Oh, William

Lucy recalls William’s 70th birthday party, hosted at his apartment by his wife Estelle. Lucy attends with her daughters, Chrissy and Becka because her husband David, a cellist, is on concert-duty. At the party, a divorced woman called Pam Carlson asks Lucy if she can love her second husband and find herself thinking about her first one at the same time. Lucy is reluctant to discuss this.

William’s wife Estelle is an actress, with a jovial, whimsical temperament. Their daughter Bridget resembles her. William cannot enjoy the party, preoccupied with the night terrors he has had about his mother, Catherine. Lucy recalls catching Estelle asking a man “are you bored to death?” in the kitchen during the party and feels a sense of unease about this (32).

The summer after the party, Lucy’s second husband, David became ill. Like Lucy, David came from poverty, although his background was Hasidic Jewish and his family cut him off when he no longer wanted to be part of that community. Lucy recalls the conversation with Pam Carlson at William’s party and admits to herself that from David’s illness in June to his death in November, William was the person she called upon. She remembers driving through snowy scenes with William from Chicago to the East Coast and concludes that “William is the only person I ever felt safe with. He is the only home I ever had” (38).

Catherine, Lucy’s ex-mother-in-law and William’s mother, “was light itself” (41), although she admitted to suffering periods of depression. Her first husband, Clyde Trask, was a potato farmer and later became a Republican state legislator in Maine. William had an affectionate relationship with his mother and Catherine, conscious that Lucy came from poverty, took charge of her wardrobe, and gave her hand-me-downs. Lucy thinks that it is natural that William confides his night terrors about Catherine to her, as she is the only one who remembers Catherine.

Just before William’s 71st birthday, Chrissy announces her pregnancy. While both William and Lucy are thrilled, Chrissy miscarries two weeks later. Chrissy is devastated, saying that she would have called the child Lucy if it were a girl.

Estelle has given William a subscription to an ancestry website for his birthday and when he uses it, he finds that Catherine had a child by Clyde Trask. The child, who was two years older than William, was called Lois. William finds it difficult to believe that Catherine would keep such a child secret. He is eager to dismiss the whole thing as a hoax. However, Lucy thinks that “it made a kind of weird sense” that Catherine had another child (53).

Lucy recalls her happiness in the year before her and William’s marriage. Each night he would read to her and she would desire him so much that if he did not reach towards her she “would feel a sense of fear and of being bereft” (54). However, at their small country club wedding, Lucy felt oddly unreal and dislocated. The feeling remained with her throughout her marriage. The sense of her own small consequence also presides over her feeling of invisibility.

Lucy recalls Catherine’s “loving but also sometimes oddly distant” approach to Chrissy and Becka when they were infants and imagines that Catherine might have been thinking of the baby girl she left behind in Maine (57). Catherine’s first encounter with Wilhelm occurred when she brought doughnuts to the prisoners of war. The attraction between Catherine and Wilhelm was instantaneous and firmly established on the day when Wilhelm came into Clyde Trask’s house and played Brahms on the piano. Their love affair endured a period of separation in England, where they exchanged letters. Finally, when Wilhelm told Catherine that he would be on the train that arrived at Boston’s North Station at five o’clock, she ran away with him, never returning to Maine.

While William still denies that his mother had another child, he receives a shocking note from Estelle announcing that she is leaving him. When Lucy visits William at his apartment, she sees that Estelle took much of the furniture including the rugs and the furniture in Bridget’s room while William was away at a conference. William fixates on a passage in Estelle’s note that accuses him of being distant. Lucy tries to comfort him, offering that they should go out to dinner.

William becomes ready to admit that Catherine had a child before him. He calculates that she would have gotten pregnant by Clyde Trask while his father Wilhelm was in England. William found out that Clyde remarried and had a few sons with his second wife.

Lucy thinks about William alone in an empty apartment and of the time that she left him. Prior to their separation, William had multiple affairs. He confessed to a few with women he did not love but waited three months more to tell Lucy about Joanne, a woman who was a mutual friend and had taken care of Lucy’s daughters when she was sick. After this, Lucy sensed that “a tulip stem inside me snapped […] never grew back” (76). The shock of this enabled her to write more truthfully. Lucy’s second husband David seemed to be William’s opposite, and Lucy found great comfort in her and David’s shared experiences of growing up in poverty and isolation.

Lucy’s daughters call her in turn and express outrage at what Estelle has done to their father. They ask Lucy to come to a family dinner at the apartment. At the dinner, the family reminisces and feels comfortable with each other.

Lucy recalls that when she brought William to meet her family, her mother demanded that Lucy take him out again, for upsetting her father. Apparently, William’s German heritage brought up traumatic wartime memories for Lucy’s father, who fought in Germany on the Allied side of WWII. After this, Lucy and her mother only saw each other at hospital beds. William paid for Lucy’s mother to visit her following the appendectomy mentioned in My Name is Lucy Barton, and later Lucy went to her mother’s deathbed. Lucy stays in touch with her brother and sister, talking to them once a week, although for many years they were estranged.

Lucy recalls how Catherine liked golf and tried to get Lucy interested too. When this endeavor failed despite Catherine purchasing golf clubs for Lucy’s birthday, Catherine surmises that “this has all been too much for her” (85).

William calls Lucy and asks her to accompany him on a road trip to Maine, where he hopes to find his half-sister, Lois Bubar. William is uncertain of the welcome he will receive, and of his motivation for going.