To Be Loved When Old

I

IT may be argued that in the circle of acquaintance I know best I have been uncommonly fortunate in my old ladies. I have, and in my old gentlemen as well. They have happened to be durable individualities with a stratagem for life and a gift for expressive language.

Once I overheard a married pair of them, in vacation at Cape Cod, having a stormy session on their lawn. The husband, aged eighty-six, was striding across the greensward with a loaded wheelbarrow in the noonday sun, and his tiny wife, aged eighty, was commanding him to desist. Instead of desisting, he was resisting. She had the wider vocabulary; he had the wheelbarrow.

At length, having fired off her most elaborate ammunition at him, she fell back on simple birdshot. ‘You come in this minute!’ she told him, spacing her syllables distinctly. ‘I want you to come right in out of the hot sun.’

‘Don’t try to hurry me, Anne,’ he admonished her, quickening his march to a run. ‘You only make me be slower.’

‘I’m not trying to hurry you!’ she called after him in vexation. ‘I’m trying to stop you! You’ll get a stroke.’

‘No, I won’t,’ he assured her, following his wheelbarrow down the slope at a gallop until he reached what he considered a safe distance. There he paused, turned around, made a megaphone of his hands, and raised his voice to platform proportions. ‘Oh, Anne! ‘ he trumpeted for the neighborhood to hear. ‘Oh, Anne! You treat me as if I were in my hundreds! ‘

Whereupon he vanished into the lower garden to work in peace.

To be loved when old is not a necessity, but it is a compliment. Normally, in our eighties, our nineties, and our hundreds, the most important loves of our life are in the past, unless by rare good luck a few of them are still traveling alongside, growing elderly too. In any case, great numbers of our choicest friends are no longer close at hand. An expert with little children once said she could always recognize the sound of a little child’s crying when the older boys had run away and left him. She said there is a peculiarly broken-hearted wail that a child makes when the others have disappeared down the road too fast for him to follow. Similarly, at the other end of life, we feel a peculiar sort of grieving when our friends have gone too far ahead, leaving us on the road.

‘Don’t you dare to die!’ wrote one lively old lady to another. ‘At this late date I can’t spare you, not possibly. Don’t you die till I do!’

Lifelong friendships like that are irreplaceable, and from this point of view extreme old age is always a calamity; but with younger people listening all about us we do not need to rub that in.

What is it that makes an elderly person adorable to newcomers on this planet, years after the older settlers he knew in youth have stepped along? I confess to an overwhelming curiosity about the traits that have carried my elderly through to the last brink with love of younger persons all around them. By long observation I think I have detected four categories of fine traits — not wild, queer traits, exotic or blue-moonish, but cultivated flowers of character.

The first of these is the gift for the contemporary moment.

Go to see my friend who remembers Lincoln, for instance. Does she ask you why you do not come to see her oftener? Or whether you were bored by such an old lady last time you came and therefore stayed away? Or does she even say she has missed you and been lonesome? For all she says on these embarrassing topics, you might have been spending your life like a cricket on her hearth. She starts right in where she is, and where you are; and the warm, cozy present moment is yours with her — just you two jubilantly together, your hostess and you alone. Such luck that nobody else happened to be there at the time of your call! If you tell her some funny gossip she laughs till she gasps with merriment, and she has no qualms about regaling you with a choice morsel in return. Unseemly gossip is not her dish, but everyone tells her the most lovable funny doings of a wide and agitated area. If you want the most entertaining news of five counties, with no unfair aspersions on anyone’s fair name, treat yourself to an afternoon call.

Is this lady, you ask yourself, concerned with small fry such as we are, when she remembers Lincoln? We all know the answer to that one. She’s concerned, and no mistake. After all, it was somebody else who told you that she remembered Lincoln.

She has sized you up as a contemporary — not seeing you as you were when you were a child in the neighborhood, and not seeing you as you might be if you could be made over; but seeing you as you are in the present, where she dwells.

II

The gift for the contemporary moment can be enhanced by a second quality: the gift of discrimination. This means a shrewd eye for human values.

Suppose you have delivered a speech on a great occasion, and an elderly gentleman, who knew everybody’s grandfather, was present. He puts out his hand to you afterwards in congratulation, and he docs not tell you (though your great-uncle’s voice haunted him all through your talk) that you are exactly like your great-uncle. He knows, discriminatingly, that you are no such thing, let your voice ring in the rafters with uncle’s very tone quality though it may. He has looked you over sharply for variations and permutations, and consequently he does not make you feel that to him you are only Colonel Broncho’s nephew. To him you are your own complicated self, more interesting for your relationships, but still yourself alone. And he liked your speech.

It is only in his heart of hearts that you spoke in the remembered accents of that grand old ghost. Some other time perhaps, when you happen to ask him about your uncle the Colonel, he will give you a newspaper clipping descriptive of his exploits, and he may remark casually, ‘I think you’d like old Broncho if you knew him now. Sometimes your voice makes me think of him. He could fill a big hall without an amplifier just as you can.’

And you, who in childhood were only too well aware that the Colonel considered you a doubtful blessing underfoot, get a new feeling of kinship with your uncle. But you are never for a moment made to feel that you are only a dim echo of old days, when your uncle, who had been a Rough Rider before he was an officer, was young.

Neither are you made to feel that you are the scion of a dwindling generation. Your great-uncle’s friend has seen that you have gone your uncle one better in the chief thing you have in common — your speech — and he does not try to blink that fact. His discriminating ear and eye give him too much pleasure for him to disregard the news they bring him — news of a fine fresh humanity coming on.

III

And speaking of generations leads me straight to my next category of good traits, the simplest and most easily cultivated of them all. The rule for it is this: Never dwell on any split between the so-called ’generations.'

The actual line of cleavage in humanity is not a matter between the generations at all. Generations are too unevenly ‘staggered’ in time for one thing, and each within itself is thoroughly mixed. Your naturally congenial friends are found all over the lot among them, and if you don’t keep pointing out that you are elderly you save a great deal of wear and tear on all concerned.

Take the next-to-the-oldest grandmother in my favorite collection, for instance. I might as well reveal at the outset that this grandmother was my own. She lived to be eighty-nine without cutting us off from her confidence. In return, when any of us happened to be in need of an audience, we went up to her house to unfold.

It happened one time that a visitor had come to dine with our parents. She had requested that we children should be on view, but we had been warned by our mother not to try to talk. My small brother and sister did not like our guest very well, and devoted themselves exclusively to their meal. I did not like our visitor either, for she always called me ‘Fanny,’an endearment I never did appreciate; and moreover she pronounced it ’Fanneh,’just as she always pronounced ’funny’ as if it were spelled ’funneh.’ But I was slightly the senior child in our family, and I felt responsible. If my brother and sister were looking so inattentive, I thought the least I could do was to register a little extra cordiality on behalf of our little flock.

Every time our visitor glanced at me as she talked, I smiled at her encouragingly; and as time went on my smile grew more strained, more and more wide and dutiful, until by the time the dessert was being brought on my smile was so wide and stiffened that it made my ears ache. Our guest kept looking at me, and I kept smiling at her, until all at once she broke off her chat with my father and addressed me solely.

’Fanneh, my dear!' she began, in the instructive tones of one who has always used her critical faculty as an instrument of social improvement. ‘Fanneh! Your mouth is rather pretteh when it is in repose, but it won’t bear the least bit of stretching.’

I took a three-inch tuck in my smile so promptly that my brother and sister nearly slid under the table. Not one of us dared to look at another of us during that dessert. Like so many tightly corked little bottles of ginger pop, we sat demurely containing our fizz. But as soon after supper as we could suitably be excused we knew what we must do. We must find a safe place where we could laugh, well out of earshot, so that our guest could not overhear us howling. Up the street to our grandmother’s house we trotted for this purpose, deciding as we ran which of us should edify our grandmother with the tale. We all agreed that the story was really mine, and that I should be allowed to tell it first. But my brother spoke for the privilege of showing our grandmother how I had looked — how far I had unfurled my smile, and with what a sudden jerk I had reefed it in. My sister said she would be our critical guest; we had all conned her speech until we knew it permanently by heart.

At our performance, our grandmother was in stitches. She had to take off her glasses and dry them when we finished, for she too had known some of the critical sayings of this quotable guest.

Did our grandmother make us feel that we were disrespectfully impersonating a member of ‘the older generation’ to which she herself belonged? She never dreamed of such a thing. Our grandmother and my brother and sister and I were all of one congenial batch of humanity; our critical guest was an esteemed and worthy citizen from another batch. Never mind ages. We were our grandmother’s friends, secure in our trust that she would see with us eye to eye. If there had been no truth in our visitor’s remark, there would have been nothing to laugh at. My brother smiling like ‘Fanneh’ and taking it all back so ‘suddenleh’ was quite as hilarious both to me and to my grandmother as was my sister gravely talking down her nose in earnest imitation of our guest.

IV

It is also true that if you want to be vividly remembered down many generations, a quick way to achieve it is to make a sufficiently lilting remark of a personal nature to somebody a great deal younger. Nothing else so sticks in the memory of a child. My own father, for instance, never forgot a remark that was made in his presence when he, aged seven, had been annoying the neighborhood and his mother was giving him a well-deserved beating with her slipper. In the midst of this scene an ancient great-aunt, who had sailed the seas out of New London with her husband in her day, came rolling through the house with nautical mien. She saw her niece with slipper in full action, and gleefully shouted to her in quarter-deck accents, ‘Pay on, Adeline! Pay on!’

This happened of a summer’s morning in the early eighteen-fifties, but our entire family connection still uses that slogan whenever in our opinion somebody in our tribe is being given a timely dressing-down. ‘Pay on, Adeline,’ we chorus like sailors singing a chantey. ‘Pay on, Adeline, pay on!’

Without the very old to tell us stories, we should lose a great deal from the echoes of an elder day. I once knew a grandmother, not mine this time but a lady from Philadelphia, who told me what her grandmother told her about an experience as a tiny girl in the Revolutionary War. It happened in a lovely house on one of Philadelphia’s loveliest streets, and it happened at midnight. The little girl (grandmother to the grandmother I knew) was fast asleep when she was awakened by an unusual tone in the voice of the old night watchman who always went along the street with his bell to announce each hour. Ordinarily it was his habit to sing out, in a perfectly expressionless tone, first the time, then the weather, and third any news of the doubtful state of our armies that might have been brought in.

The watchman’s voice was always rhythmic, like a tune, and if you were accustomed to it you did not allow it to interrupt your slumbers except as a sort of drowsy cradle song. But this time he was chanting with a more stirring note in his voice, though still in the usual order of time, weather, and news. This was what he was saying, ringing his bell the while: —

‘Twelve o’clock! It’s a fine frosty night! Corn-wal-lis sur-rend-ered at Yorktown!’ Over and over down the street.

Then came the thrilling sound of grown men running. The little girl jumped up and peeped out of her window. Candles were being lighted in all the beautiful houses. Bells were ringing. The fathers of her friends were racing to the Square. The town was celebrating with all its heart, for a horseman had just come in with the great news, and nobody dreamed of trying to go to sleep again for the rest of that night.

After reading certain fiction about the American Revolution of late, one might carry away the impression that it was sponsored and approved of chiefly by a runaway rabble. I like to recall my friend’s grandmother’s eyewitness narrative as a mild antidote. Oral tradition, to be sure; but the fact remains that the street where my friend’s grandmother lived in Philadelphia was not inhabited by anybody’s ‘rabble.’

V

‘From generation to generation’ is a stately and noble phrase, and down those flights of stairs go bands of angels and devils forevermore. Our great ambition, as we find ourselves nearing the top, can be to send rolling dowm as few devilish remarks as possible on the heads of those who follow us. This does not mean that we must make our talk too tame. I love to think of a statement that an agile octogenarian made one day to a persistent young agent who was trying to sell him something on the installment plan. ‘No, my boy,’ said the benignant sage, who calls himself ‘The Patriarch.’ ‘I am not going to buy it, not even to please you. Economy is my motto for this century.’

And I like to think also of the time when my husband’s mother was having her eightieth birthday, which the family celebrated at our traditional ‘Lobster Festival’ on Cape Cod. After a great many lobsters had been engulfed, there was a call for speeches, and my husband, the eldest son of the family, was put up as opening speaker. He bowed to his mother and began in the style of a toast — ‘To a Lady of Eighty Springs’ — when his sister jumped up beside him and amended his statement. ‘You mean,’ she told him, ‘a Lady of Eighty Inner Springs!’

And all three generations assembled around the table voted that the last word on the subject had been said.

Just what was it that gave resilience to those eighty inner springs? I believe it was partly those traits we have been discussing: the gift for enhancing the contemporary moment; the gift of independent exploits and projects; the gift of discrimination; and the gift of recognizing in every generation something that is eternally ‘ours.’

Of course it may be objected that these are strong unselfish traits, difficult to foster if one is really very feeble or very ill. That is true in a way, but it is astonishing how a well-rooted trait of personal charm will last and last. The greatgrandmother of one of my friends, in her last illness, was visited just in time by the great-granddaughter whom she most intimately loved. Both grandmother and granddaughter were ladies of spicy speech. But the granddaughter was not feeling spicy just now. She leaned over tenderly and said simply, ‘How do you feel, Grandma?’ speaking softly into the very old lady’s ear.

The great-grandmother, who had not spoken for days, recognized the dear voice, braced herself valiantly for the effort, raised one eyelid and looked out knowingly at her great-granddaughter who was also her friend. Then she spoke confidentially, with something of her old astringent manner of crisp rejoinder. ‘My cap’s on crooked and I feel bad other ways,’ said she — and died.

Feminine and fastidious to the last breath, she wished to register in no uncertain terms that a lady can ‘feel bad’ not only in her circulatory system but also in the dislocation of her cap.

Yes, I think I have been fortunate in my old ladies, and in my old gentlemen as well. I think it is one of the needless afflictions of age to find itself so often depicted as obnoxious in modern literature. Old age need not be obnoxious; that we know. And every fine character who with consummate skill makes life rich, even after its own natural enrichments have departed from this earth, deserves our humble gratitude and our praise. Let us now praise men and women who had lived, deeply lived, to be old. They shall have our proud love from generation to generation, even unto the end of the world.