Hank Devereaux and William Henry Devereaux Sr. Confront Their Emotional Distance

Hank Devereaux and William Henry Devereaux, Sr. are father and son, but their bond is marked less by shared intimacy than by the disappointments each understands the other to hold. Hank calls their emotional distance sensible and even admirable: neither tries to change the other, asks for what the other cannot provide, or voices the failures that separate them. The father’s return unsettles this arrangement, not because the two have already reconciled, but because Hank begins to recognize that he may not be prepared to encounter the changed man his father has become.

Family History and Distance

A childhood story helps establish the unevenness of their relationship. Soon after William Henry Devereaux, Sr. brought home a dog, Hank managed to kill it; his father dug the grave and was left to bury the animal. Hank later presents this as almost the only work he remembers his father doing while Hank was growing up. The episode is both a concrete memory of paternal care and a measure of how little such care seems to have accumulated into closeness: the father performs the difficult task, while the son recalls it with the dry, self-accusing perspective of an adult looking back.

The family’s separation deepened when William Henry Devereaux, Sr. accepted a full professorship at Columbia University and settled in New York with a young woman from his graduate seminar. By then he was an established scholar whose academic life had long involved distinguished appointments away from home. The new position offered security and prestige, but his move also belonged to the history of the parents’ estrangement, leaving Hank to regard the relationship with his father as something already shaped by a substantial absence.

The Father’s Public Voice and Private Vulnerability

At Columbia University, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. unexpectedly found himself unable to speak to his students. During his first class, he could not deliver a familiar lecture; after withdrawing to the hallway, he recovered the material, but his written notes then became unintelligible to him. When the problem recurred, he prepared lectures in advance and had his research assistant read them while he waited outside the classroom. He could still speak to deans, he recognized, but not to students. This distinction presents a man whose professional authority could not guarantee his ability to meet others directly, though the episode is not given as a cause of the estrangement between father and son.

He eventually discovered that he could begin speaking in the hallway and continue as he entered the classroom. His return to teaching came through an improvised crossing of the threshold: once his voice had begun outside, he could carry it into the room. The episode matters to the relationship chiefly as part of the history Hank inherits and retells. His father is not only the distant, formidable figure of Hank’s childhood; he is also a person whose public competence has failed him in a startling and humiliating way. Yet knowledge of that vulnerability does not itself produce an easy reconciliation.

What the Separation Means to Hank

When Hank considers the relationship directly, he rejects Lily’s view that his distance from his father is unnatural. He sees it instead as a practical recognition of limits. Their disappointments in one another are, in his assessment, deep and probably irreversible. Silence is not evidence that either son or father lacks understanding: Hank believes both know where they have failed in the other’s estimation. Avoiding an explicit accounting therefore seems safer than asking a question whose answer would be fully understood and difficult to bear.

Hank sets this view against a different parent-child exchange he has been considering. A father who asks his daughter where he went wrong can, Hank reflects, rely on her love to protect him from a complete answer. Hank does not believe that same protection exists between himself and William Henry Devereaux, Sr. Their distance is founded on mutual knowledge rather than a comforting misunderstanding. In Hank’s telling, the relationship’s central restraint is thus not simply an inability to speak: it is the shared awareness that speaking plainly could expose the extent of their disappointment.

The Return and Its Uncertainty

News of William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s collapse brings Hank and his mother to New York. Hank later qualifies the apparent recency of their contact: although only a couple of months have passed in the literal sense, his father was hospitalized and heavily sedated during that visit. In the fuller sense, Hank says, it has been about five years since he truly saw his father. The distinction gives their estrangement a precise shape: physical proximity during a medical crisis did not amount to a meaningful reunion.

After the father returns, Charles Purty tells Hank that he has seen him cry and then stop, grin, and carry on. Hank finds this account difficult to reconcile with the father he remembers, whose response to crude humor would once have been contempt rather than amusement. He imagines that the changed man might now laugh at it, or might find it so sad that he becomes unrecognizable even to himself. These are possibilities Hank cannot settle from memory alone. The report makes him consider, for the first time, that his mother may be right that he is unprepared for his father’s return. The relationship therefore ends this portion of the story in uncertainty: Hank’s lucid defense of distance remains intact, but the prospect of meeting a vulnerable and altered father has made that defense less secure.