Walker Percy - The Second Coming

“Yes.” No. What he remembered was the weight of her, the angle and set of his own body when he levered her out of the Rolls and in one motion around and into the wheelchair.

A tuft of bronze hair curled through the zipper of the chaplain’s jump suit. Jack Curl’s muscular jaw swelled like a pear under the temples just as his lower body swelled like a pear in the jump suit. Yet he was as light on his feet as a good dancer. He danced around in front of him like a child to catch his attention. Today for some reason it was possible to observe the smallest detail about Jack Curl, for example, the way he was letting his sideburns grow longer by shaving a little below them. The short new hair did not match the long hair of the sideburns. But more than that: he suddenly saw the purpose of the jump suit and Jack Curl’s shambling way of walking and his not quite clean hands and the pliers in his hip pocket and the way he moved his shoulders in the jump suit. Jack Curl was saying: I am more than a clergyman going about doing clerical things. I am also a handyman, a super, something of a tough really. Somebody has to fix the plumbing and wiring. To do God’s work, it is necessary to come off manual work. Like Paul fixing tents.

He took a good look at Jack Curl.

How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see everything so clearly? Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream.

Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane? And how is it that death, the nearness of death, can restore a missed life? Marion knew this. She loved to go to funerals. They went to funerals in Manhattan, Long Island, Utica, and all over the South; funerals of her uncles and aunts and cousins, his uncles and aunts and cousins, kinfolk he’d never seen. Funerals made her solemn and vivacious. The old folk here died off like flies. She attended every funeral and volunteered him as pallbearer. Suddenly he had become pallbearer to friend, kin, and stranger. It became clear why Presidents like to go to funerals. The worse things got for Lyndon Johnson, the more funerals he went to, there he stood grave and silent, dispensed. Like a President, Marion stood in her braces at a hundred gravesides, solemn and exultant.

Why is it that without death one misses his life? When Marion was dying, he was standing at the window of the hospital room, hands in pockets, gazing down at the bluish-white street light above the empty corner. It was four o’clock in the morning. She spoke to him in a different voice. In the dark her jaundice — she was yellow as a gourd — did not show, but her voice was quavery with fever. “Yes?” he said and came to the bed. She looked at him calmly. Had they looked at each other in years? “I want you to do something,” she said. “All right,” he said. “Keep the house for Leslie.” “All right,” he said. “She is going to need a place,” she said. “She is going to California but she will want to come back here, won’t she?” “Yes,” he said. “Very well. I will.”

She spoke with the quietness of people after a storm which had drowned out their voices. What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at each other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the halls like ghosts.

“Let me say this, Will,” said Jack Curl, dancing around and stopping him in a kind of mock confrontation.

“O.K.”

“Marion, your dear wife, my friend, the only benefactor these old people had, is gone. Right?”

“Right.”

“Do you know the last thing she told me before she died?”

“No.”

“She wanted to go ahead with the one project closest to her heart.”

“What was that?”

“You know. Her idea of a retirement village. A total love-and-faith community.”

“Ah.”

“What do you think of this for a name? The Marion Peabody Barrett Memorial Community.”

“Sounds fine.”

“Does it sound too much like a commune?”

“No, it sounds fine.”

“All I ask of you is what you yourself want: to carry out her wishes.”

All you ask from me is three million dollars. Well, why not?

How could he not have noticed this about Jack Curl before? that even as he was moving his shoulders around under his jump suit, playing the sweaty clergyman doing good, that Jack too was trying to catch hold of his own life? that in the very moment of this joking godly confrontation — sure, I’m trying to con you out of three million, Will, but it’s a good cause and I’m God’s own con man, okay? and so forth — here was Jack Curl trying to catch hold. And wasn’t he doing it? Wasn’t he doing everything right? Yet when you took a good look at him, this sweaty Episcopal handyman, this godly greasy super, you saw in an instant that he was not quite there. Looking at him was like trying to focus on a blurred photograph.

But you, old mole, you knew otherwise, didn’t you? You knew the secret. I could see it in your eyes, open and clear and brown, when you were run to ground in a Georgia swamp and looking up at me. You shot yourself, and then we could talk. You knew the secret. But how can that be? How can it be that only with death and dying does the sharp quick sense of life return? For that was your secret, wasn’t it? That it was death you loved most of all and loved so surely that you wanted to share the secret with me because you loved me too.

One night after the war and during the Eisenhower years the father was taking a turn under the oaks. The son watched him from the porch.

“The trouble is,” the man said, “there is no word for this.”

“For what?”

“This.” He held both arms out to the town, to the wide world. “It’s not war and it’s not peace. It’s not death and it’s not life. What is it? What do you call it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is life and there is death. Life is better than death but there are worse things than death.”

“What?”

“There is no word for it. Maybe it never happened before and so there is not yet a word for it. What is the word for a state which is not life and not death, a death in life?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder if it ever happened in history before?”

“I don’t know.” Where is the word, the girl in the greenhouse would say, and look around.

Hands in pockets, he looked at the chaplain and past him to the sunlight, which had turned yellow and now shone straight through the front door. I wonder what you would have thought of rich Christian Carolina, old mole.

“What?”

“I said what a great lady Marion was to give so unendingly of herself. There was so much to give.”

“Do you mean because she was so rich or because she was so fat?”

“Ha ha. That’s a winner. Touché. Marion would have loved that. Yes, Marion was far too heavy. God knows I tried to tell her. She said look who’s talking.” He put his hands on his side, a jolly fat lightfooted friar in a jump suit. “Marion and I had much in common. We loved all the good things God gives us. In a word we like to eat. But no, that’s not what I meant by her heart’s desire. You know what I meant.”

“What?”

A clock struck. The sun was setting.

“I am talking about Marion’s dream of a community of people living out their lives married, together, not burdening anybody, a true love-and-faith community lived according to the rhythm of God’s own liturgical year.”