The Last Gentleman (26 page)

“Val.”

“Sister Val.”

“No,” she said laughing. “Just Val. I am Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”

“Is that right?”

His refusal, he noticed, was delivered with a tingle of pleasure, both perverse and familiar. Familiar because—yes, he remembered his father refusing a priest and taking some satisfaction in it even though he, his father, took the Catholics' side in their troubles with the Klan. “Mr. Barrett,” the priest asked him with the same jolly gall, “I don't think you realized it but you just fired one of my parishioners, heh-heh, and I want to ask you if you will take her back. She has a family and no husband—” “And who could that be,” said his father, his voice ominously civil. “Souella Johnson.” Souella Johnson, who, being not merely a winehead but, failing to find Gallo sherry in the house, had polished off as a poor substitute some six cases of twenty-year-old bourbon over the years. “I will not, sir,” said his father and bang, down went the telephone.

“I will not,” he told Val with the same species of satisfaction. Perhaps we are true Protestants despite ourselves, he mused, or perhaps it is just that the protest is all that is left of it. For it is in stern protest against Catholic monkey business that we feel ourselves most ourselves. But was her request true Catholic gall, the real article, or was it something she had hit upon through a complicated Vaught dialectic? Or did she love her brother?

He read in her eyes that he looked odd. “What is it?” she asked him smiling. For a split second he saw in her his Kitty, saw it in her lip-curling bold-eyed expression. It was as if his Kitty, his golden girl of summertime and old Carolina, had come back from prison where she had got fat and white as white and bad-complexioned.

“What?” she asked again.

“I was wondering,” said the engineer, who always told the truth, “how you manage to come to the point where you feel free to make requests of people.”

She laughed again. “Jamie was right. You're a good companion. Well, I can ask you, can't I?”

“Sure.”

“It's like the story about the boy who got slapped by quite a few girls but who—well. But it's extraordinary how you can ask the most unlikely people—you can ask them straight out: say, look, I can see you're unhappy; why don't you stop stealing or abusing Negroes, go confess your sins and receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ—and how often they will just look startled and go ahead and do it. One reason is that people seldom ask other people to do anything.”

“I see.”

“Now I have to go see Sutter.”

“Yes ma'am.”

He began nodding in ancient Protestant fuddlement and irony, not knowing whether to bow, shake hands, or look down his nose. But it didn't matter. She had left without noticing.

6
.

Jamie was not in the apartment. There were voices in the room next door. That would be Sutter and Val, he calculated, and perhaps Jamie. The old itch for omniscience came upon him—lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here—but he resisted the impulse to eavesdrop. I will not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.

He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.

The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter's room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.

Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.

“—found him in New York,” Val was saying. “He's Ed Barrett's son. Have you met him?”

“I saw him in the garden.” Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer's head.

“What did you think of him?”

Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.

“Yes,” said Val.

“—nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”

“Yes.”

My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!

“Put that thing up,” said Val.

“Why?”

“Some day you're going to blow your fool head off—by accident.”

“That would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn't it?”

“And it would please you, wouldn't it, to die absurdly?”

The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.

He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter's door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter's outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.

The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.

“You must be Barrett.”

Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.

“Excuse me,” said the reeling engineer. “I thought I heard a noise.”

“Yes.”

“It sounded like a shot.”

“Yes.”

He waited but Sutter said no more.

“Did the pistol go off accidentally?”

“No. I shot him.”

“Him?” The engineer suddenly feared to turn around.

Sutter was nodding to the wall. There hung yet another medical picture, this of The Old Arab Physician. The engineer had not seen it because his peephole was some four inches below the frame. Moving closer, he noticed that the Arab, who was ministering to some urchins with phials and flasks, was badly shot up. Only then did it come over him that his peephole was an outlying miss in the pattern of bullet holes.

“Why him?” asked the engineer, who characteristically, having narrowly escaped being shot, dispatched like Polonius behind the arras, had become quite calm.

“Don't you know who that is?”

“No.”

‘That's Abou Ben Adhem.”

The engineer shook his head impatiently. “Now that I'm here I'd like to ask you—”

“See the poem? There in a few short, badly written lines is compressed the sum and total of all the meretricious bullshit of the Western world. And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest Why did it lead all the rest?”

“I don't know,” said the engineer. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the dismantled gun barrel. The fruity steel smell of Hoppe's gun oil put him in mind of something, but he couldn't think what.

“There it is,” said Sutter, loading the clip, “the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man's sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou's effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news—the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in?”

“No.”

“It wasn't Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt.”

“Who?” repeated the engineer absently, eyes glued forever to the Colt Woodsman.

“If I were a Christian, I shouldn't hesitate to identify the Anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt.”

“Leigh Hunt,” said the engineer, rubbing his eyes.

“I'm glad you came down with Jimmy,” said Sutter. “Come sit over here.”

“Yes sir.” Still not quite able to rouse himself, he allowed Sutter to lead him to the wagonwheel chair. But before he could sit down, Sutter turned him into the light from the window.

“What's the matter with you?”

“I feel all right now. I was quite nervous a few minutes ago. I've had a nervous condition for some time.” He told Sutter about his amnesia.

“I know. Jimmy told me. Are you going into a fugue now?”

“I don't know. I thought perhaps that you—”

“Me? Oh no. I haven't practiced medicine for years. I'm a pathologist I study the lesions of the dead.”

“I know that,” said the engineer, sitting down wearily. “But I have reason to believe you can help me.”

“What reason?”

“I can tell when somebody knows something I don't know.”

“You think I know something?”

“Yes.”

“How can you tell?”

“I don't know how but I can. I had an analyst for five years and he was very good, but he didn't know anything I didn't know.”

Sutter laughed. “Did you tell him that?”

“No.”

“You should have. He could have done a better job.”

“I'm asking you.”

“I can't practice. I'm not insured.”

“Insured?”

‘The insurance company cancelled my liability. You can't practice without it.”

“I'm not asking you to practice. I only want to know what you know.”

But Sutter only shrugged and turned back to the Colt.

“Why did they cancel your insurance?” the engineer asked desperately. There was something he wanted to ask but he couldn't hit on the right question.

“I got the idea of putting well people in the hospital and sending the truly sick home.”

“Why did you do that?” asked the engineer, smiling slightly. He was not yet certain when the other was joking.

Again Sutter shrugged.

The engineer was silent.

Sutter rammed a wad through the barrel. “I had a patient once who lived under the necessity of being happy. He almost succeeded but did not quite. Since he did not, he became depressed. He became very unhappy that he was not happy. I put him in the terminal ward of the hospital, where he was surrounded by the dying. There he soon recovered his wits and became quite cheerful. Unfortunately—and by the purest bad luck—he happened to suffer a serious coronary before I sent him home. As soon as it became apparent that he was going to die, I took it upon myself to remove him from his oxygen tent and send him home to his family and garden. There he died. The hospital didn't like it much. His wife sued me for a half a million dollars. The insurance company had to pay.”

The engineer, still smiling faintly, was watching the other like a hawk. “Dr. Vaught, do you know what causes amnesia?”

“Causes it? Like a virus causes chicken pox?”

“Have you seen many cases?”

“Do you regard yourself as a case?”

“I would like to know.”

“You are a very persistent young man. You ask a great many questions.”

“And I notice you don't answer them.”

The pistol was assembled. Sutter sat down, shoved in the clip, pulled back the breach and rang up a bullet. He clicked the safety and took aim at the Arab physician. The engineer screwed up one eye against the shot, but Sutter sighed and set the pistol down.

“All right, Barrett, what's wrong?”

“Sir?”

“I'm listening. What's wrong?”

Now, strangely, the engineer fell silent for a good twenty seconds.

Sutter sighed. “Very well. How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

Sutter was like an unwilling craftsman, the engineer perceived, a woodworker who has put on his coat and closed up shop. Now a last customer shows up. Very well, if you insist. He takes the wood from the customer, gives it a knock with his knuckles, runs a thumb along the grain.

“Are you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Do you like girls much?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Very much.”

“Do you have intercourse with girls?”