Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital.

This time, when he saw her bound for an elevator, he entered beside her and swung around behind her as she turned. Now, eight inches in front of him, she suddenly looked frail, like a dancer who leaves the stage and puts on a kimono. There arose to his nostrils the heavy electric smell of unperfumed hair.

She got off at the tenth floor, so up he went to the eleventh and back down the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her foot and leg disappearing through a doorway. He kept on his way, past the closed door and other doors, past a large opening into a ward, and to the end of the corridor, where he cocked a foot on a radiator, propped his mouth on a knuckle, and looked out a sooty window. As usual, he had forgotten to put on his jacket when he left Macy’s, and his tan engineer’s smock gave him the look, if not of a doctor, at least of a technician of sorts.

Directly a man came out of the room into which the Handsome Woman had disappeared, and, to the engineer’s astonishment, made straight for him.

At first he was certain he had been found out and someone had been sent to deal with him. His imagination formed the picture of a precinct station where he was charged with a misdemeanor of a vaguely sexual nature, following a woman on a subway. His eyes rolled up into his eyebrows.

But the stranger, an old man, only nodded affably. Lining up beside him, he rubbed himself against the vanes of the radiator and began to smoke a cigar with great enjoyment. He cradled one elbow in the crook of the other arm and rocked to and fro in his narrow yellow shoes.

“It looks like Dr. Calamera is running late.” The stranger screwed up an eye and spoke directly into the smoke. He was a puckish-looking old fellow who, the engineer soon discovered, had the habit of shooting his arm out of his cuff and patting his gray hair.

“Who?” murmured the engineer, also speaking straight ahead since he was not yet certain he was being addressed.

“Aren’t you assisting him in the puncture?”

“Sir?”

“You’re not the hematologist?”

“No sir.”

“They suspect a defect in the manufacture of the little blood cells in the marrow bones, like a lost step,” said the stranger cheerfully, rocking to and fro. “It don’t amount to much.”

Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great deal of time in the hospital. He had the air of one long used to the corridor, and he had developed a transient, fabulous, and inexpert knowledge of one disease. It was plain too that he imputed to the hospital staff a benevolent and omniscient concern for the one patient. It amounted to a kind of happiness, as if the misfortune beyond the door must be balanced by affectionate treatment here in the corridor. In hospitals we expect strangers to love us.

An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.

“Do you know him?” asked the old man.

“No sir.”

“That’s Dr. Moon Mullins. He’s a fine little fellow.”

The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.

The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer’s memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.

The engineer cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?” He had caught a lilt in the old man’s speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.

“I was.” The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.

“From north Alabama?”

“I was.” His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.

“Birmingham? Gadsden?”

“Halfway between,” cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle’s. “Wait a minute,” said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you—” snapping his fingers.

“Will Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett.”

“Over in—” He shook his hand toward the southwest

“Ithaca. In the Mississippi Delta.”

“You’re Ed Barrett’s boy.”

“Yes sir.”

“Lawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty.” Now it was his turn to do the amazing. “Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—”

“That was my uncle, Fannin Barrett,” murmured the engineer.

“Fannin Barrett,” cried the other, confirming it. “I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana.”

“Yes sir.”

“Chandler Vaught,” said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I’d seen you before. Weren’t you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall’s in Hattiesburg?”

“No sir.”

“Worked for the highway department?”

“No sir.”

“How did you know I wasn’t from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia.”

“You don’t sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn’t sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone.”

“Sho. But now you don’t talk like—”

“No sir,” said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. “I’ve been up here quite a while.”

“So you say I’m from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham,” said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. “Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?”

“Yes sir.”

“Anniston.”

“Yes sir.”

“He don’t even act surprised,” the old man announced to the hospital at large. “But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago.”

“Yes sir. Did you know my father?” asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.

“ Know him! What are you talking about?”

“Yes sir.”

“We used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur,” he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. “I got my youngest boy in there,” he went on in the same tone. “He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?” For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.

“No sir.”

“Do you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He’s a doctor like you.”

“I’m not a doctor,” said the engineer, smiling.

“Is that so,” said the other, hardly listening.

Now, coming to himself with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer’s arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his “stunt,” as he called it.