Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Yes.”

“And do you still think that I am spoofing you?” Dr. Gamow, who liked to be all things to all men, had somewhere got the notion that in the South you said “spoofing” a great deal.

The patient nodded.

“You also recall that this great thirst for the ‘answer,’ the key which will unlock everything, always overtakes you just before the onset of one of your fugue states?”

“Not always.”

“Always in the past”

“Not this time.”

“How much did it cost you?”

“What?”

“The telescope.”

“Nineteen hundred dollars.”

“Nineteen hundred dollars,” repeated the analyst softly.

“Which leaves me with the sum of fifty-eight dollars and thirty cents,” said the patient. “According to my calculations, I owe you for eight sessions this month, including this one.” And arising from the ambiguous chair, he placed two twenties and a ten on the desk. “Now I owe you one fifty. I’ll pay you at the end of the month.”

Dr. Gamow gazed at the money. “May I review for you one or two facts. Number one, you have had previous fugue states. Number two, you give every indication of having another. You always quit the analysis and you always buy something expensive before taking off. The last time it was a Corvette. You still have a defective ego structure, number three. Number four, you develop ideas of reference. This time it is hollow men, noxious particles, and ultimate truths.”

It always seemed strange to hear Dr. Gamow speak of him clinically. Once, when the analyst was called away from the office, he had ventured out of the ambiguous chair and stolen a glance at the file which lay open on the blotter. “… a well-developed and nourished young white male,” he read, “with a pleasing demeanor, dressed in an unusual raglan jacket.” (This description must have been written at the time he had fallen in with the Ohioans, become one himself, and bought a raglan jacket so that he could move his shoulders around freely.) “When asked why he had chosen this particular article of apparel, he replied that ‘it made me feel free.’”

Seeing himself set down so, in a clinical quotation, gave him a peculiar turn. His scalp bristled.

But now he nodded equably and, leaning back, gazed at the dusty little hummingbird.

“Very well,” said Dr. Gamow when he did not answer. “You have made your decision. The question is, what is to be done next.”

“Yes sir.”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Certainly.”

“Next week I am starting a new group in therapy. It will be limited to ten persons. It is a very good group and my feeling is that you could profit by the experience. They are people like yourself who are having difficulty relating to other people in a meaningful way. Like yourself they find themselves in some phase or other of an identity crisis. There is — let me see — a novelist who is blocked, an engineer like yourself who works with digital computers and who feels somewhat depersonalized. There is an actress you will recognize instantly, who has suddenly begun forgetting her lines. There is a housewife with a little more anxiety than she can handle, psychiatrically oriented but also success-oriented. There is an extremely sensitive Negro who is not success-oriented — a true identity problem there. And four social workers from White Plains. It’s a lot better than the last group you were in — these are some very highflying folks and I don’t think you’ll be able to snow them quite as successfully.”

That’s what you think, said the Southerner to himself; these are just the kind of folks I snow best.

“We shall meet here three times a week. The fee is nominal, five dollars.”

“I certainly do appreciate it,” said the other earnestly. “It does indeed sound like an interesting group, but for the present my salary will not permit it. Perhaps when my soil-bank check comes through—”

“From the old plantation?” asked Dr. Gamow.

“Yes. But I assure you I feel quite well.”

“Euphoric, in fact,” said Dr. Gamow ironically.

He grinned. “Mebbe I could join yall later.”

“This is not a catfish fry,” said the analyst testily.

At the end of the hour they arose and shook hands pleasantly. The patient took a last look at the dusty hummingbird which had been buzzing away at the same trumpet vine for five years. The little bird seemed dejected. The bird, the print, the room itself had the air of things one leaves behind. It was time to get up and go. He was certain that he would never see any of them again.

Before leaving, he obtained from Dr. Gamow a prescription for the little blue spansules which he saved for his worst times. They did not restore his memory, but when he was at his hollowest, wandering about some minor battlefield in Tennessee, he could swallow a spansule, feel it turn warm, take root, and flower under his ribs.

So it was that Williston Bibb Barrett once again set forth into the wide world at the age of twenty-five, Keats’s age at his death, in possession of $8.35, a Tetzlar telescope, an old frame house, and a defunct plantation. Once again he found himself alone in the world, cut adrift from Dr. Gamow, a father of sorts, and from his alma mater, sweet mother psychoanalysis.

Though it may have been true that he gave every sign of a relapse of his nervous condition, of yet another spell of forgetfulness and of wandering about the U.S. and peering into the faces of Georgians and Indianians, for the present at least he was in the best possible humor and alert as a cat. In the elevator he set down the telescope and threw a few punches: his arm was like a young oak, he could have put his fist right through the steel of the Otis cab. Each of his five senses was honed to a razor’s edge and attuned like the great Jodrell Bank antenna to the slightest signal of something gone amiss.

I am indeed an engineer, he thought, if only a humidification engineer, which is no great shakes of a profession. But I am also an engineer in a deeper sense: I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.

IT WAS THE DAY after he broke off his analysis that the engineer received a sign: he set up his telescope in the park to photograph the peregrine and had instead and by the purest chance witnessed the peculiar behavior of the Handsome Woman and her beautiful young friend. Every morning thereafter the engineer returned to the park and took his position beside the same outcropping of rock.

The peregrine returned to his perch. Every morning he patrolled the cornice, making an awkward sashay in his buff pants, cocked a yellow eye at the misty trees below, and fell like a thunderbolt, knocking pigeons out of the air in all directions. The engineer took a dozen photographs at magnification one fifty, trusting that at least one would catch the fierce eclipsed eye of the falcon.

Every morning after work he set up his Tetzlar. After taking his two bearings, one on the eyrie of the peregrine, the other on the park bench, he had then only to lock the positions into the celestial drive, press a button, and the instrument would swing in its mount and take aim like a Navy rifle.

The Handsome Woman came four days later, left a note, but the girl did not come. Again he prized open the semicircle of tin and again he found a verse.

From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,

That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.

After that, neither one came.