The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [18]
After my father’s death my aunt sent me off to prep school; during my years in college I lived in her house. After returning to work in a Biloxi hospital, my mother remarried and now lives on the Gulf Coast where her husband is a Western Auto dealer. I have six half-brothers and sisters named Smith. Sometimes during the summer I drop in at their fishing camp on Bayou des Allemands with my Marcia or my Linda.
Now Aunt Emily, fingernails clicking over the keys, comes back to the tune, the sweet sad piping of the nineteenth century, good as it can be but not good enough. To protect myself, I take one of the photographs from the mantel.
“Is she coming?” asks my aunt during the pause.
“Kate? No.”
“Well. No matter.”
Again I hold the picture to the light. The sky is darkening and a fresh wind has sprung up.
“Why didn’t you get into the picture, Sweetie?” I ask her. “Weren’t you there?”
“No indeed. Do you know what they wanted to do?”
“What?”
“Go gallivanting off to Hungary to shoot quail. I said, My God, you can shoot quail in Feliciana Parish. Anyhow I heard that something queer was going on in München. There was some kind of putsch and I didn’t like the smell of it. So off they went to hunt quail in Hungary and off I went to my putsch.” She watches me replace the picture. “We’ll not see their like again. The age of the Catos is gone. Only my Jules is left. And Sam Yerger. Won’t it be good to see Sam again?”
This is absurd of course. Uncle Jules is no Cato. And as for Sam Yerger: Sam is only a Cato on long Sunday afternoons and in the company of my aunt. She transfigures everyone. Mercer she still sees as the old retainer. Uncle Jules she sees as the Creole Cato, the last of the heroes—whereas the truth is that Uncle Jules is a canny Cajun straight from Bayou Lafourche, as canny as a Marseilles merchant and a very good fellow, but no Cato. All the stray bits and pieces of the past, all that is feckless and gray about people, she pulls together into an unmistakable visage of the heroic or the craven, the noble or the ignoble. So strong is she that sometimes the person and the past are in fact transfigured by her. They become what she sees them to be. Uncle Jules has come to see himself as the Creole member of the gens, the Beauregard among the Lees. Mercer is on occasions not distinguishable from an old retainer. Truthfully I do not know, and Mercer does not know, what Mercer really is.
The storm which has been brewing since noon now breaks over our heads. Thunder rattles the panes. We walk out on the gallery to watch it. A rushing Gulf wind slashes the banana leaves into ribbons and blows dead camellia blooms across the yard. Veils of rain, parted for a second by the house, rush back together again. Trash from the camphor trees rattles on the roof. We stroll arm in arm up and down the lee gallery like passengers on a promenade.
“After Germany I insisted on going back to England. I wanted to see the Lake Country again.”
“Did Father go?”
“Jack? Heavens no. He met two of his buddies from Charlottesville and Princeton and they took off helter-skelter up the Rhine. Off he went with a bottle of Liebfraumilch under one arm and Wilhelm Meister under the other.” (But they do not fit, I think for the hundredth time: your student prince and the ironic young dude on the mantel.)
“Jack,” she says in a different voice and immediately the Black Forest is two thousand miles away and forty years ago.
“Yes ma’am.” My neck begins to prickle with a dreadful-but-not-unpleasant eschatological prickling.
We take up our promenade. My aunt steps carefully, lining up her toe with the edge of the boards. She presses a finger against her lip, but it is not possible to tell whether she is smiling or grimacing.
“I had a brainstorm last night. It still looked reasonably good this morning. How does this strike you?” “What?” My neck prickles like a bull terrier.