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

on, Laurel closed her back door too, and walked through the house putting out lights. The only illumination on the stairs came from the lamp that they had turned on for her by her bed.
    In her own room, she undressed, raised the window, got into bed with the first book her fingers found, and lay without opening it.
    The quiet of the Mount Salus night was a little different now. She could hear traffic on some new highway, a sound like the buzzing of one angry fly against a windowpane, over and over.
    When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hearthem, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.
    Fay slept farther away tonight than in the Hibiscus—they could not hear each other in this house—but nearer in a different way. She was sleeping in the bed where Laurel was born; and where her mother had died. What Laurel listened for tonight was the striking of the mantel clock downstairs in the parlor. It never came.

2
    A T THE INEVITABLE HOUR , Laurel started from her bed and went downstairs in her dressing gown. It was a clear, bright seven o’clock, with morning shadows dappling the shine of the floors and the dining room table. And there was Missouri, standing in her hat and coat in the middle of the kitchen.
    “Am I supposed to believe what I hear?” asked Missouri.
    Laurel went to her and took her in her arms.
    Missouri took off her hat and coat and hung them on the nail with her shoulder bag. She washed her hands, and then she shook out a fresh apron, just as she’d started every morning off during Laurel’s mother’s life in Mount Salus.
    “Well, I’m here and you’re here,” said Missouri. It was the bargain to give and take comfort. After a moment’s hesitation, Missouri went on, “He always want Miss Fay to have her breakfast in bed.”
    “Then you’ll know how to wake her,” said Laurel. “When you take it up. Do you mind?”
    “Do it for him,” said Missouri. Her face softened. “He mightily enjoyed having him somebody to spoil.”
    In a little while, just as Missouri walked out with the tray, Miss Adele Courtland came in at the back door. She was wearing her best—of course, she’d arranged not to teach her children today. She offered Laurel a double-handful of daffodils, the nodding, gray-white kind with the square cup.
    “You know who gave me mine—hers are blooming outside. Silver Bells,” Miss Adele prompted her. “Is there a place left to put them?”
    They walked through the dining room and across to the parlor. The whole house was filled with flowers; Laurel was seeing them for the first time this morning—the cut branches of Mount Salus prunusand crab, the thready yellow jasmine, bundles of narcissus, in vases and pitchers that came, along with the flowers, from houses up and down the street.
    “Father’s desk—?”
    “Miss Laurel, I keep a-calling Miss Fay but she don’t sit up to her breakfast!” called Missouri on the stairs.
    “Your day has started, Laurel,” said Miss Adele. “I’m here to answer the door.”
    Laurel went up, knocked, and opened the door into the big bedroom. Instead of her mother’s writing cabinet that used to stand between those windows, the bed faced her. It seemed to swim in a bath of pink light. The mahogany headboard, rising high as the