by Walker Percy
“Evidently she wasn’t.”
Look at Mother! Look at the difference between us! I, a shaky decrepit forty-five, she in her sixties as pert as a sparrow and on good terms with the world. She sits bolt upright handsome legs crossed, nylon swishing against nylon, one hand pressed deep into her waist to emphasize her good figure. This morning she’s been up for hours, rooting around in her garden, ordering the help around, calling prospects—she’s a “realtor,” makes forty thousand a year, is more successful now than my father in his prime.
She sparkles with good health and is at one with herself. I? I am six feet ahead of myself, ricocheting between terror and elation. My toes are rotating. The out-of-doors doesn’t suit me. I feel like Henry Miller, seedy and stove up, sitting in a park in Jacksonville, Florida. Her plate is clean. She eats like a longshoreman, yet is trim as can be, has a good skin and a clear eye. What a bowel she has! Unfortunately I have my father’s bowel, which is subject to conservative rages and liberal terror.
“Tom,” says Mother, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes. “I feel that something is about to happen. They are going to do something.”
“I have the same feeling,” I say, watching her curiously. “But what’s your reason for thinking so?” Whenever Mother lowers her voice and rolls her eyes, it means she’s going to talk about them, Negroes.
“I’ve seen them,” Mother whispers, “riding around, looking.”
“Who, the Bantus or the locals?”
“Both. But that’s not the main thing.”
“What’s the main thing?”
“Last Sunday I saw a black cloud with something coiling in it hovering over the Infant Jesus of Prague.”
“You took that to be a sign something is going to happen here soon?”
“Haven’t I always been proved right in the past?”
“What was the ‘something coiling’?”
“Entrails. Which is a sign of the Bantus. They divine and foretell by examining entrails. You think I’m ridiculous.”
“I think you’re right about something happening.”
Mother has a reputation hereabouts as a seer and prophetess. What she is is a Catholic gnostic. Though she believes in God, she also relies on her crystal ball—she actually has a crystal ball, which she looks into—and her gift for seeing signs and divining hidden meanings. But she is quite brisk about it, puts on no psychic airs, has no truck with séances and such. Her clairvoyant powers have rather to do with business and politics. She will not close a deal with a Leo in May. Most of her visions and dreams are about plots of the Lefts against the Knotheads. She predicted four out of the last five assassinations.
“Don’t ask me how it happens!” she chides her admirers. “All I know is it does. Why, I would no more sell a Capricorn to a Cancer than fly to the moon. Because I know what happens when I do. I not only lose the sale but also the deposit.” She is referring to the astrology of the vendor and vendee. “And I also know, without knowing how it happens, that when I’m saying the third decade of the rosary on the third day of a novena and when I come to the third bead, I’m going to see something. Don’t ask me why!” she cries, laughing at herself.
When she says see, she means it. Last year she saw a vision of a dragon fighting a bear over the statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, to be specific: over the little globe the Infant Jesus held. War between Russia and China broke out the next week.
Her fame is spreading. “Marva, it’s a gift from God,” her friends tell her. “Why don’t you share it with the world?” But she laughs it off.
She doesn’t even interpret her visions, leaving that to others. But the meanings are clear to her friends and they usually have political overtones, auguring ill for conservatives and good for liberals. On the eve of the last national election, for example, she came to the third bead of the third decade of her rosary and she saw Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, slowly sinking into the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Her friends understood. The new President is an integrationist Mormon from Salt Lake City.
It is only after breakfast that Mother gets around to telling me that I received a telephone call earlier. She makes a face. She disapproves of the caller.
“He said for you to come see him. He said it was urgent. I deliver the message without comment.”
“Who, Mother?”
“Your friend, the Roman priest.”
“Roman?”
“Father Smith,” she says, accenting Father sarcastically.
“What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Only that you were to come to see him.”
“Where?”
“You’d never imagine.”
“Well?”
“He said he’d be down in the Slave Quarters. Now wouldn’t you know it?”
“Know what?”
“That that’s where he’d end up.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” says my mother, pushing her hand deep into her waist and arching her back. “I think he’s in with them.”
“Who?” I ask. “You mean the guerrillas?”
“So I told him in my sweetest voice that you were coming over here and going to church with me. I just dared him to say there was anything wrong with our mass.”
“You used to like him.” She did. He was a favorite with the ladies. He had a courtly manner, used to look like Ricardo Montalban playing a lithe priest and saying things like “Do not worry about the bell, my children. God will provide the bell, you will see,” etcetera. “What have you got against him now?” I ask Mother.
“He who is not with you is against you,” says Mother darkly. Her eyes glitter. She’s a bad enemy.
“Yes. Well—hm.” I shiver in the sunlight. I notice that the vines are encroaching. A tendril has twined about Mother’s antique wrought-iron Singer table.
Before we go to church, Dr. Dusty Rhoades hops the hedge. Eukie pours him a cup of coffee.
Dusty and Mother hit it off very well, I notice. Dusty winks at me and feels my bones. Then he’s got nothing against me. They both kid me.
“Marva,” says Dusty to Mother, but at the same time exploring my shoulder with his big freckled hand. “Do you think Tom’s going to invite us white trash up to the big house?” Now he’s gazing at Tara with his fond filmed-over eyes.
“Eh? What’s that?” I ask.
“He better, the scamp!” cries Mother.
“What big house?” I ask them. They both laugh merrily. I find that I am grinning too.
But Dusty goes suddenly serious. He shakes his big lion head slowly.
“You know I’m leaving for Texas in a week. And I feel bad about leaving Lola over there alone. Do you know we haven’t had a servant for a week? You don’t know how lucky you are to have your little nigger.”
Mother rolls her eyes and raises her finger to her lips. “Eukie is a treasure.”
Eukie is worthless, but that is not what bothers me.
“Guess who is going to look after my little Lola when I leave,” says Dusty past me. He and Mother are exchanging all manner of glances over my head.
“I wish the child would move in with me.” Again a regular semaphore of eye messages.
“She’s not about to leave Tara,” muses Dusty. “She says her roots are there.”
“You should have seen her over there this morning, feeding her horses, planting greens—”
“Where is Lola now?” I ask them.
“You’ll see her this afternoon at the fish fry, it’s all settled,” says Mother. “But you should have seen her, standing there in that old garden, her hands potty black, her face glowing. She never looked prettier or more determined.”
“I still don’t like to leave her there alone,” says Dusty, wagging his head.
“Do you remember what Scarlett said about the land?” asks Mother. “Or was it in The Good Earth?”
“Yes,” says Dusty, popping his great jaw muscles.
Mother squeezes my hand. “We’re making a
foursome this evening, Tommy,” she says in a strange soft voice, a rushing low-pitched thrilling voice, the sort women use on solemn occasions, funerals and weddings. “You and I and Dusty and Lola.”
Hm. Is something cooking between Mother and Dusty? And are they cooking up something between me and Lola? Warning signals flash in my brain. Look out! They’re making a match. And yet And yet, despite all, love kindles. Lola is a lovely girl after all. And a brave girl. And what lovely sounds the Guarnerius makes clasped between her lovely knees. There are worse lives, after all, than sitting on the gallery of Tara and … I look at Tara, a preposterous fake house on a fake hill: even the hill is fake, dredged up from the swamp by the state of Louisiana for Vince Marsaglia. The very preposterousness of life in Tara with Lola inflames me with love. —Yes, sitting on the gallery sipping Early Times while Lola plants greens or plays Don Quixote or we hold hands, her cello-callused fingers whispering in my palm. Lovely Lola.
The question is: how can I bear not to marry Lola? Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
“Time for mass,” says Mother, rising briskly. “Won’t you come with us, Dusty?”
But Dusty, who is a Baptist, makes his excuses, socks himself in his joyful-eccentric style, and hops the hedge.
2
We walk over to Saint Pius XII’s. Pius XII, the last Pope recognized by the American Catholic Church, was canonized by the Sacred College of Cicero, Illinois. The present “Pope” of the A.C.C., a native of Anaheim and Bishop of San Diego, took the name Pius XIII.
Property Rights Sunday is a major feast day in the A.C.C. A blue banner beside the crucifix shows Christ holding the American home, which has a picket fence, in his two hands.
Mother sits up front with the other Business & Professional Women. I skulk at the rear with the ushers, one foot in church, one foot in the vestibule. It is possible to leave at any time, since I told Mother I had to keep my appointment and might not see her after church.
I can leave any time I please, but it is deliriously cool in here. The superb air-conditioning always put me in mind of the words of the old Latin mass (to which the A.C.C. has returned as a patriotic gesture): “Grant us we beseech Thee a locum refrigerii… .”
Monsignor Schleifkopf reads the Gospel from Matthew that relates how Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man, believed in Christ and gave him his tomb. He preaches on the resurrection of Lazarus, who was also well off.
“Dearly Beloved: we are reminded by the best commentators that Lazarus was not a poor man, that he lived comfortably with sisters in a home that he owned. Our Lord himself, remember, was not a social reformer, said nothing about freeing the slaves, nor are we obliged to.”
After the sermon Monsignor Schleifkopf announced triumphantly that this week the congregation had paid off the debt on the new church, the air-conditioning, the electronic carillon that can be heard for five miles, and the new parochial school
Moon Mullins, who is an usher, greets me in the vestibule. He stands around in true usher style, hawking phlegm and swinging his fist into his hand.
Monsignor Schleifkopf prays for victory over North Ecuador and for the welfare of our brothers in Christ and fellow property owners throughout Latin America and for the success of the Moonlight Tour of the Champs in the name of “the greatest pro of them all.”
I begin to think impure thoughts. My heart, which was thumping for no good reason, begins to thump for love of Lola Rhoades and at the prospect of seeing her this very afternoon and later inviting her out into the gloaming.
When the congregation rises for the creed, I see my chance and slip out.
Christ have mercy on me. Sir Thomas More, pray for me. God bless Moon Mullins, a good fellow, a better man than I. Lord have mercy on your poor church.
Goodbye, Pius XII. Hello, Lola baby, big lovely cellist. Let us go out into the gloaming and lie in one another’s arms and watch the constellations wheel in their courses.
3
Father Rinaldo Smith is sitting on the tin-roofed porch of the tiny slave-quarter chapel. In his rolled-up shirt sleeves he looks more than ever like Ricardo Montalban. He is waiting, I suppose, for his tiny flock. The Roman Catholics are a remnant of a remnant.
We sit on the steps.
“You know what we need, Tom?” he asks with a sigh.
“What’s that, Father?”
“A bell.”
“Right, Father. And I have an idea where I might lay my hands on one.”
“Splendid,” says Father Smith, kicking a cottonmouth off the steps.
Though Father Smith is a good priest, a chaste and humble man who for twenty-five years had baptized the newborn into a new life, shriven sinners, married lovers, anointed the sick, buried the dead—he has had his troubles.
Once he turned up in the bed next to mine in the acute wing. It seemed he had behaved oddly at the ten o’clock mass and created consternation among the faithful. This happened before the schism, when hundreds of the faithful packed old Saint Michael’s. When he mounted the pulpit to make the announcements and deliver his sermon, he had instead—fallen silent. The silence lasted perhaps thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is a very long silence. Nothing is more uncomfortable than silence when speech is expected. People began to cough and shift around in the pews. There was a kind of foreboding. Silence prolonged can induce terror. “Excuse me,” he said at last, “but the channels are jammed and the word is not getting through.” When he absently blew on and thumped the microphone, as priests do, the faithful thought he was talking about the loudspeaker and breathed a sigh of relief. But Father Smith did not continue the mass. Instead he walked to the rectory in his chasuble, sat down in the Monsignor’s chair in a gray funk and, according to the housekeeper, began to mutter something about “the news being jammed”—whereupon the housekeeper, thinking he meant the TV, turned it on (strange: no matter what one says, no matter how monstrous, garbled, unfittable, whoever hears it will somehow make it fit). Monsignor Schleifkopf later said to Father Kev Kevin, the other curate, “Beware of priests who don’t play golf or enjoy a friendly card game or listen to The Lawrence Welk Show—sooner or later they’ll turn their collar around and wear a necktie.” This was before Father Kev Kevin married Sister Magdalene and took charge of the vaginal computer in Love.
So there was Father Rinaldo Smith in the next bed, stiff as a board, hands cloven to his side, eyes looking neither right nor left.
“What seems to be the trouble, Father?” asked Max, pens and flashlight and reflex hammer glittering like diamonds in his vest pocket.
“They’re jamming the air waves,” says Father Smith, looking straight ahead.
“Causing a breakdown in communication, eh, Father?” says Max immediately. He is quick to identify with the patient.
“They’ve put a gremlin in the circuit,” says Father Smith.
“Ah, you mean a kind of spirit or gremlin is causing the breakdown in communication?”
“No no, Max!” I call out from the next bed. “That’s not what he means.” What Max doesn’t understand is that Father Smith is one of those priests, and there are a good many, who like to fool with ham radios, talk with their fellow hams, and so fall into the rather peculiar and dispirited jargon hams use. “When he said there was a gremlin in the circuit, he meant only that there is something wrong, not that there is a, um, spirit or gremlin causing it.” Priests have a weakness for ham radio and seismology. Leading solitary lives and stranded in places like Pierre, South Dakota, or the Bronx or Waycross, Georgia, they hearken to other solitaries around the world or else bend an ear to the earth itself.
“Yes, they’re jamming,” says Father Smith.
When I spoke, Max and the other doctors looked at me disapprovingly. They had finished with me, passed my bed. I am like a dancing partner who’s been cut in on and doesn’t go away.
“They?” asks Max. “Who are they?”
“They’ve won and we’ve lost,” says Father Smith.
>
“Who are they, Father?”
“The principalities and powers.”
“Principalities and powers, hm,” says Max, cocking his head attentively. Light glances from the planes of his temple. “You are speaking of two of the hierarchies of devils, are you not?”
The eyes of the psychiatrists and behaviorists sparkle with sympathetic interest.
“Yes,” says Father Smith. “Their tactic has prevailed.”
“You are speaking of devils now, Father?” asks Max.
“That is correct.”
“Now what tactic, as you call it, has prevailed?”
“Death.”
“Death?”
“Yes. Death is winning, life is losing.”
“Ah, you mean the wars and the crime and violence and so on?”
“Not only that. I mean the living too.”
“The living? Do you mean the living are dead?”
“Yes.”
“How can that be, Father? How can the living be dead?”
“I mean their souls, of course.”
“You mean their souls are dead,” says Max with the liveliest sympathy.
“Yes,” says Father Smith tonelessly. “I am surrounded by the corpses of souls. We live in a city of the dead.”
“Are the devils here too, Father?” asks Max.
“Yes. But you fellows are safer than most.”
“How is that, Father?”
“Because you don’t know any better,” says the priest, cheering up all of a sudden. He laughs. “Do you want to know the truth?”
“We always want to know the truth, Father,” says Max gravely.
“I think it is you doctors who are doing the will of God, even though you do not believe in him. You stand for life. You are trying to help us in here, you are good fellows, God bless you all. Life is what—” begins the priest and, as suddenly as he laughed, now covers his face with his hands and bursts into tears.
The doctors nod silently, pat the foot of the bed, and move on.
But today at Natchez-under-the-Hill the priest is his old self, sits fully clothed and in his right mind, a gray-faced gray-haired gray man with flat hairy forearms like Ricardo Montalban. He looks at his wristwatch and, explaining that it is time for him to go into the confessional, makes as if to rise.
