The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [45]
“I’ll take you back to your mountains, Becky,” her father had said into the despairing face after Dr. Bolt had tiptoed away. Laurel was certain it was the first worthless promise that had ever lain between them. And the house on the mountain had by that time, anyway, burned. Laurel had been in camp the summer it happened; but her mother had been “up home.” She had run back into the flames and rescued her dead father’s set of Dickens at the risk of her life, and brought the books down to Mount Salus and made room for them in the library bookcase, and there they stood now. But before she died it had slipped her mind that the house had ever burned down at all.
“I’ll carry you there, Becky.”
“Lucifer!” she cried. “Liar!”
That was when he started, of course, being what he scowlingly called an optimist; he might have dredged the word up out of his childhood. He loved his wife. Whatever she did that she couldn’t help doing was all right. Whatever she was driven to say was all right. But it was not all right! Her trouble was that very desperation. And no one had the power to cause that except the one she desperately loved, who refused to consider that she was desperate. It was betrayal on betrayal.
In her need tonight Laurel would have been willing to wish her mother and father dragged back to any torment of living because that torment was something they had known together, through each other. She wanted them with her to share her grief as she had been the sharer of theirs. She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands, her own and her father’s holding onto her mother’s, long after there was nothing more to be said.
Laurel could remember, too, her mother holding her own hands before her eyes, very close, so that she seemed to be seeing them, the empty, working fingers.
“Poor hands in winter, when she came back from the well—bleeding from the ice, from the ice!” her mother cried.
“Who, Mother?” Laurel asked.
“My mother!” she cried accusingly.
After a stroke had crippled her further, she had come to believe—without being able to see her room, see a face, to verify anything by seeing—that she had been taken somewhere that was neither home nor “up home,” that she was left among strangers, for whom even anger meant nothing, on whom it would only be wasted. She had died without speaking a word, keeping everything to herself, in exile and humiliation.
To Laurel while she still knew her, she had made a last remark: “You could have saved your mother’s life. But you stood by and wouldn’t intervene. I despair for you.”
Baltimore was as far a place as you could go with those you loved, and it was where they left you.
Then Laurel’s father, when he was approaching seventy, had married Fay. Both times he chose, he had suffered; she had seen him contain it. He died worn out with both wives—almost as if up to the last he had still had both of them.
As he lay without moving in the hospital he had concentrated utterly on time passing, indeed he had. But which way had it been going for him? When he could no longer get up and encourage it, push it forward, had it turned on him, started moving back the other way?
Fay had once at least called Becky “my rival.” Laurel thought: But the rivalry doesn’t lie where Fay thinks. It’s not between the living and the dead, between the old wife and the new; it’s between too much love and too little. There is no rivalry as bitter; Laurel had seen its work.
Later and later into the night, with the buffeting kept at its distance, though it never let up, Laurel sat under the lamp among the papers. She held in her hands her mother’s yellowed notebooks—correspondence records, address books—Virginia aunts and cousins long dead, West Virginia nieces and nephews now married and moved where