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

With my lapsometer I can measure the index of life, life in death and death in life. It is possible, I suspect, to be dying and alive at Verdun and alive and dying as a booster of the Nittany Lions.

An example of life in death: for fifty years following the Battle of Verdun, French and German veterans used to return every summer to seek out the trench where they spent the summer of 1916. Why did they choose the very domicile of death? Was there life here? Afterwards they would sit for hours in a café on the Sacred Way.

But I must prove my case. I must be present with my lapsometer in circumstances where the dying are alive and the living are dead. Observe, measure, verify: here’s the business of the scientist.

Outside my “enclosed patio” the weeds are sprouting through the black pebbles Doris brought back from Mexico. Virginia creeper has taken the $500 lead statue of Saint Francis she ordered from Hammacher-Schlemmer. The birdbath and feeder Saint Francis holds are empty. Tough titty for the titmice.

Sunday night: awake till 5 a.m. Reading Stedmann on Verdun, listening to a screech owl crying like a baby in the swamp, assaulted by succubi, night exaltations, morning terror, and nameless longings; sipped twelve toddies.

But why should I be afraid? Tomorrow — today — I meet with the Director and hear the triumphant news about my lapsometer, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.

THIRTY MINUTES EARLY FOR MY APPOINTMENT. Quite nervous. But why? My article speaks for itself. The evidence is there. My invention works.

There is time to go the roundabout way through Love Clinic in hopes of catching a glimpse of Moira, my love.

No one is in but Father Kev Kevin, who is sitting at the vaginal computer reading a book, Christianity Without God .

“Is it good?”

“What? Oh. Yes, this is where it’s at.”

He jumps up and greets me with suspicious cordiality, flashing his handsome Pat O’Brien grin and shaking my hand with both of his just as he used to when he was chaplain for the Knights of Columbus. He must have bad news. He does.

“Are you looking for Miss Schaffner?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid she’s no longer with us,” said Father Kev Kevin, rocking back on his heels in his old clerical style.

“Where is she?”

“She’s working over in Geriatrics with Dr. Brown.”

“Very good,” I say, but my heart gives an ugly leap sideways. But really, why should I be jealous? Buddy Brown is a licentious man, but Moira knows this. Undoubtedly it is the hapless old folk who interest her and whom she wants to help.

“Thank you. Goodbye, Father,” I say absently.

Father Kev Kevin frowns and returns to the vaginal computer. At the same moment Lonesome Lil enters the clinic, lines up her Lucite fittings on the table, and begins taking off her good gray suit.

It does not help matters when I run into Buddy Brown in the hall. He greets me even more effusively.

“See you in The Pit this afternoon,” he says, coming close and pinching my flank in a loving kind of hate.

“The Pit?”

“At two o’clock. Me and you. Let’s give them a real show, what do you say?”

“Yes. But just now I have an appointment with the Director.”

“It’s a good case. You saw him first, then I saw him. We both know him backwards and forwards.”

“Which case? Oh, Mr. Ives.”

“Which case! Ho ho.” Buddy twists my flank a bit too hard for comfort. “Son, this time I got you by the short hairs.”

“Perhaps. What do you think is wrong with him?”

“I know what’s wrong with him.”

“And you’ve got him down for the Happy Isles.”

“What would you do with him?”

“I don’t know.” I am gazing down at Buddy’s tanned bald head and lustrous spaniel eyes. His jaw muscles spread up like a fan under the healthy skin. Could Moira like him? There is to commend him his health, strength, brains, and cleanliness. He is very clean. His fingernails are like watch crystals. His soft white shirt and starched clinical coat sparkle like snow against his clear mahogany skin. Burnished hairs sprout through the heavy gold links of his expansion band.

Buddy is winking at me. “I understand that you diagnosed uh no pathology in Mr. Ives.”

“Yes.”

“You mean you think there’s nothing wrong with him?”

“Yes.”

“Then how come he can’t walk or talk?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me and you going to have it.”

“All right.”

“This time you’re wide open.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because you have allowed nonscientific considerations to affect your judgment.”

“Nonscientific considerations?”

“Religious considerations.”

“I? Religious? How’s that?”

“Tell the truth. You oppose in principle Happy Isles and the Euphoric Switch.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want Mr. Ives to be sent there.”

“That’s true.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you disapprove?”

I fall silent.

“Tom, you and I don’t disagree,” says Buddy in an earnest friendly voice.

“We don’t?”

“It’s the quality of life that counts.”

“Yes.”

“And the right of the individual to control his own body.”

“Well—”

“And above all a man’s sacred right to choose his own destiny and realize his own potential.”

“Well—”

“Would you let your own mother suffer?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you. I know you too well and know that you place a supreme value on human values.”

“Yes.”

“We believe in the same things, differing only in the best way to achieve them.”

“We do?”

“See you in The Pit!”

One last squeeze — we are good friends now — and off he goes, white skirts sailing.

The Pit is a curious institution, a relic of medieval disputations and of doctors’ hankering for horseplay, satiric verse, heavy-handed clinical jokes, and such. Once a month a clinical-pathological conference is held in the student amphitheater, before four hundred odd students, professors, nurses, and staff members. Local physicians are invited and sometimes come, if only to see what the Leftpapasan psychiatrists and behaviorists are up to. Today’s Pit is the grand finale of the arduous ten-month school year. The seats of The Pit slope steeply to a small sunken arena, a miniature of the bullring at Pamplona. The Pit is popular with students because it is the one occasion when the Herr Professors try publicly to make fools of each other and the students can take sides (perhaps it is an Anglo-Saxon institution: no German Herr Professor would put up with it). They can clap, cheer, boo, point thumbs down, scrape their feet on the concrete. Contending physicians present and defend their diagnoses. Opponents are free to ridicule, even abuse each other. One doctor, none other than Buddy Brown in fact, routed an opponent who had diagnosed the “typical red butterfly rash of Lupus” by demonstrating that he, the opposing doctor, was colorblind.

Buddy exaggerates when he says I have my “following.” My one small success in The Pit might be compared to a single well-executed estocada by an obscure matador. I was able to demonstrate that a lady suffering from frigidity and morning terror and said to have been malconditioned by her overly rigid Methodist parents was in truth terrified by her well-nigh perfect life, really death in life, in Paradise, where all her needs were satisfied and all she had to do was play golf and bridge and sit around the clubhouse watching swim-meets and the Christian baton-twirlers. She woke every morning to a perfect husband, perfect children, a perfect life — and shook like a leaf with morning terror. All efforts to recondition her in a Skinner box failed. I thought they had got it backward, that the frigidity followed from the terror, not vice versa. How can a lady quaking with terror make love to her husband? For the first time I produced my lapsometer in The Pit — yes, the students know about my invention but are not sure whether it is a serious diagnostic tool or a theatrical prop. It registered normal readings in both the erogenous and interpersonal zones. The lady had a loving heart Ah, but what to do about it? How to demonstrate it in The Pit? An idea came to me. Sizing her up, noting her suggestibility — she was one of those quick slim ash-blondes whose gray eyes are onto you and onto what you want before you know it yourself and are willing to follow your lead: a superb dancing partner — I gambled on a quick hypnosis, put her under and implanted the posthypnotic suggestion that she had nothing to worry about, that as soon as possible she should make an excuse and leave in search of her husband. Whereupon she did, waking up, rising with parted lips and a high color, patting the back of her hair and looking at her watch: “Good heavens, I’m late. I’ve got to meet Harry. This is his day off and if I hurry, I’ll be home before he finishes his nap.” Exit, blushing. The students cheered and sang “I’m Just Wild about Harry.”