The Last Gentleman (7 page)

An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.

“Do you know him?” asked the old man.

“No sir.”

“That's Dr. Moon Mullins. He's a fine little fellow.”

The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.

The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer's memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.

The engineer cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?” He had caught a lilt in the old man's speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.

“I was.” The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.

“From north Alabama?”

“I was.” His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.

“Birmingham? Gadsden?”

“Halfway between,” cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle's. “Wait a minute,” said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. “Don't I know you? Aren't you—” snapping his fingers.

“Will Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett.”

“Over in—” He shook his hand toward the southwest

“Ithaca. In the Mississippi Delta.”

“You're Ed Barrett's boy.”

“Yes sir.”

“Lawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty.” Now it was his turn to do the amazing. “Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—”

“That was my uncle, Fannin Barrett,” murmured the engineer.

“Fannin Barrett,” cried the other, confirming it. “I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana.”

“Yes sir.”

“Chandler Vaught,” said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I'd seen you before. Weren't you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall's in Hattiesburg?”

“No sir.”

“Worked for the highway department?”

“No sir.”

“How did you know I wasn't from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia.”

“You don't sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn't sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone.”

“Sho. But now you don't talk like—”

“No sir,” said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. “I've been up here quite a while.”

“So you say I'm from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham,” said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. “Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?”

“Yes sir.”

“Anniston.”

“Yes sir.”

“He don't even act surprised,” the old man announced to the hospital at large. “But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago.”

“Yes sir. Did you know my father?” asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.

“
Know
him! What are you talking about?”

“Yes sir.”

“We used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur,” he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. “I got my youngest boy in there,” he went on in the same tone. “He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?” For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.

“No sir.”

“Do you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He's a doctor like you.”

“I'm not a doctor,” said the engineer, smiling.

“Is that so,” said the other, hardly listening.

Now, coming to himself with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer's arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his “stunt,” as he called it.

It seemed to be a roomful of women. There were only three, he determined later, but now with Mr. Vaught gripping him tight under the armpit and five pairs of eyes swinging round to him and shooting out curious rays, he felt as if he had been thrust onto a stage.

“And listen to this,” said Mr. Vaught, still holding him tightly. “He didn't say Gadsden and he didn't say Birmingham, he said halfway between.”

“Actually I didn't say that,” began the engineer.

“This is Ed Barrett's boy, Mama,” he said after pointing the engineer in several different directions.

A pince-nez flashed at him. There was a roaring in his ears. “Lord, I knew your mother, Lucy Hunicutt, the prettiest little thing I ever saw!”

“Yes ma'am. Thank you.”

The women were taken up for a while with tracing kinships. (Again he caught a note of rueful eagerness in their welcome: were they political enemies of his father?) Meantime he could catch his breath. It was a longish room and not ordinarily used, it seemed, for patients, since one end was taken up with medical appliances mounted on rubber casters and covered by plastic envelopes. At the other end, between the women, a youth lay in bed. He was grinning and thrashing his legs about under the covers. The Handsome Woman stood at his bedside, eyes vacant, hand on his pillow. As the engineer looked at her he became aware of a radiance from another quarter, a “certain someone” as they used to say in old novels. There was the same dark-browed combed look he remembered. Again a pang of love pierced his heart. Having fallen in love, of course, he might not look at her.

“—my wife, Mrs. Vaught,” Mr. Vaught was saying, aiming him toward the chunky little clubwoman whose pince-nez flashed reflections of the window. “My daughter, Kitty—” Then Kitty was his love. He prepared himself to “exchange glances” with her, but woe: she had fallen into a vacant stare, much like the Handsome Woman, and even had the same way of rattling her thumbnail against her tooth. “And my daughter-in-law, Rita.” The Handsome Woman nodded but did not take her eyes from the patient. “And here all piled up in the bed is my bud, Jamie.” The patient would have been handsome too but for a swollen expression, a softening, across the nosebridge, which gave his face an unformed look. Jamie and Kitty and Mrs. Vaught were different as could be, yet they had between them the funded look of large families. It was in their case no more than a blackness of brow, the eyebrows running forward in a jut of bone which gave the effect of setting the eye around into a profile, the clear lozenge-shaped Egyptian eye mirroring the whorled hair of the brow like a woods creature.

He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol.

“Where're you from,” cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to.

“Ithaca,” he said, smiling. “Over in the Delta.” He felt himself molt. In the space of seconds he changed from a Southerner in the North, an amiable person who wears the badge of his origin in a faint burlesque of itself, to a Southerner in the South, a skillful player of an old play who knows his cues and waits smiling in the wings. You stand in the posture of waiting on ladies and when one of them speaks to you so, with mock-boldness and mock-anger (and a bit of steel in it too), you knew how to take it. They were onto the same game. Mrs. Vaught feasted her eyes on him. He was
nice.
(She, he saw at once, belonged to an older clan than Mr. Vaught; she knew ancient cues he never heard of.) She could have married him on the spot and known what she was getting.

It was just as well he hadn't pretended to be a doctor, for presently two doctors came in. One, a gaunt man with great damp hands and coiling veins, took the patient's arm and began massaging it absently. The doctor gave himself leave not to talk and not to focus his eyes. The hand was absent-minded too, felt its way into the boy's armpit, touched the angle of his jaw. What I am doing is of no importance, said the hand. Nothing was important but an unfocused fondness which seemed to hum and fill the room. Now, while the hand went its way, browsing past bone and artery and lymph node, the doctor leaned over to read the title of the book the boy had closed on his finger.

“Tractatus Log—” he began, and exchanged glances with his assistant, a chesty little house physician with a mustache and a row of gleaming pencils and penlights clipped in his pocket. The doctors gazed at each other with thunderstruck expressions which made everybody laugh. Again the youth's eyes narrowed and his legs began to thrash about. Again the big damp hand went about its business, this time gliding to the youth's knee and quieting him. Why, he's seriously ill, thought the sentient engineer, watching the monitory hand.

“It's not too hard to read,” said the patient, his voice all squeaks and horns. “Sutter gave it to me,” he told the Handsome Woman, who was still gazing dry-eyed and had taken no notice even of the doctors.

“What a wonderful man,” cried the engineer when the doctors left. “I envy you,” he told the patient.

“You wouldn't envy me if you had to live in this room for five weeks.”

“I wouldn't mind at all,” said the engineer earnestly.

They looked at him. “How long have you been up here?” Mrs. Vaught asked.

“Five years. Seven, including my two years at Princeton. All my immediate family are dead. Do you know this is the first time I have talked to a, ah, family in years. I had forgotten—” he broke off and rubbed his forehead. He saw that he was expected to give an account of himself. “No, really. I don't think it is bad to be here. It reminds me of a time I was in the hospital—for three months—and it wasn't bad at all! In fact I felt better in the hospital than anywhere else.”

“What was the matter with you?” Jamie asked him.

“I had a nervous condition, nothing very serious, an episode of amnesia, if you want to know the truth.”

“Amnesia,” said Kitty, looking at him for the first time.

“Yes. I didn't know my own name, but I knew enough to put myself in the hospital. It was caused by a toxic condition.”

“You committed yourself,” said Mrs. Vaught.

“Yes ma'am. I went to a very expensive place in Connecticut and was soon much better.”

“How did you recover your memory?” Kitty asked him curiously.

“That was the strangest thing of all. For two months I remembered nothing. During this time I had gotten into the habit of playing Chinese checkers with another patient, a girl with a more serious condition than mine. She had not spoken to anyone for two years—she had not uttered a single word—even though she had received shock treatment. There was something familiar about her. Perhaps that was why I was attracted to her—that and the fact that I too was shy about talking and since she—”

They all laughed and he looked startled. “Yes, it's true. I was shy! I don't know why I'm not shy now. Anyhow she said nothing and I remembered nothing, and so it wasn't bad. You asked me how my memory came back. It was very simple. One night as we played Chinese checkers I looked at her and remembered who she was. ‘Aren't you Margaret Rich?' I asked her. She said nothing. ‘Didn't your family have the cottage next to ours in Monteagle ten years ago?' (That was before we started going to Mentone.) Still she said nothing. ‘Why, I remember the dress you wore to a dance,' I told her (I always remember the remote past first). ‘It was an orange-colored cotton twill sort of material.' ‘That was my piqué,' says she as normally as you please.” For some reason he flushed and fell silent.

“Do you mean that she spoke normally after that?” asked Kitty presently. She had swung around and was searching his face with her bold brown eyes.

“No, not normally, but it was a beginning,” he said, frowning, feeling irritated with himself for being garrulous.

“I don't understand why she didn't speak before,” said Jamie, thrashing his legs.

“I understand it!” cried Kitty. But then she blushed and turned away.

The others were not as amazed by the engineer's somewhat disconnected story as one might expect. For, strange to say, it was understood that it was open to him at that moment to spin just such a yarn, half-serious and curious.

“Yes, I know why your stay in the hospital was not so bad,” said Jamie. “You weren't really sick.”

“I'll trade with you any time,” said the engineer. “Believe me, it is a very uncomfortable experience to have amnesia.”

At that moment the Handsome Woman whispered something to Kitty and the two of them kissed the patient, said their goodbyes and left. He waited for another brown-eyed look but Kitty had lapsed into vacancy again and did not seem to notice him. The talkative engineer fell silent.

Presently he roused himself and took his leave. The patient and his mother asked him to come back. He nodded absently. Mr. Vaught followed him into the hall and steered him to the window, where they gazed down on the sooty moraine of Washington Heights.

“You come on up here and see Jamie again, you heanh me,” he said, drawing him close and exhaling his old-man smell of fresh cotton and sour breath.