In yesterday’s riff about Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here, I wrote that “it’s basically a ‘get away from me, you fucked my sister!’ movie…it’s about the cost of suppressing the truth and not coming clean, and the cost of coming clean about meaningless infidelity.”
In the comment thread I wrote the following about this kind of infidelity — i.e., a husband doing the deed with his wife’s sister:
“On a real-life and real-deal consequences basis, a married person getting hot and heavy with a wife or a husband’s sister or brother…forget it. It’s so far beyond the pale. Only backwood hillbillies would even flirt with such a notion. What is life without discipline?
“Had it not been for Wish You Were Here, I would’ve never even imagined….wait…hold on.
“I’ve just remembered a long-buried family story that my mom once passed along. Something happened between (a) her father (and my grandfather), a traumatized World War I veteran named Vincent who was apparently a randy fellow in his youth, and (b) his wife’s sister Edythe (my mom’s aunt, my great-aunt). It occurred when they were in their mid or late 20s.
“The injured party was my grandmother, whose first name was Dorothy or ‘Dot.’
“My maternal grandparents had married under the gun in ‘22, mind, when my grandmother became pregnant with my mom, Nancy. Relations between Dorothy and Nancy were always a bit chilly and remote, my mom told me, as Dot was ashamed of having gotten pregnant outside the bonds of marriage — a Scarlet Letter offense back in those semi-Victorian days.
“Obviously the Vincent-Edythe thing was quite traumatic once the cat was out of the bag, but despite the shock and hurt my grandmother found her way past a Felicity Price meltdown, and she and my grandfather, both around 25 or maybe a bit older when the indiscretion occurred, left it there and reconciled and moved on.
“And that’s real life. Middle-class people regarded marriage as a solemn institution when Calvin Coolidge was president. I’ll bet divorces were far less common back then.
“Edythe never married, by the way.”
Wish You Were Here‘s Felicity Price to Joel Edgerton after she finds out: “You effed my much more attractive sister? You filth. You loathsome animal. You contemptible hound. You think you know what marital misery is? Well, you’re going to suffer like never before. In fact, I’m so enraged that I’m going to put the audience through as much agony as you, my dear husband. We’ll all sink into the quicksand together — you, me, Jeffrey Wells, all the other people in the audience.”
