49 pages • 1-hour read
Mildred Pierce
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Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
Once Veda exits Mildred’s life, Mildred becomes obsessed with winning her back.
Bert tells Mildred that Veda is going to be singing one evening on a popular radio program. He invites Mildred to go with him to the studio and see Veda in person—Veda asked him to come. Mildred offers Bert a steak to instead listen to Veda sing on the radio in her Laguna Beach restaurant. During the broadcast, Veda turns out to have the most magnificent voice people in the restaurant have ever heard.
To reestablish her relationship with Veda, Mildred devises a plan: She will take over payment for Veda’s voice lessons with Mr. Treviso, the musician who earlier rejected Veda but who has now become her teacher. Mr. Treviso, however, will not talk to Mildred about Veda, explaining that Veda warned him Mildred would try this stunt. He tells Mildred bluntly that Veda is both a complete narcissist and a musical genius—a rare coloratura soprano, a voice that seems always to be found in self-centered singers. He advises Mildred to stay out of Veda’s life—she will never be a caring, trustworthy person—but Mildred cannot let go. She devises a plan to get to Veda through Monty.
Chapter 15 Summary
Mildred dresses elegantly and drives around Pasadena with Monty in search of a new home. They end up at his house. After they have sex, Mildred asks Monty to marry him and tells him she wants to buy his house and asks how much he wants for it. Monty and Mildred go to Arizona to marry. Even though her wedding is in the newspaper, Mildred doesn't hear from Veda and becomes discouraged and frustrated.
One night, Mildred gets home to a surprise party. The number one guest is Veda, who sings “Here Comes the Bride.” She and Mildred have a warm reconciliation.
Following the party, Veda spends the night. Feeling extremely fulfilled, Mildred goes to sleep feeling happier than she's ever been in her life: “When Mildred went to bed her stomach hurt from laughter, her heart ached from happiness” (268).
Chapter 16 Summary
The days that follow are the “apotheosis” (269), or high point, of Mildred’s life. She follows Veda from one performance to another, thrilled at her daughter’s growing recognition. Veda’s agent, Mr. Levinson, signs her to a radio contract sponsored by a cigarette company. When another agent has an alternative deal worth even more money, Veda curses Levinson. Levinson calmly slaps her twice and makes her apologize before he will allow her to perform at the Hollywood Bowl. Veda’s appearance at the Bowl is a great success—“the climax of Mildred’s life” (278).
Mildred’s elaborate efforts to bring Monty and Veda back into her life involved many expenses, depleting her finances and leaving her unable to pay her business expenses. Wally, who had helped Mildred incorporate so she would never lose her home or personal holdings to creditors, now represents several of her creditors. In a lengthy, frank meeting at her Laguna Beach restaurant, these creditors, with Wally as their spokesman, demand she repay them. Wally questions Mildred about Veda’s role in creating the problem. Veda, the single largest drain on Mildred’s money, is accumulating large expenses while paying Mildred nothing from her income, which is at least $500 a week. Though the creditors cannot seize Mildred’s property, they are only willing to continue supplying Mildred’s restaurants if Veda pays her own expenses.
Mildred goes to Glendale that night to see Bert. Bert is concerned that Wally and the creditors may be using a legal smokescreen to snare Mildred and Veda’s money. He tells her to get Veda out of the house to avoid any process server. The three of them will meet for breakfast the following morning to strategize.
When Mildred gets to the Pasadena mansion, she can’t find Veda. After Mildred knocks on Monty’s door, Monty won’t let her in, arguing about the necessity of looking for Veda. Mildred reaches in and turns on the light and sees Veda in Monty’s bed, dispassionately listening to them discuss her. Discovered, Monty tries to lay the blame for their affair on Mildred, while Veda rises totally naked from Monty’s bed, stands in front of the dresser mirror, and combs her hair. Mildred grabs Veda by the throat, throttling her. Veda’s face turns red as she scratches Mildred’s face. Monty strikes Mildred to get her off of Veda. Veda marches down the staircase, plays some chords on the piano, and finds she is unable to sing.
Chapter 17 Summary
The final chapter takes place the following Christmas.
In a flashback, Cain explains what happened after the altercation between Mildred and Veda. Mildred went to Reno, Nevada, to obtain a divorce from Monty. Her four businesses, all part of Mildred Pierce, Inc., went into receivership. She rented out her Pasadena mansion and moved back to her Glendale home. Because of Veda’s notoriety, the newspapers reported the choking incident and Veda’s losing her ability to sing. Unable to perform, Veda was released by the cigarette company and fired by her agent. Veda then came to Reno and made a show of forgiving Mildred. Mildred meanwhile struck a deal to supply pies to her original restaurant, run by Mr. Chris.
In the present, after Christmas dinner, a taxi shows up. Veda—her voice suddenly healed—tells Bert and Mildred that she is leaving for New York with Monty. Mildred realizes Veda has faked the voice injury to get released from her contract and sign a new one for $2500 a week. Mildred describes Veda’s clever plan, accusing her of being willing to do whatever it took “to hide what had really been going on, the love affair you’d been having with your mother’s husband, with your own stepfather” (297). Mildred tells Veda to never come back.
After Veda leaves, Mildred falls on her bed and sobs. Bert comes to her with a drink and together they say, “To hell with her” (298).
Chapters 14-17 Analysis
The unhealthy, entangled, emotionally manipulative relationship between Mildred and Veda reaches a crescendo in the last section of the novel. The sexual competition Cain has built up over the course of his book reaches its climax as Veda sleeps with Monty while he is married to Mildred. This coupling breaks many taboos—there’s a hint of pedophilia in the fact that Monty has known Veda since she was a child, as well as the suggestion of incest since he is now legally her stepfather. Drawing on the conventions of noir and noir-adjacent genres like pulp fiction, Cain makes the subtext of his novel text in the scene where rather than being ashamed of her mother finding her in bed with Monty, she rises from the bed naked and brushes her hair in the full-length mirror. Veda is the ultimate narcissist, and here, she enacts the behavior of the mythical figure who gave this term its name: Narcissus, the character from Greek mythology who died because he couldn’t bear to part from his reflection.
Both Mildred and Veda go to extreme lengths to achieve their ends, engaging in complex multi-step plots—Mildred to trap Veda, and Veda to enrich herself. The high level of executive function that makes Mildred a successful business owner becomes nightmarish in her personal life. Mildred is almost a caricature of the maternal, so desperate to bring her daughter back into her life that she undertakes a wild scheme. Knowing that Veda has no connections to high society anymore, Mildred marries Monty without loving him, and then depletes her financial resources to once again make his mansion a locus for the elite. The plan works—as soon as Veda learns that Monty is once again a rich playboy, she returns. Meanwhile, Veda builds on the earlier partial success of her pregnancy scam. This time, she parlays her fight with Mildred into a faked vocal injury that allows her to escape a lower-paying contract in favor of a more lucrative one.
The resolution of the major issues in Mildred’s life is a return to her roots. She finds herself once again emotionally close to her first husband, Bert—still the first person she goes to in a crisis, as evidenced by the emergency nighttime conversation they have about how to deal with Mildred’s creditors potentially coming after Mildred’s savings and Veda’s income. Although they were first brought together by sexual attraction (when Mildred was 17), now this more adult meeting of the minds causes renewed feelings: The night, “plus a little intermingling of rye and seltzer, had brought Bert nearer to her than he had ever been before” (287). At the end of the novel, Mildred rejects overwhelming sexual passion and histrionic drama for stability and domesticity: She is married again to Bert and living in their old home in Glendale. The novel also punishes her by taking away her business: No longer a high-flying restaurateur, Mildred is reduced to once again make money by selling pies, almost as though her capitalist success could only have come with a grimy personal life. Part of putting boundaries around Mildred’s recovered traditional married life is shutting Veda out. Interesting, although Bert is Veda’s father, the novel is unconcerned with this filial relationship. Bert must simply pick between the women in his life; having decided now to be Mildred’s champion, he pushes her to pronounce their relationship with Veda at an end. It is left to readers to decide whether Mildred really has finally let go of her desire to be loved by Veda and included in her life.
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