Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (124 page)

She took a trolley to the Falls theirselves. She’d seen them many times but never tired of their force. She claimed you could hear their roar a mile off, easy—said you could see their white steam rolling to a mountain’s height, steam as alive with rainbows as a greenhouse full of plants. At a overlook cave, she read this tourist plaque that told how a young girl onct slipped off this very observation deck, how her older brother jumped in and pulled her back to safety not twenty feet from the brink. Other sightseers formed a human chain and tugged the children safe ashore. Standing, reading this, shielded from spray by a new white parasol, she felt she had experienced a sign. She missed her children with a wallop long postponed. The Falls’ roar seemed an abscess hollow, groaning to be filled. Her children’s favorite phrases, their flukes of coloring, the very way each slept at night, curled in, sprawled out—came to her in a great and dizzying rush. She closed her parasol and used it as a prop to keep her standing. The white dress was soon covered with fine haze. Mist weighed her mutton sleeves and chilled her neck. The heroism of leaving wore off all at once—like, she explained, a prescription you cannot refill. And when she passed an arcade mirror, she saw how her face’s rouge had beaded in this haze, was bleeding—dainty—down her jaw. She left a note (on fine paper) for her young man. It said she still loved him. It swore she’d be back by return train. Her letter ended: “I forgot something.”

She took a express to Baltimore, caught her a taxi to the old address. The landlady wouldn’t open the door. Neighbors came out, saw her in the hallway, and—clucking—hid from her. Everybody felt she was worse than a murderer to leave her children and a good man. Her family had moved. They’d left no forwarding address. She traveled by a local train to her husband’s parents, their farm in far-off Indiana. It took three days. The in-laws wouldn’t come out onto their porch to even see her. They hollered through their mail slot—not even
they
knew where their son and grandchildren had got off to. They also waited to receive the new address. They blamed her, and said so with a frankness she admired more than herself. Through the brass slot, three small framed photos of her face and shoulders dropped. Glass became blue powder at her feet.

She caught the fastest rail connections back to Canada. She’d promised to be home by return train. She vowed she would treat her salesman now as brother, child, and lover, he would be her family. The key to their room had been changed. A girl on crutches and a heavy man answered. On her former dressing table, she saw a parrot cage. She found that her young salesman had quit his job, cleared out. He’d stored her bags with the janitor. This man, a East Indian with a bad limp, led her to the basement. When he saw how sad she looked, he admitted that her friend had given him a two-dollar tip. Now, studying her face, the old man offered to give back half.
She thanked him but refused the money, said how very kind he was. Then, in the dark storeroom, he told her he had heard her through the walls—enjoying a certain thing. He tried to touch her neck, her bodice. She screamed at him. Nobody understood. She’d been pawed and underestimated all her life. The salesman had left no word, though she suspected the Far East. With her luggage, she revisited the Falls, deciding to either find some decent plan or jump.—“And so, my dear, when you ask me where I’m going, you see I can’t say—and not from being rude, more from not actually knowing quite where the next hint might come from. I wait for leads, the news of everybody’s whereabouts. Oh, they’re out there, I know. I first hired a Canadian detective, then a man from Baltimore. But I ran out of money before either turned up anything. I accept jobs—I was a governess once. I’ve been a paid lady’s companion. I get clues from time to time. A girl named what I named my girl graduated from Bryn Mawr two Junes back. My salesman turned up on the payroll of a lumber firm in Eugene, Oregon. I took the train there. But nobody would talk. You can lose your place, you know. It seems there’s one groove mapped out for each of us. I slipped free of mine. I made one wrong connection. I cannot find the right track now. I can’t find it.”

Then she described her husband and young children in surprising and complete detail. Next she told me each tic, joke, and plaid-suit color of her missing salesman. But I felt sure her descriptions were thirty-some years past due. She said that if I saw them, any of them, or even possible look-alikes, I ought to contact her at once. She said she would jot down her address for me. The lady found a scrap of envelope in a depot ashtray. Tongue pressed between teeth, she did a very careful scrawl. The dark child shuffled past in slippers, still dreamy, still kicking around that vile black cigar butt. Her mother kept nodding so far forward, baby still sucking her, I feared she’d lean across and smother it. Local boys in nice clothes and in shabby ones kept piling into the men’s room looking glazed and guilty, coming back out in pairs. Must have been fifteen in there by now, doing what? I saw our superintendent of schools, who wrote the Sleepover bulletin, father of four, slip in, glancing left and right to see if he’d been spotted, and at 4 a.m. What loneliness drove people to do this, and right in my own Falls, who’d have guessed? Everyone but me seemed homeless. She handed me the paper, she acted pleased to have yet another person on the lookout for her absent ones. The scrap said: “Contact Mrs. Carlotta Webb, care of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad (will be in club cars mostly).”

I looked at her, thanked her. I creased it, said that if I did … see her folks, I’d surely be in touch. I said I was grateful for the advice of her story. She smiled, seemed tired again, went back to organizing her one battered case. She noticed my concerned look at her grayed clothes. “I
am
a tidy person.” She touched the folded things. “It’s just … I wash these out with the soap in railway lavatories. Their soap’s harsh to start with, then they
dilute it. I have found a clever way of hanging things up to dry on a moving train—but then, you see, you risk the soot. I’ve finally faced it: You can’t keep clean. You can’t keep clean in transit.”

Then she smiled, then shrugged. I walked out.

I eased on home, my neck feeling stiff, like from a long trip. I took off my good shoes, went barefoot. Sidewalks felt dewy, road’s tar felt smooth as suede. Dawn was just happening by accident again. Why does dawn always look like a secret, some shock, sort of a accomplishment? Every sunrise is walled off by the dark, from like company. Maybe each believes it is the very first. Our town looked like a rosy tour of itself, news again.

I passed that elm and, in the breeze, saw a blue blanket moving, drooping off the tree-house platform. I listened hard and thought I could hear the two boys breathing. Asleep as only eleven-year-olds (outdoors with a friend on a weekend night) can sleep. It pleased me. I imagined their shouting down, “How
was
Florida?” I invented answers. I considered smoking my cigarette but needed a light. I’ve never bought any kind of matches but the kitchen ones.

I let myself in and found Castalia dozing at the table, one of Baby’s moving-picture magazines open before her. She looked handsome spread there, her precious coat almost alive as company on the chair opposite, her twin. I felt grateful how earlier, when I’d told her what I planned, she hadn’t tried to talk me out of it, just sighed, nodded the onct. Now I touched her shoulder, she looked up surprised, then she grabbed and kissed my palm, said just,
“Knew
it.” Without a word, I give Cassie twenty dollars of my trainfare (maybe partly as a bribe to keep quiet, not that she wouldn’t). She shoved it back, I poked it in the deep pocket of her mink, then I sent her on home to
her
children.

I started making cinnamon toast for eight. I knew the smell would lure them downstairs early. Because of the sugar, plus the value I placed on their first teeth, I’d usually only do cinnamon toast twice a year. “How’d you sleep?” I asked my first ones to trail in towards the spice-and-butter smell. Kids arrived in groups or singly, rubbing their eyes, smelling of a bitter metal smell, footed pajamas scuffing. Sleep for them is taxing, they do it so hard. I heard Ned’s cane on the stairs and tip-tapping along the hall baseboard and the sound made me feel as wonderful as I’d felt terrible before. At least it was still
him
, you know? Alive and mine. Seated at table, all the children appeared fresh to me, like I’d been away a long long time. I felt myself regain—in one long greedy look—everything I’d sacrificed by leaving them. “Like logs,” come their standard reply.

“How’d
you
sleep, Momma?” Lou asked, taking rag rollers from Baby’s hair.

“Like there was no tomorrow,” says I. She nodded but asked if it was cold in here to me. “Not specially,” I told her when she looked me over. See, I was still in my good suit, even had the hat on. Near the stove, my tight shoes rested. The honeymoon satchel looked full and floppy, collapsed.

I unpinned my hat, touched the back of my hair. Nobody would ever know. In this at least, I was spared feeling ashamed. I studied them eating—each did it in a peculiar way. Baby nibbled cinnamon toast from the soft best inside out. Others came from all four corners inwards. Ned holding his with both hands now, did circles left to right. The twins chomped every which a ways. Lou, helping others, let her own get cool, then bit in perfect side-by-side squares like a mother’s spelling champ
would
eat.

And standing, barefoot, my arms crossed, overdressed for here—I saw that your Lucy here, why she didn’t want to murder nobody anymore. Not even him. For six or eight weeks, I felt better. Not exactly great, mind you, but better. My own true geographic self again.

Was in the ninth week, I found that—finally—I could.

This I’ve told you is how I got ready to run away from home. My first try had been good practice.
Then
I was ready to leave.

BUT
with them. All eight. You didn’t think I’d abandon a blind child and them darling cranky others, did you? The person, she might consider it, but when it comes to the very departure minute, she saw she couldn’t. Cap, back from the good-time Norfolk hog fest, was now off to one in Richmond. Good timing. The kids were excited. I’d sent notes to school, our excuse? “A outing.” True, I wanted to save myself. A person does. But that self had grown so root-bound tangled with these babies, semi-babies, plus my weedy half-growns. How could I live, separate?

They were either at school or in the yard and I was up in the dorms sorting their going-away things into piles. I’d told them: One summer and one fall outfit apiece, one toy, plus a hairbrush per three. Tidy. Baby’d asked if we’d stay overnight in a “vine-colored cottage.” I’d said, “How many times I got to tell you:
vine-covered
cottage.’” Come a knocking now at our front door, scared me good. In Falls nobody knocks. If they know you good enough to visit at all, they come on in, and if they’re nervous about walking into your rooms, they yell “Woooo?” for politeness. Captain’s timing, as usual, proved awful.

A telegram: “Possible stroke of yr. Husbd. Hospitalized Richmond Livestock Convention. Not that oriented.” I tipped the boy a dime and then a quarter. I stood here, one of the twins’ corduroy rompers in my hand. I wondered where I’d planned going. To Winona’s vine-colored Riding Academy maybe? Would she take in me and mine—as her cleaners, yard help? Local travel. Real local.

I hired a high school girl to move in with my brood whilst I took a train north to see how bad it was. My husband hadn’t known me by telephone. Cassie acted insulted at my choosing this girl, not imposing on
her
. But I saw that as a tribute to my friendship with Miss Cassie Marsden. I was done
with assuming stuff. You can’t just assume where a friend’s help’s concerned.

When Ned got hurt, I learned driving. Now Cap was stricken and I hopped a train like some professional gal in the movies. Tough, but kind underneath. Riding north, I felt mixed, so mixed I got lulled neutral. I arrived there weirdly relaxed and determined. I took a taxi, glad for my recent visit to Lolly’s. It all reminded me of that rough trip to see my son in the Wilmington Hospital. Only this was easier. My old man looked rested and I felt I looked good, too. But Captain couldn’t notice that in me. I took his hand. “They hurt my mother,” he said, almost cheerful, information. “Yes, they did.”

I was glad he recalled that much. “Know who I am, sugar?”

He took a while to focus on the question and then me. He nodded, smiling behind this sudden catlike spread of whiskers.

“Who am I?” I pressed, thinking he’d give me some advice, like Mrs. Williams’. I had his mammoth hand and squeezed it. Other robed men scuffed around the ward, watching, jaded. “Who?” I bent near the father of my children. “Who
am
I then?”

He tilted back into the pillow and closed his white lashes and said very tired but very grand, “You’re a little girl. You’re a little girl I’m responsible for but, the curious part is, I can’t remember your name.”

I stood here, considering weeping, mixed, mixed up. Then something in the ward’s decor—framed infantry coat of arms, crossed rifles—made me coach him. “Tell me about Simon’s pocket watch. Private Simon P. Utt.”

First I thought he would be sick. He leaned forward and, like some epileptic released into the joy and necessity of a perfect lavish fit, half yelled, drawing the attendant black man, “They’d get too close. You’d tell them to stay back. They wouldn’t. You saw they had their muskets ready. Officers forced you to or maybe knowing all your friends were watching. Maybe just the scariness of another body rushing over the hill at you. You could see their faces …”

The attendant, who reminded me of Jerome—now I think on it—he come up and touched my shoulder. We both stood watching this man with the white beard nearbout hollering a story no soul here knew quite how to take. Sounded memorized. Sounded acted.

I turned to this young man in starched whites. “I think I’m going to want to see his doctors.”

“You the daughter?”