Word: rhoda
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...childless uncle owns. Papa obligingly dies, but seventyish Uncle Edwin refuses to follow suit. (Death is ardently willed and obsessively discussed in Compton-Burnett novels, usually because it is the survivors' only means to get hold oi the estate.) Instead, Uncle Edwin marries a thirtyish neighbor named Rhoda. Since age has made Uncle Edwin's conjugal privileges meaningless, the marriage is a big surprise but, hereditarily speaking, no calamity. In a moment of passion (passion is always momentary in Compton-Burnett), Simon makes it a calamity by adulterously siring a son with Rhoda. Uncle Edwin names the infant...
...have not been great, they have at least been craftsmanlike and successful. If Tom has a fault, it is that he gives his first loyalty to the theater, something that not even an actress can forgive. But in any case, Emily no longer matters much to Tom. It is Rhoda, his first wife and only love, who fills his thoughts. Any Marquand fan knows what happens next: a flashback (by the best flashback man in the business since Proust) that illuminates the whole life, the loyalties and griefs, the prejudices and honest confusion of a man of good will...
...made good is full of the knowledge that you can't go home again. But this time it is the boy who belonged to the town's upper crust and the girl who lived on the dreary lower-lower level. Tom had first seen Rhoda coming from a typing class, and after that there was really no other woman for him, except on the rebound. He had just sold his first play, and in the happy Fitzgerald days he showed Rhoda a world she could not even imagine. But no matter how much Tom earned, Rhoda could...
...Harrow has lost all his money backing a dud play. He is aging, unsure of his talent, confused about life's meanings. Rhoda offers to come back, to get him out of his financial jam. But Tom knows when he has reached the point of no return. The novel's last line sounds like a Marquand parody: "In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone...
Divorced. Ernest Borgnine (real name: Ermes Effron Borgnine), 41, Oscar-winning (Marty) cinemactor; by Rhoda Kemins Borgnine, 34; after nine years of marriage, one child; in Santa Monica, Calif, (see SHOW BUSINESS...