Whistler Book Club Questions

Jonathan spots an old man watching Daphne in the ticket line and following them through Medieval Art and up to Modern and Contemporary. Daphne has no interest in engaging with a stranger, but Jonathan goes after the man anyway and comes back with Eddie, telling her, "This is your stepfather." His curiosity overrides her choice, yet that meeting reopens everything she had locked away since she was nine.

When Jonathan first asked about the scar on her forehead, Daphne said she had been in a car accident as a child and that her mother was driving, and she never found the right moment to correct it. She calls it an oversimplification and admits she just didn't want to open up about Eddie; she had put the whole episode away when it became too painful. Facing the truth that she was alone in the car with Eddie makes her ask, for the first time, what really changed in the four days between their rescue and her mother announcing the divorce.

Inside the car, Eddie realizes Daphne will have to crawl out the window alone at dawn to save them, and he lies that the car is dead rather than admit his fear of fire. As she leaves he asks her to tell rescuers he is her father, she promises to come back and save him, and he answers, "Whistler." Seen from inside the car, the accident is less the night Eddie almost killed Daphne, as her mother framed it, than the night a nine-year-old saved them both.

After meeting Eddie briefly, Henry quietly tells Daphne, "Dude's gay," and guesses that's why his grandmother divorced him, adding he bets it isn't even a secret. Daphne and Leda had been mystified by the divorce for decades, and their mother's only explanation was that Eddie had almost killed Daphne in the car accident. Henry has no stake in the old family story, so he sees what the adults were too close to see.

Eddie introduces Daphne as his daughter to the Hotallings, their children and his friends at the Century Club, and later to the receptionist at Random House. Daphne feels it as "a huge promotion" and understands he means he chose her, something he would never have said while Buddy was alive. For Eddie it reclaims a part of his life her mother had erased; she never said his name again after the divorce.

Eddie tells Daphne that her mother offered him an "off-ramp" from the half-life he'd been living: a wife, children and a little house, and all he had to do was give up Skip. Abigail admits that after finding Skip with his head on Eddie's chest in the hospital she wanted Eddie gone, but what she really wanted was for him to be in love with her. She takes responsibility for asking something impossible, and Eddie concedes life would have been easier if he had kept his word.

Eddie says flatly that Skip does his taxes, that he shaves the two corns on Skip's left foot, and that they watch tap-dancing movies or do the crossword together. Skip tells Polly he is going to see good old Ed Triplett, his best friend from Yale, and she wraps up cake for him to take. Polly keeps Eddie at every holiday and panics over his health, so the book leaves it open whether she is deceived or has chosen not to look too closely.

Polly assumes Daphne has come back because Eddie's leukemia has gotten worse, though Daphne didn't know he had leukemia at all. Jonathan turns off the faucet, takes Polly's hand and tells her the numbers look better than last month, a fluent lie Daphne finds she is grateful for. The scene shows Polly meeting illness with panic and suspicion, Jonathan with the practiced reassurance of a former hospital administrator, and Eddie, later, by brushing it off as old news.

On the phone after Eddie's chemo, Jonathan admits he would leave Candy at chemo and go looking for people to talk to so he didn't have to sit with her, and that he turned away her sisters, mother and friends who wanted to go. He says he was too afraid then but thinks he could show up now, for Daphne. It casts his earlier kindnesses, like rushing onto the plane to handle Buddy's death, in a new light: he is at his best managing a crisis, and staying with suffering is the hard part.

During chemo Eddie explains the bardo, a place of transition where the dead can get stuck if they don't accept they're dead, and asks Daphne to promise to tell him when he dies. They practice on Lucas Ekker, who in Eddie's eyes never accepted anything, not even the end of Positivity. For a man who spent years contorting himself to fit other people's expectations, the request is a wish to meet the truth plainly at the end, with Daphne there to say it.

In retirement Eddie fills his calendar with opera, lectures and dharma talks, and while waiting for chemo he announces he is never going to be angry at anyone again. Daphne takes him to treatment, and Skip waits in his apartment afterward and lets Eddie lean against him. In the snowbound car he wondered if a second chance could mean fully living the life he'd been given; he has some of that now, but late, with leukemia, and with Skip still shared around Polly.

On the train after Lucas dies, Leda says they were loved "not passionately but enough" and largely ignored, which made them resourceful and brave, and that the children to worry about are the singular lights of their parents' lives. Daphne recognizes those over-adored children in her students. But Leda once believed her appendicitis set off the chain of events that drove Eddie away, and Daphne grew up staring at her scar and dreaming of getting him back, so the theory may be as much comfort as diagnosis.

Eddie tells Daphne that he and her mother write notes back and forth, and that each carries a small shard of glass about the other: her disappointment, his shame, both their regrets. He says the notes help pry it loose, because there's no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life, and Abigail even says she might visit. The reconciliation seems genuine but partial, since Eddie suspects she is also feeling a little left out now that he and Daphne are friends.