The Last Gentleman

“Yall are number one on the U.P.,” he told them, turning around nervously.
    â€œWhat you say there, Will.” They shook hands with him, still-casting an eye about in the oblique Ithaca style.
    What good fellows they were, he thought, as Doris counted out his money. Why did I ever go away? Ben Huger detained him and told a story about a man who bought a golf-playing gorilla. The gorilla had been taught to play golf by the smartest trainer in the world. This man who bought the gorilla was also a hard-luck gambler but for once he seemed to have hit on a sure thing. Because when he took the gorilla out to a driving range and handed him a driver and a basket of balls, each ball flew straight down the middle for five hundred yards. So he entered the gorilla in the Masters at Augusta. On the first tee, a par five hole, the gorilla followed Nicklaus and Palmer. He addressed his ball with assurance and drove the green four hundred and ninety yards away. Great day in the morning, thought the gambler, who was acting as the gorilla’s caddy, I got it made this time for sure. Already he had plans for the P.G.A. and the British Open after collecting his fifty thousand in first prize money. But when the threesome reached the green and the gambler handed the gorilla his putter to sink the one-footer, the gorilla took the same full, perfected swing and drove the ball another four hundred and ninety yards. Then—
    Here’s what I’ll do, thought the engineer who was sweating profusely and was fairly beside himself with irritable delight. I’ll come back here and farm Hampton, my grandfather’s old place, long since reclaimed by the cockleburs, and live this same sweet life with these splendid fellows.
    â€œYou gon’ be home for a while, Will?” they asked him.
    â€œFor a while,” he said vaguely and left them, glad to escape this dread delight.
    Hardly aware that he did so, he took Kemper Street, a narrow decrepit boulevard which ran as string to the bow of the river. It still had its dusty old crape myrtles and chinaberries and horse troughs and an occasional tile marker set in the sidewalk: Travelers Bicycle Club 1903. The street changed to a Negro district. The old frame houses gave way to concrete nightclubs and shotgun cottages, some of which were converted to tiny churches by tacking on two square towers and covering the whole with brick paper. He sat on a trough which was choked with dry leaves and still exhaled the faint sunny tart smell of summer, and studied the Esso map, peering closely at the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, Houston, and points west. It came over him suddenly that he didn’t live anywhere and had no address. As he began to go through his pockets he spied a new outdoor phone in a yellow plastic shell—and remembered Kitty. Lining up quarters and dimes on the steel shelf, he gazed down Kemper to the old city jail at the corner of Vincennes. Here on the top step stood his great-uncle the sheriff, or high sheriff, as the Negroes called him, on a summer night in 1928.
    The telephone was ringing in the purple castle beside the golf links and under the rosy temple of Juno.
    The sheriff put his hands in his back pockets so that the skirt of his coat cleared his pistol butt. “I respectfully ask yall to go on back to your homes and your families. There will be no violence here tonight because I’m going to kill the first sapsucker who puts his foot on that bottom step. Yall go on now. Go ahead on.”
    â€œHello.” It was David.
    â€œHello. David.”
    â€œYes suh.” He would be standing in the narrow hall between the pantry and the big front hall, the receiver held as loosely in his hand as if it had fallen into the crotch of a small tree.
    â€œThis is, ah, Will Barrett.” It sounded strange because they didn’t, the Negroes, know him by a name.
    â€œWho? Yes suh! Mist’ Billy!” David, feeling summoned, cast about for the right response—was it surprise? joy?—and hit instead on a keening bogus cheeriness, then, seeing it as such, lapsed into hilarity: “ Ts-ts-ts. ”
    â€œIs Miss Kitty there?”
    â€œNo suh. She been gone.”
    â€œWhere?” His heart sank. She and Rita had gone to Spain.
    â€œSchool.”
    â€œOh yes.” Today was Monday. He reflected.
    â€œYes suh,” mused David, politely giving shape and form to the silence. “I notice the little bitty Spite was