Dominick’s unresolved anger

Dominick’s unresolved anger is a continuing response to loss, family responsibility, and the feeling that his own life has been repeatedly put on hold. After the death of his infant daughter, Angela Birdsey, he cannot share grief with Dessa; later, the same anger erupts during a crisis involving Thomas Birdsey and becomes inseparable from the contradiction at the heart of his life: he resents being bound to his brother, yet will not let others threaten him.

Grief and the refusal to speak

Angela’s death leaves Dominick and Dessa with incompatible explanations for what has happened. Dessa considers the possibility that God has singled them out; Dominick leans toward the possibility that there is no God and that events need not have meaning. For him, the loss joins other sources of helplessness: Thomas’s strange behavior and the absence of the biological father who has never appeared in Dominick’s life. He experiences this accumulation not as a pattern he can resolve but as proof that life can withdraw what a person expects without explanation.

Dessa tries, after some time has passed, to talk about Angela and to invite Dominick to speak about his feelings. He resists. He believes conversation and tears cannot change the fact of their daughter’s death, and he leaves rather than continue the conversation. His refusal is more than an inability to find the right words: it keeps him from sharing grief with the person who is grieving beside him. The immediate withdrawal protects him from an emotional exchange he cannot bear, but it also leaves Dessa alone with hers.

His anger moves into action when he cannot express it directly. On the worst nights he goes to the garage and strikes or slams objects. At other times he takes the keys to the couple’s 1977 Celica, drives at high speed, and ends up near the river. He skirts the state hospital and the Indian graveyard; once, he climbs the rock ledge at The Falls, a place associated with his younger years. He hopes that looking at things from above might help him understand suffering, divine will, or mercy. It does not. The stark measure of his loss remains the short coffin and the empty crib in Angela’s room.

Grief inside the marriage

Dominick’s inability to approach Dessa becomes especially clear at night. He hears her in the baby’s room, sometimes sobbing and once speaking to Angela in baby talk. He recognizes that she needs comfort and reproaches himself for remaining in bed, but cannot make himself go to her. He experiences the moment as a failure of basic care, and later wonders whether their marriage might have been saved if he had crossed the room and held her. The memory persists because it fixes his anger not only as something directed outward, but as a barrier between him and an action he knows he should take.

Dessa seeks support through meetings for parents bereaved by sudden infant death in New Haven and urges Dominick to attend. He goes twice and stops. Instead of finding the group’s shared grief helpful, he resents its willingness to talk openly and sees its participants as dwelling in sorrow. His reaction reinforces the isolation that has already formed between him and Dessa: the means she finds for facing the loss is precisely what he turns away from.

Dessa eventually tells him she is leaving. She regards the vasectomy not as the central problem but as an expression of his longstanding anger and the blame she feels he has directed toward her. She says that, even when she has been away and begun to feel stronger, seeing him again makes her feel as if she has returned to the beginning. Her description of being unable to breathe around him gives a consequence to Dominick’s inwardly held anger: it has become part of the atmosphere of their marriage. He begs her to stay and promises to change, but her luggage is already in the Celica, and she leaves with her dog. His anger has not made him indifferent to the marriage; rather, it has helped make the relationship unbearable to the person he still wants beside him.

Anger under institutional pressure

Later, Dominick’s anger surfaces during a confrontation at Hatch, where Thomas is being held. Dominick is already conscious of what he has given up while caring for his brother: he describes an unfinished paint job on Gillette Street, other demands on his time, and his sense that Thomas’s needs continue to take precedence. He also brings up the strain in his relationship with Joy, who has asked him to think about her rather than always putting Thomas first. The outburst reveals that his resentment has gathered around more than one obligation; Thomas is the focus, but the pressure also includes work and the repeated feeling that there is no room for Dominick’s own life.

Thomas’s hand has been amputated, and Dominick rejects the idea that calming down can alter either his brother’s condition or the situation that brought him to Hatch. When Dr. Patel tries to settle him, he insists on explaining why he is angry. The force of the scene comes from his insistence on being heard, not from any resolution: naming the burden does not release him from it. He is furious that he is again at the hospital dealing with Thomas’s crisis, but his anger is also shaped by the knowledge that Thomas cannot simply be left to manage alone.

The institutional process adds another form of powerlessness. Thomas has been admitted on a Physician’s Emergency Certificate initiated by a surgeon at Shanley Memorial Hospital. The certificate permits fifteen days of observation to determine whether he is dangerous to himself or others, and Dominick is told that Thomas cannot be released during that minimum period. This is not presented as a decision Dominick can reverse through insistence. The explanation makes his immediate inability to get his brother out of Hatch concrete, while placing their family crisis inside a system whose procedures are connected to wider public and political pressures around insanity findings and perceived danger.

After a hearing, the Psychiatric Security Review Board votes unanimously to retain Thomas for one year, citing potential danger to himself and others. The next review is set for October 1991; Lisa Sheffer has requested a review in six months instead. For Dominick, the decision extends the period in which he must contend with Thomas’s confinement and with the limits of what he can do for him. The proceeding supplies a timetable and a risk rationale, but it does not resolve the emotional conflict that accompanies his role as Thomas’s advocate.

The anchor and the contradiction

In trying to explain his lifelong exhaustion, Dominick imagines Thomas as an anchor dragging him down. He feels allowed only enough rope to reach the surface and breathe, never enough to escape. The image gives physical form to his perception that responsibility has narrowed his life. He remembers expecting that one day he would cut himself free, only to find himself, at forty, still at Hatch intervening in another crisis. Anger here is not a passing reaction to one hospital visit; it is his accumulated sense that the future he imagined has never arrived.

Yet the anchor image does not tell the whole truth about their relationship. Dominick admits that he sometimes hates Thomas, but he also insists that no one else should insult or threaten him. The resentment and the protectiveness coexist. He calls Thomas a curse and his whole life in the same account, exposing the emotional bind rather than settling it: his brother is both the person from whom he longs to escape and the person he will defend. His anger can make that dependence sound like a sentence, but it cannot make the bond disappear.

Narrative significance

The novel presents Dominick’s anger through recurrence and contrast. In the aftermath of Angela’s death, he turns away from conversation, the support group, and the sound of Dessa grieving; at Hatch, he speaks at length about a burden that has remained unspoken. The later outburst does not erase the earlier silences. Instead, it makes audible how loss, frustration, and responsibility have accumulated beneath them.

His anger also exposes the cost of treating protection as a duty that must be carried alone. Dominick sees himself as responsible for Thomas, but the same devotion that keeps him present feeds his resentment and damages his other relationships. Neither the image of escape nor the language of being trapped offers a clean answer. His unresolved anger marks the space between wanting a life separate from his brother and believing that separation would mean abandoning him.