Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

I’m not well, reflected the engineer, and therefore it is fitting that I should sit still, like an Englishman in his burrow, and see what can be seen.

It was a good place to live and collect one’s thoughts. In the daytime the valley echoed with the faint far-off cries of the golfers. At night a yellow harvest moon hung over the ridge and the floodlights played on the fat rosy temple of Juno. His duties were light. Indeed he had no duties. Nothing more was said after Sea Island about Jamie’s plans to go live with his sister in the pine barrens or with his brother in the city. The sick youth seemed content to move into the garage apartment. Within three weeks of their arrival the two young men and Kitty had registered at the university forty miles away and two weeks later the engineer and Jamie had pledged Phi Nu and learned the grip. Kitty realized her ambition and became not a Tri Delt but a Chi Omega.

On the morning of registration they had set out for the university, the three of them, the engineer driving, Kitty in the middle, in Mrs. Vaught’s Lincoln, and came home early enough to sit on the garden grass and leaf through their brand-new textbooks with the glazed glittering pages and fragrant fresh print. The engineer, who had just received his October check from Mr. Vaught, bought a $25 slide rule as thick and slick as a mahjong tile and fitted at the rear with a little window.

Later in the afternoon he played golf, borrowing Jamie’s clubs and making a foursome with Mr. Vaught and two pleasant fellows, Lamar Thigpen and a man from the agency. The engineer’s skill at golf stood him in good stead. (Golf he was good at, it was living that gave him trouble. He had caddied for his father and broke eighty when he was thirteen.) It was not that he was so much better than the others but rather that he was strong and had a good swing. So that when the old man, who somehow knew this, had mumbled something about “my potner” and got his bets down and waved him onto the last tee, after he and Justin and Lamar had driven, he had happened to hit a dandy. The driver sang in the air and the ball went chack, flattening, it seemed like, and took off low, then went high and overdrove the par four green. The two opponents exchanged great droll thunderstruck comical mid-South looks.

“Well now, what is this?” said Justin, the agency man, who was a big slow easy fellow, the sort referred to in these parts as a good old boy.

“Looka here now,” said Lamar.

“Sho,” said Mr. Vaught, already striking out down the fairway. “Come on, potner.”

He hit five more towering drives and scored a lucky-after-the-layoff 36.

“Well now goddamn,” said Lamar.

They called him Bombo, the son of Tarzan, and Mr. Clean. The engineer had to laugh. They were good fellows and funny.

The sixth hole fairway of the second nine ran in front of the castle. It had got to be the custom after teeing off to mark the balls and veer over to the patio, where David, the butler, had toddies ready. Custom also required that the talk, unlike other occasions, be serious, usually about politics but sometimes even about philosophical questions. The tone of the sixth-hole break was both pessimistic and pleasurable. The world outlook was bad, yes, but not so bad that it was not a pleasant thing to say so of a gold-green afternoon, with a fair sweat up and sugared bourbon that tasted as good as it smelled. Over yonder, a respectful twenty yards away, stood the caddies, four black ragamuffins who had walked over the ridge from the city and now swung the drivers they took from the great compartmented, zippered, pocketed, studded, bonneted, golf bags.

The golfers gazed philosophically into their whiskey and now and then came out with solemn Schadenfreude things, just like four prosperous gents might have done in old Virginny in 1774.

“The thing is, you just don’t get integrity where you need it most,” said Lamar Thigpen, a handsome fellow who sat slapping his bare brown arm and looking around. He was maybe forty-five and just going slack and he worried about it, pushing his sleeve up and hardening his biceps against his chest.

“I’m going to tell yall the truth,” Justin might say. “If they want the country all that bad, I’m not all that much against letting them have it”

But even these dire things were not said in ill humor.

“Ain’t nobody here but us niggers anyway,” somebody else would say finally. “Let’s play golf.”

They would get up a little creakily, their sweat having cooled and muscles stiffened, and walk to their lies. Mr. Vaught always took his second shot first because he seldom drove over a hundred yards but that always straight down the middle. And now he wound up with his brassie, drawing back slowly and swaying backward too and with a ferocious deliberation; then, for all the world as if he had been overtaken by some dread mishap, went into a kind of shiver and spasm and, like a toy wound too tight and shooting its springs, came down on the ball from all directions — Poppy drives, Lamar told Justin, like a man falling out of a tree — uttering at the end of it, as he always did, a little cry both apologetic and deprecating: “Voop!”, calculated to conjure away all that was untoward and out of the ordinary — and off he would march, hopping along like a jaybird.

Living as he did in the garage apartment and hanging out as he did in the pantry and not with Mrs. Vaught’s coterie of patriots and anti-fluoridationists who kept to the living room, the engineer met the servants first of all. Met, not got to know. The engineer was the only white man in the entire South who did not know all there was to know about Negroes. He knew very little about them, in fact nothing. Ever since he was a child and had a nurse, he had been wary of them and they of him. Like many others, he had had a little black boy for a friend, but unlike the others, who had enjoyed perfect love and understanding with their little black friends, he had been from the beginning somewhat fuddled and uneasy. At the age of thirteen he was avoiding Negroes like a queasy middle-aged liberal.

No doubt these peculiar attitudes were a consequence of his nervous condition. Anyhow it was the oddest encounter imaginable, that between him and the Vaught servants. He baffled the Negroes and they him. The Vaught servants were buffaloed by the engineer and steered clear of him. Imagine their feeling. They of course lived by their radars too. It was their special talent and it was how they got along: tuning in on the assorted signals about them and responding with a skill two hundred years in the learning. And not merely responding. Not merely answering the signals but providing home and sustenance to the transmitter, giving him, the transmitter, to believe that he dwelled in loving and familiar territory. He must be made to make sense, must the transmitter; must be answered with sense and good easy laughter: sho now, we understand each other. But here came this strange young man who transmitted no signal at all but who rather, like them, was all ears and eyes and antennae. He actually looked at them. A Southerner looks at a Negro twice: once when he is a child and sees his nurse for the first time; second, when he is dying and there is a Negro with him to change his bedclothes. But he does not look at him during the sixty years in between. And so he knows as little about Negroes as he knows about Martians, less, because he knows that he does not know about Martians.

But here comes this strange young man who acts like one of them but look at you out of the corner of his eye. What he waiting for? They became nervous and jumped out of the way. He was like a white child who does not grow up or rather who grows up in the kitchen. He liked to sit in the pantry and watch them and talk to them, but they, the Negroes, didn’t know what to do with him. They called him “he,” just as they used to call the madam of the house “she.” “Where he is?” one might say, peeping out of the kitchen door and as often as not look straight into his eyes. “Uh-oh.”