Summary
After being informed she will be going to the nursing home, Hagar starts to think of schemes for how she can escape this fate. She considers traveling to a nature spot she remembers called Shadow Point, using money from her old-age pension check. She pivots back in memory to when she sold her dishes and earned enough money to leave Manawaka. She packs her bags with the 12-year-old John and discusses how she might find a job as a housekeeper on the coast. John is nervous to leave Manawaka for the first time. Hagar informs Bram of her plans to leave, and he does not seem to care at all. Hagar and John board the train to leave. On the ride, John tells her that he has traded her father’s plaid pin for a jackknife.
In the present, Hagar wakes up the next morning and takes her check. While Doris is out, she sneaks off to the bank and gets her money. She goes to the bus depot and tries to find her way, having to ask people for help often. She takes the bus to her location and buys food items from a convenience store, where she has a tense conversation with the clerk. A man gives her a lift to Shadow Point. As she walks towards the beginning of a huge stairway, she is suddenly hit by exhaustion, realizing she has not brought any water. She makes it to the top of the stairs, feeling pain throughout her body.
She takes a nap on the floor of the abandoned house there and wakes up a bit later, almost forgetting where she is. She eats but is very thirsty and desires a cup of tea. She looks through the house and sees it has previously been occupied by tramps. Despite this, she enjoys being in a new place. She flashes back to becoming the housekeeper for Mr. Oatley, a rich, older man who lives on the coast. She kept his house very neat, although no one ever visited him, and he entertained her with stories of his days in the shipping industry.
John helps Hagar in Mr. Oatley’s garden and goes to school, where he adapts well and makes many friends—or, at least, that is what he tells Hagar. Soon, she realizes that he is often lying about having friends and what he does after school, but she never directly confronts him about it. When John is in high school, he starts making actual friends and girlfriends, but he always keeps his social life distant from Hagar. John becoming a man is something she does not like to think about in the daytime, put in the same unthinkable category as Bram and her intimate relationship with him. Though their life there was calm, Hagar now reflects on how she can never like or accept fully how her life turned out.
Chapter 6 begins with Hagar waking up in the moldy bed of the abandoned house with rain coming through the window and falling on her. It is very cold and dark. She fades in and out of knowing where she is at the present moment, forgetting things and believing she is back at her family house, blaming Doris for the coldness. When she doesn’t hear Marvin and Doris moving downstairs, she feels again as if she has been abandoned.
Hagar remembers when John was college-age and she tried to save up so he could get an education. She invested money in the stock market, but the market crashed during the Great Depression and she lost everything. John gets temporary jobs that don’t last, and it’s hard to find full-time work during such harsh economic times. He decides instead to return to Manawaka, to the Shipley house, which outrages Hagar. John has been in correspondence with Bram, who has had a girl there to cook for him. Bitter, Hagar tells John that his father never much cared for him.
After John has been back living with Bram for 2 years, he sends Hagar a letter informing her that Bram is unwell and may not live much longer. Instantly, Hagar knows she must travel to Manawaka and visit. When she arrives, she sees that Bram’s property has been affected by the ongoing drought, and she is dismayed at the neglect of the house. John is also dirty and malnourished. He is now in the business of making champagne and he drinks all the time. Hagar goes to see Bram, who is shrunken and does not even recognize her, clearly suffering from some sort of mental deterioration. John gives Bram “medicine” that is just alcohol, and this infuriates Hagar.
Hagar, staying at the house, quickly discovers that John has adopted the same coarse way of speaking and acting that his father has. When they come across the daughter of Lottie Dreiser, Hagar is appalled at the way John speaks to her. Another day, Hagar asks John to take her the cemetery so she can see how her father’s grave has been cared for. There, she is upset to see the stone angel statue toppled over. John helps her to push it back up. She discovers it also has lipstick smeared all over it and she wipes it clean, wondering who could have done such a thing.
Marvin comes to visit in Manawaka; he and John frequently bicker. Bram does not recognize Marvin nor Hagar—to whom he starts to refer as “this woman.” One night, she hears Bram call her name in his sleep and she momentarily wishes she could converse with him and say sorry. Soon after, they find Bram dead. Against the wishes of Bram’s daughters, Hagar is inspired to have Bram buried at the Currie family plot and adds the Shipley name to the headstone. When she asks John if this was the right thing to do, he seems apathetic. Yet after Bram is buried, it is John who cries rather than Hagar.
Analysis
This section of the book brings an interesting turn of events as Hagar tries to escape her destiny of the nursing home and wanders out of her normal surroundings to Shadow Point. The present action of the book is mirrored by Hagar’s recollections of the time she also left her comfort zone and went to the coast to work as a housekeeper and get out of a difficult marriage to an unstable man. The unfolding of these chapters reveals to the readers another aspect of Hagar’s character: her determination, even courage. As a 90-year-old, she puts herself in a vulnerable position by venturing away from home, but her vision of a better life—something other than what the nursing home will offer—drives her into the unknown.
In the same way, this is why she is motivated to leave Manawaka and the stable yet unhappy life she has with Bram. At this time in the early 20th century, it is not an easy decision for a woman to leave her household and husband, and we see here how Hagar is willing to leave behind her old notions of class and status to become a housekeeper for Mr. Oatley. In this way, we see a more selfless side of her emerge: she believes she is doing what is best not only for herself, but also for her son John, giving him an opportunity to grow up and go to school without the challenging and unpredictable presence of Bram.
Through these chapters, we start to see the larger picture of Hagar’s life and the tough decisions she has had to make throughout it: leaving behind her father and his controlling nature, leaving Bram, and becoming financially independent. Yet it seems as if every time she tries to escape her circumstances, however well-motivated she is, things ends up going against her in some way, creating a whole new set of conflicts to wade through. This is even true in the present moment, where she escapes in order to avoid the nursing home but ends up in an abandoned place where she is all the more vulnerable and needy. It is this sense of always waiting for something more that has hardened Hagar’s character, making her bitter and angry towards others in her life. The lesson imparted through this is that, although one can move around and try to fix problems externally, deeper problems of heart remain.
Now, 90 years old and wandering to and from the bus station, Hagar knows that she is helpless. Yet, she continues to lash out at people, in her thoughts or in speech, even making herself nauseous with her own cruelty. There is the conscious part of her that knows her constant belittling of others is wrong, yet there is also an unconscious side that can’t help but continuing its constant criticism. It is like an automatic response that Hagar has a hard time curtailing, demonstrated in the scene when she imagines she is still in Marvin’s house and blames the coldness she feels on Doris’s penny-pinching mentality.
Hagar’s return to Manawaka to see Bram is a surprising turn of events that again casts her character in a new light. Here, the conscious part of herself takes the reins, driving her to make choices from a place of moral rightness rather than petty emotions. Despite the difficulty in her marriage to Bram, Hagar now has the maturity to recognize that it is her duty to see him again before he dies. She has also held back some of her pride and sense of class superiority in fighting for Bram to be buried alongside her father—something that Jason Currie might have turned his nose up at if he were still alive.
This softer side of Hagar also shows itself in the way she visits her father’s grave to see if it is still in good condition. Despite the falling out she has had with her father, Hagar still cares about him in some way, even if this is partly motivated by her own pride of maintaining the sanctity of her family name. And in the cemetery, when she finds the toppled-over angel, we see a sure symbol of Hagar herself, who has fallen from her imagined lofty position as the daughter of the wealthy Jason Currie to a housekeeper alienated from her own family. Yet the angel can be pushed back up, and Hagar, too, may find her way again—if she steps away from her pride and rigid notions of what it means to be human. The story repeatedly shows the necessity for her to soften her stone-like nature and begin to trust others again after a life of isolation.
