The Last Gentleman: A Novel Read online

  To Mrs. Vaught elder he was as nice as he could be. His manners were good without being too ceremonial. There was a lightness in him: he knew how to fool with her. They could even have a fuss. “Now you listen to me, Billy Barrett, it’s time you buckled down,” etc. So acute was his radar that neither Mrs. Vaught nor her husband could quite get it into their heads that he did not know everything they knew. He sounded like he did. She would speak allusively of six people utterly unknown to him—“So I took one look at her when she got home from school and of course her face was all broken out and, I said ho-ho—”

  “Who is that now?” asked the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve.

  “Sally, Myra’s oldest.”

  “Myra?”

  “My stepdaughter.”

  She was much as he remembered other ladies at home, companionable and funny, except when she got off on her pet subject, fluoridation or rather the evils of it, which had come in her mind to be connected with patriotic sentiments. Then her voice become sonorous and bell-like. She grew shorter than ever, drew into herself like a fort, and fired in all directions. She also spoke often of the “Bavarian Illuminate,” a group who, in her view, were responsible for the troubles of the South. They represented European and Jewish finance and had sold out the Confederacy.

  “You know the real story of Judah P. Benjamin and John Slidell, don’t you?” she asked him, smiling.

  “No ma’am,” he said, looking at her closely to see if she was serious. She was. In her smiling eyes he caught sight of fiery depths.

  Rita, however, paid no attention to him. She looked through him.

  Kitty? Twice she was in Jamie’s room when he came up, but she seemed abstracted and indifferent. When he asked her if she wanted a Coke (as if they were back in high school in Atlanta), she put her head down and ducked away from him. He couldn’t understand it. Had he dreamed that he had eavesdropped?

  On his fourth visit to Jamie he had a small amnesic fit, the first in eighteen months.

  As he climbed into the thin watery sunlight of Washington Heights, the look and smell of the place threw him off and he slipped a cog. He couldn’t remember why he came. Yonder was a little flatiron of concrete planted with maybe linden trees like a park in Prague. Sad-looking Jewish men walked around with their hands in their pockets and hair growing down their necks. It was as far away as Lapland. A sign read: Washington Heights Bar and Grill. Could George Washington have set foot here? Which way is Virginia?

  He sat down under a billboard of Johnnie Walker whose legs were driven by a motor. He puts his hands on his knees and was careful not to turn his head. It would happen, he knew, that if he kept still for a while he could get his bearings like a man lost in the woods. There was no danger yet of slipping: jumping the tracks altogether and spending the next three months in Richmond.

  It was then that he caught sight of Kitty coming from the hospital, head down, bucking the eternal gale of the side streets. He knew only that he knew her. There were meltings of recognition about his flank and loin. He wished now that he had looked in his wallet, to make sure of his own name and maybe find hers.

  “Wait,” he caught her four steps down the IRT.

  “What? Oh.” She smiled quickly and started down again.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said, making a grimace by way of a joke.

  “Please come over here for a moment. I have something to tell you.” He knew that he could speak to her if he did not think about it too much.

  She shrugged and let him guide her to the bench.

  “What?”

  “I, ah, thought you might do me a favor.” He looked at her hard, groping for himself in her eyes. If he could not help her, hide her in Central Park, then she could help him.

  “Sure, what?”

  “You’re going in the subway?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just came out. To see, ah—” He knew he would know it as soon as she thought it. She thought it. “—Jamie.”

  “Good. He’ll be glad to see you.” She eyed him, smiling, not quite onto whatever roundabout joke he was playing and not liking it much.

  “I changed my mind and decided to go back downtown.”

  “All right.” But it was not all right. She thought he was up to some boy-girl business. “What’s the favor?”

  “That I ride with you and that you give me a punch if I miss my station.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know where I live?”

  “Yes. At—”

  He touched her arm. “Don’t tell me. I want to see if I know when I get there.”

  “What’s the matter—oh”—all joking aside now, eyes black as shoe buttons. She saw he was sweating.

  Oddest of all: strange as he felt, having slipped six cogs, the engineer knew nevertheless that it was a negotiable strangeness. He could spend some on her. “Nothing much. Will you do as I say?”

  “Yes.”

  Above them, Johnnie Walker’s legs creaked like ship’s rigging.

  “Let’s go.” He started straight out, not waiting on her.

  “That’s the wrong subway,” she said, catching up with him. “I’m taking the IRT.”

  “Right.” It was like a déjà vu: he knew what she was going to say as soon as she said it.

  They rode in silence. When the train came to the first lights of the Columbus Circle platform, he rose. “This is it,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, watching him sloe-eyed.

  “Thank you,” he said, taking her hand like a man’s, and left quickly.

  He stopped at a gum-machine mirror to see how he looked. There was nothing much wrong. His face was pale but intact. But when he straightened, his knee gave way and he stumbled to the edge of the platform. The particles began to sing.

  A hand took his. “This way,” said Kitty. Her hand was warm and grubby from riding subways.

  She led him to a bench on an arc of the Circle. It is strange, he thought, musing, but love is backwards too. In order to love, one has not to love. Look at her. Her hand was on his thigh, rough as a nurse. She made herself free of him, peering so close he could smell her breath. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re pale. Your hand is so cold.” She made a slight movement and checked it. He knew she had meant to warm his hand in her lap.

  “As long as you are here, will you go over there and buy me a glass of orange juice?”

  She watched him drink the juice. “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have supper last night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember to eat?”

  “I eat when I get hungry. I don’t remember that I have eaten.”

  “Are you hungry now?”

  “Yes.”

  They walked to the automat on Fifty-seventh Street. While she drank coffee, he ate four dollars’ worth of roast beef and felt much better. I’m in love, he thought as he drank his third glass of milk.

  “I don’t think there is anything wrong with you,” she said when he finished.

  “That’s right.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Go home and go to bed.”

  “You work at night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  “There’s one more thing—” he said.

  “What?”

  “Write your name and telephone number on this.”

  She smiled and did so but when she looked up and saw him she grew serious. “Oh.”

  “Yes, I need somebody to call. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes.”

  The sicker I am, the more I know, he thought. And the more she loves me. “Suppose I need to call you at three o’clock in the morning and say come to Weehawken.”

  “Call me.” Her face clouded. “What about next month?”

&nbs
p; “What about it?”

  “I’ll be in Spain. In Torremolinos.”

  “Write it down.” After she wrote it, he asked her. “Now what if I call you over there?”

  She looked at him, taking a tuck of lip between her teeth. “Do you mean it?”

  “I mean it. You’re the one I’m going to call.”

  “Why me?”

  He drew his chair closer to the corner of the table and put his hand in her lap. “I’m in love.”

  “You are,” she said. “Oh.”

  “I’ve never been in love before.”

  “Is that right?” Keeping a wary eye on him, she turned her head toward the empty automat.

  “Hold still,” he said, and leaning forward put his mouth on hers before she closed it. She held still from the habit of ministering to him. She was helping him. But hold on!

  “Good Lord,” she said presently and to no one.

  “I never thought it would be so simple,” said he, musing.

  “Simple?” She was caught, betwixt and between being a girl full of stratagems and a rough and ready nurse.

  “That you are in love and that there is time for it and that you take the time.”

  “I see.”

  “Let’s go to your house.”

  “What for?”

  He kissed her again.

  She tucked the corner of her mouth and began to nod and slap the table softly.

  What he wanted to tell her but could not think quite how was that he did not propose country matters. He did not propose to press against her in an elevator. What he wanted was both more and less. He loved her. His heart melted. She was his sweetheart, his certain someone. He wanted to hold her charms in his arms. He wanted to go into a proper house and shower her with kisses in the old style.

  “What do you do when you also have breakfast?” she asked him.

  “What? Oh,” he said, seeing it was a joke. “Well, I’m not joking.” He’d as soon she didn’t make Broadway jokes, gags.

  “I see you’re not.”

  “I love you.”

  “You do.” The best she could do was register it.

  “Let’s go to your house.”

  “You said you worked last night and were going to bed.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “I think you need some sleep.”

  “I need very little sleep.”

  “You’re pretty tough.”

  “Yes, I’m very strong. I can press 250 pounds and snatch 225. I can whip every middleweight at Princeton, Long Island University, and the Y.M.C.A.”

  “Now you’re joking.”

  “Yes, but it’s true.”

  “You weren’t so strong in the subway.”

  “I blacked out for a second.”

  “Do you think you’re going to have another spell of amnesia?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’d like to have you around if I do.”

  “For how long?”

  “Let’s begin with the weekend. How strange that it is Friday afternoon and that we are together now and can be together the whole weekend.”

  “This all seems like a conclusion you have reached entirely on your own. What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “Oh boy,” she said and commenced nodding and slapping again. “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Go?”

  “Now. For the weekend.”

  “You don’t fool around, do you?”

  “Don’t talk like that”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know it’s not like that.”

  “What is it like?”

  “Where then?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and put her hand on his, this time a proper girl’s hand, not a nurse’s. “Rita and I are going to Fire Island.”

  “Let Rita go and we’ll stay home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Rita is very dear to me. I can’t hurt her feelings.”

  “Why is she dear to you?”

  “What right have you to ask?”

  “Now I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’ll tell you. For one thing, Rita has done so much for us, for me, and we have done so badly by her.”

  “What has she done?”

  “Oh Lord. I’ll tell you. You hear about people being unselfish. She actually is—the only one I know. The nearest thing to it is my sister Val, who went into a religious order, but even that is not the same because she does what she does for a reason, love of God and the salvation of her own soul. Rita does it without having these reasons.”

  “Does what?”

  “Helps Jamie, helps me—”

  “How did she help you?”

  “Mama took me up to Cleveland but I became terribly depressed and went home. I went to work in Myra’s real-estate office for a while, then came up here to school—and got horribly lonely and depressed again. It was then that Rita grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and began to put the pieces back together—in spite of what my brother did to her.”

  “What did he do to her?”

  “Oh,” she shrugged. “It’s a long story. But what a horrible mess. Let’s just say that he developed abnormal psychosexual requirements.”

  “I see.” He frowned. He didn’t much like her using the word “psychosexual.” It reminded him of the tough little babes of his old therapy group, who used expressions like “mental masturbation” and “getting your jollies.” It had the echo of someone else. She was his sweetheart and ought to know better. None of your smart-ass Fifty-seventh Street talk, he felt like telling her. “I was wondering,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I love you. Do you love me?”

  “If you don’t kill me. I swear to goodness.”

  He fell to pondering. “This is the first time I’ve been in love,” he said, almost to himself. He looked up, smiling. “Now that I think of it, I guess this sounds strange to you.”

  “Not strange at all!” she cried with her actress’s lilt.

  He laughed. Presently he said, “I see now that it could be taken in the sense that I say it without meaning it.”

  “Yes, it could be taken in that sense.”

  “I suppose in fact that it could even be something one commonly says. Men, I mean.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Did you take me to mean it like that?”

  “No, not you.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s time for me to leave.”

  “You’re going to Fire Island?”

  “Yes, and you’re sleepy.”

  All of a sudden he was. “When will I see you?”

  “Aren’t you coming to my birthday party Monday?”

  “Oh yes. In Jamie’s room. I thought it was Jamie’s birthday.”

  “We’re two days apart. Monday falls between. I’ll be twenty-one and Jamie sixteen.”

  “Twenty-one.” His eyes had fallen away into a stare. “Go to bed.”

  “Right.” Twenty-one. The very number seemed hers, a lovely fine come-of-age adult number faintly perfumed by her, like the street where she lived.

  6.

  When his soil-bank check arrived on Friday, he, the strangest of planters, proprietor of two hundred acres of blackberries and canebrakes, was able to pay his debt to Dr. Gamow. Having given up his checking account, he cashed the check at Macy’s and dropped off the money at Dr. Gamow’s office on his way home Monday morning.

  Sticking his head through Dr. Gamow’s inner door at nine o’clock, he caught a glimpse of the new group seated around a new table. It didn’t take twenty seconds to hand over the bills, but that was long enough. In an instant he sniffed out the special group climate of nurtured hostilities and calculated affronts. Though they could not have met more than two or three times, already a stringy girl with a shako of teased hair (White Plains social worker?) was glaring at a little red rooster of a gent (computer engineer?). Sh
e was letting him have it: “Don’t act out at me, Buster!” The old virtuoso of groups heaved a sigh. And even though Dr. Gamow opened the door another notch by way of silent invitation, he shook his head and said goodbye. But not without regret. It was like the great halfback George Gipp paying a final visit to Notre Dame stadium.

  But that left him $34.54 to buy presents for Kitty and Jamie and to eat until payday Saturday. Sunday night he sat at his console under Macy’s racking his brain. What to give these rich Texas-type Southerners who already had everything? A book for Jamie? He reckoned not, because not even Sutter’s book held his attention for long. It was felt, fingered, flexed, but not read. His choice finally was both easy and audacious. Easy because he could not really afford to buy a gift and himself owned a single possession. Then why not lend it to Jamie: his telescope. The money went for Kitty’s present, a tiny golden ballet slipper from Tiffany’s for her charm bracelet.

  “I don’t have any use for it right now,” said he to Jamie as he clamped the Tetzlar to the window sill. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.” Not for one second did he, as he fiddled with the telescope, lose sight of Kitty, who was unwrapping the little jewel box. She held up the slipper, gave him her dry sideways Lippo Lippi look, tucked in the corner of her mouth, and nodded half a millimeter. His knee leapt out of joint. What was it about this splendid but by no means extraordinary girl which knocked him in the head and crossed his eyes like Woody Woodpecker?

  Jamie’s bed was strewn with neckties and books—three people had given him the same funny book entitled So You’re a Crock. The nurses bought a Merita cake and spelled out “Happy Birthday” in chart paper. The internes made a drink of laboratory alcohol and frozen grapefruit juice, as if they were all castaways and had to make do with what they had. From an upper Broadway novelty shop Mr. Vaught had obtained a realistic papier-mâché dogturd which he slipped onto the bed under the very noses of the nurses. As the latter spied it and let out their screams of dismay, the old man charged fiercely about the room, peering under appliances. “I saw him in here, a little feist dog!”