Oak Park

Oak Park is the leafy Chicago suburb that offers Margaret Campbell temporary refuge after her father’s death, but its familiar family home is no simple shelter. The redbrick house and her father’s untouched den hold the comfort of childhood alongside the grief and discoveries that make returning to the past difficult.

Setting and Return

After learning of her father’s death, Margaret returns to Chicago and spends her first days in Oak Park, in the house where she grew up. Though she has been back nearly three days, she has not gone to her apartment in Lincoln Park, which she left in the care of neighbours while she was away for more than eighteen months. She is afraid of what she will find there and of revisiting the life she shared with the man she married. Instead, she chooses her old bedroom in the redbrick family home: its familiarity recalls a time before adult responsibilities, and she recognizes that staying there is also a way of hiding from decisions about her future.

The House After Her Father’s Death

The family home becomes the setting for the wake on the day Margaret’s father is buried. While laughter and the clink of glasses carry from the living room, Margaret resents the guests’ apparent lightness and withdraws to her father’s den at the back of the house. The room has been left as it was when he died suddenly in a university lecture room. Heavy net curtains dim the late-afternoon light, and the quiet, dry academic atmosphere preserves a sense of his presence more vividly for her than the coffin or family photographs can.

The den’s contents give that preserved space particular weight. Margaret touches her father’s hundreds of books, including well-thumbed and annotated works by major American writers. A copy of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio falls open to “Hands,” a story she remembers from before, its margins filled with her father’s distinctive handwriting. The books and annotations offer traces of his habits and mind, even as Margaret recognizes that such remnants cannot fully restore the person she has lost.

Private Space and Discovery

The den is also where Margaret encounters evidence of a private side of her father that unsettles the image she carried of him. Looking through the recent history on his computer, she finds pornography among the last websites he visited. Shocked and repelled, she struggles to reconcile the discovery with her memory of him as gentle, scrupulously fair, and honest. Her uncertainty is not resolved before her mother enters the room. Margaret hastily closes the screen and claims she was going through her father’s things; her mother redirects her to the guests waiting at the wake.

Oak Park’s importance in these scenes lies in the contrast between refuge and confrontation. The childhood bedroom lets Margaret postpone the life and decisions she has avoided, while the den brings her into contact with grief and with the limits of what she knew about her father. The same house holds both the reassuring familiarity she seeks and the private history she can no longer leave undisturbed.