Walker Percy: The Moviegoer

A warm wind springs up from the south piling up the clouds and bearing with it a far-off rumble, the first thunderstorm of the year. The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints. Am I mistaken or has a fog of uneasiness, a thin gas of malaise, settled on the street? The businessmen hurry back to their offices, the shoppers to their cars, the tourists to their hotels. Ah, William Holden, we already need you again. Already the fabric is wearing thin without you.

The mystery deepens. For ten minutes I stand talking to Eddie Lovell and at the end of it, when we shake hands and part, it seems to me that I cannot answer the simplest question about what has taken place. As I listen to Eddie speak plausibly and at length of one thing and another — business, his wife Nell, the old house they are redecorating — the fabric pulls together into one bright texture of investments, family projects, lovely old houses, little theater readings and such. It comes over me: this is how one lives! My exile in Gentilly has been the worst kind of self-deception.

Yes! Look at him. As he talks, he slaps a folded newspaper against his pants leg and his eye watches me and at the same time sweeps the terrain behind me, taking note of the slightest movement. A green truck turns down Bourbon Street; the eye sizes it up, flags it down, demands credentials, waves it on. A businessman turns in at the Maison Blanche building; the eye knows him, even knows what he is up to. And all the while he talks very well. His lips move muscularly, molding words into pleasing shapes, marshalling arguments, and during the slight pauses are held poised, attractively everted in a Charles Boyer pout — while a little web of saliva gathers in a corner like the clear oil of a good machine. Now he jingles the coins deep in his pocket. No mystery here! — he is as cogent as a bird dog quartering a field. He understands everything out there and everything out there is something to be understood.

Eddie watches the last float, a doubtful affair with a squashed cornucopia.

“We’d better do better than that.”

“We will.”

“Are you riding Neptune?”

“No.”

I offer Eddie my four call-outs for the Neptune ball. There is always the problem of out-of-town clients, usually Texans, and especially their wives. Eddie thanks me for this and for something else.

“I want to thank you for sending Mr Quieulle to me. I really appreciate it.”

“Who?”

“Old man Quieulle.”

“Yes, I remember.” Eddie has sunk mysteriously into himself, eyes twinkling from the depths. “Don’t tell me—”

Eddie nods.

“—that he has already set up his trust and up and died?”

Eddie nods, still sunk into himself. He watches me carefully, hanging fire until I catch up with him.

“In Mrs Quieulle’s name?”

Again a nod; his jaw is shot out.

“How big?”

The same dancing look, now almost malignant. “Just short of nine hundred and fifty thou.” His tongue curves around and seeks the hollow of his cheek.

“A fine old man,” I say absently, noticing that Eddie has become as solemn as a bishop.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Binx. I count it a great privilege to have known him. I’ve never known anyone, young or old, who possessed a greater fund of knowledge. That man spoke to me for two hours about the history of the crystallization of sugar and it was pure romance. I was fascinated.”

Eddie tells me how much he admires my aunt and my cousin Kate. Several years ago Kate was engaged to marry Eddie’s brother Lyell. On the very eve of the wedding Lyell was killed in an accident, the same accident which Kate survived. Now Eddie comes around to face me, his cottony hair flying up in the breeze. “I have never told anybody what I really think of that woman—” Eddie says “woman” as a deliberate liberty to be set right by the compliment to follow. “I think more of Miss Emily — and Kate — than anyone else in the world except my own mother — and wife. The good that woman has done.”

“That’s mighty nice, Eddie.”

He murmurs something about how beautiful Kate is, that next to Nell etc. — and this is a surprise because my cousin Nell Lovell is a plain horsy old girl. “Will you please give them both my love?”

“I certainly will.”

The parade is gone. All that is left is the throb of a drum.

“What do you do with yourself?” asks Eddie and slaps his paper against his pants leg.

“Nothing much,” I say, noticing that Eddie is not listening.

“Come see us, fellah! I want you to see what Nell has done.” Nell has taste. The two of them are forever buying shotgun cottages in rundown neighborhoods and fixing them up with shutterblinds in the bathroom, saloon doors for the kitchen, old bricks and a sugar kettle for the back yard, and selling in a few months for a big profit.

The cloud is turning blue and pressing down upon us. Now the street seems closeted; the bricks of the buildings glow with a yellow stored-up light. I look at my watch: one is not late at my aunt’s house. In an instant Eddie’s hand is out.

“Give the bride and groom my best.”

“I will.”

“Walter is a wonderful fellow.”

“He is.”

Before letting me go, Eddie comes one inch closer and asks in a special voice about Kate.

“She seems fine now, Eddie. Quite happy and secure.”

“I’m so damn glad. Fellah!” A final shake from side to side, like a tiller. “Come see us!”

“I will!”

MERCER LETS ME IN. “Look out now! Uh oh.” He carries on in a mock astonishment and falls back limberkneed. Today he does not say “Mister Jack” and I know that the omission is deliberate, the consequence of a careful weighing of pros and cons. Tomorrow the scales might tip the other way (today’s omission will go into the balance) and it will be “Mister Jack.”

For some reason it is possible to see Mercer more clearly today than usual. Ordinarily it is hard to see him because of the devotion. He worked for my grandfather in Feliciana Parish before Aunt Emily brought him to New Orleans. He is thought to be devoted to us and we to him. But the truth is that Mercer and I are not at all devoted to each other. My main emotion around Mercer is unease that in threading his way between servility and presumption, his foot might slip. I wait on Mercer, not he on me.

“Didn’t nobody tell me you was coming!” cries Mercer, feeling the balance tilt against me. “I was just commencing to make a fire.”

Mercer is a chesty sand-colored Negro with a shaved head and a dignified Adolph Menjou mustache. Behind the mustache, his face, I notice, is not at all devoted but is as sulky as a Pullman porter’s. My aunt brought him down from Feliciana, but he has changed much since then. Not only is he a city man now; he is also Mrs Cutrer’s butler and as such presides over a shifting menage of New Orleans Negresses, Jamaicans and lately Hondurians. He is conscious of his position and affects a clipped speech, pronouncing his Rs and ings and diphthonging his Is Harlem-style.

Despite the gray day outside, the living room is bright, but it is not snug. The windows are open to the ceiling and the gray sky comes pouring in.

Mercer puts coal on the blazing kindling. His white coat, starched stiff as armor, creaks and rustles. A welt and a tuck form at the base of his skull. He places the coals carefully, his hand passing slowly and imperviously through the flame. Head thrown back, he breathes heavily through his mouth, holding his breath as he places a coal, then expelling it in a hiss.

We might be back in Feliciana. Here is the very sound of winter mornings in Feliciana twenty years ago when cold dark dawns were announced by the clatter of the handle on the scuttle and Mercer’s strangled breathing.