Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

The Great Horn Theme went abroad, the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the worst of times.

“But they,” he said to the levee—“they fornicate too and in public and expect them back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected.”

The boy waited for the scratch in the record. He knew when it was coming. The first part of the scratch came and he had time to get up and hold the tone arm just right so the needle wouldn’t jump the groove.

“Watch them.”

“Yes sir.”

“You just watch them. You know what’s going to happen?”

“No sir.”

“One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch.”

The man stayed, so the boy said, “Yes sir.”

“Go to whores if you have to, but always remember the difference. Don’t treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady.”

“No sir, I won’t.”

The record ended but the eccentric groove did not trip the mechanism. The boy half rose.

“If you do one, then you’re going to be like them, a fornicator and not caring. If you do the other, you’ll be like them, fornicator and hypocrite.”

He opened his eyes. Now standing in the civil public darkness of the park, he snapped his fingers softly as if he were trying to remember something.

Then what happened after that? After he —

Leaning over, he peered down at the faint dapple on the path. After a long moment he held up his watch to the lamplight. After a look around to get his bearings, he walked straight to the corner of the park and down into the BMT subway.

Yet he could scarcely have been in his right mind or known exactly where he was, for what he did next was a thing one did at home but never did here. He dropped in. He walked up to Rita’s apartment in the Mews and knocked on the door at eight thirty in the evening.

Kitty answered the door. Her mouth opened and closed. She could not believe her eyes. He defied the laws of optics.

“Oh,” she said, fearing either to look at him or to take her eyes from him.

“Let’s walk up the street,” he said. “It’s a nice night.”

“Oh, I’d love to,” she cried, “but I can’t. Give me a rain check.” She was managing somehow both to stand aside and to block the doorway.

“Let’s go ride the ferry to Staten Island.”

“Oh, I can’t,” she wailed like an actress.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” he said after a moment.

“What? Oh. Oh. ” But instead of standing aside she put her head over coquettishly. Tock, she said, clicking her tongue and eyeing the darkness behind him. They were having a sort of date here in the doorway.

“There is something I wanted to ask you. It will not take long. Your phone didn’t answer.”

“It didn’t?” She called something over her shoulder. It seemed that here was the issue: the telephone. If this issue could be settled, it seemed, he would take his leave like a telephone man. But it allowed her to admit him: she stood aside.

So it was at last that he found himself in the living room standing, in a kind of service capacity. He had come about the telephone. The two women smiled up at him from a low couch covered with Navaho blankets. No, only Kitty smiled. Rita eyed him ironically, her head appearing to turn perpetually away.

It was not a Barbados cottage after all but an Indian hogan. Rita wore a Chamula huipil (Kitty was explaining nervously) of heavy homespun. Kitty herself had wound a white quezquemetl above her Capri pants. Brilliant quetzals and crude votive offerings painted on tin hung from the walls.

They were drinking a strong-smelling tea.

“I’ve been unable to reach you by phone,” he told Kitty.

The two women looked at him.

“I may as well state my business,” said the engineer, still more or less at attention, though listing a bit.

“Good idea,” said Rita, taking a swig of the tea, which smelled like burnt corn. He watched as the muscular movement of her throat sent the liquid strumming along.

“Kitty, I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Could I speak to you alone?”

“You’re among friends, ha-ha,” said Kitty laughing loudly.

“Very well. I wanted to ask you to change your mind about going to Europe and instead go south with Jamie and me.” Until the moment he opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wished to ask her. “Here is your check, Mrs. Vaught. I really appreciate it, but—”

“Good grief,” said Kitty, jumping to her feet as if she had received an electric shock. “Listen to the man,” she cried to Rita and smacked her thigh in a Jewish gesture.

Rita shrugged. She ignored the check.

The engineer advanced and actually took Kitty’s hand. For a second her pupils enlarged and she was as black-eyed as an Alabama girl on a summer night. Then she gaped at her own hand in stupefaction: it could not be so! He was holding her hand! But instead of snatching it away, she pulled him down on the couch.

“Here. Try some hikuli tea,”

“No thanks.” As he lay back among the pillows, his eye fell upon a votive painting. It showed a man who had been thrown from a motorcycle and now lay in a ditch. He had apparently suffered internal injuries, for blood spurted from his mouth like a stream from a garden hose.

“That’s my favorite,” said Kitty. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“I guess so.”

“He was cured miraculously by the Black Virgin.”

“Is that right?”

As Kitty went on, no longer so nervous now but seeming rather to have hit upon a course she might steer between the two of them, he noticed a spot of color in her cheek. There was a liquid light, not a tear, in the corner of her eye.

“Ree’s been giving me the most fascinating account of the hikuli rite which is practiced by the Huichol Indians. The women are absolved from their sins by tying knots in a palm-leaf string, one knot for each lover. Then they throw the string into Grandfather Fire. Meanwhile the men — Ree was just getting to the men. What do the men do, Ree?”

“I really couldn’t say,” said Rita, rising abruptly and leaving the room.

“Tie a knot for me,” said the engineer.

“What,” cried Kitty, craning her neck and searching the horizon like a sea bird. “Oh.”

“Let us now—” he began and sought dizzily to hold her charms in his arms.

“Ah,” said the girl, lying passive, eyes full of light.

“I’ve reached a decision,” he said and leaned back uncomfortably among the pillows, head in the air.

“What is that?”

“Now you know that I need you.”

“You do?”

“And that although I will be all right eventually, I still have a nervous condition, and that for some time to come I’ll need you to call upon.”

“You will?”

“I’ve loved you ever since I saw you in Central — that is, in Jamie’s room.”

“Ah.”

Love, he thought, and all at once the word itself went opaque and curious, a little howling business behind the front teeth. Do I love her? I something her. He felt his nose.

“Let’s go home, either to your home or mine, and be married.”

“Married,” said Kitty faintly.

Dander from the old blankets was beginning to bother his nose. “Would you mind taking this off,” he asked her presently and took hold of her quezquemetl. “Aren’t you hot?”

“Are you out of your mind,” she whispered fiercely.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” He hadn’t meant to undress her but only to get her out of these prickly homespuns and back into decent Alabama cotton.