The Coolidge Examiner

OLD-BOY WONDER
By FANNIE HURST
(© by McClure Newspaper Syndicate.)
(WNU Service)

It occurred to the Senator one evening, when half a dozen young men and women were twitting around him, that the attitude of these younger people toward him would have amounted in words, to something like this: You wonderful old man! Eighty-eight years of age and in your right mind and apparently with your wits still about you. We think you're wonderful. We reverence you for not being something that has broken down and needs to be swept up in the dust-pan.

That was precisely, come to analyze it, the way the world behaved. Isn't he wonderful! Look how spry he is. Senator, are you going to dance? Catch him napping if you can! Want to know the youngest man in this crowd? Meet the Senator!

Exhibit A. Meet the Senator! Out of question to be treated in a way that was not special and deferential to his great age. How elaborate everybody was in manner toward him. And how elaborately, if you were eighty-eight and spry, you tried to keep up the hallucination of youth. Senator, don't you ever sleep? Nonsense. I leave it to you young sters to need sleep. I'm never tired.

Never tired! Sometimes it seemed to the Senator, as he climbed into his evening clothes, that the old bones would sag in a heap under him and veritably need to be swept up in a dust-pan by a servant in the morning. Never tired! Sometimes at dinner, surrounded by his children, grandchildren, guests, it seemed to him that the room began to wave and the faces blur and the lights to dim. But only for a second. Can't be caught napping. What was that you were saying? Bridge. Yes, a little later, but I want to dance first. You young ones are too set in your ways.

Isn't he wonderful! Can't keep up with him. If I have his pep at fifty, I'll be lucky. Grandfather, this is my dance. Come, that's a swell blackbottom.

They stood on the side lines and applauded and just for good measure you gave them the double dip and the hotsie totsy! No doubt about it, the way to feel young was to act young. Lovely lithe grandchild in your arms, or often as not, somebody else's grandchild. It kept you alive and going out of the doctor's clutches to dress every night for dinner: dance, cards or theater. Keep you on tiptoe, too, to force your memory to be well oiled and your wits nimble. None of the garrulousness or forgetfulness or repetitiousness of age for the Senator. The mind has to be treated like a fire horse, in fine fettle. Nimble. Responsive. Fleet.

Many and many a time, when he felt memory slipping, the trick was to discipline it. Never forget a name. Sign of bad memory. All right in the young, but sign of decay in age. Never repeat yourself. Sign of senility. Never doze in a chair. Never register surprise at the new youth. Reminisce but seldom. Keep apace with current events, and compare them favorably, if at all, with the "good old days."

It was a strange loneliness, being eighty-eight. Crowds of progeny and adoring youth about one, but all the real people one had known lying in those minaret cities called cemeteries. Practically the entire universe with whom the Senator had been young, and with whom he had grown into ripe age, had folded its hands and closed its eyes. Even the contemporary old people were of a generation younger than he. Eighty-eight gave you an isolation beyond the explaining. You were of one world and you had to pretend that you were of another. And yet it kept you young. Oh, yes, it kept you young.

The curious part of it all, although you could never explain that, because there was no one left living who could understand, was that it was easy to be reckless with what was left of life, because the idea of death had become so simple. Nothing much to dread. On the contrary, a vast and beautiful reunion to contemplate. Another fantastic aspect of this was that so many who were dead belonged also to the youngsters. Men and women, dozens of them who had died in their forties and fifties and even sixties would be as young to the Senator in death, when the time came for the reunion, as they had been in life.

I will be older than almost anyone in the world of death just as I am in the world of life! "Rubbish!" said the Senator aloud. "Getting morbid!"

Never associate with old age! Another of the Senator's slogans for sidestepping the implications of the years. There were, of course, certain exceptions. Twice a year he journeyed to the home of a granddaughter to visit her bedridden octogenarian father-in-law, a friend of half a lifetime. Ever so often, too, he found occasion to visit the white haired aunt by marriage of one of his sons. A beautiful, plump old creature who sat all day like a contented cat, in the sun-drenched rooms and on the sun-drenched terraces of her lovely house and let herself fatten on well-being.

Poor old Aunt Ella. Can't make her stir. Sits and soaks herself in sun. Knits sillies for people who won't wear them. Dozes by the hour. Loves waiting on. Goes to bed at eight and loves to be sleepy and snooze like an adorable old maltese cat. Can't you shame her, Senator!

You couldn't shame a great plump, purring old woman like that. She was for all the world like nothing but a maltese in the sun, sleek, contented, superior.

"Come out of it, Ella. Be a young one. Dance!"

"Dance, my hind foot, Senator. You can make your old bones play at being twenty. Mine are seventy-five and I'm showing them a good time."

Nothing to do about a woman like that! The summers were a nuisance. No use talking, the boat trips were a trial. A man was supposed to be entitled to look upon his holiday as a period of rest. But nothing of the sort. If you had the reputation of being the youngest man on board the floating palace of an ocean liner, there was no such thing as relaxation. Young ones knocking on the cabin door. Come on, Senator, we're all waiting for you to come up on board and show who is the best shuffle board player on this ship. Saving me a dance for tonight, Senator? Oh, I say, Senator, don't you go and desert me for that pretty blonde. You promised to walk the deck with me this evening.

Yes, the summers were a trial. Same way at Antibes, or Paris, or Deauville or wherever youth and beauty flitted. Fight on! Don't let the years so much as get a toe in the wedges of the door. Fight on.

Sometimes the tiredness became just a numbness and that made it easier, except you dared not relax. The memory had to be kept oiled, to repartee flawless and tendency to reminisce held firmly in check. Fight on!

"You're not an individual any more, Senator." Aunt Ella told him once, sitting on the porch in her huge upholstered chair and daubing arnica on her swollen rheumatic knuckles. "You're the prize exhibit. You're like the dog-faced man and the fat lady and the two-headed girl. You're the old-boy wonder. Can't grow old. The boy-wonder who was cursed with the inability to grow old."

How she cackled. In age you had to guard against that. Without your being aware, the laugh could become a cackle.

Then fell the nine days wonder. Almost like the one-horse shay, the Senator awoke one morning too tired to face the day of frivolities, the trivialities, the repartee and the challenge of youth. His bones hurt. His spirit hurt. His soul hurt.

The young and younger generation about him declare they can trace his disintegration to the day. Almost the hour. They blamed Aunt Ella. The facetious patter is that she vamped him at seventy-five.

Be that as it may, the Senator and Aunt Ella sit now sometimes six and seven hours on end in the great sunny terraces of the beautiful country house. The Senator has relaxed so outrageously to his rheumatism that Aunt Ella says of him somewhat testily that it is indecent to surrender.

The curious part of it is that with all his shamelessly revealed infirmities, gout, joint trouble, jaundice and a leaking heart, the Senator somehow looked better. Relaxed, is Aunt Ella's way of putting it.

"Call it what you will," says the Senator, "it's solid comfort. Being eighty-eight has enormous compensations, if you'll just let yourself be eighty-eight."