The Last Gentleman (3 page)

At the end of summer his father died. Though his death was sudden, people were less surprised than they might have been, since it was well known that in this particular family the men died young, after short tense honorable lives, and the women lived another fifty years, lived a brand new life complete with a second girlhood, outings with other girls, 35,000 hearty meals, and a long quarrelsome senescence.

For another month or so the young man, whose name was Williston Bibb Barrett or Will Barrett or Billy Barrett, sat rocking on the gallery with six women: one, his stepmother, who was a good deal older than his father, was nice enough but somewhat abstracted, having a way of standing in the pantry for minutes at a time whistling the tunes of the Hit Parade; three aunts; a cousin; and a lady who was called aunt but was not really kin—all but one over seventy and each as hale as a Turk. He alone ailed, suffering not only from hay fever but having fallen also into a long fit of melancholy and vacancy amounting almost to amnesia. It was at that time that he came near joining the ranks of the town recluses who sit dreaming behind their shutters thirty or forty years while the yard goes to jungle and the bugs drone away the long summer days.

Managing to revive himself, however, he concluded his father's affairs, sold the law library to the surviving members of the firm, reapportioned the rooms of the house in the fashion best calculated to minimize quarrels, had drawn in his favor a letter of credit in the amount of $17,500, his inheritance—and, again losing the initiative, sat rocking on the gallery with his aunts. He considered farming. But all that remained of Hampton, the family plantation, was two hundred acres of buckshot mud long since reclaimed by canebrakes.

As it turned out, his mind was made up for him, for he was drafted shortly thereafter. He put Hampton in the soil bank and served two years in the United States Army, where he took a large number of courses in electronics and from which he was honorably and medically discharged when he was discovered totally amnesic and wandering about the Shenandoah Valley between Cross Keys and Port Republic, sites of notable victories of General Stonewall Jackson.

Once again he found himself sitting in the television room of the Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan, a room done in Spanish colonial motif with exposed yellow beams and furniture of oxidized metal.

As he surveyed his resources and made allowance for his shortcomings—for he was, in some respects, a cool-headed and objective-minded young man—it seemed to him that two courses of action were called for. There was something the matter with him and it should be attended to. Treatment would take money and therefore he needed a job. Transferring his inheritance to a savings account at the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, Columbus Circle branch, he engaged a psychiatrist, whom he consulted for fifty-five minutes a day, five days a week, for the following five years, at an approximate cost of $18,000. He joined therapy groups. Toward the satisfaction of the second requirement he discovered, after careful study of the classified columns of
The New York Times,
that a “maintenance engineer” earned $175 a week. In order to qualify as a maintenance engineer, who was, as it turned out, a kind of janitor, it was necessary to take a six months' course at Long Island University, where he specialized in Temperature and Humidification Control. Upon graduation, he had no trouble securing a position since he was willing to take the night jobs no one else wanted. For the past two years he had been employed as humidification engineer at Macy's, where he presided over a console in a tiny room three floors below street level. Since automatic controls gauged the air outside and regulated the store accordingly, there was little to do but make sure the electrical relays were working properly. His hours were between 12:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., a shift no one else wanted. But he liked it. Not only did he have ample time to read and ponder, the job also offered excellent health and retirement benefits. After twenty-three years he could retire and go home, where, if the ranks of old ladies had thinned out, he could let out rooms and live like a king. The dream even came to him as the subway trains thundered along close by that he might restore Hampton plantation to its former splendor.

Even with this job, there came a time when his inheritance ran out, and it became necessary to find extra work now and then. Again he was lucky and hit upon congenial employment. A medical student who had flunked out of school and joined the Macy's staff put him onto it. For weeks and months at a time he served as companion to lonely and unhappy adolescents, precocious Jewish lads who played band instruments and lived in the towers along Central Park West. It meant removing from his congenial cell in the Y.M.C.A. to an apartment, a dislocation true enough, but it was the sort of thing he did best: tuning in his amiable Southern radar to these rarefied and arcane signals which until he came along had roamed their lonely stratosphere unreceived. Strange to say, he got onto the wave lengths of his charges when their parents could not. Best of all, it fitted in with his regular job. He worked at Macy's at night, slept in the middle of the day, and was ready for his “patient” when the latter came home from school.

4
.

His trouble still came from groups.

It is true that after several years of psychoanalysis and group therapy he had vastly improved his group skills. So thoroughly in fact did he identify with his group companions of the moment, so adept did he become at role-taking, as the social scientists call it, that he all but disappeared into the group. As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of the groups with which one might associate, so that even a normal person sometimes feels dislocated. As a consequence this young man, dislocated to began with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next. There were times when he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else.

So well did he adapt that it always came as a surprise when two groups who got along with him did not get along with each other. For example, he had fallen in with an interracial group which met at a writer's apartment in the Village on Friday nights. It did not strike him as in the least anomalous that on Saturday night he met with the Siberian Gentlemen, a nostalgic supper club of expatriate Southerners, mostly lawyers and brokers, who gathered at the Carlyle and spoke of going back to Charleston or Mobile. At two or three o'clock in the morning somebody would sigh and say, “You can't go home again,” and everybody would go back to his Park Avenue apartment. One night he made the mistake of bringing a friend from the first group to the second, a Southerner like himself but a crude sort who had not yet mastered group skills and did not know the difference between cursing the governor of Virginia, who was a gentleman, and cursing the governor of Alabama, who was not. Thereafter the Siberians grew cool to him and he dropped out. Nor did he fare much better with the interracial group. On his way home from the Village, he was set upon by Harlem thugs in the park and given the beating of his life. When he related the incident at the next meeting his friends frowned and exchanged glances.

He fared a little better with the Ohioans. Some winters ago, he found himself at a ski lodge near Bear Mountain in the company of seven other employees of Macy's, three young men and four young women, all graduates of Ohio State University. Like him, they purchased their outfits complete from cap to boots at a discount from the sports department. They all smelled of new wool and Esquire boot polish and were as healthy and handsome as could be. He hadn't been in their company a week before he became one of them: he called a girl named Carol
Kerrell,
said
mear
for mirror,
tock
for talk,
ottomobile, stummick,
and asked for
carmel
candy. The consonants snapped around in his throat like a guitar string. In April he went to Fort Lauderdale. In short, he became an Ohioan and for several weeks walked like a cat with his toes pointed in, drank beer, forgot the old honorable quarrels of the South, had not a thought in his head nor a care in the world.

It did not last. As they sat this night around the fire in the ski lodge, he and his fellow Ohioans, eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy, Tom and Jerries in hand, heads on laps, the Southerner felt a familiar and disastrous sinking of heart. The little scene, which was pleasant in every respect and which any normal person would surely have found to his liking, suddenly became hateful to him. People seemed to come to the point of flying apart. Though his companion was an attractive and healthy brunette named Carol (Kerrell) Schwarz and though he had reason to believe she liked him and would not repel his advances, the fact was that he could think of nothing to say to her. She was long of leg and deep of thigh and he liked having his head in her lap, but he experienced a sensation of giddiness when she spoke to him. Once he took her for a walk in the park. She picked up a cat. “Hello, cat,” she said, looking into the cat's eyes. “I can see your name is Mehitabel. I'm Kerrell and this is Billy. Billy, say hello to Mehitabel.” Try as he might, he could not bring himself to speak to the cat.

Now at Bear Mountain he lay with his head on her thigh and she leaned over him and said: “I'm a people-liker and I think you're my kind of people. Are you a people-liker?”

“Yes,” he said, his cheek going stiff, and thought what a pity it was he might not have sport with her without talking to her.

His knee began to jerk involuntarily and at the first opportunity he extricated himself and rushed out of the lodge. Outside, he ran through the snowy woods and threw himself into a brierpatch like a saint of old. Shivering with pain and cold, he gazed up at the shadowy knoll associated by tradition with Mad Anthony Wayne. He muttered to himself: “Barrett, you poor fellow, you must be very bad off, worse than you imagined, to have gotten things so mixed up. Here you are lying in a brierpatch when you could be lounging with young people like yourself, people against whom no objection can be raised, your head pillowed in the lap of a handsome girl. Is it not true that the American Revolution has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Wayne and his friends, so that practically everyone in the United States is free to sit around a cozy fire in ski pants? What is wrong with that? What is the matter with you, you poor fellow?”

When he was with Ohioans, he found himself talking like an Ohioan and moving his shoulders around under his coat. When he was with Princetonians, he settled his chin in his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets in a certain way. Sometimes, too, he fell in with fellow Southerners and in an instant took on the amiable and slightly ironic air which Southerners find natural away from home.

It was shortly after the weekend at Bear Mountain that he lapsed into a fugue state which was worse than the last.

But now he had developed an even more alarming symptom. He began to get things backward. He felt bad when other people felt good and good when they felt bad. Take an ordinary day in New York. The sun is shining, people live well, go about satisfying their needs and achieving goals, work at creative jobs, attend cultural attractions, participate in interesting groups. This is, by every calculation, as it should be. Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him feel worse than ever. The analyst had got it all wrong. It was not the prospect of the Last Day which depressed him but rather the prospect of living through an ordinary Wednesday morning.

Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case.

Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people too felt better in hurricanes—though it must be admitted that he had studied only four people and one hurricane, evidence hardly adequate to support a scientific hypothesis. One real robin does suggest a spring, however.

The summer before, he had got caught in hurricane Donna. A girl named Midge Auchincloss, none other in fact than the daughter of his father's old friend, had invited him to drive her up to a jazz festival in Newport. During the same weekend a small hurricane was beating up along the coast but giving every sign of careening off into the North Atlantic. Nobody took much notice of it. Friday afternoon, nothing was very different. The old Northeast smelled the same, the sky was hazed over, and things were not worth much. The engineer and his friend Midge behaved toward each other in their customary fashion. They did not have much to say, not as a consequence of a breakdown in communications such as one often hears about nowadays, but because there was in fact not much to say. Though they liked each other well enough, there was nothing to do, it seemed, but press against each other whenever they were alone. Coming home to Midge's apartment late at night, they would step over the sleeping Irishman, stand in the elevator and press against each other for a good half hour, each gazing abstractedly and dry-eyed over the other's shoulder.

But a knoll of high pressure reared up in front of Donna and she backed off to the west. On the way home from Newport, the Auchinclosses' Continental ran into the hurricane in Connecticut. Searching for Bridgeport and blinded by the rain, which hit the windshield like a stream from a firehose, the engineer took a wrong exit off the turnpike and entered upon a maze of narrow high-crowned blacktops such as criss-cross Connecticut, and got lost. Within a few minutes the gale winds reached near-hurricane strength and there was nothing todo but stop the car. Feeling moderately exhilarated by the uproar outside and the snugness within, dry as a bone in their cocoonof heavy-gauge metal and safety glass, they fell upon one another fully clothed and locked in a death grip. Strange Yankee bushes, perhaps alder and dogbane, thrashed against the windows. Hearing a wailing sound, they sat up and had the shock of their lives. There, standing in the full glare of the headlights, or rather leaning against the force of the hurricane, was a child hardly more than a babe. For a long moment there was nothing to do but gaze at him, so wondrous a sight it was, a cherub striding the blast, its cheeks puffed out by the four winds. Then he was blown away. The engineer went after him, backing up on all fours, butt to wind like a range pony, reached the ditch and found him. Now with the babe lying as cold as lard between them and not even shivering, the engineer started the Continental and crept along, feeling the margin of the road under his tire like a thread under the fingertip, and found a diner, a regular old-style streetcar of a restaurant left over from the days before the turnpikes.