Dr. Hutchins

Dr. Hutchins is Eveline Hutchins’s father, a Unitarian minister whose presence combines intellectual encouragement and affection with the commanding authority of the household. To Eveline, he is first the formidable “Yourfather” whose voice silences dinner guests, then “Dad,” her trusted “Pal,” and finally an old parent whose illness helps make her responsible for the family’s care. The changes in those names and roles trace the intimacy—and the limits—of their bond.

Identity and Household Authority

When Eveline is little, the family lives on the top floor of a yellow-brick house on North Shore Drive. Dr. Hutchins’s study is below, a room where “Yourfather mustn’t be disturbed”; the drawing room and dining room occupy the ground floor, where parishioners visit and children are expected to be seen but not heard. At dinner, his booming voice can still the company. The home’s vertical arrangement makes his importance tangible: his work and authority have their own protected space, while the children inhabit a more restricted world above it.

That authority is not presented as simple coldness. At night he stands by the children’s beds to make sure the little girls say their prayers, a ritual that leaves Eveline frightened enough to squeeze her eyes shut and burrow beneath the covers. Yet when the children are sick with measles and mumps, he comes upstairs, makes paper birdbeaks that open, and tells stories made up on the spot. Their mother says he has prayed for them in church; the children feel grown up and comforted. The same father who governs the house through voice and religious duty can enter the sickroom as a playful storyteller.

The Minister and Eveline’s Confidant

When Eveline is twelve, the family moves to a larger house on Drexel Boulevard. Her older sisters go away to boarding school, and her mother spends the winter in Santa Fe for her health. The quieter household brings Eveline into closer contact with her father: she eats breakfast with him, studies Latin with his help, and watches him work through algebra equations for her. She admires his preaching and is proud to be a minister’s daughter. By then she calls him Dad and thinks of herself as his Pal.

Her attachment also has a moral and intellectual dimension. She thinks about religious figures and the Brotherhood of Man, and at Christmas she carries baskets to poor people’s homes. The poverty she encounters frightens her, and she asks why God does nothing about Chicago’s problems and evils. Dr. Hutchins smiles and tells her she is too young to worry about such things. The answer gently closes a question she takes seriously: the father she admires for preaching kindness does not yet treat her as an equal participant in the social concerns that his faith has helped awaken. Their closeness is real, but it exists alongside the age and authority he invokes to defer her concerns.

A Father’s Rebuke

That authority takes a harsher form after Eveline goes driving with Dirk. The car crashes on the return journey; Dirk is injured, Eveline escapes without physical harm, and she reaches home at eight in the morning in a nurse’s raincoat over her ruined evening dress. At breakfast, the family says nothing at first. Dr. Hutchins rises, napkin in hand, and tells her he will not discuss her behavior, “to say nothing of the pain and mortification you have caused all of us.” He adds that it would have served her right to be seriously injured and sends her upstairs to rest. Eveline double-locks her door and sobs on the bed.

The reprimand follows an episode involving both real danger and public exposure: the family has telephoned for help, taken Dirk to the hospital, and tried to keep reporters and the morning papers away. Dr. Hutchins’s words make clear that he understands the incident as an injury to the family as well as an escapade that endangered Eveline. His intervention also reaches beyond the breakfast table. He calls Dirk and forbids him to come to the house; when Eveline later returns to Chicago, meeting Dirk requires an arrangement outside the home. In this episode the father who once helped her with lessons and delighted her with invented stories acts as the guardian of household boundaries, and his judgment intensifies her sense of isolation.

Illness, Care, and Changed Roles

The movement from being cared for to giving care becomes explicit when Dr. Hutchins is seriously ill with diabetes. Eveline is called home by telegram, leaving Freddy behind, and later Dr. Hutchins recovers. She takes him to Santa Fe to recuperate. Her mother is also often sick; her sisters are married, and George has taken a job abroad with Hoover’s Belgian Relief. Eveline feels that looking after her parents has fallen to her. She manages meals and household work, makes laundry lists, and grows irritated with the servant girls while enduring a year she experiences as dreamy and unhappy.

Her father’s recovery does not erase that burden: it places her in the practical role of tending to him and her mother. The earlier father-daughter intimacy—lessons, sermons, prayers, and shared time at home—thus acquires a later counterpart in her assumption of domestic responsibility. Dr. Hutchins remains a significant presence in Eveline’s life not because the narrative supplies a final resolution between them, but because their relationship repeatedly shifts between affection, authority, and dependence. Through him, the family home is both a place of imaginative closeness and a structure whose expectations help determine what Eveline may do and what she must carry.