The Optimist's Daughter (13 page)

“Mama, for his sake, asked at the beginning if she wouldn’t be allowed to give some sort of little welcome for her—a sitdown tea, I believe she had in mind. And Fay said, ‘Oh, please don’t bother with a big wholesale reception. That kind of thing was for Becky.’ Poor Judge Mac! Because except when it came to picking a wife,” Tish said, smiling at Laurel, “he was a pretty worldly old sweet.”

“Since when have you started laughing at them?” Laurel asked in a trembling voice. “Are they just
figures from now on to make a good story?” She turned on Tish. “And you can wink over Father?”

“Polly!” Tish grabbed her. “We weren’t laughing at them. They weren’t funny—no more than my father and mother are! No more than all our fathers and mothers are!” She laughed again, into Laurel’s face. “Aren’t we grieving? We’re grieving
with
you.”

“I know. Of course I know it,” said Laurel.

She smiled her thanks and kissed them all. She would see the bridesmaids once more. At noon tomorrow they were coming for her, all six, to drive her to her plane.

“I’m glad there’s nobody else for you to lose, dear,” Miss Tennyson Bullock said staunchly. She and the Major had driven over, late as it was, to tell Laurel goodbye.

“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.

Laurel hugged them both, and then said she intended to walk home.

“Walk!” “It’s raining!” “Nobody ever walks in Mount Salus!” They made a fuss over letting her go. Major Bullock insisted on escorting her.

On this last night, a warm wind began to blow and
the rain fell fitfully, as though working up to some disturbance. Major Bullock shot his umbrella open and held it over Laurel in gallant fashion. He set the pace at something of a military clip.

Major Bullock lived through his friends. He lived their lives with them—up to a point, Laurel thought. While Miss Tennyson lived his. In a kind, faraway tenor, he began to hum as they went along. He seemed to have put something behind him, tonight. He was recovering his good spirits already.

“He rambled
,
He rambled
,
Rambled all around
,
In and out of town
,
Oh, didn’t he ramble—”

The leafing maples were bowing around the Square, and the small No U-Turn sign that hung over the cross street was swinging and turning over the wire in trapeze fashion. The Courthouse clock could not be read. In the poorly lit park, the bandstand and the Confederate statue stood in dim aureoles of rain, looking the ghosts they were, and somehow married to each other, by this time.

“He rambled till we had to cut him down,”
sang Major Bullock.

The house was dark among its trees.

“Fay hasn’t come,” said the Major. “Oh, what a shame.”

“I expect we’ll just miss each other,” said Laurel.

“What a shame. Not to tell each other goodbye and good luck and the rest, it’s too bad.”

Pushing his umbrella before them, Major Bullock took her to the door and went with her inside to turn on the hall lights. His mouth knocked against hers, as though it knocked perfunctorily on a door, or on a dream—an old man’s goodnight; and she saw him out, lighted his way, then shut the door on him fast.

She had seen something wrong: there was a bird in the house. It was one of the chimney swifts. It shot out of the dining room and now went arrowing up the stairwell in front of her eyes.

Laurel, still in her coat, ran through the house, turning on the lights in every room, shutting the windows against the rain, closing the doors into the hall everywhere behind her against the bird. She ran upstairs, slammed her own door, ran across the hall and finally into the big bedroom, where she put on the lights, and as the bird came directly toward the new brightness she slammed the door against it.

It could not get in here. But had it been in already? For how long had it made free of the house, shuttling through the dark rooms? And now Laurel could not get out. She was in her father’s and mother’s room—now Fay’s room—walking up and down. It was the
first time she had entered it since the morning of the funeral.

4

W
INDOWS AND DOORS ALIKE
were singing, buffeted by the storm. The bird touched, tapped, brushed itself against the walls and closed doors, never resting. Laurel thought with longing of the telephone just outside the door in the upstairs hall.

What am I in danger of here? she wondered, her heart pounding.

Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest. She listened to the wind, the rain, the blundering, frantic bird, and wanted to cry out as the nurse cried out to her, “Abuse! Abuse!”

Try to put it in the form of facts, she ordered herself. For the person who wishes to do so, it is possible to assail a helpless man; it is only necessary to be married to him. It is possible to say to the dying “Enough is enough,” if the listener who overhears is his daughter with his memory to protect. The facts were a verdict,
and Laurel lived with this verdict in her head, walking up and down.

It was not punishment she wanted for Fay, she wanted acknowledgment out of her—admission that she knew what she had done. And Fay, she knew now, knew beyond question, would answer, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” This would be a fact. 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. Laurel asked herself: Have I come to be as lost a soul as the soul Fay exposed to Father, and to me? Because unlike Father, I cannot feel pity for Fay. I can’t pretend it, like Mount Salus that has to live with her. I have to hold it back until she realizes what she has done.

And I can’t stop realizing it, she thought. I saw Fay come out into the open. Why, it would stand up in court! Laurel thought, as she heard the bird beating against the door, and felt the house itself shake in the rainy wind. Fay betrayed herself: I’m released! she thought, shivering; one deep feeling called by its right
name names others. But to be released is to tell, unburden it.

But who could there be that she wanted to tell? Her mother. Her dead mother only. Laurel must have deeply known it from the start. She stopped at the armchair and leaned on it. She had the proof, the damnable evidence ready for her mother, and was in anguish because she could not give it to her, and so be herself consoled. The longing to tell her mother was brought about-face, and she saw the horror.

Father, beginning to lose his sight, followed Mother, but who am I at the point of following but Fay? Laurel thought. The scene she had just imagined, herself confiding the abuse to her mother, and confiding it in all tenderness, was a more devastating one than all Fay had acted out in the hospital. What would I not do, perpetrate, she wondered, for consolation?

She heard the bird drum itself against the door all its length from top to bottom. Her hands went to her hair and she backed away, backed out of the room entirely and into the little room that opened out of it.

It was the sewing room, all dark; she had to feel about for a lamp. She turned it on: her old student gooseneck lamp on a low table. By its light she saw that here was where her mother’s secretary had been exiled, and her own study table, the old slipper chair; there was the brass-bound three-layer trunk; there was the sewing machine.

Even before it had been the sewing room, it had been where she slept in infancy until she was old enough to move into her own room across the hall. It was cold in here, as if there had been no fire all winter; there was only a grate, and it was empty, of course. 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.

But it had been warm here, warm then. Laurel remembered her father’s lean back as he sat on his haunches and spread a newspaper over the mouth of the chimney after he’d built the fire, so that the blaze caught with a sudden roar. Then he was young and could do everything.

Firelight and warmth—that was what her memory gave her. Where the secretary was now there had been her small bed, with its railed sides that could be raised as tall as she was when she stood up in bed, arms up to be lifted out. The sewing machine was still in place under the single window. When her mother—or, at her rare, appointed times, the sewing woman—sat here in her chair pedalling and whirring, Laurel sat on this floor and put together the fallen scraps of cloth into stars, flowers, birds, people, or whatever she liked to call them, lining them up, spacing them out, making them into patterns, families, on the sweet-smelling
matting, with the shine of firelight, or the summer light, moving over mother and child and what they both were making.

It was quieter here. It was around the corner from the wind, and a room away from the bird and the disturbed dark. It seemed as far from the rest of the house itself as Mount Salus was from Chicago.

Laurel sat down on the slipper chair. The gooseneck lamp threw its dimmed beam on the secretary’s warm brown doors. It had been made of the cherry trees on the McKelva place a long time ago; on the lid, the numerals 1817 had been set into a not quite perfect oval of different wood, something smooth and yellow as a scrap of satin. It had been built as a plantation desk but was graceful and small enough for a lady’s use; Laurel’s mother had had entire claim on it. On its pediment stood a lead-mold eagle spreading its wings and clasping the globe: it was about the same breadth as her mother’s spread-out hand. There was no key in either keyhole of the double doors of the cabinet. But had there ever been a key? Her mother had never locked up anything that Laurel could remember. Her privacy was keyless. She had simply assumed her privacy. Now, suppose that again she would find everything was gone?

Laurel had hesitated coming to open her father’s desk; she was not hesitating here—not now. She touched the doors where they met, and they swung open together. Within, the cabinet looked like a little wall out
of a country post office which nobody had in years disturbed by calling for their mail. How had her mother’s papers lain under merciful dust in the years past and escaped destruction? Laurel was sure of why: her father could not have borne to touch them; 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. There were twenty-six pigeonholes, but her mother had stored things according to their time and place, she discovered, not by ABC. Only the letters from her father had been all brought together, all she had received in her life, surely—there they were; the oldest envelopes had turned saffron. Laurel drew a single one out, opened the page inside long enough to see it beginning “My darling Sweetheart,” and returned it to its place. They were postmarked from the courthouse towns her father had made sojourn in, and from Mount Salus when he addressed them to West Virginia on her visits “up home”; and under these were the letters to Miss Becky Thurston, tied in ribbons that were almost transparent, and freckled now, as the skin of her mother’s hands came to be before she died. In the back of the pigeonhole where these letters came from was some solid little object, and Laurel drew it out, her fingers remembering it before she held it under her eyes. It was a two-inch bit of slatey stone,
given shape by many little strokes from a penknife. It had come out of its cranny the temperature and smoothness of her skin; it fitted into her palm. “A little dish!” Laurel the child had exclaimed, thinking it something made by a child younger than she. “A boat,” corrected her mother importantly. The initials C.C.M.McK. were cut running together into the base. Her father had made it himself. It had gone from his hand to her mother’s; that was a river stone; they had been courting, “up home.”

There was a careful record of those days preserved in a snapshot book. Laurel felt along the shelf above the pigeonholes and touched it, the square boards, the silk tassel. She pulled it down to her.

Still clinging to the first facing pages were the pair of grayed and stippled home-printed snapshots: Clinton and Becky “up home,” each taken by the other standing in the same spot on a railroad track (a leafy glade), he slender as a wand, his foot on a milepost, swinging his straw hat; she with her hands full of the wild-flowers they’d picked along the way.