The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [64]
The angle is such that we can see the dining room and its company, except my aunt. There is only her right wrist and hand curving out and under the chair arm to rub the lion’s face with its cloven leprous nose.
“Tell Mother that I am fine and that I will be down later. I am not hungry.” Then I will indeed be fine, Kate as good as says. It is her sense of their waiting upon her and that alone that intrudes itself into her mezzanine.
When I return (my aunt received me with a single grave nod), Kate is smoking, inhaling deeply and blowing plumes of lung smoke into the air. Her knees are crossed and she swings her leg and holds her Zippo and pack in her lap.
“Have you seen Sam?” she asks me.
“Yes.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you had a bad night and that Merle had been here.” I tell her the truth because I have not the wit to tell her anything else. Kate knows it: I am the not-quite-bright one whom grown-ups take aside to question.
“Hm. Do you want to know the truth? I had a very good night. Possibly the best night of my life.”
Sam touches knife to goblet. As is his custom, he speaks down the table to my aunt but with a consciousness of the others as listeners-in. At his right, Uncle Jules is content to listen in and look on with an expression of almost besotted amiability. This is one of Em’s “dinners,” Sam is speaking at the Forum, Em is president. Long ago he, Uncle Jules, and with the same shrewdness with which he recognizes signs of corporate illness and corporate health, made out a certain pattern in Emily’s lectures. Persons of the most advanced views on every subject and of the most exquisite sensitivity to minorities (except Catholics, but this did not bother Uncle Jules), they were nevertheless observed by him to observe the same taboos and celebrate the same rites. Not so Uncle Oscar. Sitting there rared back and gazing up at the chandelier, he too is aware that he has fallen in with pretty high-flown company, but he will discover no such thing; any moment now he will violate a taboo and blaspheme a rite by getting off on niggers, Mrs. Roosevelt, dagos and Jews, and all in the same breath. But Uncle Jules will neither trespass nor be trespassed upon. His armor is his unseriousness. It would never occur to him to take their, Aunt Emily’s lecturers’, irreverent sallies as an assault upon his own deep dumb convictions. The worst they can do is live up to themselves, behave just as he has come to expect “Em’s people” to behave.
Sam tolls his goblet. “Last Thursday, Em, Eric got back from Geneva and I met him at the airport. His face was white as chalk—”
Kate, who has been sitting back and peering down her cheek at Sam’ like a theatergoer in the balcony, begins smoothing out the cellophane of her cigarette pack.
“We talked like that last night. I was very happy—”
Aunt Edna leans out to intercept Sam’s monologue. She has not yet caught on to Sam’s way of talking, so she is upset. “But what can a person do?”—and she actually wrings her hands. Aunt Edna is as nice as can be, but she is one of our kinfolks I avoid. Her soul is in her eyes and when we meet, she shoots me deep theosophical soul-glances, and though I shoot them back and am quite sympathetic on the whole, it is an uneasy business.
“Sam is a very gentle person and a very kind person,” says Kate.
“I know.”
“He is very fond of you. Are you going to hear his lecture?”
“I would like to, but I have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to Chicago.”
“What for?”
“Business.”
“We had a wonderful evening, but when I went to bed, I was somewhat apprehensive. You know how you have to guard against Sam’s flights?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever goes up must come down and I was ten miles high.”
“I know.”
“But I was on guard and I did not fall. I went straight to bed and to sleep. Then some hours later I awoke suddenly. There was nothing wrong. I was wide awake and completely alert. I thought about your proposal and it seemed to me that it might be possible after all. If only I did not ruin everything.”
Mercer passes a dish of sweet potatoes. At each place he stops breathing, head thrown back and eyes popping out, then lets out his breath with a strangling sound.