The Smith family’s misfortunes

The Smith family’s misfortunes is the pattern of bereavement, suicide, and fear that shapes Perry Smith’s understanding of his family and troubles his sister Barbara Johnson. Across the family’s history, the deaths of their mother, Fern Smith, and Jimmy Smith gather into what seems to Perry like a shared affliction, while Barbara’s experience shows that the sense of doom reaches beyond those who died: it also shadows the person who survived.

Family History and Loss

Florence Buckskin and Tex John Smith had four children, two sons and two daughters. Florence was an alcoholic and died after choking on her own vomit. Of the children, Barbara alone is described as having entered an ordinary adult life: she married and began raising a family. The other three—Perry, Fern, and Jimmy—each finished high school, but education did not protect them from the family’s losses or determine their futures.

Jimmy’s record makes the contrast especially sharp. He graduated at the top of his class, an achievement attributed to his own willpower. Barbara regarded his later suicide as ominous precisely because his character, courage, and hard work had not shielded him from disaster. The family history therefore resists a simple explanation in which effort or virtue reliably produces safety. The evidence does not establish a single cause for the siblings’ different lives; instead, it sets their achievements beside the tragedies that followed.

Fern’s death was another lasting source of uncertainty. At fourteen, she changed her name and thereafter tried to make the new name, Joy, fit her life. She was remembered as easygoing, widely liked, artistic, and talented at dancing and singing. Perry loved her and struggled to accept that she might have jumped from a San Francisco hotel window, trying instead to believe that she had slipped. He imagined that, with better luck, her looks and abilities might have allowed her to become somebody. Her death thus remains both a loss and an unresolved question in his memory: the family knows how she fell, but Perry cannot settle on what happened or why.

Perry’s Interpretation of the Pattern

Perry’s recognition that something might be wrong with the family is painful to him. The possibility troubles him most when the cause seems neither chosen nor deserved, but perhaps present from birth. He looks at what happened to his relatives and treats their histories as evidence that their lives may be connected by more than coincidence. His reasoning does not amount to a diagnosis, and the narrative does not confirm an inherited condition. It presents his suspicion as an attempt to find a pattern in repeated loss.

Fern’s memory gives that pattern an intimate dimension. Perry does not recall her only as a tragic figure: he remembers her affectionately as sweet, artistic, and capable of performance. His account holds possibility beside the fact of her death, measuring the life she might have had against the prospects he believed bad luck had taken away. At the same time, his inability to know whether her fall was accidental or deliberate shows how uncertainty persists inside the family’s grief. The event is not resolved by Perry’s love for her; it is made harder to bear by it.

Barbara as Survivor

Barbara’s response shows the pattern from the position of the sibling who remains alive and has built a family. After detectives leave, the composure that had impressed them falters. She puts off her despair until the guests have gone, feeds and bathes the children, and hears their prayers. Only then does the fear she has been containing close in on her. Her ordinary responsibilities do not remove the family history; they postpone the moment when she can face what it means to her.

Barbara says she is afraid of Perry, but her fear reaches beyond him. She wonders whether he is part of a wider configuration of terrible destinies awaiting the children of Florence Buckskin and Tex John Smith. She counts the losses: Jimmy shot himself, Fern fell or jumped, and Perry became a criminal. Because she is the only survivor among the siblings in the life she describes, she fears that her own safety may be temporary. Her imagined future includes madness, incurable illness, or losing the home, husband, and children she values in a fire. These are fears, not predictions presented as fact; their force lies in how the siblings’ history makes catastrophe seem capable of returning.

Meaning and Narrative Role

The family’s apparent doom is framed through two different responses to the same history. Perry searches the past for a possible shared cause, wondering whether the siblings were marked by something beyond their control. Barbara sees a pattern whose next victim might be herself, even though she has married and begun raising children. Neither perspective proves that the family is governed by fate. Together, however, they show how repeated deaths can make uncertainty feel like an inheritance.

The account also complicates any reading of success as protection. Jimmy’s academic distinction and Barbara’s family life stand alongside the deaths and fears that shape their stories; Fern’s talent and Perry’s love for her do not resolve the question of why her life ended as it did. By moving between Perry’s troubled inference and Barbara’s delayed despair, the narrative makes family misfortune more than a list of past events. It becomes a living interpretation of those events—one that follows the surviving siblings into their understanding of themselves, their vulnerability, and what may still happen.