The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty Read Free Book Online

Straight-armed, he carried at full length on its hanger a suit of black winter clothes. It swayed more widely than he swayed in negotiating the turn on the landing. There was a shoebox in his other hand and a leather case under his arm.
    “She’s sending me down to Pitts’, Tennyson,” he said. “Carrying him these.”
    “Naked through the streets?” Miss Tennyson objected. “But I suppose you couldn’t let her go to the trouble of packing them.”
    “A man wanted to get on out of the room,” he said stiffly. But his arm gave at the elbow, and the suit for a moment sagged; the trousers folded to the floor. Hestood there in the middle of the women and cried. He said, “I just can’t believe it yet! Can’t believe Clint’s gone for good and Pitts has got him down there—”
    “All right, I’ll believe it for you,” said Miss Tennyson, on her way to him. She rescued the suit and hung it over his arm for him, so that it was less clumsy for him and looked less like a man. “Now go on and do like she told you. You insisted on being here tonight!”
    Upstairs, the bedroom door was rather weakly slammed. Laurel had never heard it slammed before. She went and laid her cheek for a moment against Major Bullock’s, aware of the tears on it and the bourbon on his breath. He propelled himself forward and out of the lighted house.
    “Daddy, wait! I’ll drive you!” Tish called, running.
    It was the break-up, and when they’d all said goodnight, promising to return in the morning in plenty of time, Laurel saw them to the door and stood waiting until their cars had driven away. Then she walked back through the parlor as far as the doorway into the library behind it. There was her father’s old chair sitting up to his desk.
    The sound of plates being laid carefully one on top of the other reached her then from the kitchen. She walked in through the pantry.
    “It’s I.”
    Laurel knew that would be Miss Adele Courtland. She had finished putting the food away and washingthe dishes; she was polishing dry the turkey platter. It was a piece of the old Haviland in the small arbutus pattern—the “laurel”—that Laurel’s mother had loved.
    “Here in the kitchen it will all start over so soon,” Miss Adele said, as if asking forgiveness.
    “You can’t help being good. That’s what Father said about you in New Orleans,” Laurel said. Then, “He was the best thing in the world too—Dr. Courtland.”
    Miss Adele nodded her head.
    “What happened was not to Father’s eye at all. Father was going to see,” Laurel told her. “Dr. Courtland was right about the eye. He did everything right.” Miss Adele nodded, and Laurel finished, “What happened wasn’t like what happened to Mother.”
    Miss Adele lifted the stacked clean dishes off the kitchen table and carried them into the dining room and put them away in their right places on the shelves of the china closet. She arranged the turkey platter to stand in its groove at the back of the gravy bowl. She put the glasses in, and restored the little wine glasses to their ring around the decanter, with its mended glass stopper still intact. She shut the shivering glass door gently, so as not to rock the old top-heavy cabinet.
    “People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel.” She turned around, and the chandelier threw its light down on her. Her fine-drawn, elegant face might almost have withered a little more while she was outhere with the kitchen to herself. She wore her faded hair as she had always worn it from the day when she was Laurel’s first-grade teacher, in a Psyche knot. Her voice was as capable of authority as ever. “Sleep, now, Laurel. We’ll all be back here in the morning, and you know we won’t be the only ones. Goodnight!”
    She left by the kitchen door, as always, and stepped home through the joining backyards. It was dark and fragrant out there. When the Courtland kitchen light went