"The Optimist's Daughter"

[fiefoe]

Eudora Welty's voice was truly thick as molasses. Small town shenanigans are entertaining to read about, but not to be part of I'd imagine.

• “Well, I’m an optimist.”
  “I didn’t know there were any more such animals,” said Dr. Courtland.
  “Never think you’ve seen the last of anything,” scoffed Judge McKelva.
• “Go right on over to the hospital and settle in.” As the elevator doors opened, Dr. Courtland touched Laurel lightly on the shoulder. “I ordered you the ambulance downstairs, sir—it’s a safer ride.”
  “What’s he acting so polite about?” Fay asked, as they went down. “I bet when the bill comes in he won’t charge so polite.”
  “I’m in good hands, Fay,” Judge McKelva told her. “I know his whole family.”
• “If Courtland’s all that much, he better put in a better claim on how good this is going to turn out,” said Fay. “And he’s not so perfect—I saw him spank that nurse.”
• * She had left in the middle of her present job—designing a theatre curtain for a repertory theatre. Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.
• “Mr. Dalzell pulled the blind down during the night,” said Mrs. Martello, speaking in a nurse’s ventriloquist voice.
• But although Dr. Courtland paid his daily visits as to a man recovering, to Laurel her father seemed to be paying some unbargained-for price for his recovery. He lay there unchangeably big and heavy, full of effort yet motionless, while his face looked tireder every morning, the circle under his visible eye thick as paint. He opened his mouth and swallowed what she offered him with the obedience of an old man—obedience! She felt ashamed to let him act out the part in front of her.
• Judge McKelva had years ago developed a capacity for patience, ready if it were called on. But in this affliction, he seemed to Laurel to lie in a dream of patience.
• When Laurel flew down from Chicago to be present at the ceremony, Fay’s response to her kiss had been to say, “It wasn’t any use in you bothering to come so far.” She’d smiled as though she meant her scolding to flatter. What Fay told Laurel now, nearly every afternoon at the changeover, was almost the same thing. Her flattery and her disparagement sounded just alike.
• * After Papa died, we all gave up everything for Mama, of course. Now that she’s gone, I’m glad we did. Oh, I wouldn’t have run off and left anybody that needed me. Just to call myself an artist and make a lot of money.” <> Laurel did not try again, and Fay never at any time knocked at her door.
• “She laid hands on him! She said if he didn’t snap out of it, she’d—” The veneer of nurse slipped from Mrs. Martello—she pushed up at Laurel the red, shocked face of a Mississippi countrywoman as her voice rose to a clear singsong. “She taken ahold of him. She was abusing him.”
• And as if their vying and trouble-swapping were the order of the day, or the order of the night, in the waiting room, they were all as unaware of the passing of the minutes as the man on the couch, whose dangling hand now let the bottle drop and slide like an empty slipper across the floor into Laurel’s path. She walked on, giving them the wide berth of her desolation.
• Dr. Courtland looked at her briefly, as if he had seen many like Fay. As they were leaving the elevator among all the other passengers, he looked with the ghost of a smile into Laurel’s face. In a moment he said, “He helped me through medical school, kept me going when Daddy died. A sacrifice in those days. The Depression hit and he helped me get my start.”
  “Some things don’t bear going into,” Laurel said,
  “No,” he said. “No.” He took off his glasses and put them away, as if he and she had just signed their names to these words.
• * “You can take him home tomorrow.” Still he did not turn to go back into the building, but stood there by the car, his hand on the door he had closed. He gave the drawn-out moment up to uselessness. She felt it might have been the hardest thing he had done all day, or all his life. <> “I wish I could have saved him,” he said.
• Most of them had practiced-for smiles on their faces, and they all called her “Laurel McKelva,” just as they always called her. Here at his own home, inside his own front door, there was nobody who seemed to be taken by surprise at what had happened to Judge McKelva. Laurel seemed to remember that Presbyterians were good at this.
• Miss Adele lifted the stacked clean dishes off the kitchen table and carried them into the dining room and put them away in their right places on the shelves of the china closet. She arranged the turkey platter to stand in its groove at the back of the gravy bowl. She put the glasses in, and restored the little wine glasses to their ring around the decanter, with its mended glass stopper still intact. She shut the shivering glass door gently, so as not to rock the old top-heavy cabinet. <> “People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel.”
• When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.
• * Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged? Then she saw the new green shoes placed like ornaments on top of the mantel shelf.
• Then a man stepped out from behind the green and presented a full, square face with its small features pulled to the center—what Laurel’s mother had called “a Baptist face.”
• All around him was draped the bright satin of a jeweler’s box, and its color was the same warm, foolish pink that had smothered the windows and spilled over the bed upstairs. His large face reflected the pink, so that his long, heavy cheek had the cast of a seashell, or a pearl. The dark patches underneath his eyes had been erased like traces of human error.
• So did her father’s crowd—the County Bar, the elders of the church, the Hunting and Fishing Club cronies; though they seemed to adhere to their own kind, they slowly moved in place, as if they made up the rim of a wheel that slowly turned itself around the hub of the coffin and would bring them around again. <> “May I see him?” the Presbyterian minister’s wife asked right and left as she elbowed her way in, as if Judge McKelva’s body were the new baby.
• “I’m afraid my husband’s running a little late. You know people like this don’t die every day in the week. He’s sitting home in his bathrobe now, tearing his hair, trying to do him justice.”
• “When I first came to work for him,” said Dot, looking at him now, “I paid thirty-five dollars of my salary to a store in Jackson for a set of Mah Johng. It was on sale from a hundred dollars. I really can’t to this very day understand myself. But, ‘Why, Dot,’ this sweet man says, ‘I don’t see anything so specially the matter with giving yourself a present. I hope you go ahead and enjoy it. Don’t reproach yourself like that. You’re distressing my ears,’ he says. I’ll never forget his kind words of advice.”
  “Mah Johng!” gasped Miss Tennyson Bullock. “Great Day in the Morning, I’d forgotten about it.”
  Dot gave her a bitter look, almost as if she’d said she’d forgotten about Judge McKelva. “Tennyson,” she said across his body, “I’m never going to speak to you again.”
  “You don’t favor him,” she told Laurel. “A grand coffin my little girl’s afforded. Makes me jealous.” She turned toward the man. “Bubba, this is Judge and Becky’s daughter.”
• “Year after she married him,” said old Mrs. Pease. “Gone. The war. U.S. Navy. Body never recovered.”
  “You was cheated,” Mrs. Chisom pronounced.
  Laurel tried to draw back her finger. Mrs. Chisom let it go in order to poke her in the side as if to shame her. “So you ain’t got father, mother, brother, sister, husband, chick nor child. Not a soul to call on, that’s you.”
  “What do you mean! This girl here’s surrounded by her oldest friends!” The Mayor of Mount Salus stood there, clapping Laurel on the shoulder. “And listen further: bank’s closed, most of the Square’s agreed to close for the hour of services, county offices closed. Courhouse has lowered its flag out front, school’s letting out early. That ought to satisfy anybody that comes asking who she’s got!”
• He stood up and dared those rascals to shoot him! Baring his breast!”
  “He would have thought of my mother,” said Laurel. And with it came the thought: It was my mother who might have done that! She’s the only one I know who had it in her.
  “Remains a mystery to me how he ever stayed alive,” said Major Bullock stiffly. He lowered the imaginary gun. His feelings had been hurt.
  The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
• “Yes, but people being what they are, Laurel.”
  “This is still his house. After all, they’re still his guests. They’re misrepresenting him—falsifying, that’s what Mother would call it.” Laurel might have been trying to testify now for her father’s sake, as though he were in process of being put on trial in here instead of being viewed in his casket. “He never would have stood for lies being told about him. Not at any time. Not ever.”
  “Yes he would,” said Miss Adele. “If the truth might hurt the wrong person.”
• * “The least anybody can do for him is remember right,” she said. <> “I believe to my soul it’s the most, too,” said Miss Adele.
• The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other—bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams.
• “Well, you’ve done fine so far, Wanda Fay,” said old Mrs. Chisom. “I was proud of you today. And proud for you. That coffin made me wish I could have taken it right away from him and given it to Roscoe.” <> “Thank you,” said Fay. “It was no bargain, and I think that showed.”
• “The whole day left something to be desired, if you want to hear me come right out with it,” said old Mrs. Pease.
  “Go ahead. I know you’re blaming Major,” said Miss Tennyson. “Why he had to get so carried away as to round up those Chisoms, I’ll never know, myself. He said they were nothing but just good old Anglo-Saxons. But I said—”
  “You can’t curb a Baptist,” Mrs. Pease said. “Let them in and you can’t keep ’em down, when somebody dies.
• “Adele has the schoolteacher’s low opinion of everybody,” said Miss Tennyson.
  “It’s true they were a trifle more inelegant,” said Miss Adele. “But only a trifle.”
  “The pitiful thing was, Fay didn’t know any better than the rest of ’em. She just supposed she did,” said Miss Tennyson.
• “Strangely enough,” said Miss Adele, “I think that carrying-on was Fay’s idea of giving a sad occasion its due. She was rising to it, splendidly.—By her lights!” she interrupted herself before the others could do it for her. “She wanted nothing but the best for her husband’s funeral, only the most expensive casket, the most choice cemetery plot—”
• (“I’d give a pretty to know what exactly that rose is!” Laurel’s mother would say every spring when it opened its first translucent flowers of the true rose color. “It’s an old one, with an old fragrance, and has every right to its own name, but nobody in Mount Salus is interested in giving it to me. All I had to do was uncover it and give it the room it asked for.
• * Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.
• * She ran her finger in a loving track across Eric Brighteyes and Jane Eyre, The Last Days of Pompeii and Carry On, Jeeves. Shoulder to shoulder, they had long since made their own family. For every book here she had heard their voices, father’s and mother’s. And perhaps it didn’t matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.
• * “What do you mean! She’s got Fay,” Major Bullock protested. “Though that poor little girl’s got a mighty big load on her shoulders. More’n she can bear.” <> “We are only given what we are able to bear,” Miss Tennyson corrected him. They’d had such a long married life that she could make a pronouncement sound more military than he could, and even more legal.
• Fay had never dreamed that in that shattering moment in the hospital she had not been just as she always saw herself—in the right. Justified. Fay had only been making a little scene—that was all.
• Very likely, making a scene was, for Fay, like home. Fay had brought scenes to the hospital—and here, to the house—as Mr. Dalzell’s family had brought their boxes of chicken legs. Death in its reality passed her right over. Fay didn’t know what she was doing—it was like Tish winking—and she never will know, Laurel thought, unless I tell her.
• How cold Miss Verna Longmeier’s hands must have got! Laurel thought—coming here, sewing and making up tales or remembering all wrong what she saw and heard. A cold life she had lived by the day in other people’s houses.
  * to Fay, they would have been only what somebody wrote—and anybody reduced to the need to write, Fay would think already beaten as a rival. <> Laurel opened out the writing lid, and reaching up she drew down the letters and papers from one pigeonhole at a time
• “I wasn’t there! I wasn’t there!”
  “You are not to blame yourself, Becky, do you hear me?”
  “You can’t make me lie to myself, Clinton!”
  They raised their voices, cried out back and forth, as if grief could be fabricated into an argument to comfort itself with.
• ‘If the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? //Matthew 5:13
• ‘Man, proud man! Dress’t in a little brief authority!’ // Shakespeare's Measure For Measure
• When someone lies sick and troubled for five years and is beloved, unforeseen partisanship can spring up among the well. During her mother’s long trial in bed, Laurel, young and recently widowed, had somehow turned for a while against her father:
• * As for her father, he apparently needed guidance in order to see the tragic. <> What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel—something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another.
• Later still, she began to say—and her voice never weakened, never harshened, it was her spirit speaking in the wrong words—“All you do is hurt me. I wish I might know what it is I’ve done. Why is it necessary to punish me like this and not tell me why?” And still she held fast to their hands, to Laurel’s too. Her cry was not complaint; it was anger at wanting to know and being denied knowledge; it was love’s deep anger. <> “Becky, it’s going to be all right,” Judge McKelva whispered to her.
• He loved his wife. Whatever she did that she couldn’t help doing was all right. Whatever she was driven to say was all right. But it was not all right! Her trouble was that very desperation. And no one had the power to cause that except the one she desperately loved, who refused to consider that she was desperate. It was betrayal on betrayal. <> In her need tonight Laurel would have been willing to wish her mother and father dragged back to any torment of living because that torment was something they had known together, through each other. She wanted them with her to share her grief as she had been the sharer of theirs.
• Fay had once at least called Becky “my rival.” Laurel thought: But the rivalry doesn’t lie where Fay thinks. It’s not between the living and the dead, between the old wife and the new; it’s between too much love and too little. There is no rivalry as bitter; Laurel had seen its work.
• * They were looking down from a great elevation and all they saw was at the point of coming together, the bare trees marching in from the horizon, the rivers moving into one, and as he touched her arm she looked up with him and saw the long, ragged, pencil-faint line of birds within the crystal of the zenith, flying in a V of their own, following the same course down. All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.
• And they themselves were a part of the confluence. Their own joint act of faith had brought them here at the very moment and matched its occurrence, and proceeded as it proceeded. Direction itself was made beautiful, momentous. They were riding as one with it, right up front. It’s our turn! she’d thought exultantly. And we’re going to live forever.
• Left bodiless and graveless of a death made of water and fire in a year long gone, Phil could still tell her of her life. For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.
• But there was nothing like a kinship between them, as they learned. In life and in work and in affection they were each shy, each bold, just where the other was not. She grew up in the kind of shyness that takes its refuge in giving refuge. Until she knew Phil, she thought of love as shelter; her arms went out as a naive offer of safety. He had showed her that this need not be so. Protection, like self-protection, fell away from her like all one garment, some anachronism foolishly saved from childhood.
• Laurel had presumed. And no one would ever succeed in comforting Miss Adele Courtland, anyway: she would only comfort the comforter.
• But I’ll have you remember it’s my house now, and I can do what I want to with it,” Fay said. “With everything in it. And that goes for that breadboard too.” <> And all Laurel had felt and known in the night, all she’d remembered, and as much as she could understand this morning—in the week at home, the month, in her life—could not tell her now how to stand and face the person whose own life had not taught her how to feel. Laurel didn’t know even how to tell her goodbye.
• “I was being a wife to him!” cried Fay. “Have you clean forgotten by this time what being a wife is?” <> “I haven’t forgotten,” Laurel said. “Do you want to know why this breadboard right here is such a beautiful piece of work? I can tell you. It’s because my husband made it.”
• Laurel held the board tightly. She supported it, above her head, but for a moment it seemed to be what supported her, a raft in the waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before her.
• But of course, Laurel saw, it was Fay who did not know how to fight. For Fay was without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person. Other people, inside their lives, might as well be invisible to her. To find them, she could only strike out those little fists at random, or spit from her little mouth. She could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him.
• * The past is no more open to help or hurt than was Father in his coffin. The past is like him, impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again—but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.
• “Never mind,” said Laurel, laying the breadboard down on the table where it belonged. “I think I can get along without that too.” Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams.