The Last Gentleman

doing it. The mechanism creaked and whirred and down came the record plop and round it went for a spell, hissing under the voyaging needle. From the open window came Brahms, nearly always Brahms. Up and down the sidewalk went his father, took his turn under the street light sometimes with a client, sometimes alone. The clients, black and white and by and large the sorriest of crews but of course listening now with every eager effort of attention and even of a special stratspheric understanding. Between records the boy could hear snatches of talk: “Yassuh, that’s the way it is now! I have notice the same thing myself!”—the father having said something about the cheapness of good intentions and the rarity of good character—“I’m sho gon’ do like you say”—the passer-by working him of course for the fifty cents or five dollars or what, but working him as gracefully as anyone ever worked, they as good at their trade as he at his. The boy listening: what was the dread in his heart as he heard the colloquy and the beautiful terrible Brahms which went abroad into the humming summer night and the heavy ham-rich air?
    The aunts let out a holler. Bill Cullen had given away a cabin cruiser to a lady from Michigan City, Indiana.
    It was on such an evening—he passed his hand over his eyes and stretching it forth touched the sibilant corky bark of the water oak—that his father had died. The son watched from the step, old Brahms went abroad, the father took a stroll and spoke to a stranger of the good life and the loneliness of the galaxies. “Yes suh,” said the stranger. “I have heard tell it was so” (that the closest star was two light years away).
    When the man came back the boy asked him:
    â€œFather, why do you walk in the dark when you know they have sworn to kill you?”
    â€œI’m not afraid, son.”
    To the west the cars of the white people were nosing up the levee, headlights switched first to parking, then out altogether. From the east, beyond the cottonseed-oil mill, came the sound of Negro laughter.
    The man walked until midnight. Once a police car stopped. The policeman spoke to the man.
    â€œYou’ve won,” said the youth when the man came back. “I heard the policeman. They’ve left town.”
    â€œWe haven’t won, son. We’ve lost.”
    â€œBut they’re gone, Father.”
    â€œWhy shouldn’t they leave? They’ve won.”
    â€œHow have they won, Father?”
    â€œThey don’t have to stay. Because they found out that we are like them after all and so there was no reason for them to stay.”
    â€œHow are we like them, Father?”
    â€œOnce they were the fornicators and the bribers and the takers of bribes and we were not and that was why they hated us. Now we are like them, so why should they stay? They know they don’t have to kill me.”
    â€œHow do they know that, Father?”
    â€œBecause we’ve lost it all, son.”
    â€œLost what?”
    â€œBut there’s one thing they don’t know.”
    â€œWhat’s that, Father?”
    â€œThey may have won, but I don’t have to choose that.”
    â€œChoose what?”
    â€œChoose them.”
    This time, as he turned to leave, the youth called out to him. “Wait.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDon’t leave.”
    â€œI’m just going to the corner.”
    But there was a dread about this night, the night of victory. (Victory is the saddest thing of all, said the father.) The mellowness of Brahms had gone overripe, the victorious serenity of the Great Horn Theme was false, oh fake fake. Underneath, all was unwell.
    â€œFather.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhy do you like to be alone?”
    â€œIn the last analysis, you are alone.” He turned into the darkness of the oaks.
    â€œDon’t leave.” The terror of the beautiful victorious music pierced his very soul.
    â€œI’m not leaving, son,” said the man and, after taking a turn, came back to the steps. But instead of stopping to sit beside the youth, he went up past him, resting his hand on the other’s shoulder so heavily that the boy looked up to see his father’s face. But the father went on without saying anything: went into the house, on through the old closed-in dogtrot hall to the back porch, opened the country food press which had been converted to a gun cabinet,