The Last Gentleman: A Novel Page 5

  Every morning after work he set up his Tetzlar. After taking his two bearings, one on the eyrie of the peregrine, the other on the park bench, he had then only to lock the positions into the celestial drive, press a button, and the instrument would swing in its mount and take aim like a Navy rifle.

  The Handsome Woman came four days later, left a note, but the girl did not come. Again he prized open the semicircle of tin and again he found a verse.

  From you have I been absent in the spring,

  When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

  Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,

  That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.

  After that, neither one came.

  At night he sat at his desk in the Y.M.C.A. casting about in his mind and drumming his fingernails on the steel top, which had been varnished to represent wood grain.

  For two weeks he spent every spare moment at his vigil, coming to the park directly from work, forgetful of all else, sometimes forgetting to change his engineer’s smock.

  What had become of his love?

  Emerging one morning from Macy’s sub-basement, the engineer stood blinking in the sunlight at Nedick’s corner. It was the most valuable spot on the entire earth, having been recently appraised, he had read in The Times, at ninety dollars per cubic inch. It gave him pleasure to stand in Nedick’s and think about the cubic inch of space at the tip of his nose, a perfect little jewel of an investment.

  For a minute or so he stood watching the bustle of traffic, garment porters pushing trucks of dresses, commuters from Penn Station pouring down Thirty-fourth Street.

  Then, and for several mornings running, he experienced a hallucination which, however, he did not entirely recognize as such, a bad enough sign in itself. When he got sick, his sense of time went out of kilter, did not quite coincide with the ongoing present moment, now falling behind, now speeding ahead: a circumstance that no doubt accounted for the rich harvest of déjà vus. Now, as he stood in Nedick’s, it seemed to him that the scene which took place before his eyes was happening in a time long past. The canyon of Seventh Avenue with the smoking rays of sunlight piercing the thundering blue shadow, the echoing twilight spaces as dim and resounding as the precipice air of a Western gorge, the street and the people themselves seemed to recede before his gaze. It was like watching a film of bygone days in which, by virtue merely of the lapsed time, the subject is invested with an archaic sweetness and wholeness all the more touching for its being exposed as an illusion. People even walked faster, like the crowds in silent films, surging to and fro in a wavelike movement, their faces set in expressions of serious purpose so patent as to be funny and tender. Everyone acted as if he knew exactly what he was doing and this was the funniest business of all. It reminded him of a nurse he had in the South. Once his father took some movies of him and his nurse in a little park. Ten years later, when on Christmas Eve the film was shown and D’lo, passing in the hall behind the projector, stood for a moment to see herself with the others, the black nurses whose faces were underexposed and therefore all the more inscrutable but who nevertheless talked and moved and cocked a head with the patent funniness of lapsed time—D’lo let out a shriek and, unable to bear the sight of herself, threw her apron over her head. It was, he reckoned, the drollness of the past which struck her, the perky purpose of the people who acted for all the world as if they knew what they were doing, had not a single doubt.

  Still no sign of the women in the park, and he cut short his vigil, watching only during the noon hour. There was more time now to attend to his physical health. He took pains to eat and sleep regularly and to work out in the Y.M.C.A. gym. He punched a sandbag an hour a day, swam forty laps in the pool, or, on cool days, jogged three times around the reservoir in the park. After a cold shower and a supper of steak, milk, vegetables, and wheat germ, he allowed himself a half hour of television and spent the remaining three hours before work seated bolt upright at his desk trying to set his thoughts in order.

  He began the day by reading a few lines from Living, a little volume of maxims for businessmen which he had come across in Macy’s book department. It made him feel good to read its crisp and optimistic suggestions.

  On your way to work, put aside your usual worries. Instead keep your mind both relaxed and receptive—and playful. The most successful businessmen report that their greatest ideas often come to them in such intervals.

  Yes. And it was in fact very pleasant walking up Broadway instead of riding the subway every morning, one’s mind wiped clean as a blackboard (not that it was necessary for him to try to “put aside your usual worries,” since he forgot everything anyhow, worries included, unless he wrote them down).

  Cheerful and sensible though his little book of maxims was, it was no match for the melancholy that overtook him later in the day. Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where they had been miserable in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery. Color returned to their cheeks and they left the train with a spring in their step.

  Every day the sky grew more paltry and every day the ravening particles grew bolder. Museums became uninhabitable. Concerts were self-canceling. Sitting in the park one day, he heard a high-pitched keening sound directly over his head. He looked up through his eyebrows but the white sky was empty.

  That very night as he sat at his console under Macy’s, his eye happened to fall upon the Sunday Times, which lay in a corner. There on the front page of an inner section was a map of Greater New York which was overlaid by a series of concentric circles rippling out to Mamaroneck in the north, to Plainfield in the South. He picked it up. It was one of those maps illustrating the effects of the latest weapon, in this case some kind of nerve gas. The innermost circle, he noted idly, called the area of irreversible axon degeneration, took in Manhattan Island and Brooklyn as far as Flatbush, Queens as far as Flushing, and the lower Bronx. The next circle was marked the zone of “fatty degeneration of the proximal nephrone,” and the third that of “reversible cortical edema.”

  He frowned at the flickering lights of the console. Was it possible, he wondered, that—that “It” had already happened, the terrible event that everyone dreaded. He smiled and socked his head: he was not yet so bad off as to believe that he was being affected by an invisible gas.

  Then, after looking at the map another ten minutes, he saw it at last, and his heart gave a big bump in his neck. Like a funnel, the circles carried his eye plunging down into the heart of Manhattan Island to—there, just inside the southeast corner of Central Park; there the point of the compass had been stuck while the pen swiveled, there just north of the little amoeba of the Pond.

  The bench, where the Handsome Woman had sat, was exactly at ground zero.

  He smiled again. It was a sign. He knew he would see the two women again.

  He resolved to resume his vigil.

  2.

  He needn’t have bothered. The very next morning, an unmemorable day neither cloudy nor clear, hot or cold, the engineer, who had emerged from Macy’s only to plunge immediately underground again, caught sight of the Handsome Woman on the subway level of Pennsylvania Station. It was not even necessary to follow her. She took his train. When she did not get up at Columbus Circle, he stayed on too.

  The train burrowed deep into the spine of the island and began a long climb up into Washington Heights, where they emerged, she taking an elevator and he a flight of steps (but why? she didn’t know him from Adam), into a gray warren of a place which descended in broken terraces to the Hudson River. From the moraine of blackened gravel which covered the rooftops below, there sprouted a crooked
forest of antennae and branching vent pipes. A perpetual wind pushed up the side streets from the river, scouring the gutters and forcing the denizens around into the sunny lee of Broadway with its sheltered bars and grills and kosher groceries and Spanish hairdressers.

  He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital.

  This time, when he saw her bound for an elevator, he entered beside her and swung around behind her as she turned. Now, eight inches in front of him, she suddenly looked frail, like a dancer who leaves the stage and puts on a kimono. There arose to his nostrils the heavy electric smell of unperfumed hair.

  She got off at the tenth floor, so up he went to the eleventh and back down the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her foot and leg disappearing through a doorway. He kept on his way, past the closed door and other doors, past a large opening into a ward, and to the end of the corridor, where he cocked a foot on a radiator, propped his mouth on a knuckle, and looked out a sooty window. As usual, he had forgotten to put on his jacket when he left Macy’s, and his tan engineer’s smock gave him the look, if not of a doctor, at least of a technician of sorts.

  Directly a man came out of the room into which the Handsome Woman had disappeared, and, to the engineer’s astonishment, made straight for him.

  At first he was certain he had been found out and someone had been sent to deal with him. His imagination formed the picture of a precinct station where he was charged with a misdemeanor of a vaguely sexual nature, following a woman on a subway. His eyes rolled up into his eyebrows.

  But the stranger, an old man, only nodded affably. Lining up beside him, he rubbed himself against the vanes of the radiator and began to smoke a cigar with great enjoyment. He cradled one elbow in the crook of the other arm and rocked to and fro in his narrow yellow shoes.

  “It looks like Dr. Calamera is running late.” The stranger screwed up an eye and spoke directly into the smoke. He was a puckish-looking old fellow who, the engineer soon discovered, had the habit of shooting his arm out of his cuff and patting his gray hair.

  “Who?” murmured the engineer, also speaking straight ahead since he was not yet certain he was being addressed.

  “Aren’t you assisting him in the puncture?”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re not the hematologist?”

  “No sir.”

  “They suspect a defect in the manufacture of the little blood cells in the marrow bones, like a lost step,” said the stranger cheerfully, rocking to and fro. “It don’t amount to much.”

  Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great deal of time in the hospital. He had the air of one long used to the corridor, and he had developed a transient, fabulous, and inexpert knowledge of one disease. It was plain too that he imputed to the hospital staff a benevolent and omniscient concern for the one patient. It amounted to a kind of happiness, as if the misfortune beyond the door must be balanced by affectionate treatment here in the corridor. In hospitals we expect strangers to love us.

  An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.

  “Do you know him?” asked the old man.

  “No sir.”

  “That’s Dr. Moon Mullins. He’s a fine little fellow.”

  The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.

  The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer’s memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.

  The engineer cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?” He had caught a lilt in the old man’s speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.

  “I was.” The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.

  “From north Alabama?”

  “I was.” His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.

  “Birmingham? Gadsden?”

  “Halfway between,” cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle’s. “Wait a minute,” said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you—” snapping his fingers.

  “Will Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett.”

  “Over in—” He shook his hand toward the southwest

  “Ithaca. In the Mississippi Delta.”

  “You’re Ed Barrett’s boy.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Lawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty.” Now it was his turn to do the amazing. “Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—”

  “That was my uncle, Fannin Barrett,” murmured the engineer.

  “Fannin Barrett,” cried the other, confirming it. “I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Chandler Vaught,” said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I’d seen you before. Weren’t you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall’s in Hattiesburg?”

  “No sir.”

  “Worked for the highway department?”

  “No sir.”

  “How did you know I wasn’t from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia.”

  “You don’t sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn’t sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone.”

  “Sho. But now you don’t talk like—”

  “No sir,” said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. “I’ve been up here quite a while.”

  “So you say I’m from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham,” said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. “Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Anniston.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “He don’t even act surprised,” the old man announced to the hospital at large. “But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago.”

  “Yes sir. Did you know my father?” asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.

  “Know him! What are you talking about?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur,” he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. “I got my youngest boy in there,” he went on in the same tone. “He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?” For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.

  “No sir.”

  “Do you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He’s a doctor like you.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” said the engineer, smiling.

  “Is that so,” said the other, hardly listening.

  Now, coming to himsel
f with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer’s arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his “stunt,” as he called it.

  It seemed to be a roomful of women. There were only three, he determined later, but now with Mr. Vaught gripping him tight under the armpit and five pairs of eyes swinging round to him and shooting out curious rays, he felt as if he had been thrust onto a stage.

  “And listen to this,” said Mr. Vaught, still holding him tightly. “He didn’t say Gadsden and he didn’t say Birmingham, he said halfway between.”

  “Actually I didn’t say that,” began the engineer.

  “This is Ed Barrett’s boy, Mama,” he said after pointing the engineer in several different directions.

  A pince-nez flashed at him. There was a roaring in his ears. “Lord, I knew your mother, Lucy Hunicutt, the prettiest little thing I ever saw!”

  “Yes ma’am. Thank you.”

  The women were taken up for a while with tracing kinships. (Again he caught a note of rueful eagerness in their welcome: were they political enemies of his father?) Meantime he could catch his breath. It was a longish room and not ordinarily used, it seemed, for patients, since one end was taken up with medical appliances mounted on rubber casters and covered by plastic envelopes. At the other end, between the women, a youth lay in bed. He was grinning and thrashing his legs about under the covers. The Handsome Woman stood at his bedside, eyes vacant, hand on his pillow. As the engineer looked at her he became aware of a radiance from another quarter, a “certain someone” as they used to say in old novels. There was the same dark-browed combed look he remembered. Again a pang of love pierced his heart. Having fallen in love, of course, he might not look at her.

  “—my wife, Mrs. Vaught,” Mr. Vaught was saying, aiming him toward the chunky little clubwoman whose pince-nez flashed reflections of the window. “My daughter, Kitty—” Then Kitty was his love. He prepared himself to “exchange glances” with her, but woe: she had fallen into a vacant stare, much like the Handsome Woman, and even had the same way of rattling her thumbnail against her tooth. “And my daughter-in-law, Rita.” The Handsome Woman nodded but did not take her eyes from the patient. “And here all piled up in the bed is my bud, Jamie.” The patient would have been handsome too but for a swollen expression, a softening, across the nosebridge, which gave his face an unformed look. Jamie and Kitty and Mrs. Vaught were different as could be, yet they had between them the funded look of large families. It was in their case no more than a blackness of brow, the eyebrows running forward in a jut of bone which gave the effect of setting the eye around into a profile, the clear lozenge-shaped Egyptian eye mirroring the whorled hair of the brow like a woods creature.