The Optimist's Daughter

  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.

  4

  IT WAS NOT THAT NIGHT but the next that Laurel, in her room at the Hibiscus, having already undressed, suddenly dressed again. As she ran down the steps into the warm, uneasy night, the roof light went on in a passing cab. She hailed and ran for it.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are, sister,” said the driver. “Getting you something-to-ride on a night like tonight.”

  The interior of the cab reeked of bourbon, and as they passed under a streetlight she saw a string of cheap green beads on the floor—a favor tossed from a parade float. The driver took back streets, squeezing around at every corner, it seemed to Laurel, who was straining forward; but when she let down the window glass for air, she heard the same mocking trumpet playing with a band from the same distance away. Then she heard more than one band, heard rival bands playing up distant streets.

  Perhaps what she had felt was no more than the atmospheric oppression of a Carnival night, of crowds running wild in the streets of a strange city. And at the very beginning of the day, when she entered her father’s room, she thought something had already happened to Mr. Dalzell. He was up on a wheeled table, baldheaded as an infant, hook-nosed and silent—they had taken away his teeth. It was only that something was going to happen. A pair of orderlies came during Judge McKelva’s breakfast to take Mr. Dalzell to the operating room. As he was wheeled out, no longer vigilant, into the corridor, his voice trailed back, “Told you rascals not to let the fire go out.” They had still not brought him back when Laurel left.

  A strange milky radiance shone in a hospital corridor at night, like moonlight on some deserted street. The whitened floor, the whitened walls and ceiling, were set with narrow bands of black receding into the distance, along which the spaced-out doors, graduated from large to small, were all closed. Laurel had never noticed the design in the tiling before, like some clue she would need to follow to get to the right place. But of course the last door on the right of the corridor, the one standing partway open as usual, was still her father’s.

  An intense, tight little voice from inside there said at that moment in high pitch, “I tell you enough is enough!”

  Laurel was halted. A thousand packthreads seemed to cross and crisscross her skin, binding her there.

  The voice said, even higher, “This is my birthday!”

  Laurel saw Mrs. Martello go running from the nurse’s station into the room. Then Mrs. Martello reappeared, struggling her way backwards. She was pulling Fay, holding her bodily. A scream shot out and ricocheted from walls and ceiling. Fay broke free from the nurse, whirled, and with high-raised knees and white face came running down the corridor. Fists drumming against her temples, she knocked against Laurel as if Laurel wasn’t there. Her high heels let off a fusillade of sounds as she passed and hurled herself into the waiting room with voice rising, like a child looking for its mother.

  Mrs. Martello came panting up to Laurel, heavy on her rubber heels.

  “She laid hands on him! She said if he didn’t snap out of it, she’d—” The veneer of nurse slipped from Mrs. Martello—she pushed up at Laurel the red, shocked face of a Mississippi countrywoman as her voice rose to a clear singsong. “She taken ahold of him. She was abusing him.” The word went echoing. “I think she was fixing to pull him out of that bed. I think she thought she could! Sure, she wasn’t able to move that mountain!” Mrs. Martello added wildly, “She’s not a nurse!” She swung her starched body around and sent her voice back toward Judge McKelva’s door. “What’s the matter with that woman? Does she want to ruin your eye?”

  At last her legs drove her. Laurel ran.

  The door stood wide open, and inside the room’s darkness a watery constellation hung, throbbing and near. She was looking straight out at the whole Mississippi River Bridge in lights. She found her way, the night light was burning. Her father’s right arm was free of the cover and lay out on the bed. It was bare to the shoulder, its skin soft and gathered, like a woman’s sleeve. It showed her that he was no longer concentrating. At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his, and she reached to put her hand into his open hand and press it gently.

  He made what seemed to her a response at last, yet a mysterious response. His whole, pillowless head went dusky, as if he laid it under the surface of dark, pouring water and held it there.

  Every light in the room blazed on. Dr. Courtland, a dark shape, shoved past her to the bed. He set his fingertips to her father’s wrist. Then his hand passed over the operated eye; with its same delicacy it opened the good eye. He bent over and stared in, without speaking. He knocked back the sheet and laid the side of his head against her father’s gowned chest; for a moment his own eyes closed.

  It was her father who appeared to Laurel as the one listening. His upper lip had lifted, short and soft as a child’s, showing ghostly-pale teeth which no one ever saw when he spoke or laughed. It gave him the smile of a child who is hiding in the dark while the others hunt him, waiting to be found.

  Now the doctor’s hand swung and drove for the signal button. “Get out in a hurry. And collar his wife and hold her. Both of you go in the waiting room, stay there till I come.”

  The nurse pushed into the room, with another nurse at her shoulder.

  “Now what did he pull?” Mrs. Martello cried.

  The other nurse whipped the curtains along the rod between the two beds, shutting out Mr. Dalzell’s neat, vacated bed and the rocking chair with the felt hat hanging on it. With her toe, she kicked out of her way the fallen window blind lying there on the floor.

  Dr. Courtland, using both hands, drew Laurel outside the room. “Laurel, no time to lose.” He closed the door on her.

  But in the hall, she heard him give an answer to the nurse. “The renegade! I believe he’s just plain sneaked out on us.”

  In the waiting room, Fay stood being patted by an old woman who was wearing bedroom slippers and holding a half-eaten banana in her free hand.

  “Night after night, sitting up there with him, putting the food in his mouth, giving him his straw, letting him use up my cigarettes, keeping him from thinking!” Fay was crying on the woman’s bosom. “Then to get hauled out by an uppity nurse who doesn’t know my business from hers!”

  Laurel went up to her. “Fay, it can’t be much more serious. The doctor’s closed in with Father now.”

  “Never speak to me again!” shrieked Fay without turning around. “That nurse dragged me and pushed me, and you’re the one let her do it!”

  “Dr. Courtland wants us to stay here till he calls us.”

  “You bet I’m staying! Just wait till he hears what I’ve got to say to him!” cried Fay.

  “You pore little woman,” said the old woman easily. “Don’t they give us all a hard time.”

  “I believe he’s dying,” said Laurel.

  Fay spun around, darted out her head, and spat at her.

  The old woman said, “Now whoa. Why don’t you-all take a seat and save your strength? Just wait and let them come tell you about it. They will.” There was an empty chair in the circle pulled up around a table, and Fay sat down among five or six grown men and women who all had the old woman’s likeness. Their coats were on the table in a heap together, and open shoeboxes and paper sacks stood about on the floor; they were a family in the middle of their supper.

  Laurel began walking, past this group and the others who were sprawled or sleeping in chairs and on couches, past the television scree
n where a pale-blue group of Westerners silently shot it out with one another, and as far as the door into the hall, where she stood for a minute looking at the clock in the wall above the elevators, then walked her circle again.

  The family Fay had sat down with never let the conversation die.

  “Go on in there, Archie Lee, it’s still your turn,” the old woman said.

  “I ain’t ready to go.” A great hulking man in a short coat like a red blanket, who was too gray-headed to be her child, spoke like her child and took a drink from a pint bottle of whiskey.

  “They still ain’t letting us in but one at a time. It’s your turn,” the old woman said. She went on to Fay. “You from Mississippi? We’re from Mississippi. Most of us claims Fox Hill.”

  “I’m not from Mississippi. I’m from Texas.” She let out a long cry.

  “Yours been operated on? Ours been operated on,” said one of the daughters to Fay. “He’s been in intensive care ever since they got through with him. His chances are a hundred to one against.”

  “Go on in yonder, scare-cat,” ordered the mother.

  “They went in my husband’s eye without consulting my feelings and next they try to run me out of this hospital!” cried Fay.

  “Mama, it’s Archie Lee’s turn, and I come after you. Go yourself,” said the daughter.

  “I reckon you’ll have to excuse me a minute,” the old woman said to Fay. She began brushing at her bosom where Fay had cried, shaking herself to get the crumbs off her skirt. “I declare, I’m getting to where I ain’t got much left to say to Dad myself.”

  “You know what his face looks like to me? A piece of paper,” said a wizened-looking daughter.

  “I ain’t going to tell him that,” said the old woman.

  “Tell him you ain’t got too much longer to stay,” suggested one of the sons.

  “Ask him if he knows who you are,” said the wizened-looking daughter.

  “Or you can just try keeping your mouth shut,” said Archie Lee.

  “He’s your dad, the same as mine,” warned the old woman. “I’m going in because you skipped your turn. Now wait for me! Don’t run off and leave me.”

  “He don’t know I’m living,” said Archie Lee, as the woman trudged through the doorway in Indian moccasins. He tilted up the bottle: Mr. Dalzell’s son, long lost.

  Fay sobbed the louder after the old woman went.

  “How you like Mississippi?” Mr. Dalzell’s family asked, almost in a chorus. “Don’t you think it’s friendly?” asked the wizened daughter.

  “I guess I’m used to Texas.”

  “Mississippi is the best state in the Union,” said Archie Lee and he put his feet up and stretched out full length on the couch.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t have kin here. I had a grandpa living close to Bigbee, Mississippi,” Fay said.

  “Now you’re talking!” the youngest girl said. “We know right where Bigbee is, could find it for you right now. Fox Hill is harder to find than Bigbee. But we don’t think it’s lonesome, because by the time you get all of us together, there’s nine of us, not counting the tadpoles. Ten, if Granddad gets over this. He’s got cancer.”

  “Cancer’s what my dad had. And Grandpa! Grandpa loved me better than all the rest. That sweet old man, he died in my arms,” Fay said, glaring at Laurel across the room. “They died, but not before they did every bit they could to help themselves, and tried all their might to get better, for our sakes. They said they knew, if they just tried hard enough—”

  “I always tell mine to have faith,” said the wizened daughter.

  And as if their vying and trouble-swapping were the order of the day, or the order of the night, in the waiting room, they were all as unaware of the passing of the minutes as the man on the couch, whose dangling hand now let the bottle drop and slide like an empty slipper across the floor into Laurel’s path. She walked on, giving them the wide berth of her desolation.

  “Wish they’d give Dad something to drink. Wash his mouth out,” said the old mother coming back—Laurel nearly met her in the door.

  “Remember Mamie’s boy?” Another family had come in, grouping themselves around the Coke machine. The man who was working it called out, “He shot hisself or somebody shot him, one. He begged for water. The hospital wouldn’t give him none. Honey, he died wanting water.”

  “I remember Joe Boy Bush from Bruintown,” a man retorted, turning around from the television screen. “He was laying there going without water and he reached himself over and bit that tube in two and drunk that glucose. And drunk ever’ drop that was in it. And that fool, in two weeks he was up out of that bed and they send him home.”

  “Two weeks! Guess how long they’ve held us here!” cried Fay.

  “If they don’t give your dad no water by next time round, tell you what, we’ll go in there all together and pour it down him,” promised the old mother. “If he’s going to die, I don’t want him to die wanting water.”

  “That’s talking, Mama.”

  “Ain’t that true, Archie Lee?”

  But Archie Lee lay on the couch with his mouth open.

  “There’s a fair sight. I’m glad his dad can’t walk in on us and see him,” said the old woman. “No, if Dad’s going to die I ain’t going to let him die wanting water!” she insisted, and the others began raggedly laughing.

  “We’ll pour it down him!” cried the mother. “He ain’t going to stand a chance against us!” The family laughed louder, as if there could be no helping it. Some of the other families joined in. It seemed to Laurel that in another moment the whole waiting room would dissolve itself in waiting-room laughter.

  Dr. Courtland stood in the doorway, the weight of his watch in his hand.

  When Laurel and Fay reached him, he drew them into the elevator hall. The door to Judge McKelva’s room stood closed.

  “I couldn’t save him.” He laid a hand on the sleeve of each woman, standing between them. He bent his head, but that did not hide the aggrievement, indignation, that was in his voice. “He’s gone, and his eye was healing.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you let my husband die?” Fay cried.

  “He collapsed.” Fatigue had pouched the doctor’s face, his cheeks hung gray. He kept his touch on their arms.

  “You picked my birthday to do it on!” Fay screamed out, just as Mrs. Martello came out of the room. She closed the door behind her. She was carrying a hamper. She pretended not to see them as she drummed past on her heels.

  Laurel felt the Doctor’s hand shift to grip her arm; she had been about to go straight to the unattended. He began walking the two women toward the elevators. Laurel became aware that he was in evening clothes.

  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.