Ironweed

Dressed in a stolen kimono, Helen sings in her hotel room as she contemplates a painting of a swan that “was, was.” She reflects on her failed aspirations to become a classical pianist, which were cut short when her father committed suicide, leaving Helen’s mother to remove Helen from Vassar, a liberal arts school, in order to send Helen’s brother to law school.

The narrative goes back to the night before. In Finny’s car, Helen allows Finny to have sex with her, though he, exhausted, fails to ejaculate. Helen doesn’t sleep, instead getting lost in memory. In the morning, feeling pain from a tumor in her stomach, she hums “Te Deum” on her way to a nearby church that’s holding an All Saints’ Day service. A man in one of the pews reminds her of a classical conductor she once saw conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; excerpts from the text of the symphony’s final choral movement, based on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” are interspersed throughout the chapter.

Helen reflects on her relationship with her mother. After caring for her for a decade, Helen discovered a lost will leaving her half of her father’s inheritance 21 years too late. Helen abandoned her mother the same day, and her mother was transferred to a public nursing home, where she died. Helen also recalls her relationship with Arthur, a married man who owned a piano store where Helen worked in her twenties; the two carried on an affair until Arthur took up with another woman, and Helen found work elsewhere.

Leaving the church, Helen eats at a cheap cafeteria, paying with money hidden in her bra. She makes her way to a library, where she thinks back to her time living with Francis some eight years prior, until Francis lost his job as a handyman and started drinking again. Feeling nauseous, she leaves the library, then enters a music store on a whim. With the clerk’s permission, she samples recordings of Schubert lieder as well as the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, then she faints. After regaining consciousness, she leaves, taking the record with her under her shirt.

Fearing another collapse, she rents a room at Palombo’s Hotel, where she and Francis often stay, and she buys back a suitcase left there as collateral. In her room, she vomits, observes the painting of a swan, and rummages through her keepsakes. Sensing that she will soon die, she thinks back on her life mostly with satisfaction, questioning certain Catholic notions of sin and taking special pride in the fact that “she never betrayed anybody,” imagining her final separation from Francis as a way of setting him free (138). She dies peacefully as Beethoven’s music fuses with the naturalistic, Japanese imagery associated with her kimono.