These aren't comfortable moments. Those are instructive, too, and perhaps more welcome, but it's rarely the easy lessons that unstick the gears and usher in real change.
Stanley is a character made up of surprising lessons. He's not nearly as affable as some of the other residents of Pine Haven, espeically as we experience him from their eyes. He is rude, loud, and stunningly inappropriate, turning the most innocent remark into a target for lewd innuendo. But then, right in the middle of the novel (beginning with p. 155), we're finally treated to his point of view. It is nothing if not honest.
Stanley knows he is not a good father. Stanley knows he was not a good husband. And at first, as he discusses his life, he truly does not seem to care, so why should we? Cranky and curmudgeonly and such a slave to his own stubbornness, he pushes people away even as he longs to draw them near.
Bauer by Alexej von Jawlensky, circa 1912
Then we learn his secret. Stanley's wife Martha has died, and as he lies in bed one night positively steeping in bitterness and regret-- much of which involves his failed relationship with Ned, his youngest son-- Ned slips into his room and lies down to keep his father company.
Stanley hates it. He hates it because he actually loves it, as he loves Ned. He uses his son's closeness as an excuse to beat himself up, wrestling with his demons until he creates a fiction for his life that will, in some ways, absolve him.
He acts as is his own confessor in creating this act of penance: faking dementia and putting himself out of the way in a retirement home.
From p. 165:
"After a week of Ned lying there at night and their quiet breakfasts together that had become something Stanley looked forward to, he began thinking up his plan. He would slowly start to slip. He would ease himself into a character, an actor on the stage. He would be obsessed with wrestling and just rude enough to keep people at a distance. He would not shave every morning...He would convince his sons he couldn't remember things...he would make them believe with great conviction that he needed to live in one of those retirement places and and then everyone would be on his own, and if Ned had any chance of making it in life, he'd have the freedom to do so."
What do you think of Stanley? Is it possible that he has redeemed himself with this screwball plan? Is this an act of love, or the final nail in the coffin of any possibility for honest relationship with Ned?
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