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Chapter 11: The King in the Tree
- University of South Carolina Press
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CHAPTER 11 The King in the Tree The combination of the three novellas in The King in the Tree is likely to pique the reader’s curiosity, just as the organization of short stories in a collection such as In the Penny Arcade raises questions of how the stories fit together . Reviewers generally agreed the three novellas were dark renditions of love relations. Jeff Zaleski writes of “these stories as smart and fresh as they are grim,” and Christopher Paddock comments on these “three brilliant novellas ” as “each a variation on the theme of heartache: these are tales of love lost, betrayed, or unrequited.” In her Sunday New York Times review, Laura Miller calls the first of the novellas, “Revenge,” a “gothic masterpiece” in focusing on Millhauser’s fascination with the “tiger” of the imagination: “This writer is in love with a large, very beautiful and not especially tame tiger, and at its best the fiction he produces is an exquisite negotiation with the beast.”1 “Revenge” is unquestionably the most dramatic of this triad. The story’s premise is that the widow-persona is giving a prospective buyer (and readers who are “listening in”) a tour of the house she is selling. An analog is the dramatic monologue as practiced by nineteenth-century English poet Robert Browning. In fact the widower-persona of Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess” also acts as a house guide and voices resentment against a dead spouse. This widow discloses that her deceased history-professor husband was having an affair and indicates that the prospective buyer was the guilty party. Readers are drawn into this “whodunit” by the expectation of discovering the full “story.” How will the prospective buyer respond to the widow’s having fingered her as the “other woman”? How did the hypotenuse of the love triangle go missing? Where is this story leading? Because the widow occasionally speaks with barely contained rage toward her dead husband and THE KING IN THE TREE 107 more subtly toward the other woman, readers wonder if the story will end with an attempt to harm the widow’s listener, who has appeared under false pretenses, as an “innocent” house-hunter, rather than as the “home-wrecker” she is. Millhauser adapts the focus on architecture evident elsewhere in his fiction to emphasize the implications of individual spaces in a house. From the “Front Hall,” opening on the house’s public section, with the “Living Room” the widow moves to the “Kitchen,” but not without pointing out: “Door to the cellar. Back porch.” She announces she wants to show the woman the porch but not the cellar, leading the detective-reader to wonder what may be down there—especially since the widow does not use the contemporary term, “basement,” but the old-fashioned term, “cellar.” In the kitchen, traditionally a domestic, “feminine” space, the “heart” of the home, the persona offers the other woman tea and reveals her dead husband’s confession of his affair. After allowing her guest to process this revelation and the suspense to build, the persona reveals what some readers suspected: Robert confesses the other woman’s name. “Revenge” has begun to take its course as the widow hits her victimizer-victim with an even bigger blow: Robert betrayed his mistress by revealing that she meant nothing to him; she was “just a body” (The King in the Tree 13), as though the phrase were Robert’s. Perhaps he said that to protect his betrayed wife’s feelings; perhaps he was just another husband having a cheap affair. But the tour must move on to the “Back Porch,” where there is “so much more to tell” (13), and this “black widow” has a powerful tale to spin for this “fly” she has invited into her “parlor.” In the “Back Porch” section, the widow’s tale turns perverse, hinting at her murderous thoughts, following Robert’s confession. Intent on poisoning the well of her potential victim’s love of Robert, the persona voices the nightmare of any “other woman” by relating the story of entering her rival’s home at night and standing over her with a kitchen knife. To turn the knife figuratively , the persona asks if Robert ever shared the story of this and subsequent night visits to demonstrate how little he cared for the other woman, putting her life at risk to continue enjoying her body. If readers are not totally drawn into the widow’s murderous rage, they might...