The Last Gentleman

which used to sing in the pale sky over New York and Jersey. To make matters worse, everyone else in the pantry felt better than ever. It was the night before the Tennessee game. There was a grace and a dispensation in the air, an excitement and hope about the game on the morrow and a putting away of the old sad unaccomplished past. Tomorrow our own lads, the good smiling easy youths one met on the campus paths, but on the gridiron a ferocious black-helmeted wrecking crew, collide with the noble old single-wing of Tennessee. A big game is more than a game. It allows the kindling of hope and the expectation of great deeds. One liked to drink his drink the night before and muse over it: what will happen?
    Ordinarily he too, the engineer, liked nothing better than the penultimate joys of a football weekend. But tonight he was badly unsettled. The two brothers, Jamie and Sutter, had been deep in talk at the blue bar for a good half hour. And Rita had Kitty off in the bay, Rita speaking earnestly with her new level-browed legal expression, Kitty blossoming by the minute: a lovely flushed bride. Every few seconds her eyes sought him out and sent him secret shy Mary Nestor signals. Now it was she who was sending the signals and he who was stove up and cranky. Only once had she spoken to him and then to whisper: “It may be possible to swing a sweetheart ceremony with the Chi O’s as maids. I’m working on it.” “Eh? What’s that?” cocking his good ear and holding down his knee. But she was off again before he had a chance to discover what she meant. It left him uneasy.
    Something else disturbed him. Son Thigpen had brought over a carload of classmates from the university. Son, as morose as he was, and devoted exclusively to his Thunderbird and the fraternity (not the brothers themselves but the idea, Hellenism, as he called it), had nevertheless the knack of attracting large numbers of friends, lively youths and maids who liked him despite his sallowness and glumness. Now, having delivered this goodly company, he stood apart and fiddled with his Thunderbird keys. His guests were Deltans, from the engineer’s country, though he did not know them. But he knew their sort and it made him uneasy to see how little he was like them, how easy they were in their ways and how solitary and Yankeefied he was—though they seemed to take him immediately as one of them and easy too. The young men were Sewanee Episcopal types, good soft-spoken hard-drinking graceful youths, gentle with women and very much themselves with themselves, set, that is, for the next fifty years in the actuality of themselves and their own good names. They knew what they were, how things were and how things should be. As for the engineer, he didn’t know. I’m from the Delta too, thought he, sticking his hand down through his pocket, and I’m Episcopal; why ain’t I like them, easy and actual? Oh, to be like Rooney Lee. The girls were just as familiar to him, though he’d never met them either. Lovely little golden partridges they were, in fall field colors, green-feathered and pollen-dusted. Their voices were like low music and their upturned faces were like flowers. They were no different at all from the lovely little bitty steel-hearted women who sat at the end of the cotton rows and held the South together when their men came staggering home from Virginia all beaten up and knocked out of the war, who sat in their rocking chairs and made everybody do right; they were enough to scare you to death. But he for his Kitty, a little heavy-footed, yes, and with a tendency to shoulder a bit like a Wellesley girl and not absolutely certain of her own sex, a changeling (she was flushed and high-colored now just because she had found out what she was—a bride). For example, Kitty, who had worked at it for ten years, was still a bad dancer, where every last one of these Delta partridges was certain to be light and air in your arms.
    They were talking about politics and the Negro, who was now rumored to be headed for the campus this weekend. “Do yall know the difference between a nigger and an ape?” said Lamar Thigpen, embracing all three Deltans. They’re good chaps, though, thought the engineer distractedly, and, spying Mr. Vaught circling the walls, thought of something he wanted to ask him and took out after him, pushing his kneecap in with each step like a polio victim. They’re good chaps