Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (98 page)

But Winona, living there? The Widow Smythe who couldn’t even stomach the hypocrisies of First Baptist Church, who’d reclaimed her Tiffany glass off its altar? Winona who brooked no disagreement and who called sympathetic casserole bringers “leeches and their young,” Winona who’d onct told Cap she felt qualified to be a real ambassador someplace? Her at a whorehouse? Won’t that beneath a person’s dignity? Seemed unlikely to go from a homebody to a house mother. And yet, the more I thought about it (now eating my ice compress), the surer I felt: Nobody could’ve invented this. There are facts like that—standouts, ones so far into the next world you understand they got to be extremely genuine and local. “You didn’t make this up?” I asked Castalia, who, rightly, glared and pretended to try and stand, leave here.

“Sorry. I know better. I just say that because
Momma
would. Nobody’s perfect,” and smiled, which hurt.

I tucked info about Weird Winona to the back of my head. I refused to mention it to Captain. He
must
know. There was a lot we didn’t tell each other now. Unlike me, he seemed to have a bit more to withhold than which child got bad comportment marks at school. I felt glad for Winona, out there busying being the Head of Something—even if just of that.

MY
own momma, hearing man-handling rumors maybe, invited me to tea and, though the lip was yet puffy, I accepted. She stood in the foyer, said, “Ran into a door again, did we? How
are
the children? I hear that our
Louisa’s papier-mâché volcano was the absolute pinnacle of the Science Fair.” And Momma dared me to tell all concerning my marked face. Her eyes, a sufferer’s, warned: If you can’t say something nice …

So I said very little. I predicted Lou would be the next Madame Curie—only, Lou’d know to wear gloves whilst handling
her
radium. We’d had this talk before. I deeply wanted to drop the Winona whorehouse gossip on Momma but it was too good to share with somebody who couldn’t even look her own puffy daughter in the face.

When I left, she slipped me a five-dollar bill (like a fifty now).
“Do
something with your … hair, or whatever. Broaden your vistas, Lucille.”

“Yes,
ma’am,”
I said real sarcastic, and regretted it at onct. She meant: I hope the lip’s unswollen soon. Why can’t people
say
stuff? I chose to take some cash to “Lolly’s Palais de Beauté Féminine de Falls (avec manicurist on duty Vendredi and Lundi).” I went the whole hog, announced to Loll I’d want me both a wash and rinse. I did this twice a year, need it or no. My visits to the Palais dearly counted.

I first put on my white pearl-button gloves. I used them only for weddings, funerals, and Lolly’s. Castalia gathered in my preschool brood at her place and let them slip Pet Condensed Milk to her latest baby minks. “Pet for pets!” Baby lisped, and Cas and me looked at each other. “She act like a certain Lady I done worked for.” “I’m afraid so,” said I.

I was alone today—with nothing hanging on to me at either side. Felt like I might float away into the elm trees that’d grown so much since my girlhood. Even back then they’d seemed high enough a place, safe from groundlings and the trouble we then summed up in one word:
BOYS!

Lolly always squeezed in a spare appointment for me and did a real nice job. Loll give me more attention than any non-regular deserved. She’d been ahead of me in school (she was older, but held back—though she was really quick as she could be). I’d acted nice to her back then. She had a memory, Lolly did. I come in smiling. She always made a fuss. You can know that somebody’s trying hard to cheer you and you can
still
be cheered, if you are smart. Permanents were new then. I couldn’t really afford one, which is just as well since Modern Science has since proved they absolutely fry the person. A rinse’d do.

Only one building in all of white-owned Falls was stucco painted a lether-rip wedding-cake pink. “Palais avec manicurist,” the sign said. Momma made great fun of it, but I maintain, Is Lolly’s work professional or not? That’s what matters. Classiness—blue-chip classiness—is something I been turning my back on since age four.

The Palais, entire, was only about sixteen square foot, but oh, honey, so much can happen in so tiny a place. Felt like your getting in a sloshy lifeboat with six to nine other women and when you again set your foot on dry land you were stronger for the ride, real ready to stride home, but sensing you had really
been
somewhere.

Lolly was her own best walking ad. She had a long horsy face, but that
never discouraged her copying any hairdo seen anyplace in any magazine, on any human movie screen. If, later, Ginger Rogers in Wednesday night’s picture show at the Cameo wore her gold hair swept in one frothy teapot storm all to one side, count on finding a long-faced Lolly grocery-shopping in that very “do” tomorrow. If you called attention to it, Loll forever acted like she didn’t have the foggiest idea what you meant. “Oh, this? Just a stab at it. Ginger’s’s more extreme but she’s got the features to go
with
, me … well … I saw this photo taken of her talking at a garden party, talking with … David. I
like
Ginger, but she’s not up to the Prince of Wales. For all her moxie, it’s something a little coarse about our Ginger.”

Seeing the “do” on Lolly, any local lady could then decide whether it might someway suit
her
. You heard women say, “You
know
if it turned out even so-so on Lolly, ‘s going to be fabulous on you. I believe she even guesses that. If only she had a man … I mean she has
men
, plenty, from what she says, but Loll needs one good
steady
. Who deserves it more?” Lolly agreed, and said so often. Thing about Lollie (she spelled it either “y” or “ie,” depending on her mood and last night’s movie), her love life had been what you’d call checkered, plus her oft-described digestion was a mess. She was Falls’ one white double-divorcée. Lolly’s only son, a juvenile offender, had been in every federal prison on the map, but through each tribulation, her hair and nails remained a perfect wonder of the world. It almost seemed enough.

She settled me at the sink for a hot wash. I dreaded her noticing my almost-down-to-normal lip, her feeling the two goose eggs on my scalp.

My child Baby thought the sun rose and set in Lolly’s hair. Never the same twice, always a different shade of brown. Loll was savage in condemning peroxide and those who used it on anything but blisters. “I don’t
dye
people,” she said, proud. “Lolly transforms, Lolly improves, but this is not just some some crude henna hut. At Le Palais, I want to bring out the real woman underneath, not lay on a paint job that hides Inner Glow. Real beauty comes from Inner Glow, not bottles. All my customers have that certain something, Inner Glow. See anybody here that doesn’t?” We looked around at each other—all deformed in pin curls, slopped with lotions, egg whites tightening pouchy eyes—we figured we were all in the extreme outer progress headed smack
toward
Inner Glow. We gave each other the benefit of the doubt. Benefit of the doubt: darling, that’s what small town beauty parlors are there for.

During the shampoo part, while she hummed her favorite tune, I leaned my head into her specially notched sink. Loll stood over me, wetting the scalp. I loved being here because I forgot everything. The kids were in good hands. I could’ve been anybody. Her pet song was “I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince of Wales.” (And Lolly had, with two such gents, though she wasn’t mentioning no names.) Her first love was Edward but when he got kinged, she fixed on his nephew. Her shop walls were soon lined with professionally framed photos of her
David—him wearing pure-white polo togs but never really playing. “Too refined to need to even
try
, at least publicly,” Lolly said. “His chin, I’m the first to admit, is a touch weak. But me, it works on me. It proves his Inner Glow even more. The boy’s nation feels his IG. I mean, don’t you want to just take him home with you late some Saturday night, and tuck him under a blue blanket and just
see?”

Down the pike, David—as history tells us—gave up his kingdom for the woman he loved, though God knows why he picked that one. I believe: she
made
him. Lolly somewhat resembled Mrs. Simpson—knobby, long-nosed, doubly-divorced-looking. Loll was not to be consoled over David’s poor choice. On the couple’s wedding date, Loll took down every picture of either Prince of Wales, carried them to the courtyard behind her Palais. Squirting them with some lethal hair product, Loll threw a match, watched glass pop, watched David’s greyhound beauty curl and brown.

“A entire country’s Inner Glow is … doused, and for what? some tramp golddigger with a butt like a boy’s,” said Lolly. We’d never connected the name Palais with Loll’s interest in her Crown Prince. But not a week later she had the sign changed. Reduced to just “Falls’ Beauty and Inner Glow Headquarters.” You could tell some dream had died.

So on my visit that day, before England changed hands, when Le Palais still had its name, Loll was humming the Princely song, squinting in her Lucky’s back-smoke, and passing along less international trashy news. Was then that strong fingers touched my scalp’s worst knot and I, though I’d vowed not to, flinched. Couldn’t help it. This came during the brief brief period when Cap was playing out his Hit Parade of Battles on my youngish noggin. Loll’s smart fingers with their red talons right off found the biggest bump. Fingers skirted it like magic, not missing a beat in her tale of misplaced North Carolina highway funds and a certain lieutenant governor’s love-nest casino in the nearby countryside.

There might have been ten other women in the sixteen square feet of the Palais, tucked under industrial-size blowers and soaking in some necessary cream or shellac dedicated to the torturing to the surface of Inner Glow. Some such glow rested stubbornly farther
in
than others, and I placed mine among the deep-seated problem glows. But even with this high-octane gossip, and even considering close quarters, not one soul ever knew that Loll was working around a Asia Minor relief map conked on my head. Fingertips treated my each welt like secret royalty.

Chattering, she quick gets me in pin curls to hide the goose eggs. Before she whips my bib off I feel Loll do some serious backcombing of my thinning hair. And all the while, she’s scurrying from other head to other head. Wouldn’t hire no assistant. One queen per Palais, but a cross one: “Estelle, I swear to God, look at you. Your moisturizer has clogged, now didn’t I tell you to call me when it clabbered up on you, honey? Well, does that look clogged or clogged? Now wake up and put down that back issue of
Liberty
. Your glow’ll just
stay
inner without some cooperation here. I want you
attractive at the Daughters of the Confederacy Antebellum Belle Bash, but do
you
, Estelle? All right then!”

And those many years, Lolly told nobody. She never blamed me for the welts and bruises. (Blamed
him
, I mean, blamed him.)

TIMES
, while ironing, I’d find myself haunted. The people I stood recalling weren’t any souls I’d ever seen alive. I only knew them through a grown civic leader who’d been a soldier, aged thirteen, and
he
only knew these three from having killed them.

I stood dousing a terry-cloth middy belonging to Louisa and I was picturing a man shot while smoking a pipe. (I had no other info on him!) Trying to imagine his features, I’d be hoping to apologize. Sometimes my husband’s curtness hurt locals’ feelings, and I would then go over at a gathering and pay folks a little extra attention. I would be making up for what he’d done, a little social slight he had but half intended, child. And, like that, while ironing or shopping—these three victims would sweep into my head, good shirts hanging drying on one line. I soon wondered who they
were
to me, and how sick I was to feel accountable, say, to the Yankee boy who trusted a Reb with his heirloom watch? I told myself that if I ever had to kill somebody, well, I wouldn’t, couldn’t. I’d die first. And even if I did—how would I then walk around eating snacks and taking catnaps? Life would not allow a moral murderer her everyday joys and pleasures. The ghost of who you plugged would be there like state and federal sales tax on niceties great and minor. And so I paid secret tariffs—forty-odd years’ worth—to the puzzled spirits of three strangers my boy-hubby’d slaughtered. It seemed a duty—as I ironed—but, too, I got half used to their being there, like the sound of water boiling just across my kitchen. I became their protector, their volunteer Madonna on a real real smalltime level. This might sound odd, child, but, over the years, so upset was I by the idea of murder, of his doing them in (even if he
had
to), I signed on as their loyal representative. They swarmed in—faint as steam but at least that real. They each became my silent partner, okay company.

I slowly knew: I had willingly become the mother of the men my husband killed.

WELL
, at Raleigh, Cap found he could now act ceremonial and bossy as possible, he would finally get away with it forever. See, by this time, many soldiers who’d once doubted his war record, they had aged past life’s more
lucid parts. Half had one mental foot already in the vegetable patch. Their tempers improved.

They’d been full grown during our terrible Rebellion. Him? he was just a shaky sliver of a child. But none of them elders now recalled Cap’s tender age back then. At the last reunion six years back, doubters had made comments. Now men believed Cap looked so strong because of what a rough, exceptional soldier he’d once made. Older fellows still recalled the Marsden family name, still considered Captain’s mother the Tidewater’s ongoing finest-looking woman. They forgot how she’d got burned, and how—after years of living under veils and clutching teacups through flamish nightmares, after living back of drapes to hide scars—the poor thing died, Spode in hand, her last words, whispered toward what she imagined were still more gentlemen callers, “Tell … them … I’m … out.”