Hdri... - The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button -2008-
But summer ended. Daisy's family returned to their mansion, and Benjamin returned to his rocking chair. He did not see her again for twelve years.
"You should leave," Daisy said one morning. Her voice was calm, but her hands were shaking. "Not because I don't love you. Because I do. And I cannot watch you become a child while I become a crone."
"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." The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -2008- HDRi...
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.
Daisy received a phone call in 1987. She was sixty-seven years old, a widow (she had married a kind, boring accountant named Robert, who had died of a heart attack in 1984), living alone in a small apartment above her dance studio. The call was from Child Protective Services. But summer ended
They talked for three hours. She told him about Paris, about dancing until her feet bled, about a man named Walter who had proposed and then left her for a cellist. He told her about the tugboat, the dolphins, Elizabeth Abbott. He did not tell her who he was. Not yet.
That afternoon, the old clock at Union Station—the one that ran backward—finally stopped. The city tried to fix it, but no one could. So they left it as it was: frozen in time, its hands pointing to a moment that never was, a moment when all the lost boys came home, plowed their fields, married, had children, and lived their lives in the right direction. "You should leave," Daisy said one morning
1918–2003 "We are born at different doors."
He went for a walk that evening through the French Quarter. The streets were alive with jazz and the smell of gumbo. And then he saw her: Daisy Fuller, now twenty-six, a professional ballet dancer in New York, home for the holidays. She was standing outside a theater, smoking a cigarette, wearing a red dress that caught the gaslight like flame.
"No," he said.
Caroline, who had glimpsed the child only for a moment, died within the hour—not from birth, but from shock. Thomas, heartbroken and horrified, did what any man of his era might do: he wrapped the ancient infant in a shawl and carried him down the dark stairs of their Garden District mansion. He did not go to the hospital. He went to a boarding house on the fringe of the French Quarter, where a kind, exhausted woman named Queenie ran a home for the unwanted.