The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [8]
Laurel did not try again, and Fay never at any time knocked at her door.
Now Fay walked around Judge McKelva’s bed and cried, “Look! Look what I got to match my eardrops! How do you like ’em, hon? Don’t you want to let’s go dancing?” She stood on one foot and held a shoe in the air above his face. It was green, with a stilletto heel. Had the shoe been a written page, some brief she’d concocted on her own, he looked at it in her hands there for long enough to read it through. But he didn’t speak.
“But just let me try slipping out a minute in ’em, would he ever let me hear about it!” Fay said. She gave him a smile, to show her remark was meant for him to hear. He offered no reply.
Laurel stayed on, until now the supper trays began to rattle.
“Archie Lee, you gonna load that gun or you rather be caught napping?” Mr. Dalzell called out.
“Mr. Dalzell reminds me of my old grandpa,” said Fay. “I’m not sorry to have him in here. He’s company.”
The floor nurse came in to feed Mr. Dalzell, then to stick him with a needle, while Fay helped Judge McKelva with his supper—mostly by taking bite for bite. Laurel stayed on until out in the corridor the lights came on and the room went that much darker.
“Maybe you can sleep now, Father—you haven’t been asleep all day,” said Laurel.
Fay switched on the night light by the bed. Placed low, and not much more powerful than a candle flame, it touched Judge McKelva’s face without calling forth a flicker of change in its patient expression. Laurel saw now that his hair had grown long on the back of his neck, not black but white and featherlike.
“Tell me something you would like to have,” Laurel begged him.
Fay, bending down over him, placed her lighted cigarette between his lips. His chest lifted visibly as he drew on it, and after a moment she took it away and his chest slowly fell as the smoke slowly traveled out of his mouth. She bent and gave it to him again.
“There’s something,” she said.
“Don’t let the fire go out, son!” called Mr. Dalzell.
“No sir! Everything around this camp’s being took good care of, Mr. Dalzell!” yelled the floor nurse, coming to the door. “You just crawl right in your tent and say your prayers good and go to sleep.”
Laurel stood, and said goodnight. “Dr. Courtland believes the time’s almost here to try your pinhole specs,” she dared to add. “Do you hear, Father?”
He, who had been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope.
There was no response in the room. Judge McKelva, like Mr. Dalzell, lay in the dark, and Fay crouched in the rocker, one cheek on the windowsill, with a peep on the crack.
Laurel went reluctantly away.
4
IT WAS NOT THAT NIGHT but the next that Laurel, in her room at the Hibiscus, having already undressed, suddenly dressed again. As she ran down the steps into the warm, uneasy night, the roof light went on in a passing cab. She hailed and ran for it.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, sister,” said the driver. “Getting you something-to-ride on a night like tonight.”
The interior of the cab reeked of bourbon, and as they passed under a streetlight she saw a string of cheap green beads on the floor—a favor tossed from a parade float. The driver took back streets, squeezing around at every corner, it seemed to Laurel, who was straining forward; but when she let down the window glass for air, she heard the same mocking trumpet playing with a band from the same distance away. Then she heard more than one band, heard rival bands playing up distant streets.
Perhaps what she had felt was no more than the atmospheric oppression of a Carnival night, of crowds