Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“I see.”

“The point is,” he said, gathering strength, collecting his wits at last, “I don’t want you to go.”

“Oh, you don’t want me to go.”

“No, I want you to stay here and either go south with Jamie and me or—”

“You’ve got your nerve.”

“Kitty.”

“What?”

“Do you remember that I asked you to marry me last night?”

“Oh Lord,” said the girl nervously and hung up, not so much he thought, on him as on herself.

Later, after shower and breakfast, he called Jamie from the Y.M.C.A. It was time to settle things one way or another.

Jamie surprised him by answering the phone himself.

“Why didn’t you keep the telescope?” the engineer asked him.

“We’re leaving, aren’t we? Thanks, by the way.”

“Rita spoke to me today. Do you know what she wants us to do?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Again he heard the slight break in breathing, the little risible and incredulous sound he seemed to call forth from people.

“What would you do?” asked Jamie after a silence.

“I’d do what the doctor said.”

“Me too. But in any case you’re going to bum around with me for a while?”

“Sure.”

“Then call Poppy and see what’s what. After all, he’s the boss.”

“You’re right. I will. Where is he?”

“At the Astor.”

“How extraordinary.”

“It was the only hotel they knew.”

“Yello, yello.” Mr. Vaught answered the telephone as eccentrically and routinely as a priest reciting the rosary.

“Sir, this is BillyBarrett.”

“Who? Billy boy!”

“Yes sir. Sir—”

“Yayo.”

“I would like to know exactly where we stand.”

“You ain’t the only one.”

“Sir?”

“What is it you want to know, Bill?”

“I would like to know, sir, whether I am working for you or working for Rita or for both or for neither.”

“You want to know something, Bill.”

“Yes sir.”

“It would be a crying shame if you didn’t turn out to be a lawyer. You sound just like your daddy.”

“Yes sir. But—”

“Listen to me, Bill.”

“I will,” said the engineer, who had learned to tell when the old man was not fooling.

“You got your driver’s license?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right. You be standing outside on the sidewalk at nine o’clock in the morning. We’ll pick you up. Then we’ll see who’s going where.”

“Yes sir.”

“All yall be ready,” he said, like Kitty, somewhat aside from the telephone, to the world around.

It was not a good sign, thought the engineer as he hung up slowly, that Mr. Vaught spoke both broadly and irritably.

The next morning he resigned his position at Macy’s — the chief engineer, who had heard this before and was something of a psychologist himself, nodded gravely and promised the job would be waiting for him when he felt better — checked out of the Y.M.C.A. and sat on his telescope at the curb for three hours. No one came to pick him up. Once he went inside to call the hospital, the hotel, and Kitty. Had he got the directions wrong? Jamie had been discharged, the Vaughts had left the hotel, and Kitty’s telephone did not answer.

Only then, three hours later, did it occur to him that there must be a message for him. He climbed the steps again. Already the Y reentered was like a place he had lived in long ago with its special smell of earnestness and breathed air and soaped tile, the smell, as he had always taken it but only just now realized, of Spanish Protestantism. Two yellow slips were handed him across the desk. Superstitiously, he took pains to return to his perch on the street corner before reading either. The first was a garbled note, evidently from Mr. Vaught. “If plans are not finalized and you change your mind a job is always waiting. S. Vote.” “Vote” could only be Vaught.

The second was from Kitty and he couldn’t see for looking. “Europe out,” he finally made out. “Jamie more important.Please change your mind and catch up with us at Coach-and-Four Motel, Williamsburg. Know you had cause to lose patience but please change your mind. Did you mean what you said? Kitty.”

Change my mind? Mean what I said? What did I say, asked the engineer aloud. He blinked into the weak sunlight. Screwing up an eye, he tried mightily to get the straight of it. It follows, said he, diagramming a syllogism in the air, that they think I changed my mind about going with them. But I told them no such thing. Then it follows someone else did.

Another twenty minutes of squatting and musing on the telescope, not so much addled as distracted by the curiousness of sitting in the street and having no address, and he jumped suddenly to his feet.

Why, they have all left, thought he, socking himself with amazement: the whole lot of them have pulled out.

Early afternoon found him on a southbound bus counting his money. He bought a ticket as far as Metuchen. The bus was a local, a stained old Greyhound with high portholes. The passengers sat deep in her hold, which smelled of the 1940’s and many a trip to Fort Dix. Under the Hudson River she roared, swaying like a schooner, and out onto old US 1 with its ancient overpasses and prehistoric Sinclair stations. The green sky filtered through the high windows. In Elizabeth, when the door opened, he fancied he heard a twittering, ravening noise high in the green sky.

When the bus got clear of the factories and overpasses, he pulled the cord and alighted on the littered highway. On the corner stood a blackened stucco dollhouse with a pagoda roof, evidently a subdivision field office left over from the period between the great wars.

It began to rain, a fine dirty Jersey drizzle, and he took refuge in the pagoda, which was empty but for scraps of ancient newspapers, a sepia rotogravure section depicting Lucky Lindy’s visit to Lakehurst in 1928.

The drizzle stopped but it was a bad place to catch a ride. There were few cars. The concrete underfoot trembled like an earthquake as the great tankers and tractors rolled by. Yet prudence had not failed him. Against such an occasion he had obtained certain materials in Penn Station, and, returning to the pagoda, he lettered a sign which he propped against his telescope: PRINCETON STUDENT SEEKS RIDE SOUTH.

And now once again, not entirely aware that he did so, he stuck his hands in his pockets a certain way and carried his chin in his throat. In the end he even took off his Macy’s jacket (which looked more like Ohio State than Princeton), uncovering his shirt with the tuck in back and no pocket in front.

FOR AN HOUR and a half the great trucks rolled past, shaking the earth and exhaling clouds of blue headache smoke. Was it possible that his Princeton placard did more harm than good? He had in fact given up, counted his money for the third time, and resolved to ride the bus and waive eating; had even picked up telescope but not, fortunately, Val-Pak, which supported the placard, when a bottle-green Chevrolet, an old ’58 Junebug, passed and hesitated, the driver’s foot lifting and the carburetor sucking wind, speeded up and hesitated again. As the engineer watched politely lest he presume upon fortune, the Chevrolet pulled off the highway and sat interestingly on the shoulder a good hundred yards to the south. At last it came, the sign, a hand beckoned to him importunately and in a single swoop he caught up Val-Pak and telescope and left placard behind.

Already, even as he stooped, smiling, to stow his gear through the back door, which had been opened for him, he had registered his benefactor without quite looking at him. The driver was a light-colored high-stomached Negro dressed in a good brown suit, no doubt a preacher or a teacher. Now sitting beside him and taking note of the other’s civil bald bun-shaped head, of the sharp knees and thin ankles clad in socks-with-clocks, he was sure of it: here was the sort to hold converse at a lofty level with instant and prodigious agreement on all subjects. He would belong to a committee on Religion and Mental Health.