The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [33]
“Why not indeed?” said Miss Adele. “Laurel has no other life.”
“Of course I must get back to work,” said Laurel.
“Back to work.” Miss Tennyson pointed her finger at Laurel and told the others, “That girl’s had more now than she can say grace over. And she’s going back to that life of labor when she could just as easily give it up. Clint’s left her a grand hunk of money.”
“Once you leave after this, you’ll always come back as a visitor,” Mrs. Pease warned Laurel. “Feel free, of course—but it was always my opinion that people don’t really want visitors.”
“I mean it. Why track back up to the North Pole?” asked Miss Tennyson. “Who’s going to kill you if you don’t draw those pictures? As I was saying to Tish, ‘Tish, if Laurel would stay home and Adele would retire, we could have as tough a bridge foursome as we had when Becky was playing.’ ”
“Are you figuring on running me out, then? Or what?” asked old Mrs. Pease, who had tottered to her feet.
“No, play on as you’re playing now,” said Miss Adele, smiling. “Nate’s adorable French wife in New Orleans would agree with Laurel perfectly: there’s not enough Mount Salus has to offer a brilliant mind.”
“There!” exclaimed Miss Tennyson. “I’d begun to despair that we could ever make Laurel McKelva laugh on this trip at all.”
“I’ve got my passage,” Laurel said. “The afternoon flight from Jackson on Monday.”
“And she’ll make it, too. Oh, Laurel can do anything. If it’s been made hard enough for her,” said Miss Adele. “Of course she can give up Mount Salus and say goodbye to this house and to us, and the past, and go on back to Chicago day after tomorrow, flying a jet. And take up one more time where she left off.”
Laurel stood up and kissed the mischievous, wrinkled cheek.
“Laurel, look yonder. You still might change your mind if you could see the roses bloom, see Becky’s Climber come out,” said Miss Tennyson softly.
“I can imagine it, in Chicago.”
“But you can’t smell it,” Miss Tennyson argued.
All of them wandered toward the rose bed, where every hybrid tea stood low with branches cut staggered. They were hiding themselves in an opalescent growth of leaf. Behind them—Laurel took a few steps farther—the climbers rose: Mermaid, solid as a thicket, on the Pease side, and Banksia in its first feathery bloom on the Courtland side, and between them the width of bare fence where Becky’s Climber belonged. Judge McKelva had recalled himself at Becky’s Climber.
(“I’d give a pretty to know what exactly that rose is!” Laurel’s mother would say every spring when it opened its first translucent flowers of the true rose color. “It’s an old one, with an old fragrance, and has every right to its own name, but nobody in Mount Salus is interested in giving it to me. All I had to do was uncover it and give it the room it asked for. Look at it! It’s on its own roots, of course, utterly strong. That old root there may be a hundred years old!”
“Or older,” Judge McKelva had said, giving her, from the deck chair, his saturnine smile. “Strong as an old apple tree.”)
Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of match-flame had pierced through the severely cut-back trunk. If it didn’t bloom this year, it would next: “That’s how gardeners must learn to look at it,” her mother would say.
Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.
“So we’ve settled Laurel. But has anybody but Tennyson settled Fay? I don’t see how we can think so,” said Miss Adele, with the excruciated dimple making a shadow in her cheek. “When we really lack the first idea of knowing what to do with Clinton’s little minx, whom he’s left on our hands in such utter disregard for our feelings.” She was doing her best, getting back into her form today.
“Short of crowning her over the head with a good solid piece of something,” agreed Miss Tennyson. “She’ll live forever and a day. She’ll be right here when we’re gone. Why do all the men