The Optimist's Daughter (16 page)

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.

Philip had large, good hands, and extraordinary thumbs—double-jointed where they left the palms, nearly at right angles; their long, blunt tips curved strongly back. When she watched his right hand go about its work, it looked to her like the Hand of his name.

She had a certain gift of her own. He taught her, through his example, how to use it. She learned how to work by working beside him. He taught her to draw, to work toward and into her pattern, not to sketch peripheries.

Designing houses was not enough for his energy. He fitted up a workshop in their South Side apartment, taking up half the kitchen. “I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together,” he said. “I like to see
a thing finished.” He made simple objects of immediate use, taking unlimited pains. What he was, was a perfectionist.

But he was not an optimist—she knew that. Phil had learned everything he could manage to learn, and done as much as he had time for, to design houses to stand, to last, to be lived in; but he had known they could equally well, with the same devotion and tireless effort, be built of cards.

When the country went to war, Philip said, “Not the Army, not the Engineers. I’ve heard what happens to architects. They get put in Camouflage. This war’s got to move too fast to stop for junk like camouflage.” He went into the Navy and ended up as a communications officer on board a mine sweeper in the Pacific.

Taking the train, Laurel’s father made his first trip to Chicago in years to see Phil on his last leave. (Her mother was unable to travel anywhere except “up home.”)

“How close have those
kamikaze
come to you so far, son?” the Judge wanted to know.

“About close enough to shake hands with,” Phil said.

A month later, they came closer still.

As far as Laurel had ever known, there had not happened a single blunder in their short life together. But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than
the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

The house was bright and still, like a ship that has tossed all night and come to harbor. She had not forgotten what waited for her today. Turning off the panicky lights of last night as she went, she walked through the big bedroom and opened the door into the hall.

She saw the bird at once, high up in a fold of the curtain at the stair window; it was still, too, and narrowed, wings to its body.

As the top step of the stairs creaked under her foot, the bird quivered its wings rapidly without altering its position. She sped down the stairs and closed herself into the kitchen while she planned and breakfasted. She’d got upstairs again and dressed and come out again, still to find the bird had not moved from its position.

Loudly, like a clumsy, slow echo of the wingbeating, a pounding began on the front porch. It was no effort any longer to remember anybody: Laurel knew there was only one man in Mount Salus who knocked like that, the perennial jack-leg carpenter who appeared in spring to put in new window cords, sharpen the lawn mower, plane off the back screen door from its wintertime sag. He still acted, no doubt, for widows and
maiden ladies and for wives whose husbands were helpless around the house.

“Well, this time it’s your dad. Old Miss been gone a dozen year. I miss her ever’ time I pass the old place,” said Mr. Cheek. “Her and her ideas.”

Was this some last, misguided call of condolence? “What is it, Mr. Cheek?” she asked.

“Locks holding?” he asked. “Ready for me to string your window cords? Change your furniture around?” He was the same. He mounted the steps and came right across the porch at a march, with his knees bent and turned out, and the tools knocking together inside his sack.

Her mother had deplored his familiar ways and blundering hammer, had called him on his cheating, and would have sent him packing for good the first time she heard him refer to her as “Old Miss.” Now he was moving into what he must suppose was a clear field. “Roof do any leaking last night?”

“No. A bird came down the chimney, that’s all,” said Laurel. “If you’d like to be useful, I’ll let you get it out for me.”

“Bird in the house?” he asked. “Sign o’ bad luck, ain’t it?” He still walked up the stairs with a strut and followed too close. “I reckon I’m elected.”

The bird had not moved from its position. Heavy-looking, laden with soot, it was still pressed into the same curtain fold.

“I spot him!” Mr. Cheek shouted. He stamped his
foot, then clogged with both feet like a clown, and the bird dropped from the curtain into flight and, barely missing the wall, angled into Laurel’s room—her bedroom door had come open. Mr. Cheek with a shout slammed the door on it.

“Mr. Cheek!”

“Well, I got him out of your hall.”

Laurel’s door opened again, of itself, with a slowness that testified there was nothing behind it but the morning breeze.

“I’m not prepared for a joke this morning,” Laurel said. “I want that bird out of my room!”

Mr. Cheek marched on into her bedroom. His eye slid to the muslin curtains, wet, with the starch rained out of them—she realized that her window had been open all night—where the shineless bird was frantically striking itself; but she could see he was only sizing up the frayed window cords.

“It’ll get in every room in the house if you let it,” Laurel said, controlling herself from putting her hands over her hair.

“It ain’t trying to get in. Trying to get out,” said Mr. Cheek, and crowed at her. He marched around the room, glancing into Laurel’s suitcase, opened out on the bed—there was nothing for him to see, only her sketchbook that she’d never taken out—and inspected the dressing table and himself in its mirror, while the bird tried itself from curtain to curtain and spurted out of the room ahead of him. It had left the dust
of itself all over everything, the way a moth does.

“Where’s Young Miss?” asked Mr. Cheek, and opened the big bedroom door. The bird flew in like an arrow.

“Mr. Cheek!”

“That’s about my favorite room in the house,” he said. He gave Laurel a black grin; his front teeth had gone.

“Mr. Cheek, I thought I told you—I wasn’t ready for a joke. You’ve simply come and made things worse than you found them. Exactly like you used to do!” Laurel said.

“Well, I won’t charge you nothing,” he said, clattering down the stairs behind her. “I don’t see nothing wrong with you,” he added. “Why didn’t you ever go ’head and marry you another somebody?”

She walked to the door and waited for him to leave. He laughed good-naturedly. “Yep, I’m all that’s left of my folks too,” he said. “Maybe me and you ought to get together.”

“Mr. Cheek, I’d be very glad if you’d depart.”

“If you don’t sound like Old Miss!” he said admiringly. “No hard feelings,” he called, skipping into his escape down the steps. “You even got her voice.”

Missouri had arrived; she came out with her broom to the front porch. “What happen?”

“A chimney swift! A chimney swift got out of the fireplace into the house and flew everywhere,” Laurel said. “It’s still loose upstairs.”

“It’s because we get it all too clean, brag too soon,” said Missouri. “You didn’t ask that Mr. Cheeks? He just waltz through the house enjoying the scenery, what I bet.”

“He was a failure. We’ll shoo it out between us.”

“That’s what it look like. It’s just me and you.”

Missouri, when she appeared again, was stuffed back into her raincoat and hat and buckled in tight. She walked slowly up the stairs holding the kitchen broom, bristles up.

“Do you see it?” Laurel asked. She saw the mark on the stairway curtain where the bird had tried to stay asleep. She heard it somewhere, ticking.

“He on the telephone.”

“Oh, don’t hit—”

“How’m I gonna git him, then? Look,” said Missouri. “He ain’t got no business in your room.”

“Just move behind it. Birds fly toward light—I’m sure I’ve been told. Here—I’m holding the front door wide open for it.” Missouri could be heard dropping the broom. “It’s got a perfectly clear way out now,” Laurel called. “Why won’t it just fly free of its own accord?”

“They just ain’t got no sense like we have.”

Laurel propped the screen door open and ran upstairs with two straw wastebaskets. “I’ll
make
it go free.”

Then her heart sank. The bird was down on the floor, under the telephone table. It looked small and
unbearably flat to the ground, like a child’s shoe without a foot inside it.

“Missouri, I’ve always been scared one would touch me,” Laurel told her. “I’ll tell
you
that.” It looked eyeless, unborn, so still was it holding.

“They vermin,” said Missouri.

Laurel dropped the first basket over the bird, then cupped the two baskets together to enclose it; the whole operation was soundless and over in an instant.

“What if I’ve hurt it?”

“Cat’ll git him, that’s all.”

Laurel ran down the stairs and out of the house and down the front steps, not a step of the way without the knowledge of what she carried, vibrating through the ribs of the baskets, the beat of its wings or of its heart, its blind struggle against rescue.

On the front sidewalk, she got ready.

“What you doing?” called old Mrs. Pease through her window curtains. “Thought you were due to be gone!”

“I am, just about!” called Laurel, and opened the baskets.

Something struck her face—not feathers; it was a blow of wind. The bird was away. In the air it was nothing but a pair of wings—she saw no body any more, no tail, just a tilting crescent being drawn back into the sky.

“All birds got to fly, even them no-count dirty ones,”
said Missouri from the porch. “Now I got all that wrenching out to do over.”

For the next hour, Laurel stood in the driveway burning her father’s letters to her mother, and Grandma’s letters, and the saved little books and papers in the rusty wire basket where pecan leaves used to get burned—“too acid for my roses.” She burned Milton’s Universe. She saw the words “this morning?” with the uncompromising hook of her mother’s question mark, on a little round scrap of paper that was slowly growing smaller in the smoke. She had a child’s desire to reach for it, like a coin left lying in the street for any passer-by to find and legitimately keep—by then it was consumed. All Laurel would have wanted with her mother’s “this morning?” would have been to make it over, give her a new one in its place. She stood humbly holding the blackened rake. She thought of her father.

The smoke dimmed the dogwood tree like a veil over a face that might have shone with too naked a candor. Miss Adele Courtland was hurrying under it now, at a fast teacher’s walk, to tell Laurel goodbye before time for school. She looked at what Laurel was doing and her face withheld judgment.

“There’s one thing—I’d like you to keep it,” said Laurel. She reached in her apron pocket for it.

“Polly. You mustn’t give this up. You must know I can’t allow you—no, indeed, you must cling to this.” She pressed the little soapstone boat back into Laurel’s hand quickly, told her goodbye, and fled away to her school.

Laurel had presumed. And no one would ever succeed in comforting Miss Adele Courtland, anyway: she would only comfort the comforter.

Upstairs, Laurel folded her slacks and the wrinkled silk dress of last night into her case, dropped in the other few things she’d brought, and closed it. Then she bathed and dressed again in the Sibyl Connolly suit she’d flown down in. She was careful with her lipstick, and pinned her hair up for Chicago. She stepped back into her city heels, and started on a last circuit through the house. All the windows, which Missouri had patiently stripped so as to wash the curtains over again, let in the full volume of spring light. There was nothing she was leaving in the whole shining and quiet house now to show for her mother’s life and her mother’s happiness and suffering, and nothing to show for Fay’s harm; her father’s turning between them, holding onto them both, then letting them go, was without any sign.

From the stair window she could see that the crabapple tree had rushed into green, all but one sleeve that was still flowery.

The last of the funeral flowers had been carried out of the parlor—the tulips, that had stayed beautiful until the last petal fell. Over the white-painted mantel, where cranes in their circle of moon, the beggar with his lantern, the poet at his waterfall hung in their positions around the clock, the hour showed thirty minutes before noon.

She was prepared for the bridesmaids.

And then, from the back of the house, she heard a sound—like an empty wooden spool dropped down through a cupboard and rolling away. She walked into the kitchen, where through the open door she could see Missouri just beginning to hang out her curtains. The room was still odorous of hot soapsuds.

The same wooden kitchen table of her childhood, strong as the base of an old square piano, stood bare in the middle of the wooden floor. There were two cupboards, and only the new one, made of metal, was in daily use. The original wooden one Laurel had somehow passed over in her work, as forgetfully as she’d left her own window open to the rain. She advanced on it, tugged at the wooden doors until they gave. She opened them and got the earnest smell of mouse.

In the dark interior she made out the fruitcake pans, the sack of ice-cream salt, the waffle irons, the punch bowl hung with its cups and glinting with the oily rainbows of neglect. Underneath all those useless things, shoved back as far as it would go but still on the point
of pushing itself out of the cupboard, something was waiting for her to find; and she was still here, to find it.