Oh, William

“He took heart in the fact that he could pass many people—the old man with a walker, or a woman who used a cane, or even just a person his age who seemed to move more slowly than he did—and this made him feel healthy and alive and almost invulnerable in a world of constant traffic.”

This passage sets up William’s good health and vigor for his age. He compares himself with others who are on the point of decrepitude and finds himself in better shape. The feeling of being “almost invulnerable” in a world of “constant traffic” indicates William’s feeling of control over his body and by extension, his life. This will prove ironic as the “traffic” that affects more chaotic lives than his will soon disrupt his sense of order.

“It all made me think of William and how when we were young and I was in college we would drive through places like this, snowy areas that looked forlorn, but I had felt so happy with him. I felt snug with him. William had no siblings, as I have said—and in a way, at that point, neither did I—and there was, that night as I drove with my current husband and his sister, a strong memory of coziness, because William and I had been a world unto ourselves.”

Driving through a snowy landscape with David reminds Lucy of driving through similar environments with William. The past memory eclipses the present journey, along with the youthful feeling that a young couple has of being “a world unto ourselves” and therefore self-contained. While Lucy has a brother and sister, when she is with William, she feels as devoid of siblings as he is, and thus completely freed of her ties to the past. There is optimism in the vague snowy landscape, which conceals complex reality as it promises a fresh start for the young couple. Instead, older Lucy has seen and experienced too much of the world to draw comfort from a snowy car-ride and looks to the past for primacy of feeling.

“Catherine’s entire house was clean; the wooden floors in the living room shone a honey color, and the bedrooms had curtains that were white and starched-looking. Never did I think I could live like that. It did not occur to me. But that she lived like that! Really, I could not get over it.”

This passage reveals the immaculate nature of Catherine’s dwelling, with its shining floors and white, starched-looking curtains and her subsequent aspirations to middle-class elegance and propriety. It also indicates Lucy’s feeling that it is difficult to completely know what it is like to be another person. Her notion that she could not live like Catherine is a metaphor for not completely understanding her and her motives for wanting to live in a pristine home. The difference between her and Lucy on this point is so incredible that it becomes a fixation for Lucy.

“The funny thing to me, I mean funny-interesting, is that the new coat she bought for me came from a store that was not where they sold especially nice things. I did not know that for a number of years, until I began to sort out the different stores. But it was almost a store where people went who had little money.”

Following her emergence from childhood of poverty, Lucy has acquired some understanding of the class-significance behind different stores. She realizes that Catherine has replaced her beloved thrift-store coat with one from a cheap store aimed at people with low incomes. Her finding of this as “funny-interesting” indicates that she thinks there is some logic to Catherine’s reasoning. Catherine thought to replace the thrift-store coat with one that was a moderate step up, rather than the sort of luxurious coat she herself would wear. Catherine’s consciousness of emerging from poverty leads her to project her own insecurities onto Lucy’s route out of it.

“Oh I missed David! I missed him dreadfully. Unbelievably I missed him. I thought how he knew I loved tulips, and how he always—always—brought tulips to the apartment; even when they were out of season he would go to a florist nearby and bring me home tulips.”

This passage shows Lucy’s grief over David and her memory of his uncomplicated love for her. The repetition of “tulips” indicates the unguarded nature of his love for her. He gives liberally, unlike William, who is more restrained in his generosity.

“I’m really sorry, William. I am not blaming you for this (but you ARE kind of unreachable a lot). But you’re a good man. You just seem faraway at times. I mean a lot of times.”

Estelle’s letter to William spells out her frustration at his distance. She alternates the synonyms of his being “faraway” and “unreachable” and corrects the idea that he is distant “at times” with “a lot of times.” While she claims not to blame William for her departure, this lengthy explanation indicates that she has good reason for leaving him. Later in the novel, Lucy will also remark William’s propensity to be distant, as the theme of how a person is in one relationship carrying into others is developed.

“All of a sudden I realized that the rugs were gone except for a small one in the far corner of the room; this is partly why the place looked so bleak. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘She took the rugs?’”

The shocking nature of Estelle’s departure is expressed in her stripping the apartment of all its furniture and on a metaphorical level, of its comfort. Here, the emphasis on her taking the rugs alludes to the colloquial metaphor of pulling the rug out from under a person’s feet, indicating a deprivation of their former stability. The small rug left in the far corner of the room symbolizes that there is a small hope of comfort.

“We had neither one of us been raised with the outside culture of the world. Neither of us had grown up with a television in the house. We only had a vague knowledge of the Vietnam War, until we taught it to ourselves later on […] It is hard to describe what it is like when one is raised in such isolation from the outside world. So we became each other’s home.”

Lucy expresses that some of the understanding between her and her second husband David stemmed from the fact that they grew up without awareness of the outside world. As they were both poor, the preoccupation of survival and emerging from poverty were absolute and produced limited access to knowledge about the world. The necessity of teaching themselves about the Vietnam War indicates the role of such general knowledge in social integration when they left their backgrounds. The difficulty of describing such isolation to outsiders becomes almost irrelevant in the comfort that they can mutually understand and provide a home for each other.

“I had only been on one airplane before, and that was when William flew me East my senior year in college. I could not believe that I was sitting in the sky, and I had to act nonchalant about it, and I tried to. But it was astonishing.”

Having grown up in rural poverty, Lucy is astounded by modern-day wonders such as an airplane long after they have ceased to be wondrous for her contemporaries. She knows however, that if she is to fit in, she must affect nonchalance and being at ease with things that inspire strong feelings with her. This passage also shows how the deprivation of poverty isolates people and inhibits modernization.

“I am only saying: I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.”

As Lucy speculates about William’s night terrors and whether his mother’s death provoked his affairs, she acknowledges the astonishing fact that she does not know the man she married. All her ideas about him are just conjectures. The repetition of wondering about William indicates that she has asked herself about who he is numerous times during the course of their acquaintance and aligns with the book’s proposition that one person can never fully know another.

“As we drove I became aware of a sensation that was familiar, and it had started the night before with the airport seeming so surreal, almost not like an airport at all […] I was scared.”

As Lucy adjusts to the emptiness and sense of dereliction about the Maine landscape, she experiences the familiar feeling of fear from her childhood, which took place against a similar backdrop. The idea of an airport being “almost not like an airport at all” indicates that the airport, a modern contraption that she was unfamiliar with from her childhood, seems out of place in a setting which seems old-fashioned enough to be from that time.

“Here I was in rural Maine and what had just come to me was an understanding […] these people in their houses, these few houses we passed by. It was an odd thing, but it was real, for a few moments I felt this: that I understood where I was. And even, also, that I loved the people we did not see who inhabited the few houses and who had their trucks in front of these houses.”

Lucy sees the landscape and lifestyle of the rural Maine dwellers and feels as though she knows them based on her similar experiences. A feeling of love accompanies the sense of understanding, as Lucy’s ability to relate to these strangers inspires compassion.

“We have had this conversation—almost exactly that—for a number of years since we separated […] a mutual apology. This may sound strange, but it is not strange to William and to me. It is part of the fabric of who we are.”

Lucy and William’s mutual apology for the failures in their marriage forms both part of their individual personalities and also part of who they are together. In a relationship marked by love and tenderness, there is inevitable regret for where things went wrong. The apology also enables a basis of honesty from which their friendship can grow.

“And that woman looked at me, her face was contorted with fury, and she spat—she tried to spit—and she said, ‘Get out of here!’ She raised an arm, a bare arm through the slit of her nightgown, and she said, ‘Get out of here you—you horrible girl! You piece of trash!”

When Lucy tries to reassure Catherine that her suffering will soon be at an end, Catherine’s fury eviscerates all of her pretenses to middle class propriety. She tries to spit as much as her weak body will allow and calls Lucy “trash,” an insult often directed at poor people, and a word Lois later uses to describe Catherine’s own origins. The detail of Catherine’s bare arm through the slit of the nightgown indicates the visceral and authentic nature of her fury at Lucy. It is left ambiguous however, if she is mad at Lucy for reminding Catherine of her death or her humble origins.

“I remember walking back from putting some laundry in, I was walking across a little lawn, and I was wearing a light-blue denim dress, and what I remember is that it was like a small bird flew through my mind. And the bird was this: a thought: Maybe I will have to kill myself. It is the only time I can remember thinking this. And the thought came and went like a small bird in my mind.”

Lucy’s experience of a suicidal thought as a fleeting bird indicates that it is an interloper and not an intrinsic part of herself. The specific, mundane recollections of the outfit and the task of walking back from laundry indicate that though the suicidal feeling was temporary, it was still potent. Here, Strout suggests a relationship between the mundanity of maternal responsibility and Lucy’s extreme feelings.

“Never would I kill myself. I am a mother. As invisible as I feel, I am a mother.”

Lucy feels that the fact of her motherhood ought to be an amulet against suicide, as others depend on her. The feeling of invisibility that plagues her runs counter to the competing feeling that she is absolutely essential to her daughters’ well-being.

“So it wasn’t me that made him do this, if he did this while married to Joanne and also to Estelle? Then it wasn’t because of me? I could not believe this. And I thought about what he had said the night before about choice. He may not have had any choice about this part of him. How do I know? I do not know.”

Lucy is astonished to learn that William’s affairs have nothing to do with her. Her reasoning with its repeated expressions of disbelief reflects the common human propensity to magnify one’s importance in situations that are beyond one’s control. She further reflects her doubt over whether she thought William had a choice in the matter of his infidelities, concluding that she cannot know for sure.

“There was something about her that seemed deeply—almost fundamentally—comfortable inside herself, the way I think a person is when they have been loved by their parents.”

When Lucy meets Lois, the daughter that Catherine abandoned, she finds her the opposite of what most people would expect from a child that has been rejected by her parents. Lois’s security is fundamental and therefore has the quality of being unshakeable. As Lucy feels that she was not loved sufficiently by her parents, she imagines that Lois’s ease in her own skin comes from deep parental love.

‘“She came from less than nothing. She came from trash.’ The word was like a slap across my face. That word is always like a slap across my face.”

Lois’s use of the word “trash” to describe her biological mother’s origins indicates the lingering vestiges of anger she has towards Catherine for abandoning her. For Lucy, the word “trash” has the uncomfortable connotations of Catherine’s insult to her on her deathbed and harks back to a childhood where her poverty made her feel abject and unwanted. The brassy monosyllabic sound of the word “trash” makes it the sensory equivalent of a sudden slap in the face.

“When I read your book—your memoir—I was so surprised to see that it had to do with the potato farmer, my father! And I kept thinking, She’ll mention me in it, she will mention the fact that the woman left behind her baby daughter. But you never did.”

For Lois, the pain of being forgotten or written out of the family story, first by Catherine who does not share the news of her existence and then by Lucy who does not know to write about her, exacerbates the original pain of being abandoned by her mother. She seeks compensation for the original slight by hoping to find a mention of herself in Lucy’s book. When Lucy neglects to do this, Lois projects some of her anger towards Catherine onto her. This passage shows that like Lucy, Lois has her own struggles with feeling invisible.

“Oh I could see a young Catherine half-running, half-walking down that windswept November dark road, and getting to the train station without her boots, just her shoes and snow on the ground, and no real coat either, so that she would not be found out […] so deeply frightened—as she had probably always been from years of abuse at her father’s hand—and I felt I could picture her thoughts: If Wilhelm is not there when I get to Boston I will kill myself.”

This passage has all the ingredients of a romantic escape, in Catherine’s discretion and ingenuity as she gets away as quick as she can in a disguise that is inappropriate for the inclement weather. However, Lucy is certain that Catherine’s primary emotion is fear, both at the situation and of the memory of her father’s abuse that will inform the punishment she will likely experience if she is caught. In order to avoid that punishment, she judges that if she is not saved by Wilhelm’s presence in Boston, she will punish herself by ending her life.

“It was the tiniest house I think I had ever seen. I had grown up in a very small house, and this one was much smaller. It was one story and looked as though it had two rooms.”

Lucy is astonished to find that the house that Catherine grew up in was even smaller than her own childhood home. Part of her disbelief comes from the fact that she thinks Catherine adapted better than her to the norms of middle-class life and so transcended her humble beginnings to a greater extent.

“There have been a few times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember […] the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house […] there was no escape.”

Returning from the Maine trip, Lucy is at intervals haunted by the feeling of entrapment she experienced growing up in her tiny, oppressive house in Illinois. Although she has put physical distance between her and her childhood, it remains an internal state that revisits her without warning. The idea that “it came back to me with a whoosh” indicates that Lucy is not of conscious control of when the memories will revisit her. The idea of “quiet horror” indicates the silence that surrounded everything she was experiencing and relates to her feeling of invisibility.