Angela

Angela is the infant daughter of Dominick Birdsey and Dessa, whose death less than a month after her birth becomes a defining absence in her family. The novel presents her chiefly through the people who survive her: as a child her parents expected to know, a loss they struggle to bear together, and a memory that continues to shape Dominick’s choices years later.

Identity and brief life

Angela died in May 1983, three weeks and three days after her birth. Dominick had imagined getting to know his daughter more fully when the school year ended. That spring, he was balancing teaching with assistant coaching in track, work on the teachers’ union negotiating committee, and regular Sunday visits to his twin brother, Thomas Birdsey. He expected the summer months to give him time with Dessa and the baby, a chance to settle into being a father after the demands of work and family had eased.

On the morning Angela died, Dominick had stayed up late correcting his students’ papers and then slept through his alarm. As he was leaving, he decided to return and kiss the baby. Dessa had been up with Angela twice during the night and was sleeping in. The decision to go back meant that Dominick, rather than Dessa, discovered that their daughter had died. The account gives no developed portrait of Angela as an individual: her place in the story is shaped by the shortness of her life and by the future her parents had begun to imagine for her.

The discovery and its aftermath

Dominick remembers finding Angela in her bassinet and recognizing that she was dead before he could bring himself to accept it. He tried to call for Dessa. The emergency responders, doctors, priest summoned by Dessa’s family from the Greek church, and hospital social worker could not change the outcome. In the years afterward, Dominick continued to recall the ambulance leaving their driveway and Dessa’s overwhelming grief at the hospital. Her suffering became part of his own memory of the day, as did his sense that he had at least spared her the discovery by being the one who found their daughter.

The loss did not resolve into a single moment that could be left behind. Dominick says that, seven years later, the worst anniversaries—Angela’s birthday, the day she died, and sometimes the holidays—could return him to the scenes surrounding her death. His recollection also carries self-reproach: he and Dessa each wondered whether they might somehow have prevented what happened. The novel does not establish that either parent was responsible; instead, it shows how grief repeatedly generates the question of responsibility even when no answer is available.

Angela’s effect on her parents’ marriage

Angela’s first birthday approached as a difficult date for Dessa. She had left her job at the day-care center and arranged to travel alone to Greece and Sicily. She had wanted Dominick to join her and use the life-insurance money received after Angela’s death, but he refused to take time away from work. He also feared being confined with Dessa on a ship and what the trip might mean for their chances of having another child. He told her to go without him, and she went.

The difference between them was not simply a disagreement about travel. Dessa returned having decided that she wanted another child and tried to tell Dominick. He had secretly undergone a vasectomy while she was away, without discussing it with her. When he disclosed this during an intimate conversation, the revelation turned their already difficult grief into a conflict about trust and the possibility of rebuilding a family. Dessa told him that she had gone to Italy and Greece to decide she wanted another child. The couple’s separation followed in July. Angela’s death did not alone determine the marriage’s end, but the loss and Dominick’s concealed decision became tightly joined in its breakdown.

Family bonds and an imagined future

Angela’s death also shaped Dominick’s relationship with Gene Constantine. In the period afterward, Gene and Dominick spent time together while Dessa was grieving, often sitting in front of the television and waiting for her pain to ease. They shared uncertainty about whether Angela’s death was somehow their fault. Gene told Dominick that he regarded him as a son; the bond mattered to Dominick, who was already troubled by the absence of a known biological father. Their closeness grew out of a vigil for Dessa and a loss neither man could undo.

Thomas never met his niece. Dominick had gone to tell him that the baby was a girl and remembered Thomas’s pleased response to becoming an uncle. The brothers had planned to visit together, but Angela died before that could happen. Looking back, Dominick also describes Thomas’s illness as having eventually separated the twins, a separation he had struggled against throughout his life. Angela’s brief presence thus belongs to a family story in which births and losses are remembered alongside the bonds that could not be sustained as expected.

Years later, Angela remains present as an imagined child as well as a remembered infant. While waiting near a dance studio, Dominick watches young girls practicing and briefly imagines a dark-haired child in a yellow leotard as Angela. In that fantasy, Dessa and Dominick are still together, their daughter’s drawings and school papers are on the refrigerator, and a dance recital is approaching. The scene does not supply a future Angela actually lived; it makes visible the ordinary family life Dominick continues to picture and mourn.

Narrative role and continuing grief

A later pregnancy in Dominick’s life brings Angela’s death back with particular force. When Joy is pregnant, he recalls the morning he found his daughter and fears the possibility of another loss. Joy, learning about Angela, recognizes that Dominick’s grief helps explain the anger she had found difficult to understand and regrets that he had not told her sooner. Angela’s history, kept unspoken between them until then, changes how Joy interprets him and what she believes she might have been able to offer.

Angela therefore functions not as a fully depicted child but as the center of a continuing family grief. Her absence enters anniversaries, marital decisions, questions of fatherhood, and Dominick’s later intimacy. The imagined dancer and the infant in the bassinet are two versions of the same irrecoverable relationship: the daughter Dominick knew only briefly and the growing child he can picture but never meet. By returning to both the concrete circumstances of her death and the ordinary future that might have followed, the narrative shows how Angela’s short life continues to organize the lives of those who loved her.