Augustus Landor and Mattie's Father-Daughter Bond

Augustus Landor and Mattie's Father-Daughter Bond is at once the intimate center of Landor's private life and the wound that drives his later actions. The two share a secluded home and a rich store of memories, but Mattie's need for companionship takes her beyond her father's increasingly hermit-like world. After her death, Landor's grief persists in his habits, his account of her disappearance, and the chain that turns a private keepsake into evidence of the violence done to her.

A Shared Life in the Highlands

Mattie came to the Highlands as a girl of no more than seventeen, accompanying her father to a remote cottage overlooking the Hudson. There they read to one another, worked at ciphers and puzzles, and walked the hills; Mattie had a strong constitution and could live with long stretches of silence. Landor loved her and came to regard her as a consolation after the death of her mother. Their closeness, however, did not mean that she wanted a life confined to the cottage. She began quietly to pine for company, while Landor, after a long career in the city, had become a hermit.

A wealthy cousin of Mattie's late mother, married to a banker in nearby Haverstraw, offered a way out of that isolation. The older woman, who had no daughter of her own, welcomed Mattie as a substitute and sought to cultivate her natural graces. Landor's later recollections show how fully Mattie inhabited both the quiet home and the busier world she entered: she could be left in the midst of Fulton Market without complaint, trusting that someone would return for her, and she remembered outings for her thirteenth birthday, ice cream at Contoit's, and a hug for the bartender Jerry Thomas at the Metropolitan Hotel. In another childhood memory, she fell from an elm in Green-Wood Cemetery.

The Father's Memory of Mattie

When Landor speaks of Mattie, he recalls not only events but the distinctive details by which he recognizes her. Her petticoats made a sound like a stream churning against a weir; she walked with her head slightly lowered, as though checking her bootlaces. Poets could make her cry, although people almost never could. When someone spoke crossly to her, she looked directly at him as if trying to understand the change that had made him cruel. Such particulars make Landor's attachment more than a general declaration of paternal love: he preserves the texture of her movements, tastes, and responses.

That attachment surfaces in his cottage before he is ready to explain it. When Edgar Allan Poe handles a well-thumbed Byron volume, Landor tells him it belonged to his daughter. A brass chain slips from between its pages and falls to the floor. Landor identifies that as Mattie's too. Poe asks whether she is no longer there; Landor says that she ran away some time earlier, and then acknowledges that she left with someone. The exchange makes absence tangible through the book and chain, objects still kept in the house, while Landor's restrained answers disclose how difficult it remains to speak of her.

His grief also persists in bodily habit. Landor remembers telling a confidant that he had never become comfortable sharing a bed, with another person's elbow or hair in his way, yet after all these years he cannot grow used to having the bed to himself. He lies on his side and tries not to use too much blanket. In a separate conversation, when he reassures Captain Hitchcock that matters will be all right, he recognizes the reassurance as the kind of thing Mattie used to tell him even in dire circumstances. Her language has become part of the comfort he tries to offer others.

Disappearance, Death, and the Chain

Landor's first account of Mattie's fate is that she ran away with a man. The later story reveals that this explanation concealed a more painful truth. After a ball, Mattie returned carrying a chain she had taken from one of the men who assaulted her; she held it so tightly that it gouged a circle into her palm, and kept it in her beloved Byron volume, parting with it only when her father was not looking. Landor did not understand what the chain meant until after she was dead.

Mattie took her own life, and the river swept her body away. Landor subsequently told the neighbors that she had run off with another man: a lie that hid her death while preserving, in a distorted form, the fact that she had left. The account's reversal changes the meaning of his earlier confession to Poe. What sounded like the disclosure of a daughter's flight was also the cover story of a bereaved father unable to state what had happened to her.

The chain gives Landor a path from private loss toward investigation. One morning he opens the Byron volume because Mattie had loved it and finds the token inside. Its attachment to a lozenge-shaped brass plate bearing the arms of the Corps of Engineers makes it more than a memento: it identifies a connection to the men who attacked her. The clue helps form the idea Landor had been moving toward without fully recognizing it. In the relationship's tragic reversal, the object Mattie concealed from her father becomes the object through which he begins to act on her behalf.

Grief and Continuing Presence

Landor does not describe his bond with Mattie as ending with her death. Near the end of his account, he imagines time as soft and pleated, capable of folding people from different generations onto the same ground. Within this vision, Edgar Allan Poe writes verses with Mattie, while other dead acquaintances carry on the business of their lives. Landor finds comfort in imagining the dead as still present, neither assigned to heavenly choirs nor flames, and wonders whether Mattie might also be there when he dies. The vision is presented as his way of thinking about time and the end, not as proof that he has literally been reunited with her.

The relationship therefore remains active through memory, objects, repeated speech, and imagination. The Byron book preserves Mattie's love of poetry; the chain preserves the evidence of her assault; Landor's account preserves the lie he told and the truth it concealed. His final hope that Mattie may be among the dead who remain with him does not undo the loss. It gives their bond a form that can endure his inability to share a home or a life with her again.