The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [1]
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,