The Summer Wives

Joseph Vargas is the son of the Fleet Rock lighthouse keeper and occupies a liminal position: educated at Brown University, gifted at sailing and shipbuilding, warm and articulate, yet irrevocably marked by his working-class Portuguese origins and, more secretly, by his status as Hugh Fisher’s illegitimate son. This hidden paternity places him at the center of The Corrosive Nature of Family Secrets, shaping his relationship with his half-sister Isobel Fisher, his bond with the father he knows—the stoic lobsterman Pascoal Vargas—and finally his imprisonment for a murder his own mother committed.

From the moment Miranda watches him dive into the sea to rescue old Mr. Silva on the morning of her mother’s wedding, Joseph is characterized by physical courage and moral clarity. He quotes Shakespeare to Miranda with the same ease he handles lobster traps, and he seeks to end Isobel’s marriage to Clay out of a respect for her desire to leave the island and seek a more fulfilling life, which contrasts the possessive and entitled nature of many other male islanders. His plan to build yachts by hand gives him a specific ambition that the class structure of Winthrop Island will not allow him to pursue. Joseph’s guilty plea and imprisonment represent the ultimate operation of Class Segregation as Social Shield—the community’s willingness to assign blame to a fisherman’s son rather than examine the elite families’ own moral failures—and his imprisonment is rendered more unjust by the revelation, delivered on Mrs. Vargas’s deathbed, that his mother Bianca was the actual killer.

In the 1969 timeline, Joseph appears as a fugitive who has escaped prison solely to tend to his dying mother, an act of filial loyalty that reaffirms his character. He carries the marks of 17 years in a state penitentiary, yet his gentleness with Miranda in the lighthouse room and his instinctive dive into the water to save the drowning Marshal Johnny confirm that nothing essential has changed in him. He resists Miranda’s plea to sail away with her, insisting she has a public life worth living, and his escape is followed by a year of anonymous postcards from Bermuda, Cumberland Island, and Belize. However, he embraces Miranda’s choice to abandon her public life and be with him, showing how he respects her decisions and allowing them both to finally live a fulfilled life free from stifling, prejudiced expectations.

Isobel Fisher is a foil to Miranda and one of the novel’s most psychologically complex figures, moving across the narrative from a popular, reckless young woman to a guarded, diminished recluse. She is introduced in 1951 as the golden daughter of Greyfriars, someone whose “lean, straight-hipped athleticism” and scarlet lipstick project an image of effortless social command (34). However, her restlessness reveals itself almost immediately; she cannot abide the island’s codes of polite stagnation and says to Miranda that there is “a vast fabric of tender little lies” covering everything real (77). This perceptiveness makes her sympathy for outsiders—including Miranda, whom she immediately welcomes as a sister—entirely credible.

Isobel’s arc is tragic, as she never leaves the island or culture as she yearned to. Her sense of betrayal at Miranda bonding with Joseph caused her to in turn betray them both, leading to the death of her father. Isobel carries this resentment and guilt in silence for nearly two decades, staying on the island to care for their mother Francine and half-brother Hugh. Isobel judges Miranda for leaving, even though she was alienated and essentially forced out by the community, because Isobel privately envies Miranda’s ability to leave. By 1969 she has become the household’s emotional caretaker, knitting in corners and avoiding the world, the vigor of youth condensed into bitterness. Her willingness to participate in Joseph’s escape suggests that she has found a form of penance, however incomplete. Her rekindled proximity to Clay Monk at the novel’s end gestures toward a possible rediscovery of happiness or love, but Williams leaves this deliberately unresolved.

Bianca Medeiro is the 1930 narrator. An orphan raised by her aunt and uncle in the Medeiros’ general store, her infatuation with Hugh Fisher—observed from a distance before she ever speaks to him—is rendered with a mixture of romantic intensity and social pathology. Bianca understands herself as a woman chosen by God for something extraordinary, and when Hugh seduces her in the pool cabana after his father’s death, she interprets the event as a sacred union. This belief is not naïveté alone but the psychological consequence of being told from childhood that she belongs to nobody, a wound that makes Hugh’s declarations of eternal love feel like the first genuine claim anyone has laid on her existence.

Her subsequent seduction of Pascoal Vargas—cold, deliberate, aimed at securing a husband and perceived legitimacy for her unborn child—marks the distance between Bianca’s romantic self-image and her actual capacity for calculation. She becomes a figure of tragedy most fully in the 1969 deathbed confession scene, where she reveals to Miranda (whom she mistakes for a priest) that she, not Joseph, killed Hugh Fisher. The motive was Hugh’s second wife Francine’s pregnancy, which Bianca read as a final betrayal of the vow he had once made her. Her decision to allow her son to take the blame for her crime is the novel’s most destructive instance of The Corrosive Nature of Family Secrets, as the events leading to the death are a cumulation of numerous intersecting, painful lies and manipulations that must be revealed through Miranda’s return.

Hugh Fisher Senior appears most substantially in the 1930 timeline and functions as the novel’s primary emblem of patrician moral failure. He is introduced as a golden, Harvard-educated aesthete whose beauty and charm conceal the violence of his upbringing—an abusive father with an alcohol addiction who shot his son’s dog and beat his wife. Hugh’s seduction of Bianca Medeiro is sincere on its surface but ultimately exploitative. His thematic significance is that the earnestness of his feelings doesn’t matter when he still creates and exploits a power imbalance between himself and Bianca, one that he never fully acknowledges or takes responsibility for. He’s not willing to make any sacrifices in his social life by being honest about his feelings or actions.

He genuinely believes himself in love with her while simultaneously progressing toward marriage with Abigail Dumont, the socially appropriate match his family’s aspirations require. His offer to keep Bianca as a mistress after his wedding is not presented as a kind of emotional logic that the island’s class structure makes thinkable, the same logic by which Class Segregation as Social Shield allows the families to use working-class women for pleasure without consequence. His murder at Bianca’s hands is the novel’s central event, but it is a manifestation of his own deal with her that—should he ever love another woman more—she can kill him. After living a life without consequences for his actions, his death is presented as a tragic irony.

Miranda’s mother Francine is a static character whose beauty is the first fact the novel establishes about her and whose emotional trajectory moves from vulnerability to steeled endurance. A secretary at Foxcroft who married a man of principle before widowhood left her poor, she is described by Miranda as a woman of “childlike” spirit whose faith in the world was cracked by her first husband’s death. Her marriage to Hugh Fisher represents genuine love on her part, and the warmth between them at the wedding ceremony is one of the novel’s few scenes of uncomplicated happiness. 

After Hugh’s murder, Francine raises Hugh Jr. alone at Greyfriars, sells the yacht, watches the Fisher stock collapse, and converts the estate into an artist colony to pay the bills. Isobel remarks how she could only convince Francine to take in artists as her stepmother viewed the idea of taking regular boarders as demeaning, showing the impact her loss of status and wealth had on her among the otherwise wealthy islanders. In the present, Miranda sees her as “made of steel. Someone had taken my exquisite mother and tempered her in a forge” (198). Her estrangement from Miranda, driven by grief and the public scandal of Miranda’s defense of Joseph, lasts years but is eventually repaired by correspondence. In the novel’s end, Miranda and her mother live peacefully together at Greyfriars.

Clayton Monk enters the novel as Isobel’s fiancé, weak-willed and prone to impulsive actions when hurt by Isobel. A B-17 pilot who ditched a crippled aircraft in a French field and walked away with a broken arm, Clay returned from the war craving ordinary domestic life, a desire Isobel cannot share. His unrequited devotion to Isobel falters when she publicly rejects him. In 1951, he kisses Miranda on the sixth-hole green after Isobel breaks their engagement—a drunken action he regrets immediately—and his subsequent marriage to Livy Huxley is an act of pragmatism rather than passion. 

By 1969, noticeably miserable as Livy repeatedly cheats on him, Clay still manages to sponsor Hugh Jr.’s education and welcome Miranda back to the island. He once again kisses Miranda but cannot sleep with her, as they start crying, demonstrating how he is driven primarily by sadness and loneliness over his circumstances. In the novel’s climax, he shoots a warning gun at the Coast Guard cutter to give Joseph a chance to escape, a decision that reveals his deeper morality and disregard for the elitist politics governing the island. The novel ends with Isobel noted as spending significant time at Clay’s property, signalling their young romance was rekindled.

Hugh Jr. appears only in the 1969 timeline, where he is a figure of unrealized potential and as Miranda’s primary emotional anchor during her return. Born months after his father’s murder, raised by his mother and half-sister, he has grown into a well-liked, emotionally open young man. He welcomes Miranda without hesitation, stands up to the Huxleys at the Club with an authoritative demeanor, and recognizes almost immediately that she has not come to the island merely to heal family wounds. He insists on sailing off to see the world after school, saying “I want to be. I want to do” (125), a sentiment that echoes the ambitions both Isobel and Joseph once harbored. Miranda’s purchase of a sailboat for him, quietly stocked and fitted out, is her way of ensuring that at least one member of the Fisher bloodline escapes the island’s gravitational pull. His brief tryst with Livy Monk adds a note of recklessness and vulnerability that connects him to both his father and to Isobel, but his shame afterward and his willingness to face it honestly suggest a character more capable of growth than either.

The Countess—Isobel’s biological mother and former wife of Hugh Fisher—is a complex minor character, regarded as very intelligent and indifferent to the prejudices that guide islander culture. Her departure from Hugh and from Winthrop Island stems from her refusal to accept the island’s social codes, including its tacit tolerance of Joseph’s friendship with Isobel. She twice serves as Miranda’s rescuer. After Miranda is exiled from the island following the scandal, the Countess drives her directly to New York and sails with her to Paris the next day, an act of solidarity that gives Miranda a sense of belonging and security. She then introduces Miranda to Carroll Goring and, dying suddenly in an accident at the Ritz, inadvertently delivers Miranda into his control. 

Spending her final years closer to Miranda adds to Isobel’s bitterness toward Miranda, as Isobel feels robbed of both of her parents through Miranda’s actions. However, Isobel bought into the atmosphere of the island more than the Countess, demonstrated through the scene wherein she sharply corrects Isobel’s gossip that a local, Francesco, died by suicide on the cliffs. She remains an enigmatic character and an example of a woman striving to escape the confines of a class-driven, patriarchal society.

Maria Medeiro—Bianca’s aunt and adoptive parent and the keeper of the general store—appears across both timelines as a guardian of the island’s deepest secrets. In 1951, she warns the teenage Miranda that the end of summer is “when the trouble starts, sweetie” (257), a warning based on her own experience with the conflict between her daughter Francesca, Bianca, and Hugh Fisher. In 1969, upon the adult Miranda’s return to Winthrop, she doesn’t appear willing to discuss old conflicts, but she is kind and receptive to Miranda’s presence in contrast to other, more judgmental residents. She delivers lobsters with a note tied to a claw, serves as an informal courier between Joseph and Miranda, and sharply rebukes her daughter Laura’s resentment of the Schuyler family. Her loyalty runs to both the Vargas family and to some private code of fairness that overrides clan loyalty; while she judges Bianca’s choice to “steal” Francesca’s fiancé, she doesn’t blame Joseph as a child of Bianca or Miranda as a stepchild of Hugh.

Pascoal Vargas is a minor character who nonetheless bears a structural weight in the novel. The lightkeeper, former rumrunner, and devoted husband of Bianca, he is introduced in the 1930 timeline as a man past 40 who resembles, in Bianca’s uncharitable estimation, a leathery gnome. He marries Bianca knowing—or at least suspecting—that he is raising another man’s child, and he treats Joseph kindly as his own. He later comments to Miranda, “What else was I going to do? She was my wife. He was my son” (247), demonstrating an honorable character that Bianca was too heartbroken by her conflict with Hugh to appreciate. He dies in the winter before the 1969 timeline begins, and his absence from Fleet Rock leaves both Bianca and Joseph without the emotional balance he provided.