Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“A look?”

“With this.” She’s taken her ophthalmoscope from her breast pocket. “I’ve gotten very good with eyegrounds. I can tell more about you with one quick look than with a complete physical.”

“I believe you. All right.”

“Not here. Too much sun. In my office.”

Her office in the hospital has a small desk, two chairs, and an examining table. I sit on the table, knees apart. With me sitting and her standing we’re of a height. I make as if to get my knees out of her way, but she’s already between them. She examines my eyegrounds. The lance of the brilliant blue-white light seems to probe my brain. When she changes from my right eye to my left, we are face to face. Her coat rustles. I feel the radiation of heat from her cheek and once the touch of down. She doesn’t wear perfume. Her breath is sweet. She smells like a farm girl, not a doctor.

“All right,” she says, with a slight blush, I think, and backs away. “Your arteries look good. No narrowing, no plaques, no pigment, no hypertension, I would suppose.”

“Did you think I’d had a stroke?”

“You were absolutely motionless.”

I look at her. I don’t think I’d ever taken a good look at her before. I used to think of her as a convent-school type, St. Mary’s-of-the-Woods, good-looking in a hearty Midwestern way, good legs, black bobbed hair, handsome squarish face with a bruised ripe freckled effect under the eyes — the sort who might become a nun or marry a Notre Dame boy, and live in Evanston. But of course she’s not. She’s none of these. She’s old local Episcopal gentry. She went not to St. Mary’s in Indiana but to St. Elizabeth’s in Virginia.

A lot happened to her. She married, not a Notre Dame boy, but Buddy Dupre, Ed’s brother, a pleasant Tulane DKE, not merely pleasant but charming, the sort of Southern charmer who drinks too much. He had that sweetness and funniness which alcoholic Southern men often have, as if they cannot bear for the world not to be as charming as they are. He farmed a little at Pantherburn, Lucy’s family’s place, charmed everybody, got elected to the state legislature, began to spend most of his time at the Capitol Motel in Baton Rouge, did not so much separate from Lucy as drift pleasantly away, got investigated by the house ethics committee for taking a bribe from a waste-disposal contractor, got exonerated by the legislature ethics committee, which has never found a legislator unethical, drifted farther, to New Orleans, where he divorced Lucy and married the contractor’s daughter, leaving Lucy high and dry at Pantherburn, but intact, herself intact, and Pantherburn and its two thousand acres intact. She farmed it herself, planted and harvested soybeans in the not so rich loess loam, with only day labor. Then out of the blue and in her late twenties she went to medical school. She still farms Pantherburn, not with the two hundred slaves who used to pick the indigo or cut the sugar cane, or the one hundred sharecroppers who used to pick the cotton, but with two tractor drivers and two John Deeres and a leased combine for harvesting the soybeans.

I take a good look at her. She’s sitting at her desk, clicking thumbnail to tooth, not looking at me. She is somehow both stronger-looking and more feminine. There’s this odd dash of gamin French about her face, bruised cheek, and almost black boy’s hair. She reminds me of Southern women in old novels: “a splendid vivacious girl, not beautiful, but full of teasing, high spirits.”

It is as if she had only just now decided to become a woman, but not entirely seriously. Having failed at marriage, she has succeeded in farming and doctoring and has discovered that succeeding at anything is a trick, a lark. She’s enjoying herself. She is also exhilarated by my failure and disgrace. Now she can “take care” of me with her brisk tugs and brushings. We are kin; I am old enough to be her father, yet she’s more like a mother, might any moment spit on her thumb and smooth my eyebrows. She feels safe and can give herself leave with me.

She cocks her head. “Are you coming out to Pantherburn this afternoon?”

“If you want me to.”

“Do you remember coming out to Pantherburn years ago and examining my uncle? and committing him to Mandeville? when he was hiding out in the woods or the attic and wouldn’t talk to anyone?”

“Yes. How is he?”

“He’s all right. I remember how you talked to him and got him to talk. I remember how you listened to him. You looked as if you knew everything there was to know about him.”

“As it turned out I didn’t, did I?”

She cocks her head. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think you got yourself in trouble on purpose.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I think you wanted out of here, even if it meant going to prison. It wasn’t bad, was it?”

“I’m glad to be out. I’ve got to go now.”

“I know. To Father Placide about your old friend Father Smith.”

“You seem to know what’s going on around here.”

“And you seem not to.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me.”

“About Bob Comeaux? He wants Mrs. LaFaye’s place, her horses and probably her money, and will even take Mrs. LaFaye to get them.”

“You told me that. What does he want from Father Placide?”

She explains patiently. “It’s no secret. Bob Comeaux wants to buy old St. Margaret’s — you know, where Father Smith’s hospice is, or was. He wants it for a private nursing home, a real moneymaker, you know. Actually that building would be a marvelous investment. Imagine a hundred nuns living out there! And it just so happens the hospice has folded up and Father Smith has too, he’s not at all well. The bishop would like to get rid of it, he needs the money. Placide would like to get rid of it so Father Smith can come back and help him with the parish. You’re supposed to talk Father Smith out of the fire tower and into coming back to St. Michael’s. Then the bishop can sell the place to Bob Comeaux and everybody will be happy. Do you understand?”

“No.” I am thinking about the déjà vu. I think I know what it was about. It was about cars, women, girls, youth, the past, the old U.S.A., about remembering what it was like to be sitting in a car with a girl swiveled around to face you, her bare knee cocked up on the vinyl, with four wheels under you, free to go anywhere, to the Gulf Coast, to Wyoming. It, the déjà vu, came from the smell of hot Chevy metal and vinyl and seat stuffing tingling in the nostrils and radiating up into the hippocampus of the old brain and into the sights and sounds of the new cortex, which gathers into itself a forgotten world, bits and pieces of cortical memory like old snapshots scattered through an abandoned house.

I rise. She takes hold of my lapel again. “You come on out to Pantherburn later. I have something to show you. I know you can come. Your wife’s gone.”

I laugh. “I’m not surprised. You know everything else.”

“You don’t have much luck with women, do you?”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Only that you could use somebody right now to look after you.”

“And you’re going to look after me.”

“Somebody had better.”

“Why is that?”

“You’re a mess. Look at you. You may be smart, but you’re a mess.”

“That’s true.”

“Eat your BLT. I put it and the Coke in your car.”

“All right.”

“Eat.”

She grabs my lapel again, both lapels. We are almost face to face.

“You’re coming out to Pantherburn later?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

“How many cases have you got of this — ah — syndrome?”

“Oh, a dozen, I guess.”