Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Do you mean that she spoke normally after that?” asked Kitty presently. She had swung around and was searching his face with her bold brown eyes.

“No, not normally, but it was a beginning,” he said, frowning, feeling irritated with himself for being garrulous.

“I don’t understand why she didn’t speak before,” said Jamie, thrashing his legs.

“I understand it!” cried Kitty. But then she blushed and turned away.

The others were not as amazed by the engineer’s somewhat disconnected story as one might expect. For, strange to say, it was understood that it was open to him at that moment to spin just such a yarn, half-serious and curious.

“Yes, I know why your stay in the hospital was not so bad,” said Jamie. “You weren’t really sick.”

“I’ll trade with you any time,” said the engineer. “Believe me, it is a very uncomfortable experience to have amnesia.”

At that moment the Handsome Woman whispered something to Kitty and the two of them kissed the patient, said their goodbyes and left. He waited for another brown-eyed look but Kitty had lapsed into vacancy again and did not seem to notice him. The talkative engineer fell silent.

Presently he roused himself and took his leave. The patient and his mother asked him to come back. He nodded absently. Mr. Vaught followed him into the hall and steered him to the window, where they gazed down on the sooty moraine of Washington Heights.

“You come on up here and see Jamie again, you heanh me,” he said, drawing him close and exhaling his old-man smell of fresh cotton and sour breath.

“Yes sir. Sir?”

“What’s that?” said the old man, giving him a hairy convoluted ear.

“The lady who just left. Now is that Mrs. Rita Sutter or Miss—”

“Mrs. Mrs. Rita Vaught. She married my oldest boy, Sutter Vaught. Dr. Vaught. They’re divorced. But I’m going to tell you, we’re closer to her than to Sutter, my own flesh and blood. Oh, she’s a fine woman. Do you know what that woman did?”

“No sir,” said the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve to get the straight of it.

“Why, she’s the one who went up to his school when he got sick this time and got him into the hospital. When there was no room. That’s not even a regular hospital room!”

“And, ah, Kitty?”

“Kitty is Jamie’s sister. You want to know what she’s done for Kitty?”

“Yes sir.”

“She invites Kitty to come up here to New York not for a week but a year, to take ballet. She’s taking her to Europe next month! And she’s not even kin! What are you going to do with a woman like that,” cried the old man, taking the engineer by the blade of muscle at his shoulder and squeezing it hard.

“All right,” said the engineer, nodding and wincing.

“And she’s second in command to the third largest foundation in the world!”

“Foundation,” said the engineer vaguely.

“She’s executive secretary. She can pick up the telephone andspend five million dollars this afternoon.”

“Is that right?”

“You come on up here in the morning and see Jamie.”

“Yes sir.”

He did go see Jamie but Kitty was not there.

“What about Kitty?” he asked Mr. Vaught in the hall. It was not really a bold question since Mr. Vaught had once again set a tone of antic confidence, as much as to say: here we are two thousand miles from home, so it’s all right for me to tell you about my family.

“Do you know what they’ve had that girl doing eight hours a day as long as I can remember?”

“No sir.” The other, he noticed, pronounced “girl” as “gull,” a peculiarity he last remembered hearing in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Ballet dancing. She’s been taking ballet since she was eight years old. She hopes to try out for the New York City Center Ballet Company.”

“Very good.”

“Lord, they’ve had her studying up here, in Chicago, Cleveland, everywhere.”

The engineer wondered who “they” were. Mrs. Vaught? “She must be very good.”

“Good? You should see her prizes. She won first prize two years in a row at the Jay Cee Festival. Last year her mama took her up to Cleveland to study with the world’s most famous ballet teacher. They lived in a hotel for nine weeks.”

“It must require a great deal of self-sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice? That’s all she does.” The other’s eye glittered through the billowing smoke. Yet there was something unserious, even farcical, about his indignation.

“Even now?”

“I mean all. She dudn’t go out to parties. She dudn’t have, just as to say, dates. If a young man paid a call on her, I swear I don’t think she’d know what to do.”

“Is that right,” said the engineer thoughtfully.

“I don’t think it’s worth it, do you?”

“No sir,” he said absently. He rose. “I think I’ll go in and see Jamie. Excuse me, sir.”

“That’s all right!”

Without quite knowing why he did so — for now he had the Handsome Woman’s name and had looked her up in the telephone book and now knew where Kitty lived — he kept up his vigil in the park.

Once he went to look at the house they lived in. They had, Kitty and Rita, a charming cottage in a mews stuck away inside a city block in the Village. He had not imagined there could be such a place in New York, that the paltry particles, ravening and singing, could be so easily gotten round. But they were gotten round, by making things small and bright and hiding them away in the secret sunny center of a regular city block. Elsewhere in New York — wherever one stood — there was the sense of streets running a thousand miles in either direction, clear up to 302nd Street and petering out in some forlorn place above Yonkers or running clean to Ontario, for all he knew. They, Kitty and Rita, got out of the wind, so to speak, found a sunny lee corner as sheltered as a Barbados Alley.

Then why not pick up the telephone and call her up and say, what about seeing you? Well, he could not exactly say why except that he could not. The worst way to go see a girl is to go see her. The best way is not to go see her but to come upon her. Having a proper date with a girl delivers the two of you into a public zone of streets and buildings where every brick is turned against you.

The next day Rita came to the bench and Kitty joined her. It was not until he saw them through the telescope that he knew why he had kept up his vigil: it was because he did not know enough about Kitty.

When they left, they turned west. He waited. After five or six minutes they came through the maples and crossed the meadow toward the Tavern-on-the-Green. There they sat not half a mile away but twenty feet, outlined in rainbows and drifting against each other weightless and soundless like mermaids in the shallow ocean depths. Packing his telescope, he walked south past the restaurant and turned back. He found a table against a peninsula of open brickwork where by every calculation — yes: through a niche he caught a glimpse of the gold chain clasping the hardy structures of Kitty’s ankle. He ordered a beer.

Like all eavesdroppers, he felt as breathless as if the future of his life might depend on what was said. And perhaps, he being what he was, it did.

“It’s no use,” Kitty was saying.

“It is use,” said Rita. Her hair stirred. She must be turning her head to and fro against the bricks.

“What do you think is the matter with me, Ree?”

“Nothing that is not the matter with all of us.”

“I am not what I want to be.”

“Then accept yourself as you are.”

“I do!” Kitty had a trick of ending her sentences with a lilt like a question. It was a mannerism he had noticed in the younger actresses.