Free Lancelot by Walker Percy Page A

underwear (because underwear made lines). She was eating green peas and in a few minutes would make a speech. I caught her eye. In thirty seconds we were in the Governor’s bathroom, which wouldn’t lock, but her bare ass was against the door, no lock required. Two minutes later husband and wife took their places, wife gave speech, husband ate apple pie.

4
    THE FIRST TIME I ever saw her was something like that. Belle Isle was poor. As a liberal lawyer I wasn’t making much money taking N.A.A.C.P. cases. We depended on the tourist dollar. That year we came into a little bonus: we were chosen for the Azalea Trail, ten thousand good middle-class white folks, mostly women, tramped through the house shepherded by belles in hoop skirts. It brought in over five thousand dollars and we needed the money and so put up with the inconvenience: being put out of the house, carpets trampled, plates missing.
    Margot was a belle. Her father, Tex Reilly, who had made ten million dollars in mud, had moved to New Orleans to make still more in offshore rigs and so arrived in the Garden District, rich, widowed, and with a debutante-age daughter. He bought a house. What he didn’t know was that New Orleans society takes as much pleasure ignoring Texas money as New York money, which was all right with Tex, except that his daughter couldn’t be queen of Comus or queen of anything or even a maid—or even go to the balls. He didn’t even get far enough to find out that guests don’t go to the Mardi Gras balls to dance but only to watch the maskers dance. The Azalea Festival was a different matter. It was a happy marriage of rich new oil people and old broke River Road gentry. If the newcomers couldn’t dance with Comus and parade through New Orleans, they could buy old country houses and parade through the rest.
    The day was a fiasco. It drizzled, blew, hailed, and finally stormed. But the ladies came anyhow, at least five thousand, leaking water and grinding buckshot mud into our fragile faded Aubussons. The belles stationed on the gallery, a charming bevy, to welcome the visitors, got wet, hair fell, colors ran.
    I came home from work, taking the service drive, parked and headed for the back stairs and the roped-off upstairs living quarters with no other thought in mind but to get past the tourists and the belles and the mud and watch the 5:30 news. News! Christ, what is so important about the news? Ah, I remember. We were wondering who was going to get assassinated next. Sure enough, the next one did get killed. There it was, the sweet horrid dread we had been waiting for. It was the late sixties and by then you had got used to a certain rhythm of violence so that one came home with the dread and secret expectation that the pace had quickened, so that when the final act was done, the killing, the news flash: the death watch, the funeral, the killing during the funeral, one watched as one watches a lewd act come to climax, dry-mouthed, lips parted, eyes unblinking and slightly bulging—and even had the sense in oneself of lewdness placated.
    In those days I lived for the news bulletin, the interrupted program, the unrehearsed and stumbling voice of the reporter.
    As I rounded the corner of the gallery, briefcase swinging out in the turn (what was in the briefcase? A fifth of Wild Turkey and a hard-cover copy of The Big Sleep ), one belle caught my eye. Or rather her eye caught my eye and I couldn’t look away. She was as sopping wet and her colors as run together as the rest but she was not woebegone. She was backed against the plastered brick, hands behind her open to the bricks, backs of hands against her sacrum, bouncing off the wall by ducking her head and pushing with her hands. Under the muddy fringe of her hoop skirt, I could see her feet were bare. Her short hair was in wet ringlets like spitcurls on her forehead, but still springy and stiff at her temples.
    â€œYou must be the