The Last Gentleman: A Novel Read online

  “Now. Oh, my darling, do you love me?”

  “Oh yes,” said the engineer, swinging her forty-five degrees in the dust so that he could look past her toward the opening of the covert. The sky was redder. From the same direction there came a faint crepitant sound like crumpled newspaper. The cops and the Negros were shooting it out in Harlem.

  “Will you cherish me?”

  “Yes, certainly,” said the engineer.

  “I don’t mean just now. I want to be protected always. I want to be cherished.”

  “I will,” he assured her.

  “Do you know what matters most of all?”

  “What?”

  “Love.”

  “Right.”

  “Love is everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “Rita asked me what I believed in. I said I believed in love.”

  “Me too.”

  “Besides which I want to prove something to myself,” said the girl, almost to herself.

  “Prove what?”

  “A little experiment by Kitty for the benefit of Kitty.”

  “What experiment is that?”

  “Let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with Kitty,” she said.

  “I didn’t say there was.”

  Holding her, he couldn’t help thinking of Perlmutter, his young fresh-eyed colleague at Macy’s. Though he was from Brooklyn, Perlmutter looked like an Indiana farm boy. Perlmutter spoke of his wife with a lack of reserve, though not of respect, which was startling. Making love to his wife, Perlmutter said, was like “being in heaven.” Now he understood. Kitty too, he would have to say, was an armful of heaven. The astounding immediacy of her. She was more present, more here, than he could ever have calculated. She was six times bigger and closer than life. He scarcely knew whether to take alarm or to shout for joy, hurrah!

  “Never mind. What about you, you big geezer?”

  Geezer, thought the engineer. “What about me?”

  “You were the one who was always sweeping Kitty off her feet before! What happened?” She even socked him, jokingly but also irritably. The poor girl could not get the straight of it: the engineer’s alternating fits of passion and depression.

  He was wondering: had the language of women, “love” and “sweeping one off one’s feet,” and such, meant this all along, the astounding and terrific melon immediacy of nakedness. Do women know everything?

  “What about it, friend?” asked Kitty, heaving up, her pale face swimming above him. “Kitty wants to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Is this the same Will Barrett who swept Kitty off her feet in the automat?”

  “No, but it’s just as well,” he said dryly.

  “Tell Kitty why.”

  “Kitty might be too attractive,” said the chivalrous but wry engineer. “So attractive that it is just as well I don’t feel too well—for one thing, my sinuses are blocked—”

  “Oh that’s sweet,” said Kitty in as guttural, as ancient and risible and unbuttoned an Alabama voice as Tallulah Bankhead. Did he know anything about women?

  “Do you feel bad,” she asked suddenly and touched his face. “If it is not possible now to—” she broke off.

  He felt just bad enough—his head was caulked, the pressure turning him ever away into a dizzy middle distance—and so it was just possible.

  “Lover,” said Kitty as they hugged and kissed.

  “Darling,” said the engineer, not to be surpassed—was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?

  “My sweet,” said Kitty, patting his cheek at the corner of his mouth.

  But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.

  Yet when at last the hard-pressed but courteous and puisant engineer did see the way clear to sustaining the two of them, her in passing her test, him lest he be demoralized by Perlmutter’s heaven, too much heaven too soon, and fail them both—well, I do love her, he saw clearly, and therefore I shall—it was too late.

  “Dear God,” said the girl to herself, even as he embraced her tenderly and strongly—and fell away from him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m so sick,” she whispered.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head dolefully. Even their sicknesses alternated and were out of phase.

  She went to the farthest corner of the sniper’s den and began to retch. The engineer held her head. After a moment she asked in a dazed voice. “What happened?”

  “I think it was that tea you were drinking.”

  “You are so smart,” she said faintly.

  What with her swaying against him, he was having a hard time finding her clothes. It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid. But when they were dressed, they felt better. Now trousered, collared, buttoned up, he at least was himself again. There is a great deal to be said for clothes. He touched Kitty to place her, like a blind man. To his relief she sat hugging her decent skirted knees like a proper Georgia coed.

  “Do you feel better?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, hardly audible. “But talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  “Anything. Anything that comes into your head.”

  “All right.” After all, this was one thing he was good at. “I was thinking about the summer of 1864,” said the engineer, who always told the truth. “My kinsman took part in the siege of Richmond and later of Petersburg. We have a letter he wrote his mother. He was exactly my age and a colonel in the infantry. Petersburg was a rats’ war, as bad as Stalingrad. But do you know that even at the worst the officers would go to balls and cotillions? In the letter he thanks his mother for the buttermilk cookies and says: ‘Met Miss Sally Trumbull last night. She said I danced tolerably well. She gave me her handkerchief.’ He was killed later on in the Crater.”

  “Would you take me to a dance?” asked Kitty, her head turned away.

  “Sure. But what is curious is that—”

  “I’ve been dancing five hours a day for years and I can’t remember the last dance I went to.”

  “—he did not feel himself under the necessity, almost moral, of making love—”

  “I love to dance.”

  “—in order that later things be easy and justified between him and Miss Trumbull, that—”

  “My grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer,” said Kitty.

  “—that even under the conditions of siege he did not feel himself under the necessity, or was it because it was under the conditions of siege that—”

  “You’re so smart,” said Kitty, shivering and huddling against him. “Oh, I’m so cold.”

  “I must speak to your father,” said the engineer absently.

  The girl started nervously and stopped shivering. “What for?”

  “To ask your hand in marriage,” said the engineer somewhat formally.

  “You know everything,” said Kitty, commencing to shiver again. “You’re so smart.”

  “No, but I know one thing.”

  “Tell Kitty.”

  “I know what you fear most.”

  “What?”

  “People, and that is the trouble. The source of your happiness is also the source of your nightmares.”

  “That’s true.”

  Even now he was at it again, scheming, establishing his credentials. Like all women, she was, he knew, forever attuned to fortunetelling, soothsaying, and such. If he told her something, she might tell him. For there was something he wanted to know.

  “I know who you like to be with.”

  “Who?”

  “Rita and me.”

  “That’s right. Why is that?”

  “You like Rita because she is among other things a woman and no threat to you. You like me and that would be enough to put you off ordinarily becaus
e I am a man but you know something is wrong with me and that neutralizes the threat.”

  “Yes,” said the girl gloomily. “Oh, dear. I really don’t feel well.”

  “What about Rita?”

  “What about her?” He could scarcely hear her.

  “What about the notes, verses, and so on, she leaves in the park for you?” He had calculated correctly. Knowing as much as he did about her, he judged that in her eyes it must appear he might know everything. She would not think to ask how he knew about the notes. For all she knew, Rita could have told him.

  “The notes in the bench, yes. It is not quite what you think.” Was she now smiling down at her crossed legs?

  12.

  Kitty said:

  The notes. You know, I have a confession to make. I led her on. It’s my fault.

  Here it comes again, he thought, the sweet beast of catastrophe. Am I not like Rita after all and do I not also live by catastrophe? I can smell it out every time. Show me a strange house and I can walk straight to the door where the bad secrets are kept. The question is: is it always here that one seeks one’s health, here in the sweet, dread precincts of disaster? Strange: that her disaster now enables me, that now I could love her again and more easily from the pity of it.

  No, no, no, Kitty said, I don’t mean there was anything really wrong. Nothing has ever happened, not the least thing. But what I don’t know is whether from the very beginning I didn’t know in my heart of hearts what I was doing—the way a child knows nothing and yet knows everything. I’ve often wondered whether a person who found herself for the first tune in her life really and truly liked by another person and having the power for the first time to make another person like her, would she not use that power every time? Rita is a remarkable person and, wonder of wonders, she liked me. I had never dreamed that anybody would like me. And I knew exactly how to make her like me! This whole thing started last summer. The notes? They’re notes, that’s all. Poems.

  Everything happened last summer in one week. Do you think there are times like that when everything comes to a head for several people and after that their lives take a different turning? Jamie and I had gone out to see Sutter and Rita, in Tesuque. Val came out a little later. A few days later and everybody had gone off in different directions. First, I think Sutter found out that something was wrong with Jamie. Sutter could look at you and tell what was wrong with you—he’s about shot now—but I remember he did take Jamie to the laboratory. Then he and Jamie went out into the desert and got lost etcetera etcetera. After that Val left to become a postulant or something. Then I came to New York with Rita, She and Sutter had already separated. I had never met anybody like Rita. My own life had been abnormal. I had polio as a little girl and was crippled and overcame it with ten years of toe dancing (like Glenn Cunningham, Poppy said). I had tutors and Poppy sent me to a school in Switzerland—now you talk about something peculiar: those girls were a mess. I came home. My life at home. Do you know what everybody does? We live in a country club; we are not just members, we live right there on the golf links along with a hundred other houses. The men make money and watch pro football. The women play golf and bridge at the club. The children swim in meets. The mothers of the losers hate the mothers of the winners. At night Mama always gets mad at Huntley-Brinkley, turns off the TV and gets off on the Negroes and the Jews and the Federal Reserve Bank. Sunday we go to church. That’s what we do at home. Then all of a sudden I found myself with Rita. She showed me something I never dreamed existed. Two things. First, the way she devoted herself to the Indians. I never saw anything like it. They adored her. I saw one child’s father try to kneel and kiss her foot. Then she showed me how a thing can be beautiful. She kept Shakespeare’s sonnets by her bed. And she actually read them. Listen to this, she would say, and she would read it. And I could hear it the way she heard it! Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Poetry: who’d have thought it? We went for walks. I listened to her but then (is this bad?) I began to see how much she was enjoying teaching me. We went to corn dances in the pueblos. I said I had a confession. My confession is this: that even though I knew Rita and Sutter were estranged, or at least were having trouble, and although I knew exactly what effect our own friendship was having, I knew how to make Rita like me and I did it. Finally when Jamie and Sutter came back there was a scene between Val and Rita and everything blew up. At the time Val was fretting about whether to go into this religious order and she was not very stable. But everybody was unstable. Anyhow Val accused Rita of destroying Carlos’s faith—

  Carlos?

  A Zuñi boy who was Rita’s servant and protégé. (I beat him too. Rita liked him but she soon liked me better.) He was her prize pupil and she’d got him into Harvard on a scholarship. She was having Carlos and me dance the Ahaiyute myths. Carlos was the Beast God and I was the Corn Woman. Val told Carlos he was trading his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rita asked her what mess of pottage she meant, the Ahaiyute myths or Harvard? Thus—this idolatry, said Val. But Val dear, said Rita, this is his birthright, the Zuñis had the Ahaiyute myths for hundreds of years before the Spanish priests came. Val stormed out. She never liked Rita.

  What did Sutter say?

  Nothing. Or rather he laughed. But it was then that Val made up her mind too. She came back the same night and apologized. She told Rita: “It is you who are doing the work and I who am being hateful and doing nothing. Is it possible to come to believe in Christ and the whole thing and afterwards to be more hateful than before? But at least now I know what to do, and I thank you for it, Rita.” And so around she goes to each of us, kissing us and asking us to forgive her (it was that kind of summer).

  What did Sutter say to that?

  Oh, he said something about: now I don’t know, Val, maybe there is something to be said nowadays for a theology of hatred—you know Sutter. No, you don’t. But then I came on to New York with Rita. The poems in the park? They’re just that. She likes to show me her favorites—she knows I can see them as she sees them. I have to get up earlier than she does and we have different lunch hours. So if she reads something the night before—she reads at all hours—she’ll put it in the bench for me to read during my lunch. I owe her a great deal. Now she wants me to go to Europe with her. I owe her the pleasure she will take in showing it to me. But first I have to make sure of my own motives. I wrote Sutter that. I conceal nothing from him.

  What did he say?

  Nothing. He’s entirely too selfish to write a letter. If Rita is the most unselfish person I know, Sutter is the most selfish. That was the real trouble all along, that Rita did all the giving and Sutter did all the taking. Do you know what he said to me? “Blankety-blank on unselfishness,” said he. “I agree with Val and the Christers, it’s a fornication of spirit.” But that’s not right either. That’s not what Christ said.

  Blankety-blank?

  Crap.

  Don’t talk like that.

  I’m sick. Take me home.

  13.

  The next morning he called Kitty from Macy’s. “Today,” he told her, “I’ve got to get this business settled one way or the other.”

  “Don’t speak to me,” she said, her voice faint and cold.

  “Eh?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t.” But he thought he did—though, as it turned out, he was wrong.

  “You took advantage of me.”

  “Ah, dearest—” he began. His heart sank: she was right.

  But she broke in quickly (he was not right). “I have been out of my mind with worry the last few days, about this whole business, Jamie and Europe and everything. Then on top of everything I was allergic to the paint fumes and it was too much.”

  “Paint fumes,” said the engineer. He looked up in time to see his old friends the Ohioans punching in at the time clock, bound for sportswear and lingerie, a lusty clear-eyed crew who had no trouble understanding each other.

  “We
painted Rita’s attic yesterday and I turned out to be allergic to the benzene or whatever it was. I went completely out of my head. What did I say?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “But I remember enough to know that you took advantage of me, barging in like that.”

  “Barging in?”

  “Rita tells me that you didn’t call her, you just showed up.”

  “Yes,” he said contritely, willing, anxious to be convicted of a lesser crime. What foulness had he committed? It was not enough to lie with Kitty in Central Park like a common sailor: he must also take his pleasure, or almost take his pleasure, with a nice girl rendered defenseless by paint fumes.

  “I really think it put me in a terrible position for you to come to Rita’s like that. You know better than that! And then to leave without so much as a fare-you-well to Rita and walking me clear to New Jersey or wherever it was.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What?”

  “You called me, remember?”

  “Oh yes,” said the engineer, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. “I’ve got to, ah, get this business settled.” But he had lost his resolution.

  “What business?” said Kitty coldly.

  “Whether I am working for Rita or your father. But in either case—”

  “Working for Rita?” she asked sharply.

  “Rita wants me and Jamie to take the camper while you all go to Europe.”

  “I see.”

  “The point is,” he said, gathering strength, collecting his wits at last, “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Oh, you don’t want me to go.”

  “No, I want you to stay here and either go south with Jamie and me or—”

  “You’ve got your nerve.”

  “Kitty.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember that I asked you to marry me last night?”

  “Oh Lord,” said the girl nervously and hung up, not so much he thought, on him as on herself.

  Later, after shower and breakfast, he called Jamie from the Y.M.C.A. It was time to settle things one way or another.