Brian Redfield

Brian Redfield is Irene Redfield’s husband and the father of Junior and Ted, a man whose composure and apparent acquiescence conceal a persistent wish to loosen the family’s ties to its settled life. Through Irene’s close attention to his looks, manner, and silences, he appears both as a familiar domestic presence and as someone she cannot fully contain. His disagreement with Irene over how to prepare their sons for racism turns their marriage into one of the novel’s central conflicts over protection, choice, and the costs of staying in place.

Identity and Family Life

Brian enters one scene so noiselessly that, despite their years together, his arrival still disconcerts Irene. His amused smile seems faintly supercilious, while his manner allows him to tease her about swearing and about being the mother of sons. The small exchange gives their domestic life a practiced intimacy: he is close enough to notice her outburst and playful enough to make it a joke, but his sudden appearance also unsettles her.

Irene regards him as strikingly handsome without finding him pretty or effeminate. She attributes that impression partly to the slight irregularity of his nose and the marked heaviness of his chin, but especially to his deep copper-colored skin and its fine texture. Her description makes his appearance more than a passing compliment: the children’s resemblance to him will make that coloring part of the family portrait, while the novel’s racial conflicts give bodily appearance particular social weight.

The boys inherit different combinations of their parents’ traits. Junior is tall for his age and almost remarkably like Brian in features and coloring, yet Irene sees him as practical and determined like herself. Ted is more speculative and withdrawn; his apparent candor, willingness to yield when circumstances are immovable, and dislike of scenes recall Brian’s own manner. Irene thus reads her sons as carrying forward not a single paternal likeness but distinct mixtures of appearance and temperament. Her observations also show how closely she watches Brian for signs of himself in the children.

Clare and the Question of Race

Brian knows that Irene has met Clare Kendry and gone to tea with her. In a conversation about Clare’s return to her former Black acquaintances, he treats such returns as a recurring pattern rather than an isolated surprise. He recalls Albert Hammond frequenting Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, and dance halls until violence followed his attention to a white man’s partner, then observes that people who cross the racial line often come back. When Irene asks why, Brian answers that understanding the reason would mean understanding race itself. His response identifies the return as a recognizable social pattern while admitting that its deeper motive remains beyond his explanation.

His attitude toward Clare’s presence in the household is notably restrained. He regards her visits to the Redfield home with tolerant amusement and, as far as Irene can tell, neither objects to them nor seems especially pleased by them. When Irene asks whether he finds Clare exceptionally beautiful, he declines to do so. The exchange differs from Irene’s intense, watchful response to Clare: Brian does not appear to invest Clare’s visits with the same private significance, though Irene cannot use his outward neutrality to settle what he thinks.

Marriage, Security, and the Future

Brian’s composure is also a source of strain. Irene believes that his outward agreement with her wishes has concealed an increasing inclination to tear himself and his possessions away from their established setting. His desire to leave the United States for Brian's hoped-for Brazil remains alive even when the couple does not discuss it. Irene fears that possibility because she has built her understanding of family security around the life they have in New York City; she also resents the sense that he still blames her for having insisted that he remain there and continue his profession.

The disagreement becomes explicit when Brian argues that their sons need some preparation for what awaits them. He says that he wanted to take them away from what he calls a hellish place years earlier, but abandoned that plan because Irene objected; he will not, he insists, give up everything. Irene hears the words as ominous and wonders whether Clare is implicated in them, but the immediate conflict is about the boys’ future and the price of her preferred protection. Brian sees withholding knowledge as a failure of parental duty; Irene fears that exposing the children to the world’s racial hostility would compromise their happiness. Neither position is merely abstract: the argument turns on what the parents owe their sons and whether safety can be secured by keeping danger out of view.

Their shared household continues, but proximity does not guarantee ease. After Christmas, Brian moves through the home, sits opposite Irene at meals, and sleeps in the adjoining room, yet she experiences him as remote and inaccessible. She cannot persuade herself that he is happy or that their life remains as it was. She attributes this distance, tentatively, to his old longing to leave rather than to anything involving Clare, but her uncertainty exposes the limits of her knowledge of him. The tension is sharpened by the gap between his habitual surface of concord and the dissatisfaction she suspects beneath it.

Public Conflict and Narrative Role

At the gathering where John Bellew confronts Clare, Brian comes out when he hears the disturbance and identifies himself as a Redfield, demanding to know what Bellew wants. Bellew pushes past those present and directs his racial insult at Clare. Brian’s intervention is brief in the available scene, but its force lies in the contrast it creates: the man who has pressed for preparing his sons to face racism now answers a racist intrusion directly in a shared social space. He does not remain merely the absent-minded or remote husband Irene studies at home; he takes a position when Bellew brings racial hostility into the room.

Brian’s narrative significance rests on the unresolved difference between his and Irene’s forms of care. He urges preparation and has contemplated departure; she organizes family life around continuity and safety. His longings are not shown as fulfilled, and the evidence does not resolve their marital conflict. Instead, his measured manner, his remembered wish to leave, and his challenge to Bellew make visible the pressure beneath the Redfields’ domestic arrangement: racial danger cannot be removed simply by silence, while a desire to escape it threatens the stability Irene has worked to preserve.