that you stayed away” (5–6)—O’Hara uses the initial strength of their respec-
tive positions in combination with his title to invite his audience to wonder
whether they each have motives that they do not reveal to the other.
O’Hara complicates the tension with the movement to the dialogue
between Howard and Amy, even as it “appears” to be about different sub-
jects. When Amy comments that she is comfortable living home again, in
part because she enjoys reading their many detective stories, and Howard
responds that they have “early Mary Roberts Rinehart” (8)—who is known
as the American Agatha Christie and is credited with the phrase, “The butler
did it”—O’Hara’s authorial disclosure is that his audience should be on the
lookout for some mystery-solution structure in his own tale, which, after all,
introduces the dead body of Jack Hill early on.
Again, the conversational disclosures between father and daughter suggest
that they are speaking candidly. When Howard advises the divorced Amy to
have children right away if she remarries because children can help a couple
stay together, Amy notes that he implies that the advice comes from his own
experience. Howard agrees: “I know what I’m implying. And I know you’re no
fool. You know it’s often been touch and go with your mother and I. You’ve
seen that” (8). For her part, Amy explains that “nothing” would have kept her
marriage intact because she had an affair with a married man, a man that she
had been seeing even before her marriage. Amy also admits that she is no lon-
ger seeing that married man, that she now agrees with her father that he was
a “son of a bitch” (10), and that she is currently sleeping with Joe, the doctor
she has been dating and might soon marry. At the same time, for all its candor
(and it’s worth noting that in 1961 a daughter’s telling her father about extra-
marital sex is racy stuff ), the conversation calls attention to issues that Amy
does not want to discuss. When Howard starts to ask for more details about
Amy’s history with that man, she says, “Don’t ask me any more questions,
please” (9). From that point on, Howard offers judgments about the man (“He
sounds like a real son of a bitch” [10]), but he does not seek any more informa-
tion about his identity. Consequently, O’Hara uses the conversation to create
the tension about his identity.
In the crucial final conversation, O’Hara gives us four exchanges where the
relation between conversational disclosure and authorial disclosure, especially
authorial disclosure across conversations, is especially salient. The first comes
right at the beginning of the conversation after Lois asks whether Howard said
anything to Amy about Jack Hill:
“I’ll be glad when Jack is buried and out of the way.”
“I know,” said Amy.188 • CHAPTER 9