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Lucille Stone
Ruth and Lucille’s mother. A quiet and mysterious woman who married a man named Reginald Stone in a haste, and yet separated from him so soon after having her girls that neither of them remember the man who is technically their father. For reasons unknown and never explained, Helen brings the girls one day when they’re very young to Fingerbone, where she deposits them on their grandmother’s porch and then drives a car borrowed from her neighbor back in Spokane, Bernice, straight into the lake which claimed her father Edmund’s life years ago. Helen’s suicide is the book’s inciting incident, and yet the girls never learn much about who their mother was, what she was really like, or what plagued her and drove her to take her own life. The girls are never particularly emotional when it comes to remembrances of their mother, but over time, Ruth begins to remember her as cold and distant while Lucille remembers her as loving, doting, and kind.
Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother Quotes in Housekeeping
The Housekeeping quotes below are all either spoken by Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother or refer to Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1 Quotes
Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.
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Chapter 3 Quotes
We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.
“Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”
“But what was she like?”
“She was good in school.”
Lucille sighed.
“It’s hard to describe someone you know so well.”
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Chapter 4 Quotes
Altogether [the snowwoman’s] figure suggested a woman standing in a cold wind. It seemed that we had conjured a presence. We took off our coats and hats and worked about her in silence. […] We hoped the lady would stand long enough to freeze, but in fact while we were stamping the gray snow all smooth around her, her head pitched over and smashed on the ground. This accident cost her a forearm and a breast. We made a new snowball for a head, but it crushed her eaten neck, and under the weight of it a shoulder dropped away. We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.
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Chapter 7 Quotes
Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.
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“I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. She put them all over my face, so I couldn’t breathe. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.” Lucille shuddered.
“Do you know who it was?”
“Who?”
“The woman in the dream.”
“She reminded me of Sylvie, I guess.”
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Chapter 10 Quotes
[Sylvie] did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.
But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.
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Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother Character Timeline in Housekeeping
The timeline below shows where the character Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother appears in Housekeeping. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
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...
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Helen married hastily and in secret, eloping much to her mother’s chagrin before “set[ting] up housekeeping”...
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Seven years after leaving Fingerbone, Helen returned at last to her hometown and to her mother’s house. It was a Sunday...
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Helen borrowed Bernice’s car for the week to drive to Fingerbone—Bernice had urged Helen to go...
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After Helen’s suicide, Sylvia spent many days alone in her bedroom, uninclined to move or go out....
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Chapter 2
...how things could have gone “so badly” for both Sylvia and her daughters. They discuss Helen’s suicide and Sylvie’s itinerance—they describe her has a “drifter,” and wonder how they will track...
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...arrives. She does not know that Sylvia is dead, and has written to tell her mother that she is staying in Montana. After the aunts devise a gentle response and send...
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Chapter 3
Lucille abruptly asks Sylvie to tell the two of them about their mother. None of the adults have spoken about Helen since her death, and though the girls...
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...Ruth studies Sylvie, she can’t help but think how much the woman looks like her mother. She even senses the same energy in them—both Sylvie and Helen seem “startled by the...
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...if she still knows people who live in Fingerbone. Sylvie admits she and her sisters, Helen and Molly, never had many friends in town—they mostly kept to themselves. Sylvie admits she’s...
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Chapter 4
...uncertain that Sylvie will stay with them for good. She looks so much like their mother that they find themselves conflating the two, and half-waiting for Sylvie to abandon them at...
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Chapter 6
...courtesy to Sylvie.” The girls go to the lake each day, ignoring the advice their grandmother Sylvia taught them long ago about staying away from both trains and hoboes. Ruth often...
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...As the pancakes cook, she joins in the game they’re playing, noting that she and Helen used to play the same game as girls.
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Chapter 7
...are always together, and they spend much of their days indulging in reminiscences of their mother. They have begun to remember her differently, though, and often quarrel about what she was...
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...They pass an uncomfortable night in a makeshift hut—Ruth is haunted by visions of her mother, her grandmother Sylvia, and Sylvie, dreaming the half-dreams of uneasy sleep.
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...at the kitchen table. Ruth has more upsetting half-dreams in which she’s waiting for her mother to come in the front door. She feels as if she’s dying, and though she...
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...brushing her hair and styling it different ways in the mirror. They’d once watched their mother do the same thing, and though the girls tried to interpret the moment as a...
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Chapter 8
...how the two of them are the same—about how Sylvie might as well be her mother.
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...[her] flesh” and pry the house of her body apart—she wants to be with her mother, and her grandmother Sylvia, and all those she has lost.
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...will capsize and she will sink to the bottom of the lake, just like her mother did. As she thinks of the reflective power of water, she realizes that though her...
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...as she waits with Sylvie she recalls the morning that she and Lucille found their grandmother Sylvia dead in her bed, positioned as if “she had leaped toward ether” in her...
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Chapter 9
...“like another sister.” Ruth overhears this and becomes startled when Sylvie adds that Ruth is “[Helen] all over again.” Ruth knows that the women who come by are pious and generous...
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Chapter 10
...gave one another “almost no thought [...] at all.” Ruth realizes that if her own mother had not committed suicide, and had come back from the lake to resume a normal...
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Chapter 11
...whether it happened when she followed Sylvie across the bridge above the lake, or when Helen abandoned her, or perhaps even at her own conception (an event to which she was...
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