The Last Gentleman (8 page)

“Yes sir. Sir?”

“What's that?” said the old man, giving him a hairy convoluted ear.

“The lady who just left. Now is that Mrs. Rita Sutter or Miss—”

“Mrs. Mrs. Rita Vaught. She married my oldest boy, Sutter Vaught. Dr. Vaught. They're divorced. But I'm going to tell you, we're closer to her than to Sutter, my own flesh and blood. Oh, she's a fine woman. Do you know what that woman did?”

“No sir,” said the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve to get the straight of it.

“Why, she's the one who went up to his school when he got sick this time and got him into the hospital. When there was no room. That's not even a regular hospital room!”

“And, ah, Kitty?”

“Kitty is Jamie's sister. You want to know what she's done for Kitty?”

“Yes sir.”

“She invites Kitty to come up here to New York not for a week but a year, to take ballet. She's taking her to Europe next month! And she's not even kin! What are you going to do with a woman like that,” cried the old man, taking the engineer by the blade of muscle at his shoulder and squeezing it hard.

“All right,” said the engineer, nodding and wincing.

“And she's second in command to the third largest foundation in the world!”

“Foundation,” said the engineer vaguely.

“She's executive secretary. She can pick up the telephone andspend five million dollars this afternoon.”

“Is that right?”

“You come on up here in the morning and see Jamie.”

“Yes sir.”

3
.

He did go see Jamie but Kitty was not there.

“What about Kitty?” he asked Mr. Vaught in the hall. It was not really a bold question since Mr. Vaught had once again set a tone of antic confidence, as much as to say: here we are two thousand miles from home, so it's all right for me to tell you about my family.

“Do you know what they've had that girl doing eight hours a day as long as I can remember?”

“No sir.” The other, he noticed, pronounced “girl” as “gull,” a peculiarity he last remembered hearing in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Ballet dancing. She's been taking ballet since she was eight years old. She hopes to try out for the New York City Center Ballet Company.”

“Very good.”

“Lord, they've had her studying up here, in Chicago, Cleveland, everywhere.”

The engineer wondered who “they” were. Mrs. Vaught? “She must be very good.”

“Good? You should see her prizes. She won first prize two years in a row at the Jay Cee Festival. Last year her mama took her up to Cleveland to study with the world's most famous ballet teacher. They lived in a hotel for nine weeks.”

“It must require a great deal of self-sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice? That's all she does.” The other's eye glittered through the billowing smoke. Yet there was something unserious, even farcical, about his indignation.

“Even now?”

“I mean all. She dudn't go out to parties. She dudn't have, just as to say, dates. If a young man paid a call on her, I swear I don't think she'd know what to do.”

“Is that right,” said the engineer thoughtfully.

“I don't think it's worth it, do you?”

“No sir,” he said absently. He rose. “I think I'll go in and see Jamie. Excuse me, sir.”

“That's all right!”

4
.

Without quite knowing why he did so—for now he had the Handsome Woman's name and had looked her up in the telephone book and now knew where Kitty lived—he kept up his vigil in the park.

Once he went to look at the house they lived in. They had, Kitty and Rita, a charming cottage in a mews stuck away inside a city block in the Village. He had not imagined there could be such a place in New York, that the paltry particles, ravening and singing, could be so easily gotten round. But they were gotten round, by making things small and bright and hiding them away in the secret sunny center of a regular city block. Elsewhere in New York—wherever one stood—there was the sense of streets running a thousand miles in either direction, clear up to 302nd Street and petering out in some forlorn place above Yonkers or running clean to Ontario, for all he knew. They, Kitty and Rita, got out of the wind, so to speak, found a sunny lee corner as sheltered as a Barbados Alley.

Then why not pick up the telephone and call her up and say, what about seeing you? Well, he could not exactly say why except that he could not. The worst way to go see a girl is to go see her. The best way is not to go see her but to come upon her. Having a proper date with a girl delivers the two of you into a public zone of streets and buildings where every brick is turned against you.

The next day Rita came to the bench and Kitty joined her. It was not until he saw them through the telescope that he knew why he had kept up his vigil: it was because he did not know enough about Kitty.

When they left, they turned west. He waited. After five or six minutes they came through the maples and crossed the meadow toward the Tavern-on-the-Green. There they sat not half a mile away but twenty feet, outlined in rainbows and drifting against each other weightless and soundless like mermaids in the shallow ocean depths. Packing his telescope, he walked south past the restaurant and turned back. He found a table against a peninsula of open brickwork where by every calculation—yes: through a niche he caught a glimpse of the gold chain clasping the hardy structures of Kitty's ankle. He ordered a beer.

Like all eavesdroppers, he felt as breathless as if the future of his life might depend on what was said. And perhaps, he being what he was, it did.

“It's no use,” Kitty was saying.

“It is use,” said Rita. Her hair stirred. She must be turning her head to and fro against the bricks.

“What do you think is the matter with me, Ree?”

“Nothing that is not the matter with all of us.”

“I am not what I want to be.”

“Then accept yourself as you are.”

“I do!” Kitty had a trick of ending her sentences with a lilt like a question. It was a mannerism he had noticed in the younger actresses.

“What is it?”

“Everything.”

“Ah.”

“What's wrong with me?”

“Tell me,” said Rita, turning her head to and fro.

“Do you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“The truth is, I'm stupid. I'm the stupidest person in the world.”

“I see.”

“That doesn't help.”

“What would help?”

“I'm serious. Val and Jamie and you and Sutter are all so smart.”

“You're the best of the lot,” said Rita idly, turning her head against the bricks.

“Sometimes I think other people know a secret I don't know.”

“What secret?”

“The way they talk—”

“People, what people? Do you mean a man and a woman?”

“Well, yes.”

“Ah.”

“Do you know, before I meet somebody—”

“Somebody? Who is somebody?”

“Before I meet them—if I know I'm going to meet them—I actually have to memorize two or three things to say. What a humiliating confession. Isn't that awful. And it is getting worse. Why am I like that?”

“Why say anything?”

“I keep thinking that it must be possible to be with a person with things natural between us.”

“A person? What person? I'm a person. Aren't things easy between us?”

“Yes—because you've spoiled me.”

“Like hell. Finish your sandwich and get back to work.”

“Ree, I'm not even a good dancer.”

“You're good, but you're lazy.”

“No, Can Can.” Or did she say
Quin Quin?

“So now I'm getting old.”

“No, Ree. But in a particular relationship do you think it is one's attitude or the other person who counts?”

“Who is this other person?”

“Do you remember what Will said yesterday?”

“Will?”

“Will Barrett? You know, the boy Poppy brought in.”

“So now it's Will.”

“Didn't you like him?”

“You make him sound like Cousin Will from Savannah.”

“Well.”

“Honey, I've got news for you.”

“What?”

“That boy is not well.”

“Not really.”

“Really. And I can assure you there is nothing romantic about mental illness.”

“But he isn't—”

“Wait. I suddenly begin to get it. I do believe that it is his symptoms which interest you.”

“No, I think he's very nice.”

“Yes, I see it! You're the girl who can't talk. And he can't remember. That makes you a pair.”

“No.”

“So you're going to remember for him and he's going to talk for you.”

“No.”

“Only it's more than that, isn't it? You also believe you can help him.”

“Help him? Why does he need help?”

Rita's reply was not audible. They had gotten up and were moving away.

He sat deep in thought until he finished his beer. My need for eavesdropping is legitimate enough, he said to himself, screwing up an eye. What with the ravening particles and other noxious influences, when one person meets another in a great city, the meeting takes place edge on, so to speak, each person so deprived of his surface as to be all but invisible to the other. Therefore one must take measures or else leave it to luck. Luck would be this: if he saw her snatch a purse, flee into the park pursued by the cops. Then he would know something and could do something. He could hide her in a rocky den he had discovered in a wild section of the park. He would bring her food and they would sit and talk until nightfall, when they could slip out of the city and go home to Alabama. Such a turn of events was unlikely, however.

5
.

The Vaughts liked the engineer very much, each feeling that he was his or her special sort of person. And he was.

Each saw him differently.

Mr. Vaught was certain he was a stout Southern lad in the old style, wellborn but lusty as anyone, the sort who knows how to get along with older men. Back home he would have invited the younger man on a hunt or to his poker club, where he was certain to be a favorite. The second time Mr. Vaught saw him, he took him aside ceremoniously and invited him to Jamie's birthday party.

Jamie—who, he was told, had a severe and atypical mononucleosis—saw him as a fellow technician, like himself an initiate of science, that is, of a secret, shared view of the world, a genial freemasonry which sets itself apart from ordinary folk and sees behind appearances. He lent the engineer a tattered offprint of a scientific article which was written by his brother and which he kept under his pillow. It was titled
The Incidence of Post-orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students,
and divided into two sections, the first subtitled “Genital Sexuality as the Sole Surviving Communication Channel between Transcending-Immanent Subjects,” and the second, “The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence.” The engineer read the article twice and could not make head or tail of it, except a short description of technical procedure in which Dr. Sutter, following some hunch or other, had examined the urethral meatus of some thirty male suicides for the presence of spermatozoa.

To Mrs. Vaught elder he was as nice as he could be. His manners were good without being too ceremonial. There was a lightness in him: he knew how to fool with her. They could even have a fuss. “Now you listen to me, Billy Barrett, it's time you buckled down,” etc. So acute was his radar that neither Mrs. Vaught nor her husband could quite get it into their heads that he did not know everything they knew. He
sounded
like he did. She would speak allusively of six people utterly unknown to him—“So I took one look at her when she got home from school and of course her face was allbroken out and, I said ho-
ho
—”

“Who is that now?” asked the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve.

“Sally, Myra's oldest.”

“Myra?”

“My stepdaughter.”

She was much as he remembered other ladies at home, companionable and funny, except when she got off on her pet subject, fluoridation or rather the evils of it, which had come in her mind to be connected with patriotic sentiments. Then her voice become sonorous and bell-like. She grew shorter than ever, drew into herself like a fort, and fired in all directions. She also spoke often of the “Bavarian Illuminate,” a group who, in her view, were responsible for the troubles of the South. They represented European and Jewish finance and had sold out the Confederacy.

“You know the real story of Judah P. Benjamin and John Slidell, don't you?” she asked him, smiling.

“No ma'am,” he said, looking at her closely to see if she was serious. She was. In her smiling eyes he caught sight of fiery depths.

Rita, however, paid no attention tohim. She looked through him.

Kitty? Twice she was in Jamie's room when he came up, but she seemed abstracted and indifferent. When he asked her if she wanted a Coke (as if they were back in high school in Atlanta), she put her head down and ducked away from him. He couldn't understand it. Had he dreamed that he had eavesdropped?

On his fourth visit to Jamie he had a small amnesic fit, the first in eighteen months.

As he climbed into the thin watery sunlight of Washington Heights, the look and smell of the place threw him off and he slipped a cog. He couldn't remember why he came. Yonder was a little flatiron of concrete planted with maybe linden trees like a park in Prague. Sad-looking Jewish men walked around with their hands in their pockets and hair growing down their necks. It was as far away as Lapland. A sign read:
Washington Heights Bar and Grill.
Could George Washington have set foot here? Which way is Virginia?