The Last Gentleman (17 page)

He ate three helpings of turkey and ham and rye bread and sat slack and heavy with his blood singing in his ears. Fortunately his host was brimming with plans for the morrow and put him to work after supper toting paraphernalia, cameras and insurance manuals, to the Chevrolet. Later he showed him the house.

“You're going to like Mort Prince. He's our kind of folks.” They had reached the cellar, which the engineer looked at and sniffed with interest because at home the ground was too low for cellars and he'd never seen one before. “He's a sweet guy,” said Forney.

“Yes sir.”

“Have you read his stuff?”

“A couple of novels quite a while ago.”

“You haven't read
Love?
”

“His latest? No.”

“I'll get you a copy tonight.”

“Thank you, but I'm very sleepy. I think I'll go to bed.”

Forney came closer. “You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what this book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about —ing. And in a sense it is!” They were by now back at poolside and within earshot of others, including Muzh. It made the engineer nervous. “But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deeply religious. I'll get you a copy.”

The engineer groaned. What the devil does he mean telling me it's about —ing? Is —ing a joking matter? Am I to understand I am free to — his daughter? Or do we speak of —ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of —ing anyone in the vicinity? His radar boggled.

“It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying,” Forney went on. “Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer, rising unsteadily. “I think I'll go to bed.”

But no sooner had he fallen into the four-poster than a knock came at the door. It was Muzh in a shorty nightgown delivering
Love.
“You talk about randy,” said she and smote her brow. “Sheesh!”

“Thank you,” said the engineer, laughing heartily, and when she had left went reeling about the room like Rooney Lee after the battle of Seven Days. What saved him in the end was not only Southern chivalry but Yankee good sense. Muzh he saw all at once and belatedly, as she might have been seen by her classmates, as a horsy, good-natured, sisterly sort. She was, as they say in the North, a good kid. And so it was permitted him to leave her alone and to excuse himself. What a relief. He wiped his brow.

Worse luck, though, sleep deserted him, left him half dead from lack of it and wide awake. There was nothing to do but read
Love.
He read it straight through, finishing at three o'clock.

Love
was about orgasms, good and bad, some forty-six. But it ended, as Forney had said, on a religious note. “And so I humbly ask of life,” said the hero to his last partner with whose assistance he had managed to coincide with his best expectations, “that it grant us the only salvation, that of one human being discovering himself through another and through the miracle of love.”

The poor engineer arose, faint with fatigue, and threw a few final combination punches to clear his head. But when he got back in bed he found himself lying at attention, his feet sticking up, his left leg tending to rise of itself. There was nothing to do but swallow two of Dr. Gamow's spansules, which induced sleep only indirectly by inhibiting the cortical influence on the midbrain—even though he knew that his sense of time and place would suffer in consequence. Though he might not know where he was tomorrow or what year it was, at least he'd feel better than this.

At any rate he went fast asleep and woke in midmorning, somewhat disoriented but feeling quite cheerful and well.

3
.

Early afternoon found him driving like a cat. The bottle-green Chevrolet went roaring and banking around the many ramps and interchanges of eastern Pennsylvania. The pseudo-Negro sat beside him as alert and jumpy as ever. Presently they left the expressway and went among the sooty little hill towns.
Déjà vus
stole alongside and beckoned at the corner of his eye. How familiar were these steep streets and old 1937 brick-and-limestone high schools and the sooty monkey Pullman smell. Surely I attended that very one, he told himself, where I recall taking mechanical drawing in the basement. Two girls in summer school sat on the school steps, dumb pretty Pennsylvania girls. He waved. They waved back. Oh girls I love you. Don't let anybody mess with you till I get back because I've been here before. Where is this place? “Where is this?” he asked so abruptly that the pseudo-Negro jumped a good inch.

The pseudo-Negro kept harping on Mort Prince, whom they were presently to pick up. The writer, it seemed, had astonished his friends by moving to Levittown. He had inherited the house from an aunt and, instead of selling it, had sold his farm in Connecticut and moved in more or less, as the pseudo-Negro expressed it, for the simple heck of it. “Imagine going from Fiesole to Levittown,” he said, shaking his head. The engineer could very well imagine it.

He began to look forward to meeting Mort Prince. Some years ago he had read two of his novels and remembered them perfectly—he could remember perfectly every detail of a book he had read ten years ago or a conversation with his father fifteen years ago; it was the day before yesterday that gave him trouble. After a war novel which made him famous, Mort Prince wrote a novel about a young veteran who becomes disillusioned with the United States and goes to Italy in quest of his own identity. It is in Europe that he discovers he is an American after all. The book ended on a hopeful note. Mark comes home to visit his dying father, who is a judge in Vermont. The judge is a Yankee in the old style, a man of granite integrity. Now he too, Mark, knows who he is, what he must do, and that all men are his brothers. In the last chapter he climbs High Tor overlooking the valley. If a man does nothing else in life, said Mark to himself, he can at least tell one other man (that all men are brothers) and he another and he in turn another until at last amid the hatred and the dying all men shall one day hear and hearing understand and understanding believe. Mark had come home. Arising from High Tor, he picked up his coat and turned his face to the city.

After his first return to the United States, the pseudo-Negro was saying, Mort Prince had married a hometown girl and moved to Connecticut. It was at this time, as the engineer recalled it, that he had read
The Farther Journey,
a novel about a writer who lives in Connecticut and enters into a sexual relationship with a housewife next door, not as a conventional adultery, for he was not even attracted to her, but rather as the exercise of that last and inalienable possession of the individual in a sick society, freedom. In the words of one reviewer, it was “the most nearly absolutely gratuitous act since Lafcadio pushed Fleurissoire out of the railway carriage in
Les Caves du Vatican.
”

Following his divorce and his latest trip to Italy the writer, according to the pseudo-Negro, had felt the strongest compulsion to return to the United States, seek out the most commonplace environment, and there, like Descartes among the Burghers of Amsterdam, descend within himself and write the first real war novel, an absolutely unvarnished account of one day's action of one infantry platoon. When his aunt died and left him a house, he took off for Fiesole by the first plane.

The attentive engineer, at this moment skillfully piloting the green Chevrolet into the pleasant maze of Levittown, understood perfectly. If his aunt had left him such a house, he'd have moved in too and settled down in perfect contentment.

They entered Levittown. The freshly sprinkled lawns sparkled in the sunlight, lawns as beautiful as Atlanta lawns but less spectral and Druidic. Chipper little Swiss swales they were and no Negroes to cut the grass but rather Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean cranking up their Toros and afterward wisecracking over the fence. Here, he reckoned, housewives ran into each other's kitchens to borrow a cup of Duz. Not a bad life! Really he would like it very much. He could live here cheerfully as a Swiss with never a care for the morrow. But a certain someone was already in Old Virginny by now and his heart pressed south.

But even as they began to circle the blocks and search for house numbers, the sentient engineer began to detect unpleasant radiations. While the pseudo-Negro gabbled away and noticed nothing, it struck the engineer that more people than one might expect were standing about on their lawns and sidewalks. Indeed he could swear that some of them were shooting hostile glances in the direction of the Chevrolet! Recollecting Dr. Gamow's strong hints about certain delusions of persecution, he tried to pay no attention. But they were at it again! One group of householders in particular he noticed and one man in particular, a burly fellow with a small mustache who wore a furry alpine hat which was too small for him.

“What number did you say it was?” he asked the pseudo-Negro.

“One forty-two.”

“Then here it is,” said the engineer, circling the block a second time and pulling up at the same group of householders. He followed the pseudo-Negro up the walk, the latter as garrulous and shaky as ever and noticing nothing, his nerve ends firing at the slightest breeze, even nodding to the householders on the next lawn, whom he fancied to be well-wishers of some sort. They were not well-wishers. They stood about silently, hands in pockets, and kicking the turf. Next to the burly alpiner the engineer spied trouble itself: a thin fierce-eyed damp-skinned woman whose hair was done up in plastic reels, a regular La Pasionaria of the suburbs. He ventured another look. Beyond a doubt, she was glaring straight at him, the engineer!

Mort Prince met them in the deep-set cathedral door, beer in, hand, a pleasant slightish fellow with twirling black hair which flew away in a banner of not absolutely serious rebellion. He wore a black leather wristlet and, as he talked, performed a few covert isometrics on the beer can. The engineer liked him at once, perceiving that he was not the mighty fornicator of his novels but a perky little bullshooter of a certain style, the sort who stands in the kitchen during parties, suspended from himself so-to-speak, beer can in hand and matter forming at the corner of his mouth, all the while spieling off some very good stuff and very funny. One would like to get him going (and the engineer was just the one).

One glance past him into the house and he knew also how it stood with the house and how the writer lived in it. Their voices echoed on bare parquet floors. There was no furniture except a plastic dinette and an isomorphic bar in a doorway. So that was how he did it, standing clear of walls suspended within himself and disdaining chairs because chairs were for sitting and therefore cancelled themselves.

He shook hands with the engineer with a strong wiry grip, pronating his elbow.

“This is the guy that's going with us,” said the pseudo-Negro, linking arms with them. “He knows everybody down there and the ones he doesn't know he's kin to.”

“No,” said the engineer, frowning and blushing.

“You from down South?” asked Mort Prince, squeezing the beer can and not quite looking at him.

“Yes.” Though the pseudo-Negro had led him to believe that Mort Prince would welcome him with open arms, he couldn't help noticing that the writer wore an indifferent, if not unfriendly, expression.

“Tell him where you're from.”

The engineer told him.

But Mort Prince seemed abstracted and gloomy and did not respond. He said nothing and went back to pressing the beer can.

“That's where the festival is,” said the pseudo-Negro, giving the writer several meaningful nudges.

“No, I'm sorry,” said the engineer, looking at his watch. He was anxious to be on his way. He didn't like the look of things. Through the open doorway—Mort had not quite invited them in and they were standing barely beyond the sill—the engineer noticed that the householders were closer. Yes, beyond a doubt they were bearing down upon Mort Prince's house.

“I really appreciate it but as I told Mr. Aiken—” began the engineer, already nodding to the new arrivals to prepare Mort Prince and the pseudo-Negro—but it was too late.

“Hey, you,” called the burly man in the alpine hat, pointing with his chin and resting his hands lightly on his hips.

The engineer looked at him twice. Beyond any question, the stranger was addressing him. His heart gave a single dread leap. Adrenalin erected his hair roots, could it have come at last, a simple fight, with the issue clear beyond peradventure? “Are you speaking to me?”

“You from Haddon Heights?”

“Sir?” The engineer cupped a hand to his ear. The burly man's T-shirt had the legend
Deep Six
printed on it. No doubt he belonged to a bowling league. He reminded the engineer of the fellows he used to see around bowling alleys in Long Island City.

“You heard me.”

“Sir, I don't believe I like your tone,” said the engineer, advancing a step with his good ear put forward. Perhaps the time had come again when you could be insulted, hear it aright, and have it out then and there as his grandfather used to have it out. But there must be no mistake. “You were speaking to me?” he asked again, straining every nerve to hear, for nothing is worse than being an honorable deaf man who can't be certain he is insulted.

The alpiner turned to Mort Prince. “Mae here sawr him in Haddon Heights, Her brother-in-law lives in Haddonfield.”

“Haddon Heights? Haddonfield? I've never heard of either place,” said the bemused engineer. “In any case I don't care for this fellow's tone.” It had happened again, he knew, he had been mistaken for someone else.

The next thing he knew, another man came crowding in, a fair-skinned oldish man with a gray crew cut and tabs on his elbows like Jiggs.

“He's a Jersey agent, Mr. Prince,” said the newcomer.