The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [4]
“Father?” Laurel moved near.
“That’s only the way he wakes up,” said Fay from her bed, without opening her eyes. “I get it every morning.”
Laurel stood near him, waiting.
“What’s the verdict?” her father presently asked, in a parched voice. “Eh, Polly?” He called Laurel by her childhood name. “What’s your mother have to say about me?”
“Look-a-here!” exclaimed Fay. She jumped up and pattered toward his bed in her stockinged feet. “Who’s this?” She pointed to the gold button over her breastbone.
The nurse, without stopping her crochet hook, spoke from the chair. “Don’t go near that eye, hon! Don’t nobody touch him or monkey with that eye of his, and don’t even touch the bed he’s on, till Dr. Courtland says touch, or somebody’ll be mighty sorry. And Dr. Courtland will skin me alive.”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Courtland, coming in; then he bent close and spoke exuberantly into the aghast face. “All through with my part, sir! Your part’s just starting! And yours will be harder than mine. You got to lie still! No moving. No turning. No tears.” He smiled. “No nothing! Just the passage of time. We’ve got to wait on your eye.”
When the doctor straightened, the nurse said, “I wish he’d waited for me to give him a sip of water before he took off again.”
“Go ahead. Wet his whistle, he’s awake,” said Dr. Courtland and moved to the door. “He’s just possuming.” His finger beckoned Laurel and Fay outside.
“Now listen, you’ve got to watch him. Starting now. Take turns. It’s not as easy as anybody thinks to lie still and nothing else. I’ll talk Mrs. Martello into doing private duty at night. Laurel, a good thing you’ve got the time. He’s going to get extra-special care, and we’re not running any risks on Judge Mac.”
Laurel, when he’d gone, went to the pay telephone in the corridor. She called her studio; she was a professional designer of fabrics in Chicago.
“No point in you staying just because the doctor said so,” said Fay when Laurel hung up. She had listened like a child.
“Why, I’m staying for my own sake,” said Laurel. She decided to put off the other necessary calls. “Father’ll need all the time both of us can give him. He’s not very well suited to being tied down.”
“O.K., that’s not a matter of life and death, is it?” said Fay in a cross voice. As they went back to the room together, Fay leaned over the bed and said, “I’m glad you can’t see yourself, hon.”
Judge McKelva gave out a shocking and ragged sound, a snore, and firmed his mouth. He asked, “What’s the time, Fay?”
“That sounds more like you,” she said, but didn’t tell him the time. “It was that old ether talking when he came to before,” she said to Laurel. “Why, he hadn’t even mentioned Becky, till you and Courtland started him.”
The Hibiscus was a half hour’s ride away on the city’s one remaining streetcar line, but through the help of one of the floor nurses, Laurel and Fay were able to find rooms there by the week. It was a decayed mansion on a changing street; what had been built as its twin next door was a lesson to it now: it was far along in the course of being demolished.
Laurel hardly ever saw any of the other roomers, although the front door was never locked and the bathroom was always busy; at the hours when she herself came and went, the Hibiscus seemed to be in the sole charge of a cat on a chain, pacing the cracked-open floral tiles that paved the front gallery. Long in the habit of rising early, she said she would be with her father by seven. She would stay until three, when Fay would come to sit until eleven; Fay could ride the streetcar back in the safe company of the nurse, who lived nearby. And Mrs. Martello said she would take on the private duty late shift for the sake of one living man, that Dr. Courtland. So the pattern was set.
It meant that Laurel and Fay were hardly ever in the same place at the same time, except during the hours when they were both asleep in their rooms at the Hibiscus. These were adjoining—really half rooms; the partition between their beds was only a landlord’s strip of wallboard. Where there was no