The Last Gentleman

to act. Do you understand me?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIf you find yourself in too tight a spot, that is, in a situation where it is difficult to live from one minute to the next, come and see me and I’ll help you. I may not be here, but you can find me. Do you understand?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œVery well. Good night.” Sutter yawned, pushed back his chair, and began to scratch his head with both hands.
    â€œGood night.”
    In his cold bed, the engineer curled up like a child and fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.
    13 .
    He awoke to a cold diamond-bright morning. Jamie’s bed was empty. When he crossed the courtyard, the Thigpens were leaving for the game. Lamar gave John Houghton a drink, which he drained off in one gulp, little finger stuck out. In return John Houghton did a buck-and-wing, swooping down with tremendous swoops and fetching up light as a feather, clapping his hands not quite together but scuffing the horny parts past each other. The engineer, standing pale and blinking in the sunlight, was afraid Lamar was going to say “Get hot!” or something similar, but he didn’t. In fact, as the little caravan got underway and the three servants stood waving farewell on the back steps, Lugurtha fluttering her apron, Lamar shook his head fondly. “There’s nothing like the old-timey ways!” he said. The Vaught retainers seemed to remind Lamar of an earlier, more gracious time, even though the purple castle didn’t look much like an antebellum mansion and the golf links even less like a cotton plantation.
    Kitty was eating batter cakes in the pantry. She eyed him somewhat nervously, he thought. But when later he kissed her mouth, not quite cleared of Br’er Rabbit syrup, she kissed him back with her new-found conjugal passion, though a bit absent-mindedly.
    â€œRita wants to see you,” she told him as she led him through the dark dining room. “Something has happened.”
    â€œWhere’s Jamie?”
    â€œI’m afraid that’s what it’s about.”
    â€œCome over here a minute,” he said, trying to pull her behind a screen of iridescent butterfly wings. He felt like a sleepy husband.
    â€œLater, later,” said Kitty absently. For the first time he saw that the girl was badly upset.
    As they entered Rita’s tower bedroom, Kitty, he noticed, became all at once pudding-faced and hangdog. She looked like Jamie. She hung back like a fourteen-year-old summoned to the principal’s office. Her noble matutinal curves seemed to turn to baby fat.
    Rita, dressed in a heavy silk kimono, lay propped on a large bed strewn with magazines, cigarettes, eyeglasses, and opened mail. She was reading a book, which she set face down on the bed. From force of habit and by way of getting at someone, he set his head over to see the title. It was The Art of Loving. The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.
    Getting quickly out of bed and holding an unlit cigarette to her lip, Rita strode back and forth between them. So formidable was it, this way she had of setting the side of her face into a single ominous furrow (something was up all right), that he forgot all about the book.
    â€œWell, they’ve done it up brown this time,” she said at last, stopping at the window and rubbing her chin in the web of her thumb. “Or rather he has.”
    â€œWho?” asked the engineer.
    â€œSutter,” she said, turning to face him. Kitty stood beside him as flat-footed and button-eyed as Betty Jo Jones in Ithaca Junior High. “Sutter has left and taken Jamie with him,” said Rita quietly.
    â€œWhere, Ree?” Kitty cried, but somewhat rhetorically, her eyes in her eyebrows. The surprise was for his benefit.
    Rita shrugged.
    â€œI have an idea where they might be headed,” said the engineer.
    Rita rolled her eyes. “Then for pity’s sake tell us.”
    â€œJamie was determined to go either out west or to Val’s.”
    â€œThen I suggest that you jump in your little truck without further ado and go get him.”
    â€œWhat I can’t understand,” said the engineer absently, putting his fist to his forehead as if to cudgel his poor wits, “is why Dr. Vaught left when he did. He told me— Well, I had no idea he was planning to make a