Eldon Mate—Donny

Eldon Mate’s relationship with Donny Mate is a story of paternal rejection that persists across decades. Mate left shortly after Donny’s birth, and when Donny’s mother tried to bring them together again, Mate would not even pick his son up or look at him. The failed encounter became the defining scene of their estrangement; years later, Donny was missing from his mother’s life, and the father who had once refused to recognize him remained an absence rather than a source of support or reconciliation.

Separation after Donny’s birth

Donny’s mother recalled that she had last seen Eldon Mate twenty-five years and four months earlier, shortly after Donny was born. Mate had told her from the beginning that he did not like children. She assumed that having a child of his own might change his mind, but she became pregnant and Mate left. Her account presents the separation not as a disagreement that gradually widened, but as a decisive withdrawal at the point when fatherhood began.

Mate did continue to send her five hundred dollars each month, by money order and reliably enough that she acknowledged the regularity. But she said she had always worked and did not consider that amount real support. At the time of their conversation, the payment had not arrived; she thought it might be connected to an army-reserve pension that would need to be redirected after Mate’s death. The money therefore registered as a limited, administrative thread between the separated adults, not evidence of a functioning relationship between father and son.

The failed attempt to reunite

For a short time after Mate left, Donny’s mother and Mate spoke a few times. She and Donny were living in San Diego while Mate was in Mexico, and later, after he became a doctor and took hospital work in Oakland, she brought Donny there too. She described the decision as foolish in retrospect, but also explained the hope behind it: Mate’s new professional standing had revived fantasies that they might build a shared life, perhaps with her working alongside him, and that Donny might finally know his father.

Instead, Mate refused to speak to Donny, pick him up, or even look at him. Donny was frightened by his father’s white coat and began to scream. Mate became angry and ordered Donny’s mother to take the child away. The details make the encounter a concentrated reversal of her hope: the coat that marked Mate’s medical authority did not make him more approachable to his son, and the child’s distress was met not with reassurance but with rejection. Donny’s mother remembered the scene as the point when the whole effort fell apart.

She called Mate a couple more times, but he remained uninterested and refused to visit. In her recollection, Donny’s birth had turned Mate away abruptly, and the later encounter did not soften that refusal. She eventually moved across the bridge to San Francisco for work, then returned to Oakland when housing was cheaper. By then Mate had left, and the checks were arriving from Arizona as he held some kind of government job. She considered getting a lawyer but did not describe the idea as a step that repaired the father-son bond.

Donny’s life in his father’s shadow

Donny’s mother remembered him as exceptionally bright, like Mate. He earned good grades, liked science, and spent a year at San Francisco State. She once imagined he might become a doctor too. The resemblance and the imagined career carry a painful double meaning: Donny seemed to inherit the intelligence and scientific interests his mother associated with Mate, but the prospect of following his father’s path never became a shared project. His mother had hoped to work as a registered nurse and pictured the two adults building a medical practice together; after Mate rejected her and Donny, she continued working and never finished her education.

By the time of the conversation, Donny had changed markedly. His mother said he had stopped caring for himself, grown his hair and beard long, and become filthy, looking like a homeless person despite having a home he could return to. She had not seen him for two years and did not know where he was. Her account does not establish why Donny withdrew or what happened during those missing years; it does establish the contrast between the promising student she remembered and the absent, deteriorating adult she could no longer reach.

Family history and the meaning of Mate’s choices

Donny’s mother also recalled that her own father had died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, with the disease spreading through his spine and causing severe pain. His suffering made a strong impression on Mate. That recollection suggests that Mate’s later thinking about death was shaped, at least in part, by witnessing a painful decline; it does not, however, explain away his conduct as a husband or father. The account of his family life remains distinct from the public rationale he attached to helping people die.

That distinction matters in the novel’s broader ethical debate. Alex Delaware remembers physicians and nurses sometimes ending a dying child’s suffering through a slightly larger dose of morphine, an act he understood as compassion, while he questioned Mate’s motives and was troubled by his use of the Humanitron. The contrast does not prove what Mate felt toward Donny, but it places his claim to act mercifully beside a history in which he had refused the ordinary responsibilities of care toward his own child. The relationship’s defining evidence is concrete rather than diagnostic: Mate left, rejected Donny during the attempted reunion, and did not return to his son’s life; Donny’s mother was left to remember both the child she had hoped he would become and the adult she could no longer find.