The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  “All the folks around here,” cried David, laughing ts-ts-ts and waving a great limp hand in the direction of the golf links. “Folks out here got plenty money and ain’t one in ten got a dispenser-type box” (he’d been reading the brochure). “It only come with GE and Servel!”

  “Well, what in the world do they want it for,” moaned the flabbergasted engineer.

  “When the he’p gone in the evenings and folks want to fix they drinks! They ain’t going to want to fool with no old-fashioned knuckle-bruising trays” (more from the brochure). “It’s not S.E. on the other boxes.”

  “S.E.?” asked the engineer.

  “Standard Equipment.”

  “Oh. Then you’re just going to walk up to some lady’s house at ten o’clock in the morning and ring the doorbell and when she comes to the door you’re going to ask her to let you show this ice dispenser.”

  “Sho,” said David and began laughing at the sour-looking engineer, ts-ts-ts.

  “Well, you’re not,” the engineer would groan. Damnation, David couldn’t even polish silver. There was always silver cream left in the grooves. Still, the engineer liked to watch him at work. The morning sunlight fell among the silver fish in the shallows. The metal was creamy and satiny. The open jar of silver cream, the clotted rag, the gritty astringent smell of it, put him in mind of something but he couldn’t say what.

  But damn this awful vulnerability of theirs, he ranted, eyes fixed on the glittering silver. It’s going to ruin us all, this helplessness. Why, David acted as if everybody was going to treat him well! If I were a Negro, I’d be tougher than that. I’d be steadfast and tough as a Jew and I’d beat them. I’d never rest until I beat them and I could. I should have been born a Negro, for then my upside-downness would be right side up and I’d beat them and life would be simple.

  But Oh Christ, David, this goddamn innocence, it’s going to ruin us all. You think they’re going to treat you well, you act like you’re baby brother at home. Christ, they’re not going to treat you well. They’re going to violate you and it’s going to ruin us all, you, them, us. And that’s a shame because they’re not that bad. They’re not bad. They’re better than most, in fact. But you’re going to ruin us all with your vulnerability. It’s God’s terrible vengeance upon us, Jamie said Val said, not to loose the seven plagues upon us or the Assyrian or even the Yankee, but just to leave you here among us with this fearful vulnerability to invite violation and to be violated twenty times a day, day in and day out, our lives long, like a young girl. Who would not? And so the best of us, Jamie said she said, is only good the way a rapist is good later, for a rapist can be good later and even especially good and especially happy.

  But damn him, he thought, him and his crass black inept baby-brother vulnerability. Why should I, for Christ’s sake, sit here all asweat and solicitous of his vulnerability. Let him go sell his non-knuckle-bruising ice trays and if he gets hurt: well, I’m not well myself.

  David’s mother, Lugurtha Ross, was cook. She was respectable and black as black, with a coppery highlight, and had a straight Indian nose. She wanted no trouble with anybody. All she wanted in the world was to find fervent areas of agreement. She spoke to you only of such things as juvenile delinquency. “Chirren don’t have any respect for their parents any more,” she would cry. “You cain’t even correck them!”— even though David was her only living child and it was impossible to imagine him as a delinquent. She made it sound as if everybody were in the same boat; if only children would have more respect, our troubles would be over. She often made beaten biscuits in the evening, and as she sifted flour on the marble and handled the mitt of dough, she sang in a high decorous deaconess voice, not spirituals but songs she made up.

  Up in an airplane

  Smoking her sweet cigarette

  She went way up in an airplane

  Smoking her sweet cigarette

  John Houghton, the gardener, lived in a room under the engineer’s apartment. An ancient little Negro with dim muddy eyes and a face screwed up like a prune around a patch of bristling somewhere near the middle of which was his mustache, he was at least sixty-five and slim and quick as a boy. He had come from the deep country of south Georgia and worked on the railroad and once as a hod carrier forty years ago when they built the dam at Muscle Shoals. He had been night watchman for the construction company when Mr. Vaught built his castle. Mr. Vaught liked him and hired him. But he was still a country Negro and had country ways. Sometimes Jamie and David would get him in a card game just to see him play. The only game he knew was a strange south Georgia game called pitty-pat. You played your cards in turn and took tricks but there was not much rhyme or reason to it. When John Houghton’s turn came, he always stood up, drew back, and slapped the card down with a tremendous ha-a-a-a-umph!, just as if he were swinging a sledge hammer, but pulling up at the last second and setting the card down soft as a feather. David couldn’t help laughing ts-ts-ts. “What game we gon’ play, John?” he would ask the gardener to get him to say pitty-pat. “Lessus have a game of pitty-pat,” John Houghton would say, standing up also to shuffle the cards, which he did by chocking them into each other, all the while making terrific feints and knee-bends like a boxer. “Pitty-pat,” cried David and fell out laughing. But John Houghton paid no attention and told them instead of his adventures in the city, where, if the police caught you playing cards, they would sandbag you and take you to jail.

  “What do you mean, sandbag?” asked the puzzled engineer.

  “That’s what I mean!” cried John Houghton. “I mean they sandbag you.”

  Of an evening John Houghton would don his jacket, an oversize Marine drawstring jacket with deep patch pockets, turn the collar up around his ears so that just the top of his gnarled puckered head showed above it, thrust his hands deep into the patch pockets, and take a stroll down the service road which wound along the ridge behind the big houses. There he met the maids getting off work.

  At night and sometimes all night long there arose from the room below the engineer’s the sounds of scuffling and, it seemed to him, of flight and pursuit; of a chair scraped back, a sudden scurry of feet and screams, he could have sworn more than one voice, several in fact, screams both outraged and risible as pursuer and quarry rounded the very walls, it seemed like.

  4.

  They sat in the garden, the three students, on the last day of summer and leafed through their new textbooks. The whitethroat sparrows had come back early and were scratching in the sour leaves. The October sunlight was blinding on the white glazed pages, which smelled like acetate and the year ahead. The chemistry text seemed to exhale the delicate effluvium of new compounds. From the anthology there arose a subtler smell, both exotic and businesslike, of the poet’s disorder, his sweats and scribblings, and of the office order of the professor and the sweet ultimate ink. By contrast, everything else seemed untidy, the summer past, the ruined garden, one’s own life. Their best hope lay in the books themselves, the orderly march of chapter and subheading, the tables, the summaries, the index, the fine fat page of type.

  The old spurious hope and elegance of school days came back to him. How strange it was that school had nothing whatever to do with life. The old talk of school as a preparation for life—what a bad joke. There was no relation at all. School made matters worse. The elegance and order of school had disarmed him for what came later.

  Jamie had a queer-looking physical-chemical reference, as stubby and thick as a German handbook. Hefting it, you felt like a German: a whole body of knowledge, a Wissenschaft, here in your hand, a good chunky volume. Kitty had a great $15 atlas-size anthology of World Literature from Heraclitus to Robert Frost—the whole works. The engineer was content with a thin tight little volume, The Theory of Large Numbers, that and his slide rule, which he wore in a scabbard like a dagger. Sitting in the funky tannin smell of the fall garden, he slid the window of his rule and read off cube roots and cosigns. He for artifacts, bright pretty useful objects like
slide rules, and you can have your funky gardens and jaybirds crying down October.

  Each believed privately that he was taking the best course, had hit on the real thing, the meat of the university, and that the other two were deceiving themselves. Imagine what a chemistry student thinks of an anthology.

  Son Junior, Lamar Thigpen’s son, came out to join them and stood around fiddling with his Thunderbird keys, but they didn’t like him much and nobody spoke to him and at last he went away. He was a pale glum sophomore who lived at the university and drove home to the castle on weekends. Yet strangely enough, glum as he was, he had many friends at the university who liked him despite his sullen ways. He brought them over to the castle before football games, and while everyone had a good time drinking in the pantry, he stood off and fiddled with his car keys.

  The engineer, if the truth be told, was in a bad way, having been seriously dislocated by his first weeks at the university. Now feeling all at once knocked in the head, bumbly and sleepy, he excused himself and crept off to a sunny corner of the garden wall, where he curled up and went to sleep. The sparrows eyed him and hopped around in the dry crape myrtle leaves, which curled like orange peelings and seemed to burn with a clear flame in the sunlight.

  What had happened was that the university had badly thrown him off with its huge pleasantness. Powerful friendship radiations came at him from all directions. It was enough to make one uneasy. By ten o’clock on the first morning he was fairly jumping with nervousness. He did believe that the campus was the pleasantest place he had ever seen. Everyone he met was happy and good-looking and victorious and kindly and at-one with themselves, and here he was, solitary and goofy and shut up in himself, eyeballs rolled up in his eyebrows. Perfect strangers in shirtsleeves spoke to him on the paths. Beautiful little flatfooted girls swinging along in fresh cotton skirts called out to him: hi! His knee leapt. The boys said: what say! and the girls said: hi! He had of course got into the Yankee way of not speaking to anyone at all. In New York it is gradually borne in upon one that you do not speak to strangers and that if you do, you are fairly taken for a homosexual. Indeed he had noticed that Northern college boys worry about being mistaken for homosexuals and take trouble to demonstrate that they are not. At Princeton one not only did not speak to strangers on the paths; one also took care which acquaintances one acknowledged. There were those, in fact, who measured their own worth by the number of people one could afford to cut in public. That was how he nearly got into a fistfight and came to take up boxing. Still used to Southern ways, he spoke to a fellow coming toward him on the path, a cool, pipe-smoking gent (it was raining and he smoked his pipe upside-down) he had been introduced to not thirty minutes earlier at an eating club. “What say,” said the engineer and the fellow looked straight through him, snuffled in his pipe, and cut him dead. Now the engineer was not nearly as tense and honorable as his father but was still fairly tense and honorable and unused to slights, and after all his grandfather had been a great one for face-to-face showdowns in the street (“I told you, you bed-sheeted Ku Klux cowardly son of a bitch, to be out of town by four o’clock,” etc.). Before he knew it or even thought what he was doing, he had turned back, grabbed the other by his elbow, and spun him around. “Excuse me,” said the courteous engineer, “but I was introduced to you not thirty minutes ago and just now I spoke to you and furthermore I saw that you saw me speak to you and that you chose not to acknowledge my greeting. I suggest now that you do so acknowledge it.” Or some such of the formal goofy language he used with strangers. “Pardon,” said the other, looking at him for the maniac that he was. “I s’pose I was completely lost in my thots.” And off he went, snuffling in his pipe. Later the engineer observed that he smoked the pipe upside-down even on clear days. He was a Choate man. Evidently he had discovered that the engineer graduated from Ithaca High School. Thought the latter to himself: if I’m going to be challenging these fellows on the paths, I’d better be in shape to do it. You can run into a tartar, a sure-enough thick-legged gent. And what a sad business that would be, to challenge some fellow and then get the living hell beat out of you. So he went out for boxing, became a demon middleweight and had no more trouble with Choate snobs or anyone else for that matter.

  But now it was he who had learned Yankee ways. He took to eyeing people on the path to see when they would speak. He judged the distance badly and said his “hi” and “what say” too soon. His face ached from grinning. There was something to be said after all for the cool Yankee style of going your own way and paying no attention to anyone. Here for God’s sake the air fairly crackled with kinship radiations. That was it. These beautiful little flatfooted girls greeted you like your own sister! What do you do about that? He had forgotten. It made him blush to think of laying hands on them. Then he remembered: that was how you did lay hands on them!—through a kind of sisterly-brotherly joshing, messing around it was called. Everybody was wonderful and thought everybody else was. More than once he overheard one girl tell another: “She’s the most wonderful girl I ever knew!”

  That was how they treated the courses too: they cancelled out the whole academic side by honorifics. “Professor so-and-so? He’s the second smartest professor in the United States!” “Ec 4? Universally recognized as the hardest course ever given on the subject!” Etc. And poof! out the window went the whole intellectual business, kit and caboodle, cancelled out, polished off, even when you made straight A’s. Especially when you made straight A’s.

  Naturally in such an intersubjective paradise as this, he soon got the proper horrors. He began to skid a little and catch up with himself like a car on ice. His knee leapt so badly that he had to walk like a spastic, hand thrust through pocket and poking patella with each step. Spotting oncomers, fifty, sixty, seventy feet away, he began grinning and composing himself for the encounter. “Hi!” he hollered, Oh Lord, a good twenty feet too soon.

  Under the crape myrtle in the garden the song sparrow scratched like a chicken, one foot at a time, and the yellow leaves curled in a clear flame. Close by, John Houghton trimmed the brick border with an old-fashioned spring blade. Snick, snick snee, went the blade scissoring along the bricks.

  He was dreaming his old dream of being back in high school and running afoul of the curriculum, wandering up and down the corridors past busy classrooms. Where was his class? He couldn’t find it and he had to have the credit to graduate.

  Someone kissed him on the mouth, maybe really kissed him as he lay asleep, for he dreamed a dream to account for the kiss, met Alice Bocock behind the library stacks and gave her a sweet ten-o’clock-in-the-morning kiss.

  There was a step behind him and presently voices. He cracked an eyelid. The song sparrow was scratching, kicking leaves and looking around like a chicken. Fireballs danced on his lashes, broke into bows and sheaves of color.

  “Very well, little Hebe. Be Betty coed and have your little fun on Flirtation Walk—”

  “Flirtation Walk!”

  “And all the warm dalliance you want to. Drain your cup, little Hebe, then let me know when you want to get down to business.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”—delivered in Kitty’s new ironclad coed style, for crying out loud, her head tilted at an angle signifying mock-incredulity, eyes inattentive and going away.

  Englishman that he was, he woke in his burrow without a commotion. Though his cheek was pressed into the leaves and was stinging, he did not move. The sunlight fell upon a loose screen of sasanqua. He could not see them, but he heard Kitty and Rita talking a few feet away, where they must be sitting on the grass.

  A movement caught his eye. Some thirty feet away and ten feet above him a balcony of the garage overhung the garden, not a proper balcony, but just enough ledge to break the ugly wall and give a pleasant cloistered effect to the garden; not for standing on, but there stood a man anyhow, with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the garden.

  He was a Vaught, with the black brow and the high co
lor and the whorled police-dog eye, but a very finely drawn Vaught. Motionless as he was, he gave the effect of restiveness and darting. He was both merry and haggard. Sutter, the engineer was to learn, always looked as if he had just waked up, with one side of his face flushed and creased and his hair brushed up against the grain by the pillow. There was something old-fashioned about him. Perhaps it was his clothes. He was in shirtsleeves, but his shirt and pants were the kind you wear with a suit. They could be the trousers of a $35 Curlee suit. One knew at once that he would never wear slacks and a sport shirt. He put one in mind of a bachelor of the 1940’s come home to his quarters and putting on a regular white shirt and regular suit pants and stepping out to take the air of an evening. Most notable was his thinness. He was thin as a child is thin, with a simple scanting of flesh on bones. The shirt, still starched and stuck together on one side, did not lay hold of his body. It was the sort of thinness a young man worries about. But this man did not. He was indifferent to his thinness. He did not hold himself in such a way as to minimize it.

  Sutter’s hands moved in his pockets as he watched Rita and Kitty.

  “What’s the story?” Rita was saying. “Why the headlong rush for anonymity?”

  Kitty did not reply. The engineer could hear her hand moving against the nap of the freshly cut grass.

  “Mmm?” said Rita, questioning softly.

  “Nothing is changed, Ree,” caroled Kitty.

  Sutter turned his head. There was something wrong with his cheek, a shadowing, a distinguished complication like a German saber scar.

  “On your way, Minnie cat,” said Rita, and the women arose, laughing.

  Before they could turn, Sutter, still fingering the change in his pocket, ducked through the open window. Rita looked up quickly, holding her hand against the sun.