The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [16]
Miss Adele nodded her head.
“What happened was not to Father’s eye at all. Father was going to see,” Laurel told her. “Dr. Courtland was right about the eye. He did everything right.” Miss Adele nodded, and Laurel finished, “What happened wasn’t like what happened to Mother.”
Miss Adele lifted the stacked clean dishes off the kitchen table and carried them into the dining room and put them away in their right places on the shelves of the china closet. She arranged the turkey platter to stand in its groove at the back of the gravy bowl. She put the glasses in, and restored the little wine glasses to their ring around the decanter, with its mended glass stopper still intact. She shut the shivering glass door gently, so as not to rock the old top-heavy cabinet.
“People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel.” She turned around, and the chandelier threw its light down on her. Her fine-drawn, elegant face might almost have withered a little more while she was out here with the kitchen to herself. She wore her faded hair as she had always worn it from the day when she was Laurel’s first-grade teacher, in a Psyche knot. Her voice was as capable of authority as ever. “Sleep, now, Laurel. We’ll all be back here in the morning, and you know we won’t be the only ones. Goodnight!”
She left by the kitchen door, as always, and stepped home through the joining backyards. It was dark and fragrant out there. When the Courtland kitchen light went on, Laurel closed her back door too, and walked through the house putting out lights. The only illumination on the stairs came from the lamp that they had turned on for her by her bed.
In her own room, she undressed, raised the window, got into bed with the first book her fingers found, and lay without opening it.
The quiet of the Mount Salus night was a little different now. She could hear traffic on some new highway, a sound like the buzzing of one angry fly against a windowpane, over and over.
When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.
Fay slept farther away tonight than in the Hibiscus—they could not hear each other in this house—but nearer in a different way. She was sleeping in the bed where Laurel was born; and where her mother had died. What Laurel listened for tonight was the striking of the mantel clock downstairs in the parlor. It never came.
2
AT THE INEVITABLE HOUR, Laurel started from her bed and went downstairs in her dressing gown. It was a clear, bright seven o’clock, with morning shadows dappling the shine of the floors and the dining room table. And there was Missouri, standing in her hat and coat in the middle of the kitchen.
“Am I supposed to believe what I hear?” asked Missouri.
Laurel went to her and took her in her arms.
Missouri took off her hat and coat and hung them on the nail with her shoulder bag. She washed her hands, and then she shook out a fresh apron, just as she’d started every morning off during Laurel’s mother’s life in Mount Salus.
“Well, I’m here and you’re here,” said Missouri. It was the bargain to give and take comfort. After a moment’s hesitation, Missouri went on, “He always want Miss Fay to have her breakfast in bed.”
“Then you’ll know how to wake her,” said Laurel. “When you take it up. Do you