Housekeeping: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The novel’s narrator and protagonist, Ruth, introduces herself and describes the complex organization of her family. She and her sister, Lucille, grew up mostly under the care of their grandmother Mrs. Sylvia Foster; when she died, they entered the care of Sylvia’s sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona; and when their aunts “fled,” the girls at last entered the care of their aunt, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher. Despite their ever-changing caregivers, Ruth and Lucille always lived in their grandmother’s house, which was built for her by her late husband, Edmund Foster. Edmund died years before Ruth was born, but it was he who moved their family to the “unlikely” town of Fingerbone, Idaho.

Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, grew up in the Midwest in an unusual house “dug out of the ground.” As Edmund grew older and began reading, he longed to escape the confines of his constricting home and small town, and took up painting as a way of imagining himself somewhere else. Eventually, longing for more, he took a train west towards the mountains and settled in Fingerbone—a damp town largely at the mercy of an ever-flooding lake. Edmund rose through the ranks as a railroad worker until one night, a “disaster” of a train wreck claimed his life. While riding into Fingerbone on tracks which ran over the large lake, the train slid off the tracks and into the water “like a weasel sliding off a rock.”

Though the residents of Fingerbone came down to the water’s edge with lamps and rope to try and salvage pieces of the wreck—and divers entered the water to look for survivors—only a couple pieces of debris (a suitcase, a seat cushion, and a head of lettuce) were retrieved. Eventually, as morning arrived, one amateur diver said he was able to find the train at the bottom of the lake, but the dive wore him out and he could not descend to it again. The boy, though, had a reputation in town for being “an ingenious liar,” and “his story was neither believed or disbelieved.” By the next evening, the lake had iced and “sealed itself over.”

The accident turned three Fingerbone women in to widows—among them was Ruth’s grandmother Sylvia. Though the other two widows left town and moved away to be nearer to family and friends, unable to stand the sight or smell of the lake, Sylvia remained in the house Edmund had built for her. Ruth suspects the woman never considered leaving, having spent her whole life in Fingerbone. A religious woman, Sylvia believed she’d one day be reunited with Edmund, and “became altogether as good a widow as she had been a wife.”

In the wake of Edmund’s death, Sylvia’s daughters Molly, Helen, and Sylvie—sixteen, fifteen, and thirteen, respectively—began following their mother around everywhere she went, sitting at her feet while she sewed and “cluster[ing] about her” every chance they got. Their attention, she reasoned, came from their sudden and profound awareness of her. The girls occasionally cried in the night, but on the whole, the years after Edmund’s death were “years of almost perfect serenity.” The girls grew older, and Sylvie grew more and more religious. After five peaceful years, Molly, the eldest, went off to China for missionary work while Helen—Lucille and Ruth’s mother—was courted by their father, a man neither Ruth nor Lucille can remember.

Helen married hastily and in secret, eloping much to her mother’s chagrin before “set[ting] up housekeeping” in Washington. To ease Sylvia’s disappointment, Helen and her husband returned home briefly to marry before Sylvia’s eyes in Fingerbone. A few weeks after the second wedding, Sylvie visited Helen in Seattle and then set off on her own adventures, returning home only once for her own wedding. In the course of a year, all three of Sylvia’s daughters had left home, and the quiet and instinctual rituals of their lives together were gone.

Sylvia was lonely in the wake of her daughters’ departures, feeling that in mothering them she had been “constant as daylight” but also “unremarked as daylight”—in other words, taken for granted. Sylvia took pleasure and refuge in simple tasks like hanging laundry to dry and picking new potatoes from the garden, all the while trying to push away the sad knowledge that “she had never taught [her daughters] to be kind to her.”

Seven years after leaving Fingerbone, Helen returned at last to her hometown and to her mother’s house. It was a Sunday morning when she knew Sylvia would not be at home. She deposited Ruth and Lucille on the screened-in front porch with a box of graham crackers and left. In Washington, Ruth and Lucille had lived with their mother in a sparse apartment—“two rooms at the top of a tall gray building.” The three of them had few friends or visitors except for their neighbor Bernice, an old woman with garish hair and makeup that made her look like “a young woman with a ravaging disease.”

Helen borrowed Bernice’s car for the week to drive to Fingerbone—Bernice had urged Helen to go and visit her mother while she was still living. The visit, Ruth says, turned out to be a “fateful journey”—after dropping Lucille and Ruth at Sylvia’s house, Helen drove Bernice’s car up a mountain and off a cliff into the lake at the bottom of Fingerbone, the same lake where her own father, Edmund, had perished.

After Helen’s suicide, Sylvia spent many days alone in her bedroom, uninclined to move or go out. Her friends took turns looking after the shell-shocked Ruth and Lucille, and the girls took comfort in the company of Sylvia’s eccentric friends. Sylvia cared for Ruth and Lucille for five years thereafter in a manner that was at once urgent, attentive, and “abstracted,” as if she were raising Helen all over again and trying to correct whatever mistakes she’d made in her own daughter’s youth.

Though “straight and brisk and bright” even in her old age, Sylvia soon started to decline. She lost her hair and grew stooped and small and thin. She began looking forward to leaving the house to Lucille and Ruth, and advised them to hang onto it by any means necessary, even if they had to sell off the surrounding orchards one day. After Sylvia’s death, her sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona—about ten years younger than her and nearly destitute—were grateful for the chance to live rent-free in a “rambling house surrounded by peonies and rose bushes” until Ruth and Lucille came of age.