The Pilot's Wife

“And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be, at times, such a thing of beauty.”

Kathryn is struggling to understand her own response to Jack’s death and the plane crash. She imagines, as a man describes it on television, the sight of the crash over the ocean. The abstract images he describes surprise her with their aesthetic beauty, despite their horror.

The above quote uses polysyndeton, where words are separated by conjunctions, in this case “and:” “the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face” (bold guide’s emphasis). Polysyndeton in this case mimics the breathlessness and urgency of Kathryn’s crisis.

“And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.”

Throughout the novel, Kathryn is transparent about her grieving process, and provides direct insight into how she processes events. This interiority and tracing of an emotional path are hallmarks of Shreve’s fiction and the Fortune’s Rocks series. This quote, at the very beginning of the book, is just the start of Kathryn’s journey. Her grieving process is personified as a physical removal from one space to another.

“No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman’s face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love.”

Kathryn pays close attention to time throughout the novel. Here, she considers the immutability of time and its relentless passage. In addition, the images she chooses reflect her preoccupations with marriage and love, as she considers Jack’s death and its damage to her family.

“His actions were so instinctive, so swift, that Kathryn imagined that he had himself been punished that way as a child and that he had, for one brief moment, lost his usual control. Later, she tried to talk to him about the incident, but Jack, whose face still bore a deep, rosy flush, would not discuss it, except to say that he didn’t know what had come over him.”

Kathryn is remembering the only time that Jack ever spanked Mattie. By using flashbacks, Shreve provides many clues that Jack may not be what he appears, or what Kathryn thinks him to be. This passage also highlights Jack’s unwillingness to open up to Kathryn, and her inability to close the distance between them.

“How quickly the mind accommodated itself, she thought, even in such tiny increments. Perhaps it was that after a series of shocks, the body acclimated itself, like being inoculated—each subsequent shock delivering less impact. Or possibly this momentarily benumbed state was only a lull—a cease-fire. How would she know? There had never been a rehearsal for any of this.”

Once again, Kathryn observes her own grieving process. Shreve portrays Kathryn’s emotional life through her transparency and self-aware examination. Here, Kathryn acknowledges that she does not understand the grieving process, that there is no way to prepare for calamity, and she cannot be prepared for how grief will manifest.

“I don’t want you to come here and try to tell me a lot of lies to make things better. Because I don’t want lies right now. It can’t be made better, and I don’t want to pretend. I just want to be left alone.”

Mattie is navigating her own path through grief, and has separated herself from Kathryn. When Kathryn pressures her, Mattie is clear and articulate about her needs, and sometimes brutally honest. Unlike Kathryn, she lacks adult responsibility and has the ability to let grief consume her; she is able to immerse herself, and finally move beyond it.

“Worse, however, were the moments of relative calm that suddenly gave way to anger, all the more confusing because she could not always attach the anger to the appropriate person or event.”

Kathryn experiences a range of behavior as she navigates the grieving process, as well as confusion and uncertainty about Jack. This manifests in uncontrollable and sometimes misdirected outbursts. She is illustrating much of the same behavior as Mattie, but pushing actively against grief instead of leaning into it, as Mattie does.

“Mattie’s brittle. She’s fragile. She doesn’t eat. Sometimes she breaks into hysterical laughter. She doesn’t seem to have the appropriate reaction to anything anymore. Although I’d like to know what is appropriate. I told Mattie that life doesn’t just disintegrate, that we can’t break all the rules, and Mattie said, quite rightly, that all the rules had already been broken.”

Once again, Mattie shows her mother how to grieve. When Kathryn tries to get Mattie to conform to some degree of normal, or “the rules,” Mattie replies that there are no rules. This is Mattie’s first close experience with death, and it changes her world in a fundamental way. She is honest and clearheaded about the cataclysmic effect Jack’s death has had on the most fundamental aspects of life.

“She thought about that arrangement. Had it been her idea or Jack’s? They had done it for so many years, she could no longer remember when it had begun. And it had always seemed a logical system, too practical to question. Odd, she thought, how a fact, seen one way, was one thing. And then seen from another angle, was something else entirely. Or perhaps not so odd.”

Throughout the novel, Kathryn’s perspectives on her life, marriage, and husband are constantly challenged. As a result, her perspective on everyday things that she had always taken for granted is changing. In this passage, she reflects on her and Jack’s communication system when he was in London, which she now suspects Jack arranged to spend time with his other family.

“She held herself still, locked in an image, not daring to move either forward or backward for fear of the crevices. She breathed in deeply, let her breath out, laid her arms on the table.”

Kathryn has a sudden memory of her lobster dinners with Jack at her kitchen table, when she is about to eat lobster with Robert. Here, Shreve connects past and present through a unifying object, the lobster. Kathryn feels blindsided by memory, but by her own admission, will become accustomed to it. Throughout the novel, she has memories that interrupt the present, or stand alongside it to show the contrast between then and now.

“I found these papers wadded up in the pocket of Jack’s jeans on the back of the bathroom door on the day he died. I didn’t think much of them at the time and just stuck them in the pocket of my own jeans. But do you see that notation, M at A’s, and the numbers following it? What does it look like to you?”

Kathryn makes a shift here and takes control of her situation. Instead of letting revelations about Jack come from the media, the union, or the safety board, she is beginning to think about unraveling the mystery of Jack. The papers in his pockets are her first tangible lead, and will lead her on a journey to discover the truth about her husband.

“‘Even one phrase different,’ Robert said, ‘and the whole tape could mean something else. Even with the words exactly as I’ve just said them, the tape doesn’t necessarily mean anything. You know that. We’ve talked about that.’”

After Robert gives her a full rendition of the CVR recording, Katheryn struggles with the idea that Jack has brought a bomb onto the plane. Robert reminds her that context is important, and that even the subtlest shift can result in a completely different meaning. Shreve explores this idea of shifting perspective throughout the novel, as Kathryn reconsiders old memories in light of new information.

“She saw then, in a way she hadn’t quite before, that Robert was a man with a past—of course he was. He had an entire life she knew almost nothing about, a life during which he’d mastered the piano, learned to fly, become a drunk, married, had children, divorced his wife, and then had somehow become involved in his extraordinary job.”

Shreve highlights the way in which we all tend to forget that there is a complex individual in every human, with a full and complicated history. This is especially pertinent for Kathryn, as she is beginning to understand that Jack had an entire life that she knew nothing about. By applying that same new understanding to Robert, she reminds herself of the complexity of others, and moves from seeing Robert as merely a support system to seeing him as his own distinct person.

“She would not allow herself to believe that Jack had been having an affair. How could she, when she had seen firsthand what happened when a sensational story was woven around only a few facts, as had happened with the press when the CVR tape was leaked?”

Kathryn understands how things can be taken out of context—with a small shift in perspective, everything you think you know can change. Using that rationale, she refuses to believe in Jack’s infidelity, even though all evidence points in that direction. This quote shows an understanding of the importance of perspective, as well as Kathryn’s strong need to believe that her marriage was as good as she had believed.

“She has to have someone to blame, so she’s blaming you. I know it’s irrational. You don’t remember this, but for a time, right after your parents died, you blamed me.”

Mattie is angry with Kathryn, which Julia explains is a projection of her grief. Julia understands because Kathryn’s parents died when she was a teenager, and Kathryn had done the same to Julia. Julia uses her personal experience to guide Kathryn and Mattie through their grief.

“Looking into the mirror, she put her hands to her face. She could no longer deny that something was waiting for her in this city. Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and not stopping.”

Kathryn has arrived in London, and is going to seek out Muire Boland. She does not know yet exactly what Muire means to Jack’s secret life, but does not back down from confrontation. One of Katherine’s defining traits is her willingness to seek out the truth and confront it, no matter how devastating.

“‘I knew about you from the very beginning,’ Muire said. ‘Jack and I did not have secrets.’ The greater intimacy, then, Kathryn thought. An intentional knife wound.”

Early on in their first meeting, Muire confronts Kathryn with the idea that she was closer to Jack and knew all his secrets. Kathryn realizes that Muire said this on purpose to hurt her. Kathryn begins to question her status as Jack’s wife, in contrast to his relationship with Muire. She understands immediately that Jack and Muire’s relationship had an intimacy which her own marriage did not.

“After all, Kathryn had been the first wife, the primary wife, had she not? But she wondered then: In a man’s mind, who was the more important wife—the woman he sought to protect by not revealing the other? Or the one to whom he told all his secrets?”

Kathryn is really asking: Who is the pilot’s real wife? Although she knows that her marriage is the legally legitimate one, she is beginning to understand the depth of Muire and Jack’s intimacy. This makes her question whether her relationship with him was as close and intimate, and how legitimate her own marriage was.

“She thought about the impossibility of ever knowing another person. About the fragility of the constructs people make. A marriage, for example. A family.”

At the beginning of the novel, Kathryn’s faith in her marriage and husband is solid. But as the story unfolds and she learns about Jack’s propensity for Keeping Secrets, she will be forced to reevaluate what she thinks she knows. In the end, she sees not just their relationship, but all relationships, for the “fragile constructs” they are. Her faith in marriage has been deeply shaken by Jack’s betrayal.

“She thought then that she ought to be able to say she’d had the worst, got it over with. It would be a boon of sorts to know that a nadir had been reached. She could almost feel the freedom of that, to live one’s life and not be afraid. But she knew already that such freedom was an illusion and that there might be more to come.”

Kathryn takes the lessons she has learned over the course of the story and applies them to life in general. In this case, she realizes that just because she has had tragedy in her life does not mean that she will never experience more or worse tragedy at some point in the future. She now fully understands the painful unpredictability of life.

“‘I knew that Jack was in over his head,’ Muire said, ‘but he seemed a man who was not afraid to get in over his head.’ She paused. ‘Which is why I loved him.’ The sentence stung. And then Kathryn thought, surprising herself with the thought: It was why he loved you. Because you offered him this.”

IRA. She knows that Jack loved risk and that this other life offered it to him. Shreve shows here how far Kathryn has come in understanding who Jack really was.

“Did Muire Boland mean for an understanding to pass between the two women, an elemental understanding? Kathryn wondered. But then, almost simultaneously, she realized that of course the two women were linked, however much Kathryn might wish it not true. By children, certainly, half-sisters and half-brothers, but also by Jack. Through Jack.”

When Muire comes to her hotel the day after their first meeting, Kathryn understands their relationship in a different light. They are family now, in a way, and as such, will always be connected. The recognition of the link between them and between their children will lead Kathryn, at the end of the novel, to look into Muire’s children’s welfare.

“What had been real? she wondered as she studied the water, trying to find a fixed point, which she couldn’t. Had she herself been the pilot’s wife or had Muire Boland?”

Kathryn is at Malin Head, where she has convinced someone to take her, by boat, out to the crash site. She finally knows the answers to all the mysteries of Jack’s life, and is beginning to find some closure. Before she can let go, she considers the validity of Muire’s marriage and her own marriage to Jack, and their respective foundations.