Walker Percy - Lancelot

OUR LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was the certain sense that there was someone in the room with me. No mystery: I was looking straight at her. Therefore I must have dozed or I would have seen this person come in. But the interval must have been very short because the angle of moonlight lying across the bricks had not changed.

There in the straight chair across the desk from me sat a woman I seemed to know, or at least seemed to be expected to know. She knew me. I started guiltily, smiled, and nodded to cover my lapse of manners. Christ, you remember, Percival; there must have been forty women in that parish of a certain age who look more or less alike, who have a certain connection with one’s family, but whose names one never gets straight. They are neither old nor young. They could be thirty-five or fifty-five. They look the same for thirty years. Was this Miss Irma or Cousin Callie or Mrs. Jenny James? They are dark-complexioned, have full figures and a certain reputation from the past. Something had happened to them but we did not speak of it — one’s father had got them out of trouble. Oh, you remember what happened to Callie. Perhaps she had run off with an older married man. For the next forty years they do well enough. Often they hold down a small political job at the courthouse, or sell Tupperware — perhaps Cousin Callie has been Judge Jones’s mistress for twenty years. At any rate, they outlive everybody. They are healthy. They show up at funerals, weddings, and New Year open houses. One can’t imagine what they do between times.

The only thing I could be certain of was that this person seemed to have every right to be there in my pigeonnier.

And that she knew me and I was expected to know her. She smiled at me with perfect familiarity. No doubt she had come to seek shelter from the hurricane at Belle Isle, the strongest building hereabouts.

She sat bolt upright yet gracefully, smoothing down her dress into her waist, showing her figure to good effect. It was a knit dress which perfectly fitted her full breasts and hips.

Now she arched her back and sat even more bolt upright. It would never have occurred to me to ask: “Who are you and what do you want?”

Her hair was dark, perhaps a bit gray, heavy, long, and looped around her head in a not unattractive way. It had not been recently washed. I caught a whiff, not unpleasant, of unwashed woman’s hair.

I looked at her. She smiled at me, a winning smile, but her eyes glittered. She was the sort of woman, Percival, you remember from childhood, who was extraordinarily nice to you, who spoke well of your parents, who said how nice they were, how handsome you were. Yet at the mention of her name your parents exchanged glances and fell silent.

She was also the sort you might well remember if you remember how a voluptuous forty-year-old woman attracted a fifteen-year-old youth, how if we were playing football and lounging on the grass at a time-out, sweaty, tired, and cheerfully obscene, and she passed by in the street, erect, heavy in the thigh and small in the waist, we’d fall silent until the inevitable: How would you like some of that?

Then I noticed the camellia pinned at her shoulder — and at the same moment it came to me that this was not yet the season for camellias — a large open flesh-colored bloom with a sheaf of stalks sprouting from the center bearing stamens, pistils, pollen, pods, ovules.

She was real enough, I think, though I cannot explain the camellia. The slight embarrassment of not being able to remember her name was all too familiar and not like a dream. She’d come for shelter, she said (doesn’t this prove she was real, in dreams explanations are not required), but she’d changed her mind. She didn’t want to impose on us. Maybe she’d better stay with a relative in town, Cousin Maybelle.

But where did she get the camellia?

She still spoke well of everyone. “Your father was such a perfect gentleman. What perfect tact and understanding!”

“Understanding?”

“Of Lily. Your mother. Oh, Lily. What a lovely delicate creature. Like a little dove. Not like me. I’m more a sparrow. Plain but tough.”

“A dove?”

“Maybe more like a lovebird. She lived for love. Literally. Unless she was loved, she withered and died. Maury understood that. God, what understanding he had! And he also understood his own limitations and accepted them. He understood her relationship with Harry and accepted that. That man was a saint.”

“What was her relationship with Harry?”

“You’re joking. La, it was not secret.”

“They were lovers?”

“For years. Everybody knew. So romantic! They were like Camille and Robert Taylor.”

Everybody but me. Does everybody know everything but me?

“That was after my father’s — uh — indictment?”

“Yes. Poor Maury was crushed, even though it was all just dirty politics and nothing was proved. I’ve always thought his illness had something to do with what he thought of as his disgrace. Pooh, men are ridiculous. And he was too — tenderhearted. But so aristocratic!”

I was looking in my father’s sock drawer for the small change he kept in the fitted scoops for collar buttons and caught sight of something under the argyle socks. There it was, the ten thousand dollars, dusky new green bills in a powdered rubber band neat and squared away like a book, and there it was, the sweet heart pang of horror. I counted it. The bills felt like stiff petals, not like paper, like leaves covered by pollen. My heart beats slowly and strongly. Strange: I was aware that my eyes were doing more than seeing, that they were unblinking and staring and slightly bulging. They were “taking it in,” that is, devouring. For here was the sweet shameful heart of something, the secret. For minutes there was an awareness of my eyes devouring the money under the socks, making little scanning motions to and fro, the way the eye takes in a great painting. Dishonor is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret. There is no secret in honor. If one could but discover the secret at the heart of dishonor. …

Harry Wills was undressing, taking off his duke’s costume in the auditorium locker room after the ball. There was the usual drinking and horsing and laughing. No Robert Taylor, he was oldish, blue-jowled, big-nosed, hairy-chested, strong-bellied, thin-shanked, not a Realsilk salesman any more but a Schenley distributor: a traveling salesman! Wet rings from the glass of whiskey shimmered on the bench beside him. Except for his green satin helmet, sword sash, and red leatherette hip boots, he was naked. His genital was retracted, a large button over a great veined ball. As he caught sight of me, I watched him, gazed into his eyes, and saw his brain make two sluggish connections. One was: Here I was, a young Comus knight, the very one who had run 110 yards against Alabama. The other: here was I also, the son of Lily. (Jesus, was I also his son?) The two revelations fused in a single great rosy Four Roses whiskey glow of fondness, perhaps love. (A father’s love?) Rising unsteadily, he grabbed me around the neck and announced to the krewe: “You know who this is! This is Lancelot Lamar and you know what he did!” They knew and their knowing confirmed the terrible emotion swelling within him. He told them anyway. “This boy not only ran back that punt 110 yards. He was hit at least once by every man on the Alabama team — twice by some. Haven’t y’all seen the film?” The other dukes nodded solemnly. They had. They drank and gave me a drink and shook my hand. Hugging my neck, Harry sat down, pulling me down into a heavy air of lung-breathed bourbon, cigarette smoke, and genital musk.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head at the wonder of it and cursed from the very inchoateness of the terrible unnamed feeling. “Have a drink! Goddamn …!”