The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [79]
Harold’s wife is a thin hump-shouldered girl with a beautiful face. She stands a ways off from us holding her baby, my godson, and hesitates between a sort of living room and a peninsula bar; she seems on the point of asking us to sit down in one place or the other but she never does. I keep thinking she is going to get tired herself, holding the big baby. Looking at her, I know just how Harold sees her: as beeyoutiful. He used to say that so-and-so, Veronica Lake maybe, was beeyoutiful—Harold is originally from Indiana and he called me peculiar Midwestern names like “heller” and “turkey”—and his wife is beautiful in just the same way: blond hair waving down her cheeks like a madonna, heavenly blue eyes, but stooped so that her shoulder-blades flare out in back like wings.
Harold walks up and down with both hands lifted up in the baby-claw gesture he uses when he talks, and there stands his little madonna-wife sort of betwixt and between us and the kids around the TV. But Harold is glad to see me. “Old Rollo,” he says, looking at the middle of my chest. “This is great, Rollo,” and he is restless with an emotion he can’t identify. Rollo is a nickname he gave me in the Orient—it evidently signifies something in the Midwest which is not current in Louisiana. “Old Rollo”—and he would be beside himself with delight at the aptness of it. Now it comes over him in the strongest way: what a good thing it is to see a comrade with whom one has suffered much and endured much, but also what a wrenching thing. Up and down he goes, arms upraised, restless with it and not knowing what it is.
“Harold, about the baby’s baptism—”
“He was baptized yesterday,” says Harold absently.
“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