The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [18]
I say: “Then you’re not going to the Lejiers.”
She puts her cigarette on a potsherd and goes back to her rubbing.
“And you’re not going to the ball?” I ask.
“No.”
“Don’t you want to see Walter as krewe captain?”
Kate swings around and her eyes go to discs. “Don’t you dare patronize Walter.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Do you think I didn’t see the two of you upstaging him at lunch? What a lovely pair you are.”
“I thought you and I were the pair.”
“You and I are not a pair of any sort.”
I consider this.
“Good day,” says Kate irritably.
5
We talk, my aunt and I, in our old way of talking, during pauses in the music. She is playing Chopin. She does not play very well; her fingernails click against the keys. But she is playing one of our favorite pieces, the E flat Étude. In recent years I have become suspicious of music. When she comes to a phrase which once united us in a special bond and to which once I opened myself as meltingly as a young girl, I harden myself.
She asks not about Kate but about my mother. My aunt does not really like my mother; yet, considering the circumstances, that my father was a doctor and my mother was his nurse and married him, she likes her as well as she can. She has never said a word against her and in fact goes out of her way to be nice to her. She even says that my father was “shot with luck” to get such a fine girl, by which she means that my father did, in a sense, leave it to luck. All she really holds against my mother, and not really against her but against my father, is my father’s lack of imagination in marrying her. Sometimes I have the feeling myself that who my mother was and who I am depended on the chance selection of a supervisor of nurses in Biloxi. When my father returned from medical school and his surgical residency in Boston to practice with my grandfather in Feliciana Parish, he applied for a nurse. The next day he waited (and I too waited) to see who would come. The door opened and in walked the woman who, as it turned out, would, if she were not one-legged or downright ugly, be his wife and my mother. My mother is a Catholic, what is called in my aunt’s circle a “devout Catholic,” which is to say only that she is a practicing Catholic since I do not think she is devout. This accounts for the fact that I am, nominally at least, also a Catholic.
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?