Henry Devereaux and His Mother’s Bond Shaped by “We’ll Forget”

The bond between William Henry Devereaux, Jr. and his mother is founded on a promise made in a moment of private crisis: “We will forget this.” The words help a boy endure his father’s departure and the distress he cannot explain, but they also become a family silence that neither parent nor son knows how to revisit. Years later, William begins to understand that the promise may have protected them from pain while making their shared experience harder to speak about.

Childhood and the Promise

After William’s father leaves, the family remains in the university house until its lease ends. The quiet that had once been maintained for his father’s reading and writing becomes, in his memory, a deeper and stranger silence. William spends time alone in the dark cellar, where his mother usually calls him upstairs for dinner. He cannot explain to her what he does there, or what the place means to him.

One afternoon, his mother comes down the stairs without calling. William is standing on a chair with a coil of rope tied to a pipe overhead, testing whether the knot and pipe would hold his weight. He later makes clear that he did not want his life to end; he wanted to know that the pipe would hold if circumstances became worse and unbearable. Seeing his mother, he is overcome by grief he had not known how to name. He goes to her, trusting that she will not be angry, and she draws him close.

His mother tells him that the two of them will forget. The promise is deliberately broad in its meaning: it may refer to the pain of his father’s abandonment, to what she has just discovered in the cellar, or to both. William cannot explain how forgetting will happen, and the promise offers no method beyond his mother’s certainty. At that moment, her confidence is enough for him to trust her.

Care, Silence, and Distance

The promise holds in one sense: William says that he and his mother, or at least he himself, have remained faithful to it. But remembering the scene much later makes him question what that faithfulness has meant. If they have both kept the moment unspoken, they may have preserved the reassurance his mother gave him while also avoiding the distress they shared. In his later understanding, forgetting such an experience may require distance from the person who witnessed it with him.

That possibility alters how William thinks about his mother’s part in the childhood scene. As a boy, he experienced being drawn into her arms as the opposite of abandonment. As an adult, recalling another moment of helplessness beside his injured daughter, he imagines for the first time what his mother might have felt as she reached him in the cellar. The comparison does not diminish her care; it lets him see that she, too, had to respond without knowing exactly what was happening or what would follow.

The memory remains uncertain between them. When William later wonders whether his mother remembers what she promised they would forget, he cannot tell from her expression whether she is willing or able to recover it. Her frustration with him is more apparent than any shared recognition. The scene leaves their old agreement intact but unsettled: William has retrieved the memory, while its place in his mother’s own recollection remains unknown to him.

Forgiveness and the Older Generation

Their relationship also takes shape around his father’s long absence. Years later, when William sees his mother again, she reminds him that they once wondered where his father was for close to a decade. She tells William that she has not forgotten, but has forgiven, and urges him to do the same. William answers that he bears his father no ill will, while his mother insists that the absence of ill will is not the same as forgiveness. Their exchange exposes a distinction she wants him to consider, even as he resists being told what his feelings amount to.

This conversation echoes the earlier promise without resolving it. “We will forget this” offered comfort through an assurance that pain would recede; his mother’s later appeal to forgiveness asks William to make a different kind of response to the past. The book does not present forgetting, indifference, and forgiveness as interchangeable. William’s mother may have forgiven the man who left, while William is still deciding what his own lack of resentment means.

Memory Across Generations

William’s recollection becomes part of a wider pattern of family members trying to interpret what others cannot or will not say. His daughter Julie fears that her parents may divorce, a possibility made more vivid for her by the fears her older sister Karen had carried. William’s response is marked by the irony he sees in Julie’s directness, while her fear remains an earnest request for reassurance. The family’s anxieties therefore pass between generations not only as explicit disclosures but also as interpretations of silences and signs.

Near the end of the novel, William reflects that his mother could not have known what consequences would follow from finding him in the cellar and drawing him close. He argues that people often cannot know in advance what they will do or what meaning their actions will acquire afterward. In his account, the embrace that saved him in that moment may also have helped set in motion a later estrangement, because mother and son could not forget the anguish they had shared without putting distance between themselves. The thought does not accuse his mother of causing their separation; it acknowledges the unpredictable consequences of an act of care.

The relationship’s significance lies in this double truth. William’s mother gives him the trust and reassurance he needs at a moment when he cannot explain himself, and her words remain powerful decades later. Yet the memory also shows that love cannot guarantee shared understanding: what comforts one person may become difficult for both to revisit. William’s eventual act of remembering does not erase their bond or settle what his mother remembers. It allows him, instead, to see her not only as the person who steadied him, but as someone who faced the same unknowable moment from the other side.