Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“What kind of beer is he drinking?” he asked Jamie.

“Rheingold,” said Jamie.

The others took their turn, all but Rita, then Moon Mullins, who swung the Tetzlar around to the nurses’ dormitory. There was no talking to Jamie this morning. He must watch the tugs on the river, the roller coaster at Palisades Park, the tollhouse on the George Washington, Bridge, two housewives back-fencing in Weehawken. Now it was Jamie who became the technician, focusing on some bit of New Jersey and leaning away to let the doctors look.

Mrs. Vaught elder couldn’t get over it. Her pince-nez flashed in the light and she took the engineer’s arm. “Would you look at the color in that child’s face!” She made her husband take a look through the telescope, but he pretended he couldn’t see.

“I can’t see a thing!” he cried irritably, jostling his eye around the ocular.

Presently Kitty left with Rita, giving him as she left a queer hooded brown-eyed-susan look. He sat down dizzily and blew out his lips. Why couldn’t he leave with them? But when he jumped up, Mr. Vaught took him high by the arm and steered him out into the hall. He faced the younger man into a corner and for a long time did not speak but stood with his head down, nodding. The engineer thought the other was going to tell him a joke.

“Bill.” The nodding went on.

“Yes sir.”

“How much did that thing cost you?”

“The telescope? Nineteen hundred and eight dollars.”

“How much do you make a week?”

“I take home one forty-eight.”

“Did your father leave you anything?”

“Not much. An old house and two hundred acres of buckshot.”

The engineer was sure he was in for a scolding — all at once the telescope seemed folly itself. But Mr. Vaught only took out his fried-up ball of a handkerchief and knocked it against his nose.

“Bill”

“Yes sir.”

“How would you like to work for me?”

“I’d like it fine, sir, but—”

“We have a garage apartment, which Mrs. Vaught did over completely. You’d be independent.”

“Well, I really appreciate it, but—”

“You’re Ed Barrett’s boy,” began Mr. Vaught in an enumerating voice.

“Yes sir.”

“Dolly knew your mother and said she was the sweetest little lady in the world.”

“Yes sir.”

“Your mother and daddy are dead and here you are up here fooling around and not knowing what in the hail you are doing. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, sir, I’m a humidification engineer.”

“What in the woerrrld is that?” asked the other, his mouth gone quirky and comic.

The engineer explained.

“Why, hailfire, man, you mean you’re the janitor,” cried Mr. Vaught, falling back and doing a jaunty little step. For the first time the engineer caught a glimpse of the shrewdness behind the old man’s buffoonery.

“I guess I am, in a way.”

“Tell me the truth now. You don’t know what — in — the— woerrrld you are doing up here, do you?”

“Well now—” began the engineer, intending to say something about his scientific theories. But instead he fell silent.

“Where did you go to college?”

“Princeton.”

“What’s your religion?”

“Episcopalian,” said the engineer absently, though he had never given the matter a single thought in his entire life.

“Man, there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“No sir.”

But if there is nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all. “However, I do have a nervous condition—”

“Nervous! Hell, I’d be nervous too if I lived up here with all these folks.” He nodded down at the moraine of Washington Heights. “All huddled up in the Y in the daytime and way up under a store all night. And peeping at folks through a spyglass. Shoot, man!”

The engineer had to laugh. Moreover, suggestible as he was, he began to think it mightn’t be a bad idea to return to the South and discover his identity, to use Dr. Gamow’s expression. “What would you want me to do, Mr. Vaught?”

“All right. Here’s what you do. You come on down with us. Spend a year with Jamie. This will give you time to finish school if that’s what you want to do, or look around for what kind of work you want. Whatever you want to do.”

“I still don’t exactly know what it is you want—”

“Bill, I’m going to tell you something.” Mr. Vaught drew him close enough to smell his old man’s sourness and the ironing-board smell of seersucker. “I need somebody to help me out. I’m taking Jamie home ”—somebody didn’t want him to! — “and I want you to come down with me.”

“Yes sir. And then?”

“Jamie likes you. He dudn’t like anybody else at home but he likes you. (He likes Sutter, but that sapsucker — never mind.) He’s been up here four years and he’s smart as a whip about some things but he doesn’t know enough to come out of the rain about some others. He can’t drive a car or shoot a gun! You know what he and Kitty do at home? Nothing! Sit in the pantry and pick their noses.”

“How do you know I won’t do the same thing?” asked the engineer, smiling.

“Do it! But also show him how folks act. I just saw what effect you had on him. That’s the first time I’ve seen that boy perk up since I been up here. Can you drive?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Yes sir.” He got one to drive the Auchinclosses’ Continental.

“What do you say?”

“Do I understand that you would want me to be a kind of tutor or companion?”

“Don’t have to be anything. Just be in the house.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve had some experience along these lines,” said the engineer and told him about his tutoring stints with his young Jewish charges.

“You see there! We have some of the finest Jewish people at home you’ll ever find,” he added, as if the engineer were himself Jewish. “Right now the main thing we need is somebody to help me drive home.”

The proposal was not quite as good as it sounded. Mr. Vaught, he early perceived, was the sort of man who likes to confide in strangers. And the farther he got from home, one somehow knew, the more confidential he became. He was the sort to hold long conversations with the porter on train trips, stand out with him on dark station platforms. “How much do you make, Sam?” he might ask the porter. “How would you like to work for me?”

“I had this boy David drive us up, ahem,” said Mr. Vaught, clearing his throat diffidently. “I didn’t know we were going to be up here this long, so I sent him home on the bus. He couldn’t drive either. He like to have scared me to death.”

The engineer nodded and asked no questions, since he understood that the “boy” was a Negro and Mr. Vaught was embarrassed lest it should appear that the engineer was being offered a Negro’s job.

“Mrs. Vaught is certain you’ll be comfortable in Sutter’s old apartment,” he added quickly (you see it’s not a Negro’s job). For the first time the engineer began to wonder if the proposal might not be serious. “Come on, let’s go get us a Coke.”

He followed the older man to a niche off the corridor which had been fitted out as a tiny waiting room with a chrome sofa, a Coke machine, and a single window overlooking the great plunging battleship of Manhattan.

Mr. Vaught put his hand on the younger man’s knee and gave it a shake. “Son, when you reach my age I hope you will not wake up to find that you’ve gone wrong somewhere and that your family have disappointed you.”