Thomas Pemberton and Trish vanden Meer

Thomas Pemberton and Trish vanden Meer's relationship is one of the novel's most sustained and revealing threads, a marriage that begins in the idealism of the 1960s, fractures under the weight of temperamental and political difference, and yet never fully ends. Their bond spans decades, from their first meeting at Yale through Pem's priesthood, the theft of the St. Timothy's cross, his crisis of faith, and his eventual conversion to Judaism and marriage to Sarah Blumenthal. Trish remains a constant presence in Pem's life, a figure of worldly elegance and wry detachment who both grounds him and reminds him of the life he left behind.

Origins and the Shape of the Marriage

Pem and Trish meet at Yale after Pem returns from a year off working in the Peace Corps to finish his degree. She is a political science major, poised and smart-looking, fresh out of finishing schools in Switzerland, the kind of preppie woman he has always avoided—which is precisely why they fall in love. Trish is drawn to his raspy baritone, his broad face with a shock of hair always over his forehead, his sexy mouth, and his quality of not appreciating how appealing he is, like a big shaggy dog. She is fascinated by his vulnerability, how a mere idea can take hold of him and shake him up, and by his habit of relying on her to listen while he gives his brain a workout. She notices the heavy black-rimmed glasses that slip from his nose and that he is forever pushing back up, which to her typifies a certain disorder in his life—he will need taking care of. For his part, Pem is drawn to her cool sexuality, her slim athletic blonde build, her good tennis game, her fluency in French and Italian, and her Phi Beta Kappa achievement in her junior year. The political irony is immediate and pointed: her father is a big deal in the Johnson administration that Tom Pemberton detests. The marriage thus carries within it from the start a fundamental tension between Pem's radical, anti-establishment convictions and Trish's establishment pedigree.

Divergence and Divorce

The marriage does not survive the collision of their worlds. Trish is remarried, a fact Pem notes with a mixture of resignation and lingering feeling. When he learns of it, his reaction is telling: he asks why she did not say who her father is, and the answer is deferred—"That's to come." The divorce is not a clean break but a slow unraveling marked by continued contact and unspoken history. Pem still hears from Trish's new husband, who enjoys having a peacenik priest in the family, a detail that suggests the extent to which Pem's vocation became a kind of performance within their social circle. The marriage's end is registered in Pem's memory with a characteristic blend of irony and pain: "It must surely have been intimacy if I can't remember it." The line captures the strange erasure that follows their life together, the sense that what was once passionate has become almost illegible to him.

The Park Avenue Encounter

Their post-divorce relationship is dramatized most vividly when Pem visits Trish at her Park Avenue apartment, a home that was once his. He finds a new doorman, a young Hispanic man who gravely goes to the house phone, and enters a space he remembers as ten rooms on a high floor that somehow never had any sunlight. Trish has added poundage, is a bit hippy now, though still elegant. She takes one of those long lady numbers from the cigarette box on the credenza, holds the arm of the cigarette hand at the elbow, and a pale blue strand of smoke rises past the Vlaminck flowers. The scene is thick with the residue of intimacy: the expensive objects, the careful gestures, the shared history that makes even small talk feel weighted. She tells him his father has written and he has not answered; he promises he will. The encounter reveals the peculiar texture of their bond—neither fully estranged nor truly close, bound by memory and a kind of affectionate exasperation.

Trish in the Later Years

Trish reappears at the wedding of Pem and Sarah Blumenthal, where her presence is both gracious and slightly incongruous. Among the wedding gifts on the table is a card from Trish vanden Meer, offering "Congratulations to both of you," a message from the heart that carries the full weight of their history. She is also present at the reception itself, where the narrator, Everett, dances with Sarah and reflects on the scene. Trish's role in Pem's life by this point is that of a witness to his transformations, someone who knew him before he became a priest, before his crisis of faith, before his conversion. Her continued presence suggests that their relationship, though formally ended, has become a kind of permanent reference point in Pem's emotional geography.

The Relationship's Thematic Weight

The Pem–Trish relationship functions as a counterpoint to Pem's later marriage to Sarah Blumenthal. Where Sarah represents a hallowed life, a commitment to Jewish practice and community, Trish represents the secular, worldly, aesthetically refined life Pem might have lived. Their marriage embodies the novel's broader meditation on the difficulty of sustaining intimacy across political and spiritual divides. Trish's coolness and elegance, her cigarettes and Vlaminck flowers, stand against Sarah's serene love and the healing pleasure of her presence. The relationship also illuminates Pem's character: his need to be taken care of, his vulnerability to ideas, his tendency to live hard and think harder. Trish saw these qualities in him from the beginning, and her enduring, if distant, affection suggests that she understood him better than he sometimes understood himself. Their story is not one of simple failure but of a bond that, having failed as a marriage, persisted as something else—a friendship, a memory, a shared history that neither could fully relinquish.