The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  “Yes sir.”

  “Then you’ve got to come with us.”

  The engineer managed to decline, but in the end he agreed to drive the other as far as Virginia and the “cotton curtain.” When they stopped the second time to change drivers, he was glad enough to add the two ten-dollar bills, which the pseudo-Negro made a great show of paying him in advance, to his flattened wallet and to sprint around and hop into the driver’s seat.

  2.

  Under the engineer’s steady hand, the Chevrolet fairly sailed down US 1. In short order it turned onto a great new westering turnpike and swept like a bird across the Delaware River not far from the spot where General Washington crossed nearly two hundred years ago.

  Forney Aiken’s stone cottage was also standing at the time of the crossing. Some years ago, he told the engineer, he and his wife had left New York and beat a more or less disorderly retreat to Bucks County. She was an actor’s agent and had to commute. He was trying to quit drinking and thought it might help to live in the country and do chores, perhaps even farm. When farming didn’t work, he took to making things, the sort of articles, firkins and sisal tote bags, which are advertised in home magazines. But this was not as simple as it looked either. There was more to it than designing an ad for a magazine. You have to have your wholesale outlet.

  There were some people sitting around a lighted pool in an orchard when they arrived. The travelers skirted them in a somewhat ambiguous fashion, not quite ignoring them and not quite stopping to speak but catching a few introductions on the fly, so to speak. Mrs. Aiken looked after them with an expression which gave the engineer to understand that the photographer often showed up with strangers and skirted the pool. Even though it was dark, the photographer insisted on showing the engineer the orchard and barn. It was a pity because the engineer recognized one of the guests, a nameless but familiar actor who took the part of a gentle, wise doctor on the daytime serial which it was his habit to watch for a few minutes after lunch in the Y. But he must be shown on to the barn instead, which was stacked to the rafters with cedar firkins, thousands of them. For some eighteen months the barn had served as a firkin factory. But of the eight or nine thousand manufactured, only five hundred had been sold. “Take your pick,” his host urged him, and the engineer was glad enough to do so, having a liking for well-wrought wooden things. He chose a stout two-gallon firkin of red-and-white cedar bound in copper and fitted with a top. It would be a good thing to carry country butter in or well water or just to sit on between rides.

  Later he did meet the poolside group. The actor was a cheerful fellow, not at all like the sad doctor he played, even though his face had fallen into a habitual careworn expression after years in the part. But he had a thick brown merry body and a good pelt on his chest, upon which he rested his highball. No one paid any attention to Forney’s disguise. They treated him with the tender apocalyptic cordiality and the many warm hugs of show-business people. Though he knew nothing about show biz, the sentient engineer had no trouble translating their tender regard for their host. It clearly signified: Forney, you’re dead, done for, that’s why we love you. Forney was as abrupt with them as they were tender with him. He had the manner of one going about his business. To the others, it seemed to the sentient engineer, the expedition was “something Forney was doing” and something therefore to be treated with a mournful and inattentive sympathy which already discounted failure. A rangy forty-five-year-old couple with muscular forty-five-year-old calves, burnt black as Indians, found the engineer and asked him who he was. When he told them he came with Forney, they went deaf and fond. “Forney’s got more talent in his little finger than anybody here,” cried the man both privately and loudly, like a proverb, and hurried away.

  Though he had not eaten or slept since the day before, he drank two drinks and went swimming. Soon he was treading water in the deep dark end of the pool with Forney’s daughter, the only other young person present. Everyone called her Muzh or Moosh. She had the fitful and antic manner of one used to the company of her elders. In no time the two of them had their heads together, snuffling the water like seals. It was understood between them that they were being the young folk. Muzh had just returned from her college year abroad. Her shoulders were strong and sloping from bicycling around youth hostels. In the clear yellow water her strong legs bent like pants. She told him about the guests. Her way of speaking was rapid and confidential as if they had left off only a short time earlier. She rattled off some recent history. “Coop over there—” she spoke into the lambent water, nodding toward a distinguished silver-haired gent, “—is just out of the Doylestown jail, where he served six months for sodomy, though Fra says sodomy rates two to ten.” Who was Fra? (As usual, strangers expected him to know their, the strangers’, friends.) And had she, for a fact, said sodomy? He wrung out his ear. Unfortunately she was at that moment on his deaf side.

  She dawdled toward him, working the water to and fro through the sluice of her shoulder. On she went about the guests in her rapid, cataloguing voice, bent toward him, the waterline at his mouth, while he grew ever fainter with hunger and more agitated. As her knees brushed against his and she spoke of having transcended Western values, he seized her through the thick parts, fell upon her as much from weakness as desire, fainted upon her, the fine brown berry of a girl she was. “Zut alors,” she cried softly, and now perfunctorily, unsurprised, keeping herself flexed and bent away from him, she asked him about the transvaluation of values. “I couldn’t say,” he replied, disappointed. He had heard enough about values from Dr. Gamow. “No, really,” she said. “I am in something of a value crisis and so I’m deeply concerned. What can we do?” “Let’s go over yonder,” he replied, fainting with hunger and desire, and nodded to the dark polygon of the barn. “Zut,” she cried, but idly, and swam away. As he stood slack in the water, both lustful and shrunken with cold, she made forays in the water around him, flexing like a porpoise, came under him in the shallows, put him astride and unhorsed him in bluff youth-hostel style. “See you later,” she said at last and went away, but how said she it?

  Coming to himself all at once, he socked himself in the head. Swine, said he, staggering about in the shallows, white trash. Here you are in love with a certain person and bound south as a gentleman like Rooney Lee after a sojourn in the North, and at it again: pressing against girls like a horny dolphin and abusing your host besides. No more humbuggery! Leaping from the pool, he ran to the room Forney had shown him and, starved or not, threw a hundred combination punches and did thirty minutes of violent isomorphics until he dripped with sweat, took an ice-cold shower and read two pages of Living. Saints contemplated God to be rid of concupiscence; he turned to money. He returned to the pool, exhausted, ravenous, but in his right mind.

  “I apologize,” he told Muzh formally as they stood in line for cold cuts. “As a matter of fact I’ve been, ahem, in something of a value crisis myself and have not eaten or slept in quite awhile. I apologize for being forward with you.”

  “Good God,” said Muzh, brushing against him with several dorsal surfaces. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  “Don’t what?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Damn, thought he, and had to thrust his hand through his pocket to keep his knee from leaping.

  He ate three helpings of turkey and ham and rye bread and sat slack and heavy with his blood singing in his ears. Fortunately his host was brimming with plans for the morrow and put him to work after supper toting paraphernalia, cameras and insurance manuals, to the Chevrolet. Later he showed him the house.

  “You’re going to like Mort Prince. He’s our kind of folks.” They had reached the cellar, which the engineer looked at and sniffed with interest because at home the ground was too low for cellars and he’d never seen one before. “He’s a sweet guy,” said Forney.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Have you read his stuff?”

  “A couple of novels quite a while ago.”

&n
bsp; “You haven’t read Love?”

  “His latest? No.”

  “I’ll get you a copy tonight.”

  “Thank you, but I’m very sleepy. I think I’ll go to bed.”

  Forney came closer. “You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what this book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about —ing. And in a sense it is!” They were by now back at poolside and within earshot of others, including Muzh. It made the engineer nervous. “But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deeply religious. I’ll get you a copy.”

  The engineer groaned. What the devil does he mean telling me it’s about —ing? Is —ing a joking matter? Am I to understand I am free to — his daughter? Or do we speak of —ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of —ing anyone in the vicinity? His radar boggled.

  “It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying,” Forney went on. “Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found.”

  “Yes sir,” said the engineer, rising unsteadily. “I think I’ll go to bed.”

  But no sooner had he fallen into the four-poster than a knock came at the door. It was Muzh in a shorty nightgown delivering Love. “You talk about randy,” said she and smote her brow. “Sheesh!”

  “Thank you,” said the engineer, laughing heartily, and when she had left went reeling about the room like Rooney Lee after the battle of Seven Days. What saved him in the end was not only Southern chivalry but Yankee good sense. Muzh he saw all at once and belatedly, as she might have been seen by her classmates, as a horsy, good-natured, sisterly sort. She was, as they say in the North, a good kid. And so it was permitted him to leave her alone and to excuse himself. What a relief. He wiped his brow.

  Worse luck, though, sleep deserted him, left him half dead from lack of it and wide awake. There was nothing to do but read Love. He read it straight through, finishing at three o’clock.

  Love was about orgasms, good and bad, some forty-six. But it ended, as Forney had said, on a religious note. “And so I humbly ask of life,” said the hero to his last partner with whose assistance he had managed to coincide with his best expectations, “that it grant us the only salvation, that of one human being discovering himself through another and through the miracle of love.”

  The poor engineer arose, faint with fatigue, and threw a few final combination punches to clear his head. But when he got back in bed he found himself lying at attention, his feet sticking up, his left leg tending to rise of itself. There was nothing to do but swallow two of Dr. Gamow’s spansules, which induced sleep only indirectly by inhibiting the cortical influence on the midbrain—even though he knew that his sense of time and place would suffer in consequence. Though he might not know where he was tomorrow or what year it was, at least he’d feel better than this.

  At any rate he went fast asleep and woke in midmorning, somewhat disoriented but feeling quite cheerful and well.

  3.

  Early afternoon found him driving like a cat. The bottle-green Chevrolet went roaring and banking around the many ramps and interchanges of eastern Pennsylvania. The pseudo-Negro sat beside him as alert and jumpy as ever. Presently they left the expressway and went among the sooty little hill towns. Déjà vus stole alongside and beckoned at the corner of his eye. How familiar were these steep streets and old 1937 brick-and-limestone high schools and the sooty monkey Pullman smell. Surely I attended that very one, he told himself, where I recall taking mechanical drawing in the basement. Two girls in summer school sat on the school steps, dumb pretty Pennsylvania girls. He waved. They waved back. Oh girls I love you. Don’t let anybody mess with you till I get back because I’ve been here before. Where is this place? “Where is this?” he asked so abruptly that the pseudo-Negro jumped a good inch.

  The pseudo-Negro kept harping on Mort Prince, whom they were presently to pick up. The writer, it seemed, had astonished his friends by moving to Levittown. He had inherited the house from an aunt and, instead of selling it, had sold his farm in Connecticut and moved in more or less, as the pseudo-Negro expressed it, for the simple heck of it. “Imagine going from Fiesole to Levittown,” he said, shaking his head. The engineer could very well imagine it.

  He began to look forward to meeting Mort Prince. Some years ago he had read two of his novels and remembered them perfectly—he could remember perfectly every detail of a book he had read ten years ago or a conversation with his father fifteen years ago; it was the day before yesterday that gave him trouble. After a war novel which made him famous, Mort Prince wrote a novel about a young veteran who becomes disillusioned with the United States and goes to Italy in quest of his own identity. It is in Europe that he discovers he is an American after all. The book ended on a hopeful note. Mark comes home to visit his dying father, who is a judge in Vermont. The judge is a Yankee in the old style, a man of granite integrity. Now he too, Mark, knows who he is, what he must do, and that all men are his brothers. In the last chapter he climbs High Tor overlooking the valley. If a man does nothing else in life, said Mark to himself, he can at least tell one other man (that all men are brothers) and he another and he in turn another until at last amid the hatred and the dying all men shall one day hear and hearing understand and understanding believe. Mark had come home. Arising from High Tor, he picked up his coat and turned his face to the city.

  After his first return to the United States, the pseudo-Negro was saying, Mort Prince had married a hometown girl and moved to Connecticut. It was at this time, as the engineer recalled it, that he had read The Farther Journey, a novel about a writer who lives in Connecticut and enters into a sexual relationship with a housewife next door, not as a conventional adultery, for he was not even attracted to her, but rather as the exercise of that last and inalienable possession of the individual in a sick society, freedom. In the words of one reviewer, it was “the most nearly absolutely gratuitous act since Lafcadio pushed Fleurissoire out of the railway carriage in Les Caves du Vatican.”

  Following his divorce and his latest trip to Italy the writer, according to the pseudo-Negro, had felt the strongest compulsion to return to the United States, seek out the most commonplace environment, and there, like Descartes among the Burghers of Amsterdam, descend within himself and write the first real war novel, an absolutely unvarnished account of one day’s action of one infantry platoon. When his aunt died and left him a house, he took off for Fiesole by the first plane.

  The attentive engineer, at this moment skillfully piloting the green Chevrolet into the pleasant maze of Levittown, understood perfectly. If his aunt had left him such a house, he’d have moved in too and settled down in perfect contentment.

  They entered Levittown. The freshly sprinkled lawns sparkled in the sunlight, lawns as beautiful as Atlanta lawns but less spectral and Druidic. Chipper little Swiss swales they were and no Negroes to cut the grass but rather Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean cranking up their Toros and afterward wisecracking over the fence. Here, he reckoned, housewives ran into each other’s kitchens to borrow a cup of Duz. Not a bad life! Really he would like it very much. He could live here cheerfully as a Swiss with never a care for the morrow. But a certain someone was already in Old Virginny by now and his heart pressed south.

  But even as they began to circle the blocks and search for house numbers, the sentient engineer began to detect unpleasant radiations. While the pseudo-Negro gabbled away and noticed nothing, it struck the engineer that more people than one might expect were standing about on their lawns and sidewalks. Indeed he could swear that some of them were shooting hostile glances in the direction of the Chevrolet! Recollecting Dr. Gamow’s strong hints about certain delusions of persecution, he tried to pay no attention. But they were at it again! One group of householders in particular he noticed and one man in particular, a burly fellow with a small mustache who wore a furry alpine hat which was too small for him.

 
“What number did you say it was?” he asked the pseudo-Negro.

  “One forty-two.”

  “Then here it is,” said the engineer, circling the block a second time and pulling up at the same group of householders. He followed the pseudo-Negro up the walk, the latter as garrulous and shaky as ever and noticing nothing, his nerve ends firing at the slightest breeze, even nodding to the householders on the next lawn, whom he fancied to be well-wishers of some sort. They were not well-wishers. They stood about silently, hands in pockets, and kicking the turf. Next to the burly alpiner the engineer spied trouble itself: a thin fierce-eyed damp-skinned woman whose hair was done up in plastic reels, a regular La Pasionaria of the suburbs. He ventured another look. Beyond a doubt, she was glaring straight at him, the engineer!

  Mort Prince met them in the deep-set cathedral door, beer in, hand, a pleasant slightish fellow with twirling black hair which flew away in a banner of not absolutely serious rebellion. He wore a black leather wristlet and, as he talked, performed a few covert isometrics on the beer can. The engineer liked him at once, perceiving that he was not the mighty fornicator of his novels but a perky little bullshooter of a certain style, the sort who stands in the kitchen during parties, suspended from himself so-to-speak, beer can in hand and matter forming at the corner of his mouth, all the while spieling off some very good stuff and very funny. One would like to get him going (and the engineer was just the one).

  One glance past him into the house and he knew also how it stood with the house and how the writer lived in it. Their voices echoed on bare parquet floors. There was no furniture except a plastic dinette and an isomorphic bar in a doorway. So that was how he did it, standing clear of walls suspended within himself and disdaining chairs because chairs were for sitting and therefore cancelled themselves.

  He shook hands with the engineer with a strong wiry grip, pronating his elbow.