“But there would be laughs, more than anything else on this occasion.”
I will have a late lunch with Eudora Welty, I think, and this will be the kind of serious fun you never quite let go of, since I had a late lunch with her for real, twenty-six years ago, at a Fellowship of Southern Writers’ celebration. This was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the Tennessee Arts Commission Conference on Southern literature. I was being honored by the Fellowship, receiving the Hillsdale Award for Fiction. There was a brunch, made up of members of the Council and the members of the Fellowship. I went into that brunch feeling the effects of a good deal of socializing the night before, and I was desperately hungry. The first chair I saw was next to Eudora. I sat down, said, “Hello,” quietly, and looked around the room. I saw Walker Percy, George Garrett, Mary Lee Settle, James Dickey, Reynolds Price. At the table with Eudora and me were Peter Taylor, William Styron, Shelby Foote, and Cleanth Brooks.
I knew Taylor, and Ms. Welty, but these others I had never met, and they were, of course, very high on my list of literary heroes. So I was nervous and knocked the table leg with a knee as I sat down. The water in the glasses wavered slightly. Eudora introduced me to the others, and I asked about her travel and arrival. I was starving. Someone set plates in front of us. Chicken Cordon Bleu. I picked up my fork and knife and set to cut a thick slice, sticking the fork deep into the breast, and in the same moment I realized that there was only one voice speaking in that large room. Someone was speaking a prayer of thanksgiving and an invocation at the podium, and everyone was sitting head bowed, hands in lap, silent. So I tried to lift the knife from the chicken, to sit back myself. The knife wouldn’t come. It was too deeply embedded in the meat. So I had to simply sit back and leave it there, standing up in the chicken breast. Eudora leaned over slightly and murmured to me, “Richard, I believe it’s already killed.”
The rest of that speech, I had to control my laughter.
That was Eudora, to me: this quiet but wicked sense of humor. And a gentleness, too. She was eighty-two at the time.
I believe I would have us meet wherever she was most comfortable, and that would most likely be at a favorite restaurant; she would probably insist, given that we are in this world of allowing us preferences beyond time and space, that it be a favorite place of mine. So I would choose Pasta Italia, in Memphis, Tennessee. A quiet, café-like place, with a wonderful wine list and a big cheese wheel in a barrel as you come in the door.
I would go alone, and I imagine she would, too.
I think she would be feeling the slight strain of wanting to be entertaining and charming for this young man she has known only a short time, but with whom she shares several mutual friendships and a love of literature and good writing. I would walk over and kiss her cheek and sit across from her. She would already have her goblet of bourbon in crushed ice. I would order a glass of Barolo.
We would tell stories about our friends, adventures, triumphs, sorrows, losses. The last hard years, without help at times when it just wasn’t there to be had. And the long nights, the dark. But there would be laughs, more than anything else on this occasion. She would remind me of that first time, when I sat next to her at Susan Shreve’s house with my own bourbon on ice, and we realized that we were the only two people in that room drinking whiskey; and I told her that there is a line in her story “Petrified Man” that would work perfectly in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.”
“What line is that?” she said.
And I said, “When that so-called Bible Salesman is going down the ladder with Hulga’s artificial leg in his case, he should say, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ ”
Oh, how we laughed then, and she said, “It would go there. You’re right.”
And then she said, “You know, I never liked her much.”
And we laughed again.
We would talk about that kind of thing, and about the quickness of time, and we would eat pasta al forno, lovely wide folded strips of noodle, with prosciutto and fontina cheese and Béchamel sauce, and I would wonder aloud why she stopped writing stories as she got into her seventies—because I’m still writing them and will never stop until it’s taken from me. And I imagine her saying, “It was taken from me. I couldn’t do it anymore. I never felt I would have time to finish. I didn’t want to leave anything undone.”
And maybe I would tell her about a woman I knew who kept one closet in her house messy, for fear that if she ever finished with that, she’d die.
I wouldn’t want the lunch to end.
And I would take it with me, a memory and a sweet thought; but then, we do have a version of this kind of thing. I can pick up one of her books and look in, and hear the voice again, and no matter when or where I or anybody looks in, there she is.
Richard Bausch is the author of twelve novels, eight volumes of short stories, and one volume of poetry and prose. He teaches in the writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California.