dence—given Howard a reference to Hill whose veil was more transparent or
introduced a revealing discussion between Howard and Amy about whether
she was going to the funeral, or something else along those lines. Instead,
O’Hara gives his audience enough evidence to suspect that Howard knows
more than Lois and Amy give him credit for, but not enough evidence to con-
firm any suspicions with anything approaching the confidence the audience
achieves about Lois’s affair with Hill. In this way, O’Hara harnesses the power
of a limited ambiguity in his overall portraiture of the family.
Indeed, the result of O’Hara’s rich authorial disclosures through the vari-
ous conversational disclosures is a very complex and very intriguing family
portrait, one that his audience can see more clearly than any of its subjects. To
be sure, the figures of Lois and Amy emerge more clearly and sharply than the
figure of Howard, but the overall portrait emphasizes each character’s inter-
est in keeping up appearances and the way that interest increases the distance
among them. Lois clearly hides the most from the other two, even as she
works hardest to manage how they all look to the outside world and retains
a sense of her own superiority. Amy is both dependent on her parents and
capable of seeing through them. Howard might be either the most put-upon
or the most devious of the three characters.
At the level of readerly dynamics, O’Hara’s audience partially sympathizes
with each family member even as it makes some strong negative ethical judg-
ments about each, with the strongest of these directed at Lois (though any
final judgment of Howard must be tentative and provisional given the ambi-
guity about what he knows). The Ambries are not a family to admire, but they
are a family that demonstrates not only human frailty but humans’ compli-
cated ways of responding to their frailties.
Finally, the ethics of O’Hara’s telling provides a striking contrast to the
ethics of the told. Where the Ambries value appearances more than actuali-
ties, to the point that their apparent frankness with each other covers both
withholding of information and active deception, O’Hara values communi-
cation about actualities even as he is content with leaving some questions
unanswered. He especially values collaborative communication, the ways in
which he and his audience can, by working together, see past appearances
to the complexities of how family members often avoid such collaboration.
All in all, “Appearances” is a rich indirect communication from somebody to
somebody else by means of what still other somebodies communicate (or fail
to communicate) to each other.
194 • CHAPTER 9