The Last Gentleman (12 page)

There passed between them the almost voluptuous intercourse of bad news. Why is it, thought he, hunkering over and taking his pulse, I cannot hear what people say but only the channel they use?

“So it's not such a big thing,” she said softly. “One small adolescent as against the thirty thousand Japanese children we polished off.”

“How's that?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear.

“At Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“I don't, ah—”

“But this little guy happens to be a friend of mine. And yours. He has myelogenous leukemia, Bill.”

Oh, and I'm sick too, he thought anxiously, looking at his hands. Why is it that bad news is not so bad and good news not so good and what with the bad news being good, aye that is what makes her well and me sick? Oh, I'm not well. He was silent, gazing at his open hands on his knees.

“You don't seem surprised,” said Rita after a moment.

“I knew he was sick,” he murmured.

“What's that?” she asked quickly. He saw she was disappointed by his listlessness. She had wanted him to join her, stand beside her and celebrate the awfulness.

“Why shouldn't he go home?” he asked, straightening up.

“Why shouldn't he indeed? A very good question: because just now he is in a total remission. He feels fine. His blood's as normal as yours or mine. He's out of bed and will be discharged tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So. He'll be dead in four months.”

“Then I don't see why he shouldn't go home or anywhere else.”

“There is only one reason. A tough little bastard by the name of Larry Deutsch up at the Medical Center. He's got a drug, a horrifyingly dangerous drug, which incidentally comes from an herb used by the Tarahumaras.”

To his relief, Rita started on a long spiel about Jamie's illness. He knew the frequency of her channel, so he didn't have to listen.

“—so Larry said to me in the gentlest voice I ever heard: ‘I think we're in trouble. Take a look.' I take a look, and even knowing nothing whatever about it, I could see there was something dreadfully wrong. The little cells were smudged—they looked for all the world like Japanese lanterns shining through a fog. That was over a year ago—”

Instead he was thinking of wars and death at home. On the days of bad news there was the same clearing and sweetness in the air. Families drew closer. Azaleas could be seen. He remembered his father's happiness when he spoke of Pearl Harbor—where he was when he heard it, how he had called the draft board the next morning. It was not hard to see him walking to work on that Monday. For once the houses, the trees, the very cracks in the sidewalk had not their usual minatory presence. The dreadful threat of weekday mornings was gone! War is better than Monday morning.

As his sweat dried, the fleece began to sting his skin.

“—fact number two. Jamie has the best mind I ever encountered. Better even than Sutter, my charming ex-husband. It's really quite funny. His math teacher in New Hampshire was glad to get rid of him. ‘Get him out of here,' he told me. ‘He wants to argue about John von Neumann's
Theory of Games
—'”

It was her silences, when they came, that he attended.

“So what is the problem?” he asked.

“He's remitted on prednisone. Poppy and Dolly refuse to admit that he is going to die. Why not give him another pill, they say. Well, there are no more pills. He's been through them all.”

He was silent.

She regarded him with a fond bright eye.

“Somehow you remind me of the lance corporal in
Der Zauberberg.
Do you mind if I call you lance corporal?”

“No ma'am.”

“What would you like to do if you had your choice?”

“I do have my choice. Go with Jamie.”

“No, I mean if Jamie hadn't showed up.”

“Oh, I'd go see Kitty.”

“Leave all of us out of it. And suppose, too, money is no object.”

“I guess I'd finish my education.”

“In what?”

“Oh, metallurgy, I expect.”

“What school would you pick?”

“Colorado School of Mines.”

“You'd like to go out there?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Suppose Jamie would want to go too.”

“That's up to him.”

“Take a look at this.”

He found himself gazing at a curled-up Polaroid snapshot of a little white truck fitted with a cabin in its bed. The truck was parked on a stretch of meager shingly beach. Kitty, in long shorts, leaned against the cabin, wide-brimmed hat in hand in a burlesque of American-lady-on-safari.

“What is this?”

“Ulysses.”

“Ulysses?”

“He was meant to lead us beyond the borders of the Western world and bring us home.”

“I see.”

“But seriously now, here's the proposition,” she said. And he found that when she gave him ordinary directions he could hear her. As of this moment you are working for me as well as for Poppy. Perhaps for both of us but at least for me. Keep Jamie up here long enough for Larry to give him a course of huamuratl. You two rascals take my apartment here in the city and here are the keys to the shack on Fire Island. Now when you get through with Larry, take Ulysses and take off. Go home. Go to Alaska. In any event, Ulysses is yours. He has been three hundred miles, cost me seven thousand dollars, and is as far as I'm concerned a total loss. Here is the certificate of ownership, which I've signed over to you and Jamie. It will cost you one dollar. Jamie has coughed up. She held out her hand. “I'll take my money, please.”

“I don't have a dollar.”

The articles, papers, keys, photograph she lined up on his thigh. He looked closely at the snapshot again.

“What did you get it for?” he asked her.

“To camp in Europe. Isn't that stupid? Considering that I'd have to buy gas for that monster Ulysses by the liter.”

“You've already told Jamie?”

“Yes.”

“And Mr. Vaught agrees to this?”

“He will if you ask him.”

“What about Kitty?”

“My friend, allow me to cue you in. Perhaps you have not noticed it, but our young friend Jamie is sick to death of the women in the family. Including me. Kitty and I made him the same deal: the three of us for Long Island and the camper (it sleeps three) and he laughed in our faces and I can't say I blame him. Let me put it to you straight out.”

“All right.”

“Just suppose you asked him—you said, Jamie, I got Ulysses parked outside in the street—come on now, let's me and you hit the road. What would he say?”

“He wouldn't like the Ulysses part.”

“Dear God, you're right.” Her fist came down on his knee and stayed there. “You're right. You see, you
know.
All right, leave out the word ‘Ulysses.' What then? What would he do?”

“He'd go.”

“You know something: you're quite a guy.”

“Thank you.” He plucked at his sweat suit. It came away from him like old skin. “Then you mean Kitty will go to Europe, after all?”

“My dear young friend, hear this. I do believe you underestimate yourself. I do not believe you realize what a hurricane you've unleashed and how formidable you yourself are. You've got our poor Kitty spinning like a top. Not that I blame her. Why is it some men can sit like Achilles sat and some men can't? But I propose to you, my lordly young sir, that we give our young friend her year abroad, which is the only one she'll ever have. Seriously, Kitty saved my life. She is the sister of that son of a bitch I married. She bucked me up when I needed it and by God I'm returning the favor. Do you have any idea what it would be like to be raised by Poppy and Dolly, who are in their own way the sweetest people in the world, but I mean—God. You have no idea what it's like down there these days, the poor bloody old South. I'll tell you what. Give her her year in Florence and then if
you
haven't forgotten all about her, I'll send her home as fast as her little legs will carry her. Or better still, when you and Jamie get through with Larry, come on over and join us!”

The next thing he knew, she was thrusting something into his pocket, but he didn't have a pocket, then inside the drawstring of his sweat suit, tucked it with a fierce little tuck like an aunt at Christmas. “Your first month's salary in advance,” she said, and was on her way.

Taking the check from his loin, he read it several times. It seemed to be postdated. He scratched his head. On the other hand, what was today's date?

11
.

It was the first hot night. There were signs of summer. Fires had broken out in Harlem. Twice there were gunshots as close as Seventieth or Eightieth Street. Police cars raced north along Central Park West. But the park was quiet. Its public space, paltry by day, was leafed out in secrecy and darkness. Lamps made gold-green spaces in the rustling leaves.

He strolled about the alp at the pond, hands in pockets and brow furrowed as if he were lost in thought. It was a dangerous place to visit by night, but he paid no attention. He felt irritable and strong and wouldn't have minded a fist-fight. A few minutes earlier a damp young man had fallen in step on his deaf side.

“Didn't we take philosophy together at the Y?” the stranger murmured, skipping nimbly to get in step.

“What's that,” said the engineer absently.

“I thought it unconscionably bad,” murmured the other.

“Eh?” The engineer cupped his good ear.

“Are you interested in the Platonic philosophy?” the other asked him.

“In
what?
” said the engineer, stopping and swinging around to hear better but also bending upon the other such an intent, yet unfocused gaze that he melted into the night.

Strong and healthy as he felt, he was, if the truth be known, somewhat dislocated. The sudden full tide of summer sent him spinning. The park swarmed with old
déjà vus
of summertime. It put him in mind of something, the close privy darkness and the black tannin smell of the bark and the cool surprising vapors of millions of fleshy new leaves. From time to time there seemed to come to him the smell of Alabama girls (no, Mississippi), who bathe and put on cotton dresses and walk uptown on a summer night. He climbed the alp dreamily and stooped over the bench. The cul-de-sac held the same message it had held for days, a quotation from Montaigne. He read it under a lamp:

No one had picked it up. Nor was it very interesting, for that matter: when he sniffed it, it smelled not of Montaigne but of a person who might quote Montaigne on such a night as this, an entirely different matter.

“Wait—” he stopped in a dapple of light and leaves and snapped his fingers softly. That was what his father used to say. He too quoted Montaigne on a summer night but in a greener, denser, more privy darkness than this. The young man in the park snapped his fingers again. He stood a full minute, eyes closed, swaying slightly. He raised a hand tentatively toward the West.

Yonder was not the alp but the levee, and not the lamp in the trees but the street light at Houston Street and De Ridder. The man walked up and down in the darkness under the water oaks. The boy sat on the porch steps and minded the Philco, which clanked and whirred and plopped down the old 78's and set the needle hissing and voyaging. Old Brahms went abroad into the summer night. West, atop the levee, couples sat in parked cars. East, up De Ridder, from the heavy humming ham-rich darkness of the cottonseed-oil mill there came now and then the sound of Negro laughter.

Up and down the man walked and spoke to the boy when he passed the steps. More cars came nosing discreetly up the levee, lights out and appearing to go by paws, first left then right. The man grew angry.

“The prayer meeting must be over,” said the man ironically.

Out poured old Brahms, the old spoiled gorgeous low-German music but here at home surely and not in Hamburg.

“What do they expect,” said the man now, westbound. He took his turn under the street light and came back.

“Now they,” he went on, nodding to the east. “They fornicate and the one who fornicates best is the preacher.”

The Great Horn Theme went abroad, the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the worst of times.

“But they,” he said to the levee—“they fornicate too and in public and expect
them
back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected.”

The boy waited for the scratch in the record. He knew when it was coming. The first part of the scratch came and he had time to get up and hold the tone arm just right so the needle wouldn't jump the groove.

“Watch them.”

“Yes sir.”

“You just watch them. You know what's going to happen?”

“No sir.”

“One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch.”

The man stayed, so the boy said, “Yes sir.”

“Go to whores if you have to, but always remember the difference. Don't treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady.”

“No sir, I won't.”

The record ended but the eccentric groove did not trip the mechanism. The boy half rose.

“If you do one, then you're going to be like them, a fornicator and not caring. If you do the other, you'll be like them, fornicator and hypocrite.”

He opened his eyes. Now standing in the civil public darkness of the park, he snapped his fingers softly as if he were trying to remember something.

Then what happened after that? After he
—

Leaning over, he peered down at the faint dapple on the path. After a long moment he held up his watch to the lamplight. After a look around to get his bearings, he walked straight to the corner of the park and down into the BMT subway.