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1982

Summary: April 1982, Parts I–IV

Summary: Part I

Al continues his cross-country driving. Caroline no longer writes to David since his letter requesting to meet Phoebe. Caroline sees a notice that David will be speaking at a showing of his photography at a local museum, and she attends. After the presentation they meet for the first time in eighteen years, and she assesses his appearance. Although David has aged, he seems content. David expresses shock to see Caroline and reproaches her for not telling him where she was. She replies that he could have tried harder to find her. Caroline confesses that she was in love with David, and he acknowledges that he knew that. He admits he manipulated Caroline’s love for him to have her take his daughter with Down syndrome out of his life. Caroline reproaches him for not having answered her letters, and he reproaches her for leaving, a sharing of grief and anger. David becomes distracted by the museum staff, who request him to mingle with the audience, and Caroline interprets his waning attention as a dismissal and leaves for home. She realizes her love for David was always a one-sided fantasy and her life with Al and Phoebe was the fulfillment of her dreams of selfless serving.

Summary: Part II

David’s intention to join Caroline after the presentation is delayed when he is detained by Lee, an art critic, and other members of the audience. Memories of having let Caroline walk away from the cemetery at Phoebe’s memorial service agitate him, and he feels overwhelmed by grief and loss. He leaves the museum and finds himself in the locales he frequented during college. On a precipice overlooking the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, David contemplates suicide. His birth family would never know of his death because he changed his last name from McCallister to Henry to escape his past. In a clerical error, the university had admitted him under his first and middle names, David Henry, and David had never corrected the mistake, preferring to drop the McCallister surname. David Henry McCallister ceased to exist when he left for college.

David takes a seven-hour Greyhound bus ride to his ramshackle West Virginia childhood home, which looks the same as when he left except for intricate craft pictures hung everywhere, signs of an inhabitant. Exhausted from his travels and his depression, he falls asleep on a bed. David falls into a reverie of his mother making ice cream to celebrate his sister June’s infant baptism. A year later, when she was still not walking or talking, his parents recognized that something was wrong with her. The heavy grief of June’s heart condition descended on his mother like a stone. David dozes off and awakens with his wrists tied to the bedposts. He meets pregnant sixteen-year-old Rosemary, who left home when her people demanded she give up her baby. She created the scherenschnitte hanging on the walls, an artform learned from her German grandmother. David tells Rosemary the whole story of how he came to give away his daughter. When he finishes, Rosemary cuts him loose.

Summary: Part III

David arrives home from Pittsburgh after three days without communicating with his family, his clothes filthy and his face unshaven. He brings Rosemary with him. Norah had called the police, who had been investigating his disappearance when they found his abandoned briefcase at the museum and his suitcase and camera at the hotel. Norah vents her pent-up worry in anger when he doesn’t explain his actions. Paul, like his mother having imagined his father dead, feels relief. Rosemary’s elven quality arouses tender feelings in Paul, and her pregnancy reminds him of the hazards of the unprotected sex he has with Lauren Lobeglio as well as their toxic, unhealthy relationship. Paul’s friend Duke Madison dropped out of school to marry the girlfriend he got pregnant. Paul wants to find out what Rosemary knows about his father, but he goes about it by accusing her of exploiting his family. She sets him straight that David was evicting her from the house where he grew up and brought her home on the bus with him. Rosemary’s intimate connection to David’s mysterious childhood fills Paul with envy. He lashes out with the explanation that David’s profession leads him to help people.

Rosemary sees in Paul the grievous effects of David’s criminal behavior, but she reacts to protect David’s secrets. Paul plays his guitar, and the music calms him. He shows Rosemary the old photo he found in David’s darkroom, and she identifies it as David’s childhood home and describes her experiences in the empty house. Paul shares that he has gotten accepted to Julliard and intends to go despite David’s resistance. Rosemary warns him that he has an incomplete understanding of David.

Norah and David arrive unexpectedly in the middle of the day, and Paul and Rosemary listen to them arguing. Norah accuses David of having an affair with Rosemary, which strikes Paul as hypocritical as he thinks back on her affair with Howard in Aruba and all her late nights. Norah reveals that Bree has been diagnosed with breast cancer and his stressful behavior is causing her great pain. David offers to move out, and Paul suddenly joins the conversation, revealing that he and Rosemary have heard everything. He tells his parents about his acceptance to Julliard, and David stuns him with congratulations and complete support. Overwhelmed by the changes he sees in David that he doesn’t understand and the disintegration of their family life, Paul bolts out of the house. He impulsively steals a car left running on a curb and heads for the highway, thinking to escape the turmoil of his home and his toxic relationship with Lauren Lobeglio.

Summary: Part IV

Paul has been missing for twenty-four hours. At work, Norah gets a supportive phone call from her lover Sam, but she breaks off their relationship. She reflects on the four affairs she’s had and compares David’s platonic but intimate relationship with Rosemary, still living with them. The police arrest Paul in Louisville for shoplifting, and David and Norah separately make the drive to bail him out. Bree drives Norah. On the drive that years ago she used to obsessively make to abate her grief, Norah has an epiphany that she continues to run to far-flung world destinations and marital affairs as a way of coping. Bree’s life—solitary but for her Episcopal church community—has a strength and stability Norah’s lacks.

In Louisville, they meet David at the police station, where they find out that the owners of the car Paul stole are declining to press charges and the police release Paul. After giving his son a warm hug, David lectures Paul about giving up his music rehearsals while he makes restitution for the car repairs. They argue, and Paul makes a cruel remark about his dead sister. Norah slaps him, and David suggests leaving Paul in jail another day to get his thinking straightened out. Norah insists that they settle everything at home, and David leaves, feeling rejection at the united front of mother and son. On the drive back to Lexington, Bree searches for a Catholic monastery, stopping at a church for directions. Entering the sanctuary, Norah remembers how she had turned away from the church women who had come to celebrate Paul’s birth as she grieved the loss of Phoebe. The grief overwhelms her, and she sits sobbing in the pew, gaining peace from the release. Paul apologizes for his cruel remark that was meant to provoke David, and Norah admonishes him to never say that his life is not worth living. Bree, Norah, and Paul drive to the monastery up the road and get out to listen to the bells tolling to call the monks to prayer.

Analysis: April 1982, Parts I–IV

The climax of the story comes five years after David wrote to Caroline requesting to meet Phoebe. Caroline never answered that letter and stopped writing to David. When David comes to town on a speaking engagement, anger motivates Caroline to try to set the record straight with him about his behavior. After the presentation, they exchange mutual recriminations about how they’ve each handled the past eighteen years. Then Caroline goes back further, seeking closure for herself, telling him she was in love with David. David’s admission that he knew about her love reveals to Caroline that he manipulated her to have Caroline take his daughter with Down syndrome out of his life. Her anger boils up as she revisits the young and naive young woman she was in 1964. Caroline also sees her complicity. Their conversation moves to the present as David describes Paul’s accomplishments and Norah’s business.

Interrupted by staff who request that David mingle with the other guests, David asks Caroline to wait until he’s finished so they can talk more in depth about Phoebe’s life. The very thought of waiting arouses deep mistrust in Caroline. When David casually pockets the new pictures of Phoebe Caroline has brought him, her imagination sees the gesture as dismissive, and she bolts from the museum. Outside she has an epiphany that the connection she imagined between them was simply wishful romantic thinking on her part. David never actually saw her true self.

Caroline’s departure sends David into despair. He walks the streets of Pittsburgh, unable to avoid any longer the reckoning, rethinking what he has to show for his past actions. He gave away his daughter and alienated his wife and son. David rejected his birth family along with the McCallister name. His trip to his childhood home in West Virginia is a pilgrimage to salvage a connection. There, the astute and wary Rosemary puts David in restraints and challenges his last claim to decency, his identity as a doctor, when he admits his crime of giving away his daughter because of her diminished mental capacity. David finally confesses that it was harmful and explains step-by-step how he made his decision. At the end of his confession, Rosemary releases him. The truth has literally set him free in this instance.

David arrives home with Rosemary a changed man, causing havoc in the home. He gives his blessing to Paul’s aspiration to attend Juilliard, but the confusing change is the final straw for Paul. In addition to the daily anxiety Paul feels living in the household, his addictive sexual relationship with Lauren Lobeglia has filled him with self-loathing. Escaping to Louisville reprises his mother’s frenetic joyrides when Paul was a child. His arrest for car theft echoes Rosemary’s restraint of David. It’s Bree, newly dedicated to a faith-filled life, who drives Norah and Paul back to Lexington via a spiritual detour where Norah comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with Paul. The tolling of the call to prayer signals the theme of spiritual renewal.

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