Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

“Did you want to see me, Charley?”

He cupped his hand to hear. Not that he was deaf, but it was hard to hear in that room. Voices sounded reedy. The vaulted ceiling crossed by simulated hand-hewn beams roared like a conch.

Charley looked at me.

“You look like hell, Doc.”

“I know.”

“You got a good build. You ought to stay in shape.”

“You’re right.” I was feeling bad. Samantha was dead and the martins had not come back. It was a bad white winter day.

“What did you mean when you asked me if I felt strange?” Charley asked me, resuming our conversation of six months earlier.

“What? Oh. As I recall, it was a routine question.”

“Why in hell should I feel strange?” Charley’s reedy voice buzzed up into the vaulted ceiling like a cicada. He felt very low, but my own low spirits revived him sufficiently so that he pulled a lever and lay back in the recliner.

“He loves to talk to you,” said Ramona in a loud drone as if Charley were not talking, were not even present. Discovering that she still had her hat on, she clucked and, feeling for hatpins, stood up and went into the pantry. Her inner calves still had the tender straight undeveloped lines of pretty girls in the Lower Piedmont, the sort who sit drinking Cokes for twenty years. She is from Spartanburg, South Carolina.

It seemed permissible to slump as low as Charley. Charley and I could talk along the floor while Ramona went sailing through the roaring upper air as if it were her medium.

Charley was depressed but he didn’t know why. Nothing much had changed in his life, except that his son had dropped out of M.I.T. and taken to the swamp, hardly an uncommon occurrence these days. But he and his son had never been close.

“So what?” said Charley. “My old man ran me off when I was fourteen.”

So there seemed to be no external cause for Charley’s distress. On the contrary. Just the week before, the champs had signed up again to play under the arcs on the Moonlight Summer Tour. The new Paradise 36 was finished. A new concept in golf courses, its initial cost of forty million was also its final cost. What with its fleet of carts, elimination of caddies, its automatic sprinkler system with each outlet regulated by a moisture sensor, its new Tifton 451 Bermuda, which required neither mowing nor fertilizing, labor costs were eliminated.

Then what was the trouble?

Charley shrugged. “I don’t know, Doc. I mean, what’s the use? You know what I mean?”

“Yes.” Something occurred to me. “When did you see your son last?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“When?”

“Last month. On his way to Honey Island Swamp.”

“Did you quarrel with him?”

“Do you know what that sapsucker wanted to do?”

“No.”

“Move the three of them into his old room while he looks for a new cave.”

“The three of them?”

“Him and his little yehudi and their cute little bastard. Up they go to bed without a by-your-leave.”

“Yehudi?”

“Introduces her as Ethel Ginsberg or Finklestein.”

“Yes?”

“What do you mean, yes? I mean, don’t you think he could at least have had enough consideration for his mother to pretend they were married?”

“What happened then?”

“What do you mean, what happened? I threw his ass out. Wouldn’t you have?”

“I don’t know.”

I was thinking of my daughter, dead these seven years. Would I have thrown her ass out if she had gone up to bed with a Ginsberg? Yes. No. I don’t know.

Rising unsteadily, I blew my nose and reached for my lapsometer. What I was curious about was whether his deep pineal reading stayed low during his excitement Charley was so wound up that he didn’t even notice that I was going over his head like a barber. He kept swinging around to tell me something. It was like giving a haircut to a three-year-old.

(The reading was up: getting mad helped him. Or was it the talking?)

“Be still, Charley.”

Charley shut up. But he had to do something, so he started pressing buttons on his recliner. The stereo-V came booming on and stayed on.

In a minute Ramona came in and turned it down. Her hat was off and her hair was piled up in tiers like a garden-club arrangement.

“It’s a goddamn lie,” said Charley.

“What’s a lie?” Was he talking about the news or his son?

“That’s what he does all day,” Ramona told me, as if Charley were absent. “Fusses about the news and can’t wait till the next. He listens to the news every hour.”

“Fusses” seemed to be the wrong word for Charley’s anger.

Then it was that the idea first occurred to me: what would happen if one were able to apply electrical stimulation to the pineal region?

But the best I could do in those days was a kind of “historical therapy,” as I called it then: a recapture of the past and one’s self.

Only one thing worked with Charley. After his anger had subsided (something in the news — the Negroes, the Lefts, the love people, I didn’t notice — made him mad), I picked up the glass paperweight and I gave it a shake to set the snow whirling. The scene was the Battle above the Clouds atop Lookout Mountain. “Remember when we got this, honey,” Charley would usually say. “Yes. At Ruby Falls on our honeymoon.”

But that day Charley was either too angry still or too low to notice the paperweight.

“Ain’t nobody starving in no swamp,” he muttered.

I nodded, thinking he meant his son.

Ramona, who is quick and intuitive, saw my mistake and corrected me (women are smarter than psychiatrists).

“He”—still the absent he —“was talking about the news. You know, niggers supposed to be starving around here like in Beauford.”

“I see.”

Ramona gave me another hint. “He thinks they’re accusing him.”

“They?”

“That’s humbug,” said Charley.

“Guess what he told him,” said Ramona. “He told him it was his fault.”

He? Him? His? Which he is Charley and which his son and whose fault is it?

“Well of course,” I said somewhat vaguely, “everyone knows that Charley is a generous—”

“No! No!” They both turned on me. I hadn’t got the straight of it yet. I felt stupid, but on the other hand some married people, you know, carry on these mysterious six-layered conversations with all manner of secret signs.

Ramona set me straight. “Why should anyone blame Charley when all he did was build a golf course and invent the arcs? It wasn’t his forty million dollars that filled in the swamp. He was just doing his job. Is it Charley’s fault that Tifton 451 eliminates labor?”

“Yes. Hm,” I said in the best psychiatric style, pretending I knew all along. “You mean he and Chuck quarreled?”

“Quarreled, hell,” said Charley. “I kicked his ass out.”

“You should have heard them,” said Ramona. “Both of them acted ugly.” Ramona tried to put it down to menfolk’s ordinary foolishness. They had a fuss. But it was more than that. So serious was the quarrel that Charley was still worried about not winning it.

“I told him exactly like I’m telling you now: get your little yehudi and your little bastard and get your ass out.”

“They used to go hunting together,” said Ramona in her Spartanburg drone. But she was crying. “They never missed a dove season.”

“You know what he accused me of?” Charley asked me.

“No.”

“Starving niggers. You know what he called me?”

“No.”

“A hypocritical son of a bitch.”

“He didn’t actually say—” began Ramona. “That was ugly, though.”

“You too, Doc,” said Charley.

“Me?”