Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

Everything happened last summer in one week. Do you think there are times like that when everything comes to a head for several people and after that their lives take a different turning? Jamie and I had gone out to see Sutter and Rita, in Tesuque. Val came out a little later. A few days later and everybody had gone off in different directions. First, I think Sutter found out that something was wrong with Jamie. Sutter could look at you and tell what was wrong with you — he’s about shot now — but I remember he did take Jamie to the laboratory. Then he and Jamie went out into the desert and got lost etcetera etcetera. After that Val left to become a postulant or something. Then I came to New York with Rita, She and Sutter had already separated. I had never met anybody like Rita. My own life had been abnormal. I had polio as a little girl and was crippled and overcame it with ten years of toe dancing (like Glenn Cunningham, Poppy said). I had tutors and Poppy sent me to a school in Switzerland — now you talk about something peculiar: those girls were a mess. I came home. My life at home. Do you know what everybody does? We live in a country club; we are not just members, we live right there on the golf links along with a hundred other houses. The men make money and watch pro football. The women play golf and bridge at the club. The children swim in meets. The mothers of the losers hate the mothers of the winners. At night Mama always gets mad at Huntley-Brinkley, turns off the TV and gets off on the Negroes and the Jews and the Federal Reserve Bank. Sunday we go to church. That’s what we do at home. Then all of a sudden I found myself with Rita. She showed me something I never dreamed existed. Two things. First, the way she devoted herself to the Indians. I never saw anything like it. They adored her. I saw one child’s father try to kneel and kiss her foot. Then she showed me how a thing can be beautiful. She kept Shakespeare’s sonnets by her bed. And she actually read them. Listen to this, she would say, and she would read it. And I could hear it the way she heard it! Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Poetry: who’d have thought it? We went for walks. I listened to her but then (is this bad?) I began to see how much she was enjoying teaching me. We went to corn dances in the pueblos. I said I had a confession. My confession is this: that even though I knew Rita and Sutter were estranged, or at least were having trouble, and although I knew exactly what effect our own friendship was having, I knew how to make Rita like me and I did it. Finally when Jamie and Sutter came back there was a scene between Val and Rita and everything blew up. At the time Val was fretting about whether to go into this religious order and she was not very stable. But everybody was unstable. Anyhow Val accused Rita of destroying Carlos’s faith—

Carlos?

A Zuñi boy who was Rita’s servant and protégé. (I beat him too. Rita liked him but she soon liked me better.) He was her prize pupil and she’d got him into Harvard on a scholarship. She was having Carlos and me dance the Ahaiyute myths. Carlos was the Beast God and I was the Corn Woman. Val told Carlos he was trading his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rita asked her what mess of pottage she meant, the Ahaiyute myths or Harvard? Thus — this idolatry, said Val. But Val dear, said Rita, this is his birthright, the Zuñis had the Ahaiyute myths for hundreds of years before the Spanish priests came. Val stormed out. She never liked Rita.

What did Sutter say?

Nothing. Or rather he laughed. But it was then that Val made up her mind too. She came back the same night and apologized. She told Rita: “It is you who are doing the work and I who am being hateful and doing nothing. Is it possible to come to believe in Christ and the whole thing and afterwards to be more hateful than before? But at least now I know what to do, and I thank you for it, Rita.” And so around she goes to each of us, kissing us and asking us to forgive her (it was that kind of summer).

What did Sutter say to that?

Oh, he said something about: now I don’t know, Val, maybe there is something to be said nowadays for a theology of hatred — you know Sutter. No, you don’t. But then I came on to New York with Rita. The poems in the park? They’re just that. She likes to show me her favorites — she knows I can see them as she sees them. I have to get up earlier than she does and we have different lunch hours. So if she reads something the night before — she reads at all hours — she’ll put it in the bench for me to read during my lunch. I owe her a great deal. Now she wants me to go to Europe with her. I owe her the pleasure she will take in showing it to me. But first I have to make sure of my own motives. I wrote Sutter that. I conceal nothing from him.

What did he say?

Nothing. He’s entirely too selfish to write a letter. If Rita is the most unselfish person I know, Sutter is the most selfish. That was the real trouble all along, that Rita did all the giving and Sutter did all the taking. Do you know what he said to me? “Blankety-blank on unselfishness,” said he. “I agree with Val and the Christers, it’s a fornication of spirit.” But that’s not right either. That’s not what Christ said.

Blankety-blank?

Crap.

Don’t talk like that.

I’m sick. Take me home.

The next morning he called Kitty from Macy’s. “Today,” he told her, “I’ve got to get this business settled one way or the other.”

“Don’t speak to me,” she said, her voice faint and cold.

“Eh?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t.” But he thought he did — though, as it turned out, he was wrong.

“You took advantage of me.”

“Ah, dearest—” he began. His heart sank: she was right.

But she broke in quickly (he was not right). “I have been out of my mind with worry the last few days, about this whole business, Jamie and Europe and everything. Then on top of everything I was allergic to the paint fumes and it was too much.”

“Paint fumes,” said the engineer. He looked up in time to see his old friends the Ohioans punching in at the time clock, bound for sportswear and lingerie, a lusty clear-eyed crew who had no trouble understanding each other.

“We painted Rita’s attic yesterday and I turned out to be allergic to the benzene or whatever it was. I went completely out of my head. What did I say?”

“Nothing much.”

“But I remember enough to know that you took advantage of me, barging in like that.”

“Barging in?”

“Rita tells me that you didn’t call her, you just showed up.”

“Yes,” he said contritely, willing, anxious to be convicted of a lesser crime. What foulness had he committed? It was not enough to lie with Kitty in Central Park like a common sailor: he must also take his pleasure, or almost take his pleasure, with a nice girl rendered defenseless by paint fumes.

“I really think it put me in a terrible position for you to come to Rita’s like that. You know better than that! And then to leave without so much as a fare-you-well to Rita and walking me clear to New Jersey or wherever it was.”

“Yes.”

“What do you want?”

“What?”

“You called me, remember?”

“Oh yes,” said the engineer, shaking hishead to clear the cobwebs. “I’ve got to, ah, get this business settled.” But he had lost his resolution.

“What business?” said Kitty coldly.

“Whether I am working for Rita or your father. But in either case—”

“Working for Rita?” she asked sharply.

“Rita wants me and Jamie to take the camper while you all go to Europe.”