Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

What was wrong with a Mr. and Mrs. Williston Bibb Barrett living in a brand-new house in a brand-new suburb with a proper address: 2041 Country Club Drive, Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia?

Nothing was wrong, but he got worse anyway. The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.

What was wrong with marrying him a wife and living a life, holding Kitty’s charms in his arms the livelong night?

Nothing, but his memory deteriorated and he was assaulted by ghostly legions of déjà vus and often woke not knowing where he was. His knee leapt like a fish. It became necessary to unravel the left pocket of his three pairs of pants in order to slip a hand down and keep his patella in place.

It was unsettling, too, coming among a people whose radars were as sensitive as his own. He had got used to good steady wistful post-Protestant Yankees (they were his meat, ex-Protestants, post-Protestants, para-Protestants, the wistful ones who wanted they knew not what; he was just the one to dance for them) and here all at once he found himself among as light-footed and as hawk-eyed and God-fearing a crew as one could imagine. Everyone went to church and was funny and clever and sensitive in the bargain. Oh, they were formidable, born winners (how did they lose?). Yet his radar was remarkable, even for the South. After standing around two or three days, as queer and nervous as a Hoosier, he quickly got the hang of it. Soon he was able to listen to funny stories and tell a few himself.

The Vaughts liked him fine of course and did not notice that he was worse. For he was as prudent and affable as ever and mostly silent, and that was what they expected of him. All but Sutter. He had not yet met Sutter. But one day he saw his car, as he and Jamie were sitting in the sunny quarter of the golf shelter just off number 6 fairway in front of the Vaughts’ house.

Jamie was still reading The Theory of Sets. The engineer was pondering, as usual, the mystery of the singularity of things. This was the very golf links, he had reason to believe, where his grandfather had played an exhibition round with the great Bobby Jones in 1925 or thereabouts. It was an ancient sort of links, dating from the golden age of country clubs, with sturdy rain shelters of green-stained wood and old-fashioned ball-washers on each tee and soft rolling bunkers as peaceful as an old battlefield. Deep paths were worn through the rough where caddies cut across from green to fairway. The engineer’s amnesia was now of this order: he forgot things he had seen before, but things he had heard of and not seen looked familiar. Old new things like fifty-year-old golf links where Bobby Jones played once were haunted by memory.

How bad off was he, he wondered. Which is better, to walk the streets of Memphis in one’s right mind remembering everything, what one has done yesterday and must do tomorrow — or to come to oneself in Memphis, remembering nothing?

Jamie had asked him what he was thinking about. When he told him, Jamie said: “You sound like Sutter.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I went to see him yesterday. Yonder he goes now.”

But he saw no more than the car, a faded green Edsel which swung out of the steep driveway and disappeared down the links road. Jamie told him that Sutter drove an Edsel to remind him of the debacle of the Ford Motor Company and to commemorate the last victory of the American people over marketing research and opinion polls. The engineer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. It had the sound of a quixotic type who admires his own gestures.

The Vaughts lived in a castle fronting on a golf links. It was an old suburb set down in a beautiful green valley across a ridge from the city. There were other ridges, the last wrinkles of the Appalachians, which formed other valleys between them, and newer suburbs and newer country clubs.

The houses of the valley were built in the 1920’s, a time when rich men still sought to recall heroic ages. Directly opposite the castle, atop the next ridge to the south, there stood a round, rosy temple. It was the dwelling of a millionaire who had admired a Roman structure erected by the Emperor Vespasian in honor of Juno and so had reproduced it in good Alabama red brick and Georgia marble. At night a battery of colored floodlights made it look redder still.

The Vaught castle was made of purplish bricks which had been broken in two and the jagged side turned out. It had beam-in-plaster gables and a fat Norman tower and casement windows with panes of bottle glass. Mr. Vaught, it turned out, was richer even than the engineer had supposed. He had made his first fortune by inventing and manufacturing a new type of journal box for coal cars. After the second war he branched out into insurance companies, real estate, and auto dealerships. Now he owned and operated the second largest Chevrolet agency in the world. His talent, as the engineer divined it, was the knack of getting onto the rhythm of things, of knowing when to buy and sell. So that was the meaning of his funny way of hopping around like a jaybird with his ear cocked but not really listening to anybody! Rather was he tuned in to the music and rhythm of ventures, himself poised and nodding, like a schoolboy waiting to go into a jump rope. The engineer soon learned to pay no attention to him either: his talk was not talk at all, one discovered, that is, a form of communication to be attended to, but rather a familiar hum such as Lugurtha the cook made when she was making beaten biscuits.

There were other persons living in the castle. The “Myra” of whom Mrs. Vaught often spoke to the engineer as if he knew her, turned out to be Myra Thigpen, Mr. Vaught’s stepdaughter by an earlier marriage. The Thigpens were staying in the Vaught castle while their own house was being built across the golf links. Lamar Thigpen worked for Mr. Vaught as personnel manager. Myra ran a real-estate agency. A handsome woman with strong white arms and a cloud of heavy brown hair, she reminded the engineer of the Business and Professional Women he had seen turning out for luncheons at Holiday Inns from Charleston to Chattanooga. If Mrs. Vaught had thrown him off earlier by acting as if he ought to know whom she was talking about, Myra dislocated him now by acting as if she had known him all along. Had she? “You remember that old boy Hoss Hart from Greenwood who went to Mississippi State and later moved to Ithaca?” she asked him. “You mean Mr. Horace Hart who used to sell for Checkerboard Feed?” asked the engineer, who did in fact perfectly remember such a person, having heard his name once or twice fifteen years ago. “I saw him the other day,” Myra went on, “selling fruitcake for Civitan over at Boys’ State. He told me about when you and he and your daddy went duck-hunting on a houseboat on the White River.” “The White River?” The engineer scratched his head. Had Hoss Hart remembered something he had forgotten? “When you see Hoss,” said Myra, giving him a sisterly jostle such as coeds at Mississippi State give you, “just ask him if he remembers Legs.” “Yes ma’am.” “Don’t say Miss Homecoming of 1950, just say Legs and see what he says.” “Yes ma’am, I will.”

Sutter was nowhere to be seen, but the engineer made sure he would see him when he did come — as he was told Sutter occasionally did to spend the night. Sutter’s old apartment was next to the quarters assigned to the two young men, on the second floor above the great four-car garage. Not two hours passed after his arrival before he explored the apartment and discovered two things. One was a bottle of three-dollar whiskey in the cupboard of the kitchenette between the two apartments. The other thing was a knothole in the wall of his closet which looked straight into Sutter’s bedroom. He hung his Val-Pak over the hole.