The Optimist's Daughter (5 page)

At the elevator he got in with them, still standing between them. “Maybe we asked too much of him,” he said grudgingly. “And yet he didn’t have to hold out much longer.” He looked protestingly at the lighted floors flashing by. “I’d been waiting to know how well that eye would
see!”

Fay said, “I knew better than let you go in that eye to start with. That eye was just as bright and cocky as yours is right now. He just took a scratch from an old rose briar! He would have got over that, it would all be forgotten now! Nature would have tended to it. But you thought you knew better!” Without taking her eyes from him, she began crying.

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. He said then, “Laurel, there’s nobody from
home
with you. Would you care to put up with us for the rest of the night? Betty would be so glad. Trouble is, there’s goings-on, and of course more to follow. Dell—our oldest girl’s eighteen—”

Laurel shook her head.

“I’ve got my driver waiting outside, though,” Dr. Courtland went on. “As soon as you-all finish at the office, I’ll send you where you’re going, with something for you both to make you sleep.”

“All I hope is
you
lay awake tonight and remember how little you were good for!” cried Fay.

He took them on, through the necessary office gates, and when they came outside the hospital into the air and the sounds of city streets and of tonight, he helped them into his car.

“I’ll phone Adele,” he said to Laurel. That was his sister in Mount Salus. “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.

Laurel touched her hand to the window glass. He waved then, and quickly turned.

“Thank you for nothing!” Fay screamed above the whirr of their riding away.

Laurel was still gearing herself to the time things took. It was slow going through the streets. There were many waits. Now and then the driver had to shout from the wheel before they could proceed.

Fay grabbed Laurel’s arm as she would have grabbed any stranger’s. “I saw a man—I saw a man and he was dressed up like a skeleton and his date was in a long white dress, with snakes for hair, holding up a bunch of lilies! Coming down the steps of that house like they’re just starting out!” Then she cried out again, the longing, or the anger, of her whole life all in her voice at one time, “Is it the Carnival?”

Laurel heard a band playing and another band moving in on top of it. She heard the crowd noise, the unmistakable sound of hundreds, of thousands, of people
blundering
.

“I saw a man in Spanish moss, a whole suit of Spanish moss, all by himself on the sidewalk. He was vomiting right in public,” said Fay. “Why did I have to be shown that?”

“Where you come from?” the driver said scornfully. “This here is Mardi Gras
night.”

When they reached there, they found that the Carnival was overflowing the Hibiscus too. Masqueraders
were coming and going. The cat was off its chain and let inside; it turned its seamed face to look at them and pranced up the staircase and waited for them on the landing, dressed in a monkey coat sewn with sequins.

“All on my birthday. Nobody told me
this
was what was going to happen to me!” Fay cried before she slammed her door.

Her sobbing, the same two close-together, accusing notes running over and over, went on for a time against the thin sounding-board between the two beds. Laurel lay in the dark waiting for it to reach its end. The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house. Eventually she heard the ludicrous sound of chirping frogs emerge from the now completed excavation next door. Toward morning there was the final, parting shot of a pistol fired far off. Nothing came after that; no echo.

They got away in the afternoon. Judge McKelva’s body was on board the smooth New Orleans-Chicago train he had always so enjoyed travelling on; he had taken full pleasure in the starched white damask tablecloths, the real rosebud in the silver vase, the celery crisp on ice, the strawberries fresh from Hammond in their season; and the service. The days of the train itself were numbered now.

In the last car, the two women lay back in chairs in
their compartment partitioned off from the observation section behind. Fay had kicked off her shoes. She lay with her head turned away, not speaking.

Set deep in the swamp, where the black trees were welling with buds like red drops, was one low beech that had kept its last year’s leaves, and it appeared to Laurel to travel along with their train, gliding at a magic speed through the cypresses they left behind. It was her own reflection in the windowpane—the beech tree was her head. Now it was gone. As the train left the black swamp and pulled out into the space of Pontchartrain, the window filled with a featureless sky over pale smooth water, where a seagull was hanging with wings fixed, like a stopped clock on a wall. She must have slept, for nothing seemed to have changed before her eyes until the seagull became the hands on the clock in the Courthouse dome lit up in the night above Mount Salus trees.

Fay slept still. When Laurel had to touch her shoulder to wake her, Fay struggled and said, “Oh no, no, not any more!”

Two

1

T
HE ANCIENT PORTER
was already rolling his iron-wheeled wagon to meet the baggage car, before the train halted. All six of Laurel’s bridesmaids, as they still called themselves, were waiting on the station platform. Miss Adele Courtland stood out in front of them. She was Dr. Courtland’s sister, looking greatly aged. As Laurel went first down the steps, Miss Adele softly placed her hands together, then spread her arms.

“Polly,” she said.

“What are you here for?” asked Fay, as Laurel moved from one embrace into another.

“We came to meet you,” Tish Bullock said. “And to take you home.”

Laurel was aware of the row of lighted windows already sliding away behind her. The train gathered speed as swiftly as it had brought itself to a halt. It went out of sight while the wagon, loaded with the long box now, and attended by a stranger in a business suit, was wheeled slowly back along the platform and steered to where a hearse, backed in among the cars, stood with its door wide.

“Daddy wanted to come, Laurel, but we’ve been trying to spare him,” said Tish, with protective eyes following what was happening to the coffin. Her arm was linked in Laurel’s.

“I’m Mr. Pitts, hope you remember me,” said the businessman, appearing at Laurel’s other side. “Now what would you like done with your father?” When she didn’t speak, he went on, “May we have him in our parlor? Or would you prefer him to repose at the residence?”

“My father? Why—at his home,” said Laurel, stammering.

“At the residence. Until the hour of services. As was the case with the first Mrs. McKelva,” said the man.

“I’m Mrs. McKelva now. If you’re the undertaker, you do your business with me,” said Fay.

Tish Bullock winked at Laurel. It was a moment before she remembered: this was the bridesmaids’ automatic signal in moments of acute joy or distress, to show solidarity.

There was a deep boom, like the rolling in of an ocean wave. The hearse door had been slammed shut.

“—and you may have him back in the morning by ten
A.M
.,” the undertaker was saying to Fay. “But first, me and you need to have a little meeting of the minds in a quiet, dignified place where you can be given the opportunity—”

“You bet your boots,” said Fay.

The hearse pulled away, then. It turned to the left on Main Street, blotted out the Courthouse fence, and disappeared behind the Presbyterian Church.

Mr. Pitts turned to make his bow to Laurel. “I’ll return this lady to you by-and-by,” he said.

Miss Adele took Laurel’s coat over her arm and the bridesmaids gathered up all the suitcases. The old Bullock Chrysler had been waiting.

It was first-dark in the town of Mount Salus. They turned right on Main Street and drove the three and a half blocks.

The McKelva house was streaming light from every window, upstairs and down. As Tish passed the row of parked cars and turned up into the driveway, Laurel saw that the daffodils were in bloom, long streamers of them reaching down the yard, hundreds of small white trumpets. Tish lightly touched the horn, and the front door opened and still more light streamed out, in which the solid form of Miss Tennyson Bullock walked out and stood on the porch.

Laurel ran from the car and across the grass and up the front steps. Miss Tennyson—Tish’s mother—was calling to her in ringing tones, “And he was such a precious, after all!” She folded Laurel close.

Half a dozen—a dozen—old family friends had been waiting here in the house. They came out into the hall from the rooms on both sides as Laurel walked in. 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.

But there was a man’s deep groan from the dining room, and Major Bullock came swinging out into the hall, cutting through the welcomers, protesting. “I’m not even going to
have
it, I say. He was never sick a day in his life!” Laurel went to meet him and kissed his flushed cheek.

He was the only man here. It might have been out of some sense of delicacy that the bridesmaids and the older ladies, those who were not already widows, had all made their husbands stay home tonight. Miss Tennyson, who had relieved Laurel of her handbag and crushed gloves, smoothed back the part into her hair. She had been Laurel’s mother’s oldest friend, the first person she’d met when she came to Mount Salus as a bride.

Now she gave a sidelong glance at Tish and asked her, “Did Mr. Pitts manage to catch Fay?”

“He’s going to return her to us by-and-by.” Tish mocked him perfectly.

“Poor little woman! How is she taking it, Laurel?” asked Major Bullock.

At last she said, “I don’t think I can safely predict about Fay.”

“Let’s not make Laurel try,” suggested Miss Adele Courtland.

Miss Tennyson led Laurel into the dining room. The bridesmaids had been setting out a buffet. On the little side table, where Major Bullock, standing with his back to them, was quickly finishing up something,
was the drinks tray with some bottles and glasses. Laurel found herself sitting at her old place at the dinner table, the only one seated, while everybody else was trying to wait on her. Miss Tennyson stood right at her shoulder, to make her eat.

“What are all these people doing in my house?”

That was Fay’s voice in the hall.

“You’ve got pies three deep in the pantry, and an icebox ready to pop,” said Miss Tennyson, going out to meet her. “And a dining room table that might keep you from going to bed hungry.”

“Well, I didn’t know I was giving a reception,” said Fay. She came as far as the dining room doors and stared in.

“We’re Laurel’s friends, Fay,” Tish reminded her. “The six of us right here, we were her bridesmaids.”

“A lot of good her bridesmaids will ever do me. And who’s making themselves at home in my parlor?” She crossed the hall.

“Fay, those are the last, devoted remnants of the old Garden Club, of which I’m now president,” said Miss Tennyson. “Here now for—for Laurel’s mother’s sake.”