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

But we were always wary of each other. Our eyes never quite met. It was as if there was something between us, a shared secret, an unmentionable common past, an unacknowledged kinship. We were somehow onto each other. He recognized my Southern trick of using manners and even madness guilefully and for one’s own ends. I was onto his trick of covering up Alabama hambone with brave old Amherst and humping it like a Brooklyn interne. What is more, he knew that I knew and I knew that he knew. We were like two Jews who have changed their names.

Max sits behind his desk in his perfectly fitted white coat, erect as a young prince, light glancing from the planes of his forehead. But when he rises, like Toulouse-Lautrec he doesn’t rise much.

Colley drums his fingers on his pith helmet in his lap, Jungle Jim after the safari.

“Well well,” says Max with pure affection, an affection without irony. He loves me because he saved my life. “The prodigal has returned.”

“Prodigal or prodigy?” asks Colley quizzically-Amherstly.

We’re all three prodigies. Max is a prodigy. His performance on grand rounds is famous. There he stands at the foot of my bed in the ward, the small erect young prince, flanked by a semicircle of professors, psychiatrists, behaviorists, love counselors, reminding me of the young Jesus confounding his elders.

He saved me twice. Once the night before by suturing my arteries. The next morning by naming my terror, giving it habitation, standing at the foot of my bed, knowing the worst of me, then naming it with ordinary words, English common nouns, smiling and moving on.

A bad night it had been, my wrists bandaged and lashed to the rails, crucified, I by turns exalted, depressed, terrified, lustful. Miss Oglethorpe, a handsome strapping nurse (she’s now my nurse) came on at eleven and asked me what I wanted. “I want you, Miss Oglethorpe. You are so beautiful and I need you and love you. Will you lie here with me?” Since she was and I did, was beautiful and I did love and need her, and she being a woman knew the truth when she heard it, she almost did. She almost did! But of course she didn’t and instead made a horrid nurse-joke about how I couldn’t be so bad off what with chasing the nurses etcetera, but what a good nurse!

Later, lust gave way to sorrow and I prayed, arms stretched out like a Mexican, tears streaming down my face. Dear God, I can see it now, why can’t I see it other times, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it is pilgrims we are, wayfarers on a journey, and not pigs, nor angels. Why can I not be merry and loving like my ancestor, a gentle pure-hearted knight for our Lady and our blessed Lord and Savior? Pray for me, Sir Thomas More.

Etcetera etcetera. A regular Walpurgis night of witches, devils, pitchforks, thorns in the flesh, unkneed girl-thighs. Followed by contrition and clear sight. Followed, of course, by old friend morning terror.

There stood Max at the foot of my bed flanked by my former colleagues, the ten o’clock sunlight glancing from the planes of his forehead and striking sparks from the silver of his reflex hammer and tuning fork in his breast pocket, Max smiling and spreading the skirts of his immaculate white coat and saying only, “Dr. More is having some troublesome mood swings — don’t we all — but he’s got excellent insight, so we hope we can enlist his services as soon as he’ll let us, right, Tom?” And all at once it, the terror, had a habitation and name — I was having “mood swings,” right, that’s what they were — and the doctors nodded and smiled and moved to the next bed. And suddenly the morning sunlight became just what it was, the fresh lovely light of morning. The terror was gone.

That, sirs, is love.

In a week, I got up cheerfully and went about my business. Another week and, lying in my bed, I became prescient and clairvoyant, orbiting the earth like an angel and inducing instant angelic hypotheses. Another week and I had made my breakthrough.

“The prodigal returns,” says Max, smiling his candid unironic smile (Max, who is from Pittsburgh, doesn’t know all the dark things Colley and I know, so is not ironic). “This time to stay, I hope.”

“No,” I say quickly, taking a tiny shaft of fright. For I’ve just remembered that legally I’m still committed and that they could, if they wished, detain me.

“Yeah, very nice,” says Colley, shaking hands without enthusiasm. He appears to knock out two pipes at the same time. The smoke has leveled out in a layer like leaf smoke in Vermont.

“What can we do for you, Tom?” asks Max, his princely head shedding light.

“I’ve a favor to ask.”

“Ask it.”

For some reason I frown and fall silent.

“I thought you’d come by to prepare for The Pit,” says Max.

“The Pit?”

“Sure, Tom,” says Colley, cheering up at my confusion. “You’re down for Monday. This is the last go-round of the year for the students, you know, the annual Donnybrook.”

Max hastens to reassure me. “You’ve got quite a following among the students, Tom. You’re the new matador, Manolete taking on Belmonte.”

Buddy Brown, my enemy, must be Belmonte. O God, I had forgotten. The Pit is a seriocomic clinic, an end-of-year hijinks put on by the doctors for the students. Doctors, you may know, have a somewhat retarded sense of humor. In medical school we dropped fingers and ears from cadavers on pedestrians. Older doctors write doggerel and satirical verse. When I was a young man, every conservative proctologist in town had a cartoon in his office showing a jackass kicking up his heels and farting a smoke ring: “LBJ has spoken!”

“God, I had forgotten. No, Max, I came to ask you a favor.”

“Ask it.”

“You know what it is. I want you to speak to the Director about my article and my lapsometer before my appointment with him Monday.”

Colley straddles the chaise and rises.

“Wait, Colley. I want to tell you something too.”

He shrugs, settles slowly, unfolds a silver pipe tool.

“Well, Max?”

“Sure sure.” Max swivels around to the gold-green gauze. “If—”

“If what?”

“If you’ll come back.”

“You mean as patient?”

“Patient-staff. As you were.”

“Why?”

“You’re not well.”

“I’m well enough. I can’t come back.”

“Why not?”

“Something is afoot.”

“What?”

I sit down slowly and close my eyes. “You were both out birding this morning, weren’t you? Down by the Quarters.”

“Yeah!” says Max, lighting up. Rummaging in his desk for something, he hands it to me, a piece of bark. “Take a look at those cuttings.”

“O.K.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s from an overcup oak and it’s not a pileated.”

“You mean you think—”

“Ask Colley. He’s the ornithologist.”

“No question about it,” says Colley, rubbing his briar on his nose. “It’s the ivorybill. He’s out there. Just think of it, Max.”

“Yes.”

“No one’s seen him since nineteen-three and he’s out there. Think of it. I think he’s on Honey Island.”

“Yes.” Max’s eyes are shining. For him the ivorybill, which the Negroes used to call the Lord-to-God, is the magic bird, the firebird, the sweet bird of youth. For the ivorybill to return after all these years means—

Colley is different. The search for the bird is for him not a bona fide search. It is something he has got the knack of. How happy he is to have got the knack of searching for the ivorybill!

(No idle speculation this: once, before Colley and I fell out, I measured his pineal region. He had good readings at layer I, little or nothing at layer II. Diagnosis: a self successfully playing at being a self that is not itself. I told him this — he asked me! — and he took offense, rolled his eyes up in his eyebrows, and went humping off down the hall squee-gee .)