Read Online The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy - Free Book Online

white or black, the way you talk to me.”
    â€œUhmmhmm!”—fervent noises of agreement from Hudeen. “What it is, this charm school?” Chandra wanted to know. She knew I was leveling.
    I told her. She listened. Of course there are such places where you go to get coached for job interviews, how to walk, sit, carry on a conversation, eat.
    â€œChandra”—I told her to get away from the old black-white business—“it’s the current equivalent of the old finishing school.”
    â€œFinished is right,” she said, but she was eyeing me shrewdly. “No kidding?”
    â€œNo kidding.”
    Thoughtfully she spooned stuff into Margaret—and went to charm school, and got a job—for a while.
    Who knows? She might make it yet. As the Howard Cosell of anchorpersons.
    â€œTell Miss Ellen I’ll be downstairs,” I tell Hudeen.
    â€œShe be down!” cries Hudeen softly, inattentively.
    â€œChandra,” I say, “where is St. Louis?”
    â€œWhat you talking about, where is St. Louis!” cries Chandra, eyeing me suspiciously.
    â€œTell Doctor where is St. Louis!” says Hudeen, hardly listening.
    â€œSt. Louis is on the Mississippi River between Chicago and New Orleans,” says Margaret, my daughter, Miss Priss, smartest girl in class, first to put up her hand.
    â€œRight,” I say.
    They’re all right.
    â€œMy other daughter, she live in Detroit,” says Hudeen to the TV.
    Two strange thoughts occur to me in the ten seconds it takes to spiral down the iron staircase.
    One: how strange it is that we love our children and can’t stand them or they us. Love them? Yes, for true. Think of the worst thing that could happen to you. It is that something should happen to your little son or daughter, he get hurt or killed or die of leukemia; that she be raped, kidnapped, get hooked on drugs. This is past bearing. Can’t stand them? Right. When we’re with them, we’re not with them, not in the very present but casting ahead of them and the very present, planning tomorrow, regretting yesterday, worrying about money and next year.
    Counselors counsel parents: Communicate! Communicate with your kids! Communication is the key!
    This is ninety percent psycho-crap and ten percent truth, but truth of a peculiar sort.
    I don’t communicate with Tommy and he doesn’t with me, beyond a single flick of eye, a nod, and a downpull of lip. If I sat Tommy down and said, Son, let’s have a little talk, it would curdle him and curdle me, and it should.
    Imagine Dr. Sarah Smart, popular syndicated columnist and apostle of total communication, showing up one night and saying to her daughter, Let’s have a little talk. I hope daughter would tell Mom to shove off.
    Second thought on last iron step: It occurs to me that, except for the drink I took after Donna’s visit, I haven’t had a drink or a pill for two years, except for the drink at the Little Napoleon on the way home.
    I sit down. I am able to sit still and notice things, like a man just out of prison, which I am, and glad of it. I sit in a chair, feet on the floor, arms on the arms of the chair, and watch the reflection of the late-afternoon sun off the bayou. I had never noticed it before. It makes parabolas of light on the ceiling which move and intersect each other.
    I’ve gotten healthy. For two years I was greenskeeper of the officers’ golf course at the Fort Pelham air base. They made use of my history as a golfer. But instead of worrying about putting and chipping, hooking and slicing, I ran a huge John Deere tractor with a gang of floating cutters fore and aft, raked the sand traps, swung down the rough, manned the sprinklers, kept the greens like billiard tables.
    Here’s the mystery: Why does it take two years of prison for a man to be able to sit still, listen, notice his children, watch the sunlight on the ceiling?

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