#328 The Key- Eudora Welty
Albert and Ellie are in train station waiting to travel to
Niagara Falls. It is a long awaited wedding trip they have worked hard and
saved for. Ellie is skeptical that this trip will change what’s wrong with
their marriage.
Albert is “too shy for this world.” “He looked homemade, as
though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband
when she sat alone at night.”
Sitting in the station, lost in his shyness, a key suddenly
slip on the floor into his vision. Most of the rest of the passengers witnessed
the key being dropped by another man, but not Albert. He saw it as a sign, a
way to change his life.
“Now you can stop being ashamed of me, for being so cautious
and slow all my life, for taking my own time…You can take hope. Because it was
I who found the key.”
The Key was happiness, a change for the better, and it was
all his. Ellie, at first liked the change, but then resented it, seeing
Albert’s love of happiness as a challenge to her, as if she herself wasn’t
enough for Albert. To her, Albert’s happiness was selfish unless she also
possessed it:
“Happiness…is something that appears to you suddenly, that
it is meant for you, a thing for which you reach for and pick up and hide at
your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”
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