The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [9]
While Mercer speaks of current events, I edge closer to the mantelpiece. There are the Cutrers in their “grand slam” year. Uncle Jules was Rex, Kate was queen of Neptune, Aunt Emily won the Picayune cup for her work with the Home Service. Everyone said that Kate was a lovely queen, but she wasn’t. When Kate gets her hair waved and puts on an evening gown, she looks frumpy; the face in the picture is plain as a pudding.
One picture I never tire looking at For ten years I have looked at it on this mantelpiece and tried to understand it. Now I take it down and hold it against the light from the darkening sky. Here are the two brothers, Dr. Wills and Judge Anse with their arms about each other’s shoulders, and my father in front, the three standing on a mountain trail against a dark forest. It is the Schwarzwald. A few years after the first war they had gotten together for once and made the grand tour. Only Alex Bolling is missing—he is in the third frame: an astonishingly handsome young man with the Rupert Brooke-Galahad sort of face you see so often in pictures of World War I soldiers. His death in the Argonne (five years before) was held to be fitting since the original Alex Bolling was killed with Roberdaux Wheat in the Hood breakthrough at Gaines Mill in 1862. My father is wearing some kind of fraternity blazer and a hard katy straw. He looks different from the brothers. Alex too is much younger, yet he is still one of them. But not my father. It is hard to say why. The elder Bollings—and Alex—are serene in their identities. Each one coincides with himself, just as the larch trees in the photograph coincide with themselves: Judge Anse with his drooping mustache and thin cold cheeks, the hard-eyed one who is still remembered for having publicly described a Louisiana governor’ as a peckerwood son of a bitch; Dr. Wills, the lion-headed one, the rumpled country genius who developed a gut anastomosis still in use; and Alex, serene in his dream of youth and of his hero’s death to come. But my father is not one of them. His feet are planted wide apart, arms locked around an alpenstock behind him; the katy is pushed back releasing a forelock. His eyes are alight with an expression I can’t identify; it is not far from what his elders might have called smart-alecky. He is something of a dude with his round bead and tricky tab collar. Yet he is, by every right, one of them. He was commissioned in the RCAF in 1940 and got himself killed before his country entered the war. And in Crete. And in the wine dark sea. And by the same Boche. And with a copy of The Shropshire Lad in his pocket. Again I search the eyes, each eye a stipple or two in a blurred oval. Beyond a doubt they are ironical.
“Does you, Mister Jack?” asks Mercer, still in limbo, one foot toward the fire, the other on its way out.
“Yes, I do. Unilateral disarmament would be a disaster.”
“What drivel.” My aunt comes in smiling, head to one side, hands outstretched, and I whistle with relief and feel myself smiling with pleasure as I await one of her special kind of attacks, attacks which are both playful and partly true. She calls me an ingrate, a limb of Satan, the last and sorriest scion of a noble stock. What makes it funny is that this is true. In a split second I have forgotten everything, the years in Gentilly, even my search. As always we take up again where we left off. This is where I belong after all.
My aunt has done a great deal for me. When my father was killed, my mother, who had been a trained nurse, went back to her hospital in Biloxi.