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Linden Hills
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Chapter 6 Summary: “December 23rd”
Nedeed’s wife, still locked in the basement, believes that “she wasn’t like these other women; she had coped and they were crazy. They never changed” (204). In a fit of anger, she rips up the women’s books and clothes but, as she does, discovers a photograph album of Priscilla McGuire—another ancestor married to yet another Luther. In each picture, the family is positioned in the same way, with Priscilla’s small son first on her lap then standing alongside her, but as Nedeed’s wife turns the pages and moves through the years, Priscilla’s face becomes more and more obscured by shadow and “what began as a slight gray film was now deepening into a veil” until she had all but disappeared (208).
When Laurel Johnson—or Mrs. Howard Dumont—was young, she spent every summer with her Grandmother Roberta at her tiny house down a “Georgia dirt road” (216). It was there that Laurel first learned to swim and to love water, and she spent each summer in the “sandy pond” in Georgia or learning to love music (218). Soon, Laurel’s swimming kept her away from her grandmother, sent her to Berkeley for college, and then “sent her [Laurel] back a stranger” (227). Now, Laurel works at IBM and lives in a home on Tupelo Drive with her husband Howard Dumont, but something is wrong: “Wrong—she and the house on Tupelo Drive that defied all their efforts to transform it into that nebulous creation called home. Wrong—she and the career at IBM that she clung to with a desperation mistaken for pride” (228). Laurel sees that she is “imprisoned within a chain of photographs and a life that had no point” and so, suffering a breakdown, has stopped going to work and let her marriage fall apart, and now her grandmother has moved into the house to try to help (228). That afternoon, Luther Nedeed pays a call on Laurel to tell her that she must vacate her home on Tupelo Drive; her husband, whose name the house is under, has filed for divorce, and because Laurel will no longer be a Dumont, she is no longer allowed to live in the house.
After Nedeed has left, and while her grandmother is sleeping, Laurel changes into her “silver bathing suit,” goes outside to the Olympic Swimming Pool she had built in the garden, peels back the tarpaulin to reveal an empty pool, and then springs from the high platform diving board (247). Willie and Lester, who have returned to Mrs. Dumont’s house to shovel the drive as payment for the lie she upheld to the police the previous day, are startled when they hear an old woman shouting “Laurel” from the house window:
They followed the direction of the woman’s voice and saw that it was a tall, slender body in a silver bathing suit crushed into the bottom of an empty pool—“Laurel”—but it remained the cry of an old woman, calling a little girl home. (216)
Willie gets to Laurel’s body first, and as he walks away—seeing that there’s nothing he can do and haunted by the sight of Laurel’s body—notices a set of footprints in the snow, footprints he recognizes as the “strange, triangular-shaped crevices” of Luther Nedeed’s shoes (250). Willie realizes that Luther must have watched Laurel Dumont throw herself into the pool and done nothing about it.
Daniel Braithwaite—a historian who lives in Linden Hills—notices how shaken Willie is and invites him and Lester to his house so that they can warm up and call a taxi. Braithwaite, like Willie, knows that Luther Nedeed watched Laurel’s suicide, as he had witnessed it all through his window. Unlike Willie, who thinks Nedeed had an obligation to do something, Braithwaite believes that Nedeed didn’t do anything precisely because any action would have been futile: “You can delay the inevitable, set up roadblocks and detours if you will, but that personal tragedy today was just a minute part of a greater tragedy that has afflicted this community for decades” (257). Braithwaite attributes this “greater tragedy” to the lack of purpose the Linden Hills inhabitants have (260). Their only purpose has been to arrive, but once they arrive, they have nothing left to do: “Now, moving in here has simply become the thing to do, the place to be. But to be what?” (260). According to Braithwaite, this is what killed Laurel Dumont, and there was nothing that could have changed that.
Chapter 7 Summary: “December 24th”
It’s Christmas Eve, and Willie and Lester have been hired by Luther Nedeed to decorate his Christmas tree. Willie doesn’t want to go as he “wanted to forget that he had to go back down into Linden Hills,” but “he was planning to use the money that he got from Nedeed to buy a coat” (272). He realizes that although he’s spent a week in Linden Hills, “he had never heard her [Nedeed’s wife] name” (273). Even so, he feels that “she was waiting for him” and he can’t stop dreaming about her (273). In the end, Willie is able to sleep only by coming up with the first line of a poem to describe Linden Hills, which “came with an expulsion, a relief that always felt like ejaculation and, more than not, brought tears to his eyes” (276).
Meanwhile, in the basement, we finally learn Nedeed’s wife’s name: Willa Prescott Nedeed. She realizes that she can’t blame anyone but herself for her situation and that she cannot rely upon anyone else to free her:
The responsibility did not lie with her mother or father—or Luther. No, she could no longer blame Luther. Willa now marveled at the beauty and simplicity of something so small it had lived unrecognized within her for most of her life. She gained strength and a sense of power from its possession. (280)
So, she decides that when the time is right, she can “walk back up” those “twelve concrete steps” (280).
As Luther Nedeed waits for Willie and Lester to arrive, he considers the fact that he’s alone on Christmas Eve, decorating his tree with strangers: “He truly didn’t know how much longer he could go on” (286). He continues to blame his wife for his loneliness and for taking for granted everything he has given her. Even so, he still “felt himself flailing at the wind” considering all the “chaos” of Linden Hills (286):
Winston Alcott was coming to Tupelo Drive and he would leave the same way Laurel Dumont had; Luther could already see it. Give Winston four of five years and he’d break down. So what had he accomplished by forcing that marriage? He had bought himself a little time, that’s all. He had temporarily filled another home. They didn’t understand the importance of a family, of life. All of these sacrifices to build them houses and they refused to build a history. (286)
Even as Nedeed thinks all this, below him in the basement, Willa Nedeed is tidying and preparing to come upstairs.
Willie and Lester arrive at Nedeed’s house to help him with the tree. As they are decorating, Nedeed realizes that he’s left one box upstairs and asks Willie to help him. They go up a flight of stairs that is beside the stairs that lead down to the locked basement. On his way out, Willie falls and accidentally makes “the metal bolt slide toward the left as he turned,” unknowingly unlocking the basement door (297). Back in Luther’s den, Willie turns to see the full effect of the decorated tree but instead sees “in the mirror next to the kitchen door was a woman, her hair tangled and matted, her sunken cheeks streaked with dirt” (298). Willa holds out her dead son, wrapped in “sheer white lace,” and Luther quickly asks Willie and Lester to leave the house (298).
Willie and Lester are outside, standing in the frigid evening, wondering what just happened, when they hear a crash. In the house, Willa pushes past Luther with her son still in her arms, intending to go upstairs. Luther, thinking she means to head for the door, grabs her, and the “three welded together” fall into the tree which, decorated with lit candles, crashes to the floor and quickly goes up in flames (300). Outside, Willie and Lester see the house on fire. Willie tries to run back inside to save them, but “an arm grabbed him around the neck and he fell to his knees” (301). Lester holds Willie down, and so the two watch as the residents of Linden Hills eventually call the fire brigade, who douse the fire. They watch as the firefighters bring “one massive bulk” instead of “three bodies” out of the Nedeed home, which has been turned into “a pile of charred wood” (303). Finally, “hand anchored to hand,” Willie and Lester walk up and out of Tupelo Drive (304).
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Daniel Braithwaite’s response to Laurel Dumont’s suicide—although cold and unfeeling—offers a different and more complex interpretation of her demise. Willie, an outsider in Linden Hills, feels very keenly how Luther Nedeed is complicit in Laurel Dumont’s suicide, while Daniel Braithwaite believes that there was nothing Luther Nedeed could have done to prevent it. Unlike Willie and Braithwaite, we have greater insight into Laurel’s suicide and know that Nedeed’s visit to her house earlier that day may have contributed to her suicide. However, Daniel Braithwaite’s argument illustrates the degraded nature of Linden Hills as a whole, because what residents are pursuing and then gaining is ultimately an empty dream. Laurel Dumont had attained the Linden Hills dream—and the American dream—of residency, wealth, status, and material possessions, but felt that her life had amounted to nothing. Here, Naylor uses Laurel Dumont’s suicide to critique the American dream for making people desire empty ideals that ultimately amount to nothing.
Meanwhile, down in the basement, we see Willa Nedeed struggling with the same plight endured by all the Nedeed women ever since the first Luther bought Linden Hills. Willie is the first person to call attention to the fact that she is never named until the book’s closing; she’s only referred to as Mrs. Nedeed, or described simply as “she” or “her” in her narrated sections. It’s only when Willa Nedeed acquires the courage to climb the steps out of her basement prison that she is finally named; this suggests that, for the first time since her marriage to Luther, she is finally reclaiming her agency and individuality, which was subsumed by the Nedeed name she acquired upon her marriage. We see this illustrated by the photo album she finds in the basement, where Priscilla McGuire Nedeed is consumed by “the gaping hole” that shadows her face in the picture (267). The Nedeed women find themselves so consumed by the family name and inheritance (their sole purpose is to produce another Luther Nedeed) that they all but disappear. Throughout almost the entire novel, Willa Nedeed is absent from Linden Hills, physically locked away in the basement. However, in the end, it is Willa Nedeed—unwittingly helped and aided by Willie—who puts an end to both the Nedeed family and its hold on Linden Hills by climbing out of the basement and causing the fire which kills both her and Luther Nedeed and destroys the Nedeed house.
The novel’s ending is symbolic in many ways. First, the Nedeed mansion is situated in the innermost circle of Linden Hills, like hell occupies the innermost circle in Dante’s Inferno. Just like the devil rules hell, Luther who rules over Linden Hills from this house. It is ironic—and significant—that fire destroys Luther Nedeed and the possibility of any future Luther Nedeed; typically, fire is associated with hell and with the devil. Furthermore, it is the Christmas tree that causes the fire—an object that Luther takes enormous pride in, claiming to Willie and Luther that “each one of these ornaments took hours to create and a lifetime of craftsmanship to perfect” and comparing the tree to “the cheap and prefabricated” ones everyone else has in their home (292). The Christmas tree symbolizes everything Nedeed values in his life—it is unique, extravagant, not like everyone else’s. So, it is ironic that the Christmas tree causes the fire that obliterates Nedeed’s world, implying that he and his way of life are responsible for his demise.
Lastly, in the very final scene, after Willie and Lester have witnessed the house burn to the ground, the pair begin their ascent up and out of Linden Hills: “Hand anchored to hand, one helped the other to scale the open links. Then, they walked out of Tupelo Drive into the last days of the year” (304). The two have survived their descent through hell—or Linden Hills—and are now able to begin climbing out. By helping each other over the fence, Naylor implies that the two will avoid the fate of the other Linden Hills residents—alcoholism, unhappiness, suicide—because they have one another.
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