Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.

Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is the wife of William Henry Devereaux, Sr. and the mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. After her husband’s return to Railton, his quiet death exposes the distance and lost time within their marriage. She turns to his papers for a fuller encounter with the man she believes she knew, while her son’s prior knowledge of the work she discovers reveals a different, less hopeful understanding of his father’s literary legacy.

Marriage and Return

After a long estrangement, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. returns to Railton with Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. and Charles Purty. Their reunion does not restore the intimacy their marriage had lost. Her husband and son had little to say to each other before his death; the account likewise suggests that the marriage had been marked by betrayal and by conversations that never took place.

She had maintained that she was her husband’s ideal companion, and that in betraying her he had betrayed his own best self. This conviction becomes especially important after his death: the papers he left behind seem to offer evidence of the more fully alive, intellectually engaged man she felt she had missed in their actual life together.

His Death and Her Response

William Henry Devereaux, Sr. dies quietly in his favorite reading chair, dressed as if for a faculty meeting and reading Our Mutual Friend. His wife thinks he is napping and goes about her business quietly so as not to disturb him. The ordinary care in that gesture meets the finality of a death she does not yet recognize.

His death comes soon after his return, but she does not appear as shaken as her son expects. He imagines that she may feel cheated, as though fate had made a cruel joke of their reunion, yet also sees her as released from an obligation she had honored through the marriage. Her response remains the son’s interpretation rather than a direct account of her private feelings; what she does next gives that response a more concrete form.

The Papers and the Unfinished Novel

Shortly after the funeral, she tells her son that she has begun sorting through her husband’s papers. She sounds almost excited. The drafts, research notes, and letters to famous colleagues promise contact with a man who, in her son’s view, may have been more present on the page than in life. Reading them offers her a kind of recompense for the conversations they missed and, potentially, confirmation of her belief that she had been the companion best suited to him.

A couple of days later, she calls to report a discovery: a two-hundred-page novel manuscript dating from nearly twenty-five years earlier. She is eager for her son to read it when she finishes examining it. He declines politely, explaining that he has already read it because his English department colleagues had thrust it into his hands. The manuscript’s discovery therefore delights her but cannot surprise him; the same pages represent a recovered part of her husband to her and an already familiar, disappointing literary object to their son.

Mother and Son

Her son recognizes that his answer hurts her feelings. When she asks whether he is comparing his father with Billy Quigley, whom she had met at a gathering earlier that year, he assures her that he is not. His private preference is nevertheless clear: he would rather read Billy’s book. The contrast leaves her hopeful attention to her husband’s manuscript at odds with her son’s dry, unromantic assessment of its literary value.

Through this difference, Mother of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is shown trying to make a posthumous relationship out of the papers and unfinished work her husband left behind. She seeks in them the intellectual companionship and vindication that life with him did not provide. Her son, already familiar with the manuscript, cannot share her sense of discovery, and his refusal makes the gap between her hopes and his knowledge newly visible.