” The pseudo-Negro ran off the road in his excitement. The hitchhiker put a discreet hand on the wheel until the Chevy was under control. “That’s where we’re having our festival this fall. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway are coming down. What it is, is like the old morality plays in the Middle Ages.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”