The Optimist's Daughter Read online

  BOOKS BY EUDORA WELTY

  A Curtain of Green

  The Robber Bridegroom

  The Wide Net

  Delta Wedding

  The Golden Apples

  The Ponder Heart

  The Bride of the Innisfallen

  Losing Battles

  One Time, One Place

  The Eye of the Story

  One Writer’s Beginnings

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 1990

  Copyright © 1969, 1972 by Eudora Welty

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto Originally published by Random House, Inc, in May 1972

  The Optimists Daughter appeared originally in The New

  Yorker in a shorter and different form

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Welty, Eudora, 1909

  The optimists daughter

  I Title

  PZ3 W6960p 1978 [PS3545 E6] 813’ 5’2 89-40630

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78731-6

  v3.1

  For C.A.W.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Three Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Four

  About the Author

  One

  1

  A NURSE held the door open for them. Judge McKelva going first, then his daughter Laurel, then his wife Fay, they walked into the windowless room where the doctor would make his examination. Judge McKelva was a tall, heavy man of seventy-one who customarily wore his glasses on a ribbon. Holding them in his hand now, he sat on the raised, thronelike chair above the doctor’s stool, flanked by Laurel on one side and Fay on the other.

  Laurel McKelva Hand was a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark. She wore clothes of an interesting cut and texture, although her suit was wintry for New Orleans and had a wrinkle down the skirt. Her dark blue eyes looked sleepless.

  Fay, small and pale in her dress with the gold buttons, was tapping her sandaled foot.

  It was a Monday morning of early March. New Orleans was out-of-town for all of them.

  Dr. Courtland, on the dot, crossed the room in long steps and shook hands with Judge McKelva and Laurel. He had to be introduced to Fay, who had been married to Judge McKelva for only a year and a half. Then the doctor was on the stool, with his heels hung over the rung. He lifted his face in appreciative attention: as though it were he who had waited in New Orleans for Judge McKelva—in order to give the Judge a present, or for the Judge to bring him one.

  “Nate,” Laurel’s father was saying, “the trouble may be I’m not as young as I used to be. But I’m ready to believe it’s something wrong with my eyes.”

  As though he had all the time in the world, Dr. Courtland, the well-known eye specialist, folded his big country hands with the fingers that had always looked, to Laurel, as if their mere touch on the crystal of a watch would convey to their skin exactly what time it was.

  “I date this little disturbance from George Washington’s Birthday,” Judge McKelva said.

  Dr. Courtland nodded, as though that were a good day for it. “Tell me about the little disturbance,” he said.

  “I’d come in. I’d done a little rose pruning—I’ve retired, you know. And I stood at the end of my front porch there, with an eye on the street—Fay had slipped out somewhere,” said Judge McKelva, and bent on her his benign smile that looked so much like a scowl.

  “I was only uptown in the beauty parlor, letting Myrtis roll up my hair,” said Fay.

  “And I saw the fig tree,” said Judge McKelva. “The fig tree! Giving off flashes from those old bird-frighteners Becky saw fit to tie on it years back!”

  Both men smiled. They were of two generations but the same place. Becky was Laurel’s mother. Those little homemade reflectors, rounds of tin, did not halfway keep the birds from the figs in July.

  “Nate, you remember as well as I do, that tree stands between my backyard and where your mother used to keep her cowshed. But it flashed at me when I was peering off in the direction of the Courthouse,” Judge McKelva went on. “So I was forced into the conclusion I’d started seeing behind me.”

  Fay laughed—a single, high note, as derisive as a jay’s.

  “Yes, that’s disturbing.” Dr. Courtland rolled forward on his stool. “Let’s just have a good look.”

  “I looked. I couldn’t see anything had got in it,” said Fay. “One of those briars might have given you a scratch, hon, but it didn’t leave a thorn.”

  “Of course, my memory had slipped. Becky would say it served me right. Before blooming is the wrong time to prune a climber,” Judge McKelva went on in the same confidential way; the doctor’s face was very near to his. “But Becky’s Climber I’ve found will hardly take a setback.”

  “Hardly,” the doctor murmured. “I believe my sister still grows one now from a cutting of Miss Becky’s Climber.” His face, however, went very still as he leaned over to put out the lights.

  “It’s dark!” Fay gave a little cry. “Why did he have to go back there anyway and get mixed up in those brambles? Because I was out of the house a minute?”

  “Because George Washington’s Birthday is the time-honored day to prune roses back home,” said the Doctor’s amicable voice. “You should’ve asked Adele to step over and prune ’em for you.”

  “Oh, she offered,” said Judge McKelva, and dismissed her case with the slightest move of the hand. “I think by this point I ought to be about able to get the hang of it.”

  Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty saraband, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle.

  “You’ve had further disturbances since, Judge Mac?”

  “Oh, a dimness. Nothing to call my attention to it like that first disturbance.”

  “So why not leave it to Nature?” Fay said. “That’s what I keep on telling him.”

  Laurel had only just now got here from the airport; she had come on a night flight from Chicago. The meeting had been unexpected, arranged over longdistance yesterday evening. Her father, in the old home in Mount Salus, Mississippi, took pleasure in telephoning instead of writing, but this had been a curiously reticent conversation on his side. At the very last, he’d said, “By the way, Laurel, I’ve been getting a little interference with my seeing, lately. I just might give Nate Courtland a chance to see what he can find.” He’d added, “Fay says she’ll come along and do some shopping.”

  His admission of self-concern was as new as anything wrong with his health, and Laurel had come flying.

  The excruciatingly small, brilliant eye of the instrument hung still between Judge McKelva’s set face and the Doctor’s hidden one.

  Eventually the ceiling lights blazed on again, and Dr. Courtland stood, studying Judge McKelva, who studied him back.

  “I thought I was bringing you a little something to keep you busy,” Judge McKelva said in the cooperating voice in which, before he retired from the bench, he used to hand down a sentence.

  “Your right retina’s slipped, Judge Mac,” Dr
. Courtland said.

  “All right, you can fix that,” said Laurel’s father.

  “It needs to be repaired without any more waste of precious time.”

  “All right, when can you operate?”

  “Just for a scratch? Why didn’t those old roses go on and die?” Fay cried.

  “But this eye didn’t get a scratch. What happened didn’t happen to the outside of his eye, it happened to the inside. The flashes, too. To the part he sees with, Mrs. McKelva.” Dr. Courtland, turning from the Judge and Laurel, beckoned Fay to his chart hanging on the wall. Giving out perfume, she walked across to it. “Here’s the outside and here’s the inside of our eye,” he said. He pointed out on the diagram what would have to be done.

  Judge McKelva inclined his weight so as to speak to Laurel in her chair below him. “That eye wasn’t fooling, was it!” he said.

  “I don’t see why this had to happen to me,” said Fay.

  Dr. Courtland led the Judge to the door and into the hallway. “Will you make yourself comfortable in my office, sir, and let my nurse bother you with a few more questions?”

  When he returned to the examining room he sat in the patient’s chair.

  “Laurel,” he said, “I don’t want to do this operation myself.” He went on quickly, “I’ve kept being so sorry about your mother.” He turned and gave what might have been his first direct look at Fay. “My family’s known his family for such a long time,” he told her—a sentence never said except to warn of the unsayable.

  “What is the location of the tear?” Laurel asked.

  “Close to central,” he told her. She kept her eyes on his and he added, “No tumor.”

  “Before I even let you try, I think I ought to know how good he’ll see,” said Fay.

  “Now, that depends first on where the tear comes,” said Dr. Courtland. “And after that on how good a mender the surgeon is, and then on how well Judge Mac will agree to take our orders, and then on the Lord’s will. This girl remembers.” He nodded toward Laurel.

  “An operation’s not a thing you just jump into, I know that much,” Fay said.

  “You don’t want him to wait and lose all the vision in that eye. He’s got a cataract forming on his other eye,” said Dr. Courtland.

  Laurel said, “Father has?”

  “I found it before I left Mount Salus. It’s been coming along for years, taking its time. He’s apprised; he thinks it’ll hold off.” He smiled.

  “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

  FAY 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.