SOURCE: "'Among Those Missing': Phil Hand's Disappearance from The Optimist's Daughter," in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 74-88.

[In the following essay, Wolff discusses how the character of Philip Hand, from Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, was changed as the author revised the work.]

Eudora Welty published The Optimist's Daughter first as a short story in the New Yorker in 1969 and subsequently as a novel in 1972. Radically revising the character of Philip Hand during successive interim versions of the story, initially omitting and then adding, Welty finally excised most material that elaborates his character and brief marriage to Laurel. In the novel, little description of Phil remains except for a paragraph about his origins on an Ohio farm and a brief reminiscence about their wedding day, altogether amounting to no more than four pages of text. During the process of achieving the final version, Welty deleted some twenty pages of romantic scenes depicting the meeting, courtship, and marriage of Phil and Laurel.

Not included in the original story, Phil Hand evolved into a strong physical presence in the interim versions. The Philip Hand in the resulting novel, however, is dead, disembodied, arising only in Laurel's reverie on the night of her father's funeral. In the novel, though gone, Philip Hand makes his voice heard:

the past had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself—here waiting, all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel's…. 'Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!' Phil's voice cried. She wept for what happened to life. 'I wanted it!' Phil cried. His voice rose with the wind in the night and went around the house and around the house. It became a roar. 'I wanted it!'

In the novel version, left bodiless and graveless in his World War II death, Phil exists in Laurel's mind, not as a whole man, not even as a memory of a whole, but as a remembered image, a remembered voice. Phil is only a cry of despair that reverberates in Laurel's mind with an excruciating anguish not found elsewhere in Eudora Welty's fiction. His anguish naturally becomes Laurel's cry, too, of lost opportunity for life and love. As the physicality of Phil disappears, the text about him does also. Almost simultaneously creating and erasing, Welty alters Phil from the resplendent young bridegroom of the early sketches to a shadow and an absence. Her final rendering of him is the deathly, ghostly sound, occurring in Laurel's dream, as she slumps forward in her chair. Welty has commented upon the decision to alter the presentation of Phil:

I wanted the relationship of Phil and Laurel to be taken for granted for my purpose in the novel. It gave it a more proper depth and allowed me to concentrate on the scene in which Phil says, 'I wanted it!' It's really a short novel, and I still think of it as a long short story. You have to get the proportions right. You have to keep in mind the good of the whole story.

By deliberately excising Phil, Welty dramatically restructures the story into a novel that focuses not upon the happy days enjoyed by Laurel and Phil, but upon the end of those days and his disappearance. As the literal presence of Phil diminishes, he metaphorically looms larger, and as the descriptions of his everyday life with Laurel and their domestic bliss are made more sketchy, Phil becomes more fully identified. The excisions profoundly transform "The Optimist's Daughter" from a story about love to a novel about tragedy and death. Initially pictured an only child, Laurel evolves into a character who knew love, was courted, married, and widowed—a woman whose untold love story ended almost before it began. Only Phil's memory emerges as the sustaining power of the novel's final pages.

In early drafts Phil does not appear, but Laurel is immediately introduced as a widow. Draft one, sentence one reads: "Laurel Hand, born Laurel McKelva." Welty pictured Laurel's marriage before she created a husband for her. In fact, Welty recently stated that "Phil was always there in my mind, even before I decided to write about him." Laurel's absent husband is mentioned only once in several early drafts of the story, as Mrs. Chisom queries Laurel about him. In draft one, for example, we find only one reference to Laurel's husband:

"You had a bad luck with your husband, too?" Mrs. Chisom asked Laurel.

"He was lost over North Africa."

"So you ain't got father, mother, brother, sister, husband, chick nor child." Mrs. Chisom poked Laurel as if to send her from the room.

"Not a soul to call on, that's you."

Though blunt and intrusive, Mrs. Chisom has struck at the heart of Laurel's lonely predicament. Like Everyman, Laurel has no "soul to call on" and must rely only upon her memory. The title for draft one of the story, "An Only Child," is particularly apt, in this context, emphasizing Laurel's aloneness and reflecting Welty's autobiographical tendency to incorporate into this work her experience as the only girl in a family with two brothers, a configuration that gave her the "feeling that you are by yourself."

In draft two of "An Only Child," the mention of Laurel's husband is made more vague rather than more detailed: he "died in the war." Here he is dead even without the African location, without any location. She subsequently changes the scene of Phil's death, a third time, to the Battle of Leyte (Gulf), but in the final version he dies in an unspecified location in the Pacific, an early indication of the eventual placelessness, gravelessness, and anonymity Welty later accords his wartime death. Further alterations occur in Phil's war assignments. Initially serving as a fighter pilot, Phil later dies as a communications officer aboard a mine sweeper in the Navy.

Not until the third draft of the story does Welty first sketch a full character resembling Phil Hand, yet he remains unnamed. This character, a friend who lives in Chicago, will comfort Laurel:

—a friend who was not to be turned away like another Major Bullock, a friend who with healthy Middlewestern impatience would answer her….

The character of Phil Hand, Welty says, derives partly from her brothers and partly from the memories of friends lost in World War II. Her compositional technique is evinced in the combining of aspects of real people and places with the imagined to create a fictional whole. She specifically refers to "Those who fought in the Italian campaign started out over North Africa…. I had a friend who fought in the Italian campaign. But my brother fought in Okinawa, and I put that in, too." Her brother's character informs Phil's characteristics the most vividly:

Phil is an amalgamation of a lot of boys I knew. My other brother, the middle child, has some of his characteristics—those double-jointed thumbs, and he was an architect. Phil has not got his character, though. Although he did make a breadboard. But no one ever acted badly about it.

Some twenty pages of fragments describe Phil and Laurel together during early courtship days and suggest that Welty gathered together the material about this "Chicago friend" from different places or drafts. Suzanne Marrs points out in The Welty Collection that this material contains Welty's note to herself to "Omit this part for now," and that these fragments indicate her possible intention "to return to this character before publishing her story as a book."

What seems clear, at least, is that Welty once considered a greater emphasis on the early love relationship between Phil and Laurel than she finally chose for either story or novel. "Sometimes you have to know what happened to character, even if you do not use it," Welty says. Her decision to exclude the sketches of Phil as a courting lover and young husband results in an intensified conclusion for the novel, one with more mystery and pathos.

Among these revisions and drafts, available in the Mississippi State Archives, the portraits of Philip Hand do exist as Welty originally conceived them. Particularly vivid are several romantic scenes that capture the spontaneous attraction between Laurel and Phil, a quality that survives in subsequent versions, until finally it is radically reduced. Here Welty finally names Laurel's friend "Phil," and describes the couple in the kitchen of Phil's mother, on the occasion of Laurel's first visit to his family home. We hear again the theme of the "only child" as Phil's mother pleads for more than one grandchild.

His family in their Middlewestern way had seemed to her pleasantly fond and wholesomely unacquainted with one another. In the occasion of their first visit, she had heard Phil's mother ask him at the table if he liked ice cream. In exactly the same voice she had asked Laurel, over dishwashing, how soon, how many, and how wide apart would the children be? When Laurel dropped a pie plate, Mrs. Hand had [implored] [explained], "Please, not an only child!"… She laughed at the thought of her own mother making any of these remarks.

Though his Midwestern mother's directness is given voice here, Phil still has no voice of his own. Laurel's point of view governs this kitchen scene, and as Phil's mother questions her directly about children, Welty establishes a contrast between her manner and Laurel's Southern decorum. "That's a good middlewestern touch in the kitchen, isn't it," Welty now muses about her early draft. The question of the children implies marriage and sex, surprising the shy Laurel, who drops the pie plate she is holding. "Southerners," Welty says, "would not have asked the question, though it is a perfectly good question to ask." Despite these familial differences, Laurel's attraction to Phil grows. She enjoys his independence of mind and love of privacy—two qualities Laurel also possesses:

Part of Philip's arrest on her mind was his complete silence about his family. Nobody ever sat at a board and drew with a pencil who was not in love with privacy, she supposed. Phil seemed a prodigy of independence, and yet he was deprived—she had first thought him shallow; he seemed not even very much to tolerate the human species.

Draft three continues Welty's definition of Phil Hand, yet the descriptions are still sketchy, and like his name, synecdochal. His gentleness and love of birds are clear:

He was an Ohio boy, had loved birds; he stole away from life class to watch birds instead, filled his sketchbook with them, knew all about their nesting, migrations—had shown Laurel the birds of the lake, of the Northern cold.

The meeting between Laurel and Phil, she writes: "had been spontaneous—they had begun by dancing well together." Yet after the publication of the New Yorker story, the meeting place changes to the steps of the Chicago Art Institute. The predominant characteristics of both meetings are consistent: the attraction between these two people is spontaneous and strong, mutual, immediate, and undeniable.

She and Philip first walked toward each other by chance in front of the Art Institute. Each knew who the other was, there had been a friend in common. It was a cold, dark Sunday afternoon in the middle of March; the lake was indigo. They walked into the museum together and walked up the staircase, enclosed by the Sunday throng, shoulder to shoulder. As they climbed, a Monet on the floor above (it was a loan exhibition) shed light halfway down the staircase towards them, out of a lady's open parasol. They were stopped at the same moment with a foot on the same step. Then up they sped. For the rest of the afternoon, they walked miles without ever leaving the museum and never stopped talking. They were aware of an attraction as if it had been some amazing resemblance growing between them, which called clamorous attention to itself and reverberated to their footsteps. In front of a Bonnard lithograph six inches square, which contained the expansiveness of a woman standing with her arm down—curved to place a bowl in front of a man seated at a table, they came to another halt, and exchanged addresses and phone numbers. Both wrote with Venus drawing pencils, and both pencils raced, as though two lives would depend upon their quickness.

Welty characterizes the marriage of Laurel and Phil as one of magical ease—"They would live in Chicago where they had met … at the Art Institute … [They hurried] each night to get back to the apartment, that dark into which the two used to walk [,] swaying with happiness." The "manual training" Phil received in high school enables him to solve the domestic, electrical, and carpentry problems around the house.

He was amused that she had come to marriage unprepared for life with anybody who knew how to make things work. He re-routed the wiring in their apartment to give them their bed light. He made a four-legged stool for her to stand on to put up her curtains and hang her wash. He said it was just like the stool he'd made in manual training class the seventh grade in Logan's Bridge, Ohio.

Eventually he makes the breadboard, a touching gift of his handiwork for his mother-in-law.

The compatibility between Laurel and Phil derives partly from their common art; the idea of designing has metaphorical significance for both Laurel and Phil. An architect, Phil imagines and sketches houses—domestic structures—while Laurel, first a painter, later opts for design—she becomes a decorator of interior spaces. This change in Laurel's career, from painter to interior designer, is a significant one, suggesting that she is a shaper of interior landscapes.

Quickly, however, the first indications come that Laurel has lost Phil.

Laurel thought we loved each other! To love is not to dismiss. It was not even a very long time ago. But memory was a reckless power, as independent of wish as the power of loving. [Phil was the only ghost in her life, she thought]. The reminder of loss was still a part of her conscious effort to live, but was familiar now, almost in the nature of comfort. Losing your love was like being given a compass, though too late for the journey.

Welty likens love to memory, since both are "reckless" powers now ranging out of control, "independent" of the wish of the individual. She likens the loss of love to a compass—found "too late" to chart the waters together. Laurel makes the "conscious effort to live" after Phil's death, only to meet perpetual loneliness as a penance. His accustomed absence—in Derridean terms, the presence of an absence—takes on the familiarity of "a comfort."

Laurel's memories of Phil in these unpublished sketches now begin to move, "press forward," and erupt in her mind, unbeckoned, beyond her conscious control, and requiring her full attention. She ruminates about this selective, uncontrollable quality of memory, which Welty later calls "the somnambulist." Phil, the most repressed memory she has, emerges from the deep recesses of her mind:

Of all those who moved in her mind, he was the retiring one. Those closest to us in time seem quickest to vanish, and those who lay deep back begin to press forward, making voices heard. [In the long period of sleeplessness of the war and after the war [he was lost], [she was in effect staying awake]….

Laurel's sleeplessness carries forward the more general motif in the novel of sightlessness, hindsight, and the personification of memory as somnambulist. Laurel's father and mother each die blind or nearly blind. The loss of sight ironically creates deepened hindsight in both Judge McKelva and his daughter, each of whom achieves a heightened understanding of love. In this context, Welty's title change of draft four, from "An Only Child" to "Poor Eyes," is understandable. She has commented further upon that change in title:

I wanted to have something about the eyes. I first wanted to call it "Poor Eyes," but that was voted down. Bill Maxwell and Diarmuid Russell didn't like it. Bill did like The Optimist's Daughter. He said it gave a nice "chill of apprehension." But I've never been very good at titles. After the book came out I had letters that had the title wrong: "I so much enjoyed The Optimistic Daughter." Another said The Optometrist's Daughter. That's a good one, don't you think? The Optometrist's Daughter? Because of the eyes?

Welty's title also reflects her own propensity to learn through hindsight: "I seem to come to understanding belatedly," she says, and in One Writer's Beginnings she applies this sense of understanding to her parents' lives.

It seems to me, writing of my parents now in my seventies, that I see continuities in their lives that weren't visible to me when they were living. Even at the times that have left me my most vivid memories of them, there were connections between them that escape me. Could it be because I can better see their lives—or any lives I know—today because I am a fiction writer?

Sleeplessness and hindsight seem most closely related in Welty's image of memory as "the somnambulist," the wakeful sleeper.

The revisions also carefully trace Phil's wartime activities and death. During the war, Phil's letter home warns of the proximity of the perilous Kamikaze planes and presages his imminent death.

He had written on a V-mail letter not to her but to her father, and she, being at home, had opened it—the only letter not her own she had ever opened [and done as if to show she was married]—read aloud the absurdly reduced laconic words that the suicide flyers had been up to now approaching the carrier 'close enough to shake hands with me.'

The autobiographical underpinnings of these scenes become clear in Welty's statements:

My friend in World War II married into—well, when someone was lost like Phil is—I knew what that feeling was like. How could I not have?… It was a bad war. The boys we knew were involved in this, and we were with them. These young people (today) … couldn't conceive of fighting for a cause. This applies to Phil. The part in the novel about the kamikaze happened to Walter. He was in the Navy Okinawa, and later he was asked, 'How close have you come to a kamikaze' and he said, 'Close enough to shake hands with.' So I put that in the story. Who could ever make up a thing like that?"

The inevitable moment soon arrives, in these dramatic but fragmented sketches, in which Laurel receives the news of Phil's death.

That night there came knocking—first on the front room door of this apartment and then, down the hall, at her bedroom door: [S]he was writing him a letter, half drawing it the way they wrote to each other. She put her head out the front door—She recognized the knocker in a moment. It was the neighborhood Taxi, that was all;

"Wrong door." she said, pert-voiced, a young matron in the north.

He came on in. "You got a place to sit down, lady? You got a death message." He handed her a telegram. [from Washington.]

"But you were just the taxi driver!" He put on his cap, with a badge lettered "TAXI[.]" and clumped off down the stairs. Still standing in her doorway with her telegram, she heard the taxi proving itself, creaking off into the snow.

This scene is redolent with implication. Laurel receives the news of Phil's death as she is in the bedroom writing him a letter. But she is "half-drawing" this letter, "the way they always wrote to each other," another testament to their shared artistry and affection. Laurel is unaware that as she composes the letter, Phil is dead.

The ironically off-handed method by which the devastating death letter reaches Laurel, by way of "just the taxi driver," has echoes in other Welty stories of the injustice of accident. In "A Piece of News," for example, Ruby Fisher reads a shocking news story that she believes to be pronouncing her own death. The news article startles her, as for Laurel, because the outside world violates the private sphere abruptly; the newspaper and the taxi driver alter lives with cruel anonymity. Miss Larkin in "A Curtain of Green" similarly loses her husband to accident, her loss lasting a lifetime. Laurel can control neither the shock of Phil's death, nor the abruptly inadequate and inappropriate manner in which the news arrives.

Disappearing while flying over the Pacific, Phil is, as military euphemism would have it, "among the missing." But Laurel's imagination dwells upon the gruesome fate of her lover's body:

But of what had happened to him and his plane, there had been no living witness, [there was no trace]. He was among those missing, and that was the end of it. He was bones on the Pacific floor. Or his drowned body had washed up on some strip of sand and birds he would have loved and known had eaten him. And because there was nothing of him left, her [his] memory of Phil was intact; satisfied. Everything changes. [His memory was intact, yet vast (.) (F)or her it was Chicago].

Phil is physically gone, his body violently destroyed. "Bodiless and graveless," as Welty describes him later in the novel, Phil's association with birds becomes even more ironic because this careful watcher and lover of birds—who "filled his sketchbook" with birds, "knew all about their … nesting, migrations," had shown these birds to Laurel—has now literally been eaten by them.

Phil's death by drowning also has significant ramifications in the larger context of the novel. Death by water is a common end for Welty characters. Clytic drowns in a rainbarrel; Hazel Jamison in "The Wide Net" threatens to drown herself, and since she is presumed drowned, the community drags the river for her body. Grady's father has drowned in the Pearl River (in "The Wide Net"), and tears come to Grady's eyes when he imagines his drowned father's visage:

Without warning he saw something … perhaps the image in the river seemed to be his father, the drowned man—with arms open, eyes open, mouth open … Grady stared and blinked, again something wrinkled up his face.

Written thirty years before The Optimist's Daughter, this passage closely resembles the drowned visage of Phil as it appears to Laurel in the novel—mouth open, eyes open, voice crying out, as the survivor weeps for love and for the dead.

For Welty, the drowned face is the face of death in its most horrifying form—eyes that are open but cannot see, arms open wide that cannot embrace, and a mouth that is open but has no breath or voice. Although Judge McKelva does not literally drown, Welty insists on a parallel:

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.

In Welty's photographs and stories, the human face is the clearest image of life, and so bereft of all expression and voice, the drowned face becomes her most profound image of the finality of death.

The association of water with death and memory occurs in all versions of The Optimist's Daughter, perhaps because water, with its fluid properties, resembles the onset and then the "flood" of memory, that can "roll its wave" over Laurel "unbidden." In the first complete draft of the novel, for example, water evokes Laurel's memory of Phil as she washes her hands.

'the way to cool off the soonest is to let water run over the veins in your wrists.' Philip Hand's voice returned in the running water and spoke from her memory unbidden. She stood there, letting the water cool her, and the tears brimmed her eyes.

Memory arises against her will. Phil is disembodied here, as well—no image appears; Laurel simply hears his voice. But the moment is not one of horror as in the final pages of the novel. Instead the voice soothes her soul, just as the running water cools her body. Water and grief commingle again as Laurel weeps at her father's funeral. As she stands at the gravesite, grief deafens her, and she does not hear the funeral sermon.

Dr. Bolt assumed position and pronounced the words. Again Laurel failed to hear what came from his lips. She might not even have heard the high school band. Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears.

The psychological significance of the journey that the judge embarks upon is here suggested by Welty's powerfully descriptive language. Sounds from the interstate achieve the deafening pitch of "eternal ocean waves." "The ancient porter," unloading Judge McKelva's coffin from the train, is a modern-day Charon, the mythic boatman who ferries the souls of the dead down the river of eternal woe. Sound carries meaning: "There was a dead boom like the rolling in of an ocean wave. The hearse door had been slammed shut." Laurel's father is poised for his journey down the river of oblivion. The bridge over the Mississippi River, shrouded in nightfall, that Laurel sees from the Judge's hospital room window shortly before his death, further symbolizes his impending passage into the world beyond. The metaphor of the wave now takes on even more texture and resonance in describing her marriage to Phil.

As far as Laurel had ever known, there had not happened a single blunder in their short life together. But with Phil's death, the knowledge that nothing had protected him had rolled its wave in on her, over her head, and when its savagery was spent had left her stranded.

Like Phil's bones, washed ashore, Laurel is emotionally "stranded" without him. Her memory of him is "vast," like the Pacific Ocean in which he drowns, and her soul expires along with Phil's: "If Phil had lived and I had lived!"

But Laurel cannot renew Phil's life nor save it. Saving one's life is at first a joking matter between the two lovers:

'You saved my life,' she'd said when Phil replaced the broken sash cord so that the little kitchen window could be raised. 'Well, that time it was easy,' he said, and, both laughing, they sat down to the table with a blessing of a fresh breeze from the lake. Even to the sound of a distant band concert—and he'd whistled along with it, as though to say a proper husband could produce music just by loving it, skim it right off the lake.

Overseas, in wartime battles of fire and water, Phil is vulnerable to the kamikaze, and neither she nor anyone can protect him from death: "She'd had to learn it again, and now from Philip Hand again. Who knew better than she now that protecting was the feeblest act of love."

The theme of protection and vulnerability continues to wind suggestively through the later novel. Laurel's mother Becky cannot protect her own father from death, nor can Laurel save her father from destruction. Welty cites in One Writer's Beginnings the roots of this idea in her parents' lives. Her father saves her mother's life once, but ultimately she cannot save him when he needs a blood transfusion:

This time, she would save his life, as he'd saved hers so long ago, when she was dying of septicemia. What he'd done for her in giving her the champagne, she would be able to do for him now in giving her own blood.

The medical procedure fails, and Welty's father dies: "My mother … never stopped blaming herself. She saw this as her failure to save his life." The complexity of these lessons results in the fictional Laurel's understanding that "protecting was the feeblest act of love."

In revising The Optimist's Daughter, Welty excised most passages that elaborate the character of Philip Hand and his early married days with Laurel. The little description of Phil's character remaining in the novel, a brief account of his wedding day, does not substitute for the excision of sketches portraying happy love. These excisions emphasize the horror of Phil's demise and the tragedy of his loss. Commenting upon her decision to deemphasize their romance, Welty said that:

There wasn't time for any of it. I played Laurel down from the beginning—she's the eyes. But when I started developing it more, I decided to concentrate on Phil's death rather than on the earlier material…. Laurel's romance wants to come out, too. She's been trying to bring it forth. Her own has been kept waiting. Finally it burgeons out, especially in the context of the records she goes through, and the storm, and the crisis.

Not included in her original story, Phil Hand evolves into a character during Welty's compositional process. After the radical excisions, the Philip Hand of the final draft, dead and disembodied, arises in Laurel's purgatorial memory, like the ghost of Hamlet, returned from the grave to inflame the survivor with grief. The novel now relentlessly and powerfully apprehends the image of the dead Philip Hand.

She had gone on living with the old perfection undisturbing. Now, by her own hands, the past had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself—here waiting, all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel's … 'Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!' Phil's voice cried. She wept for what happened to life. 'I wanted it!' Phil cried. His voice rose with the wind in the night and went around the house and around the house. It became a roar. 'I wanted it!'

Here at last is the remembered voice of the husband silenced by death, "raised up" like Lazarus by Laurel's "hands." His voice rises with the wind in a deep and profound cry for life that becomes Laurel's expression, too, of her own missed opportunity: "I wanted it!" Phil's voice, the tornadic "roar" whirling around the house, becomes the second metaphor for the sound, like the eternal ocean waves, of deafening grief.

Removing the early sketches, reducing Phil to a voice enveloping Laurel, Welty achieves the emotional pitch and imagistic clarity that is the genius of The Optimist's Daughter. Phil's spirit merges with the bird that rushes through Laurel's house, as images of water shift to those of flight and sound. The next scene introduces a small, brown chimney sweep who enters the house with a disturbing, "pounding" wingbeat. Once inside the house, the bird "frantically" strikes itself against the window. Laurel catches and releases the bird, which flies away with a gently palpable wind. The bird, like Phil, appears bodiless as it recedes:

Something struck her face—not feathers; it was a blow of wind. The bird was away. In the air it was nothing but a pair of wings—she saw no body any more, no tail, just a tilting crescent being drawn back into the sky.

The final image of the disappearing bird symbolically incorporates both Phil's physical absence and his presence. Avid birdwatcher, sketcher of birds, eaten by them on the Pacific sands, Phil assumes here the corporeality of the chimney swift, as the housekeeper, Missouri, warns with her folk wisdom, "Bird in the house means death." As Laurel carries the bird out of the house, she has "full knowledge" of its body and spirit "vibrating through the ribs of the baskets, the beat of its wings or of its heart." The violent winds of the past are transformed here into a feather-like brush of wind of a chimney swift's wing. Her night of agony is over; even the house is still "like a ship that has tossed all night and come to harbor." Laurel's waves of emotion subside. The catharsis is at hand: the exhalation of the breath, the calming of the wind and water.

In the final moments of the ultimate chapter comes the heartrending apotheosis of Philip Hand and Laurel's own salvation, as Welty draws together the disparate symbols of bird, war-plane, and wind into the single image of the "tilting crescent," spent in memory. Mrs. Chisom was mistaken: Laurel has indeed had "a soul to call on," and that soul, like memory, "is like a well; the deeper you go, the more you recover." Thus transfigured, Phil abides imperviously in Laurel's memory of him. With Phil forever among the missing, no body to recover, no grave to tend, Laurel has only memory by which to apprehend and enshrine the disappearing man.