Terry Kitchen’s suicide in 1956 is the final loss in a remembered circle of three New York City painters and heavy drinkers, and a stark episode in the novel’s recurring account of artistic lives shadowed by death. The narrative connects Kitchen’s death to the accidental shooting of his father, then revisits it alongside the deaths of other Abstract Expressionists, turning an individual tragedy into part of a melancholy historical roll-call.

The New York Circle

When Rabo Karabekian, Jackson Pollock, and Kitchen lived in New York City, all three drank heavily and were known at the Cedar Tavern as the “Three Musketeers.” The nickname gives their companionship a jaunty, almost legendary shape, but the later account of what became of them overturns its lightness. Asked how many of the three remain alive, Rabo answers that he is the sole survivor. The joke is spare; its punchline measures the distance between the camaraderie of the tavern and the deaths that followed.

Deaths in 1956

The novel places Kitchen’s death in 1956, three weeks after Pollock died in a drunk-driving crash. Rabo recalls that Pollock’s death came just before his first wife and children left him, so the sequence binds public loss to the collapse of his own family life. Kitchen’s suicide follows soon afterward, making the three-week interval a measure of how quickly the remembered circle was emptied.

The Shooting and Its Aftermath

In a later recollection, Rabo describes an earlier incident at the front yard of Kitchen’s shack, about six miles from where he is speaking. Kitchen was drunk, as he often was, when his father arrived once again to urge him to seek treatment for his alcoholism. Kitchen fired a pistol at his father. Rabo thinks the shot may have been intended as a gesture, but explicitly acknowledges that intention can never be proved.

Kitchen then realized that his father had been shot in the shoulder. Rabo describes the shooting as an accident, distinguishing the unintended injury from any speculative meaning he assigns to the shot. Kitchen subsequently died by suicide. The account links the two events closely without claiming that the accident fully explains his death: it gives the immediate sequence, while leaving the relationship between gesture, accident, and suicide unresolved.

The Wider Roll-Call

The story returns to Kitchen’s death while Rabo and Circe Berman are leaving Happy Valley and going back to ordinary life. Rabo calls up the melancholy roll-call of artists’ suicides: Arshile Gorky in 1948, then Pollock and Kitchen in 1956, and Mark Rothko in 1970. The names and years place Kitchen within a larger history rather than treating his death as an isolated episode.

That roll-call also frames the contrast between the temporary refuge of Happy Valley and the return to real life. Kitchen’s death, first recalled through the Cedar Tavern friendship and later connected to his father’s shooting, recurs as one of the losses that Rabo carries into the present. His survivor’s answer to the old “Three Musketeers” question thus becomes more than a punchline: it names the solitude left behind by a friendship circle whose other members are dead.