The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [9]
A strange milky radiance shone in a hospital corridor at night, like moonlight on some deserted street. The whitened floor, the whitened walls and ceiling, were set with narrow bands of black receding into the distance, along which the spaced-out doors, graduated from large to small, were all closed. Laurel had never noticed the design in the tiling before, like some clue she would need to follow to get to the right place. But of course the last door on the right of the corridor, the one standing partway open as usual, was still her father’s.
An intense, tight little voice from inside there said at that moment in high pitch, “I tell you enough is enough!”
Laurel was halted. A thousand packthreads seemed to cross and crisscross her skin, binding her there.
The voice said, even higher, “This is my birthday!”
Laurel saw Mrs. Martello go running from the nurse’s station into the room. Then Mrs. Martello reappeared, struggling her way backwards. She was pulling Fay, holding her bodily. A scream shot out and ricocheted from walls and ceiling. Fay broke free from the nurse, whirled, and with high-raised knees and white face came running down the corridor. Fists drumming against her temples, she knocked against Laurel as if Laurel wasn’t there. Her high heels let off a fusillade of sounds as she passed and hurled herself into the waiting room with voice rising, like a child looking for its mother.
Mrs. Martello came panting up to Laurel, heavy on her rubber heels.
“She laid hands on him! She said if he didn’t snap out of it, she’d—” The veneer of nurse slipped from Mrs. Martello—she pushed up at Laurel the red, shocked face of a Mississippi countrywoman as her voice rose to a clear singsong. “She taken ahold of him. She was abusing him.” The word went echoing. “I think she was fixing to pull him out of that bed. I think she thought she could! Sure, she wasn’t able to move that mountain!” Mrs. Martello added wildly, “She’s not a nurse!” She swung her starched body around and sent her voice back toward Judge McKelva’s door. “What’s the matter with that woman? Does she want to ruin your eye?”
At last her legs drove her. Laurel ran.
The door stood wide open, and inside the room’s darkness a watery constellation hung, throbbing and near. She was looking straight out at the whole Mississippi River Bridge in lights. She found her way, the night light was burning. Her father’s right arm was free of the cover and lay out on the bed. It was bare to the shoulder, its skin soft and gathered, like a woman’s sleeve. It showed her that he was no longer concentrating. At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his, and she reached to put her hand into his open hand and press it gently.
He made what seemed to her a response at last, yet a mysterious response. His whole, pillowless head went dusky, as if he laid it under the surface of dark, pouring water and held it there.
Every light in the room blazed on. Dr. Courtland, a dark shape, shoved past her to the bed. He set his fingertips to her father’s wrist. Then his hand passed over the operated eye; with its same delicacy it opened the good eye. He bent over and stared in, without speaking. He knocked back the sheet and laid the side of his head against her father’s gowned chest; for a moment his own eyes closed.
It was her father who appeared to Laurel as the one listening. His upper lip had lifted, short and soft as a child’s, showing