The Optimist's Daughter

  What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel—something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another.

  Her father in his domestic gentleness had a horror of any sort of private clash, of divergence from the affectionate and the real and the explainable and the recognizable. He was a man of great delicacy; what he had not been born with he had learned in reaching toward his wife. He grimaced with delicacy. What he could not control was his belief that all his wife’s troubles would turn out all right because there was nothing he would not have given her. When he reached a loss he simply put on his hat and went speechless out of the house to his office and worked for an hour or so getting up a brief for somebody.

  “Laurel, open my desk drawer and hand me my old McGuffey’s Fifth Reader,” her mother would sometimes say while she sat there alone with her. It had become a book of reference. Laurel’s hand, now, drew open the drawer of the desk, and there lay McGuffey. She took it out and let it fall open. “The Cataract of Lodore.” She could imagine every word on the page being recited in her mother’s voice—not the young mother who had learned it on her mountain, but the mother blind, in this house, in the next room, in her bed.

  … “Rising and leaping—

  Sinking and creeping,

  Swelling and sweeping—

  Showering and springing,

  Flying and flinging,

  Writhing and ringing …

  Turning and twisting,

  Around and around

  With endless rebound;

  Smiting and fighting,

  A sight to delight in;

  Confounding, astounding—”

  Whatever she recited she put the same deep feeling into. With her voice she was saying that the more she could call back of “The Cataract of Lodore,” the better she could defend her case in some trial that seemed to be going on against her life.

  “And glittering and frittering,

  And gathering and feathering,

  And whitening and brightening,

  And quivering and shivering,

  And hurrying and skurrying,

  And thundering and floundering …”

  Then when he’d come home, her father would stand helpless in bewilderment by his wife’s bed. Spent, she had whispered, “Why did I marry a coward?”—then had taken his hand to help him bear it.

  Later still, she began to say—and her voice never weakened, never harshened, it was her spirit speaking in the wrong words—“All you do is hurt me. I wish I might know what it is I’ve done. Why is it necessary to punish me like this and not tell me why?” And still she held fast to their hands, to Laurel’s too. Her cry was not complaint; it was anger at wanting to know and being denied knowledge; it was love’s deep anger.

  “Becky, it’s going to be all right,” Judge McKelva whispered to her.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  One day her mother had from her torments gasped out the words, “I need spiritual guidance!” She, who had dared any McKelva missionary to speak his piece to her, sent out through Laurel an invitation to the Presbyterian preacher to call upon her soon. Dr. Bolt was young then, and appealing to women—Miss Tennyson Bullock used to say so; but his visit upstairs here had not been well taken. He had begun by reading her a psalm, which she recited along with him. Her tongue was faster than his. When he was left behind on everything he tried, she told him, “I’d like better than anything you can tell me just to see the mountain one more time.” When he wondered if God intended her to, she put in a barb: “And on that mountain, young man, there’s a white strawberry that grows completely in the wild, if you know where to look for it. I think it very likely grows in only one spot in the world. I could tell you this minute where to go, but I doubt if you’d see them growing after you got there. Deep in the woods, you’d miss them. You could find them by mistake, and you could line your hat with leaves and try to walk off with a hatful: that would be how little you knew about those berries. Once you’ve let them so much as touch each other, you’ve already done enough to finish ’em.” She fixed him with her nearly sightless eyes. “Nothing you ever ate in your life was anything like as delicate, as fragrant, as those wild white strawberries. You had to know enough to go where they are and stand and eat them on the spot, that’s all.”

  “I’ll take you back to your mountains, Becky,” her father had said into the despairing face after Dr. Bolt had tiptoed away. Laurel was certain it was the first worthless promise that had ever lain between them. And the house on the mountain had by that time, anyway, burned. Laurel had been in camp the summer it happened; but her mother had been “up home.” She had run back into the flames and rescued her dead father’s set of Dickens at the risk of her life, and brought the books down to Mount Salus and made room for them in the library bookcase, and there they stood now. But before she died it had slipped her mind that the house had ever burned down at all.

  “I’ll carry you there, Becky.”

  “Lucifer!” she cried. “Liar!”

  That was when he started, of course, being what he scowlingly called an optimist; he might have dredged the word up out of his childhood. He loved his wife. Whatever she did that she couldn’t help doing was all right. Whatever she was driven to say was all right. But it was not all right! Her trouble was that very desperation. And no one had the power to cause that except the one she desperately loved, who refused to consider that she was desperate. It was betrayal on betrayal.

  In her need tonight Laurel would have been willing to wish her mother and father dragged back to any torment of living because that torment was something they had known together, through each other. She wanted them with her to share her grief as she had been the sharer of theirs. She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands, her own and her father’s holding onto her mother’s, long after there was nothing more to be said.

  Laurel could remember, too, her mother holding her own hands before her eyes, very close, so that she seemed to be seeing them, the empty, working fingers.

  “Poor hands in winter, when she came back from the well—bleeding from the ice, from the ice!” her mother cried.

  “Who, Mother?” Laurel asked.

  “My mother!” she cried accusingly.

  After a stroke had crippled her further, she had come to believe—without being able to see her room, see a face, to verify anything by seeing—that she had been taken somewhere that was neither home nor “up home,” that she was left among strangers, for whom even anger meant nothing, on whom it would only be wasted. She had died without speaking a word, keeping everything to herself, in exile and humiliation.

  To Laurel while she still knew her, she had made a last remark: “You could have saved your mother’s life. But you stood by and wouldn’t intervene. I despair for you.”

  Baltimore was as far a place as you could go with those you loved, and it was where they left you.

  Then Laurel’s father, when he was approaching seventy, had married Fay. Both times he chose, he had suffered; she had seen him contain it. He died worn out with both wives—almost as if up to the last he had still had both of them.

  As he lay without moving in the hospital he had concentrated utterly on time passing, indeed he had. But which way had it been going for him? When he could no longer get up and encourage it, push it forward, had it turned on him, started moving back the other way?

  Fay had once at least called Becky “my rival.” Laurel thought: But the rivalry doesn’t lie where Fay thinks. It’s not between the living and the dead, between the old wife and the new; it’s between too much love and too little. There is no rivalry as bitter; Laurel had seen its work.

  Later and later into the night, with the buffeting kept at its distance, though
it never let up, Laurel sat under the lamp among the papers. She held in her hands her mother’s yellowed notebooks—correspondence records, address books—Virginia aunts and cousins long dead, West Virginia nieces and nephews now married and moved where Laurel no longer quite kept up with them. The brothers had moved down the mountain into town, into the city, and the banjo player who had known so many verses to “Where Have You Been, Billy Boy?” had turned into a bank official. Only the youngest had been able to come to Mount Salus to his sister’s funeral. He who had been the Evening Star climbed on two canes to her grave and said to Judge McKelva, as they stood together, “She’s a long way from West Virginia.”

  A familiar black-covered “composition book” came off the shelf and lay open on Laurel’s lap to “My Best Bread,” written out twenty or thirty years ago in her mother’s strict, pointed hand, giving everything but the steps of procedure. (“A cook is not exactly a fool.”) Underneath it had lain something older, a class notebook. Becky had sent herself to teacher’s college, wearing the deep-dyed blouse. It was her keeping her diagrams of Paradise Lost and Milton’s Universe that was so like her, pigeonholing them here as though she’d be likely to find them useful again. Laurel gazed down at the careful figuring of the modest household accounts, drifted along the lined pages (this was an old Mount Salus Bank book) to where they eased into garden diaries and the plots of her rose beds, her perennial borders. “I have just come in. Clinton is still toiling. I see him now from my kitchen window, struggling with the Mermaid rose.” “That fool fig tree is already putting out leaves. Will it never learn?”

  The last pigeonhole held letters her mother had saved from her own mother, from “up home.”

  She slipped them from their thin envelopes and read them now for herself. Widowed, her health failing, lonely and sometimes bedridden, Grandma wrote these letters to her young, venturesome, defiant, happily married daughter as to an exile, without ever allowing herself to put it into so many words. Laurel could hardly believe the bravery and serenity she had put into these short letters, in the quickened pencil to catch the pocket of one of “the boys” before he rode off again, dependent—Grandma then, as much as Laurel now—upon his remembering to mail them from “the courthouse.” She read on and met her own name on a page. “I will try to send Laurel a cup of sugar for her birthday. Though if I can find a way to do it, I would like to send her one of my pigeons. It would eat from her hand, if she would let it.”

  A flood of feeling descended on Laurel. She let the papers slide from her hand and the books from her knees, and put her head down on the open lid of the desk and wept in grief for love and for the dead. She lay there with all that was adamant in her yielding to this night, yielding at last. Now all she had found had found her. The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself, and it began to flow again.

  If Phil could have lived—

  But Phil was lost. Nothing of their life together remained except in her own memory; love was sealed away into its perfection and had remained there.

  If Phil had lived—

  She had gone on living with the old perfection undisturbed and undisturbing. Now, by her own hands, the past had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself—here waiting, all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel’s.

  What would have been their end, then? Suppose their marriage had ended like her father and mother’s? Or like her mother’s father and mother’s? Like—

  “Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!” Phil’s voice cried.

  She wept for what happened to life.

  “I wanted it!” Phil cried. His voice rose with the wind in the night and went around the house and around the house. It became a roar. “I wanted it!”

  Four

  SHE HAD SLEPT in the chair, like a passenger who had come on an emergency journey in a train. But she had rested deeply.

  She had dreamed that she was a passenger, and riding with Phil. They had ridden together over a long bridge.

  Awake, she recognized it: it was a dream of something that had really happened. When she and Phil were coming down from Chicago to Mount Salus to be married in the Presbyterian Church, they came on the train. Laurel, when she travelled back and forth between Mount Salus and Chicago, had always taken the sleeper—the same crack train she had just ridden from New Orleans. She and Phil followed the route on the day train, and she saw it for the first time.

  When they were climbing the long approach to a bridge after leaving Cairo, rising slowly higher until they rode above the tops of bare trees, she looked down and saw the pale light widening and the river bottoms opening out, and then the water appearing, reflecting the low, early sun. There were two rivers. Here was where they came together. This was the confluence of the waters, the Ohio and the Mississippi.

  They were looking down from a great elevation and all they saw was at the point of coming together, the bare trees marching in from the horizon, the rivers moving into one, and as he touched her arm she looked up with him and saw the long, ragged, pencil-faint line of birds within the crystal of the zenith, flying in a V of their own, following the same course down. All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.

  And they themselves were a part of the confluence. Their own joint act of faith had brought them here at the very moment and matched its occurrence, and proceeded as it proceeded. Direction itself was made beautiful, momentous. They were riding as one with it, right up front. It’s our turn! she’d thought exultantly. And we’re going to live forever.

  Left bodiless and graveless of a death made of water and fire in a year long gone, Phil could still tell her of her life. For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.

  She believed it just as she believed that the confluence of the waters was still happening at Cairo. It would be there the same as it ever was when she went flying over it today on her way back—out of sight, for her, this time, thousands of feet below, but with nothing in between except thin air.

  Philip Hand was an Ohio country boy. He had a country boy’s soft-spokenness and selfless energy and long-range plans. He had put himself through architectural school—Georgia Tech, because it was cheaper and warmer there—in her country; then had met her when she came north to study in his, at the Art Institute in Chicago. From far back, generations, they must have had common memories. (Ohio was across the river from West Virginia; the Ohio was his river.)

  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 equall
y 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.