34 pages • 1 hour read
William KennedyIronweed
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 3-4
Chapter 3 Summary
The group leaves the bar, and Rudy goes to sleep elsewhere. Francis and Helen walk back to the mission with Pee Wee, intending to rent a hotel room after dropping him off. At the mission, they see that Sandra is dead, and wild dogs have partially eaten her body. Running after one of the dogs, Francis trips, hurting his ankle.
Crossing the street, Helen finds herself surrounded by a group of children dressed as goblins for Halloween. They make fun of her protruding stomach and steal her purse, which contains all the money belonging to her and Francis. After moving Sandra’s body into the mission, Francis and Helen go looking for a place to sleep, as the mission is full.
As they walk, Francis sees Aldo Campione together with “Rowdy” Dick Doolan, another person from his past. Francis tells Helen about his conversations with Billy and Gerald, and she suggests that he go see his family. They arrive at a house belonging to their friend Jack, who lets them in for a drink and a bite to eat. Inside, they find Clara, a onetime sex worker who started a family and then left that family. She now lives with Jack and is sitting on a chamber pot due to illness. She is pleased to see Francis but treats Helen with disdain.
As Francis washes and shaves himself, he once again notes the presence of Aldo Campione and Rowdy Dick. He thinks back to the night in 1930 when he killed Rowdy Dick. Under a bridge with a group of fellow vagrants, Francis talked about his formative years in baseball. Rowdy Dick, who lost his siblings before losing multiple jobs, grew envious of Francis and decided to take his shoes by cutting off his feet; Francis deflected his attack, losing part of a finger and injuring his nose. Francis seized Rowdy Dick and swung him against the underside of the bridge, killing him. Back in Jack’s bathroom, Francis apologizes to his ghost.
Jack urges Francis to stop drinking and look for work, then he gently sends him and Helen away. Back on the street, they argue about what to do next. After ruling out several possibilities, Francis drops Helen off to sleep in a car belonging to a man named Finny. Though neither admits it, both know that Finny will demand sexual favors from Helen in exchange for providing shelter. Francis, meanwhile, wanders north to the neighborhood where he used to live, eventually taking refuge in a dilapidated barn.
Chapter 4 Summary
The next day, Francis follows a tip from Reverend Chester to seek work with Rosskam, a man who goes door to door collecting discarded items. After confirming that Francis can lift moderately heavy items (though not as much as Rosskam), Rosskam agrees to employ him for the day.
They set out on Rosskam’s wagon. Rosskam informs Francis that, despite being 71 years old, he has an active sex life, including hookups with women along his route. They stop for one such visit, and, at Rosskam’s invitation, Francis watches through a window as Rosskam and a woman have sex in her cellar. Francis thinks back to the first time he had sex with Helen after they both tested negative for STDs.
At Francis’s request, Rosskam pauses the wagon at the house where Francis grew up, and he imagines his parents coming home after their honeymoon to have sex, despite his mother’s religious disdain for all forms of sexuality. Embarrassed to be seen, Francis asks Rosskam to be excused from collecting any items from the houses of people he knows, and Rosskam grudgingly accepts.
The narrative shifts back in time as Francis recalls his relationship with Katrina Daugherty, a housewife from an upper-class background who lived next door to the Phelans. One day, an adolescent Francis happens to see Katrina walking naked in her backyard. When he calls out to her, she grows stiff and unresponsive. He covers her and carries her inside, where she quickly recovers.
A month later, when Francis is working on the Daugherty’s barn, Katrina invites him inside. She asks whether he has ever been in love, then demonstrates that she can fake a cataleptic fit, like the one she had in her backyard, at will.
A week later, Francis notices Katrina watching him play baseball. On another day, she invites him over for a lunch of lobster and wine. After asking about his feelings and dreams, she speaks passionately and poetically about her life and beliefs. She gifts Francis a white silk shirt, and when he removes his shirt, they begin foreplay and then have sex. Francis reflects on the way that encounter shaped his lifelong search for love. He reveals that Katrina died in a fire in 1912, and that her grave was overgrown by dandelions. Back on Rosskam’s wagon, Francis notices a shirt among the collected items and buys it with part of his day’s wages; Rosskam brands him a “sensitive, tidy bum” (112).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
The events of these chapters take on extra significance considering the temporal setting. In Western Christian tradition Halloween is the first of three days dedicated to remembering and honoring the dead. This parallels Francis’s personal struggle interacting with the dead from his past, especially when doing so highlights Francis’s weaknesses and mistakes. Indeed, his encounter with the ghost of Rowdy Dick leads into a meditation on Francis’s “compulsion to flight” (75). Meanwhile, the thieving children dressed as goblins and the wild, “red-eyed” dogs that stalk Sandra conform to more popular associations with the holiday—and yet, both robbery and encounters with wild animals are common enough experiences for those in Francis’s walk of life, suggesting that the fears and concerns playfully mocked on Halloween are real and ever present for them.
The visit to Jack and Clara highlights important facets of Francis’s character, with both serving as foils to him. Jack, unlike Francis, holds a steady job, enabling him to live comfortably with his girlfriend Clara, whereas Francis drifts from place to place and job to occasional job, continually making and revising short-term plans with Helen. Clara, like Francis, left her family, though she sustains a bitter attitude toward them, describing her children as “snots,” whereas Francis harbors much more tender feelings for his family. Taken together, these interactions demonstrate both one of his biggest challenges (settling down) and one of his greatest strengths (his loyalty), two aspects of his character that are fundamentally at odds, driving the central conflict of the plot.
Notably, when Francis wanders alone after dropping off Helen, he heads instinctively towards his former home in Albany’s north side, following “the north star, magnetized by an impulse to redirect his destiny” (87). Just as sailors famously use the north star to navigate, so too he gravitates towards his family, though, as his sleeping in a nearby barn shows, physical and emotional distance are two different matters.
Apart from providing some comic relief, Rosskam and Francis’s terse relationship adds some commentary on the employer-employee relationship. Rosskam clearly thinks of Francis as a “bum,” and he responds with surprise and annoyance when Francis does anything that he considers pretentious for someone in his situation, whether it be avoiding people who might recognize him or buying a new shirt. To Rosskam, Francis is simply a lowlife to be impressed and acted on by Rosskam’s physical and financial mastery.
Francis’s imaginative reconstruction of his parents’ nuptial encounter as well as his detailed recollection of his sexual coming-of-age with Katrina serve as prequels of sorts to the story of his own courtship and marriage, recounted later on, and the contrasts between the two stories are striking. Whereas Francis’s mother spurns physical intimacy for religious reasons, Katrina rejoices in the sensual, even as she recognizes the danger of loving “in ten thousand directions” (110).
