The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [0]
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