“Let them do all our fighting for us.”

“Let them do all our fighting for us,” is Barbara Rose’s wedding-night line about the Cribb and Molineaux Staffordshire ceramic boxing figures. Recalled by Oliver Rose as he tries to understand their separation, the expression turns a story of joining into an image of a marriage whose old humor no longer holds.

The Wedding-Night Story

Near dawn, Oliver retraces his life with Barbara to the moment he first saw her in the parlor of the rickety Barker house in Chatham, Massachusetts. The figures belonged to the story of their meeting: an auctioneer’s error had brought Cribb and Molineaux together, and the pair had finally joined the couple on their wedding night. Barbara’s remark made the figures comic stand-ins for the newlyweds, as though the two fighters could take on the quarrels in their place.

A Joke Recast by Separation

For Oliver, the story had “worn well over the years.” In the darkness and changed circumstances of the present, though, its punch line has lost its humor. What once seemed providential—the auctioneer’s mistake that united the pair—now seems merely stupid. The recollection makes the expression’s change in meaning plain: the figures’ imagined fighting had once offered a lighthearted way to frame the couple’s union, but their broken state now accompanies Oliver’s distress at the marriage’s rupture. He thinks that if the pair had not been broken, he might have been spared “this,” linking the figures’ damage to the crisis without making the old joke capable of repairing it.

Memory and Irony

The line appears within Oliver’s effort to find an explanation for a life that has abruptly changed. He insists to himself that he had been a good and loving husband, while also recalling two episodes with prostitutes during conventions when the children were small. His self-assessment sits uneasily beside his bewilderment that Barbara gave him no warning. Against that disorientation, the wedding-night anecdote is both a return to the marriage’s beginning and a measure of how far Oliver feels it has fallen: the couple once made a joke about letting the figures fight for them, but now the broken figures offer no escape from the conflict.