The Last Gentleman (33 page)

At last he went out to the landing and, seeing a light under Sutter's door, knocked. Sutter answered immediately. He was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, dressed in the same clothes, feet flat on the floor, arms lying symmetrically on the rests. There was no drink or book beside him.

At last Sutter turned his head. “What can I do for you?” The naked ceiling bulb cast his eye sockets into bluish shadow. The engineer wondered if Sutter had taken a drug.

“I have reason to believe I am going into a fugue,” said the engineer matter-of-factly. He turned up the collar of his pajamas. It was cold in here. “I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Jimmy is in there dying. Don't you think I should be more concerned with helping him?”

“Yes, but I am going to live, and according to you that is harder.”

Sutter didn't smile. “Why do you ask me?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Why don't you get married and live happily ever afterwards?”

“Why was that man screaming that you told me about? You never did say.”

“I didn't ask him.”

“But you knew why.”

Sutter shrugged.

“Was it a psychological condition?” asked the engineer, cocking his good ear.

“A psychological condition,” Sutter repeated slowly.

“What was wrong with him, Dr. Vaught?”
The pale engineer seemed to lean forward a good ten degrees, like the clown whose shoes are nailed to the floor.

Sutter got up slowly, scratching his hair vigorously with both hands.

“Come over here.”

Sutter led him to the card table, which had been cleared of dirty swabs but which still smelled of fruity Hoppe's gun oil. He fetched two chrome dinette chairs and set them on opposite sides of the table.

“Sit down. Now. I think you should go to sleep.”

“All right.”

“Give me your hand.” Sutter took his hand in the cross-palm grip of Indian wrestling. “Look at me.”

“All right.”

“Does it embarrass you to hold hands with a man and look at him?”

“Yes.” Sutter's hand felt as dry and tendinous as broomstraw.

“Count to thirty with me. When we finish counting, you will then be able to do what I tell you.”

“All right.”

When they had finished counting, Sutter said: “You say you believe I know something about you. Now you will also do what I tell you.”

“All right.”

“When you leave this room, you will go to your room and sleep soundly for nine hours. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Now when you do get up tomorrow, something is going to happen. As a consequence, you are going to be in a better position to decide what you want to do.”

“All right.”

“For the next few days you may have a difficult time. Now I shall not tell you what to do, but I will tell you now that you will be free to act. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“If you find yourself in too tight a spot, that is, in a situation where it is difficult to live from one minute to the next, come and see me and I'll help you. I may not be here, but you can find me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Good night.” Sutter yawned, pushed back his chair, and began to scratch his head with both hands.

“Good night.”

In his cold bed, the engineer curled up like a child and fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.

13
.

He awoke to a cold diamond-bright morning. Jamie's bed was empty. When he crossed the courtyard, the Thigpens were leaving for the game. Lamar gave John Houghton a drink, which he drained off in one gulp, little finger stuck out. In return John Houghton did a buck-and-wing, swooping down with tremendous swoops and fetching up light as a feather, clapping his hands not quite together but scuffing the horny parts past each other. The engineer, standing pale and blinking in the sunlight, was afraid Lamar was going to say “Get hot!” or something similar, but he didn't. In fact, as the little caravan got underway and the three servants stood waving farewell on the back steps, Lugurtha fluttering her apron, Lamar shook his head fondly. “There's nothing like the old-timey ways!” he said. The Vaught retainers seemed to remind Lamar of an earlier, more gracious time, even though the purple castle didn't look much like an antebellum mansion and the golf links even less like a cotton plantation.

Kitty was eating batter cakes in the pantry. She eyed him somewhat nervously, he thought. But when later he kissed her mouth, not quite cleared of Br'er Rabbit syrup, she kissed him back with her new-found conjugal passion, though a bit absent-mindedly.

“Rita wants to see you,” she told him as she led him through the dark dining room. “Something has happened.”

“Where's Jamie?”

“I'm afraid that's what it's about.”

“Come over here a minute,” he said, trying to pull her behind a screen of iridescent butterfly wings. He felt like a sleepy husband.

“Later, later,” said Kitty absently. For the first time he saw that the girl was badly upset.

As they entered Rita's tower bedroom, Kitty, he noticed, became all at once pudding-faced and hangdog. She looked like Jamie. She hung back like a fourteen-year-old summoned to the principal's office. Her noble matutinal curves seemed to turn to baby fat.

Rita, dressed in a heavy silk kimono, lay propped on a large bed strewn with magazines, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and opened mail. She was reading a book, which she set face down on the bed. From force of habit and by way of getting at someone, he set his head over to see the title. It was
The Art of Loving.
The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.

Getting quickly out of bed and holding an unlit cigarette to her lip, Rita strode back and forth between them. So formidable was it, this way she had of setting the side of her face into a single ominous furrow (something was up all right), that he forgot all about the book.

“Well, they've done it up brown this time,” she said at last, stopping at the window and rubbing her chin in the web of her thumb. “Or rather
he
has.”

“Who?” asked the engineer.

“Sutter,” she said, turning to face him. Kitty stood beside him as flat-footed and button-eyed as Betty Jo Jones in Ithaca Junior High. “Sutter has left and taken Jamie with him,” said Rita quietly.

“Where, Ree?” Kitty cried, but somewhat rhetorically, her eyes in her eyebrows. The surprise was for his benefit.

Rita shrugged.

“I have an idea where they might be headed,” said the engineer.

Rita rolled her eyes. “Then for pity's sake tell us.”

“Jamie was determined to go either out west or to Val's.”

“Then I suggest that you jump in your little truck without further ado and go get him.”

“What I can't understand,” said the engineer absently, putting his fist to his forehead as if to cudgel his poor wits, “is why Dr. Vaught left when he did. He told me— Well, I had no idea he was planning to make a change.”

“It seems a change was made for him,” said Rita dryly.

He became aware that Kitty was woolgathering. Something had happened and she knew about it

“What change is that?” he asked.

“Sutter has been discharged from the hospital staff.” Removing her glasses, she thrust them into the deep pocket of her kimono sleeve. Her pale rough face looked naked and serious and justified, like a surgeon who comes out of the operating room and removes his mask. “It was understood that if he left, he would not be prosecuted.”

“Prosecuted for what?” Up to his usual tricks, the engineer took her import not from the words she said but from the signals. That the import was serious indeed was to be judged from her offhandedness, the license she allowed herself in small things. She lit a cigarette and with a serious sort of free-and-easiness cupped it inward to her palm like a Marine and hunkered over an imaginary campfire between the three of them.

“What were they going to prosecute him for?” asked the engineer again. Within himself he was fighting against the voluptuousness of bad news. Would the time ever come when bad was bad and good good and a man was himself and knew straight up which was which?

“Sutter,” said Rita, warming her hands at the invisible embers and stamping her feet softly, “persuaded a ward nurse to leave her patients, some of whom were desperately ill, and accompany him to an unoccupied room, which I believe is called the terminal room. There they were discovered in bed by the night supervisor, and surrounded by pictures of a certain sort. Wynne Magahee called me last night—he's chief of medicine. He told me, he said: ‘Look, we wouldn't care less what Sutter does with or to the nurses on his own time, but hell, Rita, when it comes to leaving sick people—and to make matters worse, somebody on the ward found out about it and is suing the hospital.' I had to tell Wynne, ‘Wynne it is not for you to make explanations to us but rather for us—'”

Beside him, Kitty had gone as lumpish and cheeky as a chipmunk. “They were
not
desperately ill, Ree,” she said wearily as if it were an old argument. “It was a chronic ward.”

“Very well, they were not desperately ill,” said Rita, eyeing the engineer ironically.

Kitty's lower lip trembled. Poor Kitty, it remained to her, one of the last, to be afflicted. “Poor Sutter,” she whispered, shaking her head. “But why in the world did he—”

“However unfortunate the situation might be,” said Rita grimly, “Sutter's being discovered was not purely and simply a misfortune, that is to say, bad luck. As it happens, Sutter set the time for his rendezvous a few minutes before the night supervisor made her rounds.”

“Do you mean Sutter wanted to get caught, Ree?” cried Kitty.

“There are needs, my dear,” said Rita dryly, “which take precedence over this or that value system. I suspect, moreover, that our friend here knows a good deal more about the situation than we do.”

But though Kitty turned to him, he felt fretful and sore and would not answer. Anyhow he didn't know what Rita was talking about. Instead he asked her: “When did this happen?”

“Thursday night.”

“Then when I spoke to him last night, he already knew that he had been discharged?”

“Yes. And he also knew that he and Jamie were leaving this morning.”

“But he told me I could find him if—” The engineer broke off and fell silent. Presently he asked: “Do Mr. and Mrs. Vaught know?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“Poppy threw up his hands over his head, you know, and rushed out of the room, Dolly took to the bed.”

He was silent.

“I had supposed that your responsibilities as his tutor and companion might include a reasonable concern for his life. The last time he went off with Sutter he was nearly killed.”

The hearty thrust of her malice made him want to grin. He thought of his aunts. Malice was familiar ground. It was like finding oneself amid the furniture of one's living room. He looked at his watch. “I can leave in ten minutes. If he's in Tyree County, I'll be back tomorrow. If they've gone to New Mexico, and I think they have, it'll take longer. I'll look in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Kitty?” He waited in the doorway without looking at her.

When she did not move, he looked up. The girl was stricken. She was wringing the fingers of one hand. He had never seen anyone wring his hands.

“Are you coming with me?”

“I can't,” she said, open-mouthed and soundless like a fourteen-year-old talking past the teacher.

“Why not?”

“Bill,” said Rita, brow gone all quirky, “you can't ask this child to travel with you. Suppose you do have to go to New Mexico.”

“We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow. My uncle lives there and can arrange it.”

She shook her head fondly. “Listen, kids. Here's what you do. Bill, go find Jamie. Then stay with him or bring him home. In either case I guarantee this girl will come a-running as fast as her little legs will carry her. Kitty, I assure you he is coming back. Look at her, Lance Corporal.”

But he looked at Rita instead.

She was daring him! If you leave, said the fine gray eyes, you know that I know that you won't come back. I dare you!

And Kitty: by some queer transformation the girl, his lordly lioness of a Kitty, had been turned into a twittering bird-girl with little bitty legs.

“Kitty, I have to go to my room for a minute. Then I'm leaving.”

“Wait.”
Soundless as a little dove, she flew up to him, and still could not speak.

“What?” he said, smiling.

Rita linked arms with them and drew them together. “If it is of any interest to you, dearie,” she said to Kitty, “my money is on him. Lance Corporal?”

“What?” said the puzzled engineer.

“Idiot,” said Rita, giving him a dig in the ribs with her silken elbow. “The poor girl is wondering whether you are coming back.”

Then, registering as he did a fine glint of appraisal in Rita's eye, he saw the two of them, Kitty and Billy, as doll-like figures tumbling before the magic wand of an enchantress. Nor, and here was the strangest part of it, did he really mind.

A note was clipped with a bobby pin to the ignition switch of the Trav-L-Aire.

Meet me in one hour. Go out81
—

Did she mean north or south 81?

Turn right near top of ridge
—

Lord, which ridge and which side of it?

Watch for
For Sale
sign and Mickle mailbox
—

Before or after turning off?

Pull up out of sight of the highway and wait for me. K.