Dorothy leaves Rabo after taking their children and the portraits he had painted of them, cutting the pictures out of the Sheetrock and leaving two square holes in the wall. In Rabo’s later account, the departure becomes more than the end of a marriage: it brings together domestic loss, the disintegration of his own paintings, and an older family history of devastation and isolation.

Background and domestic context

Rabo recalls that the portraits remained on the Sheetrock for six years. Their eventual removal is part of a larger rupture: he comes home one afternoon half drunk to find that his wife and children are gone, along with the pictures. Dorothy has left a note saying they are gone forever. The portraits were not simply taken down; she cut them out of the wall, leaving two large square holes where they had been.

The contrast between the family’s absence and the physical marks left behind gives the departure its particular force in Rabo’s telling. The missing portraits had preserved an image of his sons in the home; after Dorothy takes them, the empty wall records both what has disappeared and how it was removed.

The departure and its immediate aftermath

Rabo recounts the event years later in conversation with Circe Berman, who asks what happened to the portraits and whether they were painted over. He answers that they stayed on the wall for six years before Dorothy took them with her. When Circe says he must have felt awful, he begins to describe the sight of the empty house and the cut-out squares, then stops himself. At her urging, he completes the thought by comparing his feeling to what his father must have experienced as a young teacher, left alone in his village after a massacre.

The comparison does not equate the two events; it reveals the scale and shape of Rabo’s response. The departure recalls an inherited image of being left alone after communal catastrophe, turning a domestic separation into a point of contact with his father’s past.

Converging losses

Rabo places Dorothy’s departure amid several other losses. Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen had died by suicide only a few weeks earlier, and Rabo’s own paintings were falling apart. The timing makes the empty house part of a wider personal crisis rather than an isolated marital episode: the people and works through which he had formed attachments or an artistic identity were disappearing together.

His account also gives the event an indirect connection to his earlier marriage. He remembers Dorothy telling him that he often treated her as if he did not care what her name was, or as if she were not there. Years later, Allison White makes a similar complaint when she says that Rabo calls her only “the cook” rather than using her name. These echoes place the departure alongside a recurring failure in Rabo’s relationships: women around him describe being unseen or treated as though their personhood does not register.

Narrative form and significance

The event reaches the reader as a remembered scene, not as a continuous account of the marriage. Rabo supplies a few concrete details—the six years, the note, the cut-out portraits, the two squares—and then breaks off at the point where their meaning presses hardest. Circe’s request that he finish the sentence brings the comparison with his father into the open. The pause and completion make the recollection an act of disclosure as well as a report of what happened.

Dorothy’s departure thus becomes one of the images through which Rabo understands abandonment. The empty house and the holes in its wall connect the end of his family life to the collapse of his paintings and, in his own words, to his father’s experience of isolation. The account does not resolve the separation; it shows how its meaning persists in the losses Rabo gathers around it.