Season of Deeds

Season of Deeds names the outward-looking stage of youth, when life is organized around action and the question of who a person is. In contrast with Season of Grace, which turns attention toward what a person has become, it frames the book’s reflections on age not simply as the passage of years but as a reckoning with choices made, opportunities missed, and abilities diminishing.

Meaning and Contrast

The distinction is put into words by Tony Coniglia during a late-night conversation on William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s deck. With a bottle of Irish whiskey between them, Tony describes youth as the Season of Deeds and defines its central question as “Who am I?” Season of Grace asks a different question: “What have I become?” The contrast is between a life stage oriented toward doing and becoming someone, and a later stage in which a person takes stock of the result.

Tony’s framework is not presented as a clean break between two ages so much as a change in emphasis. The Season of Deeds belongs to youth, but its force remains in the later question: what became of the ambitions that once seemed to promise a different life? Tony’s philosophical turn is also undercut by the immediate scene. When William Henry Devereaux, Jr. asks what they have become, Tony answers that he has become very drunk. The joke punctures the solemnity without dissolving the unease beneath it.

Deferred Possibilities

Earlier, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. sees the cost of unrealized possibility in the lives of his colleagues at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton. They had imagined that they were made for better things, yet have remained together in a place and profession they once might have thought temporary. Their shared surroundings make the past hard to ignore: familiar colleagues reflect not only the lives they have led but the alternatives they declined or failed to pursue.

The unrealized paths are specific. Finny could have finished his dissertation but did not. June Barnes received an offer from a decent university after publishing a well-placed article more than a dozen years earlier, but the institution would not hire Teddy Barnes as part of a package when he had just received tenure. Later, Teddy had an opportunity to move into administration; June talked him out of it, perhaps in part from resentment. Even Gracie DuBois’s poetry once showed promise. These histories make the contrast between deeds and outcomes collective: the characters’ present circumstances have accumulated through missed chances, competing loyalties, and decisions that seemed reasonable at the time.

The disappointment is compounded by the daily proximity of the people who share it. The colleagues have grown angry with one another rather than confront the possibility that the lives they wanted might have required actions they did not take. The language of having been meant for better things becomes ironic: the characters have treated their unrealized potential as evidence of what was denied them, while recognizing that some of what they regret arose from their own choices.

Aging and the Loss of Action

For William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the change of season is registered through physical and professional adjustment. At fifty, he loses to Julie Devereaux in a two-set tennis match lasting just under an hour. He has postponed the expected defeat for nearly a decade, partly by distracting her during earlier games; this time she tunes him out, runs him across the court, and wins. Her victory marks a change in their relationship as well as in his body: she can succeed without being diverted by her father’s familiar influence.

The same pressure appears in baseball. After jogging through the spring in the hope of holding his place in left field, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. voluntarily moves to first base. He can perform the position competently, but finds it offers reliability and patience rather than the poetic excitement of tracking a ball hit high and far. Phil Watson’s younger nephew takes his former place; the nephew has speed but initially lacks judgment, which Watson expects will improve with experience. The contrast makes the transfer more than a change of position: the younger player can still gain a capacity that Devereaux knows he can no longer acquire.

Narrative Significance

Season of Deeds gives a concise name to the book’s tension between imagined potential and lived consequence. The phrase recalls the energy of youth, but the novel’s examples dwell on what action did not accomplish, what was deferred, and what became harder with time. The characters’ histories resist a simple division between external circumstances and personal responsibility: limited opportunities matter, yet so do choices made within them.

The later question, “What have I become?”, therefore carries both humor and weight. Tony’s drunken answer keeps the philosophy from becoming a solemn lesson, while Devereaux’s tennis loss, move to first base, and colleagues’ stalled ambitions give it concrete form. Season of Deeds is not merely a vanished period of life; it is the measure against which the characters assess the distance between who they expected to be and the lives they actually made.