The Last Gentleman (16 page)

“Um. I'd guess you were a minister or perhaps a professor.”

“What
race?
”

“Why, um, colored.”

“Look at this.”

To the hitchhiker's astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.

“Ah,” said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn't see much in the gathering darkness.

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“Look at that patch.”

“Then you're not—?”

“I'm not a Negro.”

“Is that right?”

“My name is not Isham Washington.”

“No?”

“It's Forney Aiken.”

“Is that so,” said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

“Does that name ring a bell?”

“It does sound familiar,” said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of
déjà vus
made everything sound familiar.

“Do you remember a picture story that appeared in July '51
Redbook
called ‘Death on the Expressway'?”

“I'm not sure.”

“It was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies.”

“As a matter of fact, I think I do—”

“Do you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?”

“Who?”

“Or the article in
Liberty:
‘I Saw Vic Genovese'? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese.”

“You're Forney Aiken the—”

“The photographer.”

“Yes, I think I do,” said the engineer, nodding but still wary. This fellow could still be a philosopher. “Anyhow I certainly do appreciate the ride.” The singing hordes of mosquitoes were coming ever nearer. He wished Forney would getgoing.

“Forney,” cried the other, holding out a hand.

“Will. Will Barrett.”

The green Chevrolet resumed its journey, taking its place shakily among the Fruehauf tractors. Breathing a sigh of relief, the engineer spoke of his own small efforts in photography and took from his wallet a color snapshot of the peregrine falcon, his best.

“Tremendous,” cried the photographer, once again beside himself with delight at having fallen in with such a pleasant and ingenious young man. In return he showed his passenger a tiny candid camera concealed under his necktie whose lens looked like the jewel of a tie clasp.

It, the candid camera, was essential to his present assignment. The photographer, it turned out, was setting forth on an expedition this very afternoon, the first he had undertaken in quite awhile. It was something of a comeback, the engineer surmised. He had the shaky voice and the fitful enthusiasms of a man freshly sober.

The nature of his new project accounted for his extraordinary disguise. He wished to do a series on behind-the-scene life of the Negro. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night: why not
be
a Negro? To make a long story short, he had persuaded a dermatologist friend to administer an alkaloid which simulates the deposit of melanin in the skin, with the difference that the darkening effect could be neutralized by a topical cream. Therefore the white patch on his forearm. To complete the disguise, he had provided himself with the personal papers of one Isham Washington, an agent for a burial insurance firm in Pittsburgh.

This very afternoon he had left the office of his agent in New York, tonight would stop off at his house in Bucks County, and tomorrow would head south, under the “cotton curtain,” as he expressed it.

The pseudo-Negro was even more delighted to discover that his passenger was something of an expert on American speech. “You were my first test and I passed it, and you a Southerner.”

“Well, not quite,” replied the tactful engineer. He explained that for one thing you don't say in
sur
-ance but
in
-surance or rather
in
-shaunce.

“Oh, this is marvelous,” said the pseudo-Negro, nearly running under a Borden tanker.

You don't say that either,
mah
velous, thought the engineer, but let it go.

“What do you think of the title ‘No Man an Island'?”

“Very good.”

Tomorrow, the pseudo-Negro explained, he planned to stop in Philadelphia and pick up Mort Prince, the writer, who planned to come with him and do the text.

“But hold on,” exclaimed the driver, smacking the steering wheel again. “How stupid can you get.”

For the third time in a month the engineer was offered a job. “Why didn't I think of it before! Why don't you come with us? You know the country and you could do the driving. I'm a lousy driver.” He was. His driving was like his talking. He was alert and chipper and terrified. “Do you drive?”

“Yes sir.”

But the engineer declined. His services were already engaged, he explained, by a family who was employing him as tutor-companion to their son.

“Ten dollars a day plus keep.”

“No sir. I really can't.”

“Plus a piece of the royalties.”

“I certainly appreciate it.”

“You know Mort?”

“Well, I've heard of him and read some of his books.”

“You know, it was Mort and I who first hit on the idea of the Writers' and Actors' League for Social Morality.”

The engineer nodded agreeably. “I can certainly understand it, considering the number of dirty books published nowadays. As for the personal lives of the actors and actresses—”

The pseudo-Negro looked at him twice. “Oh-
ho
. Very good! Very ironical! I like that. You're quite a character, Barrett.”

“Yes sir.”

“Joking aside, though, it was our idea to form the first folk theater to travel through the South. Last summer it played in over a hundred towns. Where are you from—I bet it played there.”

The engineer told him.

“My God.” The pseudo-Negro ran off the road in his excitement. The hitchhiker put a discreet hand on the wheel until the Chevy was under control. “That's where we're having our festival this fall. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Broadway are coming down. What it is, is like the old morality plays in the Middle Ages.”

“Yes sir.”

“Is that where you're from?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you've got to come with us.”

The engineer managed to decline, but in the end he agreed to drive the other as far as Virginia and the “cotton curtain.” When they stopped the second time to change drivers, he was glad enough to add the two ten-dollar bills, which the pseudo-Negro made a great show of paying him in advance, to his flattened wallet and to sprint around and hop into the driver's seat.

2
.

Under the engineer's steady hand, the Chevrolet fairly sailed down US 1. In short order it turned onto a great new westering turnpike and swept like a bird across the Delaware River not far from the spot where General Washington crossed nearly two hundred years ago.

Forney Aiken's stone cottage was also standing at the time of the crossing. Some years ago, he told the engineer, he and his wife had left New York and beat a more or less disorderly retreat to Bucks County. She was an actor's agent and had to commute. He was trying to quit drinking and thought it might help to live in the country and do chores, perhaps even farm. When farming didn't work, he took to making things, the sort of articles, firkins and sisal tote bags, which are advertised in home magazines. But this was not as simple as it looked either. There was more to it than designing an ad for a magazine. You have to have your wholesale outlet.

There were some people sitting around a lighted pool in an orchard when they arrived. The travelers skirted them in a somewhat ambiguous fashion, not quite ignoring them and not quite stopping to speak but catching a few introductions on the fly, so to speak. Mrs. Aiken looked after them with an expression which gave the engineer to understand that the photographer often showed up with strangers and skirted the pool. Even though it was dark, the photographer insisted on showing the engineer the orchard and barn. It was a pity because the engineer recognized one of the guests, a nameless but familiar actor who took the part of a gentle, wise doctor on the daytime serial which it was his habit to watch for a few minutes after lunch in the Y. But he must be shown on to the barn instead, which was stacked to the rafters with cedar firkins, thousands of them. For some eighteen months the barn had served as a firkin factory. But of the eight or nine thousand manufactured, only five hundred had been sold. “Take your pick,” his host urged him, and the engineer was glad enough to do so, having a liking for well-wrought wooden things. He chose a stout two-gallon firkin of red-and-white cedar bound in copper and fitted with a top. It would be a good thing to carry country butter in or well water or just to sit on between rides.

Later he did meet the poolside group. The actor was a cheerful fellow, not at all like the sad doctor he played, even though his face had fallen into a habitual careworn expression after years in the part. But he had a thick brown merry body and a good pelt on his chest, upon which he rested his highball. No one paid any attention to Forney's disguise. They treated him with the tender apocalyptic cordiality and the many warm hugs of show-business people. Though he knew nothing about show biz, the sentient engineer had no trouble translating their tender regard for their host. It clearly signified: Forney, you're dead, done for, that's why we love you. Forney was as abrupt with them as they were tender with him. He had the manner of one going about his business. To the others, it seemed to the sentient engineer, the expedition was “something Forney was doing” and something therefore to be treated with a mournful and inattentive sympathy which already discounted failure. A rangy forty-five-year-old couple with muscular forty-five-year-old calves, burnt black as Indians, found the engineer and asked him who he was. When he told them he came with Forney, they went deaf and fond. “Forney's got more talent in his little finger than anybody here,” cried the man both privately and loudly, like a proverb, and hurried away.

Though he had not eaten or slept since the day before, he drank two drinks and went swimming. Soon he was treading water in the deep dark end of the pool with Forney's daughter, the only other young person present. Everyone called her Muzh or Moosh. She had the fitful and antic manner of one used to the company of her elders. In no time the two of them had their heads together, snuffling the water like seals. It was understood between them that they were being the young folk. Muzh had just returned from her college year abroad. Her shoulders were strong and sloping from bicycling around youth hostels. In the clear yellow water her strong legs bent like pants. She told him about the guests. Her way of speaking was rapid and confidential as if they had left off only a short time earlier. She rattled off some recent history. “Coop over there—” she spoke into the lambent water, nodding toward a distinguished silver-haired gent, “—is just out of the Doylestown jail, where he served six months for sodomy, though Fra says sodomy rates two to ten.” Who was Fra? (As usual, strangers expected him to know their, the strangers', friends.) And had she, for a fact, said sodomy? He wrung out his ear. Unfortunately she was at that moment on his deaf side.

She dawdled toward him, working the water to and fro through the sluice of her shoulder. On she went about the guests in her rapid, cataloguing voice, bent toward him, the waterline at his mouth, while he grew ever fainter with hunger and more agitated. As her knees brushed against his and she spoke of having transcended Western values, he seized her through the thick parts, fell upon her as much from weakness as desire, fainted upon her, the fine brown berry of a girl she was. “Zut alors,” she cried softly, and now perfunctorily, unsurprised, keeping herself flexed and bent away from him, she asked him about the transvaluation of values. “I couldn't say,” he replied, disappointed. He had heard enough about values from Dr. Gamow. “No, really,” she said. “I am in something of a value crisis and so I'm deeply concerned. What can we do?” “Let's go over yonder,” he replied, fainting with hunger and desire, and nodded to the dark polygon of the barn. “Zut,” she cried, but idly, and swam away. As he stood slack in the water, both lustful and shrunken with cold, she made forays in the water around him, flexing like a porpoise, came under him in the shallows, put him astride and unhorsed him in bluff youth-hostel style. “See you later,” she said at last and went away, but how said she it?

Coming to himself all at once, he socked himself in the head. Swine, said he, staggering about in the shallows, white trash. Here you are in love with a certain person and bound south as a gentleman like Rooney Lee after a sojourn in the North, and at it again: pressing against girls like a horny dolphin and abusing your host besides. No more humbuggery! Leaping from the pool, he ran to the room Forney had shown him and, starved or not, threw a hundred combination punches and did thirty minutes of violent isomorphics until he dripped with sweat, took an ice-cold shower and read two pages of
Living.
Saints contemplated God to be rid of concupiscence; he turned to money. He returned to the pool, exhausted, ravenous, but in his right mind.

“I apologize,” he told Muzh formally as they stood in line for cold cuts. “As a matter of fact I've been, ahem, in something of a value crisis myself and have not eaten or slept in quite awhile. I apologize for being forward with you.”

“Good God,” said Muzh, brushing against him with several dorsal surfaces. “Don't,” she whispered.

“Don't what?”

She didn't answer.

Damn, thought he, and had to thrust his hand through his pocket to keep his knee from leaping.