The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  Maybe he’s right, she was thinking at the edge of her mind but really watching his face for a sign, a pudding face framed by black hair combed low across his forehead and straight down the sides like Robert Newton. Maybe the Englishman can keep sane in a mad world by watching wrens and puttering about his garden—ah, she thought in her greenhouse, I can have my garden now, yes, more “grandiose” than his, he would say, because it’s a crystal palace and I’m going to live in it and make a living from it. With greens. A greenhouse is for growing greens. But maybe he’s right, and it’s one way to keep from going nutty, but maybe there’s something nutty too about an Englishman puttering about his mums while the sceptered isle slowly sinks into the sea.

  No, he wasn’t quite kosher with his too black hair and his puddingish Robert Newton face, and his sooty white skin. Anyhow, the English don’t go around talking about “the English” and “your suburbs” and saying “heavy, man.”

  Her eyes kept asking him the question, so he answered her, coming smoothly off the knock-knocks and the bird-watching and swinging round to her but offhandedly as if the birds were the important tiling and her illness a detail to be polished off on his way out. Yet it was his very off handedness which caused the familiar sweet doomstroke in her throat. What is this sweetness at the horrid core of bad news?

  No—ah—I just thought praps you might do with a light massage of your neurones. Not even a major ECT series. A small refresher course. To get you ready for the big world out there.

  You’re going to buzz me again. (Her unfamiliar voice sounded loud and crackly like the intercom.)

  Only a refresher course. I would imagine it to be your last.

  Why?

  Why what?

  The asking in this case is like the answering, she said. I mean—she stopped.

  Yes?

  She had trouble talking. It was like walking out on a stage. She could answer questions, play straight man to his knock-knock routine, even ask questions. But to make a statement on your own, surely you had to know what you were talking about.

  No buzzin cousin, she said. (A lame statement and she saw what she was doing, trying to slip in a statement in his joking style, by cockney rhyming Southern-style.)

  You’ll feel much better.

  I feel bad? Which I? It was the lilt at the end of a question that let her say it, freed her up. She did not want to go down just yet the way a statement goes down flat and hard, ends. Isn’t there a difference between the outside-I, the me you see, the meow-I and the inside deep-I-defy? Back to the old meow-I.

  I’m talking to the deep-I or the I-defy—only I thought we had agreed it became the I-define. Your I as you want to define it.

  Okay, she said, what what what.

  Okay, you want my reasons for suggesting a little refresher course.

  Yes. Yes, that is, sir.

  Don’t be afraid. No, it’s just that you don’t eat. You won’t talk to the others, staff or patient. You’ve stopped participating in group. You have stopped functioning.

  I don’t eat?

  Only the morsels you smuggle back to your room in a napkin, like a chipmunk.

  Morsel. She liked the word. It was folded on itself and had a taste. It was dark and nourishing, better than a snack. She also liked his rubbish. It was cleaner and firmer than our trash.

  How about group?

  Group? she said, meaning: I still go to group.

  He understood.

  Yes, you go to group, but you sit under the table.

  Knees are easy. Faces are defacing.

  Ha. I like that. I quite know what you mean. I’d prefer to look at knees rather than some of the defaced faces in staff conference and seminars. All the same, we’re stuck with these faces and we have to make the best of it.

  I’ll take the knees.

  There you go.

  Now he was trying to sound like Dennis Weaver and didn’t. She was embarrassed for him. How could he stand to speak himself? You’d have to be crazy to make such a fool of yourself. How could he stand to be so out-of-focus? a bogus Englishman doing knock-knocks. I’d rather be crazy. Or maybe the question was, why did she have to know everything before she could say anything?

  I—she began and stopped.

  Yes?

  (Here came her statement because this was the one thing she knew.)

  I have to go down first. You’re trying to keep me up.

  Down?

  I have to go down down down before I go up. Down down in me to it. You shouldn’t try to keep me up by buzzing me up.

  Down and down I go, round and round I go. He twirled around, keeping hands in pockets. God, she thought, if I were him I’d be crazier than me.

  Tacky-tacky, she said. I need to go down to my white dwarf.

  White dwarf?

  You know stars? He did know stars, often spoke of the constellations. To stay sane, learn about wrens, mums, Orion.

  What about stars?

  A red giant collapses into a white dwarf. Hard and bright as a diamond. That’s what I was trying to do when my mother found me in the closet going down to my white dwarf.

  Ah. Quite a speech, although I suspect you meant going down to become my white dwarf, I think.

  I have to get down to it, to me. And you won’t let me. You want me up before going down.

  Ah, but what if the star collapses all the way into a black hole? (This pleased him.) How will we find you in a black hole? (The more he thought about it, the more pleased he was.) I’m not up to a time warp.

  No buzzin cousin.

  Your parents are coming this afternoon.

  A bang by the gang.

  There you go.

  When’s the buzzing?

  Oh, tomorrow. Ninish.

  Now she wanted him to leave. One advantage to being crazy is that one is given leave to be rude. Had she gone crazy so people’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt? She turned her face into the wing of the chair until he left.

  When she heard the door close, she put the binoculars in her lap and watched the highway where it came over the hill beyond the cedars. She was waiting for the bread truck.

  When the bread truck came, she looked at her watch, opened her notebook, and began to write.

  2

  When she woke in the morning it was cool enough in the greenhouse to make her think about keeping warm when winter came.

  The stove was her best hope. The only alternative was to buy a kerosene heater in town, if such a thing was available. That cost money and meant buying and lugging fuel and stinking up the greenhouse, which still had its faint reek of root rot and tropic orchid damp.

  But how to move the stove from the cellar of the ruin to the potting shed? It was too heavy to move more than an inch or so along the cellar floor, let alone haul up the steps.

  But she thought it would do. Big and black and iron, it was a Ben Franklin maybe or a potbellied. No, it didn’t have a belly but an oven and firebox as big as a dollhouse and capped by iron lids the size of dinner plates and a balcony of warming compartments (she guessed). It even had a water tank. And its name was not Ben Franklin but Grand Crown. Mica windows, crazed and brown and glittering with crystals, let into the dark room of the oven. There were pipes of light fluted blued metal, one an elbow—fluted flues? It was a cook stove! But didn’t cook stoves warm rooms? Was it also a water heater?

  Then why hadn’t she asked the man with the golf stick to help her? He was strong enough. They could have got it out with ramps and ropes like the Egyptians building the pyramids. Had she been put off because he was angry and out of it, sunk into himself, beheading skunk cabbages and aiming the golf stick like a gun? No, for that very reason he’d have done it—for the reason that he was, she saw at once, out of it, out of his life, he’d have been glad to do anything at all except whatever it was he was doing or not doing. So that she had only to say to him in the glade do this, do that, and he’d have done it, not for her, not even seeing her, but for the pleasure, the faint iron
ic pleasure of the irrelevance of it, of helping a stranger move a stove in the woods.

  Though she could not have said so, she could tell that he had reached such a degree of irony in his life that he would as soon do one thing as another. He’d have been glad to help her move the stove just for the oddness of it. “Where have you been?” his golfer friends would ask him. “I sliced out-of-bounds on eighteen and met a girl who asked me to help her move a stove into her house.” “Right,” they would say. “What else?”

  No, she hadn’t asked him because she didn’t want to ask anybody. Asking is losing, she might have said. Or getting helped is behelt. It is not that a debt is incurred to a person for a thing as that the thing itself loses value. It was her stove and her life and she would move the stove and live her life. Sitting on the step beside the dog, she felt the porcelain shield and the blue enameled trademark Grand Crown and tapped the mica window. It was as solid as quartz. The stove was heavy. She could barely pick up one corner.

  There was time to get it out. The October sun was warm. Get it out how? With ramps? pulleys? slaves? She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that she could do it and do it alone. Anything is possible if you have time and take thought over it. She had found a treasure. You don’t ask a stranger to help you move a treasure. You don’t ask friends either. And you certainly don’t ask family.

  She had at least a month. If she had to she could take it apart piece by piece and move it like the Statue of Liberty.

  Wasn’t there a picture in a dictionary showing a child picking up a horse, using a system of pulleys and ropes? She could go to the hardware store but she needed a word. What was the word for such a thing? If she didn’t have the word, they wouldn’t give it to her. Never mind. She’d look until she found it, then point. I hate to go into hardware stores and not know the name of a thing.

  Go to library, get book on greenhouses, look up pulley in dictionary. There might be a picture of different kinds of pulleys with names.

  Move stove, she wrote. She wrote:

  Consider water problem, i.e., taking a bath. It appears stove has small pipes for heating water. Water supply?

  Two more problems:

  One: How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is approximately another fifty or sixty years. What to do? One good sign: I can already feel myself coming down to myself. From giant red star Betelgeuse, Dr. Duk’s favorite, trying to expand and fan out and take in and please the whole universe (that was me!), a great gaseous fake of a star, collapsing down to white dwarf Sirius, my favorite, diamond bright and diamond hard, indestructible by comets, meteors, people. Sirius is more serious than beetle gauze.

  Two: Memory. It’s coming back. I can say sentences if I write them because I am writing to myself. Speak memory. Why? Only because I have to know enough of where I’ve been to know which way I’m going.

  I remember my father: passing me in the downstairs hall on his way out to play golf Saturday morning. He’s forgotten I’m home to stay. Now he remembers I didn’t finish school, I didn’t get a job, I didn’t get married, I didn’t get engaged, I don’t even go steady. I didn’t move on like I was supposed to. I made straight A’s and flunked ordinary living. My father’s expression: surprise and a quick frown: Hi. (What are you doing here?) He sees my failure and feels sorry for me but wants no part of it or me and just forgets.

  My mother finding me sitting in closet of my apartment on Front Street (where I was first trying to go down to it, my white dwarf), bends over me, the little push of air carrying her Shalimar perfume, cashmere sleeves pushed up 1960 coed style, showing her tan too tan even a little branny arms, shimmer of gold, gold jewelry, gold-streaked hair, heavy clunk of bracelets (the real thing, like the chunk of a Cadillac door closing, not a Chevy). Now now, now now, this won’t do, what are you doing sitting in there? Going, go-on, Gawain, go-way, gong, God, dog, I said, not knowing what I meant—do I have to mean something?—maybe just go way, maybe dog-star = Sirius = serious = God—but she as usual insisting on making her own strong sense of everything even my nonsense (leave me my nonsense, that’s the way, the only way I’m going to get out and through—okay, Ducky, Dr. Duk, maybe you’re right, maybe I will collapse into a black hole, but if that’s the case then I have to and I will). My mother: thinking I was saying going going gone, so she said: going going gone my foot (I like her old Alabama slang coming out), you’re not going anywhere but out of there, and the only thing that’s going to be gone around here is all this dust, get a rag.

  Stop trying to make sense of my nonsense.

  My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

  Sarge: spending week with him at Nassau doing what I pleased or what I thought of as doing as I pleased. Sarge, a thin mustachioed blond Balfour salesman (fraternity and sorority jewelry) from Durham, who knew his catalogue of pins and drop letters and crests so well he had won a salesman-of-the-month trip to Nassau. Tickets for two. I, not a sorority sister, Sarge not a fraternity man, but he “pinned” me with four different pins, Chi O, Phi Mu, KD, Tri Delt, and we thought that was funny. Sarge always going by the book, Sarge and I in bed looking at a picture book and he doing the things in the book with me he thought he wanted to do and I doing the things I thought he wanted me to do and being pleased afterwards then suddenly knowing that the main pleasure I took was the same as doing well for my father: look at my report card, Daddy, straight A’s, A Plus in music.

  But what do you do after you get your straight A’s for Daddy and Sarge?

  Drugs: not bad. In my bed in Front Street apartment or in closet, getting out of it with yellowjacks and going down down down toward it, Sirius or the black hole, but not really, only seeming to, because when you come out of it you’re nowhere, not an inch closer to Sirius, not out the other side of the black hole but just back where you were, only worse, like dreaming that the plane has taken off and it never does. But drugs not bad if you don’t have to come off drug and come back. Because: drugs = illusion of going down down down to it, and if there is no it, the illusion is better than nothing.

  One thing is sure. Never again will they lock me up and buzz me.

  The sun shone straight down the cellar steps, warming her back. While she ate a sandwich of rye bread and cheese and sliced luncheon meat, her gaze wondered from the stove to the finials on the greenhouse to the dog. How could she keep meat cold? She gave the dog the luncheon meat. While he chewed it, he was able to meet her eye, giving himself leave to watch her, cocking first one eyebrow then the other at her. As long as he chewed, he could look at her. When he finished, he licked his chops and settled his complex mouth but his lip stuck high and dry on a tooth. It embarrassed him. But the dog’s embarrassment did not embarrass her. Wasn’t this a good sign?

  All next morning from sunrise to the noon she worked in the greenhouse. What to do and where to start? Clean out the jungle. Start in the corner near the door, which as soon as the sun hit it began to smell of florist damp and root reek and rain forest. Could those be orchids gone to seed in big wire baskets hanging from the roof or some kind of air-feeding lianas trailing down like snakes?

  At first she thought the laurel and rhododendron had fallen through the rotten benches and rooted in the earthen floor, but the floor under an inch of mulch was concrete. Take hold of a small tree and up it came easily with its flat fan of roots. The trouble was getting the junk out. Bush, tree, bench she dragged out and pushed into the fen. Using a piece of copper flashing from the ruins, she shoveled out root rot and potsherds, and by the time she got hungry, she had cleared a quadrant of concrete ten or twelve feet on edge. Sitting in the sun with the dog, she ate again and brushed the floor lightly with her freehand: good solid old trowel-smoothed uncracked cured concrete, iron-colored and silky as McWhorter’s driveway. Two more items for her shopping list: broom, shovel.

  Tired, she curled up in her bunk and fell immediately to sleep with only time to think: God, I am going to sleep without a pill!—and woke as suddenly. Wh
at woke her? The violet vapor from the glass grapes falling straight in her eye? No, the dog had barked. Or rumbled a deep throat rumble. He was sitting up, ears erect, hackles bristling along his spine like a razorback hog.

  Someone was coming down the trail.

  It was a troop of Girl Scouts, all but one hefty, most fat. They had shoulder patches which she could not make out. The fattest girl and the thinnest girl carried between them a banner which rippled but she could make out: Troop 12, Laf—? In—? Lafayette, Indiana? Surely Girl Scouts couldn’t be older than fourteen or fifteen, yet they looked at least twenty and bigger than life. Their legs were like trees.

  The fattest girl had straight blond hair that came straight down over her ears like eaves, like Kelso’s.

  Kelso grabbed her in the dayroom.

  I know where you’re going.

  She did. Kelso knew everything.

  You got visitors. Your folks come to see you. What they doing here? They only been here twice. Maybe they come to take you out of here. How come they keep you here? Don’t they know what a dump this is? Don’t they know they don’t buzz you any more at good hospitals? You want to know what this place is for? This is for people who are too proud to go to state and too poor or stingy to go to a good private hospital. You want to know what it costs them here to keep us? Less than half what it does at state. They making money on us, honey.

  Kelso had been at Valleyhead for fifteen years. When she was not too sick, she was canny and told the truth, but one look at her and you knew she could not make it for long in the world. There was no place for her to go. She was smart and had been a bookkeeper with Sears, but that wasn’t enough. Sometimes she went to Atlanta, to her parents’ house. Though she sounded countrified and looked like a fat lady running a service station in south Georgia, her father had a big house in Druid Hills. But she always came back fatter than ever, stiff as a board and obedient, hair coming straight down all around her head like a funnel. So stiff and obedient that once McGahey told her to sit down and she sat for hours until McGahey noticed there was no chair under her.