The Optimist's Daughter

by Eudora Welty

“Laurel, look yonder. You still might change your mind if you could see the roses bloom, see Becky’s Climber come out,” said Miss Tennyson softly. “I can imagine it, in Chicago.” “But you can’t smell it,” Miss Tennyson argued.

Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.

Laurel should have stayed home after Becky died. He needed him somebody in that house, girl,” said old Mrs. Pease. “But that didn’t have to mean Fay,” said Miss Tennyson. “Drat her!” “She’s never done anybody any harm,” Miss Adele remarked. “Rather, she gave a lonely old man something to live for.” “I’d rather not consider how,” interrupted Miss Tennyson primly.

As Laurel walked with Miss Adele toward her own opening in the hedge, there could be heard a softer sound than the singing from the dogwood tree. It was rhythmic but faint, as from the shaking of a tambourine. “Little mischiefs! Will you look at them showing off,” said Miss Adele. A cardinal took his dipping flight into the fig tree and brushed wings with a bird-frightener, and it crashed faintly. Another cardinal followed, then a small band of them. Those thin shimmering discs were polished, rain-bright, and the redbirds, all rival cocks, were flying at their tantalizing reflections. At the tiny crash the birds would cut a figure in the air and tilt in again, then again. “Oh, it’s a game, isn’t it, nothing but a game!” Miss Adele said, stepping gracefully into her own backyard.

She saw at once that nothing had happened to the books. Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, the title running catercornered in gold across its narrow green spine, was in exactly the same place as ever, next to Tennyson’s Poetical Works, Illustrated, and that next to Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. She ran her finger in a loving track across Eric Brighteyes and Jane Eyre, The Last Days of Pompeii and Carry On, Jeeves. Shoulder to shoulder, they had long since made their own family. For every book here she had heard their voices, father’s and mother’s. And perhaps it didn’t matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight.

Neither of us saved our fathers, Laurel thought. But Becky was the brave one. I stood in the hall, too, but I did not any longer believe that anyone could be saved, anyone at all. Not from others.

What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel—something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another.

That was when he started, of course, being what he scowlingly called an optimist; he might have dredged the word up out of his childhood. He loved his wife. Whatever she did that she couldn’t help doing was all right. Whatever she was driven to say was all right. But it was not all right! Her trouble was that very desperation. And no one had the power to cause that except the one she desperately loved, who refused to consider that she was desperate. It was betrayal on betrayal.

Fay had once at least called Becky “my rival.” Laurel thought: But the rivalry doesn’t lie where Fay thinks. It’s not between the living and the dead, between the old wife and the new; it’s between too much love and too little. There is no rivalry as bitter; Laurel had seen its work.

A flood of feeling descended on Laurel. She let the papers slide from her hand and the books from her knees, and put her head down on the open lid of the desk and wept in grief for love and for the dead. She lay there with all that was adamant in her yielding to this night, yielding at last. Now all she had found had found her. The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself, and it began to flow again. If Phil could have lived— But Phil was lost. Nothing of their life together remained except in her own memory; love was sealed away into its perfection and had remained there.

Now, by her own hands, the past had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself—here waiting, all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel’s.

For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.

“I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together,” he said. “I like to see a thing finished.” He made simple objects of immediate use, taking unlimited pains. What he was, was a perfectionist. But he was not an optimist—she knew that.

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.

Laurel said, “What have you done to my mother’s breadboard?”

Laurel rose and carried it to the middle of the room and set it on the table. She pointed. “Look. Look where the surface is splintered—look at those gouges. You might have gone at it with an icepick.” “Is that a crime?” “All scored and grimy! Or you tried driving nails in it.” “I didn’t do anything but crack last year’s walnuts on it. With the hammer.” “And cigarette burns—” “Who wants an everlasting breadboard? It’s the last thing on earth anybody needs!”

“Gnawed and blackened and the dust ground into it—Mother kept it satin-smooth, and clean as a dish!” “It’s just an old board, isn’t it?” cried Fay. “She made the best bread in Mount Salus!” “All right! Who cares? She’s not making it now.” “You desecrated this house.”

I’ll have you remember it’s my house now, and I can do what I want to with it,” Fay said. “With everything in it. And that goes for that breadboard too.” And all Laurel had felt and known in the night, all she’d remembered, and as much as she could understand this morning—in the week at home, the month, in her life—could not tell her now how to stand and face the person whose own life had not taught her how to feel.

“But your mother, she died a crazy!” Fay cried. “Fay, that is not true. And nobody ever dared to say such a thing.” “In Mount Salus? I heard it in Mount Salus, right in this house. Mr. Cheek put me wise. He told me how he went in my room one day while she was alive and she threw something at him.” “Stop,” said Laurel. “It was the little bell off her table. She told him she deliberately aimed at his knee, because she didn’t have a wish to hurt any living creature. She was a crazy and you’ll be a crazy too, if you don’t watch out.”