George Burbank–Rose Burbank: Marriage Amid Strain

George Burbank and Rose Burbank’s marriage joins two people who offer one another affection and a measure of refuge, but do not always know how to reach each other. Rose tries to recover a sense of identity through acts meant to please George; he responds with tenderness, yet the household’s hostility and their unspoken fears repeatedly interrupt their closeness. Their marriage is therefore marked both by genuine regard and by the difficulty of making that regard understood.

A marriage in which Rose tries to find herself

Rose’s effort to please George is not simply a matter of performing the role of a wife. She has recently felt that she has lost her identity, and making an elaborate flower arrangement becomes a way to search for it. The materials are strange enough to challenge her considerable skill. She had first seen them through the binoculars George uses to look at the mountains, against the woven-wire fence enclosing the horse pasture below the house. In themselves they seemed to be nothing; arranged, they could become art. Rose thinks of art as the ordering of ordinary elements, comparing the arrangement of trivia to Cezanne’s line and color, Chopin’s sound, or perfume’s calculated odors.

The arrangement belongs to a wider pattern of efforts directed toward George. Rose’s piano playing, her careful dressing for dinner each night, and a foolish picnic beside the road are all intended to please him; with the flowers, she also hopes to surprise him. The act makes visible both her inventiveness and her uncertainty: she is making something from overlooked materials while trying to recover a self she fears she has misplaced. Its meaning is personal even before George responds.

George has never seen anything like the arrangement. He grows a little red, chooses his words gravely, and says that he thinks it is pretty. Rose is unsure that prettiness is the right standard, but tells him she hoped he would like it and that she used to do things like it. His answer reaches beyond the immediate compliment: he says that his mother, who was more a reader, could not have made such a thing. The comparison recognizes Rose’s distinctive skill rather than measuring her against a conventional model of domestic femininity.

Affection under the pressure of Phil’s ridicule

George’s response also contains a private apprehension. He thinks of Rose’s slightness and of loving the sight of her face, but anticipates that Phil will answer her innocent handiwork with hooting laughter. The threat is not abstract: George remembers Phil’s laughter at a Christmas when, to please his mother, he had worn a blue silk dressing gown over his clothes and matching funny slippers, gifts from her. The memory explains why George expects even a harmless, affectionate gesture to become material for humiliation. It does not show him confronting Phil on Rose’s behalf; instead, it reveals how deeply the prospect of Phil’s mockery has shaped George’s expectations.

Phil appears just after George has praised the arrangement, and laughter later echoes through the bunkhouse. In the marriage, this threat reaches beyond Rose’s particular work. George knows from experience that his own attempts to please someone can be turned against him, and he can already imagine the same cruelty directed at his wife. His private admiration and his anticipation of ridicule occupy the same moment: he values what Rose has made, while the surrounding household makes open delight feel vulnerable.

The governor’s dinner and what goes unsaid

After the governor’s visit, Rose waits for George to go toward the bedroom before removing Phil’s unused plate, glass, and cutlery. She works swiftly and silently, returning each item to the cupboard without letting china tick or silver ring. Her care is not mainly about concealing the act from George; the utensils themselves, still present after Phil has left, would make the day harder to face the next morning. The objects carry the pressure of his presence into the household’s quiet aftermath.

George is already in bed, with the light still on, when Rose apologizes for playing poorly. He attributes her failure to stage fright at performing for a governor, or perhaps to the cocktails. Rose knows neither explanation is right. She had not been paralyzed by the audience but by the eating utensils of someone who was not even there. She thinks of the skull Peter keeps on his desk in Herndon, which she has always hated, as the absent Phil’s place at dinner remains fixed in her mind through his plate and cutlery. Yet she does not explain this to George. The difference between what he can offer—ordinary reassurance—and what has actually happened leaves the central wound unspoken.

Rose’s distress also concerns the story she has told about herself. She wonders why she told the governor’s wife that her piano-playing days had been at an upright in a pit in a motion picture palace, when she wanted the woman to think George had married someone of worth. Her thoughts turn to Johnny Gordon and to the difficult position of having been married twice. Thus the dinner’s failure joins public self-presentation to private unease: Rose wants to appear worthy in the eyes of the governor’s wife, but cannot easily separate that desire from her earlier marriage or from the fear that her place beside George will be judged.

Intimacy, silence, and attention

When Rose gets into bed, George is silent and soon turns away, breathing evenly. She imitates sleep, while the day’s events remain sharp in her mind. Then George clears his throat, and Rose understands that he is not asleep. She reaches for his hand. The gesture briefly makes their awareness of one another physical rather than verbal, but his hand grows rigid. The scene does not resolve what either of them feels; it shows affection attempting contact where speech has failed.

Later, the household’s neglected cottonwoods and brown patch of grass prompt Rose to ask whether fertilizer might help. George turns from the practical question to ask whether Peter is happy, recalling that he saw him watering the trees a few days earlier and had been thinking about him. His attention to Peter’s small act reveals a quiet concern that extends into Rose’s family life. Across these moments, George’s care is most legible in what he notices: Rose’s handiwork, the pleasure she means to give him, and Peter tending the trees. But attention does not guarantee understanding. The marriage’s tenderness persists alongside silences, remembered humiliation, and hurts Rose cannot bring herself to explain.