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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Secrets, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Secrets and Curiosity
Death, Love, and Legacy
World War I and the Lost Generation
Grief and Healing
Summary
Analysis
The unnamed protagonist is “called” to see his Great Aunt Mary on her deathbed. She has been in the process of dying for days. This evening, the protagonist has come back from his girlfriend’s house, where they were studying together, to find his aunt in her final hours of life.
The first sentences of the story contrast the protagonist’s youth with Aunt Mary’s old age. The protagonist is studying for the A-level exams, which may help determine his career path, and is involved in a relatively new romantic relationship. Meanwhile, Aunt Mary is in her final hours of life. This contrast introduces the theme of legacy in death, asking readers to consider the way life continues after someone passes away. Additionally, by describing the protagonist being “called” to be present at the end of Mary’s life, the story establishes that its characters are coming from a religious background. Readers can therefore be alert to religious connotations throughout the story.
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Themes
The protagonist kneels on the threshold of Aunt Mary’s bedroom, which is crowded with family members. He observes the shrunken figure of Aunt Mary on the bed as she twists her head, her white hair damp with sweat, her hands unable to clutch the crucifix someone has placed there. She makes a horrible sound deep in her throat as she breathes, as if she’s drowning, and is unable to open her eyes fully. The protagonist’s mother takes Mary’s dentures out of her mouth, causing the lower half of Mary’s face to appear to collapse.
The gruesome description of Mary’s dying body represents death as a force of destruction, erasing Mary’s personality. In death, Mary is physically shrinking and collapsing. In light of her devout Catholicism, her inability to hold the crucifix may also suggest that her soul is leaving her body, as her body loses its hold on this spiritual symbol. Finally, she is becoming closed off to the world, struggling to take in breath and sight. She is therefore disappearing in death. The protagonist’s position on the threshold of the room resonates metaphorically with this transitional state between life and death. Additionally, by kneeling on the threshold, he also demonstrates his role as a bystander, unsure of his place at Mary’s death. This bystander role is an early key into the tenuous nature of his relationship to Mary, as well as an important element to his grieving process.
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The sound Aunt Mary is making becomes intolerable to the protagonist, making him mourn the loss of her dignity. He retreats to her sitting room, where he sits “trembling with anger or sorrow,” staring at the vase of withered irises on the table. Finally, he hears women weeping in Aunt Mary’s bedroom.
The protagonist flashes back to his memories of Aunt Mary. She is a small person, with fresh skin and white, wavy hair. She wears no jewelry except for a gold locket and a worn cameo ring, which the protagonist stares at when she reads to him. At first, she reads fairy tales, but as he gets older, she reads extracts from famous novels, her favorite extract being Pip’s meeting with Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. He sometimes interrupts her to ask about the ring, and loves to hear how her grandmother gave it to her as a brooch. But she tires quickly of his questions and turns back to the story, telling him, “Don’t be so inquisitive.”
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One day, the protagonist enters Aunt Mary’s room as she sits at her desk “copying figures,” the vase of irises on the table vibrating slightly. He asks if she has any stamps for his stamp collection, and she walks over to the bureau in the corner and unlocks it. Inside, letters, postcards, and bills bulge out of the bureau’s pigeon holes. She gives him the postcards so that he can steam the stamps off of them, but she warns him to be careful not to damage the cards. She then returns to her writing.
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The postcards have interesting images from faraway places, and odd stamps the protagonist has never seen before, from Spain, France, Germany and Italy. He asks to take them downstairs, but Aunt Mary doesn’t want his mother to see the postcards, so she tells him to bring the kettle up to her room, which is secluded in the back of the house, facing the orchard.
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When the kettle boils, the protagonist steams the stamps off, which curls the postcards slightly, but Aunt Mary doesn’t notice the damage. He notices that many of the cards are from Brother Benignus, and he asks her who he is. She responds that he was a friend. The protagonist asks her if he is alive, and she tells him only that Brother Benignus is dead now, then warns him not to let the kettle run dry. After he has taken all the stamps off and replaced the postcards in their proper pigeon hole, he reaches for the bundle of letters in the bureau. But Aunt Mary quickly stops him, her voice unusually harsh, telling him he can touch anything else but the letters.
The protagonist then looks through some old papers and finds an old photograph of a beautiful girl. She has dark hair, pulled tightly back and knotted in a braid on the top of her head, and a thin mouth that looked as if it had just finished smiling. Her brown eyes are dark and knowing. He asks who she is, and Aunt Mary asks him if he thinks the girl is beautiful. When he replies that he does, Aunt Mary tells him that it is a picture of herself as a girl. He is glad that he pleased her, since she gave him the stamps.
The protagonist continues looking through the photographs and finds a picture of a man smoking a cigarette by the sea. He asks Aunt Mary who the man is, and she tells him that he was a friend, adding that the protagonist better run downstairs to see what is cooking. Instead, he looks at the back of the picture and sees the words, “John, Aug ‘15, Ballintoye.” Surprised, he tells his aunt that he thought the man was Brother Benignus, and she looks at him but does not answer. When he asks if “[her] friend was killed in the war,” she says no at first but then says that he may have been. Smiling, she tells the protagonist that he is “far too inquisitive” and urges him to go downstairs.
One summer evening, the protagonist is doing his homework while his mother organizes the household junk drawers. Aunt Mary comes downstairs and tells the family she is going to Devotions. She stops at the mirror to pat her hair before leaving the house. The protagonist sits for a long time wondering if he will have the time he needs to sneak up to her room.
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After 10 minutes, the protagonist rushes upstairs to her bureau and unlocks it. He pretends for a moment to look at the postcards before reaching for the bundle of letters and taking off the brittle elastic band. He opens one at random and reads a letter that begins, “My dearest Mary.” The writer tells Mary about censoring letters that are being sent from the battlefront, written mostly by illiterate soldiers who do not have the words to express what they feel. He tells Mary how proud he is that she is a teacher, bringing literacy to the next generation. The protagonist skims to the signature, where the writer professes his love for Mary and signs his name as John.
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In the next letter the protagonist opens, John writes to Mary that his memories of her keep him sane. He reflects on the day they climbed the head at Ballycastle and lay down in a hollow out of the wind, in the warm, dry grass. He remembers how her hair was undone, and how he kissed her for the first time, and the look of disbelief on her face afterward that made him laugh. He writes that he is laughing at himself now, with his feet in the thick mud and “his head in the clouds.”
In the next letter, John tells Mary that he is so cold it is difficult to write. His legs and feet have gone completely numb, and the ground is unbelievably cold. The dead lie frozen; you can tell they aren’t living by their slate-colored faces. He has lost all feeling besides a “sheer white trembling anger.” He tells Mary that if he survives, he will be a different person, but “the only thing that remains constant is [his] love for [her].” He then describes watching a man die beside him, drowning in his own blood after a piece of shrapnel pierced his neck.
In the next letter, John apologizes for not writing for so long. He is writing from a hospital bed, where he had been for two weeks before he regained consciousness. It took another two weeks for him to build the courage to write this letter. He tells Mary that he has been thinking a lot “about the war and about myself and about you.” He tells her he feels strongly that he needs to sacrifice something after the horrors he experienced, and that “in some strange way Christ has spoken to me through the carnage.”
After reading this line, the protagonist hears Aunt Mary’s footsteps on the stairs. He rushes frantically to slip the letters back in their envelopes but ends up crumpling them. He spreads the elastic over the bundle, but it snaps, so he squeezes the scattered letters back into their pigeon hole and slams the bureau shut loudly.
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Aunt Mary enters at this moment, and she immediately guesses what the protagonist has been doing. “You have been reading my letters,” she says quietly, and the protagonist cannot respond. She slaps him across the face and tells him to leave her room. As he exits, she hisses, “You are dirt, and always will be dirt. I will remember this till the day I die.”
Back in the present the protagonist builds a big fire in Aunt Mary’s sitting room so that his mother can clear out Mary’s belongings and turn it into his study. His mother enters the room, unlocks the bureau, and begins burning his aunt’s papers. The protagonist asks her who Brother Benignus was, and she responds that she wouldn’t know, “your aunt kept herself very much to herself.” She only knows that Brother Benignus would send Aunt Mary books.
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His mother then comes to the letters, takes off the elastic band that contains them and puts it aside in her pile of useful things. She skims one letter before throwing them on top of the fire. The protagonist asks his mother if Aunt Mary said anything about him before she died, and she responds that “the poor thing was too far gone to speak.” She then continues to burn the letters.
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