The Last Gentleman (2 page)

But he looked better than he was. Though he was as engaging as could be, something was missing. He had not turned out well. There is a sort who does well in school and of whom much is heard and expected and who thereafter does less and less well and of whom finally is heard nothing at all. The high tide of life comes maybe in the last year of high school or the first year of college. Then life seems as elegant as algebra. Afterwards people ask, what happened to so and so? And the answer is a shrug. He was the sort who goes away.

Even now he made the highest possible scores on psychological aptitude tests, especially in the area of problem-solving and goal-seeking. The trouble was he couldn't think what to do between tests.

New York is full of people from small towns who are quite content to live obscure lives in some out-of-the-way corner of the city. Here there is no one to keep track. Though such a person might have come from a long line of old settlers and a neighborhood rich in memories, now he chooses tolive in a flat on 231st Street, pick up the paper and milk on the doorstep every morning, and speak to the elevator man. In Southern genealogies there is always mention of a cousin who went to live in New York in 1922 and not another word. One hears that people go to New York to seek their fortunes, but many go to seek just the opposite.

In his case, though, it was part of a family pattern. Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned inward. The great grandfather knew what was what and said so and acted accordingly and did not care what anyone thought. He even wore a pistol in a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a barbershop and invited him then and there to shoot it out in the street. The next generation, the grandfather, seemed to know what was what but he was not really so sure. He was brave but he gave much thought to the business of being brave. He too would have shot it out with the Grand Wizard if only he could have made certain it was the thing to do. The father was a brave man too and he said he didn't care what others thought, but he did care. More than anything else, he wished toact with honor and tobe thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.

As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not know what to think. So he became a watcher and a listener and a wanderer. He could not get enough of watching. Once when he was a boy, a man next door had gone crazy and had sat out in his back yard pitching gravel around and hollering out to his enemies in a loud angry voice. The boy watched him all day, squatted down and watched him, his mouth open and drying. It seemed to him that if he could figure out what was wrong with the man he would learn the great secret of life.

Like many young men in the South, he became overly subtle and had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who decides to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens toa man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war—or the end of the world. That is why Southerners like to fight and make good soldiers. In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of one's own.

But it was worse than this in his case. It was more than being a Southerner. For some years he had had a nervous condition and as a consequence he did not know how to live his life. As a child he had had “spells,” occurrences which were nameless and not to be thought of, let alone mentioned, and which he therefore thought of as lying at the secret and somehow shameful heart of childhood itself. There was a name for it, he discovered later, which gave it form and habitation. It was
déjà vu,
at least he reckoned it was. What happened anyhow was that even when he was a child and was sitting in the kitchen watching D'lo snap beans, or make beaten biscuits, there came over him as it might come over a sorrowful old man the strongest sense that it had all happened before and that something else was going to happen and when it did he would know the secret of his own life. Things seemed to turn white and dense and time itself became freighted with an unspeakable emotion. Sometimes he “fell out” and would wake up hours later, in his bed, refreshed but still haunted.

When he was a youth he had lived his life in a state of the liveliest expectation, thinking to himself: what a fine thing it will be to become a man and to know what to do—like an Apache youth who at the right time goes out into the plains alone, dreams dreams, sees visions, returns and knows he is a man. But no such time had come and he still didn't know how to live.

To be specific, he had now a nervous condition and suffered spells of amnesia and even between times did not quite know what was what. Much of the time he was like a man who has just crawled out of a bombed building. Everything looked strange. Such a predicament, however, is not altogether a bad thing. Like the sole survivor of a bombed building, he had no secondhand opinions and he could see things afresh.

There were times when he was as normal as anyone. He could be as objective-minded and cool-headed as a scientist. He read well-known books on mental hygiene and for a few minutes after each reading felt very clear about things. He knew how to seek emotional gratifications in a mature way, as they say in such books. In the arts, for example. It was his custom to visit museums regularly and to attend the Philharmonic concerts at least once a week. He understood, moreover, that it is people who count, one's relations with people, one's warmth toward and understanding of people. At these times he set himself the goal and often achieved it of “cultivating rewarding interpersonal relationships with a variety of people”—to use a phrase he had come across and not forgotten. Nor should the impression be given that he turned up his nose at religion, as old-style scientists used to do, for he had read widely among modern psychologists and he knew that we have much to learn from the psychological insights of the World's Great Religions.

At his best, he was everything a psychologist could have desired him to be. Most of the time, however, it was a different story. He would lapse into an unproductive and solitary life. He took to wandering. He had a way of turning up at unlikely places such as a bakery in Cincinnati or a greenhouse in Memphis, where he might work for several weeks assaulted by the
déjà vus
of hot growing green plants.

A German physician once remarked that in the lives of people who suffer emotional illness he had noticed the presence of
Lücken
or gaps. As he studied the history of a particular patient he found whole sections missing, like a book with blank pages.

Most of this young man's life was a gap. The summer before, he had fallen into a fugue state and wandered around northern Virginia for three weeks, where he sat sunk in thought on old battlegrounds, hardly aware of his own name.

3
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A few incidents, more or less as he related them to his doctor, will illustrate the general nature of his nervous condition.

His trouble came from groups. Though he was as pleasant and engaging as could be, he had trouble doing what the group expected him to do. Though he did well at first, he did not for long fit in with the group. This was a serious business. His doctor spoke a great deal about the group: what is your role in the group? And sure enough that was his trouble. He either disappeared into the group or turned his back on it.

Once when he was a boy his father and stepmother put him in a summer camp and went to Europe. Now here was one group, the campers, he had no use for at all. The games and the group activities were a pure sadness. One night as the tribe gathered around the council fire to sing songs and listen to the director tell stories and later ask everyone to stand up then and there and make a personal decision for Christ, he crept out of the circle of firelight and lit out down the road to Asheville, where he bought a bus ticket which carried him as far as his money, to Cedartown, Georgia, and hitchhiked the rest of the way home. There he lived with his aunts for several weeks and with the help of a Negro friend built a tree house in a tall sycamore. They spent the summer aloft, reading comics while the tree house tossed like a raft in a sea of dappled leaves.

Later there was trouble with another group. Like his father and grandfather and all other male forebears, save only those who came of age during the Civil War, he was sent up to Princeton University. But unlike them he funked it. He did very well in his studies, joined a good club, made the boxing team, but funked it nevertheless. It happened this way. One beautiful fall afternoon of his junior year, as he sat in his dormitory room, he was assaulted by stupefying
déjà vus
. An immense melancholy overtook him. It was, he knew, the very time of life one is supposed to treasure most, a time of questing and roistering, the prime and pride of youth. But what a sad business it was for him, this business of being a youth at college, one of many generations inhabiting the same old buildings, joshing with the same janitors who had joshed with the class of '37. He envied the janitors. How much better it would be to be a janitor and go home at night to a cozy cottage by the railroad tracks, have a wee drop with one's old woman, rather than sit here solemn-and-joyous,
feierlich,
in these honorable digs. On this afternoon, some of his classmates were standing just outside in the hall, a half dozen young Republicans from Bronxville and Plainfield and Shaker Heights. They too knew it was the best years of their lives and they were enjoying themselves accordingly. They had a certain Princeton way of talking, even the ones from Chicago and California, and a certain way of sticking their hands in their pockets and settling their chins in their throats. They were fine fellows, though, once you got used to their muted Yankee friendliness. Certainly this was the best of times, he told himself with a groan. Yet, as he sat at his desk in Lower Pyne, by coincidence in the very room occupied by his grandfather in 1910, he said to himself: what is the matter with me? Here I am surrounded by good fellows and the spirit of Old Nassau and wishing instead I was lying in a ditch in Wyoming or sitting in a downtown park in Toledo. He thought about his father and grandfather. They had been very fond of their classmates, forming relationships which lasted through the years. One had only to mention the names, Wild Bill (each had a Wild Bill in his class), the Dutchman, Froggie Auchincloss the true frog the blue frog the unspeakably parvenu frog, and his father would smile and shake his head fondly and stick his hands in his pockets in a certain way and rock back on his heels in the style of the class of '37.

His classmates used words in a distinctive way. That year they called each other “old buddy” long before this expression was heard at Tulane or Utah State, and they used the words “hack” and “go” in an obscure but precise way: if you made a good run in touch football, somebody might say to you, “What a hack.” At other times and out of a clear sky, even in the middle of a sentence, somebody might say to you, “Go!”, a command not to be confused with the argot of disc jockeys but intended rather as an ironic summons to the speaker to go forth. It was a signal to him that he was straying ever so slightly from the accepted way of talking or acting, perhaps showing unseemly enthusiasm or conviction. “Go!” he would be told in the obscure but exact sense of being sent on a mission.

The fall afternoon glittered outside, a beautiful bitter
feierlich
Yankee afternoon. It was the day of the Harvard-Princeton game. He felt as if he had seen them all. The ghost of his grandfather howled around 203 Lower Pyne. He knew his grandfather occupied room 203 because he had seen the number written in the flyleaf of Schiller's
Die Räuber,
a dusty yellow book whose pages smelled like bread. After a moment the young Southerner, who still sat at his desk, tried to get up, but his limbs were weighed down by a strange inertia and he moved like a sloth. It was all he could do to keep from sinking to the floor. Walking around in old New Jersey was like walking on Saturn, where the force of gravity is eight times that of earth. At last, and despite himself, he uttered a loud groan, which startled him and momentarily silenced his classmates. “Hm,” he muttered and peered at his eyeballs in the mirror. “This is no place for me for another half hour, let alone two years.”

Forty minutes later he sat on a bus, happy as a lark, bound for New York, where he lived quite contentedly at the Y.M.C.A.

The following summer, in deference to the wishes of his father, who hoped to arouse in him a desire to complete his education and particularly to awaken a fondness for the law, he worked as a clerk in the family law firm. There was no place to sit but the library, a dusty room with a large oval table of golden oak which also served as a conference room and a place to read wills and pass acts of sale. The fragrant summer air thrust in at the window and the calfskin of the law books crumbled and flew up his nostrils. Beyond the glittering street, the oaks of the residential section turned yellow with pollen, then a dark lustrous green, then whitened with dust. He contracted dreadful hay fever and sat all summer, elbows propped on the conference table, tears running down his cheeks. His nose swelled up like a big white grape and turned violet inside. Through the doorway, opened at such an angle that he might overhear without being seen, he heard his father speak with his clients, a murmurous sound compounded of grievance and redress. As the summer wore on, it became more and more difficult to distinguish the words from the sound, until finally they merged with the quarrels of the sparrows under the window sill and the towering sound of the cicadas that swelled up from the vacant lots and filled the white sky. The other members of the firm were cordial enough, but he could not get on any other footing with them save that of the terrific cordiality of their first greetings, to which he responded as best he could while holding his great baboon's nose in a handkerchief.