The Last Gentleman: A Novel Read online

  Now at Bear Mountain he lay with his head on her thigh and she leaned over him and said: “I’m a people-liker and I think you’re my kind of people. Are you a people-liker?”

  “Yes,” he said, his cheek going stiff, and thought what a pity it was he might not have sport with her without talking to her.

  His knee began to jerk involuntarily and at the first opportunity he extricated himself and rushed out of the lodge. Outside, he ran through the snowy woods and threw himself into a brierpatch like a saint of old. Shivering with pain and cold, he gazed up at the shadowy knoll associated by tradition with Mad Anthony Wayne. He muttered to himself: “Barrett, you poor fellow, you must be very bad off, worse than you imagined, to have gotten things so mixed up. Here you are lying in a brierpatch when you could be lounging with young people like yourself, people against whom no objection can be raised, your head pillowed in the lap of a handsome girl. Is it not true that the American Revolution has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Wayne and his friends, so that practically everyone in the United States is free to sit around a cozy fire in ski pants? What is wrong with that? What is the matter with you, you poor fellow?”

  When he was with Ohioans, he found himself talking like an Ohioan and moving his shoulders around under his coat. When he was with Princetonians, he settled his chin in his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets in a certain way. Sometimes, too, he fell in with fellow Southerners and in an instant took on the amiable and slightly ironic air which Southerners find natural away from home.

  It was shortly after the weekend at Bear Mountain that he lapsed into a fugue state which was worse than the last.

  But now he had developed an even more alarming symptom. He began to get things backward. He felt bad when other people felt good and good when they felt bad. Take an ordinary day in New York. The sun is shining, people live well, go about satisfying their needs and achieving goals, work at creative jobs, attend cultural attractions, participate in interesting groups. This is, by every calculation, as it should be. Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him feel worse than ever. The analyst had got it all wrong. It was not the prospect of the Last Day which depressed him but rather the prospect of living through an ordinary Wednesday morning.

  Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case.

  Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people too felt better in hurricanes—though it must be admitted that he had studied only four people and one hurricane, evidence hardly adequate to support a scientific hypothesis. One real robin does suggest a spring, however.

  The summer before, he had got caught in hurricane Donna. A girl named Midge Auchincloss, none other in fact than the daughter of his father’s old friend, had invited him to drive her up to a jazz festival in Newport. During the same weekend a small hurricane was beating up along the coast but giving every sign of careening off into the North Atlantic. Nobody took much notice of it. Friday afternoon, nothing was very different. The old Northeast smelled the same, the sky was hazed over, and things were not worth much. The engineer and his friend Midge behaved toward each other in their customary fashion. They did not have much to say, not as a consequence of a breakdown in communications such as one often hears about nowadays, but because there was in fact not much to say. Though they liked each other well enough, there was nothing to do, it seemed, but press against each other whenever they were alone. Coming home to Midge’s apartment late at night, they would step over the sleeping Irishman, stand in the elevator and press against each other for a good half hour, each gazing abstractedly and dry-eyed over the other’s shoulder.

  But a knoll of high pressure reared up in front of Donna and she backed off to the west. On the way home from Newport, the Auchinclosses’ Continental ran into the hurricane in Connecticut. Searching for Bridgeport and blinded by the rain, which hit the windshield like a stream from a firehose, the engineer took a wrong exit off the turnpike and entered upon a maze of narrow high-crowned blacktops such as criss-cross Connecticut, and got lost. Within a few minutes the gale winds reached near-hurricane strength and there was nothing to do but stop the car. Feeling moderately exhilarated by the uproar outside and the snugness within, dry as a bone in their cocoon of heavy-gauge metal and safety glass, they fell upon one another fully clothed and locked in a death grip. Strange Yankee bushes, perhaps alder and dogbane, thrashed against the windows. Hearing a wailing sound, they sat up and had the shock of their lives. There, standing in the full glare of the headlights, or rather leaning against the force of the hurricane, was a child hardly more than a babe. For a long moment there was nothing to do but gaze at him, so wondrous a sight it was, a cherub striding the blast, its cheeks puffed out by the four winds. Then he was blown away. The engineer went after him, backing up on all fours, butt to wind like a range pony, reached the ditch and found him. Now with the babe lying as cold as lard between them and not even shivering, the engineer started the Continental and crept along, feeling the margin of the road under his tire like a thread under the fingertip, and found a diner, a regular old-style streetcar of a restaurant left over from the days before the turnpikes.

  For two hours they sat in a booth and cared for the child, fed him Campbell’s chicken-and-rice soup and spoke to him. He was not hurt but he was round-eyed and bemused and had nothing to say. It became a matter of figuring out what to do with him. The phone was dead and there was no policeman or anyone at all except the counterman, who brought a candle and joined them. The wind shrieked and the streetcar swayed and thrummed as if its old motors had started up. A window broke. They helped the counterman board it up with Coca-Cola crates. Midge and the counterman, he noticed, were very happy. The hurricane blew away the sad, noxious particles which befoul the sorrowful old Eastern sky and Midge no longer felt obliged to keep her face stiff. They were able to talk. It was best of all when the hurricane’s eye came with its so-called ominous stillness. It was not ominous. Everything was yellow and still and charged up with value. The table was worth $200. The unexpected euphoria went to the counterman’s head and he bored them with long stories about his experiences as a bus boy in a camp for adults (the Southerner had never heard of such a thing) somewhere in the Catskills.

  Even the problem of the lost child turned into a pleasure instead of a chore, so purgative was the action of the hurricane. “Where in the world do you come from?” Midge asked him. The child did not answer and the counterman did not know him. At last Midge turned up a clue. “What a curious-looking ring,” she said, taking the child’s hand.

  “That’s not a ring, that’s a chickenband,” said the counterman.

  “Is there a chicken farm near here?” the engineer asked him.

  There was, and it was the right place. When they delivered the babe an hour later, wonder of wonders, he had not even been missed. Ten children were underfoot and Dad and Mom were still out in the chickenhouses, and sister, a twelve-year-old who was also round-eyed and silent, received the prodigal as if it were nothing out of the way. This was the best of all, of course, returning the child before it was missed, him not merely delivered from danger but the danger itself cancelled, like Mr. Magoo going his way through the perilous world, stepping off the Empire State building onto a girder and never seeing the abyss.

  Breakfast in the diner and back to the turnpike and on their way again. Down and out of the storm and into the pearly light of morning, another beautiful day and augh there it was again: the Bronx all solid and sullen from being the same today as yesterday, full of itself with lumpish Yankee fullness, the bricks coinciding with themselves and braced against all corners. Gravity increa
sed.

  Down into the booming violet air of Park Avenue they crept, under the selfsame canopy and into the selfsame lobby and over the sleeping Irishman and into the elevator where they strove against each other like wrestlers, each refusing to yield an inch.

  5.

  One day the next week, a rainy Thursday afternoon, he stood in a large room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somewhere in the heights a workman was rattling the chain of a skylight. Happy people were worse off in their happiness in museums than anywhere else, he had noticed sometime ago. In here the air was thick as mustard gas with ravenous particles which were stealing the substance from painting and viewer alike. Though the light was technically good, illuminating the paintings in an unexceptionable manner, it nevertheless gave the effect of descending in a dismal twilight from a vast upper region which roared like a conch shell. Here in the roaring twilight the engineer stationed himself and watched people watch the paintings. Sometime ago he had discovered that it is impossible to look at a painting simply so: man-looking-at-a-painting, voilà!—no, it is necessary to play a trick such as watching a man who is watching, standing on his shoulders, so to speak. There are several ways of getting around the ravenous particles.

  Today the paintings were there, yes, in the usual way of being there but worse off than ever. It was all but impossible to see them, even when one used all the tricks. The particles were turning the air blue with their singing and ravening. Let everything be done properly: let one stand at the correct distance from a Velázquez, let the Velázquez be correctly lighted, set the painting and viewer down in a warm dry museum. Now here comes a citizen who has the good fortune to be able to enjoy a cultural facility. There is the painting which has been bought at great expense and exhibited in the museum so that millions can see it. What is wrong with that? Something, said the engineer, shivering and sweating behind a pillar. For the paintings were encrusted with a public secretion. The harder one looked, the more invisible the paintings became. Once again the force of gravity increased so that it was all he could do to keep from sinking to all fours.

  Yet the young man, who was scientifically minded, held himself sufficiently detached to observe the behavior of other visitors. From his vantage point behind the pillar he noticed that the people who came in were both happy and afflicted. They were afflicted in their happiness. They were serene, but their serenity was a perilous thing to see. In they came, smiling, and out they went, their eyes glazed over. The paintings smoked and shriveled in their frames.

  Here came a whole family weaving along, sunk in their happiness, man, woman, teen daughter and son, and child, all handsome as could be. But they were bogging down. When all at once: KeeeeeeeeeeeeeeRASH, first a rusty clank from above like a castle drawbridge, then a cataclysm (it got on the front page of The Times the next morning). As the dust cleared, he made out that it was not so serious, though serious enough. The skylight had fallen down at his feet, frame, glass, wheel, chain, worker, and all. For there he was, the worker, laid out and powdered head to toe like a baker. Some seconds passed before the engineer realized that it was glass that turned him white, glass powdered to sugar. It covered the family too. They stood for an age gazing at each other, turned into pillars of salt; then, when they saw that no one was hurt, they fell into one another’s arms, weeping and laughing. Suddenly everyone remembered the worker. They knelt beside him and bore him up like the mourners of Count Orgaz. The workman, an Italian youth with sloe-black eyes and black mustache who was as slight as Charlie Chaplin in his coveralls, opened his eyes and began stretching up his eyebrows as if he were trying to stay awake. Others came running up. The workman was not bleeding but he could not get his breath. As they held him and he gazed up at them, it was as if he were telling them that he could not remember how to breathe. Then he pulled himself up on the engineer’s arm and air came sucking into his throat, the throat just grudgingly permitting, it.

  It was at this moment that the engineer happened to look under his arm and catch sight of the Velázquez. It was glowing like a jewel! The painter might have just stepped out of his studio and the engineer, passing in the street, had stopped to look through the open door.

  The paintings could be seen.

  6.

  He had, of course, got everything twisted around. Though he took pride in his “objectivity” and his “evidence,” what evidence there was, was evidence of his own deteriorating condition. If there were any “noxious particles” around, they were, as every psychologist knows, more likely to be found inside his head than in the sky.

  There were other signs that all was not well. The next morning he bought a $1,900 telescope and wiped out his bank account. The afternoon of the same day he broke off his analysis.

  Some weeks earlier the telescope had been set up in the window of an optical store on Columbus Circle. Chunky as a mortar, it had a rough crackled barrel and a heavy nickel mount. The lens cup had been unscrewed and hung by a leather strap, exposing the objective lens, which had a violet cast and glowed in its recess like a great jewel. He inquired inside. As a consequence of the recent discovery of a new optical principle, he was told, it had become possible to do away with the long, mostly empty barrel of old-fashioned telescopes and to fit lenses and prisms together like the lamina of an onion. What the telescope amounted to was a canister jam-packed with the finest optical glasses and quartzes, ground, annealed, rubbed and rouged, tinted and corrected to a ten-thousandth millimeter. It was heavy and chunky, a pleasant thing. It was German.

  It must be admitted that although he prided himself on his scientific outlook and set great store by precision instruments like microscopes and chemical balances, he couldn’t help attributing magical properties to the telescope. It had to do with its being German, with fabled German craftsmen, gnomic slow-handed old men in the Harz Mountains. These lenses did not transmit light merely. They penetrated to the heart of things.

  The conviction grew upon him that his very life would be changed if he owned the telescope.

  This morning he emerged from the control room under Macy’s into the thundering morning twilight of Seventh Avenue. All at once he had to own the telescope. Not another hour must pass without it. As if his life depended on it, he plunged underground again, sat on the edge of the subway seat drumming his fingers on his knees, emerged at Columbus Circle, hopped around to the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, withdrew the balance of his inheritance and soil-bank money, a sum of $2,008.35, stuffed the money into his coat pocket, skimmed back around the Circle and whisked into the optical store, but not before casting a single fearful glance at the window. Ah, there it was, a low-down mean mortar of an instrument, a somehow military thing. Another five minutes and the telescope plopped like a walnut into its case, a kind of hatbox of blue leather which exhaled an intricate German smell and was strapped, bradded, buckled, and bulged out in front like a toilet bowl, a wicked unlovely and purely useful thing. The interior of the case was molded into irregular recesses like hollow viscera and lined in chamois and fitted with a little rack containing prisms, eyepieces, sun plate, clock drive, and a tiny camera of satiny metal which lay invested in the chamois like a platinum clip. He turned the neck of the telescope, which was knurled and calibrated with a black spiderlash in the nickel: it turned like a gear socketed in oil.

  Sweating like a field hand, the engineer climbed the steps of the Y.M.C.A. with his prize, doing his best to look like a young Christian come to bowl. In his room, he sat at his desk drumming his fingers on the varnished metal and presently jumped up and undid the straps with trembling fingers. But suddenly the corner of his eye was filled with shooting sparks and he felt dizzy. Falling upon his narrow bed, he lay perfectly still for some minutes. He felt his forehead; it was cold and greasy with sweat. Ah, I’ve forgotten to eat again, he thought. Jumping up again, he threw a few punches: his arm, developed by five years’ work on the Y.M.C.A. sandbag, felt as strong as ever. When he lay down again he was seized by a rigor, shook for a f
ull minute, and fell fast asleep. When he awoke, he felt refreshed but weak and hungry. It was growing late. The light in the window was yellow and from the park there drifted up the four-o’clock sound of sparrows.

  After washing his face in cold water, he clamped the telescope to the window jamb, selected a terrestrial eyepiece, and screwed it in place. He focused on a building clear across the park and beyond Fifth Avenue. There sprang into view a disc of brickwork perhaps eight feet in diameter. Now stripping to his shorts, he drew up a chair, made himself comfortable, and gazed another five minutes at the bricks. He slapped his leg. It was as he had hoped. Not only were the bricks seen as if they were ten feet away; they were better than that. It was better than having the bricks there before him. They gained in value. Every grain and crack and excrescence became available. Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks, as well as other things, are not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were needed to recover them.

  The telescope recovered them.

  7.

  He dressed and paid his last visit to Dr. Gamow, his psychoanalyst.

  For the thousandth time he took his seat in a reclining chair that had been purposely set in a position that was neither up nor down, neither quite faced the doctor nor faced away. Dr. Gamow, who had had it specially designed and constructed, called it his “ambiguous” chair. He learned a great deal about a patient from the way he sat in the chair. Some would walk in and sit straight up, swivel around to face the doctor across his desk like a client consulting a lawyer. Others would stretch out and swivel away to face the corner in conventional analytic style. It was characteristic of the engineer that he sat in the ambiguous chair ambiguously: leaving it just as it was, neither up nor down, neither quite facing Dr. Gamow nor facing away.