41 pages • 1 hour read
Commonwealth
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BetaChapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The story returns to the future, with 52-year-old Franny and her sister Caroline going to see the movie Commonwealth, based on Leo’s book. The sisters think it’s a terrible idea, but her father insists that they should go, especially since it’s his 83rd birthday and he is eager to see how the family will be portrayed by the actors. However, when they begin to watch the movie, Fix grows upset at the way the family is portrayed and begins yelling to leave. Franny and Caroline help the distraught Fix into his wheelchair to leave. Caroline insists that they go to the beach: “I will not allow that to be my memory of Dad’s birthday […]. I want to wipe that movie off my eyeballs. We’re going to go look at the ocean” (235). They go to the beach, even though Fix and Franny prefer to go home.
While at the beach, Franny gets a call from Albie, who is worried about his mother’s health. Franny agrees to check on Teresa, who, after divorcing Bert, continues to live in the same three-bedroom house, even after her children grew up and moved out. Teresa is now 82. Fix insists on coming with Franny, so the three of them drive to Torrance. Teresa tries to pretend that she is fine, but it is clear that she is suffering from much pain. She does not tell them that she has had stomach pain for the past three days. The Keatings take Teresa to the hospital, where she is admitted for the night due to an abscess.
When they return to Fix’s home where he lives with his second wife Marjorie, he feels very weak and ill. The events of the day have taken a toll on his body. Before going to bed, he asks to speak to Franny alone. Fix wants Franny to take his gun, which he still has from his police days. He has saved his gun to take his own life when the pain from the illness got too great. He is too weak to hold the gun and he asks Franny to shoot him the next day when Caroline and Marjorie are out at the grocery store. He proceeds to go through the detailed directions on how to carry out his wishes. He placates her when she resists, saying, “That’s all you got to do. No one is ever going to think it was you. And it won’t be you, it’s me. It’s you helping me. I wouldn’t put you in a bad spot” (267). Franny tells him she can’t, even as he is trying to explain how to do it. Fix falls asleep, and Franny takes the gun out of the room.
That night, Franny has a dream of Holly. They are both young again, standing in the Virginia field where Cal died. Holly tells young Franny about the history of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She reminds Franny of how Cal used to look for the arrowheads of the Mattaponi Indians. She then shifts abruptly, remembering the night of Cal’s death: “‘You took the gun then, remember?’ Holly said. ‘You brought it back to Caroline later that night.’” (269). Franny remembers being left with Cal’s lifeless body while the other children ran for help. She took the gun that Cal still had in his sock, so that no one would get in trouble, and “[she] remembered being glad to have something else to worry about, something other than Cal” (270).
She is woken from her dream by a phone call from the hospital. The doctor informs her that Teresa has died.
Chapter 8 Summary
The story switches back in time to when Teresa is 72 years old and has retired from her job. She buys a plane ticket to visit Holly, who is now 45 years old and has been living in Switzerland at a Zen center for the past 25 years. Her layover in Paris reminds her of her honeymoon, when Bert and Teresa traveled to Paris, much in love. The thought repels her: “It was unnerving to remember that now, at seventy-two, spreading strawberry jam on the tip of her croissant, how much she had loved him. She could barely hold the thought in her mind” (277).
As Holly waits for her mother to arrive, she remembers what drew her to the Zen center in the first place. She remembers how anxious her younger self was, always comparing herself with others and always figuring out how to be more successful. When she went to a doctor, he recommended “medication,” although she misheard him as recommending “meditation.” Even though he clarifies his mistake, she is immediately excited about seeking out meditation: “She didn’t even understand exactly what meditation entailed at that point but she knew she was going to find out” (281). Her studies eventually lead her to the Zen-Dojo Tozan in Switzerland. As her meditation practice increases, she feels she is growing closer to her brother Cal’s spirit.
Mother and daughter eagerly embrace, and Holly drives Teresa back to the center. Teresa admires the beauty of the landscape, telling Teresa that now she understands why she has chosen to live in Switzerland. At the Zen center, Teresa tries to meditate, following Holly’s direction. She has a hard time understanding the point of meditation and is frustrated that she can’t meditate like the others. On the eighth day of her visit, suddenly she has a vision of her children on the day that 15-year-old Cal died. She can see everything that happened that day, from the moment that the children leave the house to the fatal moment when Cal is stung by the bee. Then she feels his spirit come rushing to her: “He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back” (297). Mother and son are reunited, beyond the boundaries of life and death.
Chapter 9 Summary
While Caroline spends Christmas with their father, Franny, her husband Kumar, and her two step-children, Ravi and Amit, travel to Virginia to spend Christmas with their mother Beverly. Beverly is married to her third husband, Jack Dine. When they arrive, they discover that Beverly is giving a Christmas party, which includes Jack’s sons and their families. Jack has dementia. He does not remember Franny, and he treats Kumar as if he is a servant. Franny feels overwhelmed, especially since she had no idea there would be a party: “She knew the Dine boys, that’s what they were called late into their fifties, but their wives and second wives confused her, their children, in some cases two sets, some grown and married, others still small” (305).
Franny slips away from the party, escaping the numerous guests, and visits her stepfather Bert, who lives only a few miles away. He greets her warmly, happy for her to be coming home. He tells her he will be visiting Jeanette’s family for Christmas and hopes to visit Holly soon as well. He hasn’t been able to reconnect with Albie. “I don’t think he ever got over my leaving his mother” (318). Franny urges him to call nonetheless.
When she leaves Bert’s house, she pauses on the porch, remembering when Albie lived in the house when they were teenagers. One night she found him in a sleeping bag, outside in the cold, refusing to come in because he was high and he knew Bert and Beverly would be upset. So Franny crawled in the sleeping bag with him, comforting him when he said that he missed his mother. She eventually convinces him to come inside. Neither Bert nor Beverly notice.
Franny realizes she never told that story to Leo, and she is glad to have that story safe from both the book and the movie: “She had needed to keep something for herself” (322).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
While the final chapters move into the future, they also continue to circle back to the past. The Keating and Cousins family members return to their common stories, reflecting on what aspects of the story are still missing, eager to learn something new. This nonlinear structure resists the traditional expectations of a story, such as rising action, climax, and suspense, as characters continually ask about the past to fill in gaps, thus repeating stories over and over from different points of view. When Franny is hearing a new story from over thirty years ago, learning about how Fix had helped Teresa after Albie got in trouble, she wonders, “How could she have heard a story so many times and just now realize that all of the interesting parts had been left out” (241).
As the story approaches the end of the parents’ lives, at least for Fix and Teresa, the story refuses to allow death to be the end of the story. In fact, the nonlinear structure of the novel allows the chapter in which Teresa dies to be immediately juxtaposed with a flashback chapter, going back a few years to when Teresa was reunited not only with Holly, who has been living abroad in Switzerland, but also with her dead son Cal during a meditation session. Although Cal’s death occurred thirty years ago, this flashback is where the reader, like Teresa, is finally given more details about what happened. The flashback goes beyond the events of that day. “He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back” (297). Teresa’s story does not end with her death, but rather with her final embrace of her son Cal. Cal grows younger in her vision (fifteen, ten, five years old) until she is pregnant with Cal again, holding him in her maternal embrace. Such details defy traditional storytelling but the structure of the book, in which characters constantly revisit and revise the past, allows such poignant and magical reunions. While the early chapters focused on the burdens of children and the later chapters focus on the burdens of old age, the nonlinear storytelling allows a freedom that keeps the story from getting burdened by disease and death, instead allowing the boundaries of life to expand and include such possibilities as allowing a dead woman and a dead son to embrace once again.
This recycling of stories results in an understated tone, despite the traumatic events of divorce and death. Characters are continuously asking, tell me about that time again? to fill the gaps and holes of their memories, allowing another piece of the puzzle to be revealed.
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