Mattie

Mattie, Landor’s daughter, is the lost center of his private life: a young woman whose death in the river leaves him with memories, unanswered grief, and the hope that she might still be waiting for him. The novel introduces her both through her father’s recollections of everyday intimacy and through a story he tells about a maiden whose life and death disclose the wound behind his investigation.

Identity and Life with Landor

In Landor’s account, Mattie is seventeen, tall, graceful, and strong in constitution. After her mother dies, she and her father live in a cottage overlooking the Hudson River. Their days are quiet but companionable: they read to each other, work through ciphers and puzzles, and take long walks in the hills. Mattie has, however, pockets of silence that no one can penetrate. The closeness of this shared life does not mean that her own inwardness is fully accessible to her father.

Landor remembers her as a daughter who could fill the silences of his evenings. While he withdrew into what she called his bachelor moods, she might sit across the room sewing a sleeve, writing to her aunt, or smiling over something Edgar Allan Poe had written. The recollection is domestic and specific, yet it also registers how completely Landor’s attention turned toward her once he noticed her. His wife had once apologized for not giving him a son; he reassured her that a daughter suited him better. In memory, Mattie is not an abstract consolation but the person who made his quiet rooms inhabited.

A Quiet Life and Its Disruption

Mattie begins to pine for company while living with her increasingly hermit-like father. A wealthy cousin of her late mother, the wife of a banker in Haverstraw, takes pity on her and brings her into a wider social world. The cousin has no daughter of her own and regards Mattie as a pleasing substitute whom she can refine and present to her own advantage. The prospect of company therefore arrives through another woman’s attention, but also through a relationship in which Mattie is treated as someone to be molded.

After a ball, Mattie returns with a chain taken from one of the men who had set upon her. She grips it so tightly that it gouges a circle into her palm, yet keeps it hidden in a volume of Byron’s poetry, a book she had loved. The object joins an intimate possession to a record of violence: a dark token concealed among poems, held back from her father while he could see her. After her death, he finds the chain in the book and wonders whether she had meant him to discover and use it. Its lozenge-shaped brass plate bears the arms of the Corps of Engineers, giving him a concrete lead toward the men connected to her assault.

Death and the Father’s Grief

Mattie dies in the river, and the current carries her body away. Landor later tells neighbors that she ran off with another man, a lie that hides the truth of her death. His account describes her as having gone into the river with a serene heart, believing someone would be waiting for her. The narrative does not turn that description into a simple explanation of her state of mind; instead, it leaves the loss bound to what Landor cannot know and to what he cannot bring himself to say openly.

In retrospect, Landor feels that he had been losing her from the moment he first held her as a newborn. He recalls the violet, squalling infant and sees the later separation as something love could not prevent. Even the physical habits of widowhood and bereavement carry her absence: he cannot occupy the whole bed, but lies on his side trying not to use too much blanket. When Patsy challenges his insistence that Mattie is gone, he answers by holding to that fact, even as his memories continue to furnish the room with her presence.

Memory, Presence, and Ending

Landor’s memories do not remain safely in the past. In his account of time, the living and dead seem to occupy the same ground: Mattie studies at the feet of Henri le Clerc, while Edgar Allan Poe writes verses with her. These are Landor’s imagined conjunctions, not a claim that the dead have literally returned. He finds comfort in picturing them still occupied with the business of life, without heavenly choirs or infernal punishment. Mattie’s continued presence is thus both a grief and a form of companionship that makes his own approaching end easier to contemplate.

At the end, Landor walks the path he and Mattie once took and stands on the bluff above the river. He admits that he lacks her faith that someone will be waiting, and remembers his own bleak belief that people close up like shops and are forgotten. Yet he calls out to his daughter, asking her to speak in her own voice and tell him she will be there, and that all will be well. The novel leaves the appeal unanswered. Mattie’s decisive role is not only the loss that shapes Landor’s life, but also the imagined relationship through which he approaches death: he cannot know that she waits, but he cannot stop asking.