George Stransom’s bride-to-be dies the day before their wedding. He passes his days in solitude; a fellow widower’s swift remarriage renders him both envious and repulsed. Stransom honors all “his dead” with candles, all but one, that is–the bosom buddy of his youth, Anton Hague, who perpratrated an unspecified betrayal for which Stransom cannot forgive him, even when he reads years later about Hague’s gruesome death by snakebite in the daily news.
Stopping to rest after a long walk, Stransom discovers an old church with an altar “a blaze of candles.” He becomes fascinated by the image of a silent female mourner and begins regular pilgrimages to the temple and eventually becomes de facto caretaker of the altar of the dead.
His fixation on the unnamed woman, a regular mourner, blossoms, but he is hesitant to directly engage her. It turns out that the first rule of dead spouse club is that nobody talks about dead spouse club . . . not even to the only other member. Even when they eventually speak, much is left unsaid. While Stransom lights candles for all his dead, his lost love Mary chief among them, his new friend lights a candle for only one. It is only when, many, many months later, that Stransom and his friend finally engage in more casual social relations, that he learns that her one and only honored dead is in fact his “frenemy” Anton Hague, who she admits also did her great injury. The details of these injustices are never shared with one another, as the woman is reluctant to reveal the particulars.
Hague inspires a rift between the two, who while also not publically acknowledged, have become the primary living relation in the others’ life. Stransom will not budge–no candle for Hague. Echoing Meatlof, Stransom is clear–I would do anything for love . .. but I won’t do that.
The story’s narrator’s erudtition inspires an air of objectivity, but gossipy tendencies betray the prim and proper pretensions. The hyper-omniscient narrator doesn’t just relate what the characters know and think, but even reveals what they do not know they know and think, the secrets of their hearts and the lies they tell to themselves. Even inanimate objects are granted subjectivity, such as ritzy jewels behind a glass window that know they’re better than the riff-raff viewing them with envy.
The story resembles James Joyce’s, “A Painful Case,” in its depiction of a slow, awkwardly unfolding relationship between older parties living in similarly grey suburban circumstances and also Joyce’s “The Dead” in that sexy dead guy serves as the disruptive 3rd party in a relationship.
