The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  The missing Jews were the sign his father had missed!

  What would have happened if a bona fide North Carolina Jew had walked up to the car and introduced himself?

  Now he was talking aloud to himself: Father, the difference between you and me is that you were so angry you wanted no part of the way this life is and yourself in it and me in it too. You aimed only to make an end and you did. Very well, perhaps you were right. But I aim to find out. There’s the difference. I aim to find out once and for all. I won’t have it otherwise, you settled for too little.

  He had waited too long. The chaplain, leaving St. Mark’s, spied him and caught him before he could start the Mercedes.

  For a moment he was afraid the chaplain was going to get in the car but he leaned in the window. In the second his head was above the Mercedes there was time to put the Luger under his thigh.

  “Will! I’m glad I caught you. I forgot the main thing I wanted to ask you.” He tapped his temple. “The mind is going.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m giving a retreat at Montreat next week. It crossed my mind you might come along.”

  “A what?”

  “A religious retreat. It’s our regular yearly number. And our regular gang. Actually a wonderful bunch of guys. A weekend with God in a wonderful setting. It’s an ecumenical retreat. I’m double-teamed with a Roman Catholic priest from Brooklyn, a real character—he looks so much like Humphrey Bogart everybody calls him Bogey. What a card. They call me Hungry Jack. Hungry Jack and Bogey. Actually we’re not bad together. Incidentally, the food’s first-class. But the important thing’s it’s a weekend with God. That’s the bottom line.”

  “Leslie tells me I should do something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have a personal encounter. Leslie believes she has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and has been born again.”

  “There you go.”

  “There I go what?”

  “There are many mansions and so forth. It’s not my gig but if it’s hers, more power to her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Why don’t you come to the retreat and find out. We’ve got all kinds in our gang—Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans, unbelievers, Jews—all wonderful guys, the kind of guys you’d like to spend a weekend with or fishing or just shooting the breeze. We call ourselves the Montreat Mafia. They’re darn good guys and I promise you’d like—”

  “Did you say Jews?”

  “Yes. Last year we had two Jews. One a judge, the other—”

  “What kind of Jews?”

  “What do you mean, what kind?”

  “I mean were they ethnic Jews or believing Jews?”

  “God, I don’t know. I didn’t inquire.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Where are they from? One’s from Florida, the other from New York, I think.”

  “Yes, it must be.”

  “What must be?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Will you join us?”

  “Will you tell me something, Jack?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “Do you think the Jews are a sign?”

  “The Jews?” Again the quick second look. He did say Jews. And he is smiling. Are we kidding?

  “Marion thought the Jews, the strange history of the Jews, was a sign of God’s existence. What do you think?”

  “Oh wow. With all due respect to Marion, God rest her soul, hopefully we’ve gotten past the idea that God keeps the Jews around suffering to avenge Christ’s death.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. The exodus from North Carolina.”

  Then it’s a joke, said the chaplain’s smile. But what’s the joke? Better take out insurance against it not being a joke.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m less interested in signs of the apocalypse than in opening a serious dialogue with our Catholic and Jewish friends, and I can tell you we’ve gotten right down to some real boilerplate at Montreat—will you think about it?”

  “I just thought about it.”

  “We’re leaving here next Thursday, by early afternoon hopefully.”

  “I would hope that you would go in hope.”

  “Eh?” said the chaplain cocking an ear. “Right. Well, anyway—”

  “Do you believe in God?” Will Barrett asked with the same smile.

  “How’s that?” asked Jack quickly.

  “You know, God.”

  In the fading light the chaplain looked at him closely, smiling all the while and narrowing his eyes in an especially understanding way. But Jack Curl wished that Will Barrett would not smile. The chaplain’s main fear was not of being attacked or even martyred—he thought he could handle it—but of being made a fool of. It was one thing to be hauled up before the Grand Inquisitor, scorned, ridiculed, tortured. He could handle that, but suppose one is made the butt of a joke and doesn’t get the joke? He wished Will Barrett, who seldom smiled, would stop smiling.

  In the fading yellow light he could see the chaplain eyeing him uneasily to see if he was joking.

  “I’m trying to ask a serious question. That is difficult to do these days.”

  “You can say that again. Fire away.”

  The Luger was hard under his thigh. Jack Curl’s face loomed pale in the darkness.

  “Do you believe in God, Jack?”

  In the fading light he could see the chaplain look at him swiftly as if there were a joke to be caught. Then the crow’s-feet suddenly ironed out, making him look white-eyed and serious.

  “Well, if I didn’t, I’d say I needed some vocational counseling, wouldn’t you?” The chaplain’s head loomed in the Mercedes, his face large and solemn. “Seriously—and you can check me out on this—I seem to be picking up on some vibes from you lately—that you might be thinking of entering the church—am I out in left field? I was lying a while ago when I said the one thing Marion wanted most was her new community project. No, what she wanted more than anything else was your coming into the church.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you know where I’ve found God, Will?” The chaplain’s round face rose to the Mercedes roof like a balloon.

  “No, where?”

  “In other people.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t you think you belong here in the church? With your own people. This is where you’re coming from. Am I reading you right?”

  “My people?”

  “Weren’t they all Episcopalians?”

  “Yes.”

  My people? Yes, they were Episcopalians but at heart they were members of the Augusta Legion and in the end at home not at St. John o’ the Woods but with the bleached bones of Centurion Marcus Flavinius on the desert of the old Empire. They were the Romans, the English, Angles, Saxons, Jutes—citizens of Rome in the old Empire.

  “Don’t you think you belong with us?”

  “Ah.” The Luger thrust into his thigh like a thumb. He smiled. Not yet, old Totenkopf. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “What was the question?”

  “Do you believe God exists?”

  “Yes,” said the chaplain gravely. The chaplain’s face, he imagined, went keen and fine-eyed in the failing light. Could it be? the lively expression asked. A God-seeker? A man wrestling with Doubt? (He, the chaplain, had never made a convert.)

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps he is trying to tell you something at this moment,” said the chaplain solemnly. (God, don’t let me blow this, I’ve got a live one hooked.)

  “What?”

  “Grace is a mysterious thing,” said the chaplain.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Perhaps the answer lies under our noses, so to speak, in fact within ourselves. If only we would take the trouble to ask the question.”

  “I shall put the question—as a matter of form—and I shall require an answer. But the answer will not come from you or me
,” he said softly.

  “What’s that?” asked the chaplain quickly, leaning in. “I didn’t quite catch—”

  “I said only that the question can be put in such a way that an answer is required. It will be stipulated, moreover, that a non-answer, silence, shall be construed to mean no.”

  “There you go,” said the chaplain uneasily. It made him uneasy to talk about religion. Marion Peabody Barrett had terrified him with her raging sarcastic attacks on the new liturgy and his own “social gospel.” There is a time to talk religion with women, to be God’s plumber, to have solemn yet joyous bull sessions with men during a weekend with God, to horse around at a party. He was at home doing any of these but not when they were mixed up. The trouble with Barrett’s queer question and peculiar smile was that you couldn’t say which he was doing. The truth was Barrett was a queer duck. Rich, powerful, of one’s class, but queer. Sly. What to do, then? Listen. Listen with all your might. Determine whether he’s kidding or not. The chaplain narrowed his eyes and leaned several degrees toward Barrett.

  “I think I know how to ask such a question,” said Will Barrett.

  That was your trouble, old mole, you didn’t even bother to ask and you should have, if only from Episcopal rectitude and an Episcopal sense of form—as one asks routinely of an empty house before closing the door and leaving: Is anybody home?

  The question should be put as a matter of form even though you know the house is empty.

  Then no one can complain of your leaving.

  To his relief the chaplain pushed himself away, gave the Mercedes top a slap with both hands. “Why don’t you put your question on the retreat?”

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Give it some prayerful thought.”

  “Very well. I’ll see you tomorrow. You deliver Mr. Arnold because Marion would want that and I’ll try to deliver Leslie because that’s what you want.”

  “You got yourself a deal.”

  When he moved his thigh and picked up the Luger between his legs, the metal felt hotter than his own body.

  The glass doors of St. Mark’s closed behind the chaplain. Closing the door for the last time. That was it. That’s why everything looked so clear. He knew he would not come here again. When you leave a house for the last time and take one last look around before closing the door, it is as if you were seeing the house again for the first time. What happened to the five thousand times between?

  2

  He had not known who the girl in the greenhouse was until Kitty told him twice, once before the girl ran away from the sanatorium and again afterwards. But even when he found out and at the same time saw that Kitty did not know where her daughter was, he could not bring himself to pay close attention. Something else engaged him even as Kitty and her grinning dentist husband and grinning Jimmy Rogers pressed in upon him. They wanted something from him. It was clear but not from what they said. They were telling jokes and saying something about property, Arabs, money, state laws about guardianship and inheritance, developing an island. An island? Though he was not listening closely, there was the unmistakable feeling in the back of the neck when someone wants something and is casting about for a way to ask. Not finding a way, they move closer, heads weaving like a boxer’s, looking for an opening.

  What did they want? Money? Free legal advice? Both? It seemed to be Kitty who wanted it most. At least she came closest, touched, hugged, kissed, poked, jostled, swayed against, jangled, shimmered.

  What did she want?

  Though he faced the husband, now not three feet away, it was hard to take in more than the grin, white teeth, styled hair, pink clothes.

  Instead he gazed past them, past the white wicker and stuffed linen furniture, the lacquered ivory-colored tables, blue porcelain lamps—it was Marion’s Chinese Export blue-and-white room, what in the South used to be called a sun parlor—to Leslie and the Cupps and Jack Curl, past Lewis Peckham the golf pro listening politely to Bertie, Bertie making grips on an invisible golf club; past the others, guests and waiters, past the huge Louis XV secretary with its doors open to show the decoupage panels, to the bank of windows broad as a ship’s bridge opening onto a short steep yard dropping off to the gorge and the valley beyond.

  A gazebo perched on the lip of the gorge.

  A twist of cloud, thick as cotton, rose from the gorge behind the gazebo and a small scarlet oak he had never noticed before. It was stunted and lopsided and black. The few leaves that hadn’t fallen hung straight down as if they had been tied on by a child. The white gazebo was almost whited out by the cloud.

  From beyond the post oak in the silent swamp came the geclick of the Greener breech being broken and presently the gecluck of its closing.

  That was when you reloaded.

  But you had only shot once, at the first single. You had another shell. Why not wait until the second shot at the second single to reload?

  Because you knew you only needed three shots, two for the quail and one for you.

  Wait a minute. There were four empty Winchester Super-X shells afterwards, three on the quilt beside him in the Negro cabin where he was lying after the woman wiped the blood from his face, and a fourth in the Greener the guide had brought back with the shells. The cabin smelled of kerosene and flour paste. Newspapers were freshly pasted on the walls.

  But there were only three shots.

  Wait a minute. Is it possible to fire both barrels of the Greener at once? There were two triggers.

  “Wait a minute,” he said aloud. Then he smiled and shrugged. What difference did it make?

  The three Arabs were pressing in upon him. That’s what they looked like, Arabs: the dentist, Jimmy Rogers, and Bertie: brown-skinned, coming too close, smiling, nodding—Jimmy Rogers was even rubbing his hands together.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go upstairs and tend to some business.”

  “What business?” asked Kitty, frowning.

  Her closeness and nosiness gave him a shower of goose-bumps, a peculiar but not unpleasant sensation.

  “I’m looking for an old shotgun.” He noticed absently that it had become possible to tell the truth, that it was no longer necessary to make an excuse, go fix a drink.

  “What are you going to do, shoot us?” asked Kitty with a mock falling away. She told the others: “He was always like that, ready to have a shoot-out if somebody crossed him, right here and now.”

  No, I wasn’t always like that.

  “That was the way it was where we came from, wasn’t it, Will?”

  “I was going to look for an old shotgun that belonged to my father and grandfather.”

  “You didn’t mess with them either,” Kitty told the others. “Where we came from, if you fell out with somebody, you didn’t smile at them and go around behind their backs. You called them out and had it out with them.”

  That’s right. We call ourselves out and have it out with ourselves. Famous one-man shoot-outs.

  “I keep a shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot under my bed,” said the grinning dentist-husband. “I fixed a rack just inside the rail. All I got to do is reach down with one hand. Just let some sapsucker come in the door or window. Just let him come. I know a man, a substantial man no redneck, who just the other day bought a shotgun and a .357 Magnum and two cases of shells, and he’s a college graduate, not one of your nuts.”

  The grin, he noticed, went back to the eyeteeth. What’s this guy so angry about? His wife? Being a dentist? His daughter? No wonder his daughter’s nuts. Who does he want to shoot? Probably niggers.

  “Speaking of the Wild West, guns, and shoot-outs,” said Jimmy Rogers, coming even closer, close as a lover, and, putting his head down in their midst, told them one of his jokes.

  Though he tried to listen to the joke, his mind wandered. Jimmy pulled him close and then gave him a final little tug. The joke must be over. “I have to go,” he said.

  “Hold on, son,” said Kitty, but it was she who held on, laug
hing and grabbing his arm with both hands, wrists all aglint and ajangle with gold. There was about her a rushing way he didn’t remember of coming close and pushing ahead of her the smell of her hair and a perfume—Shalimar? How did he remember after all these years? It smelled like Shalimar sounded—and a friendly kind of jostling, jostling him with arm, shoulder, elbow, hip, hair swinging past the hollow of his throat. What he did remember, not he but his body, was the warmth in the places where she touched him. It was curious. Spots she touched grew warm as if he had had a positive skin test. His antibodies remembered her body. “Hold it, son. I need to have a word with you.” Curious! Something was both strange and familiar. Suddenly he realized he had not thought about women for a long time, not since Marion’s death, not since long before Marion’s death—except for the time he thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fell down in a bunker. For three years he had lived in a dream of golf and good works.

  “What?” he said, turning an ear down to her upraised face. She wanted to whisper something. The Arabs fell back, stopped smiling, bent forward in a huddle, made plans.

  “Look, Will. The summerhouse is lost in the cloud.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Do you realize what happened to us?”

  “No, what?”

  “We passed each other like ships in a fog. I was a fool. I should have grabbed you when I could.”

  “As it has turned out, I don’t think—”

  “Let’s go get lost in the fog,” she whispered. She couldn’t quite whisper but like a child trying to whisper sputtered in his ear. His hair raised. He nodded.

  “Could you meet me in the summerhouse?” she asked. “I have a bug to put in your ear.”

  Welts sprang out on his neck.

  “There’s something I have to do.”

  “What?”

  “I have to find the shotgun.”

  “I don’t mean now. I mean after dinner. After the others leave. Is there a side door?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go out the front door to get a breath of air. You go a different way. You’re always dropping out anyway. You know what Marion said about you?”

  “No, what?”

  “You were just not there half the time. But what she didn’t understand, and what you and I do, is that now and then you and I just have to drop out, don’t you?”