Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

Sutter shrugged. “It was a near thing. His wife, who was a psychiatrically oriented type, put him into analysis with an old-timey hard-assed Freudian — they’re only to be found down here in the South now — and he went crazy. Of course I got the blame for not putting, him into treatment earlier. But she didn’t sue me.”

The engineer nodded toward the Deltans. “What about them?”

“What about them?”

“Would you put them in the terminal ward?”

“They’re not screaming.”

“Should they be screaming?”

“I should not presume to say. I only say that if they were screaming, I could have helped them once. I cannot do even that now. I am a pathologist.”

The engineer frowned. He felt a stirring of anger. There was something unpleasantly ironic about Sutter’s wry rapid way of talking. It was easy to imagine him ten years from now haunting a barroom somewhere and pattering on like this to any stranger. He began to understand why others made a detour around him, so to speak, and let him alone.

He couldn’t sleep. As he lay at attention listening to the frolic in John Houghton’s room below, he began to skid a little and not recollect exactly where he was, like a boy who wakes in a strange bed. In the next bed Jamie breathed regularly. By three o’clock in the morning he was worse off than at any time since Eisenhower was President when he had worked three months for a florist in Cincinnati, assaulted by the tremendous déjà vus of hot green growing things.

At last he went out to the landing and, seeing a light under Sutter’s door, knocked. Sutter answered immediately. He was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, dressed in the same clothes, feet flat on the floor, arms lying symmetrically on the rests. There was no drink or book beside him.

At last Sutter turned his head. “What can I do for you?” The naked ceiling bulb cast his eye sockets into bluish shadow. The engineer wondered if Sutter had taken a drug.

“I have reason to believe I am going into a fugue,” said the engineer matter-of-factly. He turned up the collar of his pajamas. It was cold in here. “I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Jimmy is in there dying. Don’t you think I should be more concerned with helping him?”

“Yes, but I am going to live, and according to you that is harder.”

Sutter didn’t smile. “Why do you ask me?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Why don’t you get married and live happily ever afterwards?”

“Why was that man screaming that you told me about? You never did say.”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“But you knew why.”

Sutter shrugged.

“Was it a psychological condition?” asked the engineer, cocking his good ear.

“A psychological condition,” Sutter repeated slowly.

“What was wrong with him, Dr. Vaught?” The pale engineer seemed to lean forward a good ten degrees, like the clown whose shoes are nailed to the floor.

Sutter got up slowly, scratching his hair vigorously with both hands.

“Come over here.”

Sutter led him to the card table, which had been cleared of dirty swabs but which still smelled of fruity Hoppe’s gun oil. He fetched two chrome dinette chairs and set them on opposite sides of the table.

“Sit down. Now. I think you should go to sleep.”

“All right.”

“Give me your hand.” Sutter took his hand in the cross-palm grip of Indian wrestling. “Look at me.”

“All right.”

“Does it embarrass you to hold hands with a man and look at him?”

“Yes.” Sutter’s hand felt as dry and tendinous as broomstraw.

“Count to thirty with me. When we finish counting, you will then be able to do what I tell you.”

“All right.”

When they had finished counting, Sutter said: “You say you believe I know something about you. Now you will also do what I tell you.”

“All right.”

“When you leave this room, you will go to your room and sleep soundly for nine hours. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Now when you do get up tomorrow, something is going to happen. As a consequence, you are going to be in a better position to decide what you want to do.”

“All right.”

“For the next few days you may have a difficult time. Now I shall not tell you what to do, but I will tell you now that you will be free to act. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“If you find yourself in too tight a spot, that is, in a situation where it is difficult to live from one minute to the next, come and see me and I’ll help you. I may not be here, but you can find me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Good night.” Sutter yawned, pushed back his chair, and began to scratch his head with both hands.

“Good night.”

In his cold bed, the engineer curled up like a child and fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.

He awoke to a cold diamond-bright morning. Jamie’s bed was empty. When he crossed the courtyard, the Thigpens were leaving for the game. Lamar gave John Houghton a drink, which he drained off in one gulp, little finger stuck out. In return John Houghton did a buck-and-wing, swooping down with tremendous swoops and fetching up light as a feather, clapping his hands not quite together but scuffing the horny parts past each other. The engineer, standing pale and blinking in the sunlight, was afraid Lamar was going to say “Get hot!” or something similar, but he didn’t. In fact, as the little caravan got underway and the three servants stood waving farewell on the back steps, Lugurtha fluttering her apron, Lamar shook his head fondly. “There’s nothing like the old-timey ways!” he said. The Vaught retainers seemed to remind Lamar of an earlier, more gracious time, even though the purple castle didn’t look much like an antebellum mansion and the golf links even less like a cotton plantation.

Kitty was eating batter cakes in the pantry. She eyed him somewhat nervously, he thought. But when later he kissed her mouth, not quite cleared of Br’er Rabbit syrup, she kissed him back with her new-found conjugal passion, though a bit absent-mindedly.

“Rita wants to see you,” she told him as she led him through the dark dining room. “Something has happened.”

“Where’s Jamie?”

“I’m afraid that’s what it’s about.”

“Come over here a minute,” he said, trying to pull her behind a screen of iridescent butterfly wings. He felt like a sleepy husband.

“Later, later,” said Kitty absently. For the first time he saw that the girl was badly upset.

As they entered Rita’s tower bedroom, Kitty, he noticed, became all at once pudding-faced and hangdog. She looked like Jamie. She hung back like a fourteen-year-old summoned to the principal’s office. Her noble matutinal curves seemed to turn to baby fat.

Rita, dressed in a heavy silk kimono, lay propped on a large bed strewn with magazines, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and opened mail. She was reading a book, which she set face down on the bed. From force of habit and by way of getting at someone, he set his head over to see the title. It was The Art of Loving. The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.

Getting quickly out of bed and holding an unlit cigarette to her lip, Rita strode back and forth between them. So formidable was it, this way she had of setting the side of her face into a single ominous furrow (something was up all right), that he forgot all about the book.