Their Child — Key Ideas to Explore

Mirrors and the Gaze

The mirror appears twice in the surviving excerpts, each time as a site of confrontation. In the opening, the wife 'look[s] into the mirror' while hurling reproaches, her hair loose, her body 'strong young breast and shoulders' bared. Later, at the dinner party, Evelyn Simmons watches her husband from across the room, his face 'thrown back' with champagne, and she sees him as if for the first time. Herrick uses these reflective surfaces not for introspection but for exposure: the characters see themselves as objects, and the reader sees them seeing. The mirror does not offer clarity; it multiplies the distance between what is felt and what is shown.

Champagne and the Performance of Ease

Dr. Vessinger's observation—'Does he often enjoy—these good spirits—this—enthusiasm?'—pivots on a glass of champagne. The husband's drinking is described in physical detail: 'his eyes shone with champagne,' he 'drain[s] a fresh glass.' Herrick treats alcohol as a prop in a social theater where the husband acts the part of the carefree diner while his wife watches, 'divin[ing] that it was silly.' The dinner scene is a set piece of misalignment: the wife's misery is read by the doctor in 'the lines in your forehead,' while the husband performs a loud, repetitive gaiety. The champagne glass becomes a barrier, not a bridge.

The Body as Battlefield

Herrick's prose dwells on physical sensation as the site of conflict. The wife's 'instinctive recoil of her young body from terrible suffering, the first twitch of the flesh from the knife' is a metaphor that literalizes her experience of pregnancy as a violation. The husband's hand on her 'beautiful bare shoulders' is rejected. Later, the doctor's gaze is felt as a 'warmth of her blood as it rushed over her face and neck.' These bodily reactions—flinching, flushing, trembling—carry the emotional weight that dialogue often fails to express. The narrative trusts the body to speak where the characters cannot.

Fragments of a Shared Past

The memory of a Sicilian garden—'the roses blooming ... husbanded by bees'—interrupts the dinner scene as a brief, almost lyrical flashback. This is the only glimpse of the couple's courtship, and it arrives through the wife's mind as she sits opposite Dr. Vessinger, the man she 'had sent away.' The garden is a static image, a tableau of romance that contrasts sharply with the present: the noisy dining room, the husband's drunken laughter, the doctor's knowing eyes. Herrick does not develop the memory; he lets it sit as a single, unresolved chord. The reader is left to wonder whether the past is a lost idyll or a false one.

Herrick's method in Their Child is to let scenes collide without commentary. The narrative moves from a bedroom quarrel to a dinner party, from a mirror to a champagne glass, from a Sicilian garden to a New York dining room. The reader must piece together the marriage from these fragments. Pay attention to what is not said—the silences between the wife's outbursts, the husband's unrecorded thoughts, the doctor's withheld motives. The novel's power lies in its gaps.

Years at the desk have taught me that Herrick’s novel, with its mirrors and champagne, is really about the quiet distance we keep from those we love. That ache lingers. I find a curious echo in The Beneficent Burglar — Reading Companion, which studies kindness in unlikely rooms. One observes the broken wedding, the other the strange gift. Both understand silence.