The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [47]
When they were climbing the long approach to a bridge after leaving Cairo, rising slowly higher until they rode above the tops of bare trees, she looked down and saw the pale light widening and the river bottoms opening out, and then the water appearing, reflecting the low, early sun. There were two rivers. Here was where they came together. This was the confluence of the waters, the Ohio and the Mississippi.
They were looking down from a great elevation and all they saw was at the point of coming together, the bare trees marching in from the horizon, the rivers moving into one, and as he touched her arm she looked up with him and saw the long, ragged, pencil-faint line of birds within the crystal of the zenith, flying in a V of their own, following the same course down. All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.
And they themselves were a part of the confluence. Their own joint act of faith had brought them here at the very moment and matched its occurrence, and proceeded as it proceeded. Direction itself was made beautiful, momentous. They were riding as one with it, right up front. It’s our turn! she’d thought exultantly. And we’re going to live forever.
Left bodiless and graveless of a death made of water and fire in a year long gone, Phil could still tell her of her life. For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.
She believed it just as she believed that the confluence of the waters was still happening at Cairo. It would be there the same as it ever was when she went flying over it today on her way back—out of sight, for her, this time, thousands of feet below, but with nothing in between except thin air.
Philip Hand was an Ohio country boy. He had a country boy’s soft-spokenness and selfless energy and long-range plans. He had put himself through architectural school—Georgia Tech, because it was cheaper and warmer there—in her country; then had met her when she came north to study in his, at the Art Institute in Chicago. From far back, generations, they must have had common memories. (Ohio was across the river from West Virginia; the Ohio was his river.)
But there was nothing like a kinship between them, as they learned. In life and in work and in affection they were each shy, each bold, just where the other was not. She grew up in the kind of shyness that takes its refuge in giving refuge. Until she knew Phil, she thought of love as shelter; her arms went out as a naive offer of safety. He had showed her that this need not be so. Protection, like self-protection, fell away from her like all one garment, some anachronism foolishly saved from childhood.
Philip had large, good hands, and extraordinary thumbs—double-jointed where they left the palms, nearly at right angles; their long, blunt tips curved strongly back. When she watched his right hand go about its work, it looked to her like the Hand of his name.
She had a certain gift of her own. He taught her, through his example, how to use it. She learned how to work by working beside him. He taught her to draw, to work toward and into her pattern, not to sketch peripheries.
Designing houses was not enough for his energy. He fitted up a workshop in their South Side apartment, taking up half the kitchen. “I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together,” he said. “I like to see a thing finished.” He made simple objects of immediate use, taking unlimited pains. What he was, was a perfectionist.
But he was not an optimist—she knew that. Phil had learned everything he could manage to learn, and done as much as he had time for, to design houses to stand, to last, to be lived in; but he had known they could equally well, with the same devotion and tireless effort,