Walker Percy: Lancelot

But in order for you to understand what happened at Belle Isle and why I am here, you must understand exactly how it was that day a year ago. I was sitting in my pigeonnier as snug as could be, the day very much like today, the same Northern tang in the air, but utterly still, sun shining, sky as blue as Nebraska cornflowers, not a cloud in the sky. I was reading a book. Yet even before I glanced down at my desk and discovered my wife’s infidelity, there was something odd about the day. You will understand this because we, you and I, used to have a taste for the odd and the whimsical.

For now that I’ve thought about it, things were a little odd even before my interesting discovery. There I sat in my pigeonnier, happy as could be, master of Belle Isle, the loveliest house on the River Road, gentleman and even bit of a scholar (Civil war, of course), married to a beautiful rich loving (I thought) wife, and father (I thought) to a lovely little girl; a moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker (I thought), moderate music lover, moderate hunter and fisherman, and past president of the United Way. I moderately opposed segregation. I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy. But not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure, (no, I’ll put it more strongly: it didn’t just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking alone and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. The only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930’s. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness.

But it was odder even than that. Things were split. I was physically in Louisiana but spiritually in Los Angeles. The day was split too. One window let onto this kind of October day, blue sky, sun shining, children already building Christmas bonfires on the levee from willows their fathers had cut on the batture. The other window let onto a thunderstorm. My wife’s friend’s film company had set up a thunderstorm machine in the tourist parking lot where ordinarily cars from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio would be parked while rumpled amiable bemused Midwesterners paid their five dollars and went gawking through the great rooms as foreign to them as Castel Gandolfo (never, surely, in history were there ever a stranger pair than those victors and us vanquished). A propeller on a tower blew rain on the south wing of Belle Isle, whitening the live oaks, and the thunder machine thundered, a huge stretch of sheet metal with a motor and a padded eccentric cam. They were trying it out. A scene in the movie required a hurricane. The propeller roared like a B-29, wind and rain lashed Belle Isle, the live oaks turned inside out, Spanish moss tore loose, the sheet metal thundered. But on the other side of the pigeonnier the sun shone serenely.

Margot had told me about it but I didn’t pay much attention. The movie was about some people who seek shelter in the great house during a hurricane, a young Cajun trapper, a black sharecropper, a white sharecropper, A Christlike hippy, a Klan type, a beautiful half-caste but also half-wit swamp girl, a degenerate river rat, the son and daughter of the house, even though there are no sharecroppers or Cajuns or even a swamp hereabouts and river rats disappeared with the fish in the Mississippi years ago. And I don’t even know what a “half-caste swamp girl” is. I am still unclear about the plot. The Negro sharecropper and the redneck’s father, who seem at first to hate each other, form an unlikely alliance to protect the women of the house against rapists of both races. With the help of the Christlike hippy, white and black discover their common humanity. There was something too about the master of the house trying to steal the sharecropper’s land, which has oil under it. My only contribution to the story discussions was to point out that the land could not belong to the sharecropper if he was a sharecropper.

The five o’clock whistle at Ethyl blew. I put the book down face up on my desk. It was the plantation desk Margot had given me, built high so a planter in a hurry could write a check standing up. I don’t think those fellows ever sat down and wrote a letter or read a book. She had the legs cut off to make an ordinary desk. My eyes fell off the print to a piece of paper beside the book. I remember everything! I even remember the passage in the Chandler novel. Marlowe was looking for a man named Goodwin. He walked into a house in a canyon between Glendale and Pasadena. An English bungalow! in Pasadena! Don’t you like that? A pleasant incongruity absolutely congruous in Los Angeles. Goodwin was living there alone. Where could Goodwin have come from? I was trying to imagine Goodwin’s childhood, Goodwin twelve years old in Fort Wayne before his parents moved to California. Try to imagine someone in Los Angeles with a childhood. Inside the house Goodwin was dead, a bullet through his forehead. My eye slid off his name — I remember it because his first name was Lancelot like mine — onto the paper next to it. It was my daughter’s application to a horse camp in West Texas. Margot had filled it in and left it for me to sign. Siobhan I thought was too young for a horse camp — yes, my daughter is named Siobhan. My wife Margot was born Mary Margaret Reilly of Odessa, Texas, so our daughter was named Siobhan. This was a special Montessori horse camp and Margot insisted (“I was raised on a ranch in West Texas and I am not about to have her miss it”). I didn’t like the idea of her fooling with horses, great stupid iron-headed beasts, but I always gave in to Margot. I reached for the pen to sign the application and the medical waiver and my eye slid over the page to the letter O. No, it was not the letter O but the number 0, cipher, zero. It was her blood type, I-0. I read the medical examination. At the least the camp people were careful. In case a child got kicked in an artery, they had her blood type. I-0.

I was looking at it idly. The thunder machine stopped. My head felt a little giddy but not unpleasant, as if I were dislocated and weightless in space — sliding instantaneously from an English bungalow in a Los Angeles canyon to an artificial hurricane to an absolutely still cool clear day in Louisiana. Once in a while an empty sugar-cane truck rumbled down the River Road.

Then it was that the worm of interest turned somewhere near the base of my spine. Curious. What was curious? The star dot was slightly out of place. But what was out of place here? I didn’t know yet. Or did I? At any rate, I found myself climbing the iron staircase to the pigeon roost proper. There I kept my regular office equipment, file cabinets, typewriter, and so forth, which Margot didn’t like downstairs where she liked to think of me as Jeff Davis writing his memoirs. Not having much to do over the years, I’d kept perfect records of what little I had done. Would you believe that I became meticulous? I’d have made a good C.P.A. Better a good C.P.A. than a half-assed lawyer. There in the file cabinet I found what I had not until that moment quite realized I was looking for: my medical discharge from the army. Sir Lancelot, as you called me, Percival, discharged from the army not bloody and victorious and battered by Sir Turquine but with persistent diarrhea. The army gave me the shits and couldn’t cure me. Three months in Walter Reed, the best doctors in the world, twenty thousand dollars worth of medical care, and they couldn’t cure the simple shits. So I came home to Louisiana, in August, sat in the rocking chair on the gallery of Belle Isle, downed a great slug of bourbon, and watched the river boats. Sweat popped out on my head and I felt fine.