The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [36]
But something had been spilled on the desk. There were vermilion drops of hardened stuff on the dark wood—not sealing wax; nail polish. They made a little track toward the chair, as if Fay had walked her fingers over the desk from where she’d sat perched on its corner, doing her nails.
Laurel seated herself in her father’s chair and reached for the top drawer of his desk, which she had never thought of opening in her life. It was not locked—had it ever been? The drawer rolled out almost weightless, as light as his empty cigar box, the only thing inside. She opened the drawers one after the other on both sides of the huge desk: they had been cleaned out. Someone had, after all, been here ahead of her.
Of course, his documents he had placed in the office safe; they were in Major Bullock’s charge now, and his will was in Chancery court. But what of all the letters written to him—her mother’s letters?
Her mother had written to him every day they were separated in their married lives; she had said so. He often went about to court, made business trips; and she, every summer since she had married him, had spent a full month in West Virginia, “up home,” usually with Laurel along. Where were the letters? Put away somewhere, with her garden picture?
They weren’t anywhere, because he hadn’t kept them. He’d never kept them: Laurel knew it and should have known it to start with. He had dispatched all his correspondence promptly, and dropped letters as he answered them straight into the wastebasket; Laurel had seen him do it. And when it concerned her mother, if that was what she asked for, he went.
But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. Laurel studiously went to work on them; she lifted them from the surface of the desk and rubbed it afterwards with wax until nothing was left to show of them, either.
That was on Saturday.
3
“LAUREL! Remember when we really were the bridesmaids?” Tish cried as they sat over drinks after dinner. It was Sunday evening.
While the bridesmaids’ parents still lived within a few blocks of the McKelva house, the bridesmaids and their husbands had mostly all built new houses in the “new part” of Mount Salus. Their own children were farther away still, off in college now.
Tish’s youngest son was still at home. “He won’t come out, though,” Tish had said. “He has company. A girl came in through his bedroom window—to play chess with him. That’s what she said. I think she’s the same one who came in through his window last night, close to eleven o’clock. I saw car lights in the driveway and went to see. They call him every minute. Girls. He’s fifteen.”
“And remember Mama at the wedding,” Tish said now, “crying when it was over, saying to your father, ‘Oh, Clint, isn’t it the saddest thing?’ And Judge Mac saying, ‘Why, no, Tennyson, if I had thought there was anything sad to be said for it, I should have prevented it.’ ”
“Prevented it? I never saw a man enjoy a wedding more,” said Gert.
“Wartime or no wartime, we had pink champagne that Judge Mac sent all the way to New Orleans for!” one of the others cried. “And a five-piece Negro band. Remember?”
“Miss Becky thought it was utter extravagance. Child-foolishness. But Judge Mac insisted on it all, a big wedding right on down the line.”
“Well, Laurel was an only child.”
“Mother had a superstitious streak underneath,” Laurel said protectively. “She might have had a notion it was unlucky to make too much of your happiness.” From her place on the chaise longue by the window, she saw lightning