The Optimist's Daughter (2 page)

“It’s like Mother’s. This was the way she started.”

“Now, Laurel, I don’t have very much imagination,” protested Dr. Courtland. “So I go with caution. I was pretty close to ’em, there at home, Judge Mac and Miss Becky both. I stood over what happened to your mother.”

“I was there too. You know nobody could blame you, or imagine how you could have prevented anything—”

“If we’d known then what we know now. The eye was just a part of it,” he said. “With your mother.”

Laurel looked for a moment into the experienced face, so entirely guileless. The Mississippi country that lay behind him was all in it.

He stood up. “Of course, if you ask me to do it, I will,” he said. “But I wish you wouldn’t ask me.”

“Father’s not going to let you off,” Laurel said quietly.

“Isn’t my vote going to get counted at all?” Fay asked, following them out. “I vote we just forget about the whole business. Nature’s the great healer.”

“All right, Nate,” Judge McKelva said, when they had all sat down together in Dr. Courtland’s consulting office. “How soon?”

Dr. Courtland said, “Judge Mac, I’ve just managed to catch Dr. Kunomoto by the coat-tails over in Houston. You know, he taught me. He’s got a more radical method now, and he can fly here day after tomorrow—”

“What for?” Judge McKelva said. “Nate, I hied myself away from home and comfort and tracked down here and put myself in your hands for one simple reason: I’ve got confidence in you. Now show me I’m still not too old to exercise good judgment.”

“All right, sir, then that’s the way it’ll be,” Dr. Courtland said, rising. He added, “You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred per cent predictable?”

“Well, I’m an optimist.”

“I didn’t know there were any more such animals,” said Dr. Courtland.

“Never think you’ve seen the last of anything,”
scoffed Judge McKelva. He answered the Doctor’s smile with a laugh that was like the snarl of triumph from an old grouch, and Dr. Courtland, taking the glasses the Judge held on his knees, gently set them back onto his nose.

In his same walk, like a rather stately ploughboy’s, the Doctor led them through the jammed waiting room. “I’ve got you in the hospital, they’ve reserved me the operating room, and I’m fixed up, too,” he said.

“He can move heaven and earth, just ask him to,” said his nurse in a cross voice as they passed her in the doorway.

“Go right on over to the hospital and settle in.” As the elevator doors opened, Dr. Courtland touched Laurel lightly on the shoulder. “I ordered you the ambulance downstairs, sir—it’s a safer ride.”

“What’s he acting so polite about?” Fay asked, as they went down. “I bet when the bill comes in he won’t charge so polite.”

“I’m in good hands, Fay,” Judge McKelva told her. “I know his whole family.”

There was a sharp, cold wind blowing through Canal Street. Back home, Judge McKelva had always set the example for Mount Salus in putting aside his winter hat on Straw Hat Day, and he stood here now in his creamy panama. But though his paunch was bigger, he looked less ruddy, looked thinner in the face than on his wedding day, Laurel thought: this
was the last time she had seen him. The mushroom-colored patches under his eyes belonged there, hereditary like the black and overhanging McKelva eyebrows that nearly met in one across his forehead—but what was he seeing? She wondered if through that dilated but benevolent gaze of his he was really quite seeing Fay, or herself, or anybody at all. In the lime-white glare of New Orleans, waiting for the ambulance without questioning the need for it, he seemed for the first time in her memory a man admitting to a little uncertainty in his bearings.

“If Courtland’s all that much, he better put in a better claim on how good this is going to turn out,” said Fay. “And he’s not so perfect—I saw him spank that nurse.”

2

F
AY SAT AT THE WINDOW
, Laurel stood in the doorway; they were in the hospital room waiting for Judge McKelva to be brought back after surgery.

“What a way to keep his promise,” said Fay. “When
he told me he’d bring me to New Orleans some day, it was to see the Carnival.” She stared out the window. “And the Carnival’s going on right now. It looks like this is as close as we’ll get to a parade.”

Laurel looked again at her watch.

“He came out fine! He stood it fine!” Dr. Courtland called out. He strode into the room, still in his surgical gown. He grinned at Laurel from a face that poured sweat. “And I think with luck we’re going to keep some vision in that eye.”

The tablelike bed with Judge McKelva affixed to it was wheeled into the room, and he was carried past the two women. Both his eyes were bandaged. Sandbags were packed about his head, the linen pinned across the big motionless mound of his body close enough to bind him.

“You didn’t tell me he’d look like that,” said Fay.

“He’s fine, he’s absolutely splendid,” said Dr. Courtland. “He’s got him a beautiful eye.” He opened his mouth and laughed aloud. He was speaking with excitement, some carry-over of elation, as though he’d just come in from a party.

“Why, you can’t hardly tell even who it is under all that old pack. It’s big as a house,” said Fay, staring down at Judge McKelva.

“He’s going to surprise us all. If we can make it stick, he’s going to have a little vision he didn’t think was coming to him! That’s a
beautiful
eye.”

“But
look
at him,” said Fay. “When’s he going to come to?”

“Oh, he’s got plenty of time,” said Dr. Courtland, on his way.

Judge McKelva’s head was unpillowed, lengthening the elderly, exposed throat. Not only the great dark eyes but their heavy brows and their heavy undershadows were hidden, too, by the opaque gauze. With so much of its dark and bright both taken from it, and with his sleeping mouth as colorless as his cheeks, his face looked quenched.

This was a double room, but Judge McKelva had it, for the time being, to himself. Fay had stretched out a while ago on the second bed. The first nurse had come on duty; she sat crocheting a baby’s bootee, so automatically that she appeared to be doing it in her sleep. Laurel moved about, as if to make sure that the room was all in order, but there was nothing to do; not yet. This was like a nowhere. Even what could be seen from the high window might have been the rooftops of any city, colorless and tarpatched, with here and there small mirrors of rainwater. At first, she did not realize she could see the bridge—it stood out there dull in the distance, its function hardly evident, as if it were only another building. The river was not visible. She lowered the blind against the wide white sky that reflected it. It seemed to her that the grayed-down, anonymous
room might be some reflection itself of Judge McKelva’s “disturbance,” his dislocated vision that had brought him here.

Then Judge McKelva began grinding and gnashing his teeth.

“Father?” Laurel moved near.

“That’s only the way he wakes up,” said Fay from her bed, without opening her eyes. “I get it every morning.”

Laurel stood near him, waiting.

“What’s the verdict?” her father presently asked, in a parched voice. “Eh, Polly?” He called Laurel by her childhood name. “What’s your mother have to say about me?”

“Look-a-here!” exclaimed Fay. She jumped up and pattered toward his bed in her stockinged feet. “Who’s
this?”
She pointed to the gold button over her breastbone.

The nurse, without stopping her crochet hook, spoke from the chair. “Don’t go near that eye, hon! Don’t nobody touch him or monkey with that eye of his, and don’t even touch the bed he’s on, till Dr. Courtland says touch, or somebody’ll be mighty sorry. And Dr. Courtland will skin me alive.”

“That’s right,” said Dr. Courtland, coming in; then he bent close and spoke exuberantly into the aghast face. “All through with my part, sir! Your part’s just starting! And yours will be harder than mine. You got to lie still! No moving. No turning. No tears.” He
smiled. “No nothing! Just the passage of time. We’ve got to wait on your eye.”

When the doctor straightened, the nurse said, “I wish he’d waited for me to give him a sip of water before he took off again.”

“Go ahead. Wet his whistle, he’s awake,” said Dr. Courtland and moved to the door. “He’s just possuming.” His finger beckoned Laurel and Fay outside.

“Now listen, you’ve got to watch him. Starting now. Take turns. It’s not as easy as anybody thinks to lie still and nothing else. I’ll talk Mrs. Martello into doing private duty at night. Laurel, a good thing you’ve got the time. He’s going to get extra-special care, and we’re not running any risks on Judge Mac.”

Laurel, when he’d gone, went to the pay telephone in the corridor. She called her studio; she was a professional designer of fabrics in Chicago.

“No point in you staying just because the doctor said so,” said Fay when Laurel hung up. She had listened like a child.

“Why, I’m staying for my own sake,” said Laurel. She decided to put off the other necessary calls. “Father’ll need all the time both of us can give him. He’s not very well suited to being tied down.”

“O.K., that’s not a matter of life and death, is it?” said Fay in a cross voice. As they went back to the room together, Fay leaned over the bed and said, “I’m glad you can’t see yourself, hon.”

Judge McKelva gave out a shocking and ragged
sound, a snore, and firmed his mouth. He asked, “What’s the time, Fay?”

“That sounds more like you,” she said, but didn’t tell him the time. “It was that old
ether
talking when he came to before,” she said to Laurel. “Why, he hadn’t even mentioned Becky, till you and Courtland started him.”

The Hibiscus was a half hour’s ride away on the city’s one remaining streetcar line, but through the help of one of the floor nurses, Laurel and Fay were able to find rooms there by the week. It was a decayed mansion on a changing street; what had been built as its twin next door was a lesson to it now: it was far along in the course of being demolished.

Laurel hardly ever saw any of the other roomers, although the front door was never locked and the bathroom was always busy; at the hours when she herself came and went, the Hibiscus seemed to be in the sole charge of a cat on a chain, pacing the cracked-open floral tiles that paved the front gallery. Long in the habit of rising early, she said she would be with her father by seven. She would stay until three, when Fay would come to sit until eleven; Fay could ride the streetcar back in the safe company of the nurse, who lived nearby. And Mrs. Martello said she would take on the private duty late shift for the sake of one living man, that Dr. Courtland. So the pattern was set.

It meant that Laurel and Fay were hardly ever in the same place at the same time, except during the hours when they were both asleep in their rooms at the Hibiscus. These were adjoining—really half rooms; the partition between their beds was only a landlord’s strip of wallboard. Where there was no intimacy, Laurel shrank from contact; she shrank from that thin board and from the vague apprehension that some night she might hear Fay cry or laugh like a stranger at something she herself would rather not know.

In the mornings, Judge McKelva ground his teeth, Laurel spoke to him, he waked up, and found out from Laurel how she was and what time her watch showed. She gave him his breakfast; while she fed him she could read him the
Picayune
. Then while he was being washed and shaved she went to her own breakfast in the basement cafeteria. The trick was not to miss the lightning visits of Dr. Courtland. On lucky days, she rode up in the elevator with him.

“It’s clearing some,” Dr. Courtland said. “It’s not to be hurried.”

By this time, only the operated eye had to be covered. A hivelike dressing stood on top of it. Judge McKelva seemed inclined to still lower the lid over his good eye. Perhaps, open, it could see the other eye’s bandage. He lay as was asked of him, without moving. He never asked about his eye. He never mentioned his eye. Laurel followed his lead.

Neither did he ask about her. His old curiosity
would have prompted a dozen specific questions about how she was managing to stay here, what was happening up in Chicago, who had given her her latest commission, when she would have to go. She had left in the middle of her present job—designing a theatre curtain for a repertory theatre. Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.

He’d loved being read to, once. With good hopes, she brought in a stack of paperbacks and began on the newest of his favorite detective novelist. He listened but without much comment. She went back to one of the old ones they’d both admired, and he listened with greater quiet. Pity stabbed her. Did they
move too fast
for him now?

Part of her father’s silence Laurel laid, at first, to the delicacy he had always shown in family feelings. (There had only been the three of them.) Here was his daughter, come to help him and yet wrenched into idleness; she could not help him. Fay was accurate about it: any stranger could tell him the time. Eventually, Laurel saw that her father had accepted her uselessness with her presence all along. What occupied his full mind was time itself; time passing: he was concentrating.