Post-Valentine’s

 

At our age, my wife and I almost don’t notice Valentine’s Day. The only exception in our entire marriage when February 14th was a significant day was nine or ten years ago when my wife surprised me with an elegant dinner at a swanky little restaurant and then walked me across the street to a tiny venue where we enjoyed a wonderful concert with less than 50 other couples. The star of the show was one of my favorite singers, Mandy Barnett, and it was an evening I’ll never forget.

But my strongest memory of Valentine’s Day stretches back to when I was seven years old. In Miss Stewart’s class, we performed the classic American ritual of decorating a brown paper lunch sack with hearts and other Valentine’s regalia, Scotch-taping them to the front of our desks, and then circulating through the classroom and depositing the Valentines we’d brought from home in the sacks. This was in the days before enforced equality of feelings; Miss Stewart did not order us to ensure that we each had a Valentine for every classmate. Consequently, some of the children got a card from everyone, most got a card from many classmates, and a few sad little souls got few. I don’t remember anyone receiving no Valentines, but some of the sacks were noticeably light.

The night before, my mother was helping me put my Valentines together, and when we were done, there were three or four cards left over. Mother asked if I could think of anyone else to whom I might give a Valentine, and I came up empty, fixated as I was on the faces of the little group of children in my class whom I detested. I wasn’t about to give a Valentine to one of them…seven year-olds can be quite unbending in their moral code.

Then something occurred to me. One of Mother’s friends was an elderly lady named Mrs. Wilson, a widow who ran a boarding house in her large home. She was a kind, deeply religious soul whom I loved like a surrogate grandmother. I would often stop by her house in warm weather and find her out on the wide wraparound porch, shelling peas or sewing or reading her Bible and cooling herself with a funeral home fan. Whenever I stopped by, she would chat with me and show genuine interest in my life, and when I started to leave, she would give me a nickel or a dime from her apron pocket. I used to fret that Mrs. Wilson believed that I only came to see her for these monetary treats; to this day I hope she knew that I loved her and enjoyed her kind company.

There were usually anywhere from four to six men staying in Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house, occupying the large, high-ceilinged bedrooms on the second and third floors. Some of them worked at the oak flooring plant or the paper mill on the edge of town. They were for the most part friendly to the little shirt-tail boy who showed up from time to time. One of them used to enjoy tossing a ball back and forth with me. He was a taciturn man who looked quite a bit like the actor Claude Akins. He wore Vitalis in his hair and smoked filterless Camels. Outside, of course — Mrs. Wilson didn’t allow smoking in her house.

Every once in a while, Mrs. Wilson would invite me to share a meal if I happened to show up at mealtime. I accepted her offer once or twice. I can remember the enormous dining room table lined with silent, hungry men, their heads bent over the steaming plates of food she served up. Mrs. Wilson would eat after the men had eaten, and she took her meals in the kitchen at a little table laden with house plants and her big Bible. I loved to watch her wash the dishes in the coffin-sized sink, which was divided into three sections and had gas burners under it to heat the water super-hot. That kitchen was a sunny place of peace in my childhood, and I revisit it often on days that are less than peaceful.

Two of Mrs. Wilson’s longtime boarders were elderly pensioners, men who had no family and found a boarding house to their domestic taste. I have little memory of one of the men except that he was very quiet and that he only appeared at mealtimes and then disappeared back up the stairs, taking a long, long time to climb them with both hands on the banister.

The other longtime boarder was Mr. Crutchfield. He was 90 years old, which made him the oldest person I ever knew in my childhood. He was tall and gaunt and always wore a felt Dobbs hat and a white shirt and gray trousers held up by suspenders. Mr. Crutchfield bore a striking resemblance to the character actor Burt Mustin, and even his voice had the same high, reedy timbre as Mr. Mustin’s.

On the days when I swung by Mrs. Wilson’s and she was either busy cooking, cleaning, or taking a nap (she stole quick little catnaps when she had a chance, snoring in her room at the foot of the stairs, just inside the screened front door), Mr. Crutchfield was almost always around. In cool weather, he would be in the entry hallway, sitting in a leather wing back chair and reading under the pool of yellow light from the gooseneck lamp with the fringed shade.  If the weather was above 50 degrees, he would be out on the porch in one of the many heavy rockers (never in the porch swing), his long, skinny legs twined around each other like pipe cleaners, his hands resting on the crook of the cane that he always carried but never really seemed to need. He would see me walk up or ride up on my bike, and he would take one index finger that looked eight inches long and he would touch it to the brim of his Dobbs, and call to me in a voice that sounded like uillian pipes, “Howdy, boy! Come on up and visit with me!” And so I would. Mr. Crutchfield would ask me about school and about my family, and he would pass comments on the weather, or the cars driving by on Fifth Street, or the inaccurate aim of the paperboy. He would tell me about his own boyhood, about his life, about something called The War. “Boy, I hope you never have to go off to a War,” he would say, looking down his aquiline nose at me with those pale blue eyes. Then he would change the subject and tell me a funny story, or show me a coin trick. In his presence, I always felt important. More than that, I felt peaceful, as if he and I were building a little bubble of safety around us, and that nothing could disturb the harmony we shared.

So when Mother asked me on that February 13th evening at the kitchen table if I could think of anyone else to whom I might want to give a Valentine, my mind settled on Mrs. Wilson and Mr. Crutchfield. Mother smiled at my idea, and we fixed up the cards for them.

The next day after school, I carried my books and my brown sack with the Valentines I’d received, and I walked along the sidewalks beneath the arch of oaks and elms, and I arrived at Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house. Both of my friends were on the front porch. Mrs. Wilson had a tub of peas or beans on her lap, and Mr. Crutchfield was reading yesterday’s evening paper. They both called to me and smiled as I approached the porch.

I went to Mrs. Wilson and handed her the card and said, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” She put down the vegetables and put her hands on her cheeks, her eyes wide. She opened the card and read it and exclaimed over it, and drew me to her and gave me a hug. Embarrassed a bit, I turned to Mr. Crutchfield and gave him his card and said, “This is for you, Mister Crutchfield.”

The old man looked down at the card, then into my eyes. He put down the paper and took the card, and I watched his long fingers open the envelope and take out the card. I can still remember how the card looked. It had a cute puppy on it and it read “Dog-gone It! Be My Valentine!”

Mr. Crutchfield read it out loud, then read my shaky signature. He stared at it and then looked at me again after a moment. Then he read the card aloud again. He returned it to the envelope and put it in his shirt pocket, then reached out and laid his bony old hand on my thin little shoulder. “Thank you, boy,” he whispered. His Adam’s apple worked up and down for a moment. I was pleased with last night’s decision.

About a year later, Mother came to me while I was outside playing and told me that Mr. Crutchfield had died the night before. She asked me if I wanted to go with her to the funeral home the next day and pay our respects, and I decided that I did indeed want to go. I didn’t cry that night, but the next day when we walked into the quiet room where Mr. Crutchfield’s body lay in its gray casket, I came apart, sobbing and heaving. I was glad that there were no other visitors present. The finality of death and the awful fact that I would never see Mr. Crutchfield again struck me like one of the artillery shells he used to describe to me during afternoons on the porch.

A few weeks after Mr. Crutchfield’s death, Mother and I were walking home, perhaps from the grocery store, and when we passed Mrs. Wilson’s large home, we saw that she was sitting on the porch. She waved us towards her, and so we went up onto the porch and sat with her. I swung in the swing while the two adults talked in quiet voices. I looked over at the rocking chair where my friend used to sit, hands on the top of his cane, blue eyes scanning the yard and the street, Dobbs hat perched on his thin white hair. Then Mrs. Wilson addressed me.

“Sweetie, I wanted to show you something, if you’ll come with me.” She stood and took my hand, and with Mother following, she led me into the house, through the dim foyer, and up the staircase. The hush inside the house was a constant, the opposite of the world outside, the world I was beginning to experience — it was an anti-roar, a protest against din. At the top, Mrs. Wilson paused and pointed to the door before us.

“This was Mr. Crutchfield’s room. Did he ever let you go inside?”

I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”

“Well, I cleaned it the day after he died, but I kept it just as it was. Haven’t moved a thing. I wanted you to see.”

She opened the door, and the three of us went inside. The room looked like a monk’s cell, sparse and airy and clean, with the barest of adornments. The bed was covered with a white chenille bedspread, and next to it was a small marble-topped nightstand with a lamp. Next to the lamp was the valentine I’d given Mr. Crutchfield a year before. It was open and standing on display, the little puppy beaming in the direction of the pillow on the bed.

“He was so proud of that card. He used to show it to visitors when they would call on him. Sometimes he would say to himself while he was sitting outside, “Doggone it, be my Valentine.” She looked down into my face, touching the top of my blonde head, and I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.

“He thought the world of you, sweetie. He thought the world of you.”

~ S.K. Orr