Walker Percy - The Second Coming

What do you think, Allie? her father asked her. You take the top of the chalet. There’s a room in the back with a balcony and the damnedest view you ever saw. Well?

Wif you? Wiv view? she heard herself say.

Why did she sound so crazy around her parents? Because no matter what she said or did, her mother would make her own sense of it and her father wouldn’t like it. So it didn’t matter what she said. It was like being alone in a great echoing cave. There was a temptation to holler.

A view! said her father. You wouldn’t believe the view!

Interesting, said Dr. Duk, safe behind his thigh and therefore more able to conceal himself. You thought she said with view, meaning room with view. But thought I heard with you, meaning praps she might have some reservations about living with you. With you both. With yall.

Dr. Duk smiled, pleased with himself. He could talk Southern.

They all looked at her.

She shrugged. She didn’t know which she meant or whether she meant anything.

Dr. Duk’s plan: I think yall are overlooking one little thing. Both plans are excellent. But the fact remains that Allison is not quite herself yet — though she is clearly making progress, progress toward a decision to have something to do with us. My own feeling about Allison is that she knows a great deal more than she lets on. Right, Allison?

Wraing.

You see, said Dr. Duk. What she said was halfway between right and wrong. She’s afraid to commit herself. My own wish is that she have a final little refresher course of treatment.

I don’t think she needs any more shock treatments, said her mother. There’s nothing wrong with Allison except that she’s an extremely sensitive person who is more subject to tension than most people. So am I! Tension! That’s the enemy. She gets wound up just like me. You know what I do? Stretch out and tell my toes to relax, then my knees — they do it!

You want to know what I think it all comes down to, said her father to the world around, looking at no one in particular. It all comes down to accepting your responsibility. Once you do that, you got it made.

Shape up or ship out, she thought. Right. I’m shipping out.

This little refresher course is my own contribution, said Dr. Duk. I’m reading a little paper on it in San Francisco. My finding is that a refresher course of six treatments in selected cases is even more effective than the usual thirty.

No buzzin cousin. It was her voice but it sounded like a radio with a bad volume control.

They all looked at her.

She herself will tell you, said Dr. Duk, that after receiving my own modified ECT, she feels better, relates better to people and her environment, speaks freely, eats better, sleeps better.

Fried is crucified, said the radio.

They all looked at Dr. Duk, she too.

Dr. Duk smiled down at his little Dead-Sea-scroll Marlboro. Allison is giving us her own theory of why ECT works — which is as good as any, to tell you the truth. Namely that going through the ordeal of ECT is a kind of expiation for guilt. Having expiated, one naturally feels better.

Guilt? said her mother, arching her back so suddenly that gold shivered and glinted. Guilt for what?

That is something we might well get into, said Dr. Duk. Now. How does this grab you? I wonder if you two would be interested in coming up, participating in some family sessions. Some studies have been done on the subject and are quite promising. Come to think of it, I might just mention that our Founder’s Cottage here is available and you might consider that in lieu of the chalet—

Look, Doc, said her father. He was on his feet and for the first time unsmiling. It made him look queer. White showed in the smoothed-out crow’s-feet. Taking off his new pink crinkly jacket, he draped it carefully over the back of the wooden chair. Now he faced them unsmiling but nodding, hands resting lightly on his hips (seeing himself, she knew, as General Patton surveying the mess at Kasserine Pass). Let’s get this show on the road, Doc.

Show? said Dr. Duk, turning to her for translation.

She translated: you and them but not me.

That’s right, Doc. We got some business to talk over that Allison is not interested in. Could we talk in your office?

Oh, said Dr. Duk. He rose in some confusion. Okeydoke.

You know what we do at home, Doc, when we have a little problem, said her father. I call a conference, around the dining-room table, after Dinah the cook leaves. I believe in getting it all out on the table. Then we take a vote.

Then the chairman decides, said her mother.

Chairman? Again Dr. Duk asked her.

Of the boring board.

In the confusion of ushering them into his office, Dr. Duk got crossed up between wanting to please her father, wanting to get the show on the road, wanting to rent (or sell?) the vacant Founder’s Cottage, and forgot about her. Dr. Duk smelled the money, Kelso said. Your folks must have struck oil, babe. He forgot to call McGahey to come get her, forgot even to send her back to her room. They all forgot her.

Alone in the parlor, she felt good. She had been given leave, sanction, through omission. She felt like a child left at the movies and forgotten. She could see the best part again.

No sooner had the office door closed than she knew what she would do. Her father wanted to get down to business with Dr. Duk — bidness he called it — and the business had to do with her. Therefore it was her business.

It, the moment of the closing of the office door, was the beginning of her freedom. As she sat alone, it crossed her mind for the first time in her life: What if I make the plans for me? What then? Is there an I in me that can start something? An initiating I, an I–I. What if I had left the black maid hanging out clothes, broke off the conversation and left, would it have killed her? Would my embarrassment kill me? Perhaps not.

Why of all places, in this sour little parlor, should it have come to her, not only that she could make a plan but the plan itself? She knew what to do and how to do it. All her life she had watched people do things. She knew that Dr. Duk would be sitting behind his desk in the casemented bay. A Nikon camera fixed to a tripod stood next to him. One window, the one with the feeding station, was always cranked open in good weather. If an evening grosbeak or a goldfinch showed up, Dr. Duk could snap the camera by moving his hand only an inch or so to a remote-control device. Sometimes he kept the shutter switch in his hand. If she was talking to him and he heard a bird alight behind him, his eyes did not move from her face yet he seemed to be looking through the back of his head. A thick tree-sized pittosporum smelling of bitter bark covered window and feeding station.

Under the station was a space, a little leafy room where one could sit in comfort on a limb of pittosporum.

3

Tuesday the man came again. Again it was she who saw him before he saw her. She was in the shadow of the rock filling a Clorox jug from the tiny waterfall. The dog rumbled and his spine hairs went stiff as boar bristles.

The man was walking toward the greenhouse from the glade. His hands were in his pockets. Something in brown paper was tucked under his arm. The sunlight made a glint on a facet of his forehead and his brown hair, which had streaks on it. Was it turning gray or was it burnished and bleached by the sun? Was he gray-haired or a platinum blond? He was not good-looking. His eye sockets were too deep, his eyes too light, his mouth too grim, his skin burned too dark by the sun. Her father always smiled; he never smiled. A shadow like a German saber scar crossed one cheek. Today he was dressed differently. Instead of golf clothes, he wore an ordinary white shirt and ordinary pants. No, not ordinary. The shirt was tailored and had a soft rolled buttoned-down collar and the pants were narrow in the cuff and at least two inches above the dirty tennis shoes. Was he dressed carelessly as her father would dress if he put on shirt and pants on Saturday morning? No, he thought about how he would dress. The way he walked reminded her of the yachtsmen who stopped in Williamsport and strolled about town: not exactly ambling and not striking out, foot coming down heel first, but toed in, left shoulder coming forward with left leg. It was either a Northern walk or a yachting walk.