The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [48]
When the country went to war, Philip said, “Not the Army, not the Engineers. I’ve heard what happens to architects. They get put in Camouflage. This war’s got to move too fast to stop for junk like camouflage.” He went into the Navy and ended up as a communications officer on board a mine sweeper in the Pacific.
Taking the train, Laurel’s father made his first trip to Chicago in years to see Phil on his last leave. (Her mother was unable to travel anywhere except “up home.”)
“How close have those kamikaze come to you so far, son?” the Judge wanted to know.
“About close enough to shake hands with,” Phil said.
A month later, they came closer still.
As far as Laurel had ever known, there had not happened a single blunder in their short life together. But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
The house was bright and still, like a ship that has tossed all night and come to harbor. She had not forgotten what waited for her today. Turning off the panicky lights of last night as she went, she walked through the big bedroom and opened the door into the hall.
She saw the bird at once, high up in a fold of the curtain at the stair window; it was still, too, and narrowed, wings to its body.
As the top step of the stairs creaked under her foot, the bird quivered its wings rapidly without altering its position. She sped down the stairs and closed herself into the kitchen while she planned and breakfasted. She’d got upstairs again and dressed and come out again, still to find the bird had not moved from its position.
Loudly, like a clumsy, slow echo of the wingbeating, a pounding began on the front porch. It was no effort any longer to remember anybody: Laurel knew there was only one man in Mount Salus who knocked like that, the perennial jack-leg carpenter who appeared in spring to put in new window cords, sharpen the lawn mower, plane off the back screen door from its wintertime sag. He still acted, no doubt, for widows and maiden ladies and for wives whose husbands were helpless around the house.
“Well, this time it’s your dad. Old Miss been gone a dozen year. I miss her ever’ time I pass the old place,” said Mr. Cheek. “Her and her ideas.”
Was this some last, misguided call of condolence? “What is it, Mr. Cheek?” she asked.
“Locks holding?” he asked. “Ready for me to string your window cords? Change your furniture around?” He was the same. He mounted the steps and came right across the porch at a march, with his knees bent and turned out, and the tools knocking together inside his sack.
Her mother had deplored his familiar ways and blundering hammer, had called him on his cheating, and would have sent him packing for good the first time she heard him refer to her as “Old Miss.” Now he was moving into what he must suppose was a clear field. “Roof do any leaking last night?”
“No. A bird came down the chimney, that’s all,” said Laurel. “If you’d like to be useful, I’ll let you get it out for me.”
“Bird in the house?” he asked. “Sign o’ bad luck, ain’t it?” He still walked up the stairs with a strut and followed too close. “I reckon I’m elected.”
The bird had not moved from its position. Heavy-looking, laden with soot, it was still pressed into the same curtain fold.
“I spot him!” Mr. Cheek shouted. He stamped his foot, then clogged with both feet like a clown, and the bird dropped from the curtain into flight and, barely missing the wall, angled into Laurel’s room—her bedroom door had come open. Mr. Cheek with a shout slammed the door on it.
“Mr. Cheek!”
“Well, I got him out of your hall.”
Laurel’s door opened again, of itself, with a slowness that testified there was nothing behind it but the morning breeze.
“I’m not prepared for a joke this morning,” Laurel said. “I want that bird out of my room!”
Mr. Cheek marched on into her bedroom. His eye slid to the muslin curtains, wet, with the starch