The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [77]
“I’m sorry.”
“You were godfather-by-proxy.”
“Oh.”
The trouble Is there is no place to come to rest. We stand off the peninsula like ships becalmed—unable to move.
Turning my back on Harold, I tell Kate and Veronica how Harold saved my life, telling it jokingly with only one or two looks around at him. It is too much for Harold, not my gratitude, not the beauty of his own heroism, but the sudden confrontation of a time past, a time so terrible and splendid in its arch-reality; and so lost—cut adrift like a great ship in the flood of years. Harold tries to parse it out, that time and the time after, the strange ten years intervening, and it is too much for him. He shakes his head like a fighter.
We stand formally in the informal living area.
“Harold, how long have you been here?”
“Three years. Look at this, Rollo.” Harold shoves along the bar-peninsula a modernistic horsehead carved out of white wood, all flowing mane and arching neck. “Who do you think made it?”
“It’s very good.”
“Old Rollo,” says Harold, eying the middle of my chest. Harold can’t parse it out, so he has to do something. “Rollo, how tough are you? I bet I can take you.” Harold wrestled at Northwestern. “I could put you down right now.” Harold is actually getting mad at me.
“Listen, Harold,” I say, laughing. “Do you go into the city every day?”
Harold nods but does not raise his eyes.
“How did you decide to live here?”
“Sylvia’s family live in Glencoe. Rollo, how do you like it way down yonder in New Orleans?”
Harold would really like to wrestle and not so playfully either. I walked in and brought it with me, the wrenching in the chest. It would be better for him to be rid of it and me.
Ten minutes later he lets us out at the commuter station and tears off into the night.
“What a peculiar family,” says Kate, gazing after the red turrets of Harold’s Cadillac.
Back to the Loop where we dive into the mother and Urwomb of all moviehouses—an Aztec mortuary of funeral urns and glyphs, thronged with the spirit-presences of another day, William Powell and George Brent and Patsy Kelly and Charley Chase, the best friends of my childhood—and see a movie called The Young Philadelphians. Kate holds my hand tightly in the dark.
Paul Newman is an idealistic young fellow who is disillusioned and becomes cynical and calculating. But in the end he recovers his ideals.
Outside, a new note has crept into the wind, a black williwaw sound straight from the terrible wastes to the north. “Oh oh oh,” wails Kate as we creep home to the hotel, sunk into ourselves and with no stomach even for hand-holding. “Something is going to happen.”
Something does. A yellow slip handed across the hotel desk commands me to call operator three in New Orleans.
This I accordingly do, and my aunt’s voice speaks to the operator, then to me, and does not change its tone. She does not bother to add a single overtone of warmth or cold, love or hate, to the monotone of her notification—and this is more ominous than ten thousand williwaws.
“Is Kate with you?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Would you like to know how we found you?”
“Yes.”
“The police found Kate’s car at the terminal.”
“The police?”
“Kate did not tell anyone she was leaving. However, her behavior is not unexplainable and therefore not inexcusable. Yours is.”
I am silent.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I think. “I can’t remember.”
4
It is impossible to find a seat on a flight to New Orleans the night before Mardi Gras. No trains are scheduled until Tuesday morning. But buses leave every hour or so. I send my aunt a telegram and call Stanley Kinchen and excuse myself from the talk on Selling Aids—it is all right: the original speaker had recovered. Stanley and I part even more cordially than we met. It is a stratospheric cordiality such as can only make further meetings uneasy. But I do not mind. At midnight we are bound for New Orleans on a Scenicruiser which takes a more easterly course than the Illinois Central, down along the Wabash to Memphis by way of Evansville and Cairo.
It is good to be leaving; Chicago is fit for no more than a short rotation. Kate is well. The summons from her stepmother has left her neither glum nor fearful. She speaks at length to her stepmother and, with her sure instinct for such matters, gets her talking about canceling reservations and return tickets, wins her way, decides we