Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

The room is a beautiful room and by every right a cheerful room, with its walls of books, its bokhara glowing like a jewel, its blackening portraits. The prisms of the chandelier wink red in the firelight. Scattered over the satinwood table is the usual litter of quarterlies and rough-paper weeklies and, as always, the great folio The Life of the Buddha. My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice.

Mercer is speaking to me.

“—but they still hasn’t the factories and the — ah — producing set-up we has.”

So Mercer wants to talk about current events. I do so willingly though I am certain he knows more about the subject than I do. He stands facing neither me nor the fire but in a kind of limbo. He holds the coal scuttle and puts one foot toward the door but neither quite stays nor leaves.

Mercer has dissolved somewhat in recent years. It is not so easy to say who he is any more. My aunt truly loves him and sees him as a faithful retainer, a living connection with a bygone age. She tells about Mercer’s devotion to Dr Wills, how he went around for days after Dr Wills’ death, his face streaming with tears. I do not doubt this. Yet I know for a fact that Mercer steals regularly from her by getting kickbacks from the servants and tradespeople. But you can’t call him a thief and let it go at that. Mercer has aspirations. How does he see himself? When he succeeds in seeing himself, it is as a remarkable sort of fellow, a man who keeps himself well-informed in science and politics. This is why I am always uneasy when I talk to him. I hate it when his vision of himself dissolves and he sees himself as neither, neither old retainer nor expert in current events. Then his eyes get muddy and his face runs together behind his mustache. Last Christmas I went looking for him in his rooms over the garage. He wasn’t there but on his bed lay a well-thumbed volume put out by the Rosicrucians called How to Harness Your Secret Powers. The poor bastard.

While Mercer speaks of current events, I edge closer to the mantelpiece. There are the Cutrers in their “grand slam” year. Uncle Jules was Rex, Kate was queen of Neptune, Aunt Emily won the Picayune cup for her work with the Home Service. Everyone said that Kate was a lovely queen, but she wasn’t. When Kate gets her hair waved and puts on an evening gown, she looks frumpy; the face in the picture is plain as a pudding.

One picture I never tire looking at. For ten years I have looked at it on this mantelpiece and tried to understand it. Now I take it down and hold it against the light from the darkening sky. Here are the two brothers, Dr Wills and Judge Anse with their arms about each other’s shoulders, and my father in front, the three standing on a mountain trail against a dark forest. It is the Schwarzwald. A few years after the first war they had gotten together for once and made the grand tour. Only Alex Bolling is missing — he is in the third frame: an astonishingly handsome young man with the Rupert Brooke-Galahad sort of face you see so often in pictures of World War I soldiers. His death in the Argonne (five years before) was held to be fitting since the original Alex Bolling was killed with Roberdaux Wheat in the Hood breakthrough at Gaines Mill in 1862. My father is wearing some kind of fraternity blazer and a hard katy straw. He looks different from the brothers. Alex too is much younger, yet he is still one of them. But not my father. It is hard to say why. The elder Bollings — and Alex — are serene in their identities. Each one coincides with himself, just as the larch trees in the photograph coincide with themselves: Judge Anse with his drooping mustache and thin cold cheeks, the hard-eyed one who is still remembered for having publicly described a Louisiana governor as a peckerwood son of a bitch; Dr Wills, the lion-headed one, the rumpled country genius who developed a gut anastomosis still in use; and Alex, serene in his dream of youth and of his hero’s death to come. But my father is not one of them. His feet are planted wide apart, arms locked around an alpenstock behind him; the katy is pushed back releasing a forelock. His eyes are alight with an expression I can’t identify; it is not far from what his elders might have called smart-alecky. He is something of a dude with his round head and tricky tab collar. Yet he is, by every right, one of them. He was commissioned in the RCAF in 1940 and got himself killed before his country entered the war. And in Crete. And in the wine dark sea. And by the same Boche. And with a copy of The Shropshire Lad in his pocket. Again I search the eyes, each eye a stipple or two in a blurred oval. Beyond a doubt they are ironical.

“Does you, Mister Jack?” asks Mercer, still in limbo, one foot toward the fire, the other on its way out.

“Yes, I do. Unilateral disarmament would be a disaster.”

“What drivel.” My aunt comes in smiling, head to one side, hands outstretched, and I whistle with relief and feel myself smiling with pleasure as I await one of her special kind of attacks, attacks which are both playful and partly true. She calls me an ingrate, a limb of Satan, the last and sorriest scion of a noble stock. What makes it funny is that this is true. In a split second I have forgotten everything, the years in Gentilly, even my search. As always we take up again where we left off. This is where I belong after all.

My aunt has done a great deal for me. When my father was killed, my mother, who had been a trained nurse, went back to her hospital in Biloxi. My aunt offered to provide my education. As a consequence much of the past fifteen years has been spent in her house. She is really my great aunt. Yet she is younger by so many years than her brothers that she might easily be my father’s sister — or rather the daughter of all three brothers, since it is as their favorite and fondest darling that she still appears in her own recollection, the female sport of a fierce old warrior gens and no doubt for this reason never taken quite seriously, even in her rebellion — as when she left the South, worked in a settlement house in Chicago and, like many well-born Southern ladies, embraced advanced political ideas. After years of being the sort of “bird” her brothers indulged her in being and even expected her to be — her career reached its climax when she served as a Red Cross volunteer in the Spanish civil war, where I cannot picture her otherwise than as that sort of fiercely benevolent demoniac Yankee lady most incomprehensible to Spaniards — within the space of six months she met and married Jules Cutrer, widower with child, settled down in the Garden District and became as handsome and formidable as her brothers. She is no longer a “bird.” It is as if, with her illustrious brothers dead and gone, she might now at last become what they had been and what as a woman had been denied her; soldierly both in look and outlook. With her blue-white hair and keen face and terrible gray eyes, she is somehow at sixty-five still the young prince.

It is just as I thought. In an instant we are off and away down the hall and into her office, where she summons me for her “talks.” This much is certain: it is bad news about Kate. If it were a talk about me, my aunt would not be looking at me. She would be gazing into the hive-like recesses of her old desk, finger pressed against her lip. But instead she shows me something and searches my face for what I see. With her watching me, it is difficult to see anything. There is a haze. Between us there is surely a carton of dusty bottles— bottles? — yes, surely bottles, yet blink as I will I can’t be sure.

“Do you see these whisky bottles?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And this kind?” She gives me an oblong brown bottle.