Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Wait a minute, Kitty,” said the engineer as the girl turned away.

“What now?”

“Hold on! Don’t leave.”

“All right, what?”

“It seems I have not been able to make myself understood,” he told them all, “or at least to prevent misunderstandings. I want to be very certain that everybody understands me now.”

“I told you he wanted to come with us,” said Mrs. Vaught to her husband, her pince-nez flashing.

“In any case,” said the engineer, “let me state my intentions once and for all, particularly with regard to Jamie and, ah, Kitty.” He almost said Miss Kitty.

“My God,” said Kitty, turning red as a beet. “What is the man talking about?” She besought Rita, who in turn was watching the engineer like a hawk, her eyes wary and fine.

“I want to make clear what apparently I failed to make clear in New York, that from the beginning I accepted Mr. Vaught’s offer with great pleasure and that I shall be happy to go to school with Jamie or anywhere else he wants to go.”

Kitty seemed both relieved and irritated. “That’s why he was fixing to take off for Colorado,” she said loudly to Rita, and hollowed out her cheek with her tongue.

“What’s that?” asked the engineer quickly.

“He wants to know whose idea Colorado was,” she said, still addressing Rita. She actually jerked a thumb at him, angry as an umpire. What had happened to his love?

Rita shrugged.

“Have you already forgotten what you told Rita?” asked the girl, meeting his eye.

“That’s possible,” said the engineer slowly. The worst of it was that he could have forgotten. “Since it was Rita I told, maybe she could refresh my memory.”

“Glad to, Lance Corporal,” she said, shrugging and smiling. “Though it is nothing we all don’t already know. What you told me, if you recall, was that what you really wanted to do was attend the Colorado School of Mines.”

“Without Kitty,” said Kitty.

“No,” said the engineer.

“Yes,” said Rita. “Don’t you remember the day I returned the telescope?”

“Why yes,” said the engineer, remembering something, “but I certainly did not mean that I wasn’t ready and anxious to join the Vaughts. Besides that, I had already committed myself to Mr. Vaught and I always honor my obligations.”

“So now we’re an obligation,” said Kitty, addressing all Virginia. Her eyes flashed. It crossed his mind that she was what used to be called a noble high-spirited girl.

“No no, Kitty,” said the poor engineer.

“You may recall, Lance Corporal,” said Rita dryly, “that I asked you straight out which of us you wanted to work for, me or Poppy. You were unable to give a clear answer and spoke instead of Colorado. Knowing that you were a gentleman and did not like wrangling with women (I don’t blame you), I did not press the issue. Perhaps I was wrong.”

The trouble was he could not be sure and she knew it. And as he gazed at her he fancied he caught a gleam in her eye. She was skirting with him the abyss within himself and not doing it ill-naturedly: I know, said the gleam, and you know that I know and that you are not quite sure and that I might even be right.

“Anyhow Poppy is right,” said Rita, rubbing her hands briskly. “We are all here and that is what counts. Why don’t we hit the road?”

They were all leaving that very day, it turned out. Another two hours and he’d have missed them.

Mrs. Vaught and Kitty had one more room in the Governor’s Palace to see, one more pewter candle-snuffer to buy. The engineer stayed at the motel to help Jamie pack. But Jamie was tired and went to lie down; the engineer packed for him. Rita found him sitting on the back step of the camper counting his money.

“You can keep that,” she said. He had come to her post-dated check.

“No, thanks,” he said and handed it over. Now it was he who eyed her warily, but not disagreeably.

“Believe it or not, I’m very happy things worked out as they have.”

“You are?”

“I’m afraid I was the cause of the misunderstanding.”

He shrugged.

“Anyhow you passed your test by ordeal and here is your prize.” For the second time she handed him a little hexagonal General Motors key.

“Thank you.”

“You want to know why I’m glad you’re here? Because you’re the only one who can help Jamie. If only you will. You know sometimes I have the feeling, Lance Corporal, that you are onto all of us, onto our most private selves. Or perhaps it is rather that it is you and I who know, who really know; and perhaps it is the nature of our secret that we cannot tell our friends or even each other but must rather act for the good of our friends.”

The engineer was silent. From force of habit, he looked as if he knew what she was talking about, what their “secret” was, though in truth he had not the least idea.

“Bill.”

“Yes?”

“Take Jamie and get the hell out of here. Take Ulysses and go while the going is good. Go roam the byways and have a roistering good time of it. Find yourselves a couple of chicks. You’re two good-looking fellows, you know!”

“Thank you,” said the engineer politely.

“Drink and love and sing! Do you know what I thought as I was standing in the governor’s bedroom yesterday?”

“No.”

“Jamie was standing in front of me in the lovely, careless way he gets from you or from somebody, like young golden-haired Sir Tristram, leaning on his sword, and all at once the dreadful thought occurred to me: what must it be like to live and die without ever having waked in the morning and felt the warm mouth of one’s beloved on his?”

“I couldn’t say,” said the engineer, who had never waked in the morning and found anybody’s warm mouth on his.

“Bill, have you ever been to the Golden Isles of Georgia?”

“No.”

‘That’s where we’re headed. You can meet us there or not, as you like. And if you two bums want to detour through Norfolk, that’s all right too.”

“O.K.”

They didn’t, the engineer and Jamie, quite cut loose after all, or detour through Norfolk (did Rita mean he should take Jamie to a whorehouse?) or feel any beloveds’ warm mouths on theirs. But they had a good time and went their own way for a day or two at a time, wandering down the old Tidewater, sleeping in the piney woods or along the salt marshes and rendezvousing with the Cadillac in places like Wilmington and Charleston.

The camper was everything he had hoped for and more. Mornings on the road, the two young men sat together in the cab; afternoons the engineer usually drove alone. Well as he looked, Jamie tired easily and took to the bunk in the loft over the cab and either read or napped or watched the road unwind. They stopped early in the evening and went fishing or set up the telescope on a lonesome savanna and focused on the faraway hummocks where jewel-like warblers swarmed about the misty oaks.

Nights were best. Then as the thick singing darkness settled about the little caboose which shed its cheerful square of light on the dark soil of old Carolina, they might debark and, with the pleasantest sense of stepping down from the zone of the possible to the zone of the realized, stroll to a service station or fishing camp or grocery store, where they’d have a beer or fill the tank with spring water or lay in eggs and country butter and grits and slab bacon; then back to the camper, which they’d show off to the storekeeper, he ruminating a minute and: all I got to say is, don’t walk off and leave the keys in it — and so on in the complex Southern tactic of assaying a sort of running start, a joke before the joke, ten assumptions shared and a common stance of rhetoric and a whole shared set of special ironies and opposites. He was home. Even though he was hundreds of miles from home and had never been here and it was not even the same here — it was older and more decorous, more tended to and a dream with the past — he was home.