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Summary
Chapter 19
In the present, as the rain begins to lighten, Emily’s daughters continue to interrogate her about why she didn’t pursue acting. They then discuss how, after that summer, Duke starred in a show called Rampart, which Ripley directed. It was a huge success, and it earned ten Emmys. Having exhausted this topic, their curiosity then shifts to how Lara eventually rekindled her relationship with Joe. Lara shares that it took another three to four years before they got back together, despite the girls' pleas for more details. She begins to feel suddenly exhausted and frustrated and ends the conversation by saying she went to New Hampshire to look after her dying grandmother Nell.
In her internal thoughts, the story continues. Lara returns to New Hampshire to live with her grandmother, who isn’t able to continue her work as a tailor due to macular degeneration. Shortly after Laura comes home, her grandmother discloses that she has a large lump in her breast. She’s dying of breast cancer, and she and Lara begin to meet with doctors and cancer specialists. While she’s delirious from treatment, Nell mentions someone named Brian sitting at the foot of the bed. Lara’s mother later tells her on the phone that Brian was Nell’s brother, and he died in the snow years ago. When she passes away, Nell is buried next to Brian. Lara deals with her grandmother’s arrangements and then moves to New York to work as a seamstress. While working at the theater, she hears someone call her Emily. It’s Joe. The two fall in love.
They stay in New York for a short while, then return to Michigan the next summer to visit Ken and Maisie at the cherry farm. Joe had been financially supporting the farm for a long time, enough that he’d essentially purchased it from Ken with his contributions. Lara deliberately skips the story of herself and Joe falling in love, because she doesn’t feel she should have to share it. Instead, she tells her daughters that one morning, Joe proposed that they marry and settle in Michigan on the farm. Ken and Maisie moved to Arizona to live with their daughter. In 1997, Duke comes to the farm unannounced, wearing a wedding ring from his failed marriage. Lara and Duke have a brief, tense exchange. Duke meets the girls, and then asks to see the cemetery. On the road there they come across Joe, who is shocked to see Duke.
Chapter 20
The girls are shaken and surprised to hear that they met Duke when they were little. The conversation shifts back to the present, and Lara remembers learning of Duke’s death. Maisie came back late from a dog birth and read that Duke had drowned while on a boat in Capri. She woke Lara to tell her. They had all been concerned about how Emily would react to the news. Lara keeps to herself the memory of another encounter with Duke, which happened in New York after she had reconnected with Joe but before they moved to Michigan. By then, Duke, already in Rampart and very famous, had reached out from a treatment center outside of Boston. He asks her to visit as part of a therapeutic exercise. Lara takes a bus to Boston and gets into the center using the name Emily Webb. Despite Duke being in the midst of a divorce from his wife Chelsea, they have brief, cold sex in the bathroom. After leaving Duke, Lara unexpectedly but happily runs into Sebastian. They catch up while Sebastian drives to New York. When Lara realizes she is pregnant six weeks later, she gets an abortion and has no regrets.
Analysis: Chapters 19 & 20
Moral and ethical responsibilities and the consequences of avoiding them are everywhere in this part of the novel, especially in the sections where Lara discusses the choices she had to make after leaving Duke. When Lara returns to New Hampshire to care for her grandmother, it marks the end of the carefree, youthful part of her life and the beginning of another, more mature and responsible stage. Her grandmother’s death is the catalyst that pushes this change forward. Lara’s transformation is represented symbolically by Grandmother Nell losing her ability to sew, and Lara taking over those duties for her. Instead of being cared for by an older relative, Lara becomes the carer as her grandmother succumbs to first the loss of her eyesight and then breast cancer. As a seamstress, Grandmother Nell was responsible for fixing the mistakes other people make and for making things fit that wouldn’t work otherwise. Lara takes this mantle from her, but one of the first lessons she must learn is that she can’t hold everything together, no matter how beautifully she sews. Nell’s death is tragic, but it leads Lara to find work in New York as a seamstress in her own right, and then to reconnect with Joe and eventually move back to Michigan.
Read more about Seamstressing as a symbol in Tom Lake.
By contrast, Duke spends much of his life avoiding responsibility. While Lara chose stability, Duke pursued fame and personal indulgence, often without considering the long-term effects of his actions. Their cold, perfunctory sexual interaction in the care facility reminds Lara of how little Duke actually engages and connects with other people. They have spent years thinking about one another, but their sexual reunion is a disappointing tryst in a bathroom that takes less than fifteen minutes from start to finish. Duke ostensibly reached out to Lara as part of his therapeutic exercises in making amends, but in reality, he just wants to find sexual release in the comfort of her body. The news of his death by drowning fits the arc of his spontaneous, reckless life. Lara is certain that Duke’s drowning wasn’t accidental and that he committed suicide, although she also doesn’t mention this to her daughters. In a way, Duke’s death is his final performance.
Read more about the novels’s theme of Moral and Ethical Responsibility.
Lara’s relationship with Joe also takes on a new dimension for the daughters as they learn more about how their parents came back together. They had been excitedly waiting to hear about the grand romance between Duke and Lara but end up being more invested in their parents’ love story. In comparison to Duke, who shirks responsibility wherever he can, Joe is a fortress of solidity and safety even in his youth. He proves this by providing financial support for the cherry farm, even getting them into commercials for Skippy peanut butter to help the family business stay afloat. The way Lara and Joe rekindled their relationship after years apart feels less dramatic than the daughters may have imagined, but it shows the beauty of the steady, meaningful life that Lara ultimately chose over her whirlwind relationship with Duke. While her romance with their father might not have been a captivating roller coaster, Emily and her sisters come to realize that the love their mother has for Joe is both deeper and more important than her infatuation with Duke.
