Diary of H. L. Mencken by H.L. Mencken

Diary of H. L. Mencken by H.L. Mencken

Author:H.L. Mencken [Fecher, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80886-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-06T16:00:00+00:00


BALTIMORE, DECEMBER 27, 1942.

The Christmas just past was the gloomiest of all the gloomy ones that I can recall. On the Saturday before it, December 19, August and I went out to the Home for Incurables to see my mother’s younger brother, Charles H. Abhau. We had not visited him since last Christmas. He is now approaching 74 and is plainly breaking up. His usual garrulity, always hard to bear, has been made worse by incoherence. His talk wanders, and he is constantly stopping to recall some inconsequential name or date, nearly always in vain. Last Spring he had a hemorrhage in his left eye, and is still more or less blind in it. The hemorrhage was caused by hypertension. His blood pressure, he said, is “190 plus,” but I suspect that it is actually much higher. He shows mental confusion and looks like a corpse. This poor man has been disabled by infantile paralysis since the age of three, and for a long while past has been steadily deteriorating. He now complains bitterly about the neglect of his doctors, who, plainly enough, have found that nothing can be done for him. In particular, he complains that they have not paid any attention to his eye. I tried to tell him that the hemorrhage would eventually clear up, but in all probability I didn’t make it sound very convincing. I think he fears becoming completely helpless like his brother William, who has now been in bed eight years, suffering stroke after stroke but never dying. It is really dreadful to peg out in that lingering way, but it seems to be an Abhau family trait. Only my mother, who was the luckiest of the family, died quickly, and even my mother was full of increasing discomforts for more than a year.

August and I went to Loudon Park Cemetery Christmas morning and found the family gravestone, which is of white marble, lying flat upon the ground, dingy with greasy grime. Every year there are more factories in the Loudon Park region and it is more difficult to keep the stone clean. From the cemetery we went to Gertrude’s apartment at 5110 Gwynn Oak avenue, and had Christmas dinner with her. Downstairs was our Uncle William, lying helpless upon his bed and unable to speak. He recognized us, but that was all. In the evening we went to Gerald W. Johnson’s house at 1310 Bolton street, and on our way stopped at the Edmund Duffys’. The Duffy daughter, who is named after Sara, is now eight years old. She is a very lively child, and had pretty well worn out her parents by the time we dropped in. As a Christmas present they gave her the privilege of staying up until she wanted to go to bed, but toward 11 o’clock Anne Duffy began suggesting to her that the time had come. She went unwillingly and a few minutes later had bounced back in her pajamas, and was ready for another inning. She gave us an exhibition of her reading, and did very well.



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