Symbol: Victor's Mural
Sylvie admires Victor's beautiful mural, which is something he is able to work on before his career as a public artist is cut short by his arrest for a nonexistent crime. She sees the "hands of different colours, their fingers interlacing" (74), and such interlocked hands suggest the community in which she lives. This is further suggested by the fact that they are many colors, connoting the different races of the people of Scarborough. Interlocked hands symbolize working together, camaraderie, agreement, and unity.
Symbol: Jason's Chair
On Christmas Eve, Clara, her parents, and her uncle gather together around the table, but there is an empty chair there. The empty chair is a symbol for Jason, her elder brother who left the family (we do not know why). It is potent, especially for Clara's parents, because it is so vividly an image of absence, of someone who should be there but is not.
Symbol: Bing's Daddy's foot tracings
Another symbol of absence is the collection of Bing's Daddy's foot tracings. They represent the ghost of his presence, the former physicality of the man now turned to mere memory. Bing looks at these to try to remember his father and to facilitate his own grief over his father's loss; he hopes that one day, his own feet will fit in the tracings, which would symbolize him becoming a man.
Motif: Seasons
The seasons are a motif in the novel, and they have their usual attendant themes and meanings. For example, the tragic climax of the novel—Laura and Cory's deaths—comes in the cold harshness of winter. Marie's breakthrough with Johnny comes in the spring, traditionally a time of promise and new beginnings.
Motif: Bad Fathers
Cory, Bing's father, and Sylvie's father are all lacking as fathers. They have varying problems, some attributed to their upbringing, some attributed to the pressures of masculinity, some a result of their own choices. Regardless of what cocktail of reasons comes together to explain their behavior, they do not do right by their families. It is, in the latter two cases, up to strong mothers to make up for their husband's shortcomings.
