The Last Gentleman: A Novel Read online

  For the thousandth time Dr. Gamow looked at his patient—who sat as usual, alert and pleasant—and felt a small spasm of irritation. It was this amiability, he decided, which got on his nerves. There was a slyness about it and an opacity which put one off. It had not always been so between them. For the first year the analyst had been charmed—never had he had a more responsive patient. Never had his own theories found a readier confirmation than in the free (they seemed to be free) associations and the copious dreams which this one spread out at his feet like so many trophies. The next year or so left him pleased still but baffled. This one was a little too good to be true. At last the suspicion awoke that he, the doctor, was being entertained, royally it is true and getting paid for the privilege besides, but entertained nevertheless. Trophies they were sure enough, these dazzling wares offered every day, trophies to put him off the scent while the patient got clean away. Sourer still was the second suspicion that even the patient’s dreams and recollections, which bore out the doctor’s theories, confirmed hypotheses right and left, were somehow or other a performance too, the most exquisite of courtesies, as if the apple had fallen to the ground to please Sir Isaac Newton. Charged accordingly, the patient of course made an equally charming confession, exhibited heroic sweats and contortions to overcome his bad habits, offered crabbed and meager dreams, and so made another trophy of his disgrace.

  The last year of the analysis the doctor had grown positively disgruntled. This one was a Southern belle, he decided, a good dancing partner, light on his feet and giving away nothing. He did not know how not to give away nothing. For five years they had danced, the two of them, the strangest dance in history, each attuned to the other and awaiting his pleasure, and so off they went crabwise and nowhere at all.

  The doctor didn’t like his patient much, to tell the truth. They were not good friends. Although they had spent a thousand hours together in the most intimate converse, they were no more than acquaintances. Less than acquaintances. A laborer digging in a ditch would know more about his partner in a week than the doctor had learned about this patient in a year. Yet outwardly they were friendly enough.

  The engineer, on the other hand, had a high opinion of his analyst and especially liked hearing him speak. Though Dr. Gamow was a native of Jackson Heights, his speech was exotic. He had a dark front tooth, turned on its axis, and he puckered his lips and pronounced his r’s almost like w’s. The engineer liked to hear him say neu-wosis, drawing out the second syllable with a musical clinical Viennese sound. Unlike most Americans, who speak as if they were sipping gruel, he chose his words like bonbons, so that his patients, whose lives were a poor meager business, received the pleasantest sense of the richness and delectability of such everyday things as words. Unlike some analysts, he did not use big words or technical words; but the small ordinary words he did use were invested with a peculiar luster. “I think you are pretty unhappy after all,” he might say, pronouncing pretty as it is spelled. His patient would nod gratefully. Even unhappiness is not so bad when it can be uttered so well. And in truth it did seem to the engineer, who was quick to sniff out theories and such, that people would feel better if they could lay hold of ordinary words.

  At five o’clock, the Southerner’s hour, the office smelled of the accumulated misery of the day, an ozone of malcontent which stung the eyes like a Lionel train. Some years ago the room had been done in a Bahama theme, with a fiber rug and prints of hummingbirds and Negresses walking with baskets on their heads, but the rug had hardened and curled up at the corners like old skin. Balls of fluff drifted under the rattan table.

  “I—suggest—that if it is all right with you—” began Dr. Gamow, jotting a note on a smooth yellow pad with a gold pencil (this is all you really need to set your life in order, the patient was thinking, a good pad and pencil), “—we’ll change Monday from five to five thirty. How is that for you, bad, eh?”

  “No, it’s not bad at all.”

  Dr. Gamow pricked up his ears. “Did you say mad?”

  “No, I believe I said bad: it’s not bad at all.”

  “It seemed to me that at first you said mad.”

  “It’s possible,” said the agreeable patient.

  “I can’t help wondering,” said Dr. Gamow shyly, “who is mad at who.” Whenever he caught his patient in a slip, he had a way of slewing his eyes around as shyly as a young girl. “Now what might it be that you are mad about?”

  “I’m not really.”

  “I detected a little more m than b. I think maybe you are a little mad at me.”

  “I don’t—” began the other, casting back in his mind to the events of the last session, but as usual he could remember nothing. “You may well be right, but I don’t recall anything in particular.”

  “Maybe you think I’m a little mad at you.”

  “I honestly don’t know,” said the patient, pretending to rack his brain but in fact savoring the other’s words. Maybe, for example, was minted deliberately as a bright new common coin mebbe in conscious preference to perhaps.

  Dr. Gamow put his knees exactly together, put his head to one side, and sighted down into the kneehole of his desk. He might have been examining a bank of instruments. His nostril curved up exposing the septum of his nose and imparting to him a feral winged look which served to bear out his reputation of clinical skill. His double-breasted suit had wide lapels and it was easy to believe that, sitting as he did, hunched over and thick through the chest, his lapels bowed out like a cuirass, his lips pursed about the interesting reed of a tooth, that he served his patients best as artificer and shaper, receiving the raw stuff of their misery and handing it back in a public and acceptable form. “It does sound to me as if you’ve had a pretty bad time. Tell me about it.” And the unspeakable could be spoken of.

  He told Dr. Gamow he had reached a decision. It seemed plain to him that he had exhausted the resources of analysis—not that he had not benefited enormously—and in the future he thought he might change places with the analyst, making a little joke of it, heh-heh. After spending almost five years as an object of technique, however valuable, he thought maybe he’d go over to the other side, become one of them, the scientists. He might even have an idea or two about the “failure of communication” and the “loss of identity” in the modern world (at it again, throwing roses in the path, knowing these were favorite subjects of Dr. Gamow’s). Mebbe he should strike out on his own.

  For another thing, said he, he had run out of money.

  “I see that after all you are a little mad at me,” said Dr. Gamow.

  “How’s that?” said the patient, appearing to look caught out

  “Perhaps it might be worthwhile to look into whatever it is you are mad about.”

  “All right,” said the patient, who would as soon do one thing as another.

  “Yesterday,” said the analyst, leafing back through his pad, “we were talking about your theory of environments. I believe you said that even under ideal conditions you felt somewhat—hollow was the word I think you used.”

  “Yes.” He was genuinely surprised. He had forgotten that he had spoken of his new theory.

  “I wondered out loud at the time what you meant by hollow—whether it referred to your body or perhaps an organ, and it seemed to me you were offended by the suggestion.”

  “Yes.”

  He remembered now that he had been offended. He had known at the time that Dr. Gamow had thought he meant that he had felt actually hollowed out, brain or spleen emptied of its substance. It had offended him that Dr. Gamow had suggested that he might be crazy.

  “I then made the suggestion that mebbe that was your way of getting rid of people, literally ‘hollowing them out,’ so to speak. A pretty thoroughgoing method of execution.”

  “That is possible.”

  “Finally, you may recall, you made a little slip at the end of the hour. You said you had to leave early—you had jumped up, you may recall—saying that you had to attend a m
eeting at the store, but you said ‘beating.’”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t help but wonder who the beating was intended for. Was it you who got the beating from me yesterday? Or am I getting a beating from you today?”

  “You could be right,” said the other, trying to straighten the ambiguous chair and face the doctor. He meant to signify that he wished to say something that should be listened to and not gotten at. “Nevertheless I have decided on a course of action and I think I’d better see it through.” For some reason he laughed heartily. “Oh me,” he said with a sigh.

  “Hnhnhn,” said Dr. Gamow. It was an ancient and familiar sound, so used between them, so close in the ear, as hardly to be a sound at all.

  The Southerner leaned back and looked at the print of hummingbirds. They symbolized ideas, Dr. Gamow had explained jokingly, happy ideas which he hoped would fly into the heads of his patients. One bird’s gorget did not quite fit; the print had been jogged in the making and the gorget had slipped and stuck out like a bib. For years the patient had gazed at this little patch of red, making a slight mental effort each time to put it back in place.

  “I notice now that you use the phrase ‘run out’—‘I have run out of money’,” said Dr. Gamow. Lining up his feet again, he sighted along his knee like an astronaut. “The idea suggests itself that you literally ran out of your own money—”

  “Figuratively,” murmured the other.

  “Leaving it behind? I could not help but notice you seem to have acquired what seems to be a very expensive possession.”

  “What is that?”

  “The handsome leather case.” Dr. Gamow nodded toward the reception room. “Camera? Microscope?”

  “Telescope,” he said. He had forgotten his recent purchase! He was, moreover, obscurely scandalized that the doctor should take account of something out in the waiting room.

  “A telescope,” mused the analyst, sighting into the farthest depths of the desk. “Do you intend to become a seer?”

  “A seer?”

  “A see-er. After all a seer is a see-er, one who can see. Could it be that you believe that there is some ultimate hidden truth and that you have the magical means for obtaining it?”

  “Ha-ha, there might be something in that. A see-er. Yes.”

  “So now it seems you have spent your money on an instrument which will enable you to see the truth once and for all?”

  The patient shrugged affably.

  “It would be pretty nice if we could find a short cut and get around all this hard work. Do you remember, the last time you left you stood up and said: ‘Look here now, this analysis is all very well but how about telling me the truth just between ourselves, off the record, that is, what am I really supposed to do?’ Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you still think that I am spoofing you?” Dr. Gamow, who liked to be all things to all men, had somewhere got the notion that in the South you said “spoofing” a great deal.

  The patient nodded.

  “You also recall that this great thirst for the ‘answer,’ the key which will unlock everything, always overtakes you just before the onset of one of your fugue states?”

  “Not always.”

  “Always in the past”

  “Not this time.”

  “How much did it cost you?”

  “What?”

  “The telescope.”

  “Nineteen hundred dollars.”

  “Nineteen hundred dollars,” repeated the analyst softly.

  “Which leaves me with the sum of fifty-eight dollars and thirty cents,” said the patient. “According to my calculations, I owe you for eight sessions this month, including this one.” And arising from the ambiguous chair, he placed two twenties and a ten on the desk. “Now I owe you one fifty. I’ll pay you at the end of the month.”

  Dr. Gamow gazed at the money. “May I review for you one or two facts. Number one, you have had previous fugue states. Number two, you give every indication of having another. You always quit the analysis and you always buy something expensive before taking off. The last time it was a Corvette. You still have a defective ego structure, number three. Number four, you develop ideas of reference. This time it is hollow men, noxious particles, and ultimate truths.”

  It always seemed strange to hear Dr. Gamow speak of him clinically. Once, when the analyst was called away from the office, he had ventured out of the ambiguous chair and stolen a glance at the file which lay open on the blotter. “…a well-developed and nourished young white male,” he read, “with a pleasing demeanor, dressed in an unusual raglan jacket.” (This description must have been written at the time he had fallen in with the Ohioans, become one himself, and bought a raglan jacket so that he could move his shoulders around freely.) “When asked why he had chosen this particular article of apparel, he replied that ‘it made me feel free.’”

  Seeing himself set down so, in a clinical quotation, gave him a peculiar turn. His scalp bristled.

  But now he nodded equably and, leaning back, gazed at the dusty little hummingbird.

  “Very well,” said Dr. Gamow when he did not answer. “You have made your decision. The question is, what is to be done next.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Next week I am starting a new group in therapy. It will be limited to ten persons. It is a very good group and my feeling is that you could profit by the experience. They are people like yourself who are having difficulty relating to other people in a meaningful way. Like yourself they find themselves in some phase or other of an identity crisis. There is—let me see—a novelist who is blocked, an engineer like yourself who works with digital computers and who feels somewhat depersonalized. There is an actress you will recognize instantly, who has suddenly begun forgetting her lines. There is a housewife with a little more anxiety than she can handle, psychiatrically oriented but also success-oriented. There is an extremely sensitive Negro who is not success-oriented—a true identity problem there. And four social workers from White Plains. It’s a lot better than the last group you were in—these are some very highflying folks and I don’t think you’ll be able to snow them quite as successfully.”

  That’s what you think, said the Southerner to himself; these are just the kind of folks I snow best.

  “We shall meet here three times a week. The fee is nominal, five dollars.”

  “I certainly do appreciate it,” said the other earnestly. “It does indeed sound like an interesting group, but for the present my salary will not permit it. Perhaps when my soil-bank check comes through—”

  “From the old plantation?” asked Dr. Gamow.

  “Yes. But I assure you I feel quite well.”

  “Euphoric, in fact,” said Dr. Gamow ironically.

  He grinned. “Mebbe I could join yall later.”

  “This is not a catfish fry,” said the analyst testily.

  At the end of the hour they arose and shook hands pleasantly. The patient took a last look at the dusty hummingbird which had been buzzing away at the same trumpet vine for five years. The little bird seemed dejected. The bird, the print, the room itself had the air of things one leaves behind. It was time to get up and go. He was certain that he would never see any of them again.

  Before leaving, he obtained from Dr. Gamow a prescription for the little blue spansules which he saved for his worst times. They did not restore his memory, but when he was at his hollowest, wandering about some minor battlefield in Tennessee, he could swallow a spansule, feel it turn warm, take root, and flower under his ribs.

  So it was that Williston Bibb Barrett once again set forth into the wide world at the age of twenty-five, Keats’s age at his death, in possession of $8.35, a Tetzlar telescope, an old frame house, and a defunct plantation. Once again he found himself alone in the world, cut adrift from Dr. Gamow, a father of sorts, and from his alma mater, sweet mother psych
oanalysis.

  Though it may have been true that he gave every sign of a relapse of his nervous condition, of yet another spell of forgetfulness and of wandering about the U.S. and peering into the faces of Georgians and Indianians, for the present at least he was in the best possible humor and alert as a cat. In the elevator he set down the telescope and threw a few punches: his arm was like a young oak, he could have put his fist right through the steel of the Otis cab. Each of his five senses was honed to a razor’s edge and attuned like the great Jodrell Bank antenna to the slightest signal of something gone amiss.

  I am indeed an engineer, he thought, if only a humidification engineer, which is no great shakes of a profession. But I am also an engineer in a deeper sense: I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.

  Chapter Two

  1.

  IT WAS THE DAY after he broke off his analysis that the engineer received a sign: he set up his telescope in the park to photograph the peregrine and had instead and by the purest chance witnessed the peculiar behavior of the Handsome Woman and her beautiful young friend. Every morning thereafter the engineer returned to the park and took his position beside the same outcropping of rock.

  The peregrine returned to his perch. Every morning he patrolled the cornice, making an awkward sashay in his buff pants, cocked a yellow eye at the misty trees below, and fell like a thunderbolt, knocking pigeons out of the air in all directions. The engineer took a dozen photographs at magnification one fifty, trusting that at least one would catch the fierce eclipsed eye of the falcon.