The Moviegoer

Feliciana Parish before Aunt Emily brought him to New Orleans. He is thought to be devoted to us and we to him. But the truth is that Mercer and I are not at all devoted to each other. My main emotion around Mercer is unease that in threading his way between servility and presumption, his foot might slip. I wait on Mercer, not he on me.
    â€œDidn’t nobody tell me you was coming!” cries Mercer, feeling the balance tilt against me. “I was just commencing to make a fire.”
    Mercer is a chesty sand-colored Negro with a shaved head and a dignified Adolph Menjou mustache. Behind the mustache, his face, I notice, is not at all devoted but is as sulky as a Pullman porter’s. My aunt brought him down from Feliciana, but he has changed much since then. Not only is he a city man now; he is also Mrs Cutrer’s butler and as such presides over a shifting menage of New Orleans Negresses, Jamaicans and lately Hondurians. He is conscious of his position and affects a clipped speech, pronouncing his Rs and ings and diphthonging his Is Harlem-style.
    Despite the gray day outside, the living room is bright, but it is not snug. The windows are open to the ceiling and the gray sky comes pouring in.
    Mercer puts coal on the blazing kindling. His white coat, starched stiff as armor, creaks and rustles. A welt and a tuck form at the base of his skull. He places the coals carefully, his hand passing slowly and imperviously through the flame. Head thrown back, he breathes heavily through his mouth, holding his breath as he places a coal, then expelling it in a hiss.
    We might be back in Feliciana. Here is the very sound of winter mornings in Feliciana twenty years ago when cold dark dawns were announced by the clatter of the handle on the scuttle and Mercer’s strangled breathing.
    The room is a beautiful room and by every right a cheerful room, with its walls of books, its bokhara glowing like a jewel, its blackening portraits. The prisms of the chandelier wink red in the firelight. Scattered over the satinwood table is the usual litter of quarterlies and rough-paper weeklies and, as always, the great folio The Life of the Buddha. My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice.
    Mercer is speaking to me.
    â€œâ€”but they still hasn’t the factories and the—ah—producing set-up we has.”
    So Mercer wants to talk about current events. I do so willingly though I am certain he knows more about the subject than I do. He stands facing neither me nor the fire but in a kind of limbo. He holds the coal scuttle and puts one foot toward the door but neither quite stays nor leaves.
    Mercer has dissolved somewhat in recent years. It is not so easy to say who he is any more. My aunt truly loves him and sees him as a faithful retainer, a living connection with a bygone age. She tells about Mercer’s devotion to Dr Wills, how he went around for days after Dr Wills’ death, his face streaming with tears. I do not doubt this. Yet I know for a fact that Mercer steals regularly from her by getting kickbacks from the servants and tradespeople. But you can’t call him a thief and let it go at that. Mercer has aspirations. How does he see himself? When he succeeds in seeing himself, it is as a remarkable sort of fellow, a man who keeps himself well-informed in science and politics. This is why I am always uneasy when I talk to him. I hate it when his vision of himself dissolves and he sees himself as neither, neither old retainer nor expert in current events. Then his eyes get muddy and his face runs together behind his mustache. Last Christmas I went looking for him in his rooms over the garage. He wasn’t there but on his bed lay a well-thumbed volume put out by the Rosicrucians called How to Harness Your Secret Powers. The poor bastard.
    While Mercer speaks of current events, I edge closer to the mantelpiece. There are the Cutrers in their “grand slam” year. Uncle Jules was Rex, Kate was queen of Neptune, Aunt Emily won the Picayune cup for her work with the Home Service. Everyone said that Kate was a lovely queen, but she wasn’t. When Kate gets her hair waved and puts on an evening gown, she looks frumpy; the face in the picture is plain as a pudding.
    One picture I never tire looking at. For ten years I have looked at it on this mantelpiece and tried to understand it. Now I take it down and hold it against the light from the