The Last Gentleman

when everything comes to a head for several people and after that their lives take a different turning? Jamie and I had gone out to see Sutter and Rita, in Tesuque. Val came out a little later. A few days later and everybody had gone off in different directions. First, I think Sutter found out that something was wrong with Jamie. Sutter could look at you and tell what was wrong with you—he’s about shot now—but I remember he did take Jamie to the laboratory. Then he and Jamie went out into the desert and got lost etcetera etcetera. After that Val left to become a postulant or something. Then I came to New York with Rita, She and Sutter had already separated. I had never met anybody like Rita. My own life had been abnormal. I had polio as a little girl and was crippled and overcame it with ten years of toe dancing (like Glenn Cunningham, Poppy said). I had tutors and Poppy sent me to a school in Switzerland—now you talk about something peculiar: those girls were a mess. I came home. My life at home. Do you know what everybody does? We live in a country club; we are not just members, we live right there on the golf links along with a hundred other houses. The men make money and watch pro football. The women play golf and bridge at the club. The children swim in meets. The mothers of the losers hate the mothers of the winners. At night Mama always gets mad at Huntley-Brinkley, turns off the TV and gets off on the Negroes and the Jews and the Federal Reserve Bank. Sunday we go to church. That’s what we do at home. Then all of a sudden I found myself with Rita. She showed me something I never dreamed existed. Two things. First, the way she devoted herself to the Indians. I never saw anything like it. They adored her. I saw one child’s father try to kneel and kiss her foot. Then she showed me how a thing can be beautiful. She kept Shakespeare’s sonnets by her bed. And she actually read them. Listen to this, she would say, and she would read it. And I could hear it the way she heard it! Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. Poetry: who’d have thought it? We went for walks. I listened to her but then (is this bad?) I began to see how much she was enjoying teaching me. We went to corn dances in the pueblos. I said I had a confession. My confession is this: that even though I knew Rita and Sutter were estranged, or at least were having trouble, and although I knew exactly what effect our own friendship was having, I knew how to make Rita like me and I did it. Finally when Jamie and Sutter came back there was a scene between Val and Rita and everything blew up. At the time Val was fretting about whether to go into this religious order and she was not very stable. But everybody was unstable. Anyhow Val accused Rita of destroying Carlos’s faith—
    Carlos?
    A Zuñi boy who was Rita’s servant and protégé. (I beat him too. Rita liked him but she soon liked me better.) He was her prize pupil and she’d got him into Harvard on a scholarship. She was having Carlos and me dance the Ahaiyute myths. Carlos was the Beast God and I was the Corn Woman. Val told Carlos he was trading his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rita asked her what mess of pottage she meant, the Ahaiyute myths or Harvard? Thus—this idolatry, said Val. But Val dear, said Rita, this is his birthright, the Zuñis had the Ahaiyute myths for hundreds of years before the Spanish priests came. Val stormed out. She never liked Rita.
    What did Sutter say?
    Nothing. Or rather he laughed. But it was then that Val made up her mind too. She came back the same night and apologized. She told Rita: “It is you who are doing the work and I who am being hateful and doing nothing. Is it possible to come to believe in Christ and the whole thing and afterwards to be more hateful than before? But at least now I know what to do, and I thank you for it, Rita.” And so around she goes to each of us, kissing us and asking us to forgive her (it was that kind of summer).
    What did Sutter say to that?
    Oh, he said something about: now I don’t know, Val, maybe there is something to be said nowadays for a theology of hatred—you know Sutter. No, you don’t. But then I came on to New York with Rita. The poems in the park? They’re just that. She likes to show me her favorites—she knows I can see them as she sees them. I have to get up earlier than she does and we have different