The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [12]
“I don’t think we ought to let him ride, do you, Mrs. Cutrer? Here we are doing the work of the economy and there he is skimming off his five percent like a pawnbroker on Dryades Street.”
My aunt turns into herself another degree and becomes Lorenzo himself.
“Now here’s a distinguished pair for you,” she tells Kate and watches her carefully; she is not paying any attention to us. “The barbarians at the inner gate and who defends the West? Don John of Austria? No, Mr. Bolling the stockbroker and Mr. Wade the lawyer. Mr. Bolling and Mr. Wade, defenders of the faith, seats of wisdom, mirrors of justice. God, I wouldn’t mind if they showed a little spirit in their debauchery, but look at them. Rosenkranz and Guildenstern.”
It comes to me again how formidable Walter was in college, how much older he seemed then. Walter is a sickly-looking fellow with a hollow temple but he is actually quite healthy. He has gray sharklike skin and lidded eyes and a lock of hair combed across his forehead in the Mac-Arthur style. Originally from Clarksburg, West Virginia, he attended Tulane and settled in New Orleans after the war. Now at thirty-three he is already the senior partner of a new firm of lawyers, Wade & Molyneux, which specializes in oil-lease law.
“Mr. Wade,” my aunt asks Walter. “Are you a seat of wisdom?”
“Yes ma’am, Mrs. Cutrer.”
I have to grin. What is funny is that Walter always starts out in the best brilliant-young-lawyer style of humoring an old lady by letting her get the better of him, whereas she really does get the better of him. Old ladies in West Virginia were never like this. But strangely, my aunt looks squarely at Kate and misses the storm warnings. Kate’s head lowers until her brown shingled hair falls along her cheek. Then as Walter’s eyes grow wider and warier, his smile more wolfish—he looks like a recruit picking his way through a minefield—Kate utters a clicking sound in her teeth and abruptly leaves the room.
Walter follows her. My aunt sighs. Uncle Jules sits easy. He has the gift of believing that nothing can really go wrong in his household. There are household-ups and household-downs but he smiles through them without a flicker of unease. Even at the time of Kate’s breakdown, it was possible for him to accept it as the sort of normal mishap which befalls sensitive girls. It is his confidence in Aunt Emily. As long as she is mistress of his house, the worst that can happen, death itself, is nothing more than seemly.
Presently Uncle Jules leaves for the office. My aunt speaks to Walter in the hall. I sit in the empty dining room thinking of nothing. Walter joins me for dessert. Afterwards, as Mercer clears the table, Walter goes to the long window and stands looking out, hands in his pockets. I am prepared to reassure him about Kate, but it turns out that it is the Krewe of Neptune, not Kate, which is on his mind.
“I wish you would reconsider, Binx.” There is an exhilaration in his voice which carries over from his talk with Uncle Jules. “We’ve got a damn good bunch of guys now.” Ten years ago he would have said “ace gents”; that was what we called good guys in the nineteen forties. “You may not agree with me, but in my opinion it is the best all-around krewe in Carnival. We’re no upstarts and on the other hand we’re not a bunch of old farts—and—” he adds hastily as he thinks of Uncle Jules, “our older men are among the ten wealthiest and most prominent families in New Orleans.” Walter would never never say “rich”; and indeed the word “wealthy,” as he says it, is redolent of a life spiced and sumptuous, a tapestry thick to the touch and shot through with the bright thread of freedom. “You’d really like it now, Jack. I mean it. You really would. I can give you positive assurance that every last one of us would be delighted to have you back.”
“I certainly appreciate it, Walter.”
Walter still dresses as well as he did in college and sits and stands and slouches with the same grace. He still wears thick socks summer and winter to hide his thin veined ankles and still crosses his legs to make his calf look fat. In college he was one of those upperclassmen freshmen spot as a model: he was Phi Beta Kappa without grinding for it and campus leader without intriguing for it. But most of all he was arbiter of taste. We pledges would see him in the fraternity house sitting with his hat on and one skinny knee cocked up, and so the style was set for sitting and wearing hats. The hat had to be a special kind of narrow-brim brown felt molded to a high tri-cornered peak and then only passable after much fingering had worn the peak through. He liked to nickname the new pledges. One year he fancied