The Last Gentleman: A Novel

  “I don’t,” said the engineer, at a total loss. He had lost his intuition!

  “If I do outlive Jamie,” said Sutter, putting on his Curlee jacket (double breasted!), “it will not be by more than two hours. What in Christ’s name do you think I’m doing out here? Do you think I’m staying? Do you think I’m going back?”

  The engineer opened his mouth but said nothing. For the first time in his life he was astonished.

  “You won’t join me, Barrett?”

  “What? No. No, thanks.”

  Sutter nodded cheerfully, dropped the pistol in the side pocket of the jacket, and hurried down the path after the last of the dudes.

  Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life. From that time forward it was possible to meet him and after a few minutes form a clear notion of what sort of fellow he was and how he would spend the rest of his life.

  11.

  The pleasant little brunette was coming out of Jamie’s room when he turned the corner. He smiled at her and experienced a pang of pleasure when she veered and he saw she meant to stop him. But she was not smiling, and instead of speaking she held out a thermometer. He couldn’t see for looking, save only that the red line came dizzyingly near the top.

  “Is he conscious?” he asked her.

  “If you want to call it that. He’s delirious.”

  “Do you think you should—”

  “I’ve already notified Dr. Bice.”

  “How is his pulse?”

  “One-thirty, but regular.”

  “He’s not, ah, fibrillating?”

  “No.”

  “Would you come back later, that is, from time to time when you can—as often as you can, in fact, to take his pulse.”

  Now she did smile. “Why, yes.”

  One look at Jamie and he went for the phone. The youth’s face was turned to the window. His dusty dead friable hair lay on the pillow as if it had been discarded, a hank.

  As he got change from the cashier—he wouldn’t dare reverse the charges to Val—he began to grieve. It was the shame of it, the bare-faced embarrassment of getting worse and dying which took him by surprise and caught his breath in his throat. How is this matter to be set right? Were there no officials to deal with, the shame of dying, to make suitable recompense? It was like getting badly beat in a fight. To lose. Oh, to lose so badly. Oh, you bastards living and well and me dying, and where is the right of that? Oh, for the bitter shame of it.

  At last the circuits clicked open into the frying frazzling silence of Alabama. He fancied he could hear the creak of the cancerous pines.

  “Hello,” he cried after a wait. “Hello!”

  “Hello,” came a voice as faint and faraway as 1901.

  “Who is this?”

  “This here Axel.” It sounded like a child standing a good two feet below a wall phone.

  “Axel, let me speak to Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”

  “Who?”

  He repeated it.

  “Who dat?”

  “Sister—”

  “Sister Viney?”

  “Yes, Sister Viney.”

  “Yes suh, she here.”

  “Well, go get her, Axel.”

  “Yes suh.”

  The ancient Alabama silence fried away in his ear. His foot went to sleep. Twice he had to stoke the box with quarters. That black cretin Axel—

  “Hello.”

  He gave a start. He had almost forgotten where he was. “Hello, is this Val? That is, Sister—”

  “This is Val.”

  “Val, this is—” Christ, who? “—Will Barrett.”

  “Yes?” The same calculated buzzing non-surprise—he felt a familiar spasm of irritation.

  “I, ah—Jamie asked me to call you.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about a book. A book about entropy. Actually, that is not the real reason I’m—”

  “Entropy,” she repeated.

  “Jamie said you promised to send him a book.”

  “How is Jamie?”

  “He asked me—”

  “Never mind about the book. How is he?”

  “He is very sick.”

  “Is he dying?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m leaving now. I’ll get a plane in New Orleans.”

  “Good.”

  He slumped with the relief of it. She’d do, nutty as she was. It came over him suddenly: there is another use for women after all, especially Southern women. They knew how to minister to the dying! It was they all along who had set at nought the shame of it and had done it so well that he had not even known that it took doing. He’d rather have a proper Southern woman (even one of his aunts!) but he’d settle for this one. “Very good. And would you call the rest of the family. My change is gone and I have to get back to Jamie.” All women come. The more women, the less shame.

  “If anything happens before I get there, you’ll have to attend to it.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Attend to what?”

  “His baptism.”

  “Ma’am? Eh?”

  “I said you’ll have to see to his baptism if I don’t get there in time.”

  “Excuse me,” said the courteous but terrified engineer. “Much as I’d like to oblige you, I don’t believe I can take the responsibility.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, I’m not a member of the family.”

  “You’re his friend, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you deny him penicillin if it would save his life?”

  “No,” he said, stiffening. None of your Catholic tricks, Sister, the little tricky triumphs of analogy. You learned more in Paterson, New Jersey, than you realize. But he said only: “Why don’t you get Sutter?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “As a matter of fact, he asked me to call you too.”

  “Good. Then you hold the fort till I get there.”

  “I don’t believe in baptizing anybody against their will,” said the sweating engineer, for lack of anything better to say.

  “Then ask him if it’s against his will.”

  “Ask him?”

  “Barrett, I charge you to ask him.” She sounded serious enough but he couldn’t swear she wasn’t laughing at him.

  “It’s really none of my business, Sister.”

  “It’s my responsibility but I am giving it to you until I get there. You can call a priest, can’t you?”

  “I am not of your faith, Sister.” Where did he get these solemn religious expressions?

  “Then call a minister for God’s sake. Or do it yourself. I charge you. All you have to do is—”

  “But—”

  “If you don’t call someone, then you’ll have to do it yourself.”

  Then God knows I’ll call someone, thought the prudent engineer. But he was becoming angry. To the devil with this exotic pair, Sutter and Val, the absentee experts who would deputize him, one to practice medicine, the other to practice priestcraft. Charge him indeed. Who were they to charge anybody?

  “Barrett, look. I know that you are a highly intelligent and an intuitive man, and that you have a gift for fathoming people. Isn’t that true?”

  “I don’t know,” he said glumly.

  “I think you can tell when somebody is deadly serious about something, can’t you?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Then I am charging you with the responsibility. You will have to fathom that according to your own lights.”

  “You can’t—” But the circuits had closed on unhappy old Alabama, frying away in its own juices.

  The poor addled engineer took the steps four at a time, racing to do he knew not what. So that when he reached the sickroom and found Jamie both unconscious and unattended, he was of two minds about it: dismayed that the worst had happened, that Jamie was very likely dying here and now; yet
relieved despite himself that Jamie was unconscious and so he didn’t have to ask him any such question (for it was of course absolutely the last question to be tolerated by the comradely and stoic silence generated between the two of them). Here he stood, therefore, stooped over the machinery of Jamie’s veins, hoist not only by the vast awkwardness of dying but now by religion too. He became angrier than ever. Where was the hospital staff? Where was the family? Where was the chaplain? Then he noticed, almost idly as if he had spied a fly on the pillow, that there was something amiss about the vein. Its machinery rhythm was out of kilter.

  All along he had known it would come to this and that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take the pulse. The thread of artery stirred fitfully under his finger but there was no profit in it. Which stirrings to count?

  Without knowing how he came there, he had fetched up again at the nurses’ cage where reigned bald Queen Bess. Once again he made noises and motions and once again she annihilated him, rendered him invisible and of no account.

  “Nurse,” he said sternly, four feet away. He actually raised a forefinger.

  She answered the telephone.

  All at once time fell in, bent, and he was transported over the Dutch sort of door—it didn’t seem to open—flew over it like a poltergeist and found himself inside the station. He seemed to be listening. “You hear me, goddamn it,” thundered a voice terrible and strange. It was for the two of them to listen as the voice went on. “—or else I’m going to kick yo’ ass down there.” An oddly Southern voice, then not his surely. Yet her glossy eyes were on him, round as a dollar watch, the lids nictitating from below like a lizard’s. Her smile, stretching open the rugae, the troughs of which he noticed were bare of lipstick, proffered a new ghastly friendship for him. Now as he watched, dreaming, she was using the phone again.

  “Yes sir. But Mr. Barrett seems a little upset. Yes, good.” She knew him! Perhaps she had known him all along. On the other hand, there seemed to have sprung up between them a brand-new friendship, a species of roguish fondness.

  Again segments of time collapsed, fell away, and he was transported magically into the corridor, she at his side, squeezing his arm in a love-joke. Doors flew open. Elevators converged on the floor.

  The next thing he knew he was speaking in a businesslike and considered manner to the resident and chaplain outside Jamie’s closed door. He had survived the hiatus of his rage. There remained only the smell of it, strong as burnt meat; he hugged his arms close to his armpits.

  The resident had just come out of Jamie’s room. He spoke seriously but in a measured, relaxed way. That’s what I wanted, thought the engineer, sighing—someone to give measure and form to time itself. Was that the worst of dying, dying without permission, license, so to speak?

  The engineer nodded and turned to the chaplain. He explained the commission.

  “Therefore it seemed proper to me,” he concluded, “to pass along to you the request of his sister, who is a religious of your faith.”

  “I see,” said the priest, who, however, instead of listening to what the engineer said, was eyeing this strange young man himself. Evidently he could not make out what kind of bird he was dealing with. Three times he asked the engineer where he came from, as if this might shed some light.

  “Do you know Father Gillis from Conway, Arkansas?” the priest asked him. If only he could get a fix on him!

  “No sir.” Damnation, did they have to hit upon a mutual friend?

  They were a curious pair, the resident and the priest. The resident was hollow-eyed and green-skinned and sunken of cheek. His hair grew down his neck in ringlets like a hyacinth. There was a rash on his throat under his loose collar. But unhealthy as he was he affected the easy nonchalance of an athlete and swung his fist softly. The priest was a neat chunky man whose thick auburn hair had been freshly cut and combed, exposing a white healthy scalp in the wide part. The gold stems of his bifocals pressed snugly against muscular temples. His hand, which he gave the engineer in a tentative interrogatory clasp (what sort of a bird are you, asked the hand), was thick through the palm and heavily freckled.

  “He’s fibrillating,” said the haggard resident, first addressing the engineer. Then, not quite getting hold of him either, he turned to the priest, all the while making a few soft swings of fist to hand. “A heavy presystolic murmur. Temperature one-o-five point three, lungs filled up to the seventh interspace, spleen down to here.”

  “What does that mean?” asked the frowning engineer.

  The resident shrugged, squared off with his fist for a combination punch but didn’t throw it. “Pulmonary edema, for one thing. He’s drowning in his own fluids.”

  “Will he regain consciousness?”

  The resident frowned. There was a protocol here, a way of speaking-in-the-hall which the resident and priest were onto and he, the engineer, was not. The question did not pass muster, for the resident turned to the priest.

  “Do you know what that joker told me last night?” (This is the way we speak.) “I always horse around with him. I wanted to take his temperature and I asked him what he wanted me to do, meaning which did he prefer, rectal or oral. So he says to me: Bice, you know what you can do with it. Oh, you can’t make a nickel on him,” he said, trying the engineer again (Now do you see? This is the way death itself can be gotten past).

  The priest hung fire, vague and fond, until he saw the resident had finished. “Now, ah,” he said, touching the engineer’s elbow with just the hint of interrogatory pressure, as if he meant to ask the time. But the touch was skillful. The engineer found himself guided into the solarium.

  “Let me see if I understand you,” said the priest, putting his head down and taking hold of a water pipe in his thick freckled hand. He watched intently as his perfect thumbnail creased a blister of paint. “This young man you say has never been baptized, and though he is unconscious now and perhaps will not regain consciousness, you have reason to believe he desires baptism?”

  “No sir. His sister desires the baptism.”

  “But he has a Catholic background?”

  “If you mean Roman Catholic, no. I’m an Episcopalian,” said the engineer stiffly. Where in the world did these ready-made polemics come from? Never in his entire lifetime had he given such matters a single thought and now all at once he was a stout Anglican, a defender of the faith.

  “Of course, of course. And the young man in there, is he also from a Protestant, that is, an Episcopal background?”

  “No sir. His background was originally Baptist, though his family later became Episcopalian—which accounts for the delay.” The engineer, who could not quite remember the explanation, fell silent. “Delay in baptism, that is,” he added after a moment.

  The priest examined another blister on the water pipe. “I don’t quite see why I have been summoned,” he said softly. “Perhaps you’d better call the Protestant chaplain.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” said the engineer hastily, breaking out in a sweat lest the priest leave and he, the engineer, should have to go careening around the walls again. “Jamie professed no faith, so it is all the same which of you ministers, ah, ministers to him.” For some reason he laughed nervously. He didn’t want this fellow to get away—for one thing, he liked it that the other didn’t intone in a religious voice. He was more like a baseball umpire in his serviceable serge, which was swelled out by his muscular body. “As I told you, his sister, who is a nun, made me promise to send for you. She is on her way out here. She is a religious of a modern type. Her habit is short, to about here.” Then, realizing that he was not helping his case, he added nervously: “I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t found her own order. She is doing wonderful work among the Negroes. Aren’t foundresses quite often saints?” He groaned.

  “I see,” said the priest, and actually stole a glance at the other to see, as the engineer clearly perceived, whether he was quite mad. But the engineer was past minding, as long as the priest got on with it. Evidently thi
s was an unusual case. The priest tried again.

  “Now you. Are you a friend of the family?”

  “Yes, a close friend and traveling companion of the patient.”

  “And the other gentleman—he is the patient’s brother?”

  “Sutter? Is he here?” For the second time in his life the engineer was astonished.

  “There is a visitor with the patient who I gather, from his conversation with Dr. Bice, is a doctor.”

  “That must be Sutter.”

  “The only thing is, I don’t yet quite understand why it is you and not he who is taking the initiative here.”

  “He was not here when Jamie had his attack. But he told me—he must have just come.”

  The priest took off his glasses, exposing naked eyes and a naked nosebridge, and carefully polished the lenses with a clean handkerchief. Making a bracket of his hand, he put the glasses back on, settling the stems onto his healthy temples.

  “It would help if we had some indication from the patient or at least from the immediate family. Otherwise I don’t want to intrude. In fact, I would say it is a ‘must.’”

  “Yes sir.” Unhinged as he was, the engineer was still sentient. He perceived that the priest had a certain style of talking which he no doubt shared with other priests. It was a good bet that quite a few priests liked to say such things as “It is a ‘must’” or perhaps “Now that is the sixty-four-dollar question.”

  “Sir, could we go in and speak to the patient’s brother?”

  “Well, let’s see what we shall see.”

  The resident had left. Sutter was leaning against the window in Jamie’s room, his foot propped on the radiator.

  “Dr. Vaught,” said the engineer, handing the priest along ahead of him—the goods to be delivered at last. “This is Father—”

  “Boomer,” said the priest.

  “Father Boomer,” said Sutter, shaking hands but not taking his foot from the radiator.

  After a glance at Jamie—the youth’s head had fallen to the side and his eyes were closed—the engineer told Sutter: “Val asked me to call Father Boomer.”

  “You spoke to Val just now?”