The reunion between William Henry Devereaux, Jr. and William Henry Devereaux, Sr. begins not with recognition or confession but with a television left on in the background. Nearly a decade has passed since they last met, apart from a hospital visit when the elder man was heavily sedated after his collapse. Their reunion moves from an awkward handshake to a walk among the remnants of a local amusement midway, then to a conversation in which the father’s account of his own crisis gives way to an unexpected admission of guilt and grief.

The Reunion

After his mother leaves with Charles Purty, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. finds his father dozing in his mother’s reading chair. A home-renovation show plays on television. Even asleep, the elder man seems prepared to defend an argument: his repose has the force of someone anticipating a scholarly objection and getting ready to demolish it. The son’s view of him is more unsettled. Time has altered the once aristocratic features and the long silver hair he has worn since the late 1960s; the mane has yellowed, and his face now seems markedly more feminine. The son wonders whether his mother sees the same resemblance to an old woman.

William Henry Devereaux, Sr. wakes beneath his son’s unsympathetic gaze, rises slowly, and offers his hand. The son answers with the same name, and they shake: the father’s palm is dry, the son’s moist. Neither appears to know what to say next. Their silence, likened by the son to the fabled meeting of Joyce and Proust, is especially telling: after establishing that neither knows the other’s work, the two writers reportedly had nothing further to discuss. Here, father and son turn to the television as if it might supply a subject. The comparison makes their shared literary identity feel less like a bond than an awkward obligation they cannot readily put into words.

The Walk to the Old Midway

The father’s attention shifts to the old amusement park, whose Ferris wheel is just visible among the trees. When he asks what it is, his son identifies the old midway. The father immediately sets off, leaving his son to wonder whether he intends merely to look around or actually to ride something. The energy of his stride seems at odds with the major collapse he has suffered. His son, meanwhile, is slowed by what he is increasingly convinced is a pearl-sized stone obstructing his ureter, and struggles to keep up.

Their brisk walk takes them to the shore of what used to be a lake, now a foul-smelling, muddy depression. The abandoned landscape comes into view: the Ferris wheel, the building that housed the carousel, and a go-cart track swallowed by weeds. Although the grounds are gated and locked to keep children out, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. has already started around the lake. His son calls after him and asks what could be done with the place. The father insists there should be something, then calls the prospect wonderful. The old attractions remain as visible structures, but the lake and midway have lost their former use; the scene places the father’s forward drive against a landscape marked by abandonment.

The walk also reverses the apparent balance between the two men. At first the son expects his father to tire, while he himself has to shorten his pace. Eventually, however, the father’s energy gives way. When his son suggests resting, the elder man is readily glad to stop at a nearby bench. The moment makes his earlier determination real without making it evidence of recovery: he can still pursue a purpose, but he is also vulnerable to fatigue.

Two Accounts of Crisis

On the bench, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. observes that his son is not well and says his mother has described him as going through a midlife crisis. The son assures him he is doing better than ever, but his father gives no sign of accepting the reassurance. Instead, he describes a turning point of his own, experienced at his son’s age, and frames it as a crisis of the soul. He begins recounting the year he lost his voice after going to Columbia University, apparently offering an account of humiliation that might make his son feel less alone.

The consolation becomes tangled in the father’s self-regard. Before he can develop the story’s point, he digresses into the enormous salary he commanded, its importance to the later salaries of academic stars, and the claim that no English department today could afford him in his prime. When he returns to the lost-voice episode, he recounts a triumphal Dickens lecture and an attack on Bleak House. What might have become a story about bodily vulnerability turns instead, in the son’s partial hearing, into a tale of intellect overcoming the larynx and scholarship prevailing over art—a vindication of the father and his salary. The story offers a possible bridge between the men, but its self-celebrating detours repeatedly draw attention back to the speaker.

Dickens and the Unfinished Confession

The conversation changes direction when William Henry Devereaux, Sr. says he has recently started rereading Dickens. He still calls much of the novelist’s work appalling, remaining ceremonially loyal to his long-standing judgments, but now acknowledges a power in it that he describes as transcendent. His son sees that the father is ostensibly speaking to him while, as in their other conversations, really addressing himself. The admission nevertheless carries a force that the earlier performance did not: the critic who built a career on dismissing Dickens now recognizes something in the work that his old verdict could not contain.

Then the father says he feels almost as though he had sinned against Dickens. His son is caught between sorrow and hilarity and asks whether that is what his father feels guilty about: how he treated the novelist. William Henry Devereaux, Sr. answers yes without hesitation. At first the son thinks his father is looking at him, then realizes the gaze is fixed somewhere behind him, perhaps on the abandoned carousel or on the world of Pip and Joe Gargery at the forge. His father’s face seems to come apart, and tears run down his cheeks. He begins to speak but cannot continue, overcome with grief.

The scene’s emotional disclosure is therefore indirect. The father does not explain the grief or complete the thought that begins to surface; the son can only witness the tears and register the mixture of sorrow and absurdity surrounding them. A reunion that opens in silence ends in another kind of silence, but its meaning has changed: the father’s practiced story of personal triumph has given way to an emotion he cannot turn into a lecture or a defense. The moment offers contact without resolving the distance between them.