The Last Gentleman

sir.”
    â€œDo you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He’s a doctor like you.”
    â€œI’m not a doctor,” said the engineer, smiling.
    â€œIs that so,” said the other, hardly listening.
    Now, coming to himself with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer’s arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his “stunt,” as he called it.
    It seemed to be a roomful of women. There were only three, he determined later, but now with Mr. Vaught gripping him tight under the armpit and five pairs of eyes swinging round to him and shooting out curious rays, he felt as if he had been thrust onto a stage.
    â€œAnd listen to this,” said Mr. Vaught, still holding him tightly. “He didn’t say Gadsden and he didn’t say Birmingham, he said halfway between.”
    â€œActually I didn’t say that,” began the engineer.
    â€œThis is Ed Barrett’s boy, Mama,” he said after pointing the engineer in several different directions.
    A pince-nez flashed at him. There was a roaring in his ears. “Lord, I knew your mother, Lucy Hunicutt, the prettiest little thing I ever saw!”
    â€œYes ma’am. Thank you.”
    The women were taken up for a while with tracing kinships. (Again he caught a note of rueful eagerness in their welcome: were they political enemies of his father?) Meantime he could catch his breath. It was a longish room and not ordinarily used, it seemed, for patients, since one end was taken up with medical appliances mounted on rubber casters and covered by plastic envelopes. At the other end, between the women, a youth lay in bed. He was grinning and thrashing his legs about under the covers. The Handsome Woman stood at his bedside, eyes vacant, hand on his pillow. As the engineer looked at her he became aware of a radiance from another quarter, a “certain someone” as they used to say in old novels. There was the same dark-browed combed look he remembered. Again a pang of love pierced his heart. Having fallen in love, of course, he might not look at her.
    â€œâ€”my wife, Mrs. Vaught,” Mr. Vaught was saying, aiming him toward the chunky little clubwoman whose pince-nez flashed reflections of the window. “My daughter, Kitty—” Then Kitty was his love. He prepared himself to “exchange glances” with her, but woe: she had fallen into a vacant stare, much like the Handsome Woman, and even had the same way of rattling her thumbnail against her tooth. “And my daughter-in-law, Rita.” The Handsome Woman nodded but did not take her eyes from the patient. “And here all piled up in the bed is my bud, Jamie.” The patient would have been handsome too but for a swollen expression, a softening, across the nosebridge, which gave his face an unformed look. Jamie and Kitty and Mrs. Vaught were different as could be, yet they had between them the funded look of large families. It was in their case no more than a blackness of brow, the eyebrows running forward in a jut of bone which gave the effect of setting the eye around into a profile, the clear lozenge-shaped Egyptian eye mirroring the whorled hair of the brow like a woods creature.
    He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol.
    â€œWhere’re you from,” cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to.
    â€œIthaca,” he said, smiling. “Over in the Delta.” He felt himself molt. In the space of seconds he changed from a Southerner in the North, an amiable person who wears the badge of his origin in a faint burlesque of itself, to a Southerner in the South, a skillful player of an old play who knows his cues and waits smiling in the wings. You stand in the posture of waiting on ladies and when one of them speaks to you so, with mock-boldness and mock-anger (and a bit of steel in it too), you knew how to take it. They were onto the same game. Mrs. Vaught feasted her eyes on him. He was nice. (She, he saw at once, belonged to an older clan than Mr. Vaught; she knew ancient cues he never heard of.) She could have married him on the spot and known what she was getting.
    It was just as well he hadn’t pretended to be a doctor, for presently two doctors came in. One, a gaunt man with great damp hands and