The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy

Author:Walker Percy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2010-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

5.

“A pretty links, isn’t it? You know, I was one of the first people to be brought up in a suburb. Aren’t you Will Barrett?”

He had been watching the golfers from the patio and he turned around quickly, irritably, not liking to be surprised. There stood a woman he first took to be a Salvation Army lass and he was about to refuse her alms even more irritably. But then he noticed she was a Vaught. She must be Val.

“In the past,” she went on before he could answer, “people have usually remembered their childhood in old houses in town or on dirt farms back in the country. But what I remember is the golf links and the pool. I spent every warm day of my girlhood at the pool, all day every day, even eating meals there. Even now it doesn’t seem right to eat a hamburger without having wrinkled fingers and smelling chlorine.” She didn’t laugh but went on gazing past him at the golfers. Her musing absent-mindedness, he reckoned, was one of the little eccentricites nuns permitted themselves. He had never spoken to a nun. But perhaps she was not a proper nun after all, wearing as she did not a proper habit but a black skirt and blouse and a little cap-and-veil business. But beyond a doubt she was a Vaught, though a somewhat plumpish bad-complexioned potato-fed Vaught. Her wrist was broad and white as milk and simple: it was easy for him to imagine that if it was cut through it would show not tendon and bone but a homogenous nun-substance.

“I’ve been looking for you, Barrett. Once I heard your father make a speech to the D.A.R. on the subject of noblesse oblige and our duty to the Negro. A strange experience and a strange bunch of noblewomen. Not that I know much about noblesse oblige, but he gave them proper hell. He was right about one thing, of course, character. You don’t hear much about that either nowadays.”

“Is that why you became a nun?” he asked politely.

“Partly, I suppose. I drove up to see Jamie and now I want to see you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Jamie looks awful.”

“Yes.” He was about to enter with her onto the mournful ground of Jamie’s illness, but she fell away again. John Houghton’s scissors came snicker-sneeing along the brick walk behind her and flushed a towhee out of the azaleas, a dandy little cock in tuxedo-black and cinnamon vest She gazed down at the bird with the same mild distracted eye.

“Does John Houghton still run after school girls?”

“Ma’am? Oh. Well, yes.”

Now freed by her preoccupation with the forgotten trophies of her past, the sentient engineer swung full upon her. What to make of it, this queer casualness of hers? Was it Catholic, a species of professional unseriousness (death and sin are our affair, so we can make light of them), almost frivolity, like electricians who make a show of leaning on high-voltage wires? Or was it an elaborate Vaught dialectic, thus: Rita and the rest of you are going to be so serious about Jamie, therefore I am not, etc.

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