The Optimist's Daughter (6 page)

“What’s Becky’s Garden Club got to do with me?” exclaimed Fay. She stuck her head inside the parlor door and said, “The funeral’s not till tomorrow.”

“They’re a hard bunch to put off till tomorrow,” said Miss Tennyson. “They picked their flowers and they brought ’em.”

Laurel left her chair and went out to Miss Tennyson
and the gathering ladies. “They’re all Father’s friends, Fay. They’re exactly the ones he’d have counted on to be here in the house to meet us,” she said. “And I count on them.”

“Well, it’s evermore unfair. I haven’t got anybody to count on but me, myself, and I.” Fay’s eyes travelled to the one man in the gathering and she accused him.
“I
haven’t got one soul.” She let out a cry, and streaked up the stairs.

“Poor little woman, she’s the helpless kind,” said Major Bullock. “We’re going to have to see about her.” He looked around him, and there were the suitcases, still standing near the front door. Three of them: one was Judge McKelva’s. Major Bullock loaded himself and walked upstairs with them. When he came back, almost immediately, his step was even heavier. Straight-armed, he carried at full length on its hanger a suit of black winter clothes. It swayed more widely than he swayed in negotiating the turn on the landing. There was a shoebox in his other hand and a leather case under his arm.

“She’s sending me down to Pitts’, Tennyson,” he said. “Carrying him these.”

“Naked through the streets?” Miss Tennyson objected. “But I suppose you couldn’t let her go to the trouble of packing them.”

“A man wanted to get on out of the room,” he said stiffly. But his arm gave at the elbow, and the suit for a moment sagged; the trousers folded to the floor. He
stood there in the middle of the women and cried. He said, “I just can’t believe it yet! Can’t believe Clint’s gone for good and Pitts has got him down there—”

“All right, I’ll believe it for you,” said Miss Tennyson, on her way to him. She rescued the suit and hung it over his arm for him, so that it was less clumsy for him and looked less like a man. “Now go on and do like she told you. You
insisted
on being here tonight!”

Upstairs, the bedroom door was rather weakly slammed. Laurel had never heard it slammed before. She went and laid her cheek for a moment against Major Bullock’s, aware of the tears on it and the bourbon on his breath. He propelled himself forward and out of the lighted house.

“Daddy, wait! I’ll drive you!” Tish called, running.

It was the break-up, and when they’d all said goodnight, promising to return in the morning in plenty of time, Laurel saw them to the door and stood waiting until their cars had driven away. Then she walked back through the parlor as far as the doorway into the library behind it. There was her father’s old chair sitting up to his desk.

The sound of plates being laid carefully one on top of the other reached her then from the kitchen. She walked in through the pantry.

“It’s I.”

Laurel knew that would be Miss Adele Courtland. She had finished putting the food away and washing
the dishes; she was polishing dry the turkey platter. It was a piece of the old Haviland in the small arbutus pattern—the “laurel”—that Laurel’s mother had loved.

“Here in the kitchen it will all start over so soon,” Miss Adele said, as if asking forgiveness.

“You can’t help being good. That’s what Father said about you in New Orleans,” Laurel said. Then,
“He
was the best thing in the world too—Dr. Courtland.”

Miss Adele nodded her head.

“What happened was not to Father’s eye at all. Father was going to see,” Laurel told her. “Dr. Courtland was right about the eye. He did everything right.” Miss Adele nodded, and Laurel finished, “What happened wasn’t like what happened to Mother.”

Miss Adele lifted the stacked clean dishes off the kitchen table and carried them into the dining room and put them away in their right places on the shelves of the china closet. She arranged the turkey platter to stand in its groove at the back of the gravy bowl. She put the glasses in, and restored the little wine glasses to their ring around the decanter, with its mended glass stopper still intact. She shut the shivering glass door gently, so as not to rock the old top-heavy cabinet.

“People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel.” She turned around, and the chandelier threw its light down on her. Her fine-drawn, elegant face might almost have withered a little more while she was out
here with the kitchen to herself. She wore her faded hair as she had always worn it from the day when she was Laurel’s first-grade teacher, in a Psyche knot. Her voice was as capable of authority as ever. “Sleep, now, Laurel. We’ll all be back here in the morning, and you know we won’t be the only ones. Goodnight!”

She left by the kitchen door, as always, and stepped home through the joining backyards. It was dark and fragrant out there. When the Courtland kitchen light went on, Laurel closed her back door too, and walked through the house putting out lights. The only illumination on the stairs came from the lamp that they had turned on for her by her bed.

In her own room, she undressed, raised the window, got into bed with the first book her fingers found, and lay without opening it.

The quiet of the Mount Salus night was a little different now. She could hear traffic on some new highway, a sound like the buzzing of one angry fly against a windowpane, over and over.

When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear
them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

Fay slept farther away tonight than in the Hibiscus—they could not hear each other in this house—but nearer in a different way. She was sleeping in the bed where Laurel was born; and where her mother had died. What Laurel listened for tonight was the striking of the mantel clock downstairs in the parlor. It never came.

2

A
T THE INEVITABLE HOUR
, Laurel started from her bed and went downstairs in her dressing gown. It was a clear, bright seven o’clock, with morning shadows dappling the shine of the floors and the dining room table. And there was Missouri, standing in her hat and coat in the middle of the kitchen.

“Am I supposed to believe what I hear?” asked Missouri.

Laurel went to her and took her in her arms.

Missouri took off her hat and coat and hung them on the nail with her shoulder bag. She washed her hands, and then she shook out a fresh apron, just as she’d started every morning off during Laurel’s mother’s life in Mount Salus.

“Well,
I’m
here and
you’re
here,” said Missouri. It was the bargain to give and take comfort. After a moment’s hesitation, Missouri went on,
“He
always want Miss Fay to have her breakfast in bed.”

“Then you’ll know how to wake her,” said Laurel. “When you take it up. Do you mind?”

“Do it for him,” said Missouri. Her face softened. “He mightily enjoyed having him somebody to spoil.”

In a little while, just as Missouri walked out with the tray, Miss Adele Courtland came in at the back door. She was wearing her best—of course, she’d arranged not to teach her children today. She offered Laurel a double-handful of daffodils, the nodding, gray-white kind with the square cup.

“You know who gave me mine—hers are blooming outside. Silver Bells,” Miss Adele prompted her. “Is there a place left to put them?”

They walked through the dining room and across to the parlor. The whole house was filled with flowers; Laurel was seeing them for the first time this morning—the cut branches of Mount Salus prunus
and crab, the thready yellow jasmine, bundles of narcissus, in vases and pitchers that came, along with the flowers, from houses up and down the street.

“Father’s desk—?”

“Miss Laurel, I keep a-calling Miss Fay but she don’t sit up to her breakfast!” called Missouri on the stairs.

“Your day has started, Laurel,” said Miss Adele. “I’m here to answer the door.”

Laurel went up, knocked, and opened the door into the big bedroom. Instead of her mother’s writing cabinet that used to stand between those windows, the bed faced her. It seemed to swim in a bath of pink light. The mahogany headboard, rising high as the mantelpiece, had been quilted from top to bottom in peach satin; peach satin ruffles were thrown back over the foot of the bed; peach satin smothered the windows all around. Fay slept in the middle of the bed, deep under the cover, both hands curled into slack fists above her head. Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged? Then she saw the new green shoes placed like ornaments on top of the mantel shelf.

“Fay!” she cried.

Fay gave no sign.

“Fay, it’s morning.”

“You go back to sleep.”

“This is Laurel. It’s a few minutes before ten o’clock. There’ll be callers downstairs, asking for you.”

Fay pushed herself up on her arms and cried over her shoulder, “I’m the widow! They can all wait till I get there.”

“A good breakfast do you a lot of good,” said Missouri, bringing it in, letting Laurel out.

Laurel bathed, dressed. A low thunder travelled through the hall downstairs and shook in her hand as she tried to put the pins in her hair. One voice dominated the rest: Miss Tennyson Bullock was taking charge.

“So this time it’s Clint’s turn to bring you home,” said an old lady’s voice to her as she came down the stairs. All Laurel could remember of her, the first moment, was that a child’s ball thrown over her fence was never to be recovered.

“Yes, daughters need to stay put, where they can keep a better eye on us old folks,” said Miss Tennyson Bullock, meeting Laurel at the foot of the stairs with a robust hug. “Honey, he’s come.”

Miss Tennyson led the way into the parlor. Everything was dim. All over the downstairs, the high old windows had had their draperies drawn. In the parlor, lamps were burning by day and Laurel felt as she entered the room that the furniture was out of place. A number of people
rose to their feet and stood still, making a path for her.

The folding doors between the parlor and the library behind it had been rolled all the way back, and the casket was installed across this space. It had been raised on a sort of platform that stood draped with a curtain, a worn old velvet curtain, only halfway hiding the wheels. A screen of florist’s ferns was being built up before her eyes behind the coffin. Then a man stepped out from behind the green and presented a full, square face with its small features pulled to the center—what Laurel’s mother had called “a Baptist face.”

“Miss Laurel, I’m Mr. Pitts again. I recall your dear mother so clearly,” he said. “And I believe you’re going to be just as pleased now, with your father.” He put out his hand and raised the lid.

Judge McKelva lay inside in his winter suit. All around him was draped the bright satin of a jeweler’s box, and its color was the same warm, foolish pink that had smothered the windows and spilled over the bed upstairs. His large face reflected the pink, so that his long, heavy cheek had the cast of a seashell, or a pearl. The dark patches underneath his eyes had been erased like traces of human error. Only the black flare of the nostrils and the creases around the mouth had been left him of his old saturnine look. The lid had been raised only by half-section, to show him propped on the pillow; below the waist he lay cut off from any eyes. He was still not to be mistaken for any other man.

“You must close it,” said Laurel quietly to Mr. Pitts.

“You’re not pleased?” But he had never displeased anyone, his face said.

“Oh, look,” said Miss Tennyson, arriving at Laurel’s side. “Oh,
look.”

“I don’t want it open, please,” said Laurel to Mr. Pitts. She touched Miss Tennyson’s hand. “But Father would never allow—when Mother died, he protected her from—”

“Your mother was different,” said Miss Tennyson firmly.

“He was respecting her wishes,” Laurel said. “Not to make her lie here in front of people’s eyes—”

“And I’ve never forgiven him for that. Nobody ever really got to tell Becky goodbye,” Miss Tennyson was saying at the same time. “But honey, your father’s a Mount Salus man. He’s a McKelva. A public figure. You can’t deprive the public, can you? Oh, he’s lovely.”

“I would like him away from their eyes,” said Laurel.

“It is Mrs. McKelva’s desire that the coffin be open,” said Mr. Pitts.