Death of Una Hamilton

Una Hamilton was the eldest daughter of Samuel and Liza Hamilton, a thoughtful, studious, and dark girl who from childhood hungered for learning as a child does for cookies in the late afternoon. She and her father shared a conspiracy about learning, borrowing secret books and communicating their contents privately. Of all the Hamilton children, Una had the least humor, a quality that set her apart from the gaiety of her siblings and perhaps drew her toward a man who shared her seriousness.

Life and Marriage

Una met and married an intense dark man named Anderson, a technician whose fingers were stained with chemicals, mostly silver nitrate. Anderson was one of those men who lived in poverty so that his lines of questioning might continue; his question was about photography, and he believed that the exterior world could be transferred to paper not in ghost shadings of black and white but in the colors the human eye perceives. He had little gift for communication and a terror and contempt for speculation, the inductive leap being not for him. He dug a step and pulled himself up one single step, the way a man climbs the last shoulder of a mountain. Anderson had great contempt, born of fear, for the Hamiltons, for they all half believed they had wings—and they got some bad falls that way. He married Una, perhaps, because she had little humor, and this reassured him. Because her family frightened and embarrassed him, he took her away to the north, to a black and lost place somewhere on the borders of Oregon, where he must have lived a very primitive life with his bottles and papers.

Death and Its Aftermath

Una wrote bleak letters without joy but also without self-pity, reporting that she was well and that her husband was near to his discovery. Then she died, and her body was shipped home. George Hamilton, who told the story many years later with tears in his eyes and a croaking voice, remembered that Una was not a beautiful girl like Mollie, but she had the loveliest hands and feet. Her ankles were as slender as grass and she moved like grass; her fingers were long and the nails narrow and shaped like almonds. She had lovely skin, translucent, even glowing. She did not laugh and play like the rest of the family; there was something set apart about her, as though she were always listening. When they brought her home, her nails were broken to the quick and her fingers cracked and all worn out. Her poor, dear feet were broken and gravel-cut and briar-cut; she had not worn shoes for a long time, and her skin was rough as rawhide. The family thought it was an accident, given the many chemicals around, but Samuel thought and mourned in the thought that the accident was pain and despair.

Narrative Role and Significance

Una's death struck Samuel like a silent earthquake. He said no brave and reassuring words; he simply sat alone and rocked himself, feeling that it was his neglect that had done it. His tissue, which had fought joyously against time, gave up a little. His young skin turned old, his clear eyes dulled, and a little stoop came to his great shoulders. Liza, with her acceptance, could take care of tragedy, having no real hope this side of Heaven, but Samuel had put up a laughing wall against natural laws, and Una's death breached his battlements. He became an old man. The loss of Una was the crack in his wall that caused the whole structure of his immortality to crash, opening his defended keep and letting in old age. It was a turning point that accelerated his decline and deepened the sorrow that would eventually lead to his own death.