The Last Gentleman

and incredulous sound he seemed to call forth from people.
    â€œWhat would you do?” asked Jamie after a silence.
    â€œI’d do what the doctor said.”
    â€œMe too. But in any case you’re going to bum around with me for a while?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œThen call Poppy and see what’s what. After all, he’s the boss.”
    â€œYou’re right. I will. Where is he?”
    â€œAt the Astor.”
    â€œHow extraordinary.”
    â€œIt was the only hotel they knew.”
    â€œYello, yello.” Mr. Vaught answered the telephone as eccentrically and routinely as a priest reciting the rosary.
    â€œSir, this is BillyBarrett.”
    â€œWho? Billy boy!”
    â€œYes sir. Sir—”
    â€œYayo.”
    â€œI would like to know exactly where we stand.”
    â€œYou ain’t the only one.”
    â€œSir?”
    â€œWhat is it you want to know, Bill?”
    â€œI would like to know, sir, whether I am working for you or working for Rita or for both or for neither.”
    â€œYou want to know something, Bill.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œIt would be a crying shame if you didn’t turn out to be a lawyer. You sound just like your daddy.”
    â€œYes sir. But—”
    â€œListen to me, Bill.”
    â€œI will,” said the engineer, who had learned to tell when the old man was not fooling.
    â€œYou got your driver’s license?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œAll right. You be standing outside on the sidewalk at nine o’clock in the morning. We’ll pick you up. Then we’ll see who’s going where.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œAll yall be ready,” he said, like Kitty, somewhat aside from the telephone, to the world around.
    It was not a good sign, thought the engineer as he hung up slowly, that Mr. Vaught spoke both broadly and irritably.
    14 .
    The next morning he resigned his position at Macy’s—the chief engineer, who had heard this before and was something of a psychologist himself, nodded gravely and promised the job would be waiting for him when he felt better—checked out of the Y.M.C.A. and sat on his telescope at the curb for three hours. No one came to pick him up. Once he went inside to call the hospital, the hotel, and Kitty. Had he got the directions wrong? Jamie had been discharged, the Vaughts had left the hotel, and Kitty’s telephone did not answer.
    Only then, three hours later, did it occur to him that there must be a message for him. He climbed the steps again. Already the Y reentered was like a place he had lived in long ago with its special smell of earnestness and breathed air and soaped tile, the smell, as he had always taken it but only just now realized, of Spanish Protestantism. Two yellow slips were handed him across the desk. Superstitiously, he took pains to return to his perch on the street corner before reading either. The first was a garbled note, evidently from Mr. Vaught. “If plans are not finalized and you change your mind a job is always waiting. S. Vote.” “Vote” could only be Vaught.
    The second was from Kitty and he couldn’t see for looking. “Europe out,” he finally made out. “Jamie more important.Please change your mind and catch up with us at Coach-and-Four Motel, Williamsburg. Know you had cause to lose patience but please change your mind. Did you mean what you said? Kitty.”
    Change my mind? Mean what I said? What did I say, asked the engineer aloud. He blinked into the weak sunlight. Screwing up an eye, he tried mightily to get the straight of it. It follows, said he, diagramming a syllogism in the air, that they think I changed my mind about going with them. But I told them no such thing. Then it follows someone else did.
    Another twenty minutes of squatting and musing on the telescope, not so much addled as distracted by the curiousness of sitting in the street and having no address, and he jumped suddenly to his feet.
    Why, they have all left, thought he, socking himself with amazement: the whole lot of them have pulled out.
    Early afternoon found him on a southbound bus counting his money. He bought a ticket as far as Metuchen. The bus was a local, a stained old Greyhound with high portholes. The passengers sat deep in her hold, which smelled of the 1940’s and many a trip to Fort Dix. Under the Hudson River she roared, swaying like a schooner, and out onto old US 1 with its ancient