Read Online Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus - Free Book Online Page B

babies except whilst changing diapers or jamming bottles into their mouths—and you know, from want of notice, some of them children just died? Fact. Happens at this end of the production line too. It’s hardest on your shyest widowers and bachelors.
    Arriving alone, they keep to their rooms. Men have got this gift for prideful glumness, for rehashing long-done-with grudges. Dignity—the wrong kind—undoes many a gent, seems like. They arrive here and find four woman to each male—you think
that’d
give them the will to live! But no—regular happiness seems cheap to them. They don’t trust it yet (and with some fellows creeping beyond ninety). Once and for all, darling, getting old ain’t getting wise. I could give you a wheelchair tour from room to room and prove my point. No names, please.
    First thing men notice is how our Home’s roof leaks so bad. Come April showers, there’s tin and plastic trash cans lined up for catching hallway water. Your chair wheels get soaked. Your hands go black with rubbery grit. Then men discover that the food here can, some Thursdays especially, nearbout gag a maggot. To gents, it starts seeming a plot against them personally.
    Being fellows that had jobs and pension plans they’ve outlived, men hate knowing that they’re on the dole. All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races. It’s especially hard onyour registered Republicans. They think us others in here, poor as them, hold it
against
them, or else that we ain’t fit company ourselves, also being this broke while this “mature.”
    After the new men have been socked in here two weeks, we know if they are going to get the joke or not.—The un-laughers? the what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this types? well, they just die out quicker. It’s simple. But if you see a fellow take a little interest in
My Children, Right or Wrong
, if you catch him asking what happened to each character before he come in on the middle, and if he speaks to you at dinner in Multi-Purpose and makes it to breakfast a few days a week, if you learn what he done for a living and which part of it he was best at and what he misses most, well—maybe he’s going to be with us for a while. He’s in on the prank, see? and knows it ain’t just a stunt at his expense. It’s here for
him
to chuckle over too.
    Trouble is: what a body has got to laugh off—grows bigger and bigger, don’t it, child? Soon you have to be a regular glutton for cruelty jokes. You got to laugh at them wicked Helen Keller ones and
be
li’l Helen reading them by hand off of a waffle iron. Near the end, bad jokes practically come sit on you, hollering down,
“This
strike you as funny? that grab you? this break your funnybone or this?
this?”
    But “Lanes’ End Rest”? I think the name is tacky and that the government should be ashamed and change it.
7
    ONCE Marsden made sure his own mother was alive enough to carry on, hid safe in a boardinghouse with Mr. William Morris’ wallpaper and a servant girl around the clock, he steeled hisself for visiting Ned’s. Couldn’t be a chore that even your smoothest boy looked forward to. There’s all kinds of bravery and—for some boys—social calls require a gumption in the league with Battle Nerve. How do you tell a widow that her single child is dead? Is it better to blurt out one loaded sentence or to first roll a long talked mattress under her—
then
hit her with it, making her fall more safe?
    Of course, Will had heard how she received the letter. He didn’t yet know which of his division officers’d wrote the thing. Local talkers described in great detail how—on hearing—Winona flopped into front-yard weeds. And yet, Will felt the death had not yet been announced. Wouldn’t seem true for the Widow Smythe till Marsden hisself strode over, knocked, told. He put the visit off for a while.
    One