The Optimist's Daughter

  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.

  “The most beautiful blouse I ever owned in my life—I made it. Cloth from Mother’s own spinning, and dyed a deep, rich, American Beauty color with pokeberries,” her mother had said with the gravity in which she spoke of “up home.” “I’ll never have anything to wear that to me is as satisfactory as that blouse.”

  How darling and vain she was when she was young! Laurel thought now. She’d made the blouse—and developed the pictures too, for why couldn’t she? And very likely she had made the paste that held them.

  Judge McKelva, who like his father had attended the University of Virginia, had met her when he worked one carefree year at a logging camp with quarters in Beechy Creek, where her mother had taught school.

  “Our horse was Selim. Let me hear you pronounce his name,” her mother had said to Laurel while they sat here sewing. “I rode Selim to school. Seven miles over Nine Mile Mountain, seven miles home. To make the time pass quicker, I recited the whole way, from horseback—I memorized with no great effort, dear,” she’d replied to the child’s protest. “Papa hadn’t had an entirely easy time of it, getting books at all up home.”

  Laurel had been taken “up home” since a summer before she remembered. The house was built on top of what might as well have been already the highest roof in the world. There were rocking chairs outside it on the sweet, roofless green grass. From a rocking chair could be seen the river where it rounded the foot of the mountain. It was only when you wound your way down the mountain nearly to the bottom that you began to hear the river. It sounded like a roomful of mesmerized schoolchildren reciting to their teacher. This point of the river was called Queen’s Shoals.

  Both Becky’s father and her mother had been Virginians. The mother’s family (fathered by a
line of preachers and teachers) had packed up and gone across the border around the time of the Secession. Becky’s own father had been a lawyer, too. But the mountain had stood five times as high as the courthouse roof, straight up behind it, and the river went rushing in front of it like a road. It was its only road.

  They must have had names. Laurel never remembered hearing them said. They were just “the mountain,” “the river,” “the courthouse,” parts of “up home.”

  In the early morning, from the next mountain, from one stillness to another, travelled the sound of a blow, then behind it its echo, then another blow, then the echo, then a shouting and the shouting falling back on itself. On it went.

  “Mother, what are they doing?” Laurel asked.

  “It’s just an old man chopping wood,” said “the boys.”

  “He’s praying,” said her mother.

  “An old hermit that is,” said Grandma. “Without a soul in the world.”

  “The boys”—there were six—saddled the pony for their sister; then they rode off with her. They lay on blankets and saddles under the apple tree and played the banjo for her. They told her so many stories she cried, all about people only she knew and they knew; had she not cried she would have never been able to stop laughing. Of her youngest brother, who sang “Billy Boy” and banged comically on the strings, she said, “Very well for Sam. He went out and cried on the ground when I married.”

  In sight of the door there was an iron bell mounted on a post. If anything were ever to happen, Grandma only needed to ring this bell.

  The first time Laurel could remember arriving in West Virginia instead of just finding herself there, her mother and she had got down from the train in early morning and stood, after it had gone, by themselves on a steep rock, all of the world that they could see in the mist being their rock and its own iron bell on a post with its rope hanging down. Her mother gave the rope a pull and at its sound, almost at the moment of it, large and close to them appeared a gray boat with two of the boys at the oars. At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.

  Bird dogs went streaking the upslanted pasture through the sweet long grass that swept them as high as their noses. While it was still day on top of the mountain, the light still warm on the cheek, the valley was dyed blue under them. While one of “the boys” was coming up, his white shirt would shine for a long time almost without moving in her sight, like Venus in the sky of Mount Salus, while grandmother, mother, and little girl sat, outlasting the light, waiting for him to climb home.

  Wings beat again. Flying in from over the mountain, over the roof and a child’s head, high up in blue air, pigeons had formed a cluster and twinkled as one body. Like a great sheet of cloth whipping in a wind of its own making, they were about her ears. They came down to her feet and walked on the mountain. Laurel was afraid of them, but she had been provided with biscuits from the table to feed them with. They walked about, opalescent and solid, on worm-pink feet, each bird marked a little differently from the rest and each with a voice soft as a person’s.

  Laurel had stood panic-stricken, holding a biscuit in a frozen gesture of appeal.

  “They’re just Grandma’s pigeons.”

  Her grandmother smoothed Laurel’s already too straight hair and pushed it behind her ears. “They’re just hungry.”

  But Laurel had kept the pigeons under eye in their pigeon house and had already seen a pair of them sticking their beaks down each other’s throats, gagging each other, eating out of each other’s craws, swallowing down all over again what had been swallowed before: they were taking turns. The first time, she hoped they might never do it again, but they did it again next day while the other pigeons copied them. They convinced her that they could not escape each other and could not themselves be escaped from. So when the pigeons flew down, she tried to position herself behind her grandmother’s skirt, which was long and black, but her grandmother said again, “They’re just hungry, like we are.”

  No more than Laurel had known that rivers ran clear and sang over rocks might her mother have known that her mother’s pigeons were waiting to pluck each other’s tongues out. “Up home,” just as Laurel was in Mount Salus, her mother was too happy to know what went on in the outside world. Besides, when her mother looked closely, it was not in order to see pigeons but to verify something—the truth or a mistake; hers or another’s. Laurel was ashamed to tell anybody else before she told her mother; as a result the pigeons were considered Laurel’s pets.

  “Come on!” cried “the boys” to Grandma. “Let the little beggar feed her pigeons!”

  Parents and children take turns back and forth, changing places, protecting and protesting each other: so it seemed to the child.

  Sometimes the top of the mountain was higher than the flying birds. Sometimes even clouds lay down the hill, hiding the treetops farther down. The highest house, the deepest well, the tuning of the strings; sleep in the clouds; Queen’s Shoals; the fastest conversations on earth—no wonder her mother needed nothing else!

  Eventually her father would come for them—he would be called “Mr. McKelva”; and they would go home on the train. They had taken a trunk with them—this trunk, with all the dresses made in this room: they might have stayed always. Her father had not appeared to realize it. They came back to Mount Salus. “Where do they get the mount?” her mother said scornfully. “There’s no ‘mount’ here.”

  Grandma had died unexpectedly; she was alone. From the top of the stairs Laurel had heard her mother crying uncontrollably: the first time she had ever heard anyone cry uncontrollably except herself.

  “I wasn’t there! I wasn’t there!”

  “You are not to blame yourself, Becky, do you hear me?”

  “You can’t make me lie to myself, Clinton!”

  They raised their voices, cried out back and forth, as if grief could be fabricated into an argument to comfort itself with. When, some time later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.

  Laurel’s own mother, after her sight was gone, lay in bed in the big room reciting to herself sometimes as she had done on horseback at sixteen to make the long ride over the mountain go faster. She did not like being read to, she preferred to do the reading, she said now. “ ‘If the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’ ” she had asked, the most reckless expression on her wasted face. She knew Dr. Courtland’s step, and greeted him with “ ‘Man, proud man! Dress’t in a little brief authority!’ ”

  “Don’t let them tie me down,” her mother had whispered on the evening before the last of the operations. “If they try to hold me, I’ll die.”

  Judge McKelva had let this pass, but Laurel had said, “I know—you’re quoting the words of your own father.”

  She had nodded at them fervently.

  When she was fifteen years old, Becky had gone with her father, who was suffering pain, on a raft propelled by a neighbor, down the river at night when it was filled with ice, to reach a railroad, to wave a lantern at a snowy train that would stop and take them on, to reach a hospital.

  (“How could you make a fire on a raft?” asked Laurel, here on this matting. “How could a fire burn on water?” “We had to have a fire,” said her mother, sewing on her fingers. “We made it burn.”)

  In the city of Baltimore, when at last they reached the hospital, the little girl entrusted the doctors with what he had told her: “Papa said, ‘If you let them tie me down, I’ll die.’ ” He could not by then have told the doctors for himself; he was in delirium. It turned out that he had suffered a ruptured appendix.

  Two doctors came out of the operating room, to where Becky stood waiting in the hall. One said, “You’d better get in touch with whoever you know in Baltimore, little girl.” “But I don’t know anybody in Baltimore, sir.” “Not know anybody in B
altimore?”

  This incredulity on the part of the hospital was the memory that had stayed sharpest in Becky’s mind, although afterwards she had ridden home in the baggage car of the train, guided herself back to her mother and the houseful of little boys, bearing the news and bringing the coffin, both together.

  Neither of us saved our fathers, Laurel thought. But Becky was the brave one. I stood in the hall, too, but I did not any longer believe that anyone could be saved, anyone at all. Not from others.

  The house shook suddenly and seemed to go on shaking after a long roll of thunder.

  “Up home, we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it,” her mother used to say. “We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms wide open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.” During the very bursting of a tornado which carried away half of Mount Salus, she said, “We never were afraid of a little wind. Up home, we’d welcome a good storm.”

  “You don’t know anybody in Baltimore?” they had asked Becky.

  But Becky had known herself.

  There had been so much confidence when first her vision had troubled her. Laurel remembered how her mother, early in the morning of her first eye operation (and after an injection supposed to make her sleepy), was affected with the gayest high spirits and anticipation, and had asked for her dressing case, and before the inadequate mirror had powdered and dabbed rouge on her face and put on a touch of lipstick and even sprayed about with her scent, as though she had been going to an evening party with her husband. She had stretched out her hand in exhilaration to the orderly who came to wheel her out, as if after Nate Courtland had removed that little cataract in the Mount Salus Hospital, she would wake up and be in West Virginia.

  When someone lies sick and troubled for five years and is beloved, unforeseen partisanship can spring up among the well. During her mother’s long trial in bed, Laurel, young and recently widowed, had somehow turned for a while against her father: he seemed so particularly helpless to do anything for his wife. He was not passionately enough grieved at the changes in her! He seemed to give the changes his same, kind recognition—to accept them because they had to be only of the time being, even to love them, even to laugh sometimes at their absurdity. “Why do you persist in letting them hurt me?” her mother would ask him. Laurel battled against them both, each for the other’s sake. She loyally reproached her mother for yielding to the storms that began coming to her out of her darkness of vision. Her mother had only to recollect herself! As for her father, he apparently needed guidance in order to see the tragic.