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In some ways, Kate is the moral center of the play. Her delusions about her dead son, Larry, lead to her anxiety, suspicions, and superstitions. She goes in and out of the house many times, a reflection of her internal and external selves, which collide in Acts Two and Three. As Kate is forced to accept both Larry’s death and Joe’s guilt, she grows as a person, wife, and mother. Along with Chris, she is the character who changes the most throughout the play.

Outwardly, Kate is a loving, simple, domesticated mother, as much a part of the mid-twentieth-century American Dream as her successful businessman husband. In the beginning, she appears secondary and submissive to Joe, but as the play unfolds, Kate grows stronger, until the moment when she slaps Joe across the face. Kate refuses to accept Chris’s marriage to Ann because it would mean that Larry is dead. If Larry is dead, it means that Joe is morally guilty of his son’s death, the terrible truth revealed in Act Two. Act Three reveals an even deeper truth: as Kate enters into the light of truth and acceptance, Joe retreats into the shadows of his own guilt.

Kate carries the burden of Joe’s secret while he puts on a jovial public face. In fact, it is Joe who is in denial, not Kate. Kate denies Larry’s death because she has no choice. Accepting his suicide would mean that Joe was responsible for the deaths of the pilots in the war, and Kate says explicitly that God would never allow such a reality.

When Kate reads Larry’s letter and realizes that he took his own life, she is crushed, but she is also set free from the emotional jail that she has lived in for three years. At the play’s conclusion, Joe is dead inside the house, still hiding from the truth, and Kate is in the open, holding and comforting her living son, Chris.

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