Walker Percy - Lancelot

Rudy? Who is Rudy? Me? Why Rudy?

Raine was humming a tune, or rather making as if she were humming a tune, a child’s head-bobbing tune, as if it were a signal.

Was the tune “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

Is that because I drink and sometimes have a red nose?

Is it because Rudolph had antlers?

Did Dana say Rudy? Actually I do not really think he did.

How strange it is that a discovery like this, of evil, of a kinsman’s dishonesty, a wife’s infidelity, can shake you up, knock you out of your rut, be the occasion of a new way of looking at things!

In the space of one evening I had made the two most important discoveries of my life. I discovered my wife’s infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life. I saw it and myself clearly for the first time.

Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe — that’s all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker?

But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me.

In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!

I’m serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you’ve seen quite a few? Well, I haven’t, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You’re not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin?

You don’t look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.

But joking aside. I must explain my second discovery. After I walked out of the dark parlor, where no one ever sat, and quietly out the front door. I took a different route to my pigeonnier. A tiny event but significant. Because it was only when I did this that I realized that I had taken exactly the same route for months, even years. I had actually made a path. My life had fallen into such a rut that it was possible to set one’s watch (Suellen told me this) when I walked out the front door at night. It must be two minutes to ten because he likes to get there just in time to turn on the ten o’clock news. News of what? What did I expect to happen? What did I want to happen?

No. First, I paid a visit to Siobhan and Tex. who talked about runny babbits.

“I liked the bunny rabbits,” said Siobhan, hugging my neck.

“You like those runny babbits!” cried Tex, still holding out his hands for her and, thinking he’d made a joke, kept on repeating it: “I told you you’d like those runny babbits!”

Tex got on her nerves, in fact bored the hell out of her. It was almost as if he knew it and wanted to, enjoyed the mindlessness of runny babbits.

Siobhan escaped both of us, squatted under the TV livid in the phosphorescent light, her cloudy blue eyes not even then quite focused on the big-eyed cartoon animals.

Tex, of course, got on his next favorite subject, not chivvying Siobhan with his bad jokes but chivvying me for my neglectful ways. He couldn’t get over the fact that I had allowed Margot to rebuild the old burned wing of Belle Isle over a gas well even though it had been capped.

For the tenth time he upbraided me in his fond jabbing inattentive way. Was it his wealth, I often wondered, which gave him license to be such a pain, a prodding tunnel-visioned unheeding bore, or had he gotten rich because he was such a pain?

Yet he was a friendly-seeming pleasant-looking fellow with his big-nosed Indian-brown face, slicked-down black-dyed hair, liver-spotted muscular arms. At first sight one might take him for a golf pro, an old seasoned, whiskey-cured sun-drenched Sam Snead — until one noticed that he was not, that his way of standing around hands on hips was not like a golfer at all but the way an oilfield roughneck stands slouched at his alert ease, waits his moment while great machinery hums, heavy pipes swing, chains clank. Yes, that was it, that was his happiness and unhappiness: idleness can be happy only if the machinery is running and one looks on with a presiding interest, comforted as only machinery, one’s own machinery, can comfort. His sudden riches had stunned him. In the silence of wealth he felt deprived, deafened, and so he must reach out, grab, poke, drive Siobhan crazy.

“When are you going to cement that well in?”

“There’s nothing left down there but a little marsh gas, Tex.”

“How you get by with having a Christmas tree under your house beats me.” He can’t or won’t listen.

“It was put there before the state law was passed. Anyhow, it’s only a small shallow well.”

“It still has two hundred pounds of pressure.”

“Christ, no. Thirty pounds at the outside.”

“—two hundred pounds in rotten wartime black pipe.”

Christ, you stupid Texas bastard, why don’t you listen?

“It’s got to be sealed,” Tex droned on. “A Christmas tree won’t do it. The only way to seal a well is to cement it.”

“I know.”

“How in hell can Maggie seal a producing well and build a house over it?”

On he went, poking me like poking Siobhan, poking and not listening, not even listening to himself. His fond unhappy eyes drifted away. Even his expert opinion was nutty. In the same breath he complained about the well producing and not producing and didn’t listen long enough to hear the contradiction. Getting rich had made him so miserable he must make everyone miserable.

Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan, not about the well, which I couldn’t have cared less about, whether it produced or not, went dry or blew up, but why didn’t I do something about Siobhan? Either throw Tex out or give her back to Suellen or both. They’d both be better off. Christ, for all I knew Tex was fooling with her. Doesn’t it happen sometimes with fine fond upstanding grandfathers? You nod. You mean they’re penitent afterwards? Good for them. Suellen was good to Siobhan before and would be again. She had raised me, thousands of Suellens had raised thousands like me, kept us warm in the kitchen, saved us from our fond bemused batty parents, my father screwed up by poesy, dreaming of Robert E. Lee and Lancelot Andrewes and Episcopal chapels in the wildwood, and my poor stranded mother going out for joyrides with Uncle Harry.

Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan earlier? Here’s a confession, Father. Because I didn’t really care, and that had nothing to do with her not being my daughter (that made me feel better, gave me an excuse). We are supposed to “love” our children. But what does that mean?

Yet, and here’s the strangest thing of all, it was only after my discovery, after I found out that Siobhan was not my child, that I was able to do something about it. Since Siobhan was not my child, I could help her! It was simple after all: (1) Tex was bad for the child, (2) something should be done, (3) nobody was doing anything or even noticing, (4) therefore I would tell Tex to move back to New Orleans and let Suellen take care of Siobhan.

Why couldn’t I take care of her? To tell you the truth, she got on my nerves.

Why didn’t I love Siobhan when I thought she was my own child? Well, I suppose I “loved” her. What is love? Why this dread coldness toward those closest to you and most innocent? Have families ever loved each other except when some dread thing happens to somebody?