The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [12]
“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.
“I saw a man