The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [5]
In the mornings, Judge McKelva ground his teeth, Laurel spoke to him, he waked up, and found out from Laurel how she was and what time her watch showed. She gave him his breakfast; while she fed him she could read him the Picayune. Then while he was being washed and shaved she went to her own breakfast in the basement cafeteria. The trick was not to miss the lightning visits of Dr. Courtland. On lucky days, she rode up in the elevator with him.
“It’s clearing some,” Dr. Courtland said. “It’s not to be hurried.”
By this time, only the operated eye had to be covered. A hivelike dressing stood on top of it. Judge McKelva seemed inclined to still lower the lid over his good eye. Perhaps, open, it could see the other eye’s bandage. He lay as was asked of him, without moving. He never asked about his eye. He never mentioned his eye. Laurel followed his lead.
Neither did he ask about her. His old curiosity would have prompted a dozen specific questions about how she was managing to stay here, what was happening up in Chicago, who had given her her latest commission, when she would have to go. She had left in the middle of her present job—designing a theatre curtain for a repertory theatre. Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.
He’d loved being read to, once. With good hopes, she brought in a stack of paperbacks and began on the newest of his favorite detective novelist. He listened but without much comment. She went back to one of the old ones they’d both admired, and he listened with greater quiet. Pity stabbed her. Did they move too fast for him now?
Part of her father’s silence Laurel laid, at first, to the delicacy he had always shown in family feelings. (There had only been the three of them.) Here was his daughter, come to help him and yet wrenched into idleness; she could not help him. Fay was accurate about it: any stranger could tell him the time. Eventually, Laurel saw that her father had accepted her uselessness with her presence all along. What occupied his full mind was time itself; time passing: he was concentrating.
She was always conscious, once she knew, of the effort being made in this room, hour after hour, from his motionless bed; and she was conscious of time along with him, setting her inner chronology with his, more or less as if they needed to keep in step for a long walk ahead of them. The Venetian blind was kept lowered to let in only a two-inch strip of March daylight at the window. Laurel sat so that this light fell into her lap onto her book, and Judge McKelva, holding himself motionless, listened to her read, then turn the page, as if he were silently counting, and knew each page by its number.
The day came when Judge McKelva was asked to share the room with another patient. When Laurel walked in one morning, she saw an old man, older than her father, wearing new, striped cotton pajamas and an old broadbrimmed black felt hat, rocking in the chair by the second bed. Laurel could see the peppering of red road dust on the old man’s hat above his round blue eyes.
“This is too strong a light for my father, I’m afraid, sir,” she said to him.
“Mr. Dalzell pulled the blind down during the night,” said Mrs. Martello, speaking in a nurse’s ventriloquist voice. “Didn’t you pull it down?” she shrieked. Judge McKelva did not betray that he was awake, but the old man rocking appeared as oblivious as the Judge to the sound of their voices. “He’s blind, and nearly deaf in the bargain,” Mrs. Martello said proudly. “And he’s going in surgery just as soon as they get him all fixed up for it. He’s got a malignancy.”
“I had to pull the vine down to get the possum,” Mr. Dalzell piped up, while Laurel and the nurse struggled together to string the blind back into place. Dr. Courtland came in and did it.