Duet for Three

Darlene Money was a writer in Mississauga, Ontario.

Aggie, a widow in her eighties, and her middle-aged schoolteacher daughter June, who lives with her, play the “duet” in Barfoot’s third and best novel. Years before, when June’s mismatched marriage failed, Aggie reluctantly took her in along with her daughter Frances, a child who has elicited from Aggie all the devotion she failed to feel for her own daughter; in appearance and character June was too much like the husband Aggie hated. Now, to June’s disgust and her own dismay, Aggie starts wetting the bed at night. This is the last straw for the chronically tired and disappointed June, and ignoring Aggie’s determination to remain in her own home, June puts her name on a nursing home waiting list.

The greater part of the novel consists of accounts of the past that shaped Aggie and June, told from their alternating points of view. We see the courting of Aggie, her marriage that deteriorated almost from the beginning, her struggle as a young widow to support herself and June, June’s childhood, her ill-advised marriage, Frances’s growing up and achieving independence. Near the end, the action moves back to the present. Just as the reader has seen how past events have formed Aggie’s and June’s characters and opinions, so they, too, come to understand themselves and each other a little better, to recognize that there is a much stronger bond of love and dependence between them than either had suspected. As the novel closes they await a visit from Frances, relying on her, in the role of intermediary she has played for years, to resolve the crisis caused by Aggie’s incontinence. But in truth they have already solved it themselves.

For all Aggie’s errors and omissions, her courage and honest recognition of her faults evoke sympathy, and most readers will support her over June in this novel’s conflict. But Barfoot succeeds in evoking understanding and pity, if not sympathy, for the rigid, narrow-minded June — just one of the strengths of this sensitive portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship.