The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

Why would anyone want to make such plans now? He could not. He could not bring himself to tell a joke or even to consider that he had another twelve holes of golf to play. As for planning the next shot, he had no idea whether he would hit the ball three feet or three hundred feet. Did it matter?

The heart

They were not exactly old friends, though Jimmy seemed to know more about him than he knew himself. He, Jimmy, knew about his old girlfriend, his wife’s death, his money, his wife’s money, his brother-in-law’s money, his honorary degree, his man-of-the-year award.

Jimmy joined the Rho Omega Kappas, the Rocks, who wore sweaters under their double-breasted suits and showed too much gum when they smiled.

After you grow up, you stop having fistfights, cursing, getting drunk, and talking about women. You begin to banter. He had bantered for thirty years.

The figure moved behind the poplar, or perhaps a bream of air stirred the leaves. He went on gazing but could not bring his eyes to focus. Something distracted him. Though his gaze was fixed, it was unseeing. He seemed to be listening, head slightly cocked.

Until today he had not thought of his father for years. Now he remembered everything his father said and did, even remembered the smell of him, the catarrh-and-whiskey bream and the hot, quail reek of his hands.

instantly and without the least surprise as if he had known it all along but had not until now taken the trouble to know that he knew.

what’s more even beat you, made more money, wrote a law book, won an honorary degree, listened to better music. Now Marion is dead and I can’t believe I spent all those years in New York in Trusts and Estates and taking dogs down elevators and out to the park to take a crap.

The whole twenty years could just as easily have been a long night’s dream, and here he was in old Carolina, thinking of Ethel Rosenblum and having fits and falling down on the golf course—what in God’s name was I doing there, and am I doing here?

Once he cleared the screen of leaves the sun behind him suddenly went down and came up in front, blazing into his eyes.

The sun behind him was reflected from a bank of windows. It was a house of glass.

it occurred to him that for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, he knew exactly what was what and what he intended to do. He remembered everything. He fell down again but not seriously, springing up immediately and hardly missing a step. Had the girl seen him fall?

Words surely have meanings, she thought, and there is my trouble. Something happens to words coming to me from other people. Something happens to my words. They do not seem worth uttering. People don’t mean what they say. Words often mean their opposites.

She read the phrase aloud: a tall man with a deeply tanned face. It sounded strange in the dead silence and the warm Carolina sunlight.

When she met his gaze, he cocked the other eyebrow and looked at a chipmunk. Can a dog be embarrassed?

The dog followed, his serious hazel eyes attentive but unable to meet her gaze.

Have a look-see. Nobody walks in your suburbs. Children look at me with absolute astonishment. Parents suspect me of being a molester. Dogs try to bite me.

She had trouble talking. It was like walking out on a stage. She could answer questions, play straight man to his knock-knock routine, even ask questions. But to make a statement on your own, surely you had to know what you were talking about.

It was the lilt at the end of a question that let her say it, freed her up. She did not want to go down just yet the way a statement goes down flat and hard, ends.

Morsel. She liked the word. It was folded on itself and had a taste. It was dark and nourishing, better than a snack.

Now he was trying to sound like Dennis Weaver and didn’t. She was embarrassed for him. How could he stand to speak himself? You’d have to be crazy to make such a fool of yourself. How could he stand to be so out-of-focus? a bogus Englishman doing knock-knocks. I’d rather be crazy.

Or maybe the question was, why did she have to know everything before she could say anything?

I have to go down first. You’re trying to keep me up. Down? I have to go down down down before I go up. Down down in me to it. You shouldn’t try to keep me up by buzzing me up.

One advantage to being crazy is that one is given leave to be rude. Had she gone crazy so people’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt?

Though she could not have said so, she could tell that he had reached such a degree of irony in his life that he would as soon do one thing as another.

He’d have been glad to help her move the stove just for the oddness of it. “Where have you been?” his golfer friends would ask him. “I sliced out-of-bounds on eighteen and met a girl who asked me to help her move a stove into her house.” “Right,” they would say. “What else?”

He sees my failure and feels sorry for me but wants no part of it or me and just forgets.

Stop trying to make sense of my nonsense. My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

God, I am going to sleep without a pill!—and woke as suddenly. What woke her? The violet vapor from the glass grapes falling straight in her eye? No, the dog had barked. Or rumbled a deep throat rumble. He was sitting up, ears erect, hackles bristling along his spine like a razorback hog.

Dr. Duk: nodding and smiling, straining every nerve, blood rushing forward to his face, to keep up with this dashing exotic person—his buddy?

And that rascal Will! Not only did he marry a Peabody, he also made it on his own, from editor of the Law Review, straight into the top Wall Street firm, one of the Ten Most Promising Young Attorneys, early retirement, man-of-the-year here—I mean, he did it all! I should have known better—but he was always out of it when I knew him—little did I realize what was going on behind that absentminded expression. Just wait till I get my hands on that rascal! So who do I end up with? Old blue-eyes here. But he’s cute. Aintcha, hon?

She could see that Dr. Duk was just beginning to see that her father smiled all the time and that all his expressions, even frowns, occurred within the smile. For example, now he was grinning angrily, not smiling.

Because no matter what she said or did, her mother would make her own sense of it and her father wouldn’t like it. So it didn’t matter what she said. It was like being alone in a great echoing cave. There was a temptation to holler.

But the fact remains that Allison is not quite herself yet—though she is clearly making progress, progress toward a decision to have something to do with us.

You want to know what I think it all comes down to, said her father to the world around, looking at no one in particular. It all comes down to accepting your responsibility. Once you do that, you got it made.

Shape up or ship out, she thought. Right. I’m shipping out.

As she sat alone, it crossed her mind for the first time in her life: What if I make the plans for me? What then? Is there an I in me that can start something? An initiating I, an I-I.

Under the station was a space, a little leafy room where one could sit in comfort on a limb of pittosporum.

A shadow like a German saber scar crossed one cheek. Today he was dressed differently.

Perhaps there was no unease with him because he managed to be both there and not there as one required. Is it possible to stand next to a stranger at a bus stop and know that he is a friend? Was he someone she had known well and forgotten?

Gazing at her, he almost smiled. In her odd words he seemed to hear echoes of other voices in other years.

“What is entailed with you?” “Nothing. Why?” “You seem somewhat pale and in travail. Is the abomination at home or in the hemispheres?” “I don’t know. Maybe both. You mean my brain. I don’t feel very well, to tell the truth.”

“No? Why not?” “Because there I will be with people having put the stove where I want it. And that’s the old home fix-up which is being in a fix. Then what? The helping is not helping me.”

He noticed that she treated the gift of the word exactly like the avocados. She’d have to think about it after he left.

His eyes, his face reminded her of something, what? yes, of the face and white eyes of combat soldiers she had seen a long time ago in Life magazine.

Why could she remember perfectly an old Life magazine but could not quite remember why she had decided to come here?

dinner, so Allie naturally called Miss Sally Aunt Sally. Sure, we knew Miss Sally was fond of Allie ever since Allie was a little girl—for one thing Allie was the only one who would listen to her because the old lady could talk the ears off a jackass and frankly I couldn’t stand it more than a few minutes—

(That was because I thought I was supposed to and did not know how not to listen or what would happen to a person if one got up and went away.)

It wasn’t even the treasure I liked but the island and the idea of something being hidden there and finding it through a geometry of pine trees.)

As Jack Curl talked, Will Barrett stood in the hall moving his head a little to make the bright sunlight race like quicksilver around the beveled glass of the front door.