Lancelot

secret. There is no secret in honor. If one could but discover the secret at the heart of dishonor. …
    Harry Wills was undressing, taking off his duke’s costume in the auditorium locker room after the ball. There was the usual drinking and horsing and laughing. No Robert Taylor, he was oldish, blue-jowled, big-nosed, hairy-chested, strong-bellied, thin-shanked, not a Realsilk salesman any more but a Schenley distributor: a traveling salesman! Wet rings from the glass of whiskey shimmered on the bench beside him. Except for his green satin helmet, sword sash, and red leatherette hip boots, he was naked. His genital was retracted, a large button over a great veined ball. As he caught sight of me, I watched him, gazed into his eyes, and saw his brain make two sluggish connections. One was: Here I was, a young Comus knight, the very one who had run 110 yards against Alabama. The other: here was I also, the son of Lily. (Jesus, was I also his son?) The two revelations fused in a single great rosy Four Roses whiskey glow of fondness, perhaps love. (A father’s love?) Rising unsteadily, he grabbed me around the neck and announced to the krewe: “You know who this is! This is Lancelot Lamar and you know what he did!” They knew and their knowing confirmed the terrible emotion swelling within him. He told them anyway. “This boy not only ran back that punt 110 yards. He was hit at least once by every man on the Alabama team—twice by some. Haven’t y’all seen the film?” The other dukes nodded solemnly. They had. They drank and gave me a drink and shook my hand. Hugging my neck, Harry sat down, pulling me down into a heavy air of lung-breathed bourbon, cigarette smoke, and genital musk.
    â€œJesus,” he said, shaking his head at the wonder of it and cursed from the very inchoateness of the terrible unnamed feeling. “Have a drink! Goddamn … !”
    Do you remember my mother? I never thought of her as “beautiful” or “good-looking” but rather as too pale, with wide winged unplucked eyebrows which gave her a boy’s look. You thought she was beautiful? Perhaps I don’t remember her after she began to drink. Later she became sly and even a little voluptuous. After years of secret drinking, there came to be a tightness and glossiness about her face. Her chin receded a little. Her eyes became brilliant and opaque and mischievous as if she knew a joke on everybody. You know, I’ve since known several genteel lady drunks who develop this same glossy chinless look. Is that a facial syndrome of woman alcoholics? Or a certain kind of unhappy Southern lady? Or both?
    I remember her earlier not as “beautiful” but as thin-boned, quick, and sporty. There was a kind of nervous joking aggressiveness about her. She liked to “get” me. On cold mornings when everyone was solemn and depressed about getting up and going off to work or school, she would say, “I’m going to get you,” and come at me with her sharp little fist boring away into my ribs. There was something past joking, an insistence, about the boring. She wouldn’t stop.
    Uncle Harry, jovial Schenley salesman and third cousin once removed, family friend and benefactor who brought me presents—even presents on ordinary weekdays, imagine a glass pistol loaded with candy on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon or a Swiss army knife with twenty-two blades—who was not only nice to me but took Lily, who was delicate then and had to rest a lot, for “joyrides” to False River—“Get her out of the house, Harry!” my father said—leaving him, my father, to his beloved quiet. Once he, my father, painted a mystical painting of our alley of live oaks showing the perpetual twilight filling them even at noon, and above, great domed spaces shot through by a single stray shaft of sunlight, a picture he entitled “O sola beatitudo! O beata solitudo!” He wrote a poem with the same title. Poet Laureate he was of Feliciana Parish, so designated by the local Kiwanis, lying on his recliner on the deep shaded upper gallery dreaming over his history manuscript, dreaming not so much of a real past as what ought to have been and should be now and might be yet: a lovely golden sunlit Louisiana of bayous and live oaks and misty green savannahs, Feliciana, a happy land of decent folk and droll folkways and quiet backwaters, the whole suffused by gentle