The Last Gentleman (21 page)

“Let us go in the service room.” For it is here and not by moonlight—he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.

“There you are,” said Rita, opening the door opposite. “Where in the world was the ice machine?”

And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.

The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.

6
.

One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.

The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his
Theory of Sets.
The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.

“—but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!”

“Then go to a good one.”

He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.

Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out—had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.

“Have I told you what I want to be?”

“I'm afraid you have.”

“I want to be an ordinary silly girl who has dates and goes to dances.”

“You're in a fair way to do it.”

“I love to dance.”

“Then work harder at it. You're lazy.”

“You know what I mean. I mean dancing cheek to cheek. I want to be broken in on.”

“They don't dance like that now.”

“I want to have beaus.”

“You can have beaus in Tesuque or in Salamanca and not ruin your mind while you do it”

“I want to be Tri Delt.”

“Good God!”

“I want to go to dances and get a tremendous rush. That's what my grandmother used to say: I went to such and such a dance and got a tremendous rush. Did you know my grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer?”

“Yes, you told me.”

“I want to talk the foolishness the girls and boys at home talk.”

“You're on your way.”

“I want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater.”

“Very well.”

“I want to go to the Sugar Bowl.”

“Christ.”

“But you're going to stay with us. I need you!”

Rita was silent.

“Remember our bargain, Ree.”

“What bargain?” said Rita in a muffled voice. She had turned away from the window.

“That you stay till Christmas. By then I'll know. I could easily have flunked out by then just as I flunked out before. But even if I don't I'll know. I'll know whether to go with you or not.”

“We'll see,” said Rita absently.

7
.

They reached the Golden Isles of Georgia in time for the first tropical storm of the year. The wind whipped over the gray ocean, out of kilter with the slow rhythm of the waves, tore up patches of spume, and raised a spindrift. Georgians had sense enough to go home and so the Vaughts had the hotel to themselves, an honorable old hacienda of wide glassed-in vestibules opening into conservatories and recreation rooms, and rows of brass pots planted with ferns, great cretaceous gymnosperms from the days of Henry Grady, dry and dusty as turkey wings. They looked at stuffed birds and group photographs of Southern governors and played mahjong.

A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you. In a day's time they had a standing joke going as if you had been there a month. One bold fellow noticed the engineer take out his red book and read a few maxims as he waited for the elevator. “Now he's gon' be the
smart
one!” he announced to the hotel and later meeting him in the hall would therefore holler: “You got your book with you?” with a special sort of boldness, even a recklessness, which he took to be his due by virtue of the very credential of his amiability. The engineer laughed politely and even cackled a bit in order to appear the proper damn fool they would have him be.

By four o'clock the afternoon had turned yellow and dark. The engineer and Jamie found some rook cards and played a game in the conservatory, which still had a magic lantern from the days when lectures were delivered to vacationers on birds and sea shells. When the wind picked up, the engineer decided to go see to the Trav-L-Aire. Jamie wouldn't come. He went out of his way to tell the engineer he was going to telephone his sister Val.

“What for?” the engineer asked him, seeing that the other wanted him to ask.

“When I feel bad, I call her and she makes me feel better.”

“Is she the sister who joined the religious order?”

“Yes.”

“Are you religious?”

“No.”

“Then what good can she do you?” They had fallen into the abrupt mocking but not wholly unserious way of talking which people who spend a lot of time together get into.

“She is not religious either, at least not in the ordinary sense.”

“What is she doing in a religious order?”

“I don't know. Anyhow that is not what I'm interested in.”

“What are you interested in?” asked the engineer, sniffing the old rook cards. They smelled like money.

“I thought she might give me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Anything. Teaching, minor repairs. I am feeling very good physically.”

“I'm sure it's a wonderful work she is doing.”

“I'm not interested in that either,” said Jamie irritably. “I'm not interested in the Negroes.”

“What are you interested in?”

“Anything she wants me to do. Her place is down in Tyree County in the piney woods, ten miles from nowhere. I thought it wouldn't be bad to live there as we have been living, in the camper. We could teach, give her a hand. You may not want to. But I am feeling very strong. Feel my grip.”

“Very good.”

“I can put you down hand-wrestling.”

“No, you can't.”

“Let's see.”

The engineer, who never faked with Jamie, put him down quickly. But Jamie was surprisingly strong.

“Why don't we work out together, Bill?”

“O.K.”

“What do you think of going down to Tyree County?” asked Jamie, hiding behind his rook cards.

“I thought you wanted to go to college.”

“What I don't want is to go back home to the same thing, see Mother and Poppy every morning, watch the same golfers pass on number 6 fairway.”

“O.K.” Then he's changed his mind about Sutter, thought the engineer.

“O.K. what? You mean you'll go?”

“Sure,” said the engineer, who in truth saw how it stood with Jamie and did not think it such a bad idea himself, going to the end of nowhere, parking in the pines and doing a few humble tasks.

Jamie laughed. “You mean it, don't you? You're telling the truth, you're ready to go.”

“Sure. Why shouldn't I tell the truth?”

“I don't know,” said Jamie, laughing at him.

Before he left the hotel, he picked up an old crime-club selection in the library,
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
a light pulpy book gnawed by silverflsh and smelling of the summer of 1927. Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not. No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes. Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper dance, pay her court, not mess around.

Accordingly he proposed that they stay in the bird room and play mahjong with Poppy and Jamie and Rita but she wouldn't hear of it.

Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments. It was going to be a bad storm. Under the dirty low-flying clouds the air was as yellow as electric light. His spirits rose, he told himself, because it might be possible for them to enter here and now into a new life. If they were trapped by the storm in the Trav-L-Aire, they could sit at the dinette and play gin rummy, snug as children, very like many another young couple who came down here in the days of the great Bobby Jones and had a grand time. Sit face to face and deal the cards and watch the storm, like a chapter from Mary Roberts Rinehart entitled “Trapped in the Storm: Interesting Developments”; perhaps even steal a kiss or two.

The camper was hove to in a hollow of the dunes. He had snugged her down with a hundred feet of nylon rope which he wound around cabin and axle and lashed to iron rings set in some broken beachworks. Inside the cabin he pumped up the butane tank and lit the little ashen mantles. Soon the camper leapt against its tether; the wind sang like a harp in her rigging. She creaked in every joint like the good prairie schooner she was and wouldn't leak a drop. The sand scoured the aluminum skin like birdshot.

He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he'd brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand—most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc.—instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.

“Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.

“Aren't you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.

“Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.

Look at her, he thought peevishly. She had worn leotards so many years she didn't know how to wear a dress. As she sat, she straddled a bit. Once in a Charleston restaurant he had wanted to jump up and pull her dress down over her knees.

Abruptly she put her cards down and knocked up the little Pullman table between them. “Bill.”

“Yes.”

“Come here.”

“All right.”

“Am I nice?”

“Yes.”

“Am I pretty?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, how would I look to you if you saw me in a crowd of girls?”

“Fine. The best, in fact.”

“Why don't I think so?”

“I don't know.”

She stretched out her leg, clasping her dress above the knee; “Is that pretty?”

“Yes,” he said, blushing. It was as if somehow it was his leg she was being prodigal with.

“Not crippled?”

“No.”

“Not muscle-bound?”

“No.”

“I worry about myself.”

“You don't have to.”

“What do you really think of me? Tell me the literal truth.”

“I love you.”

“Besides that.”

“I couldn't say.”

“Oh darling, I didn't mean that. I mean, do you also
like
me? As a person.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think other boys will like me?”

“I don't know,” said the engineer, sweating in earnest. Great Scott, he thought in dismay. Suppose she does have a date with another “boy.”

“I mean like at a dance. If you saw me at a dance, would you like to dance with me?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know that I've danced all my life and yet I've never been to a regular dance?”

“You haven't missed much,” said the engineer, thinking of the many times he had stood around picking his nose at Princeton dances.

“Do you realize that I've hardly ever danced with a boy?”