The Moviegoer (4 page)

I am silent. Now my aunt does take her seat at the desk.

“I haven't told Walter. Or Jules. Because I'm not really worried. Kate is just fine. She is going to come through with flying colors. And she and Walter are going to be happy. But as time grows short, she is getting a little nervous.”

“You mean you think she is afraid of another accident?”

“She is afraid of a general catastrophe. But that is not what worries me.”

“What worries you?”

“I don't want her moping around the house again.”

“She's not working downtown with you?”

“Not for two weeks.”

“Does she feel bad?”

“Oh no. Nothing like that. But she's a little scared.”

“Is she seeing Dr Mink?”

“She refuses. She thinks that if she goes to see a doctor she'll get sick.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“She will not go to the ball. Now that's all right. But it is very important that she not come to the point where it becomes more and more difficult to meet people.”

“She's seen no one?”

“No one but Walter. Now all in the world I want you to do is take her to the Lejiers and watch the parade from the front porch. It is not a party. There will be no question of making an entrance or an exit. There is nothing to brace for. You will drop in, speak or not speak, and leave.”

“She is that bad?”

“She is not bad at all. I mean to take care that she won't be.”

“What about Walter?”

“He's krewe captain. He can't possibly get away. And I'm glad he can't, to tell the truth. Do you know what I really want you to do?”

“What?”

“I want you to do whatever it was you did before you walked out on us, you wretch. Fight with her, joke with her—the child doesn't laugh. You and Kate always got along, didn't you? Sam too. You knew Sam will be here Sunday to speak at the Forum?”

“Yes.”

“I want Sam to talk to Kate. You and Sam are the only people she'd ever listen to.”

My aunt is generous with me. What she really means is that she is sure Sam can set things right and that she hopes I can hold the fort till Sam arrives.

3

IT IS A SURPRISE
to find Uncle Jules at lunch. Last fall he suffered a serious heart attack from which, however, he recovered so completely that he has dispensed with his nap since Christmas. He sits between Kate and Walter and his manner is so pleasant and easy that even Kate is smiling. It is hard to believe anything is wrong; the bottles, in particular, seem grotesque. Uncle Jules is pleased to see me. During the past year I discovered my sole discernible talent: the trick of making money. I manage to sell a great many of the stocks which Uncle Jules underwrites. He is convinced, moreover, that I predicted the January selloff and even claims that he advanced a couple of issues on my say-so. This he finds pleasing, and he always greets me with a tremendous wink as if we were in cahoots and might get caught any minute.

He and Walter talk football. Uncle Jules' life ambition is to revive the fortunes of the Tulane football team. I enjoy the talk because I like football myself and especially do I like to hear Uncle Jules tell about the great days of Jerry Dalrymple and Don Zimmerman and Billy Banker. When he describes a goal-line stand against L.S.U. in 1932, it is like King Arthur standing fast in the bloodred sunset against Sir Modred and the traitors. Walter was manager of the team and so he and Uncle Jules are thick as thieves.

Uncle Jules is as pleasant a fellow as I know anywhere. Above his long Creole horseface is a crop of thick gray hair cut short as a college boy's. His shirt encases his body in a way that pleases me. It fits him so well. My shirts always have something wrong with them; they are too tight in the collar or too loose around the waist. Uncle Jules' collar fits his dark neck like a tape; his cuffs, folded like a napkin, just peep out past his coatsleeve; and his shirt front: the impulse comes over me at times to bury my nose in that snowy expanse of soft finespun cotton. Uncle Jules is the only man I know whose victory in the world is total and unqualified. He has made a great deal of money, he has a great many friends, he was Rex of Mardi Gras, he gives freely of himself and his money. He is an exemplary Catholic, but it is hard to know why he takes the trouble. For the world he lives in, the City of Man, is so pleasant that the City of God must hold little in store for him. I see his world plainly through his eyes and I see why he loves it and would keep it as it is: a friendly easy-going place of old-world charm and new-world business methods where kind white folks and carefree darkies have the good sense to behave pleasantly toward each other. No shadow ever crosses his face, except when someone raises the subject of last year's Tulane-L.S.U. game.

I mention seeing Eddie Lovell and deliver his love.

“Poor Eddie,” my aunt sighs as she always does, and as always she adds: “What a sad thing that integrity, of itself, should fetch such a low price in the market place.”

“Has she gone to Natchez again?” asks Uncle Jules, making his lip long and droll.

Walter Wade cocks an ear and listens intently. He has not yet caught on to the Bollings' elliptical way of talking. “She” is Eddie's sister Didi, and “going to Natchez” is our way of referring to one of Didi's escapades. Several years ago, while Didi was married to her first husband, she is said to have attended the Natchez Pilgrimage with several other couples and “swapped husbands.”

“Oh yes,” says my aunt grimly. “Several times.”

“I didn't think the Pilgrimage came until April,” says Walter, smiling warily.

Kate frowns at her hands in her lap. Today Kate has her brown-eyed look. Sometimes her irises turn to discs. I remember another time when my aunt asked me to “talk” to Kate. When Kate was ten and I was fifteen, my aunt became worried about her. Kate was a good girl and made good grades, but she had no friends. Instead of playing at recess, she would do her lessons and sit quietly at her desk until class began. I made up the kind of spiel I thought my aunt had in mind. “Kate,” I said in my aunt's Socratic manner, “you think you are the only person in the world who is shy. Believe me, you are not. Let me tell you something that happened to me,” etc. But Kate only watched me with the same brown-eyed look, irises gone to discs.

Mercer passes the corn sticks, holding his breath at each place and letting it out with a strangling sound.

Walter and Uncle Jules try to persuade me to ride Neptune. My aunt looks at me in disgust—with all her joking, she has a solid respect for the Carnival krewes, for their usefulness in business and social life. She shifts over into her Lorenzo posture, temple propped on three fingers.

“What a depraved and dissolute specimen,” she says as usual. She speaks absently. It is Kate who occupies her. “Grown fat-witted from drinking of old sack.”

“What I am, Hal, I owe to thee,” say I as usual and drink my soup.

Kate eats mechanically, gazing about the room vacantly like someone at the automat. Walter is certain of himself now. He gets a raffish gleam in the eye.

“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 MacArthur 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 “head” names. He lined them up and sat back with his knee cocked up, pushed up his hat with his thumbnail. “You over there, you look to me like Pothead; you talking, you're Blowhead; you're Meathead; you're Sackhead; you're Needlehead.” For a year after I joined the fraternity I lived in the hope of pleasing him by hitting upon just the right sour-senseless rejoinder, and so of gaining admission to his circle, the fraternity within the fraternity. So when he stopped before the last pledge, a boy from Monroe with a bulging forehead and eyes set low in his face, he paused. “And you, you're—” “That's Whalehead,” I said. Walter raised an eyebrow and pulled down his mouth and nodded a derisive nod to his peers of the inner circle. I was in.

A pledge too felt the privilege of his company and felt the strain too. For one lived only to walk the tightrope with him, to be sour yet affable, careless but in a certain style of carelessness, sardonic yet likable, as popular with men as with women. But strain or no strain, I was content to be his friend. One night I walked home with him after he had been tapped for Golden Fleece—which was but the final honor of a paragraph of honors beneath his picture in the annual. “Binx,” he said—with me he had at last dropped his sour-senseless way of talking. “I'll let you in on a secret. That business back there—believe it or not, that doesn't mean anything to me.” “What does, Walter?” He stopped and we looked back at the twinkling campus as if the cities of the world had been spread out at our feet. “The main thing, Binx, is to be humble, to make Golden Fleece and be humble about it.” We both took a deep breath and walked back to the Delta house in silence.

When I was a freshman, it was extremely important to me to join a good fraternity. But what if no fraternity invited me to join? During rush week I was invited to the Delta house so the brothers could look me over. Another candidate, Boylan “Sockhead” Bass from Bastrop, and I sat together on a leather sofa, hands on our knees while the brothers stood around courting us like virgins and at the same time eying us like heifers. Presently Walter beckoned to me and I followed him upstairs where we had a confidential talk in a small bedroom. Walter motioned to me to sit on the bed and for a long moment he stood, as he is standing now: hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels and looking out the window like Samuel Hinds in the movies. “Binx,” he said. “We know each other pretty well, don't we?” (We'd both gone to the same prep school in New Hampshire.) “That's right, Walter,” I said. “You know me well enough to know I wouldn't hand you the usual crap about this fraternity business, don't you?” “I know you wouldn't, Walter.” “We don't go in for hot boxes around here, Binx. We don't have to.” “I know you don't.” He listed the good qualities of the SAEs, the Delta Psis, the Dekes, the KAs. “They're all good boys, Binx. I've got friends in all of them. But when it comes to describing the fellows here, the caliber of the men, the bond between us, the meaning of this little symbol—” he turned back his lapel to show the pin and I wondered if it was true that Deltas held their pins in their mouths when they took a shower—“there's not much I can say, Binx.” Then Walter took his hat off and stood stroking the tricornered peak. “As a matter of fact, I'm not going to say anything at all. Instead, I'll ask you a single question and then we'll go down. Did you or did you not feel a unique something when you walked into this house? I won't attempt to describe it. If you felt it, you already know exactly what I mean. If you didn't—!” Now Walter stands over me, holding his hat over his heart. “Did you feel it, Binx?” I told him straight off that nothing would make me happier than to pledge Delta on the spot, if that was what he was getting at. We shook hands and he called in some of the brothers. “Fellows, I want you to meet Mister John Bickerson Bolling. He's one of those broken-down Bollings from up in Feliciana Parish—you may have heard the name. Binx is a country boy and he's full of hookworm but he ought to have some good stuff in him. I believe he'll make us a good man.” We shook hands all around. They were good fellows.