The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [80]
Something does. A yellow slip handed across the hotel desk commands me to call operator three in New Orleans.
This I accordingly do, and my aunt’s voice speaks to the operator, then to me, and does not change its tone. She does not bother to add a single overtone of warmth or cold, love or hate, to the monotone of her notification—and this is more ominous than ten thousand williwaws.
“Is Kate with you?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Would you like to know how we found you?”
“Yes.”
“The police found Kate’s car at the terminal.”
“The police?”
“Kate did not tell anyone she was leaving. However, her behavior is not unexplainable and therefore not inexcusable. Yours is.”
I am silent.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I think. “I can’t remember.”
4
It is impossible to find a seat on a flight to New Orleans the night before Mardi Gras. No trains are scheduled until Tuesday morning. But buses leave every hour or so. I send my aunt a telegram and call Stanley Kinchen and excuse myself from the talk on Selling Aids—it is all right: the original speaker had recovered. Stanley and I part even more cordially than we met. It is a stratospheric cordiality such as can only make further meetings uneasy. But I do not mind. At midnight we are bound for New Orleans on a Scenicruiser which takes a more easterly course than the Illinois Central, down along the Wabash to Memphis by way of Evansville and Cairo.
It is good to be leaving; Chicago is fit for no more than a short rotation. Kate is well. The summons from her stepmother has left her neither glum nor fearful. She speaks at length to her stepmother and, with her sure instinct for such matters, gets her talking about canceling reservations and return tickets, wins her way, decides we’ll stay, then changes her mind and insists on coming home to ease their minds. Now she gazes curiously about the bus station, giving way every few seconds to tremendous face-splitting yawns. Once on the bus she collapses into a slack-jawed oblivion and sleeps all the way to the Ohio River. I doze fitfully and wake for good when the dawn breaks on the outskirts of Terre Haute. When it is light enough, I take out my paper-back Arabia Deserta and read until we stop for breakfast in Evansville. Kate eats heartily, creeps back to the bus, takes one look at the black water of the Ohio River and the naked woods of the bottom lands where winter still clings like a violet mist, and falls heavily to sleep, mouth mashed open against my shoulder.
Today is Mardi Gras, fat Tuesday, but our bus has left Chicago much too late to accommodate Carnival visitors. The passengers are an everyday assortment of mothers-in-law visiting sons-in-law in Memphis, school teachers and telephone operators bound for vacations in quaint old Vieux Carré. Our upper deck is a green bubble where, it turns out, people feel themselves dispensed from the conventional silence below as if, in mounting with others to see the wide world and the green sky, they had already established a kind of freemasonry and spoken the first word among themselves. I surrender my seat to Kate’s stretchings out against me and double up her legs for her and for the rest of the long day’s journey down through Indiana and Illinois and Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi hold converse with two passengers—the first, a romantic from Wisconsin; the second, a salesman from a small manufacturing firm in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who wrecked his car in Gary.
Now in the fore seat of the bubble and down we go plunging along the Illinois bank of the Mississippi through a region of sooty glens falling steeply away to the west and against the slope of which are propped tall frame houses with colored windows and the spires of Polish churches. I read:
We mounted in the morrow twilight; but long after daybreak the heavens seemed shut, over