The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [7]
Going down on the elevator with him, another time, she asked, “Is it the drugs he has to take that make him seem such a distance away?”
He pinched a frown into his freckled forehead. “Well, no two people react in just the same way to anything.” They held the elevator for him to say, “People are different, Laurel.”
“Mother was different,” she said.
Laurel felt reluctant to leave her father now in the afternoons. She stayed and read. Nicholas Nickleby had seemed as endless to her as time must seem to him, and it had now been arranged between them, without words, that she was to sit there beside him and read—but silently, to herself. He too was completely silent while she read. Without being able to see her as she sat by his side, he seemed to know when she turned each page, as though he kept up, through the succession of pages, with time, checking off moment after moment; and she felt it would be heartless to close her book until she’d read him to sleep.
One day, Fay came in and caught Laurel sitting up asleep herself, in her spectacles.
“Putting your eyes out, too? I told him if he hadn’t spent so many years of his life poring over dusty old books, his eyes would have more strength saved up for now,” Fay told her. She sidled closer to the bed. “About ready to get up, hon?” she cried. “Listen, they’re holding parades out yonder right now. Look what they threw me off the float!”
Shadows from the long green eardrops she’d come in wearing made soft little sideburns down her small, intent face as she pointed to them, scolding him. “What’s the good of a Carnival if we don’t get to go, hon?”
It was still incredible to Laurel that her father, at nearly seventy, should have let anyone new, a beginner, walk in on his life, that he had even agreed to pardon such a thing.
“Father, where did you meet her?” Laurel had asked when, a year and a half ago, she had flown down to Mount Salus to see them married.
“Southern Bar Association.” With both arms he had made an expansive gesture that she correctly read as the old Gulf Coast Hotel. Fay had had a part-time job there; she was in the typist pool. A month after the convention, he brought her home to Mount Salus, and they were married in the Courthouse.
Perhaps she was forty, and so younger than Laurel. There was little even of forty in her looks except the line of her neck and the backs of her little square, idle hands. She was bony and blue-veined; as a child she had very possibly gone undernourished. Her hair was still a childish tow. It had the tow texture, as if, well rubbed between the fingers, those curls might have gone to powder. She had round, country-blue eyes and a little feist jaw.
When Laurel flew down from Chicago to be present at the ceremony, Fay’s response to her kiss had been to say, “It wasn’t any use in you bothering to come so far.” She’d smiled as though she meant her scolding to flatter. What Fay told Laurel now, nearly every afternoon at the changeover, was almost the same thing. Her flattery and her disparagement sounded just alike.
It was strange, though, how Fay never called anyone by name. Only she had said “Becky”: Laurel’s mother, who had been dead ten years by the time Fay could have first heard of her, when she had married Laurel’s father.
“What on earth made Becky give you a name like that?” she’d asked Laurel, on that first occasion.
“It’s the state flower of West Virginia,” Laurel told her, smiling. “Where my mother came from.”
Fay hadn’t smiled back. She’d given her a wary look.
One later night, at the Hibiscus, Laurel tapped at Fay’s door.
“What do you want?” Fay asked as she opened it.
She thought the time had come to know Fay a little better. She sat down on one of the hard chairs in the narrow room and asked her about her family.
“My family?” said Fay. “None of ’em living. That’s why I ever left Texas and came to Mississippi.