The Last Gentleman

entitled So You’re a Crock. The nurses bought a Merita cake and spelled out “Happy Birthday” in chart paper. The internes made a drink of laboratory alcohol and frozen grapefruit juice, as if they were all castaways and had to make do with what they had. From an upper Broadway novelty shop Mr. Vaught had obtained a realistic papier-mâché dogturd which he slipped onto the bed under the very noses of the nurses. As the latter spied it and let out their screams of dismay, the old man charged fiercely about the room, peering under appliances. “I saw him in here, a little feist dog!”
    Screwing in the terrestrial ocular fitted with a prism, and focusing quickly on the Englewood cliffs, the engineer stepped aside. The patient had only to prop himself on an elbow and look down into the prism. A little disc of light played about his pupil. The engineer watched him watch: now he, Jamie, would be seeing it, the brilliant theater bigger and better than life. Picnickers they were, a family deployed on a shelf of granite above the Hudson. The father held a can of beer.
    Once Jamie looked up for a second, searched his face for a sign: did he really see what he saw? The engineer nodded. Yes, he saw.
    â€œWhat kind of beer is he drinking?” he asked Jamie.
    â€œRheingold,” said Jamie.
    The others took their turn, all but Rita, then Moon Mullins, who swung the Tetzlar around to the nurses’ dormitory. There was no talking to Jamie this morning. He must watch the tugs on the river, the roller coaster at Palisades Park, the tollhouse on the George Washington, Bridge, two housewives back-fencing in Weehawken. Now it was Jamie who became the technician, focusing on some bit of New Jersey and leaning away to let the doctors look.
    Mrs. Vaught elder couldn’t get over it. Her pince-nez flashed in the light and she took the engineer’s arm. “Would you look at the color in that child’s face!” She made her husband take a look through the telescope, but he pretended he couldn’t see.
    â€œI can’t see a thing!” he cried irritably, jostling his eye around the ocular.
    Presently Kitty left with Rita, giving him as she left a queer hooded brown-eyed-susan look. He sat down dizzily and blew out his lips. Why couldn’t he leave with them? But when he jumped up, Mr. Vaught took him high by the arm and steered him out into the hall. He faced the younger man into a corner and for a long time did not speak but stood with his head down, nodding. The engineer thought the other was going to tell him a joke.
    â€œBill.” The nodding went on.
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œHow much did that thing cost you?”
    â€œThe telescope? Nineteen hundred and eight dollars.”
    â€œHow much do you make a week?”
    â€œI take home one forty-eight.”
    â€œDid your father leave you anything?”
    â€œNot much. An old house and two hundred acres of buckshot.”
    The engineer was sure he was in for a scolding—all at once the telescope seemed folly itself. But Mr. Vaught only took out his fried-up ball of a handkerchief and knocked it against his nose.
    â€œBill”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œHow would you like to work for me?”
    â€œI’d like it fine, sir, but—”
    â€œWe have a garage apartment, which Mrs. Vaught did over completely. You’d be independent.”
    â€œWell, I really appreciate it, but—”
    â€œYou’re Ed Barrett’s boy,” began Mr. Vaught in an enumerating voice.
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œDolly knew your mother and said she was the sweetest little lady in the world.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œYour mother and daddy are dead and here you are up here fooling around and not knowing what in the hail you are doing. Isn’t that so?”
    â€œWell, sir, I’m a humidification engineer.”
    â€œWhat in the woerrrld is that?” asked the other, his mouth gone quirky and comic.
    The engineer explained.
    â€œWhy, hailfire, man, you mean you’re the janitor,” cried Mr. Vaught, falling back and doing a jaunty little step. For the first time the engineer caught a glimpse of the shrewdness behind the old man’s buffoonery.
    â€œI guess I am, in a way.”
    â€œTell me the truth now. You don’t know what—in—the— woerrrld you are doing up here, do you?”
    â€œWell now—” began the engineer, intending to say