Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

To my relief she greets me cheerfully. She clasps one leg, rests her cheek on a knee and rubs an iron welt with steel wool. She has the advantage of me, sitting at her ease in a litter of summers past, broken wicker, split croquet balls, rotting hammocks. Now she wipes the welt with solvent; it begins to turn pale. “Well? Aren’t you supposed to tell me something?”

“Yes, but I forget what it was.”

“Binx Binx. You’re to tell me all sorts of things.”

“That’s true.”

“It will end with me telling you.”

“That would be better.”

“How do you make your way in the world?”

“Is that what you call it? I don’t really know. Last month I made three thousand dollars — less capital gains.”

“How did you get through a war without getting killed?”

“It was not through any doing of yours.”

“Arm anh anh.” It is an old passage between us, more of a joke now than a quarrel. “And how do you appear so reasonable to Mother?”

“I feel reasonable with her.”

“She thinks you’re one of her kind.”

“What kind is that?”

“A proper Bolling. Jules thinks you’re a go-getter. But you don’t fool me.”

“You know.”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“You’re like me, but worse. Much worse.”

She is in tolerable good spirits. It is not necessary to pay too much attention to her. I spy the basket-arm of a broken settee. It has a presence about it: the ghost of twenty summers in Feliciana. I perch on a bony spine of wicker and prop hands on knees.

“I remember what I came for. Will you go to Lejiers and watch the parade?”

Kate stretches out a leg to get at her cigarettes. Her ritual of smoking stands her in good stead. She extracts the wadded pack, kneads the warm cellophane, taps a cigarette violently and accurately against her thumbnail, lights it with a Zippo worn smooth and yellow as a pocket watch. Pushing back her shingled hair, she blows out a plume of gray lung smoke and plucks a grain from her tongue. She reminds me of college girls before the war, how they would sit five and six in a convertible, seeming old to me and sullen-silent toward men and toward their own sex, how they would take refuge in their cigarettes: the stripping of cellophane, the clash of Zippos, the rushing plume of lung smoke expelled up in a long hissing sigh.

“Her idea?”

“Yes.”

Kate begins to nod and goes on nodding. “You must have had quite a powwow.”

“Not much of one.”

“You’ve never understood Mother’s dynamics.”

“Her dynamics?”

“What do you suppose she and I talk about?”

“What?”

“You. I’m sick of talking about you.”

Now I do look at her. Her voice has suddenly taken on its “objective” tone. Since she started her social work, Kate has spells of talking frankly in which she recites case histories in a kind of droning scientific voice: “—and all the while it was perfectly obvious that the poor woman had never experienced an orgasm.” “Is such a thing possible!” I would cry and we would shake our heads in the strong sense of our new camaraderie, the camaraderie of a science which is not too objective to pity the follies and ignorance of the world.

There is nothing new in her tack against her stepmother. Nor do I object, to tell the truth. It seems to serve her well enough, this discovery of the possibilities of hatred. She warms under its influence. It serves to make the basement a friendlier place. Her hatred is a consequence of a swing of her dialectic. She has, in the past few months, swung back to her father (the basement is to be a TV room for him). In the beginning she had been her father’s child. Then, as a young girl, the person of her stepmother, this quick, charming and above all intelligent woman, had appeared at a critical time in her rebellion. Her stepmother became for her the rallying point of all those forces which, until then, had been hardly felt as more than formless discontents. If she hadn’t much use for her father’s ways, his dogged good nature, his Catholic unseriousness, his little water closet jokes, his dumbness about his God, the good Lord; the everlasting dumb importuning of her just to be good, to mind the sisters, and to go his way, his dumb way of inner faith and outer good spirits — if she hadn’t much use for this, she hardly knew how little until she found herself in the orbit of this enchanting person. Her stepmother had taken her in charge and set her free. In the older woman, older than a mother and yet something of a sister, she found the blithest gayest fellow rebel and comrade. The world of books and music and art and ideas opened before her. And if later her stepmother was to take alarm at Kate’s political activities — a spiritual rebellion was one thing, the soaring of the spirit beyond the narrow horizons of the parochial and into the lofty regions of Literature and Life; nor was there anything wrong with the girlish socialism of Sarah Lawrence; but political conspiracy here and now in New Orleans with the local dirty necks of the bookshops and a certain oracular type of social worker my aunt knew only too well — that was something else. But even so, now that it was in the past, it was not really so bad. In fact, as time went on, it might even take on the flavor of one’s Studententage. How well I remember, her stepmother told her, the days when we Wagnerians used to hiss old Brahms — O for the rapturous rebellious days of youth. But now it is she, my aunt herself, who falls prey to Kate’s dialectic of hatreds. It was inevitable that Kate should catch up with and “see into” her stepmother, just as she caught up with her father, and that she should, in the same swing of the dialectic, rediscover her father as the authentic Louisiana businessman and, if not go to Mass with him, build him a TV room. It was inevitable that she should give up the Philharmonic upstairs and take up the Gillette Cavalcade in the basement. It is, as I say, all the same to me which parent she presently likes or dislikes. But I am uneasy over the meagerness of her resources. Where will her dialectic carry her now? After Uncle Jules what? Not back to her stepmother, I fear, but into some kind of dead-end where she must become aware of the dialectic. “Hate her then,” I feel like telling her, “and love Jules. But leave it at that. Don’t try another swing.”

I say: “Then you’re not going to the Lejiers.”

She puts her cigarette on a potsherd and goes back to her rubbing.

“And you’re not going to the ball?” I ask.

“No.”

“Don’t you want to see Walter as krewe captain?”

Kate swings around and her eyes go to discs. “Don’t you dare patronize Walter.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Do you think I didn’t see the two of you upstaging him at lunch? What a lovely pair you are.”

“I thought you and I were the pair.”

“You and I are not a pair of any sort.”

I consider this.

“Good day,” says Kate irritably.

WE TALK, MY AUNT and I, in our old way of talking, during pauses in the music. She is playing Chopin. She does not play very well; her fingernails click against the keys. But she is playing one of our favorite pieces, the E flat Etude. In recent years I have become suspicious of music. When she comes to a phrase which once united us in a special bond and to which once I opened myself as meltingly as a young girl, I harden myself.

She asks not about Kate but about my mother. My aunt does not really like my mother; yet, considering the circumstances, that my father was a doctor and my mother was his nurse and married him, she likes her as well as she can. She has never said a word against her and in fact goes out of her way to be nice to her. She even says that my father was “shot with luck” to get such a fine girl, by which she means that my father did, in a sense, leave it to luck. All she really holds against my mother, and not really against her but against my father, is my father’s lack of imagination in marrying her. Sometimes I have the feeling myself that who my mother was and who I am depended on the chance selection of a supervisor of nurses in Biloxi. When my father returned from medical school and his surgical residency in Boston to practice with my grandfather in Feliciana Parish, he applied for a nurse. The next day he waited (and I too waited) to see who would come. The door opened and in walked the woman who, as it turned out, would, if she were not one-legged or downright ugly, be his wife and my mother. My mother is a Catholic, what is called in my aunt’s circle a “devout Catholic,” which is to say only that she is a practicing Catholic since I do not think she is devout. This accounts for the fact that I am, nominally at least, also a Catholic.