Emory Breedlove

Emory Breedlove, the younger brother of Monica Breedlove, is presented chiefly through his sister’s lively commentary and through a handful of domestic scenes. Fishing, card games, murder stories, and joking conversation define his visible social world; his response to Monica’s late-night alarm over Christine gives that comic portrait a more serious edge. When Monica insists that Christine’s unanswered phone signals trouble, Emory first urges her to stop worrying, then accompanies her to investigate. After Christine’s death, he characterizes her not as crazy but as a woman who had been worried sick.

Identity and Introduction

Emory lives close to Monica, whose apartment is one floor above Christine’s. On the morning Monica offers to drive Christine and Rhoda to Fern Grammar School, she explains that Emory is still asleep: nothing can get him up before eight. His car, however, is parked in front of the building, and Monica proposes using it rather than making Christine retrieve her own car. Emory is absent from this exchange, but Monica also presents a gift from him to Rhoda: dark glasses decorated with rhinestones, meant to keep the sun from the child’s brown eyes. The gift reaches Rhoda through Monica, who adjusts the glasses herself and invites the child to admire them in a mirror. Emory’s first impression is therefore mediated by his sister: a late sleeper whose thoughtfulness arrives as a stylish present.

The novel gives a more physically specific portrait at a gathering where conversation turns to the meaning of being concealed or not yet brought to the surface. Emory is described as plump and ruddy, a few years younger than Monica, with hair receded across a pink, domed forehead. His small, hard belly seems, in the narrator’s wry description, designed to display a massive watch chain and emblem. The details make his body part of the book’s comic social observation, while the surrounding discussion shows how readily Monica turns familiar people into subjects for her theories.

Habits and Comic Presence

Monica’s account of her brother’s interests is pointedly subjective, not an independent statement of his inner life. She says he is fifty-two and has never married, doubts that he has had a serious love affair, and lists fishing, murder mysteries involving the dismemberment of housewives, canasta, baseball games, and singing in male quartets as his principal pursuits. She adds that he spends Sundays fishing on a boat with other men and without women. When her remarks provoke unease, Emory responds with a weak laugh and tells her, “You can say that again!” The exchange establishes the sibling dynamic: Monica makes a bold, expansive claim, while Emory answers with a brief joke rather than a serious rebuttal. Her speculation about his preferences remains her speculation; the novel does not make his silence or laughter a confirmation.

Fishing is also attached to an ordinary family occasion. On the day of the school picnic, one of Emory’s fishing friends sends him a seven-pound redfish. Emory calls Monica to say that, because it is Saturday, he is closing the plant at noon and will be home for lunch; he asks her to prepare redfish Gelpi, a dish she has not made for some time. He invites Reginald Tasker, a true-crime writer whom Christine and Kenneth have met before, and asks Monica to help entertain him. The lunch is served in the alcove where Monica keeps ferns and African violets rather than in the paneled dining room. Emory and Tasker are discussing a local murder when Monica overhears fragments and jokes that they are off to the races again. Emory’s interests thus place him in a social circle where crime can be both serious subject matter and a familiar kind of entertainment.

Banter and Social Relations

At another gathering, Emory’s teasing briefly brings Christine into the conversation. After Monica reflects on the association of the words “breed” and “love” in the Breedlove name, Emory says he had thought she married Norman Breedlove because he was the only man who asked her. Before Monica can answer, he turns to Christine and jokes that, with her gray eyes and yellow hair, she must have had to beat the boys off with an umbrella. Christine replies that the assumption is entirely wrong: she was never popular and had been too earnest and literal for boys. The exchange presents Emory as quick to tease, but it also lets Christine’s dry correction set the record straight. His contribution is social banter, not privileged knowledge of either woman’s past.

His humor can become blunt. When the women are talking about sex, Emory sticks his head into the room and says that if they are going to talk dirty, he and Reginald will have to leave. The women dissolve into laughter. Monica then asks Emory to open another bottle of sherry, apologizing to a guest for his condition and saying that he is drunk; Emory answers, “Well, look who’s talking!” The scene depends on the shared familiarity of the siblings: Monica mocks him openly, and he returns the joke without interrupting the gathering. His small acts—getting the sherry and taking part in the repartee—make him part of the household’s easy, sociable rhythm.

Concern for Christine

That ease changes in the final sequence. While playing contract with Monica and two strangers, Emory hears her say for the third time that she is worried about Christine. He dismisses the unanswered phone at first, suggesting that Christine may not want to answer or may have gone to the movies, and tells Monica to let her mind her own business. Monica objects that Christine always answers and no longer goes out alone at night. Her concern becomes harder to set aside when Mrs. Forsythe confirms that Christine and Rhoda have not been seen since before supper, then reports that repeated ringing and knocking at their door have brought no response.

Monica decides to go over herself. Emory then says that he will not let her drive to town alone at that hour and agrees to leave with her. At the apartment building, they meet Johnnie Kunkel and Mrs. Forsythe; Monica asks Johnnie to climb to the back balcony and enter through the kitchen if necessary. Emory’s role here is not to solve the mystery but to accompany his sister once her alarm has become urgent enough to demand action. His initial dismissal and subsequent decision to go preserve both sides of his characterization: he can minimize another person’s worry, yet he does not leave Monica to face the late-night investigation alone.

After Christine has died, Kenneth asks whether she was insane. Emory answers, “Christine wasn’t crazy,” and describes her as “worried sick.” The distinction is brief but consequential. Against a framing of Christine’s final act as mere madness, Emory identifies the anxiety and distress that Monica had sensed when Christine stopped answering the phone. His words do not explain everything Christine did, but they place concern, rather than insanity, at the center of his understanding. Across the novel, Emory remains a supporting figure whose comedy is often supplied by Monica’s teasing; at the end, his plain judgment gives that familiar social presence a moment of humane seriousness.