Cal Takes Aron to See Kate
On the night of Thanksgiving 1917, Cal Trask, smarting from his father Adam's rejection of a fifteen-thousand-dollar gift meant to atone for the family's lost fortune, set in motion a chain of events that would destroy his family. Cal, whose own discovery of his mother Kate's identity as a brothel madam had been a source of secret torment, decided to share that knowledge with his brother Aron in the most brutal way possible. He intercepted Aron on the street and, claiming to have a surprise to show him, led him not to a place of wonder but to the dilapidated house on Castroville Street where Kate lived and worked. The walk was a calculated act of cruelty, born from Cal's feeling that his father loved Aron more and from his own shame at being the son of a whore.
The Revelation at Kate's House
When the two brothers arrived at the overgrown yard of Kate's establishment, Cal did not simply tell Aron the truth. He brought him face to face with their mother. Inside the house, Aron confronted Kate, and the encounter was catastrophic. Aron, who had always believed his mother was dead and buried in the East, a story carefully maintained by Adam and Lee, was confronted with the living, breathing reality of a woman he could not reconcile with his angelic image of a lost parent. Kate, seeing her beautiful, golden-haired son for the first time since his infancy, reacted with a cold, defensive laugh. Aron's mind broke under the shock. He screamed ugly, maddened words at Kate, words aimed as much at himself and the shattering of his world as at her. Then, in a frenzy of despair, he turned and ran from the house, leaving Cal standing in the yard.
Cal's Motive and the Aftermath
Cal's motive was a complex tangle of jealousy and a desperate, twisted need to share his own burden. He had long known the truth about Kate, having followed her on her Monday errands and eventually confronted her. He had also confessed his fear to Lee that he had inherited his mother's evil, a fear Lee had tried to dispel. But on Thanksgiving, after Adam had rejected his money and praised Aron's academic achievements, Cal's resentment boiled over. He wanted to destroy the pedestal on which Aron stood, to make him see the ugliness that Cal himself could not escape. The immediate aftermath was violent: as Cal followed his sobbing brother out of the yard, Aron turned and struck him with a fist like a whip, knocking him to the ground. Aron then fled into the night, his hoarse cries echoing as he ran. Cal lay in the dirt, hearing the sounds of the railroad yard, and felt a hollow, casual emptiness that soon gave way to a crushing guilt.
Consequences: Death, Stroke, and Guilt
The revelation set off a chain of irreversible tragedies. Aron, unable to face the world he had known, immediately enlisted in the army under a false age, sending a postcard to his father that read, "Dear Father, I'm in the army. I told them I was eighteen. I'll be all right. Don't worry about me. Aron." He was killed in the Battle of Cantigny in France on May 28, 1918. When the telegram announcing Aron's death arrived, Adam read it, and the shock of the news, compounded by the knowledge of how Aron had come to be in the army, caused a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The stroke left Adam paralyzed on his left side, barely able to speak, and confined to a bed from which he would never recover. Cal was left to bear the full weight of his actions, confessing to his paralyzed father, "I did it. I'm responsible for Aron's death and for your sickness. I took him to Kate's. I showed him his mother." The event thus stands as the novel's central catastrophe, the moment when the accumulated sins of the parents—Cathy's abandonment and Adam's lie—are visited upon the children, and when Cal's struggle with his own nature reaches its most destructive expression.
