The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [21]
She is right. I will say yes. I will say yes even though I do not really know what she is talking about.
But I hear myself saying: “As a matter of fact I was planning to leave Gentilly soon, but for a different reason. There is something—” I stop. My idea of a search seems absurd.
To my surprise this lame reply is welcomed by my aunt.
“Of course!” she cries. “You’re doing something every man used to do. When your father finished college, he had his Wanderjahr, a fine year’s ramble up the Rhine and down the Loire, with a pretty girl on one arm and a good comrade on the other. What happened to you when you finished college? War. And I’m so proud of you for that. But that’s enough to take it out of any man.”
Wanderjahr. My heart sinks. We do not understand each other after all. If I thought I’d spent the last four years as a Wanderjahr, before “settling down,” I’d shoot myself on the spot.
“How do you mean, take it out of me?”
“Your scientific calling, your love of books and music. Don’t you remember how we used to talk—on the long winter evenings when Jules would go to bed and Kate would go dancing, how we used to talk! We tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. Don’t you remember discovering Euripides and Jean-Christophe?”
“You discovered them for me. It was always through you that—” All at once I am sleepy. It requires an effort to put one foot in front of the other. Fortunately my aunt decides to sit down. I wipe off an iron bench with my handkerchief and we sit, still arm in arm. She gives me a pat.
“Now. I want you to make me a promise.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Your birthday is one week from today.”
“Is that right?”
“You will be thirty years old. Don’t you think a thirty year old man ought to know what he wants to do with his life?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Then?”
“Yes. Next Wednesday afternoon—after Sam leaves. I’ll meet you here at this spot. Will you promise to come?”
“Yes ma’am.” She expects a great deal from Sam’s visit.
Pushing up my sleeve to see my watch, she sucks in her breath. “Back to the halt and the lame and the generally no ’count.”
“Sweetie, lie down first and let me rub your neck.” I can tell from her eyes when she has a headache.
Later, when Mercer brings the car around to the front steps, she lays a warm dry cheek against mine. “m-M! You’re such a comfort to me. You remind me so much of your father.”
“I can’t seem to remember him.”
“He was the sweetest old thing. So gay. And did the girls fall over him. And a mind! He had a mind like a steel trap, an analytical mind like yours.” (She always says this, though I have never analyzed anything.) “He had the pick of New Orleans.”
(And picked Anna Castagne.)
Mercer, who has changed to a cord coat and cap, holds the door grudgingly and cranes up and down the street as much as to say that he may be a chauffeur but not a footman.
She has climbed into the car but she does not release my hand.
“He would have been much happier in research,” she says and lets me go.
6
The rain has stopped. Kate calls from under the steps.
She is in the best of spirits. She shows me the brick she found under linoleum and the shutters Walter bought in a junkyard. It bothers her that when the paint was removed the shutters came somewhat frayed from the vat. “They will form a partition here. The fountain and planter will go out here.” By extending the partition into the garden, a corner of the wall will be enclosed to form a pleasant little nook. I can see why she is so serious: truthfully it seems that if she can just hit upon the