Summary
Bert and Mildred go to the bar that Wally owns down by the waterfront. They sit down at a table, when suddenly, Mildred notices that the woman singing in the bar is Veda, dressed in a sequined costume and smiling broadly. Sailors whistle at her while she sings, and Bert turns to Mildred, saying, "I'm sorry I did it like this, but I didn't know how to tell you."
Wally wanders into the room, lighting a cigarette, and looks over at Mildred. As the song ends, Mildred goes to talk to Wally, telling him she's going to take Veda home and asking for his help. Wally jokes that the best way to get Veda to do anything is "hit her in the head first." Scowling, Mildred goes to find Veda herself, backstage.
When she goes into the dressing room, Mildred stares affectionately at Veda and Veda stares back, smiling. Veda introduces Mildred to Miriam Ellis, another singer at the nightclub. When Miriam leaves the room, Mildred asks Veda to come home, telling her she doesn't belong in the bar. Veda asks where she would be better suited, and Mildred tells her that she's only ever wanted Veda to be happy. "Are you happy here?" Mildred asks, to which Veda replies, "When I first came here, I used to cry occasionally, but I've gotten over that."
Mildred begs Veda to come back home, but Veda insists that she's free now and she can do whatever she wants. When Mildred tells her that she's gotten the house redecorated, with a new piano, Veda simply says, "I want the kind of life that Monte taught me, and you won't give it to me. I'm sorry for all the trouble I've caused, but if I went home it would start all over again. You know that, you know who I am. The way you want to live isn't good enough for me."
Mildred asks Veda if she would come home if she could provide her with the kind of life that Monte taught her. "But you couldn't, could you mother," says Veda, as Miriam comes back into the dressing room and tells Veda that she has a number coming up. Mildred leaves.
We see the exterior of Monte's mansion, with a for sale sign in the front yard. Inside, Monte leads Mildred around, and asks her if she actually wants to buy the house. "Do you live here all alone?" Mildred asks him, and he tells her he does, then offers her a drink. When he apologizes for not having any mixers, she assures him that she prefers to drink her liquor straight, which surprises Monte.
Monte tells Mildred that he had to sell the orange grove, but that an uncle with a little money let him keep the beach house. "You don't really want to buy this antiquated tomb. You'd be out of your mind," he says. As Mildred describes all the ways she would refurbish the mansion, she realizes that Monte is looking at her desirously. They stop being businesslike and reminisce about their affair, when suddenly Mildred requests that Monte ask her to marry him. He is startled by her request, and she tells him she has a personal reason for wanting to get married. "A reason named Veda," he says, adding, "Because your reason for doing anything is usually Veda."
Monte tells Mildred that he cannot afford her, that she has money and he doesn't, which creates an imbalance. "I want you to love me again the way you did then...I'm lost without it," he says to her, adding that if they are to get married, he'll have to own 1/3 of a share in her business. She agrees.
We see their wedding announcement, then the scene shifts to Lottie answering the door of the newly refurbished mansion, as Bert comes in. Lottie goes and announces Bert to Mildred, who comes out of her office and greets her ex-husband. Bert tells her he was driving by and decided to come in and say hello. She invites him to sit down and have a drink, but he tells her he works long hours, so shouldn't.
Abruptly, Bert asks Mildred if she actually loves Monte. After a pause, she tells him, "I'm not exactly in love with him...Monte and I understand each other. I thought too if I moved away from that other house, fixed this place up, I thought maybe..." Bert knows that it's all been for Veda, and tells Mildred that he brought her a wedding present.
Mildred goes to the window and sees Veda outside, Bert's wedding present. "She wanted to come home," Bert tells her, and Mildred smiles with tears in her eyes at the return of her daughter.
Veda comes inside and embraces her mother as sentimental music plays. "I'll change, mother, I promise. I'll never say mean things to you ever again," says Veda, and Mildred goes to thank Bert for reuniting her with Veda. When Monte comes in and greets Veda, Bert takes his leave.
The scene shifts and we see Veda blowing out the candles on her birthday cake with a large room full of guests. Lottie pours champagne with another maid, then answers the phone. It's Mildred, who's at work, and wants to talk to Ida, who's at Veda's party. Mildred tells Ida that she'll be at the office a little longer, as a group of men argue around a table in the office behind her. As Ida hangs up, Veda and Monte walk into the room, and Ida says she thinks Mildred might be in some business trouble.
Back at the office, a man tells Mildred that she must take care of her credit problem or the business will be taken away from her. If she resists, she will be forced into bankruptcy. Wally tries to comfort her by telling her that she can manage it, to which she responds, "That's very nice. Stealing the business from me and then letting me run it." Wally scolds her for using so much of her earnings to lure Veda home, and tells her that she would be alright if Monte didn't want to sell his share of the business. Suddenly, Mildred realizes that all this trouble is because of Monte's disregard for their arrangement. Heartbroken, she goes to the phone and calls Ida, asking to speak to Monte, but Ida tells her Monte left. Mildred takes a pistol out of a desk drawer and goes to the beach house.
Back in the present, Mildred tells Peterson that she killed Monte that night, but Peterson doesn't believe her. "We know you weren't alone in the house with him. We have proof of that and various other things," says Peterson. After Peterson makes a brief call, some other policemen bring Veda into the room, and Peterson says she was about to get on a flight to Arizona when they caught her.
Veda feigns innocence, but Peterson insists that Mildred told them everything. Peterson correctly guesses that Veda was already at the beach house when she arrived that night. The scene shifts back into a flashback, as Mildred arrives at the beach house, expecting Monte to be there alone. As she goes down a spiral staircase, she finds Monte kissing Veda against the bar. When they see Mildred come in, Veda tells her mother that Monte has never loved her, that he's always loved Veda, and they have been having an affair for a long time. "I've got what I wanted. Monte's going to divorce you and marry me, and there's nothing you can do about it," Veda says.
Mildred pulls out her pistol as Monte runs towards her and tells her to listen to reason. Weeping, she throws the gun on the floor and runs out. "If you think I'm going to marry you, you're very much mistaken," Monte says, turning back to Veda. The two of them begin to argue, their fight escalating to Monte calling Veda a "rotten little tramp." As Mildred gets in her car, she sobs as she finds it will not start. Suddenly, she hears several gunshots. Veda is shooting Monte inside. Mildred goes in to find Veda sobbing about her crime, and Veda tells her that Monte laughed at her and told her she didn't have the guts to kill him. "I didn't mean to, but the gun kept going off over and over," she says, before asking for her mother's help.
"I can't get you out of this," says Mildred, going to the phone and calling the police. Veda begs her mother to help her, telling her that it's both their faults and that she will change. "It's your fault I'm the way I am," Veda says, and Mildred hangs up the phone.
In the present, Mildred tells Peterson that she tried to help her daughter. "This time your daughter pays for her own mistake," says the inspector, and they take Veda away. Peterson dismisses Mildred, telling her, "There are times when I regret being a policeman." In the hall, Bert walks Mildred out.
Analysis
In this section, Mildred is rather unceremoniously reunited with Veda, when Bert takes her down to Wally's waterfront restaurant. There, Veda is dressed in a revealing costume, singing a rowdy song to excitable sailors who holler and whistle at her. This proves to be quite a blow for Mildred, who imagined that her cultivation of her gifted daughter would lead to greater things. Not only does Veda despise and abuse her mother, but she goes against all of the high society aspirations that Mildred sacrificed so much to ensure that her daughter would have.
For the first time, Veda's obsessively aspirational perspective is put under more of a microscope, when Mildred goes to visit her in her dressing room. Mildred pleads with her daughter to come home, telling her that she's even redecorated the house so that Veda will like it more. This is not enough, however, according to Veda, who says that she wants "the kind of life that Monte taught [her]." Veda's desire is not simply to have the refined taste of someone from the upper class, but to become a member of the upper class, to be a different person, someone like Monte, who grew up with a casual and unbothered relationship to money. Veda's desire for wealth and status is not simply material, but connected to her sense of identity and worth. However spoiled Veda may be, she is almost chillingly self-aware about it.
Just when it seemed that Mildred would maintain her self-respect and step away from her ungrateful child to live her own life, she falls under Veda's spell once again. Within minutes of being reunited with the daughter she was so intent on leaving behind, Mildred is negotiating with her, asking her how she could possibly win back her affection. Predictably, the only way to bring Veda back home is through money, to make her feel as though she belongs to a more sophisticated set. Mildred, after displaying such self-respect for a time, falls victim to Veda's demands and sets out to buy her daughter the life she so desires.
It is not long before Mildred's self-sacrifice takes on astronomical proportions. Immediately after tearfully welcoming Veda back into her home, we see Mildred putting in some hard hours at work while Veda's birthday party is going on. The very role that Mildred so desperately wants to play—that of adoring and attentive mother—is deprived of her by both Monte and Veda, the people for whom she must provide. She works so that others don't have to, and it would seem that Mildred Pierce's tragic flaw is her inability to give to herself. In this way, she is the ultimate symbol of motherhood, a role in which the parent must give up so much of themselves in order to take care of their child, a thankless and selfless role in any family.
Mildred's tragic flaw, her unconditional love for her daughter, obscures the truth from the police until the final twist ending, in which we realize that it was Veda who killed Monte, and not Mildred. Not only that, but in the flashback, we see that, in a turn of events that would fit in in a Greek tragedy or a Freudian textbook, Veda is having an affair with her stepfather, Monte. Not only is Veda transgressing the sanctity of the family structure, but she has no shame about it, and gloats that she has finally gotten what she wanted, adding a particularly villainous, "And there's nothing you can do about it" to her shameless confession.
