Ask Again, Yes

Part 2 reveals both past and present challenges in the characters’ lives: an unexpected pregnancy, a stillbirth, falling in love, alcohol addiction. Each of the principal family members, reeling from the shooting, struggles to handle the impact of the event. They utilize a variety of strategies for handling trauma: escape, ignorance, denial, silence. None find their way to any sort of peace or redemption. The characters remain in full retreat from the implications of the shooting.

Francis copes by diving into a painful regimen of physical rehabilitation. Keane details the exact nature of Francis’s wounds and the incremental improvements in his ability to walk and to make sentences. The regimen, although grueling, works. Francis regains much of his mobility; multiple surgeries ensure he keeps his vision. Yet Francis remains deeply troubled. He cannot look at himself in the mirror, he feels isolated from his family, and he does not know what to do with the anger he feels toward Anne. He refuses to deal with the implications beyond his physical recovery. The affair he has later is both a surrender to ego and a physical relief, much like the painkillers he took during his rehabilitation.

Brian’s coping strategy is the least useful and the most hurtful. He brought the gun into the house; he forgot to lock the pistol. He saw his wife, on a rampage, get the gun from the kitchen cabinet. Rather than confront the dangerous situation, he simply headed upstairs. Afterward, he runs away, quitting the force rather than facing queries about his accountability. He moves out of the neighborhood and leaves his son behind in the care of his brother. Much of this behavior can be attributed to Brian’s alcohol dependence. For Brian (and later for Joan Kavanaugh, who is struggling after a divorce), alcohol is another way of leaving the situation rather than facing up to it.

Anne copes by remaining silent. In the Albany mental hospital, she lapses into a guarded and absolute silence (at one point, she declines even to meet with Peter). Placed on a variety of mood-altering pharmaceuticals, Anne festers in her pain. She has no voice—indeed, she is given no section in Part 2. She is neglected and forgotten; the state believes the best thing for Anne is to keep her away from society.  

Peter and Kate handle the trauma through complicit denial. Their families never talk about the shooting. Not surprisingly, Kate and Peter both come to the same conclusion: Their love compels the present and defines the future. They have no need to bother with the past—ironic, given that Peter’s field of history and Kate’s field of forensics rely on exactly the opposite assumption. Kate simplifies the entire event, telling both her mother and later Peter that Anne hated her, and that’s it. When Eddie Marik first approaches Kate, he asks her to talk about the shooting, an offer she declines. Her mother advises her to keep busy, but Kate’s hectic schedule serves the same purpose as Francis’s painkillers and Brian’s alcohol.

If Kate denies reality through a strategy of deliberate simplification, Peter takes that simplification to its logical extreme. When his mother declines to meet him anymore, he decides the past is the past. His mother, the shooting, and his festering anger simply have nothing to do with him. Not entirely surprisingly, Peter edges into self-medicating with alcohol.

In Part 2, the only character who offers any promising avenue to genuine recovery and redemption is Uncle George. His advice to his nephew, as Peter leaves for college, balances an embrace of the past with a fragile hope for the future. The closing scene—a drunk Peter, a coward in full retreat, sneaking back to his dorm room, trying hard not to make any noise—suggests exactly the problem: Everyone is tiptoeing around, trying not to make noise.