Edith Taft Fairbanks

Edith Taft Fairbanks is Rabo Karabekian’s second wife and the loving, practical presence who draws him out of isolation. She tends to people, animals, and the household with an expansive attentiveness; after her death, the man who had planned for his own burial instead unlocks the barn and returns to painting. Her care is not incidental domestic background but a force that changes how Rabo lives—and what he does when it is gone.

Identity and Background

Rabo first sees Edith on a truck trip, when he is negotiating to rent a barn from her first husband, whom he regards at the time as an amiable but useless idler. Edith is carrying a tamed raccoon. Rabo recalls this as prophetic: her affinity for animals anticipates the way she will approach him when he has withdrawn into the barn as a hermit. She leaves nature poems and good things to eat outside his sliding doors until, in his telling, she has tamed him and he becomes her husband.

That account makes a joke of the distance between the formidable artist and the animal she says she has domesticated. At their wedding reception, speaking to a female relative from Cincinnati while Rabo wears his specially made suit, Edith introduces him as her tamed raccoon. The image is affectionate, but it also reverses Rabo’s self-conception: he is not simply the isolated man who chooses his own terms of life; he is someone reached and cared for by another person.

Care and Domestic Life

Rabo describes Edith as a multitude, an Earth Mother whose presence fills the Victorian house with love, merriment, and hands-on domesticity. Privileged throughout her life, she nevertheless works alongside the cook and gardener, shops for food, feeds the household’s pets and birds, and befriends wild rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons. Her care moves across distinctions between paid household work, family life, and attention to animals: she participates in the work herself and makes the home a place of active welcome.

The house is not only a private couple’s refuge. Edith and Rabo host frequent parties, and guests—mostly her friends and relatives—sometimes stay for weeks. Against Rabo’s estrangement from his own blood relatives and the disappearance from his life of the Army companions who survived his capture, her social world gives the house a different structure: visitors arrive, stay, and belong through their connection with her. The home’s abundance is therefore something she makes and sustains through practical labor and relationships, not merely a consequence of its size or privilege.

Marriage and the Work of Recognition

The narrative presents Edith’s care as a response to Rabo’s withdrawal, but it does not make her simply a healer whose needs disappear into his recovery. Rabo’s memory of being coaxed from the barn emphasizes her patient gestures—food left outside the sliding doors and poems offered to a hermit who will not come out. The raccoon metaphor links this intimate history to her broader nurturing nature, while the household’s bustle shows the work that surrounds such care.

A later confrontation with the household cook, Allison White, exposes how easily Rabo can fail to recognize the people who make his domestic life possible. When Allison says she will leave after Circe Berman departs, she explains that she had been ready to go before Circe’s arrival, but stayed because Circe made the place exciting. Her immediate demand is that Rabo learn her name: she does not want to be reduced to “the cook.” Rabo recognizes that this is close to what his first wife Dorothy had told him—that he often behaved as if he did not care whether he knew her name or whether she was there at all. Allison also repeats Dorothy’s charge that he is afraid of women. The parallel gives the reader a measure of Rabo’s recurring failure to see women as individuals, even as he remembers Edith’s care in loving detail. Edith’s labor and emotional presence are central to his account of a full home, but the story is told through his recollection, not hers.

Death and Its Consequences

Rabo assumes that he will be the first of the married pair to die. When he locks the barn with a single padlock and hasp, he imagines a wake held there after his burial. He tells Edith to explain the expanse of white inside as her husband’s last painting—even though he had not painted it—and to give the work its long title. The plan turns his own death into the occasion for revealing the barn’s white interior, with Edith cast as the person who will carry out and explain his wishes.

The order is reversed. Edith dies first, only two months after the plans are made: her heart stops and she falls into a flower bed. Her doctor says there was no pain. At her burial, held at noon in Green River Cemetery a few yards from the graves of Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen, Rabo has his strongest vision yet of human souls unencumbered by the body. He imagines pure neon tubes standing around the rectangular grave. Edith’s death thus makes the physical fact of her absence and Rabo’s sense of an enduring soul collide in a single funeral image.

Her wake is held at the home of one of her friends, rather than at Rabo’s house, and Rabo does not attend. He also does not return to the house where, in his description, he had been useless, contented, and loved without reason for a third of his life. His withdrawal from the funeral gathering and the home emphasizes what has ended: not only his marriage, but the everyday setting in which Edith’s care had made room for him.

The Barn and Rabo’s Return to Painting

After Edith’s death, Rabo goes to the barn, unlocks its sliding doors, and turns on the lights. He looks at the white interior he had once imagined as the subject of his own wake. He then drives to a hardware store in East Hampton that carries art supplies and buys what a painter could need, except for the one ingredient he says he must supply himself: soul. The sequence makes his return to painting inseparable from bereavement. Edith had drawn him out of the barn during his life; after she dies, he opens it again and turns toward the work he had left undone.

The return also recasts the barn’s locked whiteness. Rabo’s whimsical instructions had assigned Edith the role of naming it as a last painting after his death, although he had not made it. Once she is gone, he re-enters the space himself, and the lack of a finished work becomes a demand rather than a joke. Edith is not present to witness this decision, but the narrative places her death immediately before it: the renewed act of painting follows the loss of the person whose patience, poems, food, and animal-like teasing had helped make his isolation permeable.