Mercer passes the corn sticks, holding his breath at each place and letting it out with a strangling sound.
Walter and Uncle Jules try to persuade me to ride Neptune. My aunt looks at me in disgust — with all her joking, she has a solid respect for the Carnival krewes, for their usefulness in business and social life. She shifts over into her Lorenzo posture, temple propped on three fingers.
“What a depraved and dissolute specimen,” she says as usual. She speaks absently. It is Kate who occupies her. “Grown fat-witted from drinking of old sack.”
“What I am, Hal, I owe to thee,” say I as usual and drink my soup.
Kate eats mechanically, gazing about the room vacantly like someone at the automat. Walter is certain of himself now. He gets a raffish gleam in the eye.
“I don’t think we ought to let him ride, do you, Mrs Cutrer? Here we are doing the work of the economy and there he is skimming off his five percent like a pawnbroker on Dryades Street.”
My aunt turns into herself another degree and becomes Lorenzo himself.
“Now here’s a distinguished pair for you,” she tells Kate and watches her carefully; she is not paying any attention to us. “The barbarians at the inner gate and who defends the West? Don John of Austria? No, Mr Bolling the stockbroker and Mr Wade the lawyer. Mr Bolling and Mr Wade, defenders of the faith, seats of wisdom, mirrors of justice. God, I wouldn’t mind if they showed a little spirit in their debauchery, but look at them. Rosenkranz and Guildenstern.”
It comes to me again how formidable Walter was in college, how much older he seemed then. Walter is a sickly-looking fellow with a hollow temple but he is actually quite healthy. He has gray sharklike skin and lidded eyes and a lock of hair combed across his forehead in the MacArthur style. Originally from Clarksburg, West Virginia, he attended Tulane and settled in New Orleans after the war. Now at thirty-three he is already the senior partner of a new firm of lawyers, Wade & Molyneux, which specializes in oil-lease law.
“Mr Wade,” my aunt asks Walter. “Are you a seat of wisdom?”
“Yes ma’am, Mrs Cutrer.”
I have to grin. What is funny is that Walter always starts out in the best brilliant-young-lawyer style of humoring an old lady by letting her get the better of him, whereas she really does get the better of him. Old ladies in West Virginia were never like this. But strangely, my aunt looks squarely at Kate and misses the storm warnings. Kate’s head lowers until her brown shingled hair falls along her cheek. Then as Walter’s eyes grow wider and warier, his smile more wolfish — he looks like a recruit picking his way through a minefield — Kate utters a clicking sound in her teeth and abruptly leaves the room.
Walter follows her. My aunt sighs. Uncle Jules sits easy. He has the gift of believing that nothing can really go wrong in his household. There are household-ups and household-downs but he smiles through them without a flicker of unease. Even at the time of Kate’s breakdown, it was possible for him to accept it as the sort of normal mishap which befalls sensitive girls. It is his confidence in Aunt Emily. As long as she is mistress of his house, the worst that can happen, death itself, is nothing more than seemly.
Presently Uncle Jules leaves for the office. My aunt speaks to Walter in the hall. I sit in the empty dining room thinking of nothing. Walter joins me for dessert. Afterwards, as Mercer clears the table, Walter goes to the long window and stands looking out, hands in his pockets. I am prepared to reassure him about Kate, but it turns out that it is the Krewe of Neptune, not Kate, which is on his mind.
“I wish you would reconsider, Binx.” There is an exhilaration in his voice which carries over from his talk with Uncle Jules. “We’ve got a damn good bunch of guys now.” Ten years ago he would have said “ace gents” that was what we called good guys in the nineteen forties. “You may not agree with me, but in my opinion it is the best all-around krewe in Carnival. We’re no upstarts and on the other hand we’re not a bunch of old farts — and—” he adds hastily as he thinks of Uncle Jules, “our older men are among the ten wealthiest and most prominent families in New Orleans.” Walter would never never say “rich”; and indeed the word “wealthy,” as he says it, is redolent of a life spiced and sumptuous, a tapestry thick to the touch and shot through with the bright thread of freedom. “You’d really like it now, Jack. I mean it. You really would. I can give you positive assurance that every last one of us would be delighted to have you back.”
“I certainly appreciate it, Walter.”
Walter still dresses as well as he did in college and sits and stands and slouches with the same grace. He still wears thick socks summer and winter to hide his thin veined ankles and still crosses his legs to make his calf look fat. In college he was one of those upperclassmen freshmen spot as a modeclass="underline" he was Phi Beta Kappa without grinding for it and campus leader without intriguing for it. But most of all he was arbiter of taste. We pledges would see him in the fraternity house sitting with his hat on and one skinny knee cocked up, and so the style was set for sitting and wearing hats. The hat had to be a special kind of narrow-brim brown felt molded to a high tri-cornered peak and then only passable after much fingering had worn the peak through. He liked to nickname the new pledges. One year he fancied “head” names. He lined them up and sat back with his knee cocked up, pushed up his hat with his thumbnail. “You over there, you look to me like Pothead; you talking, you’re Blowhead; you’re Meathead; you’re Sackhead; you’re Needlehead.” For a year after I joined the fraternity I lived in the hope of pleasing him by hitting upon just the right sour-senseless rejoinder, and so of gaining admission to his circle, the fraternity within the fraternity. So when he stopped before the last pledge, a boy from Monroe with a bulging forehead and eyes set low in his face, he paused. “And you, you’re—” “That’s Whalehead,” I said. Walter raised an eyebrow and pulled down his mouth and nodded a derisive nod to his peers of the inner circle. I was in.
A pledge too felt the privilege of his company and felt the strain too. For one lived only to walk the tightrope with him, to be sour yet affable, careless but in a certain style of carelessness, sardonic yet likable, as popular with men as with women. But strain or no strain, I was content to be his friend. One night I walked home with him after he had been tapped for Golden Fleece — which was but the final honor of a paragraph of honors beneath his picture in the annual. “Binx,” he said — with me he had at last dropped his sour-senseless way of talking. “I’ll let you in on a secret. That business back there — believe it or not, that doesn’t mean anything to me.” “What does, Walter?” He stopped and we looked back at the twinkling campus as if the cities of the world had been spread out at our feet. “The main thing, Binx, is to be humble, to make Golden Fleece and be humble about it.” We both took a deep breath and walked back to the Delta house in silence.
When I was a freshman, it was extremely important to me to join a good fraternity. But what if no fraternity invited me to join? During rush week I was invited to the Delta house so the brothers could look me over. Another candidate, Boylan “Sockhead” Bass from Bastrop, and I sat together on a leather sofa, hands on our knees while the brothers stood around courting us like virgins and at the same time eying us like heifers. Presently Walter beckoned to me and I followed him upstairs where we had a confidential talk in a small bedroom. Walter motioned to me to sit on the bed and for a long moment he stood, as he is standing now: hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels and looking out the window like Samuel Hinds in the movies. “Binx,” he said. “We know each other pretty well, don’t we?” (We’d both gone to the same prep school in New Hampshire.) “That’s right, Walter,” I said. “You know me well enough to know I wouldn’t hand you the usual crap about this fraternity business, don’t you?” “I know you wouldn’t, Walter.” “We don’t go in for hot boxes around here, Binx. We don’t have to.” “I know you don’t.” He listed the good qualities of the SAEs, the Delta Psis, the Dekes, the KAs. “They’re all good boys, Binx. I’ve got friends in all of them. But when it comes to describing the fellows here, the caliber of the men, the bond between us, the meaning of this little symbol—” he turned back his lapel to show the pin and I wondered if it was true that Deltas held their pins in their mouths when they took a shower—“there’s not much I can say, Binx.” Then Walter took his hat off and stood stroking the tricornered peak. “As a matter of fact, I’m not going to say anything at all. Instead, I’ll ask you a single question and then we’ll go down. Did you or did you not feel a unique something when you walked into this house? I won’t attempt to describe it. If you felt it, you already know exactly what I mean. If you didn’t—!” Now Walter stands over me, holding his hat over his heart. “Did you feel it, Binx?” I told him straight off that nothing would make me happier than to pledge Delta on the spot, if that was what he was getting at. We shook hands and he called in some of the brothers. “Fellows, I want you to meet Mister John Bickerson Bolling. He’s one of those broken-down Bollings from up in Feliciana Parish — you may have heard the name. Binx is a country boy and he’s full of hookworm but he ought to have some good stuff in him. I believe he’ll make us a good man.” We shook hands all around. They were good fellows.