The Last Gentleman

grandfather howled around 203 Lower Pyne. He knew his grandfather occupied room 203 because he had seen the number written in the flyleaf of Schiller’s Die Räuber, a dusty yellow book whose pages smelled like bread. After a moment the young Southerner, who still sat at his desk, tried to get up, but his limbs were weighed down by a strange inertia and he moved like a sloth. It was all he could do to keep from sinking to the floor. Walking around in old New Jersey was like walking on Saturn, where the force of gravity is eight times that of earth. At last, and despite himself, he uttered a loud groan, which startled him and momentarily silenced his classmates. “Hm,” he muttered and peered at his eyeballs in the mirror. “This is no place for me for another half hour, let alone two years.”
    Forty minutes later he sat on a bus, happy as a lark, bound for New York, where he lived quite contentedly at the Y.M.C.A.
    The following summer, in deference to the wishes of his father, who hoped to arouse in him a desire to complete his education and particularly to awaken a fondness for the law, he worked as a clerk in the family law firm. There was no place to sit but the library, a dusty room with a large oval table of golden oak which also served as a conference room and a place to read wills and pass acts of sale. The fragrant summer air thrust in at the window and the calfskin of the law books crumbled and flew up his nostrils. Beyond the glittering street, the oaks of the residential section turned yellow with pollen, then a dark lustrous green, then whitened with dust. He contracted dreadful hay fever and sat all summer, elbows propped on the conference table, tears running down his cheeks. His nose swelled up like a big white grape and turned violet inside. Through the doorway, opened at such an angle that he might overhear without being seen, he heard his father speak with his clients, a murmurous sound compounded of grievance and redress. As the summer wore on, it became more and more difficult to distinguish the words from the sound, until finally they merged with the quarrels of the sparrows under the window sill and the towering sound of the cicadas that swelled up from the vacant lots and filled the white sky. The other members of the firm were cordial enough, but he could not get on any other footing with them save that of the terrific cordiality of their first greetings, to which he responded as best he could while holding his great baboon’s nose in a handkerchief.
    At the end of summer his father died. Though his death was sudden, people were less surprised than they might have been, since it was well known that in this particular family the men died young, after short tense honorable lives, and the women lived another fifty years, lived a brand new life complete with a second girlhood, outings with other girls, 35,000 hearty meals, and a long quarrelsome senescence.
    For another month or so the young man, whose name was Williston Bibb Barrett or Will Barrett or Billy Barrett, sat rocking on the gallery with six women: one, his stepmother, who was a good deal older than his father, was nice enough but somewhat abstracted, having a way of standing in the pantry for minutes at a time whistling the tunes of the Hit Parade; three aunts; a cousin; and a lady who was called aunt but was not really kin—all but one over seventy and each as hale as a Turk. He alone ailed, suffering not only from hay fever but having fallen also into a long fit of melancholy and vacancy amounting almost to amnesia. It was at that time that he came near joining the ranks of the town recluses who sit dreaming behind their shutters thirty or forty years while the yard goes to jungle and the bugs drone away the long summer days.
    Managing to revive himself, however, he concluded his father’s affairs, sold the law library to the surviving members of the firm, reapportioned the rooms of the house in the fashion best calculated to minimize quarrels, had drawn in his favor a letter of credit in the amount of $17,500, his inheritance—and, again losing the initiative, sat rocking on the gallery with his aunts. He considered farming. But all that remained of Hampton, the family plantation, was two hundred acres of buckshot mud long since reclaimed by canebrakes.
    As it turned out, his mind was made up for him, for he was drafted shortly thereafter. He put Hampton in the soil bank and served two years in