that pattern seemed to be completed with the revelation about Amy and Jack
Hill, the audience now discovers, at the very end of the story, another, deeper
layer to the pattern.
In light of these conclusions, O’Hara’s audience has further reason to inter-
pret Lois’s response as a nondenial denial, one in which she stops short of tell-
ing Amy that she did not have the affair even as she tries to discourage Amy’s
conclusion. With this nondenial denial, Lois refuses Amy’s implicit invitation
toward a greater intimacy based on their similar experience, a choice that
reinforces what O’Hara has already disclosed about her character. Lois is com-
mitted to keeping up appearances, and she has appeared to be the concerned
mother helping her daughter keep her daughter’s affair from Howard. She is
far more comfortable being Amy’s older, wiser confidant than she is being
Amy’s equal.
At this point, the audience does not have any privileged access to events
with respect to Lois, except for the exact details of Howard’s conversation
with Amy. But O’Hara’s concluding with another reference to detective stories
and to the mystery-solution pattern invites some further reflection. Might
Howard, who after all is the original reader of the detective stories and the
one who mentions Mary Roberts Rinehart to Amy, know more than Lois and
Amy give him credit for knowing? If Lois and Amy are committed to keeping
up certain appearances, isn’t it plausible to wonder about the extent to which
Howard is similarly committed, especially in light of his sudden capitulation
to Lois’s request that he go to Hill’s funeral? Does Lois’s suspicion that he is
getting nearer the truth stop too soon—has he perhaps figured it out? Is How-
ard’s question to Amy about the man having “gone out of [her] life” what she
initially suspects it is, a covert reference to the recently deceased Hill?
No less a practitioner of dialogue narrative than George V. Higgins
believes that Howard knows about both affairs and “torment[s] his women-
folk by making veiled references designed to keep them constantly on the
edge of fear of public humiliation, while lacking the guts to confront either
of them or Jack Hill directly” (On Writing 120–21). As much as I admire Hig-
gins’s own writerly skills, I find that he is seriously overreading the story here,
as his leap from conversations in the privacy of their home to possible “pub-
lic humiliation” indicates. (Higgins also overreads Lois’s role in Amy’s affair
when he says that “she connived in her daughter’s seduction” by Hill [121].)
Neither Higgins nor O’Hara provides any evidence of Howard’s knowledge
equivalent to the pattern of hints O’Hara supplies to confirm Amy’s insinua-
tion about Lois’s affair with Jack. And if O’Hara wanted his audience to have
a degree of confidence about Howard’s knowledge comparable to the one he
gives that audience about Lois’s affair, he could easily have planted such evi-
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 193