William Henry Devereaux Jr. and Lily’s Nearly Thirty-Year Marriage

William Henry Devereaux, Jr. and Lily Devereaux’s nearly thirty-year marriage is presented as both a durable partnership and a relationship whose ease can conceal unspoken unease. Their shared home, long-established routines, and William’s confidence in Lily’s love give the marriage stability; his unsettling fantasies, their daughter’s fear of divorce, and his tendency to deflect closeness show that stability is not the same as complete understanding.

Shared Home and Domestic Life

After moving out of Railton, William and Lily made their home in Allegheny Wells. Nearly twenty years earlier, they bought the development’s first lot, using the advance on William’s novel for the down payment and construction. Their choices shaped a house and landscape distinct from those of later neighbors: they cleared most of their lot’s trees, planted grass, and built front and back decks. Lily, who had grown up in a dark Philadelphia neighborhood, wanted light, open lawns, and outdoor living. The patio furniture they bought for that life spent seven months of each year stored in the garage, but the deck remained a favored place to sit.

The house’s wooded setting gives their domestic life a seasonal rhythm. In summer, the trees screen the neighboring homes and the couple can enjoy a sense of solitude; in autumn and winter, bare branches expose the houses and make the neighbors more visible. William and Lily anticipate the return of that summer privacy. Deck sitting is one of the ways William identifies them as compatible: after classes end, they plan to take chilled white wine outside, read or talk, and stay there until the evening makes them sleepy. The ritual is ordinary, but its repetition marks a shared life that has endured beyond the early years of their marriage.

Affection, Insecurity, and Evasion

The marriage is not portrayed as immune to doubt. After Teddy Barnes comes home with William and flirts with Lily, William imagines her with other men. Similar fantasies had already arisen, including one about Vince, a man Lily worked with at the high school. William briefly tried to interpret Lily’s behavior as evidence of an infatuation, though he could not sustain that interpretation. The fantasies persist despite his conviction that Lily loves him and no one else. He recognizes that this certainty may be arrogant, particularly because he knows there are times when she is displeased with him. His thoughts thus hold two positions at once: confidence in the marriage and a recurring, unsettling image of its betrayal.

A conversation about Lily’s happiness makes the gap between affection and attentiveness more immediate. Julie has told William that he fails to notice when Lily is unhappy, and he asks Lily about it. She says she is not often unhappy, but identifies his being lost as something that troubles her. When Lily comes over and kisses him, William reads the gesture as a possible invitation to renewed intimacy. Rather than meet her openly, he pretends that her touch has hurt him. Lily looks disappointed, and William recognizes that he has chosen a feigned injury instead of the closeness he had wanted. The exchange makes his avoidance visible: he can desire intimacy and still turn aside when it is offered.

Their Daughter’s Fear of Divorce

Julie’s concern about her parents’ marriage exposes how family anxieties can pass from one child to another. William understands that Karen, Julie’s older sister, had long watched for signs that their parents might divorce. The fear grew after several of Karen’s friends experienced bitter parental separations during high school; she began to read ordinary disagreements and conversations she had not fully heard as warnings. Because Karen was older, she helped Julie inherit that anxiety. Julie also resents that Lily tells Karen things she does not tell her, which leaves her feeling excluded from her mother’s confidences.

Julie eventually tells William that she could not bear for him and Lily to divorce at that moment. Her appeal is striking partly because William sees it as uncharacteristically direct and without irony. He does not report that the couple is planning to separate; rather, the scene shows how their daughters can interpret uncertainty as a threat to the family. Julie’s fear also makes William’s own private confidence in Lily’s love less conclusive: the marriage may feel secure to him and still appear vulnerable to those watching it from within the family.

The Wider Family and the Marriage’s Boundaries

William and Lily have agreed not to let their respective fathers become a serious source of conflict between them. That boundary reflects their affection for each other’s parents, but the two relationships are not equally easy to bear. Lily loves Angelo Caprice while being ashamed and angered by his bigotry. After her mother died during Lily’s girlhood, Angelo’s devotion to his daughter helped her through the loss; they were once inseparable. Her departure for university changed their relationship quickly. Lily returned with language and values that excluded her father, asked him to stop using some of his familiar expressions, and began seeing men he disliked. She eventually married William, whom Angelo regarded as an especially bad choice.

William interprets the estrangement as a painful collision between a parent’s hopes and a child’s education and independence. Angelo had expected Lily to become more affluent without becoming different; instead, he saw her speech, parenting, and commitments as a repudiation of his identity as a father. William’s account does not erase the harm of Angelo’s prejudice, nor Lily’s continuing love for him. In the marriage, the agreed boundary around their fathers serves as a practical way to keep those conflicting loyalties from becoming a direct marital quarrel.

Endurance and Mutual Knowledge

William’s reflections on family suggest that a long marriage rests partly on what its members can perceive in one another. He argues that spouses, children, parents, colleagues, and friends are needed because they may know a person better than that person knows himself. The idea is tested by the distance between William’s assumptions and Lily’s actual response: he believes in her love, but does not always notice her unhappiness or understand why she is disappointed. Their history offers evidence of compatibility and continuing tenderness, not proof that either partner can read the other perfectly.

The marriage therefore persists in the space between assurance and misreading. Shared evenings on the deck, the house they built, and nearly three decades together establish an intimate common life; William’s fantasies and evasions reveal how uncertainty can survive inside it. Lily’s ability to tell him plainly that she is unhappy to see him lost gives the relationship a measure of candor, even when he does not answer it well. The book presents their bond not as free of strain, but as a lasting partnership whose ordinary habits and moments of recognition repeatedly meet the work still required to understand one another.