She says only one more thing, tilting her head, eyes alight. “What about the court house?”
“It’s too late. You didn’t have to come. I’m sorry.”
“Listen!” she cries, as far away as Eufala itself. “I had a wonderful time!”
ONCE A WEEK, on Fridays, all Cutrer salesmen return to the main office for a lunch conference with the staff. The week’s business is reviewed, sales reports made, talks given on market conditions and coming issues presented by the underwriter. But today there is not much talk of business. Carnival is in full swing. Parades and balls go on night and day. A dozen krewes have already had their hour, and Proteus, Rex and Comus are yet to come. Partners and salesmen alike are red-eyed and abstracted. There is gossip about the identity of the king and queen of Iberia tonight (most of the staff of Cutrer, Klostermann and Lejier are members either of the Krewe of Neptune or the Krewe of Iberia). It is generally conceded that the king of Iberia will be James (Shorty) Jones, president of Middle Gulf Utilities, and the queen Winky Ouillibert, the daughter of Plauche Ouillibert of Southern Mutual. The choice is a popular one — I can testify that both men are able, likable and unassuming fellows.
Some Fridays, Uncle Jules likes to see me in his office after lunch. When he does, he so signifies by leaving his door open to the corridor so that I will see him at his desk and naturally stop by to say hello. Today he seems particularly glad to see me. Uncle Jules has a nice way of making you feel at home. Although he has a big office with an antique desk and a huge portrait of Aunt Emily, and although he is a busy man, he makes you feel as if you and he had come upon this place in your wanderings; he is no more at home than you. He sits everywhere but in his own chair and does business everywhere but at his own desk. Now he takes me into a corner and stands feeling the bones of my shoulder like a surgeon. “Ravaud came in to see me this morning.” Uncle Jules falls silent and throws his head straight back. I know enough to wait. “He said, Jules, I’ve got a little bad news for you — you know the convention of the open-ends, the one you never miss? I said, sure, I know about it.” Now Uncle Jules puts his head down to my chest as if he were listening to my heart. I wait. “Do you know when it is? Why yes, along about the middle of March, I told him. Along about Tuesday, says Ravaud. Carnival day.” Uncle Jules presses my shoulder to keep me quiet. “Is that right, Ravaud? Oh, that reminds me. Here are your tickets. Have a good trip.” Uncle Jules is bent way over and I can’t tell whether he is laughing, but his thumb presses deep into the socket of my shoulder.
“That’s pretty good.”
“But then he said something that stuck in my mind. He said, I don’t mind going if you want me to, Jules, but you got the man right in your own family. Why that scoun’l beast Jack Bolling knows more about selling open-ends than anybody on Carondelet Street. So. You don’t really care about Carnival, do you?” He does not really believe I do not. As for himself, he could not conceive being anywhere on earth Mardi Gras morning but the Boston Club.
“No sir.”
“So. You take the ten-thirty plane Tuesday morning,” says Uncle Jules in his gruff way of conferring favors.
“Where to?”
“Where to! Why goddam, Chicago!”
Chicago. Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. Not in a thousand years could I explain it to Uncle Jules, but it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere. Great day in the morning. What will it mean to go mosying down Michigan Avenue in the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray? How can I deal with five million personal rays?
“I want you to make a few more contacts.” Uncle Jules lays back his head and we wait ten seconds. “Then when you get back, I think we might have something for you downtown.” The gruffest voice and so the greatest favor of all.
“Yes sir,” say I, looking pleased as punch and even prickling in the hairline to do justice to his gruffest favor. Oh sons of all bitches and great beast of Chicago lying in wait. There goes my life in Gentilly, my Little Way, my secret existence among the happy shades in Elysian Fields.
FOR SOME TIME NOW the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. Wednesday as I stood speaking to Eddie Lovell, I felt my eye closing in a broad wink.
After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library — where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point. Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them. Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counter-attack. Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.
Nell Lovell, I was saying, spotted me and over she comes brandishing a book. It seems she has just finished reading a celebrated novel which, I understand, takes a somewhat gloomy and pessimistic view of things. She is angry.
“I don’t feel a bit gloomy!” she cries. “Now that Mark and Lance have grown up and flown the coop, I am having the time of my life. I’m taking philosophy courses in the morning and working nights at Le Petit Theatre. Eddie and I have re-examined our values and found them pretty darn enduring. To our utter amazement we discovered that we both have the same life-goal. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“To make a contribution, however small, and leave the world just a little better off.”
“That’s very good,” I say somewhat uneasily and shift about on the library steps. I can talk to Nell as long as I don’t look at her. Looking into her eyes is an embarrassment.
“—we gave the television to the kids and last night we turned on the hi-fi and sat by the fire and read The Prophet aloud. I don’t find life gloomy!” she cries. “To me, books and people and things are endlessly fascinating. Don’t you think so?”