relation to those suspicions shortly, but first I want to note how O’Hara uses
Amy’s insinuation as part of his larger disclosure about her character. Lois is
right to note that Amy has been playing detective, but Amy’s choice to reveal
her suspicions shows that she is quite confident that they are well grounded
and that she believes she has something to gain by expressing them. Either
she and Lois will have something else to share—or she can learn something
further by the manner of Lois’s denial.
Furthermore, in a case of authorial disclosure within conversation, Amy’s
insinuation prompts O’Hara’s audience to reconfigure the initial dialogue in
this scene. Amy’s comments there now all seem to have an additional, covert
layer that Lois is not aware of. Amy’s “I know” in response to Lois’s “I’ll be
glad when Jack’s gone” now looks like a serious understatement, and her “I
wasn’t the only one [Jack] played around with” now appears far more pointed.
As a result, Amy emerges from O’Hara’s managing of the relations between
her conversational and his authorial disclosures as a character who is by turns
careless, immoral, aware of her faults, grateful, shrewd, and bold. Joe, her
future husband, is likely in for some surprises of his own.
In order to assess what Lois’s response to Amy’s insinuation reveals about
her, we need to consider how O’Hara uses the authorial disclosures across con-
versations to guide his audience’s detective activities and how that guidance
affects the audience’s reconfiguration of both character and events. O’Hara
gives his audience considerable evidence that Amy gets it right: Lois does not
confirm Amy’s suspicions, but O’Hara confirms those of his audience. From
the first and third conversations, the audience knows that Jack did not start
disliking Hill only recently but rather that he “never” liked Hill. From the first
conversation, the audience also knows that Hill was as an usher at Howard
and Lois’s wedding. Consequently, they would have been in each other’s orbit
during the early years of Howard and Lois’s marriage, the time when, accord-
ing to Howard, they stayed together for Amy’s sake. Moreover, the audience
knows that if Amy is right, Lois has even more reason to keep up appearances
so that Celia—and others—don’t start asking why Howard would not go to
Hill’s funeral. In fact, the audience can recognize that, in light of Hill’s age, this
motive of keeping her own affair a secret from Howard and Celia becomes at
least as compelling, since people would be more likely to suspect that Hill had
been involved with Lois than with Amy. In addition, Lois’s own curious judg-
ment earlier in this conversation, that covering up Amy’s affair would have
been as bad in Howard’s eyes as her having an affair with Jack herself, now
seems less curious: she wants to minimize her own transgression and maxi-
mize Amy’s. Furthermore, in terms of the overall sequence of the story, Amy’s
inference provides a nice final twist to the mystery-solution pattern: although
192 • CHAPTER 9