The parent-child relationship between Kelly Kelleher and Arthur Kelleher

Kelly Kelleher’s relationship with her father, Arthur Kelleher, combines fierce protection with a recurring struggle over bodily difference, parental authority, and political conviction. His response to her childhood strabismus helped determine how her family understood normality, while Kelly’s later clashes with him over politics exposed a divide that affection did not erase. In the car accident, her thoughts turn back toward him—not as an adversary, but as someone she still wants to protect from worry and blame.

Early Care and the Question of Normality

From birth, Kelly had strabismus: the muscles controlling her left eye were weaker than those controlling her right, and her vision had not yet resolved into a single image. Her parents repeatedly watched her eyes and tried to assess the problem. Arthur was especially distressed by physical abnormality, a concern the narrative presents as part of a family emphasis on health, attractiveness, and normality. His love for his daughter was real, but so was his alarm about what her condition might mean for her life among other people.

The family faced competing medical advice. One doctor recommended exercises; another advised an operation as soon as possible, warning that the weaker eye might become permanently atrophied. Kelly’s mother and Grandma Ross initially favored giving the exercises a chance, and a therapist tried to help. Arthur argued that they should consider the possibility that the treatment would fail and imagine Kelly entering school while other children might tease her. The possibility of social rejection made the question of treatment inseparable from the parents’ fear of how others would judge their daughter.

At last, Arthur took a weekday morning off, and he and Kelly’s mother drove their daughter from Gowanda Heights to Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. Surgery corrected the eye. Her recovery was swift, though not entirely painless, and afterward her eyes appeared normal to outside observers. The outcome settled the immediate medical problem, but the episode also reveals the pressure the family placed on visible signs of normality and the care with which Arthur watched over Kelly.

Affection and Authority

Kelly’s memory of her father includes not only a decisive act of care but also moments of tension whose meaning she could not fully grasp as a child. She recalls that after wordless disagreements with her mother, Arthur sometimes drove in a way that frightened her. In the Toyota, his impatient, erratic driving recalls those earlier occasions. The memory makes his present conduct feel familiar without making it reassuring: parental authority, household conflict, and Kelly’s dependence are joined in the same recollection.

Their affection survives disagreements, but political arguments make the question of authority explicit. Arthur was a close friend and longtime golfing partner of Hamlin Hunt, a Republican congressman whose public views Kelly found abhorrent. Even when business was not thriving, Arthur contributed to Hunt’s campaigns and took pride in being included in Republican Party events. Kelly, who had studied politics at Brown and volunteered for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, confronted her father over his support for Hunt. Arthur’s response to her later Democratic activism was openly dismissive and angry. Their dispute was political on its surface, but Kelly understood it as also being about her father’s authority and her refusal to defer to it.

Political Conflict and Its Aftermath

Kelly’s political commitments were not casual. During the presidential campaign, she believed that George Bush’s conduct and views should make his rejection obvious, and she did not realize how badly the Democratic effort was faring until its final weeks. When the result became clear, she suffered an intense personal collapse: she stopped eating, went without sleep, and eventually called her mother from Boston Common, disoriented and asking to be collected. The evidence places this distress within Kelly’s political life and shows her turning to her mother for help; it does not describe Arthur’s direct response to that crisis.

The aftermath nevertheless forms part of the father-daughter relationship. Kelly later tried to regain her health and described relations with her parents as all right, while still avoiding the family home and feeling guilty about having worried her mother and provoked quarrels with Arthur. She did not simply abandon her convictions or declare their disagreements resolved. Instead, the relationship appears to have continued alongside those tensions, with affection and a measure of renewed ease coexisting with her awareness that the quarrels had involved her father’s authority.

The Father in Kelly’s Thoughts During the Accident

After the Toyota leaves the road and sinks, Kelly’s attention shifts among the immediate danger, memories, and imagined appeals to people she loves. She recalls a childhood episode in which she had been frightened by a friend’s suicide attempt and had sought comfort from her mother. As the water rises, she imagines her mother present again. The recollection places her parents within the emotional language of fear and protection, even as the accident separates her from any actual help.

Kelly also imagines the practical response her father would make to a rescue. Believing that her right leg may be trapped, she is willing to let rescuers amputate it, and she imagines that Arthur would be the one to blame anyone for the outcome: he is known in the family for being litigious. In her fantasy, she would explain the circumstances and take the blame herself. The thought is both an expression of her enduring closeness to him and a reversal of the earlier pattern in which he had acted to shield her from harm. Now she imagines shielding him from conflict and responsibility, even while fighting to survive.

Near the end of the novel, Kelly’s thoughts include a message of love to her grandmother, mother, and father. That address gathers the relationship’s competing elements without resolving them into a simple account of either harmony or estrangement. Arthur had tried to protect Kelly, had insisted on medical intervention when he feared for her future, and had become the focus of serious political conflict; Kelly, for her part, continued to imagine his likely actions and to care about what he might endure. Their bond remains present in her thoughts when she is most vulnerable.