"We're passing each other," she said one night, lying in bed, tracing the lines on his smooth face. "I'm going one way. You're going the other."
Queenie unwrapped the shawl and did not scream. She had seen everything in her fifty years—yellow fever, stillborn twins, a girl with webbed feet. She looked at the tiny, wrinkled face, the clenched fists like bird claws, and said, "Well, Lord. You sure is ugly. But you is also a child of God." She named him Benjamin, after a quiet boarder who had died of a broken heart the week before.
But when she mentioned Queenie's boarding house, and the old man in the rocking chair who had spelled Mississippi, his eyes filled with tears.
"You lied to me," she said. "Or you're a ghost. Or I'm insane." The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...
"No," he said.
Daisy Fuller was seven years old, the granddaughter of a wealthy cotton broker who summered in the Garden District. She came to Queenie's boarding house once with her grandmother to deliver old clothes to the poor. While the adults talked, Daisy wandered into the courtyard where Benjamin sat in a rocking chair, wrapped in a quilt, watching a moth die on a lantern.
Thomas entered. The crib held something that resembled his father more than his son: a wizened, arthritic creature of perhaps eighty, with milky eyes, a bald spotted head, and a feeble, rasping cry. "He is deformed," the doctor whispered. "Some children are born old. It's a condition of the blood." "We're passing each other," she said one night,
Benjamin grew smaller. That was the first strange thing Queenie noticed. At what should have been his first birthday, he lost a tooth. By his third birthday, he could sit up—not because he grew stronger, but because his spine uncurled. His hair, which had been white, darkened to gray. He learned to walk at age five, not as a toddler, but as a man recovering from a long illness: stiff, shuffling, leaning on a cane whittled by Mr. Daws, the blind pianist who lived upstairs.
"Please," she said. "Let me remember you like this. Let me remember you as a man."
"Benjamin?" she whispered.
She did. Every day that summer, she came. They played checkers (she won), she read him The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (he cried when the witch melted), and she taught him how to catch grasshoppers. He taught her how to play the blues on Mr. Daws's old piano. She was the first person—the only person—who looked at him and did not see an old man. She saw a friend.
It was on the tugboat that he met the love of his life—or so he thought. Her name was Elizabeth Abbott, a British diplomat's wife, nearly sixty, with silver hair and a laugh like cracked bells. She was traveling alone to Memphis, and she spent the entire four-day journey in the wheelhouse with Benjamin, drinking tea and talking about poetry. She was the first woman to kiss him—on the cheek, then on the mouth. "You have old eyes," she whispered, "but young hands."