42 pages • 1 hour read
Laura MoriartyThe Chaperone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
Mary has asked to meet Cora at Grand Central Station, and Cora nervously shows up early to wait for her. Impulsively, she buys a bouquet of roses for Mary. As soon as Mary shows up, Cora sees a resemblance to herself and knows that Mary is her mother, not a friend as she told the nuns. The two quickly acknowledge the fact and go to the train station restaurant to talk. Mary tells Cora her story.
Cora’s father was Mary’s short-term teenage boyfriend, whom she met at a dance and who disappeared to go out West when Mary told him about the pregnancy. He was 15 and Mary was 17 when Cora was conceived. Mary left for New York so her relatives in Boston wouldn’t find out about the baby, and she gave birth to Cora in a shelter for prostitutes and other women in need. She stayed in New York for six months to nurse Cora, and Cora understands that Mary “had left the first day she’d been allowed” (247). She asked that Cora be sent to a “Catholic home [orphanage]” (248), and she then returned to Boston, telling her relatives that she had gotten a new job in New York but had been robbed of her wages at knifepoint.
Mary now lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts, is married to a man she met in her twenties, and has at least three children with her husband. She warns Cora not to contact her or her family, saying, “We do stick together. If you make any trouble, you’ll find that out yourself” (244). Mary seems to have a high social status and doesn’t want Cora to jeopardize that status with the story of her conception and birth. Cora is crushed, both by the disinterest and even hostility Mary exhibited toward her as a baby and by the fact that Mary doesn’t intend to see her again. Cora asks about the woman in the red shawl whom she remembers as a toddler, and Mary says that it was just one of the women who lived at the women’s shelter, likely a prostitute. Mary takes an afternoon train back to Haverhill, and Cora notices that she pointedly leaves behind the roses.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary
Cora picks up Louise from class directly after meeting with Mary. She is exhausted and emotional after talking with her birth mother. Louise is exuberant after being selected for a permanent position with Denishawn and asked to perform in Philadelphia the next night. Ruth St. Denis meets with Cora and says that the offer is contingent on Louise abiding by the decorum and moral standards of the school, not just on her dancing ability, and that Louise can move into the school’s dormitories right after the Philadelphia trip. This would mean Cora could leave New York whenever she wanted.
Cora is distant and withdrawn from Louise that night and falls into an uneasy sleep. When she wakes up around three o’clock, Louise is gone. Cora waits uneasily, watching the street below her window, and soon sees Louise approaching with Floyd Smithers. Louise is clearly drunk, but Floyd insists that he’s sober and that he hasn’t taken advantage of Louise in any way.
Cora’s inquiries about whether Floyd made advances toward Louise lead to the girl’s drunken confession that she had a sexual relationship with her Sunday school teacher back in Wichita. Louise also reveals that her first sexual encounter happened when she was just nine years old, before her family moved to Wichita. Her mother knew about both sexual relationships and didn’t try to prosecute the men. Cora is horrified and not sure whether to believe Louise. She begins to see Louise as more vulnerable than she did before the revelation and chides herself for the sexual warnings she’s unknowingly given Louise in the past.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
Cora gets Louise up and packed for Philadelphia the next morning. She tries to talk to Louise about her sexual abuse, but Louise brushes her off and says that if Cora tries to talk to Myra about it, her mother will feign innocence. Cora has also decided not to tell Ruth St. Denis about Louise’s behavior the night before, although if she did so Louise would certainly be dismissed from the dance school. By going out with Floyd alone and consuming illegal alcohol, Louise has jeopardized her permanent position with the dance group. Nonetheless, Cora is complicit in concealing the drunken incident, a stance that shows she cares about Louise and her career.
Cora takes Louise to class and then returns to the apartment and takes a nap. When she wakes up, she goes to the luncheonette and apologizes to Floyd, saying she knows he didn’t try to take advantage of Louise. Later, aimless, she wanders around New York after watching a Buster Keaton movie that makes her think of Joseph. She walks to the outbuilding by the orphanage where he lives and tells him she’s free for the night. Joseph is happy and surprised to see her.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
Cora and Joseph have sex, and she stays the night in his apartment since Louise is performing in Philadelphia. Joseph walks her home the next morning, and they agree to meet again at her apartment the next day while Louise is at dance class. That afternoon, Cora picks up Louise from class and convinces her to go apologize to Floyd for her behavior on the night they went out together. She allows Louise to see Floyd alone, and she returns to the apartment to rest. She’s awoken by Joseph and his daughter, Greta, who have come to tell her they’ve been asked to leave the orphanage. It’s implied that he’s been let go because someone saw Cora enter and leave Joseph’s apartment, which the nuns would have disapproved of. Joseph says they plan to stay with a friend in Queens. Cora feeds them both and feels an affinity for Greta, who reminds her of herself when she was sent West.
She asks Joseph to come and live with her and Alan in Wichita and to let her look after Greta during the days while he works. Louise comes back before Joseph can answer, and because of Cora’s undressed state (she took some of her clothes off to take a nap), she assumes that Cora has been having an illicit relationship. She’s amused by this departure from Cora’s concerns about respectability. Later it’s revealed that Cora tells Louise that Joseph is her brother.
Part 2, Chapters 14-17 Analysis
One of the most striking differences between the New York and Wichita settings is that in New York, Cora and Louise are anonymous. The people who surround them in public spaces do not know their background, their history, their social connections, and so forth. This difference does not affect Louise as much as it does Cora because Louise disdains trying to be “respectable.” To Cora, however, the change in setting leads to a change in behavior as she comes to realize that her lack of social ties means that she is free to act with less restraint than in Wichita.
While Cora enjoys this feeling for a while, utilizing the city’s anonymity to conduct her extra-marital affair with Joseph, she also tires of it after a while and longs to return to Wichita, where she feels a sense of belonging. She also does not seem to consider that while she is relatively anonymous in the city, Joseph is not. The consequences of her visit to his apartment are profound—he and Greta are kicked out of the orphanage, which leads to her suggestion that they come to Wichita and stay with her and Alan. This invitation is an example of Cora’s growing willingness to take risks (although, in this case, Joseph is risking more than she is) and assert her desires. This change in her behavior drives the plot of the novel forward, especially in these chapters.
The power dynamic between Louise and Cora is also shifting in this section of the novel. Previously, Cora was the one of the two who exhibited vulnerability, as when she asked Louise to pick up the book on the train—acknowledging that her corset prevented her from doing so—while Louise was more or less impervious to embarrassment or shame. The novel portrays Cora as under a constant strain to keep Louise in check when the two are together. Louise’s drunken confession and Cora’s complicity in concealing it from Louise’s dance teachers signal that their relationship has shifted. Now Cora has deeply personal information about Louise that Louise has revealed in spite of herself, and Cora is therefore gaining more dominance in the relationship. Louise resents her vulnerable position, both because she is irritated by Cora’s adherence to social convention and because she dislikes feeling powerless, but the shift foreshadows her vulnerability with Cora later in the book.
