Hortense Daigle’s bereavement

Hortense Daigle’s bereavement is presented as grief that repeatedly returns to two absences: her son Claude and the penmanship medal that disappeared with him. Her memories insist on Claude’s particularity and on the closeness of their bond, while her questions about the medal turn mourning toward an unresolved account of his death. Across two visits from Christine Penmark, sorrow appears as recollection, suspicion, need, and self-reproach rather than as a settled state.

Claude as Hortense Remembers Him

Hortense resists descriptions of Claude as timid or lacking confidence. She does not replace them with a picture of an aggressive boy, either; instead, she remembers him as sensitive and artistic, a child who made flower drawings so beautifully that she once wanted to show them to Christine but could not bear to look at them so soon after his death. The drawings preserve an image of Claude’s talents, but even the possibility of sharing them is painful: the objects that might make him present again are also reminders of what she has lost.

Her account of their closeness is intensely personal. Claude called her his sweetheart, put his arms around her neck, and told her his thoughts. He had said he would marry her when he grew up, and Hortense recalls teasing him that he would find a prettier girl. His reply, as she recounts it, was that no one in the world was as pretty and sweet as she was. These recollections make her grief inseparable from the intimate, childlike language of their relationship. She remembers not only a son but the person who chose her as his confidante and imagined a future in which their bond would endure.

The Missing Medal

The penmanship medal concentrates Hortense’s anguish. It was the only thing Claude had ever won, she says, and he valued it greatly. She cannot accept that the searchers looked thoroughly: she repeatedly asks them to return and search again, and she disputes the suggestion that the medal simply fell from his shirt and sank into the sand. She had pinned it on herself and remembers the clasp as strong and tight. That precise memory gives her objection force; in her account, the medal should not have come off by itself.

Hortense also imagines the medal as part of Claude’s burial. She believes he would want to be buried with it and asks Christine to persuade the men to look again so she can please him in every way she can. The request makes the search more than a practical effort to recover a lost possession: it becomes an act she can still perform for her son. Her attention to the medal sits beside, and at moments seems to eclipse, her expressions of loss. The story presents this fixation not as proof that the medal explains Claude’s death, but as the form her need for an answer takes.

Grief in Body and Speech

When Christine first visits, Hortense is resting on a sofa, her hair disarranged and her eyes red and swollen; sedatives have left her mind somewhat drugged. She breaks off while trying to speak about Claude and presses her face into her pillow. Christine sits beside her and takes her ringed hand, offering physical sympathy as Hortense describes their closeness. Later, as she speaks about the missing medal, Hortense weeps without restraint, her face pale and bloated and her hair fallen over her eyes. Her grief repeatedly interrupts speech, then resumes through the same remembered bond and the same unanswered question.

On Christine’s later visit, the grief has also sharpened into attention to the circumstances of Claude’s death. Hortense recalls bruises on his hands and a peculiar crescent-shaped place on his forehead that the undertaker covered. She reports that the doctor who saw Claude believed he must have bled before he died, though the water had washed the blood away. She then links her uncertainty about the medal to her uncertainty about what happened to her son: if she knew what became of it, she says, she would have a better idea of what happened to him. The medal thus joins keepsake and clue in her imagination, carrying both the memory of Claude’s achievement and her search for an explanation.

Christine as Witness and Comfort

Christine’s visits place her close to Hortense’s changing needs. On the first, she listens, takes Hortense’s hand, and answers softly that she understands. On the later visit, she arrives alone with the medal in her purse, having left Rhoda at home. Hortense initially rejects her presence, accusing her of bringing further heartbreak and asking her to go away. Dwight Daigle tells Christine that his wife has been unreasonable since Claude’s death, is under a doctor’s care, and has worried the family.

Hortense then reverses course: she enters the room, embraces Christine, and insists that she stay. She remembers the previous visit as pleasant, invites Christine to sit beside her, and speaks self-consciously about Christine’s social position and her own former work as a beauty-parlor operator. Her welcome does not last without interruption. At the bedside, Hortense again remembers Claude and the medal, then tells Christine she should leave. The shifts do not cancel one another; they show how comfort and resentment coexist in a grief that makes another person’s presence both desired and difficult to bear.

The Unresolved Return

After Christine leaves, Hortense calls herself impossible, while Dwight again explains that she is under a doctor’s care. Christine returns home with the medal still in her bag. The visit has brought neither the object back to Hortense nor an answer to the questions she attaches to it. Her bereavement therefore remains open at the end of these scenes: Claude is preserved in vivid memories of his drawings, affection, and promise, but the missing medal continues to stand for what Hortense cannot recover or know.