The Optimist's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 ghostly-pale teeth which no one ever saw when he spoke or laughed. It gave him the smile of a child who is hiding in the dark while the others hunt him, waiting to be found.
    Now the doctor’s hand swung and drove for the signal button. “Get out in a hurry. And collar his wife and hold her. Both of you go in the waiting room, stay there till I come.”
    The nurse pushed into the room, with another nurse at her shoulder.
    “Now what did he pull?” Mrs. Martello cried.
    The other nurse whipped the curtains along the rod between the two beds, shutting out Mr. Dalzell’s neat, vacated bed and the rocking chair with the felt hat hanging on it. With her toe, she kicked out of her way the fallen window blind lying there on the floor.
    Dr. Courtland, using both hands, drew Laurel outside the room. “Laurel, no time to lose.” He closed the door on her.
    But in the hall, she heard him give an answer to the nurse. “The renegade! I believe he’s just plain sneaked out on us.”
    In the waiting room, Fay stood being patted by an old woman who was wearing bedroom slippers and holding a half-eaten banana in her free hand.
    “Night after night, sitting up there with him, putting the food in his mouth, giving him his straw, letting him use up my cigarettes, keeping him from thinking!” Fay was crying on the woman’s bosom. “Then to get hauled out by an uppity nurse who doesn’t know my business from hers!”
    Laurel went up to her. “Fay, it can’t be much more serious. The doctor’s closed in with Father now.”
    “Never speak to me again!” shrieked Fay without turning around. “That nurse dragged me and pushed me, and you’re the one let her do it!”
    “Dr. Courtland wants us to stay here till he calls us.”
    “You bet I’m staying! Just wait till he hears what I’ve got to say to him!” cried Fay.
    “You pore little woman,” said the old woman easily. “Don’t they give us all a hard time.”
    “I believe he’s dying,” said Laurel.
    Fay spun around, darted out her head, and spat at her.
    The old woman said, “Now whoa. Why don’t you-all take a seat and save your strength? Just wait and let them come tell you about it. They will.” There was an empty chair in the circle pulled up around a table, and Fay sat down among five or six grown men and women who all had the old woman’s likeness. Their coats were on the table in a heap together, and open shoeboxes and paper sacks stood about on the floor; they were a family in the middle of their supper.
    Laurel began walking, past this group and the otherswho were sprawled or sleeping in chairs and on couches, past the television screen where a pale-blue group of Westerners silently shot it out with one another, and as far as the door into the hall, where she stood for a minute looking at the clock in the wall above the elevators, then walked her circle again.
    The family Fay had sat down with never let the conversation die.
    “Go on in there, Archie Lee, it’s still your turn,” the old woman said.
    “I ain’t ready to go.”