Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

Ordinarily he too, the engineer, liked nothing better than the penultimate joys of a football weekend. But tonight he was badly unsettled. The two brothers, Jamie and Sutter, had been deep in talk at the blue bar for a good half hour. And Rita had Kitty off in the bay, Rita speaking earnestly with her new level-browed legal expression, Kitty blossoming by the minute: a lovely flushed bride. Every few seconds her eyes sought him out and sent him secret shy Mary Nestor signals. Now it was she who was sending the signals and he who was stove up and cranky. Only once had she spoken to him and then to whisper: “It may be possible to swing a sweetheart ceremony with the Chi O’s as maids. I’m working on it.” “Eh? What’s that?” cocking his good ear and holding down his knee. But she was off again before he had a chance to discover what she meant. It left him uneasy.

Something else disturbed him. Son Thigpen had brought over a carload of classmates from the university. Son, as morose as he was, and devoted exclusively to his Thunderbird and the fraternity (not the brothers themselves but the idea, Hellenism, as he called it), had nevertheless the knack of attracting large numbers of friends, lively youths and maids who liked him despite his sallowness and glumness. Now, having delivered this goodly company, he stood apart and fiddled with his Thunderbird keys. His guests were Deltans, from the engineer’s country, though he did not know them. But he knew their sort and it made him uneasy to see how little he was like them, how easy they were in their ways and how solitary and Yankeefied he was — though they seemed to take him immediately as one of them and easy too. The young men were Sewanee Episcopal types, good soft-spoken hard-drinking graceful youths, gentle with women and very much themselves with themselves, set, that is, for the next fifty years in the actuality of themselves and their own good names. They knew what they were, how things were and how things should be. As for the engineer, he didn’t know. I’m from the Delta too, thought he, sticking his hand down through his pocket, and I’m Episcopal; why ain’t I like them, easy and actual? Oh, to be like Rooney Lee. The girls were just as familiar to him, though he’d never met them either. Lovely little golden partridges they were, in fall field colors, green-feathered and pollen-dusted. Their voices were like low music and their upturned faces were like flowers. They were no different at all from the lovely little bitty steel-hearted women who sat at the end of the cotton rows and held the South together when their men came staggering home from Virginia all beaten up and knocked out of the war, who sat in their rocking chairs and made everybody do right; they were enough to scare you to death. But he for his Kitty, a little heavy-footed, yes, and with a tendency to shoulder a bit like a Wellesley girl and not absolutely certain of her own sex, a changeling (she was flushed and high-colored now just because she had found out what she was — a bride). For example, Kitty, who had worked at it for ten years, was still a bad dancer, where every last one of these Delta partridges was certain to be light and air in your arms.

They were talking about politics and the Negro, who was now rumored to be headed for the campus this weekend. “Do yall know the difference between a nigger and an ape?” said Lamar Thigpen, embracing all three Deltans. They’re good chaps, though, thought the engineer distractedly, and, spying Mr. Vaught circling the walls, thought of something he wanted to ask him and took out after him, pushing his kneecap in with each step like a polio victim. They’re good chaps and so very much at one with themselves and with the dear world around them as bright and sure as paradise. The game was tomorrow and they were happy about that; they knew what they wanted and who they hated. Oh, why ain’t I like them, thought the poor engineer, who was by no means a liberal — never in fact giving such matters a single thought — but who rather was so mystified by white and black alike that he could not allow himself the luxury of hatred. Oh, but they were lordly in theirs, he noticed, as he hobbled along. Then forgetting what he wanted to ask Mr. Vaught, he fetched up abruptly and took his pulse. “I’m not at all well,” he said to himself.

“What’s the matter,” asked Sutter, who had been watching him from his kitchen chair at the blue bar. Jamie, the engineer noticed, had left.

“I don’t feel well. Where’s Jamie?”

“He went to bed.”

“I wanted to ask him what his plans were.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s all right. What about you?”

“I think my nervous condition is worse. I feel my memory slipping.”

“What was that book you were reading earlier?”

“Freeman’s R. E. Lee. ”

“Are you still strongly affected by the Civil War?”

“Not as strongly as I used to be.”

“How strongly was that?”

“When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank. Later, in New York, whenever there was a plane crash, I would scan the passenger list to see how many Southerners had been killed.”

“And yet you are not one of them.” Sutter nodded toward the Thigpens.

“No.”

“Are your nationalistic feelings strongest before the onset of your amnesia?”

“Perhaps they are,” said the engineer, gazing at himself in the buzzing blue light of the mirror. “But that’s not what I’m interested in.”

Sutter gazed at him. “What are you interested in?”

“I—” the engineer shrugged and fell silent.

“What is it?”

“Why do they feel so good,” he nodded toward the Deltans, “and I feel so bad?”

Sutter eyed him. “The question is whether they feel as good as you think, and if they do, then the question is whether it is necessarily worse to feel bad than good under the circumstances.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” said the engineer irritably.

“One morning,” said Sutter, “I got a call from a lady who said that her husband was having a nervous breakdown. I knew the fellow. As a matter of fact, they lived two doors down. He was a Deke from Vanderbilt, president of Fairfield Coke and a very good fellow, cheerful and healthy and open-handed. It was nine o’clock in the morning, so I walked over from here. His wife let me in. There he stands in the living room dressed for work in his Haspel suit, shaved, showered, and in the pink, in fact still holding his attaché case beside him. All in order except that he was screaming, his mouth forming a perfect O. His corgi was howling and his children were peeping out from behind the stereo. His wife asked me for an opinion. After quieting him down and having a word with him, I told her that his screaming was not necessarily a bad thing in itself, that in some cases a person is better off screaming than not screaming — except that he was frightening the children. I prescribed the terminal ward for him and in two weeks he was right as rain.”

The engineer leaned a degree closer. “I understand that. Now what I want to know is this: do you mean that in the terminal ward he discovered only that he was not so bad off, or is there more to it than that?”

Sutter looked at him curiously but did not reply.

“Did you get in trouble with him too?”