Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  “Back,” you nod.

  You open the velvet cask, you set the hands of your new watch by the big round café clock. To hold the timepiece to your ear and close your eyes, learning its voice, not borrowed, bought.

  “New?” the waitress asks.

  “Sure is. Swiss. They never go to war, you know, the Swiss.”

  “How they do that, you reckon?”

  “Just smart, I guess. Not sure—I’ll have to look into it.—But, yeah, I think this one’s going to keep real good time.”

  Later, during a very needed bath, you find that your own legs are—up to the hairy kneecap, one showing that awful scar—tinted blue. Like a centaur, you’re half animal till—six latherings and a scrub brush later—blueness floats off. It’s gone, with that fearful tannic foreign smell.

  —So, child, this’s been the story of Simon’s splendid pocket watch. Its fate, its travels.

  The end.

  One Old Man in Here I Like

  We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.

  —PSALM 55:14

  MALES are frailer and shorter-lived, overly talented at the pride that depresses. So there ain’t many non-bedridden men here at Lanes’. Them that’s here get noticed. Some things never change. Where’s the justice?

  We have twenty-nine women and twelve men left, last count. Counting is something you got to do most every breakfast. “Well, friends, what’s the latest bloodshed box score? Did poor Nineteen make it through the night?” We use this shorthand—useful, considering the room turnover owing to excess death. Every person first gets known by the number over their door. If they last three months, you go ahead and memorize their name.

  “You mean the new Nineteen? That last one—gloomy Gus—he hardly got unpacked.”

  “But I thought our only recent new one was Thirty-nine.”

  “Thirty-nine? Fool, you’re slipping. I am Thirty-nine. Six straight years I’ve been Thirty-nine.”

  “You and Jack Benny. Jell-O Again.”

  My own favorite male stays Twenty-one, Professor Taw. It ain’t escaped me: Other ladies in here like him too. Thirteen and Thirty especially. That Thirteen is shameless and throws herself at people and I pity her for it. One thing about Twenty-one, he has the kind of cynical sense of humor that lets a body squeak through tiny spaces, expecting nothing, settling for what little comes. “You see?” he says when the worst turns up. It often does. That way, he makes nothing seem a predicted something—perpetual-motion machine.

  The fellow is also the very encyclopedia come alive. A lot of folks read books, but how many remember all the good lines? Taw once confessed to taking three pills of chelated zinc every day of his life. He’s popped them ever since—at the age of thirty-eight—he first forgot something. He offered me free zinc. “Not that you need it,” Taw told me, a first compliment. I may be vainest about my memory—which is most of what little I’ve got left to brag on, child. He was shrewd, knowing what I’d tolerate anybody’s praising. And he knew it just days after coming in here on a stretcher.

  Now I do take zinc, when I remember to. And I ain’t much worse off than I was back when Taw got dragged in here looking like a condemned man. Even now, Taw drools some. How else can I say it? Look, nobody’s ideal. The poor man’s skin is yellow as Lifebuoy soap. He was one of the Why Me? types I mentioned. The kind that seems to think he’s got a life sentence to serve out—which is true enough. These ones want to get loose early, they think dying’s like parole. So they die.

  Well, Professor Taw didn’t. Or least, he ain’t yet. Us two tease each other something merciless. Others can’t stand to be around us long. Fine with me. I could wish that the man was in better health. Just my luck, finally hearing the long-awaited song, then catching its very last stanza.

  Fact is, the makers of Camel cigarettes—his brand from the twenties on—should pay to keep this gent off our nation’s streets where others might hear his unfiltered cough. He’s lost a lung and a half. He’s still got a three-pack-a-day habit. I don’t want to talk about it. If you’re a person’s friend, you don’t harp on things you know are past their ever changing. Sure, it hurts you, but you keep still.

  Professor Wendell Taw is the one person at Lanes’ that has a fame bigger than local. Very first day he arrived, while he was still in Admissions yelling at the staff, our head nurse stopped in here with my pills. She told me about his prizes in physics. She explained he was part Cherokee and had never married. He’d lost his pension by investing in some microscope that’d split atoms, or could see atoms get split or something. I noticed him missing the next day’s breakfast then the next. Bad sign. I smelled tobacco fumes coming out under his door. I figured Twenty-one’s number was all but up. I’d caught a glimpse of him—a hard man and a proud one. Maybe you’ll be disappointed in me, sugar, but I’ve always felt drawn to a certain kind of Ornery. Man. Being right tough myself, I forever believe that I can get under the rock of them. Takes one to know one, all that. A kind gentle easygoing helpful type man—now I appreciate one. I know the world needs more. I love them for friends—like Jerome, everybody’s favorite orderly, black or white. Like Larry. But such generous boys don’t quite get my motor purring, get that flint to sparking heat. It still happens even at my age. You’d be surprised. Maybe you’d feel disgusted, honey. But Time’ll change that. You’ll be happy when it’s you.

  Taw’s third day here, with me being naturally nosy and too old to feel ashamed of it, your Lucy decides to talk with him just onct before he passes. The Professor wouldn’t even leave his room to see our soap show. When two ladies walkered in and begged him to come watch it, when they told him about Carlo’s roadster going over the cliff maybe for real this go-round and about the Uptons’ marriage problems because of what happened one time only between Raphaela Upton and the randy car mechanic during a thunderstorm upstate—which was, the ladies tried telling Taw, to prove how liberal they were, nobody’s fault—he just laughed at them. He called them Porridge Brains, he threw the book at them. Literal. Propped wheezing in bed, it was all the man could reach. “And then he threatened to—something—on us,” one later explained. “Tell, Maude.”

  “To spit right on us,” Maude admitted, looking at her hands.

  “Thank you, Maude,” her friend said, and Maude added as how she felt better for saying it.

  Well, I had me a crude thought. From our Bookmobile Lady (Tuesdays and Thursdays) I checked out Beginning Physics. It was a pretty powder-blue color, the jacket. I tried reading the first six chapters—to help me show off. I soon give up. At Normal School, I never even got far past fractions. Well, physics with its drag times and force fields made me feel satisfied but overfull like I’d ate twelve pounds of chicken and pastry and the pastry lumps was opening a chicken-and-pastry franchise at the bottom of my stomach. So, what I did, I memorized (and this was even before zinc’s help) some test questions stuck between chapters. “What is energy?” run one. I admit: lately I’d been wondering that myself. Maybe you noticed that—unlike many a other old person—I never talk about my physical complaints. That, I believe, is why I snag a bit more company than most along this hall. I’m lucky. But I will say this—six months ago, I was not in no pink of health, bodily or otherwise. You get bored. Your body does. You ask it to do something usual—like digest this, please. It goes, “Why should I? Again?” So, the big Yawn was really setting in for good when I noticed Taw.—The hardest part is a old animal’s keeping properly interested. You can decide to.

  Book in my lap in my chair, I knock at his door. No answer. Unlimited time passed. I finally called, “Get decent. It’s just somebody.” Without waiting to be asked, I wheeled right in. He’d brought nothing with him but half dozen old-time sandbag-bottomed ashtrays (already full), a good set of German binoculars (in a case like a rifle’s), plus around four hundred books and many a notepad. Not one family photo. He might have been a silverfish that gets its nourishment direct from nibbling paper. Or from
Camels. My chair met smoke thick as a mad scientist’s experiment in a movie show. And back of haze, like the bush that burned but won’t ever all the way consumed, him—half Cherokee, all bone, part genius. I was sure of it. I needed him to be one.

  From out the foggy gray, one long yellow-orange hand pointed back towards that door I’d just used. “You plan to interest me in something. You intend to ‘draw him out.’ Spare me. Do. ‘A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations.’—Bertrand Russell. Close the door behind you. Madam? I spit on you and your Welcome Wagon.” In bed, he turned away.

  Sure, it was a poor greeting. But his voice gave off the color of a plum fifteen minutes before it’s going to be overripe—if you can catch the thing the very second it’s most perfectly ready, you know it’ll give you everything and just for finding it in time. Still, true, sure, the stranger had been extra surly.

  I threw my wheels into reverse. I had mostly backed into hall again when I stopped. He must of seen me hesitate. Then, I promise you, I heard him clear his throat and chest—a sound I will not wish on any future human ears (a warehouseful of cellophane is wadded at onct). And he did. Spit. A big parchment-colored corner piece of something landed on lino not three inches from my left wheel. I looked down at the thing. “You are rude,” I said. “Ain’t you a nasty old thing to do that, hocking oysters at me!”

  Well, then, I took as big a breath as my small but clearer lungs would accept and, with my best slippers and the chair’s chrome footrest still in his room, I chanced it, navigated right towards his bed. “Prepare to duck,” I told myself. I was considering giving the man a second chance, I figured what else is there to do till My Children come on at one?

  Finally went, “Hi! I’m taking me a physics course by correspondence? and I’m doing so bad that even the mailman laughs. I need to lift a few answers off of you, like it or no, and if you spit again and especially if you get any on me, I’ll … do something. I ain’t saying what but you don’t want to test me, hear?—Okay, now for starters: Why is gravity so great and what is energy?”

  Safe behind smoke, he looked my way—it was the most bored expression I have ever seen on any human face, alive or dead.

  Silent, he downed about half a cigarette with one slimy inhale, the whole front end flared to prove it was dying right into the dead part where all its million kin had been perishing since 19 and 21. Lanes’ End for Camels. Odd, watching, I felt sorrier for that weed than for him.

  Professor Taw and me both waited a right long time to know what might happen next. Finally he goes, “You don’t require a physics lesson. You need a hearing aid and some fierce training at manners. Secondly, you could use acting lessons. That is the feeblest ploy imaginable. A course by mail. Who put that idea into your head? The director, who called me ‘new boy on campus’? Or the swishy black orderly, who thinks this mausoleum is a popularity contest—with his menu of ‘optional’ services? Massages indeed. Who sent you?”

  I held my own. I stared Taw down, tried. With the smoke between us, I couldn’t really tell who was winning—a mercy. “Yeah?” says I, trying to sound tough, knowing I won’t making too good sense. “Well, Buster Brown, look, between us—off the record—I’ll leave if you slip me just the one. Okay. I believe I’ll go with: What is energy?”

  “If I knew that, would I be sealed into this crypt? Would I look like this? Would I put up with every senile hag’s rolling in here feigning an interest in my subject? There’ve been others, you know. Don’t fancy yourself as being in the least unique. Does your book even concern physics? I seriously doubt it.”

  “Is the Pope Cath’lic, you raunchy old … cigarette butt.”

  “Hold up the text, then, which is it? And don’t you dare touch me, you. Just place it on the southeast corner of the bed.” I flung it down—like granting him something major and not liking that one little bit.

  He grabbed Beginning Physics, twisted away from me, moaned, “Oh God, not the Tripler edition. No. No!” And he gawked at me like this might be some great first joke we shared.

  “Yeah, the Triplet,” smirks I. “What of it?”

  “For openers, it’s roughly twenty-eight or-nine years out of date.”

  “Well, who ain’t, mister?—You’re not, I guess?”

  “Certain old women might shrug off thirty years of hard-fought breakthroughs. I can’t afford to. Three decades back, you were probably already well past noticing. Look at your face. You have so many ruptured capillaries, you appear suntanned. You seem to be roughly what? a hundred and eighteen or nineteen, very roughly.—You, only thirty years out of date! don’t flatter yourself, Nefertiti. And she uses the Tripler! Well, I spit on your edition.”

  “Don’t you dare. It’s the Public Library’s. I’ll get fined.”

  “Why torture me, why now? Bernie Tripler is retired to West Palm Beach in a hacienda on the proceeds of interest earned by this first edition alone. He and his wife, Olga—ghastly enterprising woman—threw this thing together during one of their college summer vacations. Years ago we were all in school together. Their timing was incredible. The ninth edition Wilkinson was thoroughly fatigued (we all made jokes about it) but every college somehow used it anyway. While I was fighting to get my name into such texts, the Triplers, totally superficial climbing types, stole off, did a compilation of lowest-common-denominator survey facts, and proceeded to retire in style.—The Tripler edition, and you dare bring me this!”

  Knowing I was in semi-over my head, I decided to keep still—maybe racking up a bit more accidental credit. For good measure, I crossed my arms, like Castalia taught me.—Ruptured capiltaries? Is that what’s turnt me brown as a yam?

  He paused. “Out,” he said.

  “No,” I went. “I need tutoring and I ain’t leaving till I get me at least jigger of it.”

  “You’re tremendously hostile. Your face and age have made you as bitter as gall, haven’t they?”

  “Maybe they have, maybe they ain’t. But I’m here to stay.” Then I remembered a song off of Easy Listening radio. “‘Did you say I had a lot to learn? Well, don’t think I’m a-trying not to learn … Teach me tonight.’ “(I’m not sure why I told him this. But when a person spits at you, it makes you do strange.)

  “She’s totally senile. She’s speaking doggerel. She …” Then I saw him decide something, that maybe I was harmless. (It’s a mistake others have made and later paid for dearly.) Old Professor Taw—squinting in the blue globe of his personal smoke—using a bone finger stained saffron from sixty years’ nicotine, flipped to the back of my book, quick as any cardsharp. Throwing my textbook open on the bed’s nearest edge, his witty hand then pointed, whisked away. For a man his age, Taw had very few liver spots. I give his Indian blood full credit.

  I read aloud. “The Taw Effect (in combustion).”

  Bent over his bed, with my eyes so far gone, I was ashamed of needing to stoop three inches from the words. I next felt pleased but scared.—To have your name in somebody else’s library book and them wheeling it around in their chair’s side pocket, not even knowing. It was something.

  I never before imagined I might meet anybody with their name someplace safe, permanent, on record for as long as the world rolls forwards. The Triplers—Bernie and Olga (see how quick a study I can be when I get all hopped up around celebrities?)—they’d showed Taw’s formula and under it had printed a paragraph—a short one, true, but a paragraph—and in a book for beginners. Someway, that seemed to me better than getting your work wrote up in a rule book for more higher-ups. It meant that this ruined-looking wheezy man had—while teaching college in a small Tennessee hill town—managed to get in on the ground floor of … well, the Physical World, or something.

  “How …” I hesitated to make a fool of myself, but then, like always, threw caution aside, just jumped even into physics, feet-first. (Honey, if I kept my dignity safe on every single subject I’m ignorant of, why, I’d never say anything.) “How, sir … did you think
it up? Or whatever.”

  “One doesn’t ‘think it up,’ Rebecca of Sunnybrook. One notices.”

  (I felt a chill, being, my own self, a fan of noticing.)

  “It had been present all along. It only required someone’s saying, ‘There. That,’ and then describing it for the record. It’s not like a work of art. ‘Art is I—science is us.’ I simply added one more inch onto the temple. This,” he pointed to the tiny equation, four two-storied numbers and a bridging equal mark, “describes the single new thing I observed. But, enough self-promotion. Before you leave, I have two questions for you—Miss, Mrs.?”

  “Mrs. but the Mister he done died.”

  “More the fool he. First, your name, and secondly, why, oh why are you still in here plaguing me? Did I not tell you to leave? Do you like being spat on? Some do, I’m told. Leave, now. Why are you here? Who sent you?”

  “Number one …” (I could enter into the scientific spirit, child.) “Name’s Lucy Marsden. To you, Lucille. No, Mrs. Marsden. The Widow Mrs. Marsden. Number two: It ain’t ruptured capiltaries, it’s rouge, intentional rouge. Plus, I’m here because (A) I’m just nosy, which is lucky, because (B) it keeps the air going into and out of your nose, and … well, because, well … (D)”

  “(C).”

  “No, sir, (D). I meant (D).”

  “You slipped and you’re covering. I can’t abide that. Did you or did you not just now make a slack and probably senile mistake?”

  “Yeah, well, it won’t happen again, all right, ashtray mouth?” And I grabbed my book, my Tripler, and reverse-wheelied right out of there.

  One thing I remember from my days of flirting and the receded high tide of the lovey-dovey: You got to always leave them feeling your womanly mystery. Burn them with it. I figured maybe the first glimpse of me had rekindled a will to live in Taw’s ruined chest. Darling, I wouldn’t of gone back in there, even if I heard the man begging.