The Optimist's Daughter (12 page)

“Oh, it’s a game, isn’t it, nothing but a game!” Miss Adele said, stepping gracefully into her own backyard.

2

L
AUREL
faced the library. This was where, after his retirement and marriage, her father had moved everything he wanted around him from his office in the Mount Salus Bank Building on the Square.

Perhaps a crowded room, whatever is added, always looks the same. One wall was exactly the same. Above
one bookcase hung her father’s stick-framed map of the county—he had known every mile; above the other hung the portraits of his father and grandfather, the Confederate general and missionary to China, as alike as two peaches, painted by the same industrious hand on boards too heavy to hang straight, but hanging side by side: the four eyebrows had been identically outlined in the shape of little hand-saws placed over the eyes, teeth down, then filled in with lamp-black.

She saw at once that nothing had happened to the books.
Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi
, the title running catercornered in gold across its narrow green spine, was in exactly the same place as ever, next to Tennyson’s Poetical Works, Illustrated, and that next to Hogg’s
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
. 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. In the other bookcase, which stood a little lower—maybe because of Webster’s
Unabridged
and the McKelva family Bible, twin weights, lying on top—there was the Dickens all in a set, a shelf and a half full, old crimson bindings scorched and frayed
and hanging in strips.
Nicholas Nickleby
was the volume without any back at all. It was the Gibbon below it, that had
not
been through fire, whose backs had come to be the color of ashes. And Gibbon was not sacrosanct:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
looked out from between two volumes. Laurel dusted all of them, and set them back straight in the same order.

The library was a little darker now that one of the two windows that looked out on the Courtland side of the house was covered by Judge McKelva’s office cabinet. This was jammed with lawbooks and journals, more dictionaries, his Claiborne’s
Mississippi
and his Mississippi Code. Books, folders, file boxes were shelved with markers and tapes hanging out. Along the cabinet top his telescope was propped extended, like a small brass cannon.

Laurel slid back the glass doors and began to dust and put back neatly what she came to. His papers were in an order of their own—she thought it was that of importance to unimportance. He had kept civic papers dating from the days when he was Mayor of Mount Salus, and an old dedication speech made at the opening of the new school (“These are my promises to you, all the young people I see before me: …”). The promises had made them important to him. There was a bursting folder of papers having to do with the Big Flood, the one that had ruined the McKelva place on the river; it was jammed with the work he had
done on floods and flood control. And everybody had already forgotten all about that part of his life, his work, his
drudgery
. This town deserved him no more than Fay deserved him, she thought, her finger in the dust on what he’d written.

Laurel took her eyes away from words and stood for a moment at the window. In the backyard next door, Miss Adele was hanging something white on the clothesline. She turned as if intuitively toward the window, and raised her arm to wave. It was a beckoning sort of wave. She beckons with her pain, thought Laurel, realizing how often her father must have stood just here, resting his eyes, and looked out at her without ever seeing her.

Yet he loved them as a family. After moving into town from out in the country, the Courtlands ploughed the field behind the house, and back of that, in the pasture, kept cows. In Laurel’s early memory, Mrs. Courtland had sold milk and to Judge McKelva’s disturbance had had her children drink it skimmed blue so she could sell all the cream.

It was not until that night when Dr. Courtland told her, that Laurel ever heard he owed part of his medical schooling to her father. Never had Judge McKelva been well off until the last few years. He had come unexpectedly into a little oil money from a well dug in those acres of sand he still owned in the country—not a great deal, but enough, with his salary continuing for life, to retire on free of financial worry.
“See there?”
he had written to Laurel—or rather dictated to Dot, who loved underlining his words on her typewriter. “There was never anything wrong with keeping up a little optimism over the Flood. How well would you like to knock off, invite a friend for company, and all go see England and Scotland in the spring?” The next thing she heard, he was about to marry Fay.

She’d been all around the room, and now there was the desk. It stood in the center of the room, and it had been her father’s great-grandfather’s, made in Edinburgh—a massive, concentrated presence, like that of a concert grand. (The neglected piano in the parlor seemed to have no presence at all.) Behind the desk yawned his leather chair, now in its proper place.

Laurel walked around to it. There used to be standing on the desk, to face him in his chair, a photograph of her mother, who had been asked to stop what she was doing and sit on the garden bench—this was the strongly severe result; and the picture was gone. That was understandable. The only photograph here now was of herself and Philip running down the steps of the Mount Salus Presbyterian Church after their wedding. Her father had given it a silver frame. (So had she. Her marriage had been of magical ease, of
ease
—of brevity and conclusion and all belonging to Chicago and not here.)

But something had been spilled on the desk. There were vermilion drops of hardened stuff on the dark
wood—not sealing wax; nail polish. They made a little track toward the chair, as if Fay had walked her fingers over the desk from where she’d sat perched on its corner, doing her nails.

Laurel seated herself in her father’s chair and reached for the top drawer of his desk, which she had never thought of opening in her life. It was not locked—had it ever been? The drawer rolled out almost weightless, as light as his empty cigar box, the only thing inside. She opened the drawers one after the other on both sides of the huge desk: they had been cleaned out. Someone had, after all, been here ahead of her.

Of course, his documents he had placed in the office safe; they were in Major Bullock’s charge now, and his will was in Chancery court. But what of all the letters written to him—her mother’s letters?

Her mother had written to him every day they were separated in their married lives; she had said so. He often went about to court, made business trips; and she, every summer since she had married him, had spent a full month in West Virginia, “up home,” usually with Laurel along. Where were the letters? Put away somewhere, with her garden picture?

They weren’t anywhere, because he hadn’t kept them. He’d never kept them: Laurel knew it and should have known it to start with. He had dispatched all his correspondence promptly, and dropped letters as he answered them straight into the wastebasket;
Laurel had seen him do it. And when it concerned her mother, if that was what she asked for, he
went
.

But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. Laurel studiously went to work on them; she lifted them from the surface of the desk and rubbed it afterwards with wax until nothing was left to show of them, either.

That was on Saturday.

3

“L
AUREL
! Remember when we really
were
the bridesmaids?” Tish cried as they sat over drinks after dinner. It was Sunday evening.

While the bridesmaids’ parents still lived within a few blocks of the McKelva house, the bridesmaids and their husbands had mostly all built new houses in the “new part” of Mount Salus. Their own children were farther away still, off in college now.

Tish’s youngest son was still at home. “He won’t come out, though,” Tish had said. “He has company. A girl came in through his bedroom window—to play
chess with him. That’s what she said. I think she’s the same one who came in through his window last night, close to eleven o’clock. I saw car lights in the driveway and went to see. They call him every minute. Girls. He’s fifteen.”

“And remember Mama at the wedding,” Tish said now, “crying when it was over, saying to your father, ‘Oh, Clint, isn’t it the saddest thing?’ And Judge Mac saying, ‘Why, no, Tennyson, if I had thought there was anything sad to be said for it, I should have prevented it.’ ”

“Prevented
it? I never saw a man enjoy a wedding more,” said Gert.

“Wartime or no wartime, we had pink champagne that Judge Mac sent all the way to New Orleans for!” one of the others cried. “And a five-piece Negro band. Remember?”

“Miss Becky thought it was utter extravagance. Child-foolishness. But Judge Mac insisted on it all, a big wedding right on down the line.”

“Well, Laurel was an only child.”

“Mother had a superstitious streak underneath,” Laurel said protectively. “She might have had a notion it was unlucky to make too much of your happiness.” From her place on the chaise longue by the window, she saw lightning flickering now in the western sky, like the feathers of a bird taking a bath.

“Judge Mac laughed her out of it, then. Remember the parties we had for you!” Gert gave Laurel a lovingly
derisive slap. “That was before the Old Country Club burned down, there never was another dance floor like that.”

“What kind of dancer was Phil, Polly? I forget!” Tish lifted her arms as though the memory would come up and dance her away to remind her.

“Firm,” said Laurel. She turned her cheek a little further away on the pillow.

“Your daddy knew how to enjoy a grand occasion as well as we did—as long as it stayed elegant, and as long as Papa didn’t get too high before it was over,” Tish said. “Of course, Mama should have saved all her tears for her own child’s wedding.” Tish was the only divorcée, as Laurel was the only widow. Tish had eloped with the captain of their high school football team.

“But Miss Becky would rather go through anything than a grand occasion,” said Gert.

“I remember once—it must’ve been the Bar Association Meeting, or maybe when he was Mayor and they had to function at some to-do in Jackson—anyway, once Judge Mac himself bought Miss Becky a dress to wear, came home with it in a box and surprised her. Beaded crepe! Shot beads! Neck to hem, shot beads,” said Tish. “Where could you have been, Laurel?”

Gert said, “He’d picked it out in New Orleans. Some
clerk
sold it to him.”

Music started up from off in another room of the house. Duke Ellington.

“The young don’t dance to him. They play chess to him, I suppose,” Tish said aside to Laurel. “And Miss Becky said, ‘Clinton, if I’d just been told in advance you were going to make me an extravagant present, I’d have asked you for a load of floor sweepings from the cottonseed-oil mill.’ Can’t you hear her?” Tish cried.

“She wore it, though, didn’t she?” one of them asked, and Tish said, “Oh, they’d do anything for each other! Sure she wore it. And the weight she had to carry! Miss Becky told Mama in confidence that when she wasn’t wearing that dress, which was nearly a hundred per cent of the time, she had to keep it in a bucket!”

The bridesmaids laughed till they cried.

“But when she wanted to justify him, she wore it! With an air. What floored me, Laurel, was him getting married again. When I saw Fay!” said Gert. “When I saw what he
had
there!”