Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

He looked behind him. No one followed him in the street. The drowsiness came again. He had to sleep then and there. He lay down in the warm black sand of a vacant lot and slept two hours without moving a muscle. He woke in his right mind and went back to the Y.

Jogging home from the reservoir the next morning, he spotted Rita two hundred yards away, sitting on a bench next to the milk-fund booth, the toilet-shaped telescope case under her hand. All at once he knew everything: she had come to get rid of him. She hoped he would take his telescope and go away.

But she was, for the first time, as pleasant as could be and patted the bench next to her. And when he sat down, she came sliding smack up against him, a bit too close for comfort. He humped himself over in his sweat suit and tried to smell as good as he could.

Her fist came softly down on his knee; she looked him in the eye and spoke not eight inches away. He couldn’t hear for listening.

“But you and I know better,” she was saying. “He’s got no business going home.”

“Jamie?”

Looking into her eyes was something of a shock. Every line of her face was known to him. Yet now, with her eyes opening into his, she became someone else. It was like watching a picture toy turned one degree: the black lines come and the picture changes. Where before her face was dark and shut off as a gypsy, now her eyes opened into a girlishness.

“Bill—”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Oh come on. Rita.”

“O.K., Rita.”

Again the fist came down softly on his knee.

“I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“The Vaughts are very fond of you.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“The extraordinary part of it is that though you are a new friend — perhaps because you are a new friend — you have more influence with them than anyone else.”

“I doubt it. I haven’t heard from them in several days.”

“Oh, they carry on about you something awful. They plan to take you home with them, don’t they?”

“When did you hear that?”

“Yesterday.”

“Did Mr. Vaught tell you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“But never mind about Poppy. Right now it’s Jamie who needs us.” As gravely as she spoke, he noticed that she cast her eyes about, making routine surveys of Eighth Avenue. There was about her the air of a woman who keeps busy in a world of men. Her busyness gave her leave to be absent-minded. She was tired, but she knew how to use her tiredness.

“Why?”

“Jamie can’t go home, Bill.”

“Why not?”

“Let me tell you something.”

“All right.”

“First — how much do you care for Jamie?”

“Care for him?”

“Would you do something for him?”

“Yes.”

“Would you do anything for him?”

“What do you mean?”

“If he were in serious trouble, would you help him?”

“Of course.”

“I knew you would.”

“What is it?” he asked after a moment.

Rita was smoothing out her skirt until it made a perfect membrane across her thighs. “Our Jamie is not going to make it, Bill,” she said in a low thrilling voice and with a sweetness that struck a pang to the marrow.

There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?

“So it’s not such a big thing,” she said softly. “One small adolescent as against the thirty thousand Japanese children we polished off.”

“How’s that?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear.

“At Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“I don’t, ah—”

“But this little guy happens to be a friend of mine. And yours. He has myelogenous leukemia, Bill.”

Oh, and I’m sick too, he thought anxiously, looking at his hands. Why is it that bad news is not so bad and good news not so good and what with the bad news being good, aye that is what makes her well and me sick? Oh, I’m not well. He was silent, gazing at his open hands on his knees.

“You don’t seem surprised,” said Rita after a moment.

“I knew he was sick,” he murmured.

“What’s that?” she asked quickly. He saw she was disappointed by his listlessness. She had wanted him to join her, stand beside her and celebrate the awfulness.

“Why shouldn’t he go home?” he asked, straightening up.

“Why shouldn’t he indeed? A very good question: because just now he is in a total remission. He feels fine. His blood’s as normal as yours or mine. He’s out of bed and will be discharged tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So. He’ll be dead in four months.”

“Then I don’t see why he shouldn’t go home or anywhere else.”

“There is only one reason. A tough little bastard by the name of Larry Deutsch up at the Medical Center. He’s got a drug, a horrifyingly dangerous drug, which incidentally comes from an herb used by the Tarahumaras.”

To his relief, Rita started on a long spiel about Jamie’s illness. He knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn’t have to listen.

“—so Larry said to me in the gentlest voice I ever heard: ‘I think we’re in trouble. Take a look.’ I take a look, and even knowing nothing whatever about it, I could see there was something dreadfully wrong. The little cells were smudged — they looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns shining through a fog. That was over a year ago—”

Instead he was thinking of wars and death at home. On the days of bad news there was the same clearing and sweetness in the air. Families drew closer. Azaleas could be seen. He remembered his father’s happiness when he spoke of Pearl Harbor — where he was when he heard it, how he had called the draft board the next morning. It was not hard to see him walking to work on that Monday. For once the houses, the trees, the very cracks in the sidewalk had not their usual minatory presence. The dreadful threat of weekday mornings was gone! War is better than Monday morning.

As his sweat dried, the fleece began to sting his skin.

“—fact number two. Jamie has the best mind I ever encountered. Better even than Sutter, my charming ex-husband. It’s really quite funny. His math teacher in New Hampshire was glad to get rid of him. ‘Get him out of here,’ he told me. ‘He wants to argue about John von Neumann’s Theory of Games —’”

It was her silences, when they came, that he attended.

“So what is the problem?” he asked.

“He’s remitted on prednisone. Poppy and Dolly refuse to admit that he is going to die. Why not give him another pill, they say. Well, there are no more pills. He’s been through them all.”

He was silent.

She regarded him with a fond bright eye.

“Somehow you remind me of the lance corporal in Der Zauberberg. Do you mind if I call you lance corporal?”

“No ma’am.”

“What would you like to do if you had your choice?”

“I do have my choice. Go with Jamie.”

“No, I mean if Jamie hadn’t showed up.”

“Oh, I’d go see Kitty.”

“Leave all of us out of it. And suppose, too, money is no object.”

“I guess I’d finish my education.”

“In what?”

“Oh, metallurgy, I expect.”

“What school would you pick?”

“Colorado School of Mines.”

“You’d like to go out there?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Suppose Jamie would want to go too.”

“That’s up to him.”

“Take a look at this.”

He found himself gazing at a curled-up Polaroid snapshot of a little white truck fitted with a cabin in its bed. The truck was parked on a stretch of meager shingly beach. Kitty, in long shorts, leaned against the cabin, wide-brimmed hat in hand in a burlesque of American-lady-on-safari.