The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [38]
On this last night, a warm wind began to blow and the rain fell fitfully, as though working up to some disturbance. Major Bullock shot his umbrella open and held it over Laurel in gallant fashion. He set the pace at something of a military clip.
Major Bullock lived through his friends. He lived their lives with them—up to a point, Laurel thought. While Miss Tennyson lived his. In a kind, faraway tenor, he began to hum as they went along. He seemed to have put something behind him, tonight. He was recovering his good spirits already.
“He rambled,
He rambled,
Rambled all around,
In and out of town,
Oh, didn’t he ramble—”
The leafing maples were bowing around the Square, and the small No U-Turn sign that hung over the cross street was swinging and turning over the wire in trapeze fashion. The Courthouse clock could not be read. In the poorly lit park, the bandstand and the Confederate statue stood in dim aureoles of rain, looking the ghosts they were, and somehow married to each other, by this time.
“He rambled till we had to cut him down,” sang Major Bullock.
The house was dark among its trees.
“Fay hasn’t come,” said the Major. “Oh, what a shame.”
“I expect we’ll just miss each other,” said Laurel.
“What a shame. Not to tell each other goodbye and good luck and the rest, it’s too bad.”
Pushing his umbrella before them, Major Bullock took her to the door and went with her inside to turn on the hall lights. His mouth knocked against hers, as though it knocked perfunctorily on a door, or on a dream—an old man’s goodnight; and she saw him out, lighted his way, then shut the door on him fast.
She had seen something wrong: there was a bird in the house. It was one of the chimney swifts. It shot out of the dining room and now went arrowing up the stairwell in front of her eyes.
Laurel, still in her coat, ran through the house, turning on the lights in every room, shutting the windows against the rain, closing the doors into the hall everywhere behind her against the bird. She ran upstairs, slammed her own door, ran across the hall and finally into the big bedroom, where she put on the lights, and as the bird came directly toward the new brightness she slammed the door against it.
It could not get in here. But had it been in already? For how long had it made free of the house, shuttling through the dark rooms? And now Laurel could not get out. She was in her father’s and mother’s room—now Fay’s room—walking up and down. It was the first time she had entered it since the morning of the funeral.
4
WINDOWS AND DOORS ALIKE were singing, buffeted by the storm. The bird touched, tapped, brushed itself against the walls and closed doors, never resting. Laurel thought with longing of the telephone just outside the door in the upstairs hall.
What am I in danger of here? she wondered, her heart pounding.
Even if you have kept silent for the sake of the dead, you cannot rest in your silence, as the dead rest. She listened to the wind, the rain, the blundering, frantic bird, and wanted to cry out as the nurse cried out to her, “Abuse! Abuse!”
Try to put it in the form of facts, she ordered herself. For the person who wishes to do so, it is possible to assail a helpless man; it is only necessary to be married to him. It is possible to say to the dying “Enough is enough,” if the listener who overhears is his daughter with his memory to protect. The facts were a verdict, and Laurel lived with this verdict in her head, walking up and down.
It was not punishment she wanted for Fay, she wanted acknowledgment out of her—admission that she knew what she had done. And Fay, she knew now, knew beyond question, would answer, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” This would be a fact. Fay had never dreamed that in that shattering moment in the hospital she had not been just as she always saw herself—in the right. Justified. Fay had only been making a little scene—that was all.
Very likely, making a scene was, for Fay, like home. Fay had brought scenes to the hospital—and here, to the house