Atdtda36: Figured you knew, 1011-1015 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

Frank is featured as the survivor that Jesse might anticipate being.
Analogous to its treatment of Jesse is the way the narrative takes Frank
away from family concerns. He goes with Stray to meet Jesse, his nephew
(1012), a figure from an alternative life, one in which family ties (writing
to his mother) might have been paramount. He also, of course, hopes ‘to see
how Stray look[s] underneath that hospital nun’s rig’ (1013), just before
his sighting of Linderfelt, ‘a face out of the past’, a reminder of what he
has been doing while neglecting family. In the previous section, bottom of
1008, Jesse reminds Stray of Reef; here, ‘she’d had Frank figured for Reef
without the loco streak’ (1012). Similarly, her reference to Denver,
repeated, makes Frank think of his mother, all in anticipation of the
meeting with Jesse.

 

At the outset, we find Frank ‘in pursuit of ‘a perhaps imaginary machine
gun’ (1011). On 1004 ‘Frank understood he would eventually be heading up to
Ludlow to find Stray’, so the ‘imaginary machine gun’ perhaps functions as
an excuse. However, when he does find her, introduced here as ‘the barroom
Madonna’ (1011), he evidently takes a while to identify her. He doesn’t get
the incidental reference to Michelangelo’s Pietà, given to the reader in
lieu of her name; and the reader is only informed of Stray’s presence here
when Frank has, indeed, recognised and named her. In Frank’s eyes, she is
‘drably turned out’, her appearance recalling the exchange with Sister
Clementia on 1007. Cf his subsequent desire ‘to see how Stray looked
underneath that hospital nun’s rig’ (1013). If Frank is surprised to find
her thus, he perhaps expected her to be as she was previously: cf the
writing of Stray’s relationship with Jesse on 1008. Similarly, his reference
to Ewball might be supposed to bother her (‘he took some time wondering how
to put it’, 1011). All of this in a setting that invokes Italy.

 

On the following page, Frank’s ‘long recitation about Wren’ is something he
does ‘without meaning to’ – the speech isn’t intended but, as a
‘recitation’, seems to be a narrative he has rehearsed over and over,
perhaps shared here for the first time. However, what he tells Stray is
denied the reader. This passage features dialogue that recaps the action and
sees these two characters recalibrating their relationship; suddenly, what
follows is Frank’s announcement (‘what I heard’) of the intended move on the
tent colony, which he assumes (‘Figured you knew’) Stray was already aware
of. At this point, then, he places Stray within his own narrative.

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