Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (90 page)

I stood by her black Chickering grand. She wore a Sunday dress on weekdays now, trying to fluff up the self-esteem I’d helped flatten. I waited till she finished her fifth and final concert piece. Done, she turned to me with no expression whatever. I said, “Look, there ain’t no reason I should be bleeding from between my legs, is there?”

Sitting, she drew herself up, fingertips touched her beautiful cameo. “No,” she said. “No fair reason in this world.” Then her features broadened from the inside out. “Yes,” and she fell—face in one arm’s crook—onto keyboard with this slash of spine-crack sound. She laid there weeping, her back bucking like a child’s. I stroked Momma’s neck, the fine and upswept hair. “It’s nothing.” I left out Ain’t this time for her sake. “It’s nothing. I just asked.”

NIGHTS
, I heard my people strolling the hallway, no lightning to scare them awake. Discussing the future: mine. Two weeks after bleeding in the bath, I took first serious notice of a big ex-soldier. He’d been keeping eyes on me. (Otherwise how would I have seen so much of his eyes in his eyes?) The uniform, jaw, body all seemed made of solid shoulder, one upright wall—painted mostly gray. For years I thought “soldier” and “shoulder” came from one word. Poppa’s friend looked back with a readiness unknown since Shirl. Alone as much as I was, I had too much time to think about his gazing at me so. Captain seemed to offer what a best friend my own age was supposed to.—He claimed I brought out the boy in him.

He lingered around the house some evenings, sat beside me in the old porch swing. Poppa joked, flattering the man. Pop kept giving me slow grins and cagey winks I fought not to see. I figured Momma would make quite the fuss over my first caller, and such a wealthy one. I expected her to flirt, to overdress. Instead she acted like Distance come indoors. All day Poppa mentioned how Captain was nice-looking, had a good share of fame hereabout, the big house on Summit long paid for, rental properties aplenty.
How onct when General Forrest, old by then, came through here by train, the General waited at the station, asked some black child to run fetch the Captain. From the waiting room’s far side, a crowd watched these two catch up on old times until the 5:42 whipped a grizzled hero off again. Pop pressed his case: “Who else you waiting for, woman, the Lord Jesus? He’s a confirmed bachelor, wouldn’t know what to
do
. He’d probably throw rocks at it. You expecting Jesus Harvard Vanderbilt Astor or what?”

Polite as Momma acted toward the Captain, she could make her handshake leave a blue icicle bracelet dangling on any person. Pop scolded her afterwards, said that, around Captain, she carried on like Queen Victoria unamused mid-migraine.

Now every night, my folks paced, talking in low solemn tones about whose house I’d be living in for life. Nobody asked me. Momma admitted she was the one who might seem to favor such “an alliance.” True, other local mothers had perked up, even Mrs. Saiterwaite, on hearing talk of Captain’s interest in unlikely me. I was up to seventy-some pounds. Momma knew this could put us back on the social map. She might just use my debut invitation list for the wedding roll call. Without a coming-out, my value marriage-wise had been cut way back. All this she knew. “But,” she said. “For one thing, the age difference.”

“Happens all the time,” Pop announced. “Juliet won’t but fourteen.”

“Juliet who?”

Silent, Poppa was enjoying the moment, “Mrs. Juliet Romeo, ever heard of her?”

“But, dearest, her young man was that age as well.” Momma always considered Literature the biggest name a person can drop. I sat up in the dark bedroom, listening. But not even Shakespeare had swayed my mother.

“I see Captain’s hand with those yellow nails, huge. They look like a war veteran’s hands would. God knows where they’ve
been
. And I study our child sitting there, knowing not a thing, Samuel. I’m sorry but it makes me the slightest bit nauseous. It just does. I cannot picture any of it together in the same frame.—You think marriage is easy for a woman, just because ours has been so fortunate. But, dear one, marriage has … more excruciating high F’s than the Queen of the Night’s second aria. Everybody cannot
do
it. She’s so young, she’s not even seen Europe yet, or for that matter Washington, D.C. I want Lucille spared, is all. I promise you, I’d rather have her remain unmarried like my stick-in-the-mud sisters. I would. You mustn’t rush me on this. She’s our only one—she’s been my hope all these years. Of course I’ve known she lacks finish, but still …”

When Pop started in about Captain’s war record again, Momma—pacing—got louder, claimed she didn’t care if he’d won the thing single-handed. It didn’t matter if he owned controlling interest in the world. “Samuel, he’s older than
we
are.”

“Look, woman, he
wants
her. I mean, not to be overblunt, but have you got yourself a good long gander at our sweet Runt Funny lately?”

“Do not call my baby that. You know I loathe your doglike nicknames for her.”

“But have you? I mean really
looked?”

She rushed him. I heard her, he’d be holding Momma’s wrists to stop her pounding his shoulders. In bed, I leaned back, hands laced behind my head. She started crying in a low, lost, sour way.

In dark, I grimaced, smiled, I panted out of fear. For years, I’d heard the woman define who-all I might, by accident, turn into: a scholar, society butterfly, overnight beauty? But now—in her tone, the ugly gasps out there—I felt her really fighting suddenly for me myself. Me, plain—like I was and had been all along. But, odd, instead of feeling honored, I turned mean. I did. Just kept hardening my heart to the woman who might’ve saved me. After all, I wondered, where had Mrs. Queen of Night been when I needed her? She’d forever hinted I should keep a eye out for some male person, one holding property and a known name. She had criticized my old girlfriend till I dreaded bringing Shirl downstairs into Momma’s royal presence. And now, for once, I decided I wanted to do exactly what Momma’d told me to, back then. Seemed my best way of repaying the woman for all them daily stings, the sighs, small freezing glances doled my way.—Honey, I believed that, by wedding the Captain, I’d be spiting
her
.

THAT’S
how young I was. I couldn’t know that Pop—a dirt farmer who’d married money hisself—would want the same for his child. (He forgot we now had some dollars of our own.) He’d been so pleased with his own odd step-up, he couldn’t imagine anything finer for his girl. Too, I hadn’t taken this into account: Poppa was a man and so was this admired fellow he planned handing me to. That, you find out later, counts. My being Pop’s blood-own single child, Momma’s being his life and chow line forever—these were listed in one column. In the other rode Captain’s being he-horse male. It won. No amount of years in the porch swing with us females had thrown the ledger balance our own way.

Looking back, I pieced all this together. As Mrs. Married, I’d have lots of household hours to mull on how it’d happened. But at the time, it was me alone in the dark. Me, minus a best friend to test things out on. Me, at fourteen, with a gland where a brain should be, one headful of revenge, no notion where babies even come from—me, stretched out there in that fine garlanded bed, hands behind my skull, feeling in pretty complete control for once. Ha! I could weep, remembering.—I want to break into my own story, child. I’d scream, “Fire!” I’d rush my own skinny self free of that big white house, get me out in time. Of course, you can’t ever save yourself in time, can you? That’s one thing
about
time—it’s like the spring water that has to sit a while before it comes quite clear enough to drink, and by then it’s too room-temperature to quench your thirst.

•   •   •

POPPA
would not take Momma’s No answer. He grew sly (I saw how many lessons he’d picked up from her all along—or her/him?—by now it was hard to chicken/egg them). Not since he got excited about the P.O. job was Pop missing off the porch for two days running: He’d bought a box of sticky caramels after finding out these were a certain seamstress’s favorite. He visited the black lady who still held layaway cash on my deb gown. Sweet-talking, passing around candy to all her children and her whole Baby Africa block, Pop egged her into carrying deb-dress money over towards the wedding one. He whipped out a wad of bills, then went to her best bolted silks and flipped through, picking a perfect royal blue for Momma’s gown. Bridesmaids? There would be none—we wanted it to be simple but elegant, don’t you know. Besides, I had no girlfriends. He knew the Captain had a right to wear his uniform to church. Poppa, born too late to fight, he envied that. So my daddy paid for a tuxedo to be built on him, from scratch. (Honey, the man was serious.)

Inviting the seamstress to our house for a unannounced measuring session, Poppa laid in some champagne. He settled beside Momma, showed her a invitation he’d scribbled out in smudgy pencil. “Wrong, wrong,” she had to laugh. “This is on a level with the things young Shirley used to copy, scraps I’d find under bolsters: ‘The Maharajah of Raleigh and Mrs. Incorrigible Maharajah-ette request your presence at a Fountain Gala.’ Pathetic. The only thing you got correct is our names’ spelling. Otherwise, darling, I’m afraid this is so far off it’s nearly ‘Original.’” And when she took the pencil he held there at the ready, Pop gave me this chastened little wink. I got—at that very second—my first strange uh-oh kind of roaring in my ears.

Then I knew I was about to make a major step. Pop, playing dumb, had drawn Momma into so many fidgety details. She had just said Yes without half noticing. Which meant, darling, that I had just said Yeah.

As for my would-be bridegroom, I felt he knew me pretty good. At fourteen, who-all was there to know yet? He offered me my due, right square in either eye. Since Shirl ditched me, nobody’d really met my head-on stare. Captain did.

One night, walking with him, I chose to point out my (our) old tree house. He said he loved trees, certain trees where important things had happened, they could be like friends, could they not? He gave me a rose geranium for my bedroom’s bay window, showed me how to break the leaf and let out scent like a rose’s. Only thing troubled me: To catch you a whiff, you had to go and ruin a whole leaf. He asked did I like pets. Wanted to know my favorite color. Wondered did I love marching-band music as much as he did. I went, “Probably.” Answering as best I could, while seen walking around town with him, I felt right interesting, almost adult. The snooty Saiterwaite girls, out under a new fad for parasols, spotted the two of us, arm in arm. I felt them covet me the Captain. Maybe I was wrong.

Pop, less than three months later, off the books, really set up the engagement.
Honey, what’d I know? I believed wedlock’s strongest half was the “wed” and not the “lock.” I thought it would feel like being in a nice clean tub (owing to modesty—one filled maybe chest-deep this time with suds and this go-round in the company of a sweet hard-scrubbing boy my age). I wanted to try everything. Besides, as Poppa pointed out, before Captain came along and proposed, nobody had ever asked me.

The ring itself—offered that autumn, by moonlight in the back-yard garden—was one and a half full carats, it had belonged to the addled Mrs. Marsden, who’d saved it from Sherman’s fires. A beauty, pear-shaped, just alive with lights. For a gal my age, this helped. Alone with it, I talked to my new rock. “Cocked his shiny eye and said, ‘Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepyhead?’” I spoke to it the way other girls of my years were yet chatting up each other or their dolls.

SHIRLEY
was, our local paper claimed, the recent and unmistakable central belle at a tony Hunt Club Ball in faraway Raleigh. Me, married off, in a house alone a lot, minus the fired Castalia, pregnant with my first (it happened about this quick, too, child), I had long afternoons to think back on my long spell with Miss Shirley Popular. I heard, through local tongue-waggers, how the girls what’d taken up our stablekeeper’s daughter sure did rue the day. Quick study, that quiet Shirl. Why, just after she quit me cold turkey, Shirl switched to the Episcopal Church, leaving me and her own folks stranded as abandoned Baptists. She’d taken to wearing white and left all us cheap earnest pastels behind. The Baptist preacher’s wife and daughter, ladies who’d first “discovered” Shirley, let it be known around town that they felt, yeah, right … well,
used
. They’d been Miss Shirley’s total-emersion stepping-stones towards high-society sprinklers. Episcopalians thought that liquor was just a digestive aid. They thought good genes were the equal of good works. They thought the Godhead had stationery with a list of charter members engraved on it. They believed God was a club. Shirley, she agreed. Shirl joined.

Soon she was attracting—at musicales and charity benefits (first in Falls then on up to Rocky Mount then Durham and finally to Raleigh itself)—attentions of the very boys her fancy early friends expected to interest. Emily Saiterwaite was, you heard, just livid over it. Ha ha ha.

Shirl still remembered how to keep her mouth shut: a asset. The Summit gang had fixed Shirl up a mite too good. They’d even hinted early on as how she should use her middle name—the neutral Ann—to help offset a certain low-class brassy aftertaste that Shirley left in folks’ mouths.

I sat breast-feeding my Louisa—eager eater, that one. I had Shirl’s picture (in the daily paper) propped on my right knee. I realized afterwhile that my knee was rocking, like you’d keep a colicky baby amused. It was
just a picture. The leg jiggled it happy anyways. I sat remembering a certain clean dairy smell she carried with her. I did wonder. Maybe if I hadn’t said old Ain’t so much? Maybe if she’d stayed plain Shirl and my good friend, maybe then I wouldn’t have married quite so young? Maybe. Of course I knew better. Still, it pleased me to think that a finer-quality speech might’ve let me rise. (I’d still be fifteen but someway unpregnant, a non-mother—not that I regretted my dear hungry baby Lou here.) I would rise then, to a safer lighter life. Who knew? Maybe because I spoke rude Ain’t so much, I had to say “I do” so early.