The Last Gentleman

and so very much at one with themselves and with the dear world around them as bright and sure as paradise. The game was tomorrow and they were happy about that; they knew what they wanted and who they hated. Oh, why ain’t I like them, thought the poor engineer, who was by no means a liberal—never in fact giving such matters a single thought—but who rather was so mystified by white and black alike that he could not allow himself the luxury of hatred. Oh, but they were lordly in theirs, he noticed, as he hobbled along. Then forgetting what he wanted to ask Mr. Vaught, he fetched up abruptly and took his pulse. “I’m not at all well,” he said to himself.
    â€œWhat’s the matter,” asked Sutter, who had been watching him from his kitchen chair at the blue bar. Jamie, the engineer noticed, had left.
    â€œI don’t feel well. Where’s Jamie?”
    â€œHe went to bed.”
    â€œI wanted to ask him what his plans were.”
    â€œDon’t worry about him. He’s all right. What about you?”
    â€œI think my nervous condition is worse. I feel my memory slipping.”
    â€œWhat was that book you were reading earlier?”
    â€œFreeman’s R. E. Lee. ”
    â€œAre you still strongly affected by the Civil War?”
    â€œNot as strongly as I used to be.”
    â€œHow strongly was that?”
    â€œWhen I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank. Later, in New York, whenever there was a plane crash, I would scan the passenger list to see how many Southerners had been killed.”
    â€œAnd yet you are not one of them.” Sutter nodded toward the Thigpens.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAre your nationalistic feelings strongest before the onset of your amnesia?”
    â€œPerhaps they are,” said the engineer, gazing at himself in the buzzing blue light of the mirror. “But that’s not what I’m interested in.”
    Sutter gazed at him. “What are you interested in?”
    â€œI—” the engineer shrugged and fell silent.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œWhy do they feel so good,” he nodded toward the Deltans, “and I feel so bad?”
    Sutter eyed him. “The question is whether they feel as good as you think, and if they do, then the question is whether it is necessarily worse to feel bad than good under the circumstances.”
    â€œThat doesn’t mean anything to me,” said the engineer irritably.
    â€œOne morning,” said Sutter, “I got a call from a lady who said that her husband was having a nervous breakdown. I knew the fellow. As a matter of fact, they lived two doors down. He was a Deke from Vanderbilt, president of Fairfield Coke and a very good fellow, cheerful and healthy and open-handed. It was nine o’clock in the morning, so I walked over from here. His wife let me in. There he stands in the living room dressed for work in his Haspel suit, shaved, showered, and in the pink, in fact still holding his attaché case beside him. All in order except that he was screaming, his mouth forming a perfect O. His corgi was howling and his children were peeping out from behind the stereo. His wife asked me for an opinion. After quieting him down and having a word with him, I told her that his screaming was not necessarily a bad thing in itself, that in some cases a person is better off screaming than not screaming—except that he was frightening the children. I prescribed the terminal ward for him and in two weeks he was right as rain.”
    The engineer leaned a degree closer. “I understand that. Now what I want to know is this: do you mean that in the terminal ward he discovered only that he was not so bad off, or is there more to it than that?”
    Sutter looked at him curiously but did not reply.
    â€œDid you get in trouble with him too?”
    Sutter shrugged. “It was a near thing. His wife, who was a psychiatrically oriented type, put him into analysis with an old-timey hard-assed