Anne Elizabeth Trent–Joe Washburn relationship

The Anne Elizabeth Trent–Joe Washburn relationship is defined less by a shared life than by the persistence of an attachment that never becomes a lasting partnership. From Anne Elizabeth Trent’s first visible response to Joe Washburn, through an almost-confession after he saves her, to their brief kiss during wartime grief, closeness repeatedly approaches fulfillment and then recedes. Joe’s kindness keeps the possibility alive for her, but his marriage, his restraint, and the pressures of war leave the relationship unresolved.

A First Attraction and an Unspoken Confession

Joe Washburn enters Anne Elizabeth Trent’s story at her high-school graduation, when she waits in the family’s new Pierce Arrow touring car for her father and brothers. She is already self-conscious about her appearance and the contrast between her sunburned face and the fair complexion she admires in another girl. Joe passes in a serious mood, compliments how lovely she looks, and continues on. His attention brings an intense blush; the scene establishes an attraction that Anne cannot readily name or express, even as her reaction makes its force apparent.

The attraction acquires a more private history when Joe, newly graduated from law school in Austin and about to join Anne’s father’s office, spends two weeks on the ranch. Anne behaves provocatively toward him: she arranges an unsuitable pony, puts horned toads in his cot, and tries to trick him at meals. Her teasing alienates her brothers, and her father calls her a tomboy, but she seems unable to stop. The narrative places this unruly conduct beside her earlier shyness, presenting her approach to Joe as a mixture of pursuit and embarrassment rather than an open declaration.

That summer, Anne dives from a bluff into a deep swimming hole and strikes her head. Joe pulls her from the water; as she struggles, she clings to him so tightly that her father later says she nearly cost Joe his life. In the confused moments before she loses consciousness, Anne tries to tell him she wants him. When she wakes again, her first concern is whether she has acted foolishly by telling him she is crazy about him. No one discusses the attempted confession. Joe instead visits her while she recovers from a fractured skull, reading aloud after lunch, including Lorna Doone and Nicholas Nickleby. Anne listens from bed, hoping he might like her, but the intimacy of his visits does not settle what he feels. His care sustains her attachment while leaving its central question unanswered.

Testing the Bond from a Distance

Anne’s departure for a finishing school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, places physical distance between them, but does not end her preoccupation. She cries at night, unhappy with the school and worrying that Joe will never like her now. Later, after returning to Texas, she becomes engaged to Edwin Vinal, yet during a summer at the ranch she cannot bring herself to tell her father about the engagement. Her feelings about Joe remain sufficiently unsettled that her brothers’ teasing—that Joe is engaged to someone in Oklahoma City—makes her furious. She responds by barely speaking to Joe and riding a difficult pinto, then drives through a gate and breaks both lamps on the car. Her father rebukes her recklessness; she answers that she is leaving to earn her own living and that he will be rid of her.

Joe meets these displays with what the account describes as his usual grave kindness. At times Anne catches a playful, understanding look in his eyes, which leaves her suddenly weak and self-conscious. The suggestion of mutual recognition is never confirmed as a promise. On the night before Joe leaves, Anne challenges him to handle a rattlesnake. He catches it with a forked stick; Bud kills it with a hoe. Joe then tells Anne that she sometimes talks as if she lacks sense. She calls him yellow, while Bud insists that she apologize. Anne retreats to her room and does not come out before Joe leaves the next morning. The episode turns their flirtatious testing into open embarrassment, without producing a reconciliation or a confession.

The separation becomes more definitive when Joe marries and lives in Oklahoma, where he is making money from oil. Anne feels more at ease in Dallas when he is absent because seeing him upsets her. Yet his absence does not erase the attachment; it gives her relief from its immediate force rather than a clear ending. Her other activities and social life continue, but Joe remains an emotional exception.

Bud’s Death and a Brief Return to Intimacy

During the war, Anne organizes a canteen and repeatedly applies to serve abroad, while Joe is in military aviation training. When a War Department telegram reports that Bud has crashed and died on his first solo flight, Joe calls from San Antonio and speaks to Anne in his grave, practical manner. She recognizes his voice and is overwhelmed. She drives through muddy roads to Austin and then on to San Antonio, arriving at the Menger after a blowout. There she finds Joe sitting beside her father, both men looking drawn and exhausted. Anne tends to her father first, asks Joe to wait, and puts her father to bed before returning to the lobby.

Outside the hotel, Anne presses Joe to say who is responsible for the condition of the planes. Joe argues that mistakes are inevitable in a large institution, that aviation is still new, and that the men had understood the risks. Anne insists that Bud’s death at home is different from a death in France and that someone responsible for faulty inspection should answer for it. Joe counters that wartime criticism should wait until the war is won. Their exchange reveals a genuine conflict in how they respond to grief: Anne seeks accountability for a particular death, while Joe appeals to institutional scale and wartime necessity. Their disagreement does not end his care for her, but it exposes the distance between her personal demand and his public-duty argument.

The next morning Anne goes to the aviation camp, carrying the small pearl-handled revolver kept in her car, and tries to reach Colonel Morrissey. At the gate she is given a chair and a chance to speak by telephone, but she faints before she can explain herself. Joe takes her back to the hotel, pats her hand, and stays with her while she cries. She is put to bed and kept there until after the funeral. The sequence makes Joe a source of immediate comfort at the moment Anne’s grief overwhelms her, but it does not convert that comfort into a commitment. She later remains in San Antonio, working at the canteen and living a hectic social life.

The Kiss, the Retreat, and the Unfinished Ending

At a party for men leaving overseas, Anne encounters Joe again and sees that he has been drinking. They sit together on the kitchen steps. Joe tells her he is unhappy with his wife, dissatisfied with the money he is making from oil leases, and frustrated that the army has made him an instructor instead of sending him overseas. Anne says that she too wants to go abroad and that her life in San Antonio feels foolish. When she tells him she wishes she were dead and begins to cry, Joe kisses her. Anne quietly tells him that she loves no one but him. Joe regains control, apologizes, calls himself crazy, and asks her to treat the incident as though it had never happened.

His withdrawal makes the encounter a moment of disclosure without a change in their circumstances. Joe has revealed unhappiness in his marriage and army service, and the kiss confirms a powerful intimacy between them; nevertheless, he refuses to let that intimacy stand as a decision. Anne leaves San Antonio for Dallas the next morning. She later stays to care for her father, and although thoughts of Joe sometimes make her feel unable to bear the situation, she resolves to remain at home and become an old maid. The narrative records no agreement between them and no departure from Joe’s marriage.

At Thanksgiving, Joe and his wife come to dinner. Anne has cooked the turkey herself because the household’s usual helper is sick. Remembering Bud at the table, she feels faint and runs to her room. When Joe comes to see what is wrong, she rises, laughs, and kisses him on the mouth, then returns to the guests and helps the dinner continue. The gesture repeats the relationship’s central pattern: a sudden movement toward intimacy, followed by a return to the obligations surrounding them. Anne soon tells the family that she intends to go abroad for six months with Near East Relief. Though she has not yet formally signed up, she does so the next morning and is sent to New York to sail for Rome. Her departure gives her a new objective beyond the relationship, while leaving Joe and Anne without a shared resolution.

Meaning of the Relationship

The bond is shaped by missed speech and interrupted contact. Anne’s first attempted declaration comes during the aftermath of her accident; later, teasing, anger, and challenges take the place of direct conversation. Joe’s repeated kindness invites hope, but his clearest response to Anne’s love is to retract the kiss and ask her to erase it. Even the Thanksgiving kiss produces no promise or altered arrangement. The relationship’s intensity is therefore measured not by a settled partnership, but by how strongly it persists through distance, other attachments, bereavement, and wartime upheaval.

Its unresolved quality also distinguishes Anne’s private longing from the active course she eventually chooses. Joe remains a source of attraction and pain, but Anne’s decision to undertake relief work sends her away from the domestic future she had imagined for herself. The ending neither confirms that she has ceased loving him nor suggests that they will reunite. Instead, it leaves the attachment unfinished as Anne sails toward Rome: emotionally consequential, repeatedly rekindled, and never made into a common life.