Ari

Ari is Paul Drabble’s son and the child Frances Welty thought she might one day become a mother to. He appears briefly within Frances’s imagined sleigh journey, but that appearance exposes the emotional reality beneath her embarrassment: she is grieving not only the end of a romance, but also a possible relationship with a child she had already imagined as part of her life.

Identity and Appearance

Ari is introduced through a child’s voice. He tells Frances that he was the one who meant something, a statement that redirects her attention from Paul Drabble to the child she had expected to matter in her future. The scene identifies him as Paul’s son; it does not give further details about his age, circumstances, or life beyond this moment.

His entrance is deliberately small and startling. Frances does not turn around, because she cannot bear to look at him. Ari’s voice nevertheless brings into the open what her declaration that she is over Paul cannot settle: the imagined prospect of becoming connected to his child has become its own source of loss.

Frances’s Imagined Future

Frances tells Gillian that she thought she was going to be Ari’s mother. She says this was the only time in her life she had even considered being a mother. The specificity matters: she is not describing a general wish for children, but a future she had considered in connection with Paul’s son. Ari therefore represents a possibility Frances had allowed herself to imagine, even though the scene frames that future as unrealized.

Frances calls her own response embarrassing and whispers that she is deeply embarrassed. Gillian does not dismiss the feeling or treat it as evidence that Frances should have moved on. Instead, she names it as a loss and tells Frances that she is allowed to grieve, even if the loss feels embarrassing. Her answer validates the emotional consequence without confusing the imagined future with an actual motherhood or relationship.

The Snowbound Grief

The narrative gives Frances’s mourning an extended, impossible image: snow falls silently for days as she grieves the loss of an imaginary boy, while Gillian sits beside her with her head bowed in sympathy. The snowfall eventually leaves them like frozen, snow-covered figures. Ari’s brief spoken appearance thus opens into a prolonged tableau of grief and companionship, where the imagined nature of the boy does not make the sorrow disappear.

The scene’s contrast is central to Ari’s function. Frances had just insisted that she was completely over Paul, but her distress reveals that letting go of him also means confronting the future she attached to his son. Gillian’s presence makes the grief bearable without arguing it away: she remains beside Frances, sharing the silence as the snow accumulates.

Narrative Role and Limits

Ari matters here less as a developed participant in the story than as the figure through whom Frances can recognize what she has lost. His voice gives the imagined child a moment of apparent agency, while Frances’s refusal to turn around keeps the encounter within the landscape of her grief. The narration explicitly calls him imaginary in describing what Frances mourns; it does not establish that Ari himself is unreal, but distinguishes the boy from the maternal future Frances pictured.

When spring arrives and the snow melts, Frances turns to another absence within the same imagined journey, asking why her father is not there and proposing that he be brought on board. Her father answers from the back of the sleigh. This shift does not erase Ari’s place in the preceding grief: the passage moves from mourning an imagined son to summoning Frances’s father, extending the journey’s attention to the people and relationships she longs to include. Ari’s scene remains a concise but consequential instance of the book treating imagined attachment as emotionally consequential, while preserving the distinction between grief and literal biography.