The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [12]
“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 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