Springs is the Long Island village that marks both Rabo Karabekian’s attempt to establish a family life in the country and the isolation that follows its collapse. Its houses and nearby potato barn anchor a geography of departure, retreat, and uneasy companionship.

Setting and the Move to the Country

Rabo buys a house in Springs while moving his family from New York City to the country, a change made much against their will. At the time, he has little money, and what he does have is meant for a crib and a youth bed. The move therefore begins not as a carefree escape but as a strained domestic undertaking, with practical expenses and family resistance already built into it.

The village is also where Rabo later sells that house after his first wife, Dorothy, and their sons, Terry and Henri, leave him. He makes Edith’s potato barn his home as well as his studio. The shift from the Springs house to the barn gives the place a second meaning: the country setting that was supposed to hold a family becomes the landscape of Rabo’s withdrawal from family life.

Retreat and Loneliness

After the separation in 1956, Rabo gives up on himself as a painter and seeks out solitude. He describes himself as a hermit for eight years, a period of chosen isolation that he sets beside the loneliness he endured as a boy and during the Great Depression in New York City. Springs thus figures not simply as a peaceful rural refuge but as the setting where retreat becomes a deliberate way of living.

The loneliness persists even after that hermit period. Following Edith’s death, Rabo says the friends in his life had been hers rather than his. His account makes the social texture of Springs personal and fragile: residence in a village does not itself supply companionship, and the loss of the person who connected him to its circle leaves him acutely alone.

Houses, Neighbors, and Companionship

Paul Slazinger, a fellow wounded veteran and Rabo’s friend, sleeps alone in a house next door to Rabo’s old house in Springs. Rabo says that Paul comes over almost every day. His visits range across the property: he may be watching tennis, sitting on the beach and staring out to sea, playing cards with the cook, or reading on the far side of the potato barn, away from practically everyone.

This neighboring arrangement gives Springs a modest counterpoint to Rabo’s hermitage. Paul has a separate house and his own solitary habits, yet the near-daily visits make friendship part of the landscape. The village contains both distance and repeated contact: Rabo can live apart from ordinary company while still being visited by someone he regards as a friend of his own.

Narrative Significance

Springs gathers the novel’s changes in Rabo’s domestic life into a small, recurring geography. The move from the city brings a wife and children into the country; their departure leaves him to exchange the family house for a potato barn; later, Paul’s nearby home makes room for companionship without ending solitude. The place’s significance lies in that contrast between intended home and actual refuge, and between the isolation Rabo seeks and the friendship that continues to cross the short distance between neighboring properties.