The Last Gentleman (25 page)

But now it was he who had learned Yankee ways. He took to eyeing people on the path to see when they would speak. He judged the distance badly and said his “hi” and “what say” too soon. His face ached from grinning. There was something to be said after all for the cool Yankee style of going your own way and paying no attention to anyone. Here for God's sake the air fairly crackled with kinship radiations. That was it. These beautiful little flatfooted girls greeted you like your own sister! What do you do about that? He had forgotten. It made him blush to think of laying hands on them. Then he remembered: that was how you did lay hands on them!—through a kind of sisterly-brotherly joshing, messing around it was called. Everybody was wonderful and thought everybody else was. More than once he overheard one girl tell another: “She's the most wonderful girl I ever knew!”

That was how they treated the courses too: they cancelled out the whole academic side by honorifics. “Professor so-and-so? He's the second smartest professor in the United States!” “Ec 4? Universally recognized as the hardest course ever given on the subject!” Etc. And poof! out the window went the whole intellectual business, kit and caboodle, cancelled out, polished off, even when you made straight A's. Especially when you made straight A's.

Naturally in such an intersubjective paradise as this, he soon got the proper horrors. He began to skid a little and catch up with himself like a car on ice. His knee leapt so badly that he had to walk like a spastic, hand thrust through pocket and poking patella with each step. Spotting oncomers, fifty, sixty, seventy feet away, he began grinning and composing himself for the encounter. “Hi!” he hollered, Oh Lord, a good twenty feet too soon.

Under the crape myrtle in the garden the song sparrow scratched like a chicken, one foot at a time, and the yellow leaves curled in a clear flame. Close by, John Houghton trimmed the brick border with an old-fashioned spring blade.
Snick, snick snee,
went the blade scissoring along the bricks.

He was dreaming his old dream of being back in high school and running afoul of the curriculum, wandering up and down the corridors past busy classrooms. Where was his class? He couldn't find it and he had to have the credit to graduate.

Someone kissed him on the mouth, maybe really kissed him as he lay asleep, for he dreamed a dream to account for the kiss, met Alice Bocock behind the library stacks and gave her a sweet ten-o'clock-in-the-morning kiss.

There was a step behind him and presently voices. He cracked an eyelid. The song sparrow was scratching, kicking leaves and looking around like a chicken. Fireballs danced on his lashes, broke into bows and sheaves of color.

“Very well, little Hebe. Be Betty coed and have your little fun on Flirtation Walk—”

“Flirtation
Walk!
”

“And all the warm dalliance you want to. Drain your cup, little Hebe, then let me know when you want to get down to business.”

“What in the world are you
talking
about?”—delivered in Kitty's new ironclad coed style, for crying out loud, her head tilted at an angle signifying mock-incredulity, eyes inattentive and going away.

Englishman that he was, he woke in his burrow without a commotion. Though his cheek was pressed into the leaves and was stinging, he did not move. The sunlight fell upon a loose screen of sasanqua. He could not see them, but he heard Kitty and Rita talking a few feet away, where they must be sitting on the grass.

A movement caught his eye. Some thirty feet away and ten feet above him a balcony of the garage overhung the garden, not a proper balcony, but just enough ledge to break the ugly wall and give a pleasant cloistered effect to the garden; not for standing on, but there stood a man anyhow, with his hands in his pockets, looking down into the garden.

He was a Vaught, with the black brow and the high color and the whorled police-dog eye, but a very finely drawn Vaught. Motionless as he was, he gave the effect of restiveness and darting. He was both merry and haggard. Sutter, the engineer was to learn, always looked as if he had just waked up, with one side of his face flushed and creased and his hair brushed up against the grain by the pillow. There was something old-fashioned about him. Perhaps it was his clothes. He was in shirtsleeves, but his shirt and pants were the kind you wear with a suit. They could be the trousers of a $35 Curlee suit. One knew at once that he would never wear slacks and a sport shirt. He put one in mind of a bachelor of the 1940's come home to his quarters and putting on a regular white shirt and regular suit pants and stepping out to take the air of an evening. Most notable was his thinness. He was thin as a child is thin, with a simple scanting of flesh on bones. The shirt, still starched and stuck together on one side, did not lay hold of his body. It was the sort of thinness a young man worries about. But this man did not. He was indifferent to his thinness. He did not hold himself in such a way as to minimize it.

Sutter's hands moved in his pockets as he watched Rita and Kitty.

“What's the story?” Rita was saying. “Why the headlong rush for anonymity?”

Kitty did not reply. The engineer could hear her hand moving against the nap of the freshly cut grass.

“Mmm?” said Rita, questioning softly.

“Nothing is
changed,
Ree,” caroled Kitty.

Sutter turned his head. There was something wrong with his cheek, a shadowing, a distinguished complication like a German saber scar.

“On your way, Minnie cat,” said Rita, and the women arose, laughing.

Before they could turn, Sutter, still fingering the change in his pocket, ducked through the open window. Rita looked up quickly, holding her hand against the sun.

5
.

“A pretty links, isn't it? You know, I was one of the first people to be brought up in a suburb. Aren't you Will Barrett?”

He had been watching the golfers from the patio and he turned around quickly, irritably, not liking to be surprised. There stood a woman he first took to be a Salvation Army lass and he was about to refuse her alms even more irritably. But then he noticed she was a Vaught. She must be Val.

“In the past,” she went on before he could answer, “people have usually remembered their childhood in old houses in town or on dirt farms back in the country. But what I remember is the golf links and the pool. I spent every warm day of my girlhood at the pool, all day every day, even eating meals there. Even now it doesn't seem right to eat a hamburger without having wrinkled fingers and smelling chlorine.” She didn't laugh but went on gazing past him at the golfers. Her musing absent-mindedness, he reckoned, was one of the little eccentricites nuns permitted themselves. He had never spoken to a nun. But perhaps she was not a proper nun after all, wearing as she did not a proper habit but a black skirt and blouse and a little cap-and-veil business. But beyond a doubt she was a Vaught, though a somewhat plumpish bad-complexioned potato-fed Vaught. Her wrist was broad and white as milk and simple: it was easy for him to imagine that if it was cut through it would show not tendon and bone but a homogenous nun-substance.

“I've been looking for you, Barrett. Once I heard your father make a speech to the D.A.R. on the subject of
noblesse oblige
and our duty to the Negro. A strange experience and a strange bunch of noblewomen. Not that I know much about
noblesse oblige,
but he gave them proper hell. He was right about one thing, of course, character. You don't hear much about that either nowadays.”

“Is that why you became a nun?” he asked politely.

“Partly, I suppose. I drove up to see Jamie and now I want to see you.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Jamie looks awful.”

“Yes.” He was about to enter with her onto the mournful ground of Jamie's illness, but she fell away again. John Houghton's scissors came snicker-sneeing along the brick walk behind her and flushed a towhee out of the azaleas, a dandy little cock in tuxedo-black and cinnamon vest She gazed down at the bird with the same mild distracted eye.

“Does John Houghton still run after school girls?”

“Ma'am? Oh. Well, yes.”

Now freed by her preoccupation with the forgotten trophies of her past, the sentient engineer swung full upon her. What to make of it, this queer casualness of hers? Was it Catholic, a species of professional unseriousness (death and sin are our affair, so we can make light of them), almost frivolity, like electricians who make a show of leaning on high-voltage wires? Or was it an elaborate Vaught dialectic, thus: Rita and the rest of you are going to be so serious about Jamie, therefore I am not, etc. His radar boggled and couldn't get hold of her. He was obscurely scandalized. He didn't like her much.

“How long does Jamie have?”

“Eh? To live— Oh, Rita said months, four months I think she said. But I think longer. Actually he is much better.”

“Jamie tells me you and he are good friends.” Her gaze was still fixed on the tiny amber eye of the towhee, which crouched with its head cocked, paralyzed.

“Yes.”

“He says that you and he may go somewhere together.”

“Jamie changes his mind about that. He was talking earlier about living with Sutter or going down to stay with you.”

“Well, now he wants to go somewhere with you.”

“Do you mean, leave school?”

“Yes.”

“He knows I'm ready to go any time.” Presently he added: “I can understand him wanting to go away.”

“Yes. That was what I want to speak to you about.”

He waited.

“Mr. Barrett—”

“Yes ma'am.”

“It may well happen that it will be you and not one of us who will be with Jamie during the last days of his life and even at his death.”

“I suppose that is true,” said the engineer, taking note of a warning tingle between his shoulder blades.

“Everyone thinks very highly of you—though for strangely diverse, even contradictory reasons. I can't help noticing. You are evidently quite a fellow. That's hardly surprising, considering whose son you are.”

“Ah—” began the engineer, frowning and scratching his head.

“Though I can't say that I agree with your father on his reasons for treating Negroes well rather than beating them up, still I'd rather that he'd won over the current scoundrels even if he'd won for the wrong reasons.”

“Perhaps,” said the engineer uneasily, not wanting to discuss either his father's “reasons” or her even more exotic reasons.

“But in any case I too can perceive that you are a complex and prescient young man.”

“I certainly appreciate—” began the engineer gloomily.

“Clearly you would do right by Jamie even if you had no affection for him, which I have reason to believe you do have.”

“Yes,” said the other warily. It was still impossible to get a fix on her. He had known very few Catholics and no nuns at all.

“Mr. Barrett, I don't want Jamie to die an unprovided death.”

“Unprovided?”

“I don't want him to die without knowing why he came here, what he is doing here, and why he is leaving.”

“Ma'am?” The engineer felt like wringing out his ear but he did not.

“It may fall to you to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“About the economy of salvation.”

“Why don't you tell him?” He was watching her as intently as the towhee watched her. There was no telling what she might do.

She sighed and sat down. The towhee, released from its spell, flew away. “I have told him.”

The engineer, though standing erect, began to lean about five degrees away from her.

“It is curious, Mr. Barrett, but what I told him was absolutely the last thing on earth he would listen to. It was not simply one of a great number of things he might have listened to more or less indifferently. It was, of all things, absolutely the last thing. Doesn't that strike you as strange?”

“I couldn't say. But if you can't tell him what you believe, you his sister, how do you expect me to tell him what I don't believe?”

But she was at it again, her trick of engaging him then slipping away. “They didn't ride in carts the last time I was here,” she said, gazing past him at the golfers. Do all nuns banter about salvation? “And yet, there he was, reading all that guff with relish.”

“What guff?”

“That book about radio noise from the galaxies, noise which might not be noise. Did you give it to him?”

“No.”

She ignored his irritation. “I've noticed,” she said gloomily and not especially to him, “that it is usually a bad sign when dying people become interested in communication with other worlds, and especially when they become spiritual in a certain sense.”

“Don't you believe in other worlds and, ah, spirits?”

“It is strange, but I've always distrusted so-called spiritual people,” she muttered, mostly ruminating with herself. “You know how women talk about such and such a priest being spiritual?”

“No.” How could he know any such thing?

“I always steer clear of those birds. But no, actually I owe spiritual people, ladies, a great deal—they're very generous with me when I beg from them. It's a strange business, isn't it? The most unlikely people are generous. Last week I persuaded the local Klonsul of the Klan to give us a Seven-Up machine. Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?”

“I couldn't say,” said the sleepy engineer.

She brought herself up and looked at him for the first time. “Mr. Barrett, Jamie's salvation may be up to you.”

“Eh? Excuse me, but apart from the circumstance that I do not know what the word ‘salvation' means, I would refuse in any case to accept any such commission, Miss, ah—, that is
,
Sister—”