Black Hills (51 page)

So Paha Sapa did the best he could, losing pay he could not afford to lose, and we took the long train ride to spend the weekend of April 1 and 2 in the city.

My reluctance to see you rather than merely remember you as you were when we were young and in love and then married was threefold: first, I was acutely aware that our marriage lasted a little longer than twelve years but, by the time I made up my mind to ask Paha Sapa to bring me to New York, your widowhood had gone on for fifty-seven years. Being a full-time professional widow would change anyone. Second, I did not want the arrival of this sixty-eight-year-old Indian to alarm you. I knew already through the occasional newspaper accounts that Paha Sapa encountered and shared with me that you, the most famous widow in America, were constantly being harassed by letter and in person by various publicity seekers claiming to be “the unknown” or “last” survivor of the massacre at the Little Big Horn. Charlatans all. Third and final, I confess to you now—since you will never hear this—that I dreaded seeing you as an old woman.

You were always so youthful and so beautiful in the time I knew you, Libbie, my darling. Those dark curls. That soft and mischievous smile was unlike that of any woman I had ever met. The full, firm, and—as I discovered so soon in our married lovemaking—infinitely responsive body.

How could I trade those memories for the reality of an old woman in her nineties: wrinkled, sagging, rheumy eyed, lacking hearing, sight, mobility, humor, and any glimmer of her youthful self?

That was my fear. That turned out to be too close to the fact.

The only thing that allows me to pardon myself a little from charges of cruelty here, Libbie, is the fact that I knew so well that you used to be put off and appalled by old people as well, but especially old women. There was something about a truly old woman that terrified you almost as much as the thunder that used to send you hiding under the bed in the early years of our marriage. (All of the years of our marriage seem like early years to me.)

In recent years, Paha Sapa borrowed and read all three of your published books
—Boots and Saddles,
published in 1885;
Following the Guidon,
from 1890; and
Tenting on the Plains,
published in 1893—and in one of those books, I believe it was the last one, I clearly recall this passage (a rare use of elaborate description from you, my dear) in which that fear of aging and of old women becomes all too obvious. We had ridden to this Sioux village not too long after my victory on the Washita and a group of old women, most of their husbands killed in my attack, had formed a sort of welcoming committee for us. You wrote:

I remember you talking to me in bed that night after we saw those Sioux, Libbie. You where shivering, your shoulders shaking as if you were sobbing, but there were no tears. The widowhood of these old crones was part of their ugliness, you said. They had become nothing after their warrior husbands died—merely an extra mouth to be fed, grudgingly, by the men in the band who would pay them no attention for the rest of those empty women’s sad lives. “The orifices were now empty… ” indeed. Empty forever, and dried up and forgotten and useless.

That was your fear then, when your complexion was still flawless and your breasts were high and firm (due, in part, perhaps, to the fact that we never succeeded in having a child) and your smile was still a girl’s quick smile and your eyes sparkled with energy. So when, several years ago, Paha Sapa read some rare newspaper account of you—perhaps it had to do with an equestrian statue of me being erected somewhere, or with the 50
^th
commemoration of my murder at the Little Big Horn—and you were quoted as saying, “I am an antique, but I do enjoy myself. I have a delightful time,” I knew you were lying.

P
aha Sapa had some personal business to attend to in New York—from what little I saw, it seemed yet another ritual to appease one of the endless list of his dead—and then he returned to the little hotel near Grand Central Terminal. The hotel obviously had been recommended to Paha Sapa, an Indian, because the clientele was largely Negro with some foreigners, also of color. But in truth, Libbie, the rooms were somewhat nicer than the one we stayed in across the street from the Brunswick that last winter we spent in New York, and while our view, you remember, had been
of rooftops and alleys and water towers atop those rooftops, Paha Sapa’s actually looked out on a busy and moderately attractive boulevard.

He spent no time looking at the view, but waited his turn to use the bath down the hall. Then he dressed in fresh underlinens, new socks, his best white shirt, and his one tie and rumpled suit and trousers. His cheap shoes had been scuffed up a bit during some exertion he’d expended on the Brooklyn Bridge and now he spit-shined and buffed them. They still looked cheap and uncomfortable, but one could see one’s reflection in them when he left the room.

Paha Sapa had stopped at a hot dog stand on his way back from the Brooklyn Bridge, but I could tell he was still very hungry. But he had only two days in New York City and he couldn’t spend all of his quarters the first day.

The walk to 71 Park Avenue was only a few blocks and Paha Sapa was almost an hour early when he got there. After looking at the tall cooperative apartment building and then at the doorman—who seemed to be looking back suspiciously—Paha Sapa put his hands in his pockets and thought about which way to walk to kill the time. He was nervous… I could tell. I thought I would be terribly nervous as well and certainly the anxiety had been building in me (in what was left of me) all during the three-day-and-night train ride east from Rapid City, but there was a strange, cold emptiness descending on me as well. It was a sensation that it might be impossible to describe to you, Libbie, so I won’t try.

We were standing in front of the Doral Hotel (somewhere, in something Paha Sapa had read, someone had said that you liked to walk past this hotel when you still got out on walks, Libbie, although I can’t imagine why) and that doorman was also giving us the evil eye, so Paha Sapa strolled on, crossing the street and heading east toward the river.

Thus we made several circuits, four blocks east, two blocks north, then back again, until it was time to present ourselves at the door. Paha Sapa actually stopped at one of the windows of the Doral Hotel to inspect himself. His expression did not change, but I could feel him frowning. Then he braced his shoulders and crossed the street.

It was a strange double doorway to the apartment building, somewhat like one of the air locks on Colonel Roebling’s caissons as Big Bill Slovak had described them to Paha Sapa. Trapped in the little space with the burly, absurdly dressed guard—Paha Sapa was remembering a similar uniform on the guard-conductor on a Ferris Wheel at the Chicago World’s Fair forty years earlier—my host repeated the fact that he had a four p.m. appointment with a resident, Mrs. Elizabeth
Custer. The doorman spoke into a brass speaking tube of the type I’d seen only on the bridge of riverboats and there came back a long, inhuman squawking. The doorman continued to squint suspiciously at us, but he told us the floor and pushed a button to open the inner door.

Before we could seek out an elevator or begin ascending the staircase, there was a nunnish flurry and rustle of black skirts and an eager or otherwise determined female motion descending that dark staircase and for a brief but thrilling moment I was sure it was you, Libbie, more spry than I had imagined you being near the end of your ninetieth year and also supernaturally aware of who was visiting and wildly eager to greet me after all these years. But when the woman’s face hove into view, a sense of disappointment and reality washed over me. She was far too young to be you, although she was one of those women who go through life appearing as if they were born old. She was also scowling fiercely.

“Are you the Indian, the Mr. Slow Horse?” It was a demand and a challenge. The emphasis on certain words seemed random, an old affectation. Her voice was hoarse, as if from being raised in indignation far too many times.

Paha Sapa stepped back toward the air lock to make room for her at the base of the stairs. He did not remove his hat. He did not, I noticed, end his sentence with “ma’am” as he tended to do with lady tourists at Mount Rushmore.

“Yes.”

She stayed on the bottom step to give herself physical as well as moral authority over Paha Sapa, but this woman was tall enough—and Paha Sapa short enough—that she needn’t to have bothered with the physical and couldn’t have succeeded with the moral.

“I am
Miss
Marguerite
Merington… ”

Before Paha Sapa could nod recognition of the name (which he did not, I knew, actually recognize), she swept on.

“… and I
must
tell you
, Mr
. Slow
Horse,
that I was
totally
and unequivocally
opposed
to your
seeing
and wasting Mrs. Custer’s
time
and energy in this way!”

The doorman had taken a step back and not merely so that he could open the outer door while Paha Sapa held open the inner door of the air lock for the aggrieved lady. It was obvious that the doorman knew Miss Marguerite Merington and had long ago devised a strategy of keeping the maximum distance he could in such a small space.

“
Well,
shame
on
you for wasting this fine lady’s
time
in this way is all I have to
say,
and I hope that May knows what she’s
doing,
but she rarely, in my
humble
opinion, has Mrs. Custer’s wel
fare
in mind when she
allows
these ri
dic
ulous appointments….”

Paha Sapa had not tried to speak. Perhaps he, like me, was watching the outraged emphasis creep into syllables now as well as complete, if random, words.

Then Miss Marguerite Merington was gone, out onto the sidewalk of Park Avenue, sweeping out through the door which the doorman, wisely, held from behind on the outside as she bustled through, using the door and its window as a shield, I thought.

“Is that Mr. Slow Horse down there?” came a shouted but still somehow softer voice from several floors above. It was not your voice, of course, Libbie. I guessed it was either your housekeeper’s or, more likely since the voice held no servant’s diffidence in it, that of the lady Paha Sapa and I had been writing to in order to arrange this interview, my so-called favorite niece (whom I had never met), a certain May Custer Elmer.

Paha Sapa walked over to the stairwell and raised his face. Now he did remove his cap.

“Yes.”

“Come up, please. Come up. Take the stairs, if you are able. The elevator takes forever to react to its summons. Come up, Mr. Slow Horse!”

I
was sure that I was ready for the encounter with your little apartment there at 71 Park Avenue—I’d read about it, or rather Paha Sapa had, including the long 1927 interview where the reporter referred to your home as “a delightful return to the elegance of the previous century,” but the truth was far more powerful than that: entering your apartment was the equivalent of taking one of Mr. Wells’s time machines back to 1888. Outside, through thick panes of glass on windows shut tight even on such a lovely spring day, came the bus and train and automobile honking sounds of the 20th Century; inside, 1888 in all ways. The windows, although properly clean, seemed nailed shut, and each of the little rooms we moved through smelled increasingly musty—a mixture of furniture polish, of stale air, of hidden dust, of aged things, and of aged people. Your apartment, my beloved, had an old-woman smell about it. (I remember in the early days of our marriage we each were forced to come to terms with the fact—which no one warns newlyweds about—that in such cramped, one-room-and-a-bathroom quarters, one soon must learn to live amidst all the other person’s all-too-human smells. There
had been something strangely exciting about that then. Now, through Paha Sapa’s still-keen senses, I noted only that the apartment smelled of old women.)