Secrets

Great Aunt Mary could be considered the antagonist of the story: The protagonist experiences conflict with her throughout his childhood because she consistently deflects his inquiries into her life. Despite being part of the boy’s immediate family, Aunt Mary is a secretive character who has compartmentalized many parts of her past life. The tidy organization of her room—and especially of her letters—illustrates the control she exercises over what information she shares.

Though reserved, Aunt Mary is not cold, and she shows her loving side when she reads to the protagonist and allows him into her room to collect stamps from her postcards. Through the protagonist’s secretive reading of her letters, the reader learns about Aunt Mary’s past love affair with a soldier she met prior to World War I. This relationship—and her evident pride in her beauty as a young woman—reveals a softer side to the character. Far from being secretive, Aunt Mary once had “eyes that said so much without words” (30). The letters also imply the reason for Mary’s current secretiveness: the trauma of WWI, experienced both secondhand through John’s letters and in her eventual “loss” of him to the war, if not literally to death. Mary is thus the primary vehicle through which the story explores Secrets, Trauma, and the Limits of Emotional Intimacy.

John/Brother Benignus is a mysterious secondary character important to the story’s plot. The letters that the protagonist reads are written by this character and influence Great Aunt Mary’s personality for the rest of her life. Via John’s own words, MacLaverty characterizes him as reflective, sensitive, and vulnerable; he is candid about the depth of his feelings for Mary and strives to express himself even as trauma leaves him increasingly unable to feel anything but anger. Even then, he seems to regret the changes he is experiencing, apologizing to Mary for sharing graphic details of the war with her and lamenting, “I have no pity or sorrow for the dead and injured. I thank God it is not me but I am enraged that it had to be them” (31).

The fourth letter reveals John’s narrow survival; now recovering in a hospital, he explains that he feels called to a life of religious devotion as a result of his wartime experiences. The story implies that John becomes the Catholic monk named Brother Benignus, which explains why his romantic relationship with Aunt Mary ended. Aunt Mary’s reluctance to say whether or not John died in the war demonstrates that she feels she lost him to it regardless of him being physically alive; the John she knew before World War I was no longer the same person writing her letters after the war.