The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [37]
“Judge Mac laughed her out of it, then. Remember the parties we had for you!” Gert gave Laurel a lovingly derisive slap. “That was before the Old Country Club burned down, there never was another dance floor like that.”
“What kind of dancer was Phil, Polly? I forget!” Tish lifted her arms as though the memory would come up and dance her away to remind her.
“Firm,” said Laurel. She turned her cheek a little further away on the pillow.
“Your daddy knew how to enjoy a grand occasion as well as we did—as long as it stayed elegant, and as long as Papa didn’t get too high before it was over,” Tish said. “Of course, Mama should have saved all her tears for her own child’s wedding.” Tish was the only divorcée, as Laurel was the only widow. Tish had eloped with the captain of their high school football team.
“But Miss Becky would rather go through anything than a grand occasion,” said Gert.
“I remember once—it must’ve been the Bar Association Meeting, or maybe when he was Mayor and they had to function at some to-do in Jackson—anyway, once Judge Mac himself bought Miss Becky a dress to wear, came home with it in a box and surprised her. Beaded crepe! Shot beads! Neck to hem, shot beads,” said Tish. “Where could you have been, Laurel?”
Gert said, “He’d picked it out in New Orleans. Some clerk sold it to him.”
Music started up from off in another room of the house. Duke Ellington.
“The young don’t dance to him. They play chess to him, I suppose,” Tish said aside to Laurel. “And Miss Becky said, ‘Clinton, if I’d just been told in advance you were going to make me an extravagant present, I’d have asked you for a load of floor sweepings from the cottonseed-oil mill.’ Can’t you hear her?” Tish cried.
“She wore it, though, didn’t she?” one of them asked, and Tish said, “Oh, they’d do anything for each other! Sure she wore it. And the weight she had to carry! Miss Becky told Mama in confidence that when she wasn’t wearing that dress, which was nearly a hundred per cent of the time, she had to keep it in a bucket!”
The bridesmaids laughed till they cried.
“But when she wanted to justify him, she wore it! With an air. What floored me, Laurel, was him getting married again. When I saw Fay!” said Gert. “When I saw what he had there!”
“Mama, for his sake, asked at the beginning if she wouldn’t be allowed to give some sort of little welcome for her—a sitdown tea, I believe she had in mind. And Fay said, ‘Oh, please don’t bother with a big wholesale reception. That kind of thing was for Becky.’ Poor Judge Mac! Because except when it came to picking a wife,” Tish said, smiling at Laurel, “he was a pretty worldly old sweet.”
“Since when have you started laughing at them?” Laurel asked in a trembling voice. “Are they just figures from now on to make a good story?” She turned on Tish. “And you can wink over Father?”
“Polly!” Tish grabbed her. “We weren’t laughing at them. They weren’t funny—no more than my father and mother are! No more than all our fathers and mothers are!” She laughed again, into Laurel’s face. “Aren’t we grieving? We’re grieving with you.”
“I know. Of course I know it,” said Laurel.
She smiled her thanks and kissed them all. She would see the bridesmaids once more. At noon tomorrow they were coming for her, all six, to drive her to her plane.
“I’m glad there’s nobody else for you to lose, dear,” Miss Tennyson Bullock said staunchly. She and the Major had driven over, late as it was, to tell Laurel goodbye.
“What do you mean! She’s got Fay,” Major Bullock protested. “Though that poor little girl’s got a mighty big load on her shoulders. More’n she can bear.”
“We are only given what we are able to bear,” Miss Tennyson corrected him. They’d had such a long married life that she could make a pronouncement sound more military than he could, and even more legal.
Laurel hugged them both, and then said she intended to walk home.
“Walk!” “It’s raining!” “Nobody ever walks in Mount Salus!” They made a fuss over letting her go. Major Bullock