Run

“Would the country lay down its foreign wars, its need for health care and education, in order to turn its collective gaze to the splendors of the cod?”

While waiting for Teddy at his ichthyology lab, Tip imagines his father’s disapproving statements about his choice of career. This passage highlights an essential element of Tip’s character arc because for most of Tip’s life, his father Doyle has tried to persuade him into a career in politics. Attending political lectures with Doyle, like the Jesse Jackson one Tip is about attend with Teddy, is a typical method of persuasion that Doyle has used over the years. Hinting implicitly at Tip’s annoyance at Doyle, this scene foreshadows the argument that they will have after the Jesse Jackson lecture.

“In fact, Bernard Doyle had slipped so completely from the public consciousness that on the rare occasion some stranger said, ‘Hello, Mr. Mayor,’ he found himself brightening inordinately. It was that last vestige of his own vanity that struck him as the more humiliating thing of all.”

During Jesse Jackson’s lecture, Doyle considers how both his family’s difficulties and scandals and his accomplishments as mayor of Boston seem forgotten by the public. An important moment of insight into his character, this quote shows his embarrassment at the pride he still harbors for this work. This tinge of “vanity” relates to the vanity in the family already highlighted in Chapter 1 through the Virgin Mary statue.

“And then Teddy, the one she had always especially liked, left his brother and came and crouched down right beside her. He put his arm around her like she was someone he knew and for a second he held her tight so that her shoulder pushed against his ribs. Then he let go and took off his own coat and put it over her mother.”

Through Kenya Moser’s point of view, Ann Patchett’s narrator relays this scene as Teddy suddenly comforts her after Tip and Tennessee’s accident. This quote gives readers context clues showing Kenya’s familiarity with the Doyles; it also foreshadows the end of the chapter when the Doyles will learn about Tennessee watching Tip and Teddy for much of their lives. It also gives insight into the kindness of Teddy’s character, who is yet unaware of either Tennessee’s or Kenya’s identities.

“‘I didn’t see the car,’ Doyle said. And yet he must have. Even in the snow he would have seen the headlights. He tried to remember the moment. He wanted Tip to come to the party at the Simonses’ house. Tip was walking away. They were arguing. The snow was coming down so hard. Doyle squinted his eyes. He did not see the lights behind his son. All of a sudden he felt quite certain that there were no lights. The driver did not have his lights on. For the rest of his life he would tell himself this and it would help to ease his grief.”

In this scene at Mount Auburn Hospital, Doyle struggles to remember the details of the car accident. Significantly, the chapter’s earlier scene describing the crash does not mention headlights; Doyle makes this determination about the car’s headlights to palliate his guilt for not pushing Tip out of the way. Doyle’s process of justification in this scene echoes the justification that he offered to the media after Sullivan’s car accident killed his girlfriend, Natalie (see Chapter 6).

“But they knew that wasn’t true. There were very few people left in the waiting room now, and where they were standing, so near to the door, there was no one else at all. No one would see them or stop them. No one would care who she left with except for the Doyles themselves.”

Pratchett’s narrator relates the above scene through Doyle’s point of view, as he and his sons are about to leave Mount Auburn Hospital for the first time. Even though Kenya has nowhere to go, Doyle tries to convince Tip, Teddy, and himself that the hospital will not allow them to bring her home. Although his justification unravels in the empty waiting room, he stubbornly persists. Patchett uses his cognitive dissonance as a catalyst for the plot since it forces Kenya to confess to the Doyle’s she and Tennessee’s true identities.

“Even as a little boy Tip could be pinned into place by an idea. Set him on the floor with a picture book and he would stay until the book was finished. Set him on the floor with a can of Lincoln Logs and he would stay until he’s built himself a woody Taj Mahal.”

Doyle reflects on his adoptive son’s salient personality traits, noting Tip’s longstanding gift for careful, focused concentration. Ironically, Doyle does not realize that the “idea” of studying fish, which he first introduced to his young son, has “pinned” Tip to a life in the sciences. Doyle admires his son’s intelligence and conscientiousness, but the narration reveals how he is really only able to understand this aspect of Tip insofar as it relates to his childhood.

“The girl, Kenya, was more troubling as she seemed to be the very body of evidence: long legs, long neck, the warm color of her skin. He had noticed her hands, the elegant beds of her fingernails. Those hands could be compared.”

In a cab on their way to Doyle’s home, Doyle cynically thinks to himself about Tennessee and Kenya, whom he worries will try to con him. Kenya’s apparent resemblance to his adoptive sons leads the reader to consider the parallels that Patchett draws between the Doyles and the Mosers. The mere suggestion that she is also their sibling makes Doyle feel suddenly vulnerable. Here, readers see a darker side of the novel’s theme The Importance of Protecting Loved Ones begin to emerge through Doyle’s point of view.

“But if there had been another call, the agency saying there was one more sibling in the set and this one was a girl, a daughter for Bernadette, oh, he would have given anything if she could have had a daughter. Even if she had come at the very end, even for a week. Doyle sat down at the edge of the bed and closed his eyes.”

Doyle’s character begins to slowly grow away from the cynicism he felt toward Kenya in the chapter’s earlier scenes. Here, Doyle starts getting to know Kenya; while talking to her, he suddenly remembers the daughter that Bernadette prayed to her statue for years ago. Doyle imagining Kenya as his daughter while she is preparing to spend the night in his sons’ childhood bedroom foreshadows Doyle’s adoption of Kenya and her receiving the Virgin Mary statue from him at the novel’s close.

“You want to think she’s our mother? Then who is our father? Did you ask yourself that one? That’s where babies come from, Teddy, a mother and a father. Open the door to one and you’re going to have to start looking for the other.”

Late in the evening, after Tennessee and Tip’s accident, Tip rebukes Teddy for asking what he thinks about the night’s events. The reader learns that Tip is bitter toward his biological mother for putting him up for adoption at 14 months old. Patchett uses rhetorical questions in Tip’s speech in order to show Tip’s diegetic challenge of Teddy but also prompt the reader to consider the novel’s topics surrounding parentage.

“He blinked into the darkness of his childhood room, made out the shape of his oak dresser and narrow door of his closet, and realized that coming home had been a mistake. He’d only gotten half the equation right: he absolutely had to leave Africa, but he hadn’t spent enough time thinking about which plane to get on and where the plane should land. This was not a Christmas visit.”

Here, Sullivan first hints that he left Africa in a hurry but does not reveal why. This scene suspends this question until the conversation that he has with Tennessee in Chapter 6 in which he confesses that he left because he was stealing and illegally selling medications. Patchett’s choice to leave this question unanswered engages the reader until its resolution in Chapter 6. Sullivan also alludes to his tense relationship with Doyle here, as he realizes that by returning home, he may have to explain his unfortunate situation to his already disapproving father.

“Nobody knew if he was looking to see if there wasn’t somebody else coming to take him away or if he was trying to find the person who’d left him behind. Sullivan wondered if he would remember any of that now. Probably not. Tip wasn’t easy like Teddy. He was suspicious, didn’t want to be touched. And who could blame him? This kid had a memory.”

Sullivan reminisces about Tip’s childhood the morning after the car accident. This passage develops both Sullivan’s and Tip’s characters in this scene: Sullivan, for example, is as an observant, empathic older brother who has felt for Tip since he was a child. By extension, Tip’s tendency for aloofness and his singular focus on his work is explained as the result of his feeling abandoned as a small child. Patchett refers to this sense of abandonment indirectly by mentioning Tip’s suspicion, reflecting the haziness of this childhood “memory.”

“Then walking halfway backwards he stepped off the curb and into the street, into the lights that she only at the moment realized were coming towards them. He could have been anybody. He was a boy stepping out in front of a car he clearly did not see.”

As she lays in her bed at Mount Auburn Hospital, Tennessee remembers the night before, when she saved Tip. This quote is significant because it reveals an inaccuracy in Doyle’s remembrance of the accident, toward the end of Chapter 3. Unlike Doyle, who insists that the driver did not have his lights on, Tennessee distinctly remembers seeing the car’s oncoming headlights before jumping in front of Tip. Patchett modulates the motif of “I did not see…” so that Tennessee notices that Tip “did not see,” thus making his lack of awareness more pronounced.

“He stacked and unstacked and restacked, looking for the perfect angle at which to prop himself up, then finally got out of bed and sat in the chair by the window so that he could look out at the snow, the gorgeous sea of sugar-ice that he was no longer responsible for shoveling.”

Due to a heart condition, Uncle Father Doyle is unable to sleep in his room at the Regina Cleri home for retired priests. As he sits by his window, the symbolic significance of snow in the novel begins to change from something with ominous associations to a “gorgeous sea of sugar-ice.” This is significant as it anticipates Kenya’s perception of the snow in Chapter 7 as something that beautifies even her poorly maintained housing project.

“In a country where the demand exceeded the supply by hundreds of thousands of vials he was saving lives and making money hand over fist, and then spending it fist over hand, pumping the fruits of his labor directly back into that fruitless economy. In that light it wasn’t even wrong. It was expansive distribution.”

As Sullivan tells Tennessee about why he left Africa, he relays his perspective on his theft of medication. This passage is significant because through Sullivan’s point of view, readers glean his character’s similarity to Doyle. Like his father, Sullivan palliates his guilt by justifying his theft, calling it “expansive redistribution.” Importantly, readers do not learn why Sullivan wanted to earn extra money in Africa this way, or on what he was spending the money. The humorous use of palindrome—“hand over fist” and “fist over hand”—highlights his flippant attitude.

“My father had a plan, you know. He was already set to run for governor. He had it laid out like a chess match. My father had a plan for the people, not just the people in his family or the people in Massachusetts. He had a plan for All The People and he threw it away on the one person he didn’t much care for to begin with.”

Late in Chapter 6, Sullivan explains to Tennessee the ruin of Bernard Doyle’s career. In this scene, Sullivan simultaneously critiques his father’s carefully planned career and expresses guilt over it being ruined. The capitalization of “All The People” dehumanizes the people subsumed within the phrase and highlights Sullivan’s complicated sense of bitterness towards his father’s political career.

“Not a single sound floated up from Union Park, not kids screaming, not the drivers of passing cars laying on their horns, not the shouts of men arguing with each other or crazy women arguing with themselves.”

On the fourth floor of Doyle’s home, in Tip and Teddy’s childhood bedroom, Kenya realizes a significant difference between Union Park Street and her Cathedral housing project. Unlike the cramped, dark apartment she shares with Tennessee, this space is quiet, peaceful, and well-lit. Most of the noises that Kenya lists as being typical in her own nearby neighborhood do not exist on the Doyles’ residential, tree-lined street. Kenya’s observations highlight the theme of Awareness of Privilege, as Kenya begins to closely observe the results of socioeconomic privilege.

“Being the only girl meant being resourceful and strong, but to have two brothers would have meant not always having to work so hard at being safe.”

Kenya muses about how different her life might have been if she had grown up alongside Tip and Teddy. This passage alludes to how Tennessee, a working single mother, has raised Kenya to think and act in relation to her environment. Kenya spends most days after school home alone in her housing project; this is her environment until she meets the Doyles. With Tip and Teddy by her side, however, she imagines a luxurious reprieve from having to watch out for herself so vigilantly. Patchett hence adds a gendered dimension to the theme of Awareness of Privilege.

“That was Boston: on one block there were houses so beautiful the mayor himself could be living in one and three blocks away there was a housing project where it maybe wasn’t always so nice but it was still a lot nicer than other places.”

Patchett’s narrator relays an unexpected insight through Kenya’s point of view. At only 11 years old, Kenya notices how sharply wealth divides her city’s various neighborhoods and communities. This is something that Doyle also notes in Chapter 7, but that his sons do not seem to realize; this is significant because, despite her young age, Kenya is more aware of Tip and Teddy’s advantages than they are. Here, for example, Kenya acknowledges the differences between the Doyles’ beautiful street and her own “housing project,” yet still suggests an awareness of “other places” that are inhospitable.

“‘You stay here by yourself?’

Kenya slipped out of her coat and laid it over the back of the chair. She took off her mother’s hat. ‘It’s no big deal. I put both of the locks on the door and I leave the television on. Someday she’ll get a job where she’ll only have to work while I’m in school. That’s going to be perfect.’”

Doyle arrives with Kenya at her apartment, in a housing project that he remembers from his time as mayor. As a parent who sheltered his sons following the death of Bernadette, Doyle is surprised that Kenya stays home alone in a neighborhood like hers. Patchett juxtaposes the two families through Kenya’s response: Tennessee cannot be home for Kenya like Doyle was for his boys. However, recalling the scene where Kenya muses about life with older brothers by her side, this quote similarly reveals Kenya longing for a reprieve from this routine: “Someday” Tennessee will have a job with better hours.

“But after I saw that picture in the paper I thought, One of you is going to go on and have a very sweet deal, get an education, live in a nice house, be safe all the time, and one of you is going to stay with me. I wasn’t feeling so good then, and staying with me didn’t sound like anything but a burden this child would have to endure.”

Unsure whether she is asleep, awake, or under the influence of medication, Tennessee speaks with her deceased friend, Tennessee Alice Moser, from her hospital bed. Here, Tennessee recalls giving up Tip for adoption after seeing a photo of Teddy and the Doyles in the newspaper. This passage reveals that she made this decision to unburden her son from a difficult life. Using the anaphora of “one of you” more starkly contrasts the two lives that Tennessee presents following this phrase.

“This was a girl who was cared for, who would not be sent out of the house with her hair gathered into unequal sections. He could see all: hands, comb, soft hair, and for the first time he thought of the woman and the girl in this picture as people who had a tenuous connection to him. When as a child he had thought of the mother who gave him away at all it was as someone who was reckless and halfhearted, someone incapable of finishing anything she had begun.”

Kenya warms Tip’s hypothermic hands after they arrive at his lab. As she tends to him, Tip studies the girl’s carefully sectioned braids and sees that her mother—his own biological mother—takes good care of Kenya. Patchett uses hair, frequently used as an expression of Black cultural identity, to spark this sense of connection for Tip to his biological ancestry. This awareness catches Tip off guard, as he has always resented his biological mother for placing him for adoption.

“He thought about the myriad ways he had been lucky until now, and then he opened his eyes and saw her there. There was no one he could think of at that moment that he would rather have bending over him, no one more competent, no one who knew him better.”

This quote reveals the affection and trust that Tip has quickly, and uncharacteristically, developed for Kenya. They have only spent one afternoon together, yet Tip feels like Kenya sees and understands him better than his brothers or father. After she capably tended to his hypothermia, and then thoughtfully engaged him about his research on fish, Tip decides that Kenya is the only person he wants to see after falling on ice. This scene foreshadows the close relationship that the two will share at the close of the novel.

“Kenya was magically exempt from everything the boys had had to endure. She didn’t have to go to Kerry’s fund-raising breakfasts. She was never once sent into the cold to hand out leaflets door to door. Politics, just at the moment that Teddy had finally picked it up, had ceased to be his father’s driving interest.”

At Tip’s graduation from medical school, Teddy thinks about the upbringing Kenya has with Doyle. In this quote, he reveals that Doyle has changed his approach to parenting. Instead, Doyle invests himself in Kenya’s extant interests like running. Patchett presents this using negative diction—“didn’t have to,” “never one,” “ceased to be”—to emphasize the change in Doyle’s parenting rather than Kenya’s own actions.