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

“Ellen was looking for you,” Leroy is saying, leaning close but not too close, a good drinking friend. He’s fixed himself a toddy. “She’s got some patients.”

“That’s impossible. I don’t see patients Saturday afternoon.”

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

Leroy, like Ellen, believes that right is right and in doing right. You’re a doctor, so you do what a doctor is supposed to do. Doctors cure sick people.

The terror comes from piteousness, from good gone wrong and not knowing it, from Southern sweetness and cruelty, God why do I stay here? In Louisiana people still stop and help strangers. Better to live in New York where life is simple, every man’s your enemy, and you walk with your eyes straight ahead.

Leroy believes that doctors do wonders, transplant hearts, that’s the way of it, right? Isn’t that what doctors are supposed to do? He knows about my lapsometer, believes it will do what I say it will do — fathom the deep abscess in the soul of Western man — yes, that’s what doctors do, so what? Then do it. Doctors see patients. Then see patients.

“Looks like it’s going to freshen up,” says Leroy. We drink toddies, eat eggs, and watch the martins come skimming home, sliding down the glassy sky.

In the dark mirror there is a dim hollow-eyed Spanish Christ. The pox is spreading on his face. Vacuoles are opening in his chest. It is the new Christ, the spotted Christ, the maculate Christ, the sinful Christ. The old Christ died for our sins and it didn’t work, we were not reconciled. The new Christ shall reconcile man with his sins. The new Christ lies drunk in a ditch. Victor Charles and Leroy Ledbetter pass by and see him. “Victor, do you love me?” “Sho, Doc.” “Leroy, do you love me?” “Cut it out, Tom, you know better than to ask that.” “Then y’all help me.” “O.K., Doc.” They laugh and pick up the new Christ, making a fireman’s carry, joining four hands. They love the new Christ and so they love each other.

“You all right now?” Leroy asks, watching me eat eggs and drink my toddy.

“I’m fine.”

“You better get on over there.”

“Yes.”

I leave cheerfully, knowing full well that Ellen must be gone, that I shall be free to sit in my doorway, listen to Don Giovanni , sip Early Times, and watch the martins come home.

The back doors of the Little Napoleon and my father’s old office let on to the ox-lot in the center of the block. It is getting dark. The thunderhead is upon us. A sour rain-drop splashes on my nose. It smells of trees. The piles of brickbats scattered in the weeds are still warm. A dusty trumpet vine has taken the loading ramp of Sears and the fire escape of the old Majestic Theater. In the center of the ox-lot atop a fifteen-foot pole sits my father’s only enduring creation: a brass-and-cedar martin hotel with rooms for a hundred couples. Overhead the martins wheel and utter their musical burr and rattle. They are summer residents. Already they are flocking with their young, preparing for their flight to the Amazon basin.

I sit at my desk and listen to Don Giovanni and watch the martins through the open door. From the lower desk drawer, where I also keep the free samples of Bayonne-rayon Skintone organs, I fetch a fresh bottle of Early Times.

My office is exactly as my father left it twenty years ago: three rooms, one behind the other like a shotgun cottage, but with a hall alongside, my office at the rear, treatment room in the middle, and at the front the waiting room furnished with the same sprung green wicker and even the same magazines: the Ford Times, National Geographic , the Knights of Columbus magazine, and the S A E Record (my father was an S A E).

The offices are dark. No sign of Ellen, my nurse, and no patient in the waiting room. A sigh of relief and a long happy evening.

No such luck.

A half hour of happiness, the fresh sour evening, the gathering storm, a warm toddy, and the singing god-like devilish music of Don Giovanni and— bang.

Bang up front, the door slams, and here comes Ellen clop-clopping down the hall.

It seems I’ve got not one but three patients. They went away all right, but they’ve come back. Ellen told them: don’t worry, she’d find me.

I sigh and console myself: I should be able to polish them off in thirty minutes — and do right by them, Ellen! Leroy! Hippocrates! — and get back to my researches. I’ve the strongest feeling that the second breakthrough is imminent, that if I wait and be still and listen, it will come to me, the final refinement of my invention that will make it the perfect medicine. I’ve the strongest feeling that the solution is under my nose, one of those huge simple ideas that are so big you can’t see them for being too close.

“Good heavens, Chief, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you all day.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why have you been looking for me? Today is Saturday.”

I lean back in my chair and watch Ellen sadly as she picks up the fifth of Early Times and puts it back in the drawer of organs. Then she rinses out my toddy glass, closes the back door, turns off Mozart, pops a chlorophyll tablet in my mouth, wets her thumb with her tongue and smooths my eyebrows with firm smoothings like a mother. My eyebrows feel wet and cool.

Ellen Oglethorpe is a beautiful but tyrannical Georgia Presbyterian. A ripe Georgia persimmon not a peach, she fairly pops the buttons of her nurse’s uniform with her tart ripeness. She burgeons with marriageable Presbyterianism. It somehow happens that the strict observance of her religion gives her leave to be free with her own person. Her principles allow her a kind of chaste wantonness. She touches me, leans against me, puts spit on me. I shudder with horrible pleasure and pleasurable horror. Caught up by her strong female urgings, one to mother, one to marry, one to be a girl-child and lean against you, she muses and watches and is prodigal with herself — like an eleven-year-old who stands between your legs, eyes watching your eyes, elbows and knees engaging you in the lap, anywhere, each touch setting off in you horrid girl-child tingles. She doesn’t know how close is close.

Now she stands in front of me even closer than usual, hands behind her. I have to look up. Her face is tilted back, the bones under her cheeks winged and wide as if the sculptor had spread out the alar ridges with two sure thumb thrusts. The short downy upper lip is lifted clear of the lower by its tendon. Her face, foreshortened, is simple and clear and scrubbed and peach-mottled, its beauty fortuitous like that of a Puritan woman leaning over her washtub and the blood going despite her to her face.

“Look, Ellen, it’s Saturday. What are you doing here?”

“Not an ordinary Saturday.”

“No?”

“It’s your birthday.”

And what she’s hiding behind her is a present. She hands it to me. I feel a prickle of irritation. My birthday is but one more occasion for her tending to me, soliciting me, enlisting me. Yes, it is my birthday. I am forty-five. As I unwrap it, she comes round and leans on my chair arm and breathes on me.

It is the sort of present only a woman would buy. A gift set of Hell-for-Leather pre-shave and after-shave lotion. Through the chair arm comes the push of her heedless body weight. Her sweet breath comes through her parted lips. There is nothing to do but open a bottle. It smells like cloves.

“We’ve got customers, Chief.”

Though she is an excellent nurse, I wish she would not call me Chief and herself my girl Friday.

Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic sexual-religious longing I woke with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same.