The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [46]
A familiar black-covered “composition book” came off the shelf and lay open on Laurel’s lap to “My Best Bread,” written out twenty or thirty years ago in her mother’s strict, pointed hand, giving everything but the steps of procedure. (“A cook is not exactly a fool.”) Underneath it had lain something older, a class notebook. Becky had sent herself to teacher’s college, wearing the deep-dyed blouse. It was her keeping her diagrams of Paradise Lost and Milton’s Universe that was so like her, pigeonholing them here as though she’d be likely to find them useful again. Laurel gazed down at the careful figuring of the modest household accounts, drifted along the lined pages (this was an old Mount Salus Bank book) to where they eased into garden diaries and the plots of her rose beds, her perennial borders. “I have just come in. Clinton is still toiling. I see him now from my kitchen window, struggling with the Mermaid rose.” “That fool fig tree is already putting out leaves. Will it never learn?”
The last pigeonhole held letters her mother had saved from her own mother, from “up home.”
She slipped them from their thin envelopes and read them now for herself. Widowed, her health failing, lonely and sometimes bedridden, Grandma wrote these letters to her young, venturesome, defiant, happily married daughter as to an exile, without ever allowing herself to put it into so many words. Laurel could hardly believe the bravery and serenity she had put into these short letters, in the quickened pencil to catch the pocket of one of “the boys” before he rode off again, dependent—Grandma then, as much as Laurel now—upon his remembering to mail them from “the courthouse.” She read on and met her own name on a page. “I will try to send Laurel a cup of sugar for her birthday. Though if I can find a way to do it, I would like to send her one of my pigeons. It would eat from her hand, if she would let it.”
A flood of feeling descended on Laurel. She let the papers slide from her hand and the books from her knees, and put her head down on the open lid of the desk and wept in grief for love and for the dead. She lay there with all that was adamant in her yielding to this night, yielding at last. Now all she had found had found her. The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself, and it began to flow again.
If Phil could have lived—
But Phil was lost. Nothing of their life together remained except in her own memory; love was sealed away into its perfection and had remained there.
If Phil had lived—
She had gone on living with the old perfection undisturbed and undisturbing. Now, by her own hands, the past had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself—here waiting, all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel’s.
What would have been their end, then? Suppose their marriage had ended like her father and mother’s? Or like her mother’s father and mother’s? Like—
“Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!” Phil’s voice cried.
She wept for what happened to life.
“I wanted it!” Phil cried. His voice rose with the wind in the night and went around the house and around the house. It became a roar. “I wanted it!”
Four
SHE HAD SLEPT in the chair, like a passenger who had come on an emergency journey in a train. But she had rested deeply.
She had dreamed that she was a passenger, and riding with Phil. They had ridden together over a long bridge.
Awake, she recognized it: it was a dream of something that had really happened. When she and Phil were coming down from Chicago to Mount Salus to be married in