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 had a conspiracy about learning—secret books were borrowed and read and their secrets communicated privately. Of all the Hamilton children, Una had the least humor. She was not a beautiful girl like her sister Mollie, but she had the loveliest hands and feet, slender as grass, and a translucent, even glowing skin. She seemed always to be listening, and when she read, her face would be like the face of one listening to music. There was some pure simple thing in Una, and she gave answers not pointed up and full of color and 'maybes' the way the rest of the family would.
Life and Marriage
Una met and married an intense dark man named Anderson, a man whose fingers were stained with chemicals, mostly silver nitrate. He was one of those men who live in poverty so that their lines of questioning may continue; his question was about photography, and he believed that the exterior world could be transferred to paper in the colors the human eye perceives. Anderson had little gift for communication and, like most technicians, a terror and a contempt for speculation. He 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. Anderson never fell, never slipped back, never flew; his steps moved slowly, slowly upward, and in the end, it is said, he found what he wanted—color film. 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 Aftermath
Una wrote bleak letters home without joy but also without self-pity. She was well and she hoped her family was well; her husband was near to his discovery. And then she died and her body was shipped home. George Hamilton, many years later, told the story with tears in his eyes and a croaking voice. 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; her dear feet had not worn shoes for a long time. Her skin was rough as rawhide. The family thought it was an accident—so many chemicals around—but Samuel thought and mourned in the thought that the accident was pain and despair.
Thematic Significance
Una's death struck Samuel like a silent earthquake. He said no brave and reassuring words; he simply sat alone and rocked himself. He felt that it was his neglect had done it. And now 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; she had 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. Tom later told the family that it was Una's death that had done it: "He couldn't get over Una. He told me how a man, a real man, had no right to let sorrow destroy him. He told me again and again how I must believe that time would take care of it. He said it so often that I knew he was losing." Una's death thus became the crack in Samuel's wall that caused the whole structure to crash, opening the door to his own decline and eventual death.
