Memory returned like spring.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty, first published in book form in 1972

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Optimist's Daughter is a story about a small and somewhat unique family trio - a father, his daughter, and a very recent stepmother - who are navigating a health scare, and then sadly, the death of the father, in the deep South somewhere in the 19XXs? I'm honestly not sure if there are any date ranges or references, but I'd say maybe 1940s/1950s? The story was initially published in excerpt form in the New Yorker in 1969, I believe. Maybe it's supposed to be earlier, I can't totally tell. Here are the main characters:

Judge Clint McKelva (from Mississippi) + Becky (from West Virginia, d.), then Fay (from Texas)

                         ==Laurel, daughter of Clint and Becky (from Mississippi) + Philip (d.)

There's also a Doctor in the mix, Dr. Courtland, who is both a former neighbor and old friend and a respected doctor in New Orleans, it seems? He is put in charge of Clint's eye surgery, which somehow ends up being fatal. He doesn't die in surgery, but after, kind of just never recovers. Laurel's mother Becky also apparently died of some sort of eye injury? Not sure what's going on there, or if eye injuries were more precarious in previous years, or if it's just dramatic coincidence. 

The book follows Clint, Laurel, and Fay, and then later just Laurel and Fay as they navigate Clint's passing. We start in New Orleans for Clint's eye surgery, and find our way back to Mount Salus, Mississippi, Laurel's hometown and where Clint and Fay reside. It's not a plot-heavy book, so not much more happens other than the neighbors supporting Laurel as she processes having lost both of her parents, and Fay's somewhat wacky family from Texas descending and whisking her away for a bit. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I liked this book, on the whole. It's fairly contemplative, and gentle, but I enjoyed it for what it was, and was pleased to read a woman author, although I am woefully under-read when it comes to BIPOC women authors, especially from the South.

Here are some thoughts!

The Cast of Characters

Clint - the Judge, first Becky's, then Fay's husband, Laurel's father, beloved neighbor

The Judge was an interesting character, particularly because he's only in the narrative for a short while, and then mostly present through Laurel and the neighbors' memories of him.

• Judge McKelva was a tall, heavy man of seventy-one who customarily wore his glasses on a ribbon. Holding them in his hand now, he sat on the raised, thronelike chair above the doctor's stool, flanked by Laurel on one side and Fay on the other. I liked the way Welty painted with words, telling me where each person and each item in the room could be found.

• He seldom spoke now unless he was spoken to, and then, which was wholly unlike him, after a wait - as if he had to catch up. He didn't try any more to hold her in his good eye. It was very sad to watch the Judge deteriorate (and so rapidly) after his mysterious eye surgery. 

• Still clinging to the first facing pages were the pair of grayed and stippled home-printed snapshots: Clinton and Becky 'up home', each taken by the other standing in the same spot on a railroad track (a leafy glade), he slender as a wand, his foot on a milepost, swinging his straw hat; she with her hands full of the wildflowers they'd picked along the way. I liked the scenes of Laurel remembering her parents and thinking about 'up home', which for Becky was her family's homestead in West Virginia. It reminded me of seeing old pictures of the family farm at Rosehaven.

• Her father in his domestic gentleness had a horror of any sort of private clash, of divergence from the affectionate and the real and the explainable and the recognizable. 

Becky, Clint's first wife and Laurel's mother, beloved neighbor

We didn't get a lot of information about Becky, as she has already died when the book begins, but I liked this line of someone remembering her: 

'Up home, we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it. We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms wide open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.' During the very bursting of a tornado which carried away half of Mount Salus, she said, 'We were never afraid of a little wind. Up home, we'd welcome a good storm.'

Laurel, the optimist's daughter, Becky's only child, Fay's sometimes-nemesis

Laurel is an interesting character. She's not terribly present in the narrative, in my opinion, but acts more as a vehicle for discovering and unearthing the memories of her parents. 

• Laurel McKelva Hand was a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark. She wore clothes of an interesting cut and texture, although her suit was wintry for New Orleans and had a wrinkle down the skirt. Her dark blue eyes looked sleepless. 

• But there was nothing of her mother here for Fay to find, or for herself to retrieve. The only traces there were of anybody were the drops of nail varnish. Fay has been taking over the house and doing things that seem upsetting to Laurel, like painting her nails on the fine furniture. ;)

(Wanda) Fay, the silly stepmother, Clint's second wife, of Texan origin

Fay is by far the most interesting character in the novel. She is depicted as a sort of wild card, undeserving of the Judge in his staid home. She initially lies and says her family is dead, and then they inconveniently show up to mourn her husband's passing and she has to admit that they are all very much alive. Here are some Fay-isms:

• Fay, small and pale in her dress with the gold buttons, was tapping her sandaled foot.

• Fay laughed - a single, high note, as derisive as a jay's.

• On finding out her husband will need an eye operation: 'Just for a scratch? Why didn't those old roses go on and die?' He at first thinks he's sustained an eye scratch from the rose bush in trying to prune it. I love Fay's response. 

• 'I don't see why this had to happen to me.' lololol.

• 'What's the good of a Carnival if we don't get to go, hon?' Fay is very salty that they have come to New Orleans and end up spending Mardi Gras in a hospital.
• It was still incredible to Laurel that her father, at nearly seventy, should have let anyone new, a beginner, walk in on his life, that he had even agreed to pardon such a thing.

• Doctor Courtland: 'He collapsed.'  Fay: 'You picked my birthday to do it on!' There's a theme of things happening TO Fay, in case you hadn't picked that up ;)

• Fay, to Doctor Courtland: 'All I hope is you lie awake tonight and remember how little you were good for!'

• 'All on my birthday. Nobody told me this was going to happen to me!'

• When Fay's family arrives: 'Get back! - Who told them to come?'

The neighbors, a bunch of biddies and a random husband here and there, Laurel-friendly, anti-Fay

The neighbors are sort of a collective character in that we spend most of the second half of the book in Clint and Fay's/Laurel's home, and the neighbors have invited themselves over to organize things.

Miss Tennyson: 'Are we all going to have to feel sorry for her?'

'I hope I never see her again,' said Laurel. 

'There, girlie, you got it out,' said Miss Tennyson. 'She's a trial to us all and nothing else.' On how they really feel about Fay.

To Laurel: 'Once you leave after this, you'll always come back as a visitor. Feel free, of course - but it was always my opinion that people don't really want visitors.' This was interesting. The neighbors are all pretty insistent that Laurel stay in Mount Salus and try to sort of wrest the home from Fay, but Laurel is apparently an artist and lives in Chicago, so she's not swayed.

Some stand-out moments

But when are the big floats coming? 

I loved this exchange: 

'What a way to keep his promise,' said Fay. 'When he told me he'd bring me to New Orleans some day, it was to see the Carnival.' She stared out the window. 'And the Carnival's going on right now. It looks like this is as close as we'll get to a parade.'

Because it reminded me of when I went to visit my sister in New Orleans while she was living there. I didn't really want to go to any of the big Mardi Gras parades because I thought they'd be overwhelming and they're not really my scene, but there are many parades that happen in the weeks leading up to the main events, and so we decided to go to one of those. One of the major parades is 'Rex', so Diana took me to a parade called 'tit Rex' (like a short form of Petite Rex, or little Rex). They call themselves a 'microkrewe' and the parade floats are all miniatures, wheeled on children's playwagons and such. Diana and I were happily enjoying this parade when a couple emerged next to us and told us how they had to see a Mardi Gras parade and had driven something like 14 hours from Kentucky overnight. And they looked at us, and looked at the floats, and said, "When are the big floats coming?" And I felt very sad for them because the major parades were not for a few weeks. But it was also a hilarious moment. Fay's distance from Mardi Gras reminded me of that.

Are you a lady?

I think in various posts I've talked about whether I'd make a good XYZ based on the book's parameters, including things like a whaler, a fisherman, etc. For this book, a made a list of seeming requirements to be a lady:

Can you...

• Make a bed (yes! I make mine every day)
• Play bridge (erm, sort of, long story; parents both played)
• Separate an egg (yes!)
• Cook Sunday dinner (yes!)

So I guess I'm 3/4 of a lady! ;)

Mount Salus, Laurel's hometown and the location of Clint and Fay/Becky's home

I loved this description of the town:

The leafing maples were bowing around the Square, and the small No U-Turn sign that hung over the cross street was swinging and turning over the wire in trapeze fashion. The Courthouse clock could not be read. In the poorly lit park, the bandstand and the Confederate statue stood in dim aureoles of rain, looking the ghosts they were, and somehow married to each other, by this time.

The chimney swift, aka intruder alert, who lets itself into the home when Laurel is alone

Windows and doors alike were singing, buffeted by the storm. The bird touched, tapped, brushed itself against the walls and closed doors, never resting. Laurel thought with longing of the telephone just outside the door in the upstairs hall.

   What am I in danger of here? She wondered, her heart pounding. This was an interesting scene, maybe a metaphor for the world coming in to break up Laurel's nostalgia, maybe just a silly bird!

Words or ideas new to me

Straw Hat Day - the day designated for men to switch from winter hats to the straw hats of spring and summer – quietly started in New Orleans in the late 1910s. In April of 1922, Mayor Andrew McShane decided to make it official, issuing a Straw Hat Day proclamation and urging men to “put the old felt lid away and crown your bean with nifty, up-to-the-minute headgear.” Stores filled their windows with straw hats, resulting in record-breaking sales. Straw Hat Day is casually mentioned in the book and I thought, is this a thing I am supposed to know about? 

Referents and Reverberations

This is the section of my blog where I talk about books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referent) or after (reverberation). 

This line about Laurel and Fay keeping watch over Clint at the hospital:

It meant that Laurel and Fay were hardly ever int he same place at the same time, except during the hours when they were both asleep in their rooms at the Hibiscus. These were adjoining - really half rooms; the partition between their beds was only a landlord's strip of wallboard. Where there was no intimacy, Laurel shrank from contact; she shrank from that thin board and from the vague apprehension that some night she might hear Fay cry or laugh like a stranger at something she herself would rather not know.

Reminded me of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Charlotte says that her path rarely crosses that of her husband, Mr. Collins, and that she encourages him in pursuits that keep their paths parallel rather than perpendicular. 

And I enjoyed that Laurel has this scene: 

One day, she had the luck to detect an old copy of Nicholas Nickleby on the dusty top shelf in the paperback store. That would reach his memory, she believed, and she began next morning reading it to her father. as Nicholas Nickleby is waiting for me to read it on my kitchen table.

Lines I Particularly Liked

• Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty saraband, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle.

• This was like a nowhere.

• 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.

• She walked on, giving them the wide berth of her desolation. I love this line.

• The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house.

• Set deep in the swamp, where the black trees were welling with buds like red drops, was one low beech that had kept its last year's leaves, and it appeared to Laurel to travel along with their train, gliding at a magic speed through the cypresses they left behind.

• Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged? Laurel feels less certain of her enmity for Fay when she catches her dozing, and I loved this line.

• From her place on the chaise longue by the window, she saw lightning flickering now in the western sky, like the feathers of birds taking a bath.

I'll leave you with a few of my special favorite moments, blobbists. 

#1 - On the title:

Judge: Well, I'm an optimist. 

Dr. Courtland: I didn't know there were any more such animals. 

Judge: Never think you've seen the last of anything. :)

#2 - Laurel, on her parents reading to her and to each other:

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.

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. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful. These were some of my favorite lines in the novel.

#3 - On Laurel and Phil watching the birds: 

All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world. 

  And they themselves were a part of the confluence.

Enjoy being in the confluence today, dear blobbists! This member of the confluence is off to 18th century France and the world of satire. Keep safe!