William Henry Devereaux Sr.’s return to Railton reunites him with his wife and places his fragile recovery, his books, and the prospect of teaching back within the family’s everyday world. The event is disclosed not through a formal reunion scene but through its effects: a U-Haul full of books, Charles Purty’s account of the couple together, and the mother’s plans to bring her husband back to the university. William Henry Devereaux Jr.’s dry, initially incredulous perspective makes the return feel at once concrete and difficult to comprehend.

The Return Takes Shape

William Henry Devereaux Jr. approaches campus by the back gate, anticipating demonstrators at the front entrance who may be carrying signs with his picture. Before reaching it, he stops at The Circle Bar and Grill, where he sees a pickup towing a U-Haul trailer. The man who gets out looks like Charles Purty, but the pointed toes of his cowboy boots make William Henry Devereaux Jr. stay inside his car and lower the window rather than approach him. The detail gives the encounter a wary, comic edge; on looking again, he sees that Charles Purty himself looks as though someone wearing similar boots has stomped him.

The trailer supplies the first tangible account of the family’s relocation. Charles Purty says it is full of William Henry Devereaux Sr.’s books, while the furniture has gone into storage. He thinks some of the furniture was worth more than the books, though nobody asked his opinion. His account also includes a brief absence during which belongings were stolen. The move has therefore brought material disruption as well as reunion: books are being transported back into the family’s life, while furniture is displaced and the arrangements have not proceeded according to Charles Purty’s preferences.

Charles Purty’s Recognition

Over breakfast, Charles Purty describes the deeper consequence of the return for himself. He had pursued William Henry Devereaux Jr.’s mother for a long time, suspecting that the courtship was futile but retaining some hope even after she announced that her husband was coming back. Seeing the couple together finally makes their bond unmistakable to him. The recognition ends his remaining hope of winning her affection; in his view, they belong together in a way he had not fully accepted until he witnessed them as a pair.

Charles Purty also reports that William Henry Devereaux Sr. cries repeatedly. William Henry Devereaux Jr. finds the report hard to reconcile with his image of his father and asks whether Charles witnessed it himself. Charles says that William Henry Devereaux Jr. has not seen his father in a while. The correction exposes a distinction between physical and emotional absence: William Henry Devereaux Jr. and his mother went to New York after hearing of the collapse, but his father was hospitalized and heavily sedated. In the fuller sense, he has not seen his father for about five years. The return thus confronts him with a changed parent he has not yet learned how to imagine.

Charles explains that William Henry Devereaux Jr.’s mother had advised him to let the crying pass. His father, Charles says, eventually stops and grins. Faced with this description, William Henry Devereaux Jr. considers for the first time that his mother may be right about his own unreadiness for his father’s return. What had seemed like a straightforward homecoming now carries an emotional demand: he must encounter a father whose present vulnerability does not fit the familiar image he has kept.

Recovery and a Proposed Return to Teaching

When William Henry Devereaux Jr. later speaks with his mother, she confirms that his father is in poor condition. She attributes the collapse to the last woman he had been involved with, whom she identifies by her academic specialty as the Virginia Woolf woman. According to her, this woman emptied both his checking and savings accounts before abandoning him, leaving him nearly penniless. The return follows not only a collapse and hospitalization but also a financial betrayal that has sharply altered his circumstances.

His mother rejects the idea that discharge from the hospital means he has recovered. She believes that he needs normal routines, familiar surroundings, his books, and someone with whom to discuss subjects that matter to him. Since he cannot resume teaching until the fall, she proposes that he teach one course each semester at West Central Pennsylvania University. She has an appointment to discuss the arrangement with Dickie Pope the following week and says that the chancellor, an old friend, has promised to have the request conveyed. Her plan treats teaching as part of the ordinary life that might support her husband’s return, not merely as a position to be restored.

The plan is presented with confidence, though it is not yet an accomplished appointment. His mother speaks as if her husband’s name and the chancellor’s support will secure the course, while William Henry Devereaux Jr. is caught off guard by the assumption that his father will teach there. Her certainty contrasts with his uncertainty about what his father can manage and what their renewed proximity will require.

Books, Home, and the Meaning of Return

At the family home, the formal dining room is lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling. William Henry Devereaux Jr. imagines that his mother sees more than shelves: she sees the graduate students, visiting poets, distinguished guests, and attentive English department colleagues who would have made the room an intellectual world around her husband. Those imagined people are absent, as are the campus resources and audience she pictures. What is present is her faith in the life she wants to restore. Her smile appears to William Henry Devereaux Jr. as vindication, and he tells her that she takes his breath away.

The books in the U-Haul and the book-lined room give the return a material form, but they do not settle what recovery or reconciliation will mean. His mother is building a future from familiar surroundings, conversation, and a possible teaching course; Charles Purty has learned that her marriage remains decisive; and William Henry Devereaux Jr. has begun to recognize that he is not prepared simply by virtue of his father being back. The return therefore marks a change in the family’s circumstances without resolving the distance between father and son.