The Optimist's Daughter (3 page)

She was always conscious, once she knew, of the effort being made in this room, hour after hour, from his motionless bed; and she was conscious of time along with him, setting her inner chronology with his, more
or less as if they needed to keep in step for a long walk ahead of them. The Venetian blind was kept lowered to let in only a two-inch strip of March daylight at the window. Laurel sat so that this light fell into her lap onto her book, and Judge McKelva, holding himself motionless, listened to her read, then turn the page, as if he were silently counting, and knew each page by its number.

The day came when Judge McKelva was asked to share the room with another patient. When Laurel walked in one morning, she saw an old man, older than her father, wearing new, striped cotton pajamas and an old broadbrimmed black felt hat, rocking in the chair by the second bed. Laurel could see the peppering of red road dust on the old man’s hat above his round blue eyes.

“This is too strong a light for my father, I’m afraid, sir,” she said to him.

“Mr. Dalzell pulled the blind down during the night,” said Mrs. Martello, speaking in a nurse’s ventriloquist voice. “Didn’t you pull it down?” she shrieked. Judge McKelva did not betray that he was awake, but the old man rocking appeared as oblivious as the Judge to the sound of their voices. “He’s blind, and nearly deaf in the bargain,” Mrs. Martello said proudly. “And he’s going in surgery just as soon as they get him all fixed up for it. He’s got a malignancy.”

“I had to pull the vine down to get the possum,” Mr. Dalzell piped up, while Laurel and the nurse struggled together to string the blind back into place. Dr. Courtland came in and did it.

Mr. Dalzell proved to be a fellow Mississippian. He was from Fox Hill. Almost immediately, he convinced himself that Judge McKelva was his long-lost son Archie Lee.

“Archie Lee,” he said, “I might’ve known if you ever did come home, you’d come home drunk.”

Judge McKelva once would have smiled. Now he lay as ever, his good eye closed, or open on the ceiling, and had no words to spare.

“Don’t you worry about
Mr. Dalzell,”
Mrs. Martello said to Laurel as they prepared one morning to change places. “Your daddy just lets Mr. Dalzell rave. He keeps just as still, laying there just like he’s supposed to. He’s good as gold.
Mr. Dalzell’s
nothing you got to worry about.”

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“N
OTHING TO DO
but give it more time,” said Dr. Courtland regularly. “It’s clearing. I believe we’re getting us an eye that’s going to
see
a little bit.”

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. She managed a time or two (by moving heaven and earth) to have some special dish prepared for him outside; but he might as well have been spooned out hospital grits, canned peaches, and Jello, for all that food distracted him out of his patience—out of his unnatural reticence: he had yet to say he would be all right.

One day, she had the luck to detect an old copy of
Nicholas Nickleby
on the dusty top shelf in the paperback store. That would reach his memory, she believed, and she began next morning reading it to her father.

He did not ask her to stop; neither could he help her when she lost their place. Of course, she was not able to read aloud with her mother’s speed and vivacity—that was probably what he missed. In the course of an hour, he rolled his visible eye her way, though he rationed himself on the one small movement he was permitted, and lay for a long time looking at her. She was not sure he was listening to the words.

“Is that all?” his patient voice asked, when she paused.

“You got that gun loaded yet?” called Mr. Dalzell. “Archie Lee, I declare I want to see you load that gun before they start to coming.”

“That’s the boy. You go right on hunting all night in your mind,” Mrs. Martello stoutly told Mr. Dalzell. She would never in a year dare to get so possessive of Judge McKelva, Laurel reflected, or find something in his predicament that she could joke about. She had gained no clue but one to what he used to be like in Mount Salus. “He’s still keeping as good as gold,” she greeted Laurel every morning. “It’s nothing but goodness—I don’t think he
sleeps
all that steady.”

Mrs. Martello had crocheted twenty-seven pairs of bootees. Bootees were what she counted. “You’d be surprised how fast I give out of ’em…” she said. “It’s the most popular present there is.”

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.
He seldom spoke now unless he was spoken to, and then, which was wholly unlike him, after a wait—as if he had to catch up. He didn’t try any more to hold her in his good eye.

He lay more and more with both eyes closed. She dropped her voice sometimes, and then sat still.

“I’m not asleep,” said her father. “Please don’t stop reading.”

“What do you think of his prospects now?” Laurel asked Dr. Courtland, following him out into the corridor. “It’s three weeks.”

“Three weeks! Lord, how they fly,” he said. He believed he hid the quick impatience of his mind, and moving and speaking with deliberation he did hide it—then showed it all in his smile. “He’s doing all right. Lungs clear, heart strong, blood pressure not a bit worse than it was before. And that eye’s clearing. I think he’s got some vision coming, just a little bit around the edge, you know, Laurel, but if the cataract catches up with him, I want him seeing enough to find his way around the garden. A little longer. Let’s play safe.”

Going down on the elevator with him, another time, she asked, “Is it the drugs he has to take that make him seem such a distance away?”

He pinched a frown into his freckled forehead.
“Well, no two people react in just the same way to anything.” They held the elevator for him to say, “People are different, Laurel.”

“Mother was different,” she said.

Laurel felt reluctant to leave her father now in the afternoons. She stayed and read.
Nicholas Nickleby
had seemed as endless to her as time must seem to him, and it had now been arranged between them, without words, that she was to sit there beside him and read—but silently, to herself. He too was completely silent while she read. Without being able to see her as she sat by his side, he seemed to know when she turned each page, as though he kept up, through the succession of pages, with time, checking off moment after moment; and she felt it would be heartless to close her book until she’d read him to sleep.

One day, Fay came in and caught Laurel sitting up asleep herself, in her spectacles.

“Putting your eyes out, too? I told him if he hadn’t spent so many years of his life poring over dusty old books, his eyes would have more strength saved up for now,” Fay told her. She sidled closer to the bed. “About ready to get up, hon?” she cried. “Listen, they’re holding parades out yonder right now. Look what they threw me off the float!”

Shadows from the long green eardrops she’d come
in wearing made soft little sideburns down her small, intent face as she pointed to them, scolding him. “What’s the good of a Carnival if we don’t get to go, hon?”

It was still incredible to Laurel that her father, at nearly seventy, should have let anyone new, a beginner, walk in on his life, that he had even agreed to pardon such a thing.

“Father, where did you meet her?” Laurel had asked when, a year and a half ago, she had flown down to Mount Salus to see them married.

“Southern Bar Association.” With both arms he had made an expansive gesture that she correctly read as the old Gulf Coast Hotel. Fay had had a part-time job there; she was in the typist pool. A month after the convention, he brought her home to Mount Salus, and they were married in the Courthouse.

Perhaps she was forty, and so younger than Laurel. There was little even of forty in her looks except the line of her neck and the backs of her little square, idle hands. She was bony and blue-veined; as a child she had very possibly gone undernourished. Her hair was still a childish tow. It had the tow texture, as if, well rubbed between the fingers, those curls might have gone to powder. She had round, country-blue eyes and a little feist jaw.

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.

It was strange, though, how Fay never called anyone by name. Only she had said “Becky”: Laurel’s mother, who had been dead ten years by the time Fay could have first heard of her, when she had married Laurel’s father.

“What on earth made Becky give you a name like that?” she’d asked Laurel, on that first occasion.

“It’s the state flower of West Virginia,” Laurel told her, smiling. “Where my mother came from.”

Fay hadn’t smiled back. She’d given her a wary look.

One later night, at the Hibiscus, Laurel tapped at Fay’s door.

“What do you want?” Fay asked as she opened it.

She thought the time had come to know Fay a little better. She sat down on one of the hard chairs in the narrow room and asked her about her family.

“My family?” said Fay. “None of ’em living. That’s why I ever left Texas and came to Mississippi. We may not have had much, out in Texas, but we were always so close. Never had any secrets from each other, like some families. Sis was just like my twin. My brothers were all so unselfish! 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.

Now Fay walked around Judge McKelva’s bed and cried, “Look! Look what I got to match my eardrops! How do you like ’em, hon? Don’t you want to let’s go dancing?” She stood on one foot and held a shoe in the air above his face. It was green, with a stilletto heel. Had the shoe been a written page, some brief she’d concocted on her own, he looked at it in her hands there for long enough to read it through. But he didn’t speak.

“But just let me try slipping
out
a minute in ’em, would he ever let me hear about it!” Fay said. She gave him a smile, to show her remark was meant for him to hear. He offered no reply.

Laurel stayed on, until now the supper trays began to rattle.

“Archie Lee, you gonna load that gun or you rather be caught napping?” Mr. Dalzell called out.

“Mr. Dalzell reminds me of my old grandpa,” said Fay. “I’m not sorry to have him in here. He’s company.”

The floor nurse came in to feed Mr. Dalzell, then to stick him with a needle, while Fay helped Judge McKelva with his supper—mostly by taking bite for bite. Laurel stayed on until out in the corridor the lights
came on and the room went that much darker.

“Maybe you can sleep now, Father—you haven’t been asleep all day,” said Laurel.

Fay switched on the night light by the bed. Placed low, and not much more powerful than a candle flame, it touched Judge McKelva’s face without calling forth a flicker of change in its patient expression. Laurel saw now that his hair had grown long on the back of his neck, not black but white and featherlike.

“Tell me something you would like to have,” Laurel begged him.

Fay, bending down over him, placed her lighted cigarette between his lips. His chest lifted visibly as he drew on it, and after a moment she took it away and his chest slowly fell as the smoke slowly traveled out of his mouth. She bent and gave it to him again.

“There’s
something,” she said.

“Don’t let the fire go out, son!” called Mr. Dalzell.

“No sir! Everything around this camp’s being took good care of, Mr. Dalzell!” yelled the floor nurse, coming to the door. “You just crawl right in your tent and say your prayers good and go to sleep.”

Laurel stood, and said goodnight. “Dr. Courtland believes the time’s almost here to try your pinhole specs,” she dared to add. “Do you hear, Father?”

He, who had been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope.

There was no response in the room. Judge McKelva,
like Mr. Dalzell, lay in the dark, and Fay crouched in the rocker, one cheek on the windowsill, with a peep on the crack.

Laurel went reluctantly away.

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