Oh, William

Lucy’s 71-year-old ex-husband, William Gerhardt is tall, slender, and well-dressed with a mustache and a full head of white hair. The youthful retention of height, hair, and slimness indicates that while William has aged, he has retained the impression of virility. William’s relative fitness and agility, and his enjoyment of having a wife much younger than himself and fathering a 10-year-old daughter, make William feel in control and resilient. However, when his wife Estelle leaves him and he discovers that his mother Catherine had a daughter that he never knew about, William’s underlying insecurities are revealed. The night terrors he experiences about both his parents, but chiefly his mother, indicate that he has unresolved issues from childhood that relate to his emotional withholding in romantic relationships and resultant pattern of women leaving him.

As he goes on the trip to Maine with his ex-wife Lucy, William reveals his helplessness in dealing with the past of his father Wilhelm, a German prisoner of war. These feelings of horror and guilt were exacerbated rather than relieved when William visited the Nazi concentration camps in Germany. However, despite his experience visiting the camps, William accepts the money that his paternal grandfather made by profiting off WWII. William becomes very wealthy in turn, suppressing feelings of guilt about the money’s origin. His mother, Catherine, judges the funds as “dirty money” and declares that he should “give […] all away” (95), intensifying William’s insecurity regarding his mother’s love.

William adored his mother, often sidelining the young family he created with Lucy so that he could spend time with her, but he felt rejected by Catherine when she sent him to nursery a year early and forced him to seek refuge in the arms of a teacher. This feeling of being rejected by one woman and rushing into the arms of another continues throughout his marriages, when he responds to his wives’ wish for independence by seeking consolation with other women. In his marriage to Lucy, this happens when Lucy resumes her maiden name and becomes depressed following Catherine’s death. William’s use of a new woman to soften the rejection of another also occurs when his half-sister Lois refuses to see him and on returning to New York, he immediately takes up with an unsuitable society woman. While Lucy has seen a psychiatrist and is dealing with her issues, it is not clear that William has, and as a result, he is in a continual pattern of seeking resolution and avoiding pain. Lucy portrays his inflexibility as typical of a man of his generation.

Like Lucy, William struggles with feeling invisible. However, his male middle-class privilege means that he feels that he is entitled to visibility, and he does not struggle with the same lack of self-esteem as Lucy. This is shown when he compares himself to Richard Baxter, a more successful rival parasitologist, and tortures himself with imagining that Baxter is from a town they encounter on their journey. At the end of the trip, he calls Lucy in triumph stating that Baxter was from another town, thus dismissing the thought that he needed to feel haunted by him. Just as Baxter has lost his authority for William, by the end of the book, William and the type of manhood he represents lose their authority for Lucy. She will now relate to him from a place of compassion rather than one of seeking safety.

William’s half-sister Lois Bubar is the product of Catherine Cole’s union with potato-farmer Clyde Trask prior to her romantic escape with Wilhelm. Unlike most of the inhabitants in the Maine towns Lucy and William visit, Lois and her family are relatively wealthy.

Lois, 73, has “a youngish look” with nice light-brown hair and a lithe physique (168). In her youth, she was pretty and even crowned Miss Potato Blossom Queen of 1961. Although she idolizes Marilyn Smith, the adopted mother who left Lois her ancestral home, she shares some personality traits with Catherine Cole, the biological mother she resents. For example, the beauty pageant win, in addition to her teaching career and mothering of four children who all “turned out right” despite the addiction problems that plague their contemporaries (180), give Lois a sense of pride and of rising against the odds, like Catherine. Lucy, who is impressed by Lois’s fundamental sense of security, imagines that she was loved by all of her parents, including Catherine, who she imagines lavishing caresses on Lois in her first year of life.

However, while Lois is content with who she is, she too struggles with a sense of invisibility and being left behind. This is evident in her hostility to Catherine, both as the mother who abandoned her and the woman who later visited her in expensive clothes, an ostentatious display of how little regard Catherine has for her humble origins. It seems to Lois that despite Catherine’s protestations of misery, she has gotten away with the crime of abandoning her. By extension, Lois also resents Lucy, who accidentally excludes her from her memoir, which details Catherine’s escape from the potato-farmer to marry Wilhelm. Lois’s wish to be in Lucy’s next memoir indicates her desire not to be forgotten by city people who might look down on her for staying in the same town all her life.

Catherine Cole, who is referred to by her maiden name by both her son and daughter, came from the humblest origins of any character in Strout’s novel. She grew up in a tiny, two-room house in Maine with a mother who had alcoholism, an abusive father, and a troubled brother. She used her good looks and intelligence to get out of the family home when she was 18 by exploiting the rift between Clyde Trask and his sweetheart Marilyn Smith. However, the marriage was more one of convenience than love, and Catherine became besotted with Wilhelm, a prisoner of war who was in an equally entrapped state as she felt herself to be.

While Catherine portrayed her relationship with Wilhelm as a romantic escapade and kept silent on how she transformed from a poor, small-town girl into the embodiment of middle-class elegance, the truth was more complex. Just as the Maine landscape reminded Lucy of her childhood, Lucy’s presence in William’s life reminded Catherine of her own roots. While Catherine never directly voiced this observation, it emerged in her preoccupation that middle class pursuits like vacations and golf are “too much” for Lucy. Lucy’s sense of Catherine’s presence as oppressive can be seen when she changes her last name back to Barton, indicating that she wants to reclaim her origins rather than hiding them like her mother-in-law.

Catherine uses the vague, casual term “the blues” for the moods that interrupt her light, likeable personality (41), and William’s ancestry test reveal the lost child behind these episodes. Strout does not offer concrete reasons for why Catherine keeps Lois a secret, but Lucy speculates that Catherine may have been motivated by her desire to distance herself from her previous life, her anticipation of Wilhelm’s resentment of this fact, and Lois’s later rejection of Catherine. By the end of the novel, Lucy sympathizes with Catherine, acknowledging that there must have been terror and desperation in her flight to Wilhelm, as well as excitement. Additionally, the detail of the friend who never visited Catherine in her last two months of suffering, implies that despite her efforts to become middle-class, Catherine did not make profound connections in the community she joined.

Wilhelm Gerhardt, the German prisoner of war who Catherine left her husband for is dark-eyed with “a small disdainfulness” on his face which indicates his intrinsic authority and his lack of willingness to be pushed around (122). On seeing a photograph of Wilhelm, Lucy realizes that William shares his attractive and somewhat troubling aura of authority.

Wilhelm’s daring is evident when he takes the risk of entering Clyde Trask’s house and seducing his wife with his beautiful piano-playing. While Lucy can entertain that Wilhelm pursued Catherine, even with the obstacle of a stay in London, because he loved her, she also thinks that Wilhelm’s motives for marrying Catherine and entering the United States may have been more self-interested. This is because the marriage granted him the opportunity of a new start under the name William, the opportunity to study at prestigious MIT and become a scientist. There is the sense that Wilhelm, who expresses gratitude to the American G.Is who imprisoned him rather than killing him on the spot, is a survivor. A hint of his chauvinistic, not entirely benign nature is also given in the detail of his and Catherine’s marital struggles on his learning that she had a daughter by Clyde Trask. There is the implication that he may have been in part responsible for Catherine’s silence on Lois.

While Wilhelm expresses his sorrow at what his country of origin did, William’s night terrors and visits to Dachau indicate that this apology was not enough, as William remained “deeply haunted” and “unmoored” by his father’s role in the Nazi atrocities (96). The Nazi offences are also realized in characters outside of Wilhelm’s family, such as in Lucy’s war-traumatized father’s refusal to see William because of his German blood. The fact of Wilhelm’s sudden death from an intestinal puncture when William was fourteen, indicates that William, and by extension the rest of the characters, are forced to deal with his role and the Nazi atrocities for themselves. His generation is gone; it is up to them to decide the future.