Oscar wouldn’t come down for guests, and when there was a stranger at the table he always excused himself as soon as possible. Sometimes, declaring himself unfit company, he simply had Zaddie bring his dinner upstairs, and he ate it while listening to the television news. Zaddie sat by him at these times and talked with him so that he’d have company—and so that if he upset his food or needed something she could take care of it without a fuss.
It was a good thing that Zaddie had so many of the younger Sapp girls under her, for increasingly her time was taken up with Oscar. He wanted her during the day to keep him company, and talk to him. They watched As the World Turns together, and made predictions as to what would happen next, and expressed nearly constant disapproval of the evil characters’ actions. When the Mobile Press-Register arrived about three o’clock, Zaddie read it aloud to him. He still made a pretense of trying to read it himself, but Zaddie invariably snatched it out of his hands, saying, “Mr. Oscar, I’m not gone let you sit there and hog that paper. I want to see what’s in it, too. So you just sit back and let me read it out loud. You want the front page or the obituaries first today?”
Together, Oscar and Zaddie followed the whole Alabama civil rights business with all the intensity and interest with which they followed the twelve-thirty soap opera.
“Mr. Wallace,” Oscar declared, “is coming down hard on your people. Don’t you think you and I better send Sammy up there with a letter or something and ask him to ease up a little bit?”
“You write the letter,” said Zaddie, “and I will pay for Sammy’s gas.”
“Are you looking for equality, Zaddie?” Oscar asked, with a little of his old high-flown courtliness.
“Equality with what, Mr. Oscar? Equality with who?”
“Don’t you want to be better paid? Don’t you want not to have to pay your poll tax? If all your people voted, Zaddie—if they didn’t do anything but register all the Sapps in this town—why you could take over. You could have a colored mayor, and a colored sheriff, and a colored I-don’t-know-what-all.”
“I guess we could,” said Zaddie.
“Then do it. If you did it, you could be the mayor, Zaddie. I’d vote for you. So would Elinor. And Miriam and Malcolm, too. You’d be the first colored female mayor in Alabama, I bet.”
“I bet I would,” said Zaddie. “But who’d read the paper to you every day?”
“I don’t know, Zaddie, I don’t know. Maybe you ought not run for office after all. I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t hear the obituaries every afternoon. Maybe you ought to give up this idea of politics. But I tell you what: in my will, I’ll leave you enough money to start up a campaign and beat Mr. Wallace out of office. I bet you could turn Selma and Sylacauga right-side up again.”
. . .
In the evenings after supper, Oscar went upstairs to his sitting room, closed the door, and turned on his radio. He listened to ball games in far-off places. Billy and Malcolm would often be next door, watching television together. Miriam and Elinor would be downstairs, lingering at the table. Oscar’s relish for company was weakening. There wasn’t anyone his own age, of his own generation, except for Elinor. James and Mary-Love were long-dead, and he thought of them as dead. That is, he never expected either of those two to walk in the door and demand something of him. But Sister and Queenie were another matter. He frequently found himself straining to catch Queenie’s shrill laugh from the screened-in porch, or Sister’s loud complaints from next door. He turned up the radio louder at his side, as if its volume—rather than death—prevented him from hearing them when they called.
It was only late at night, when the lights had been turned off and the room lay shrouded in real darkness, not just the darkness of his own dim vision, that Oscar became somewhat his old self again. Only Elinor was happy witness to this small, nightly transformation. Oscar and Elinor talked long into the night, of their family, what Lilah must be doing in New York, how Miriam and Malcolm were getting along, the next round of improvements at Gavin Pond Farm. They talked about the town, how the Piggly Wiggly parking lot was to be enlarged, how a fourth third-grade teacher was going to be needed soon, how they ought perhaps to donate some money to have the town hall clock and bells repaired. They traded gossip. Elinor got hers from all over the white community. The black community news filtered into Oscar’s ears through the willing agency of Zaddie Sapp, mostly during the commercials of As the World Turns.
Oscar spoke volubly and without restraint with his wife as they lay in bed together, usually with Oscar on his back and Elinor turned toward him on her side, one arm thrown lightly across his chest. When Oscar grew tired at last, he merely interrupted either his wife or himself with a curt “Good-night, Elinor,” and fell immediately asleep.
Only once did Elinor refuse this dismissal, and that was on Christmas night of 1967, after they had all spent the day out at Gavin Pond Farm. “Don’t go to sleep yet, Oscar. I want to talk to you.”
“I’m tired, Elinor. What’s it about?” he asked impatiently.
“Your eyes, Oscar. Your eyes were bothering you today. I could see it.”
“Everybody could see it, Elinor,” said Oscar after a minute. “They’d have to be as blind as I am not to have seen it.”
“It’s gotten worse, hasn’t it?”
“Yes. These things do get worse. They don’t get better.”
“Oscar, there’s no point in snapping at me.”
“Then let’s not talk about it, Elinor!”
“We have to,” said Elinor, squeezing his arm. “Soon you’re not going to be able to see at all.”
Oscar was silent for several moments, then he said in a low voice. “You remember when Sammy and I drove out to Texas about five years ago, ’cause I said there was all those golf courses out there I hadn’t been on yet and I wanted to see them before I died?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I didn’t go out there to play golf. They’ve got terrible courses out in Texas, and everybody in the world knows it. So I didn’t go out there for that. I went out there to see a doctor, a man at Texas A&M Hospital. And I saw him, and he said I could have the operation, but that there was a pretty good chance that I’d come out of it totally blind. So I hopped in the car, and I said, ‘Sammy, let’s go home. I’m tired of Texas.’ I wasn’t deceiving you, Elinor. I just didn’t have the heart to tell you.”
“Oscar, I knew all this.”
“How’d you know?” Oscar asked in surprise.
“Sammy told Zaddie that he had driven you to a hospital while you were in Texas, and I made him remember which hospital it was. So I called them up, and I talked to your doctor and he told me.”
“Good,” said Oscar. “I didn’t like deceiving you.”
Elinor hugged him close. “Oscar, I’d like to see the day that you put one over on me.”
“Me too, Elinor, me too. Can I go to sleep now?”
“No,” said Elinor, drawing back. “I talked to that doctor again last week.”
“Why’d you do that?” Oscar asked, now alarmed.
“I told him you were getting worse. He said you should go out and see him again. Things may have changed.”
“Things have changed. I’m worse. I’m a lot worse than I was five years ago. Elinor, do you have any idea how much I dreaded going to see that man, how much it took out of me? I don’t think I could go back out there by myself.”
“You’re not,” she assured him. “I’m going with you.”
“Would you?”
“Of course, I would. You and Sammy can sit in the front seat, and I’ll sit in the back seat with your feather mattresses. Oscar,” laughed Elinor, “what on earth do they think at the Hilton when you walk in with one suit bag and a colored man carrying five feather mattresses?”
“They say, ‘This way to your suite, Mr. Caskey.’ I always get a suite, ’cause then they don’t care what you do. They’re used to crazy old rich people, I guess. Poor old Mama,” he sighed.
“Poor old Mama what?”
“What would she think of me now? A crazy old rich man, being carted around the South by Luvadia Sapp’s boy in a car filled with mattresses and pillows. Mama wasn’t sick a day in her life—not till she died, anyway. What would she think of me, so blind that I’m even afraid to get up out of the chair if somebody else is in the room? Afraid I’ll bump into something, and they’ll find out I cain’t see anything at all.”
“That’s why you and I are going to Texas,” whispered Elinor.
“Don’t talk to me about it,” pleaded Oscar. “Just set it all up. But don’t tell me when it’s gone be. Don’t tell me you’ve made an appointment and reserved a suite at the hotel. When it’s time to go, just say, ‘Oscar, put on your pants, we’re going for a ride.’ And all the way out to Texas, I’ll just pretend we’re on our way to Pensacola for supper.” He laughed at his own weakness.
“That’s just how we’ll do it,” agreed Elinor. “All right, Oscar, you can go to sleep now. All that unwrapping you did today must have tired you out.”
“I made Zaddie sit by me,” said Oscar, “so she could tell me what everything was. The only time she didn’t have to tell me was when I opened Tommy Lee’s present—those damned pajamas he gets me every year. Always the wrong kind. That boy doesn’t have the first—” He broke off suddenly.
“What’s wrong?” asked Elinor.
“Elinor, you got to promise me something.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask what. Say you’ll promise me.”
“I’ll promise you. Whatever you want, Oscar. What do you want me to promise?”
“Promise me that you’ll let me die before you do,” he said. “Promise me that you won’t make me live on in this big old house alone. Let me die first. Promise me that.”
Elinor pressed her face against his shoulder.
“I promise,” she said unhesitatingly, and in such a voice that gave him confidence. “I’ll be here to take care of you for as long as you live.”
“I couldn’t do without you,” said Oscar quite matter-of-factly as they lay together there in the dark. “I wouldn’t even want to try.” Elinor said nothing, but she snuggled closer to her husband. “Why did you come?” he asked.
“Come? Come where?”
“Come here to Perdido,” said Oscar thoughtfully. “Mama was always asking that question: ‘Why did Elinor come to Perdido?’ I always said, ‘Mama, I don’t care. I’m just glad she did.’”
“Mary-Love wasn’t glad,” said Elinor dryly.
“No, she wasn’t.” Oscar admitted readily. “She thought you came on purpose, just to snag me.”
“How do you know I didn’t?”
“Did you?” he asked with calm curiosity. “Did you hide yourself up in the Osceola for three days—”
“Four days.”
“—four days, waiting for Bray and me to come along in that old green boat? Remember that old boat?”
“I do,” said Elinor.
“Well, did you? Were you lying in wait for me there, like Mama said you were?”
“Oscar, I never wanted anything in this world besides you,” Elinor replied evasively.
“And you wanted to be rich, and you wanted to have a big family so you could be head of it. And you wanted to make everybody dress up for dinner, and you wanted—”
Elinor laughed. “Of course I wanted all those things. What woman in her right mind wouldn’t want them? But those things wouldn’t have meant anything to me if you hadn’t been here.”
“And when I die?” Oscar asked lightly. “And when you’re left alone—’cause remember, you just promised I’d die first—and when those things are all you’ve got left, are you saying they won’t mean anything without me?”
“No,” said Elinor. “I’m not saying that. And, Oscar, I certainly don’t intend to dress you up in your coffin, see you put down next to Mary-Love, and then drop dead across your grave, either. But when you’re dead, those other things will start to fade. I know they will. And when they’ve faded to nothing, then I’ll die, too.”
“Fade away...” breathed Oscar softly. “Oh, Lord, Elinor, we’re so old!”
“That’s what happens here,” said Elinor.
“Here?”
“Up on dry land, Oscar...”
“That’s right,” said Oscar. “Up here on dry land. You still didn’t answer my question, though.”
“What question?”
“Mama’s question. When Bray and I were riding through the flooded streets of this town and we rowed by the Osceola, you were sitting in your room on the edge of the bed. I saw you. You know, Elinor, I cried the day they tore that hotel down. I cried because I remember that Easter Sunday morning when I rescued you out of that corner room. But that’s the question: did I rescue you? Or were you just waiting there for me to come along? All this—this house, and the mill, and Gavin Pond Farm, and all these rich, rich relatives we’ve got, oil wells, and stocks and bonds, and Miriam’s forty-thousand safety-deposit boxes filled with jewelry, and hot-and-cold running servants, and you and me lying here in this bed in the dark. Elinor—is this my doing because I rescued you, or is this your doing because you were lying in wait for me like Mama always said you were?”
“Your mama,” said Elinor, turning over on her other side, away from Oscar, “always did think that she was right, and that everybody else was wrong. Well, Oscar, sometimes Mary-Love was right about things.”
Chapter 80
Oscar’s Pajamas
So, without telling Oscar, Elinor made the appointment with the doctor at Texas A&M Hospital, and one day in February she said to her husband, “Oscar, pull on your pants, we’re going for a ride.” While Oscar was dressing, Elinor and Zaddie stripped the bed. Sammy Sapp and Malcolm took Oscar’s five feather mattresses and his four favorite pillows and somehow fitted them into the trunk and the back seat of the Lincoln Continental, leaving enough room for Elinor to squeeze in the back.
“We’re just going to Pensacola for supper,” Oscar called out to Miriam and Malcolm, who, as Sammy whispered to him, were standing on the front porch of their house. “But y’all don’t wait up.”
Every ten miles Oscar turned and asked, “Elinor, are we in Pensacola yet?”
“Not long, Oscar. Sammy, what does that sign say just ahead?”
“Pensacola. Ten miles.”
“Be patient, Oscar, we’ll be there before you know it.”
This obvious game tickled Oscar, and he kept it up at wearisome length all the way to Texas. Elinor had booked the largest suite in the biggest hotel in Houston, and Sammy and three bellboys carried up the mattresses and put them in the place of the regular ones. Elinor made up the bed herself, and informed the maids that she would continue to do so.
Oscar saw the doctor the next day, and the doctor pronounced him worse. An operation was more dangerous now than it would have been years before, the chances of total blindness greater. On the other hand, Oscar was nearly blind now, and the operation could not therefore be regarded as much of a gamble.
“He’ll do it,” said Elinor, and Oscar nodded reluctant agreement.
The operation was performed a week later. Oscar and Elinor and Sammy meantime remained in the hotel, none of them happy to be away from Perdido for so long. The operation was performed, and Oscar emerged from it totally blind.
. . .
The mattresses were put back into the car, and Oscar and Elinor, with Sammy behind the wheel, headed back to Perdido. “That supper in Pensacola disagreed with me, Elinor,” was all that Oscar said.
As Elinor led Oscar up the sidewalk to the house, she said to him, “We’re not going to keep this a secret, Oscar. You know that.”
Oscar nodded. “When people see me fall headlong down the town hall steps, they’re just gone know.”
But things were better for Oscar after that, as it turned out. No vision at all was only a little less than what he had got along with before, and at least now t
here was no disheartening deterioration. He no longer had to make any pretense about his need for help about the house. He had an excuse not to talk to visitors. All his subterfuges and fictions were laid aside with his thick-lensed eyeglasses; he had need of none now. He didn’t come down to dinner at all anymore, but remained in his sitting room with Zaddie for company.
Elinor did not seek to halt Oscar’s withdrawal into his own world. A week might pass without his leaving the bedroom or his sitting room. The rest of the house grew unfamiliar to him, and to go through other rooms was as trying an adventure for him as attempting to walk down to the Ben Franklin store without a guide. That suite of rooms at the back of the second floor began to smell of Oscar as Sister’s bedroom had smelled of her. On fine days, Zaddie would walk him out to the car, and Sammy would drive him around town and then out to the Lake Pinchona Country Club. Sammy would park the Continental next to the golf course and Oscar would sit very still, smelling the newly mown greens and listening with pleasure to the thwacking of the balls and the intermittent cursing of the players. They’d call out to him as they’d pass by, “Hey, Mr. Caskey, don’t you want to get out of that hot car and come join us?”
“Who is that calling to me?” Oscar would cry in return.
“It’s Fred Jernigan and Roscoe.”
“Fred, Roscoe, sure, I’ll come out there, if you boys will promise to play with your eyes shut tight.”
“We promise,” Fred and Roscoe would always laugh, and then move on to the next hole.
Billy Bronze was of some comfort to Oscar in the evenings, for Billy would listen to the ball games with him. But for the other members of the family, Oscar had little patience. Miriam sometimes came to visit for a few minutes—with Malcolm in tow—and would spill out a little news of the mill. Oscar, however, had lost all interest in the Caskey businesses, and only wanted to know what they heard from Lilah, whether she was married yet, if she was seeing people, or if she was interested in any one particular boy. Grace and Lucille and Tommy Lee came much more rarely to Perdido now that Queenie was dead. When they did come, they all paid a visit of respect to Oscar, but had little to say to him. On one such visit, Oscar turned to Tommy Lee and asked, “Tommy Lee, you got any little girlfriends yet?”