Fates and Furies

Chollie visits Mathilde in her dying days. He begins to go through Lotto’s valuable manuscripts searching, for the first draft of Lotto’s first play, The Springs. Yet he can’t find it, as Land had stolen it many years ago—a fact Land had confessed to Mathilde.

Mathilde visits Land when he does a play in New Jersey. He recognizes her, despite her change in appearance. Mathilde remembers the last time she got to watch Lotto act.

Mathilde reconciles with her past of abandonment. She tries to side with the rational part of herself: that it is unfair and too harsh for a family to remove their love completely from a 4-year old child for making “a baby’s mistake” (386). She tries to create one true story out of two versions: one bad and one good.

The good version has Mathilde absentmindedly moving her leg, which her baby brother was leaning on for balance. This accidentally causes him to fall down the stairs headfirst like “thrown laundry.” The bad version has her 10-year-old cousin witnessing the chain of events and seeing the leg twitch as a malicious and intentional kick of her baby brother, in order to knock him down the stairs to keep him quiet.