The Last Gentleman

the United States Army, where he took a large number of courses in electronics and from which he was honorably and medically discharged when he was discovered totally amnesic and wandering about the Shenandoah Valley between Cross Keys and Port Republic, sites of notable victories of General Stonewall Jackson.
    Once again he found himself sitting in the television room of the Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan, a room done in Spanish colonial motif with exposed yellow beams and furniture of oxidized metal.
    As he surveyed his resources and made allowance for his shortcomings—for he was, in some respects, a cool-headed and objective-minded young man—it seemed to him that two courses of action were called for. There was something the matter with him and it should be attended to. Treatment would take money and therefore he needed a job. Transferring his inheritance to a savings account at the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company, Columbus Circle branch, he engaged a psychiatrist, whom he consulted for fifty-five minutes a day, five days a week, for the following five years, at an approximate cost of $18,000. He joined therapy groups. Toward the satisfaction of the second requirement he discovered, after careful study of the classified columns of The New York Times, that a “maintenance engineer” earned $175 a week. In order to qualify as a maintenance engineer, who was, as it turned out, a kind of janitor, it was necessary to take a six months’ course at Long Island University, where he specialized in Temperature and Humidification Control. Upon graduation, he had no trouble securing a position since he was willing to take the night jobs no one else wanted. For the past two years he had been employed as humidification engineer at Macy’s, where he presided over a console in a tiny room three floors below street level. Since automatic controls gauged the air outside and regulated the store accordingly, there was little to do but make sure the electrical relays were working properly. His hours were between 12:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., a shift no one else wanted. But he liked it. Not only did he have ample time to read and ponder, the job also offered excellent health and retirement benefits. After twenty-three years he could retire and go home, where, if the ranks of old ladies had thinned out, he could let out rooms and live like a king. The dream even came to him as the subway trains thundered along close by that he might restore Hampton plantation to its former splendor.
    Even with this job, there came a time when his inheritance ran out, and it became necessary to find extra work now and then. Again he was lucky and hit upon congenial employment. A medical student who had flunked out of school and joined the Macy’s staff put him onto it. For weeks and months at a time he served as companion to lonely and unhappy adolescents, precocious Jewish lads who played band instruments and lived in the towers along Central Park West. It meant removing from his congenial cell in the Y.M.C.A. to an apartment, a dislocation true enough, but it was the sort of thing he did best: tuning in his amiable Southern radar to these rarefied and arcane signals which until he came along had roamed their lonely stratosphere unreceived. Strange to say, he got onto the wave lengths of his charges when their parents could not. Best of all, it fitted in with his regular job. He worked at Macy’s at night, slept in the middle of the day, and was ready for his “patient” when the latter came home from school.
    4 .
    His trouble still came from groups.
    It is true that after several years of psychoanalysis and group therapy he had vastly improved his group skills. So thoroughly in fact did he identify with his group companions of the moment, so adept did he become at role-taking, as the social scientists call it, that he all but disappeared into the group. As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of the groups with which one might associate, so that even a normal person sometimes feels dislocated. As a consequence this young man, dislocated to began with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next. There were times when he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else.
    So well did he adapt that it always came as a surprise when two groups who got along with him did not get along with each other. For example, he had fallen in with an interracial group