The Huntress

McBride’s Antiques, the business that has been in the McBride family for three generations, is a sustained motif in the novel. Despite its New World, American location, it functions as a window and even a passageway into Old World Europe.

The antiques store is the place where Daniel trades his all-American Red Sox cap and sportive talk for a three-piece suit and expert knowledge on what are likely European antiques. In the early postwar years, the shop becomes a place where Daniel meets “refugees […] selling their last antique brooch or bit of silver - men with names they’ve obviously changed, women holding children who don’t look anything like them, people making excuses for their scars or accents” (186). Daniel’s acceptance that such refugees are necessarily secretive means that he does not find anything especially suspicious about the Huntress, who comes to him with a false name, a child that does not resemble her, and her jewelry to sell.

Given that the Huntress is beautiful and refined, Daniel admires her “as though he were admiring a beautiful porcelain vase” (356) and agrees to bring her into his family. He only becomes suspicious when Jordan reveals the Huntress’s links to the Nazis and when she installs dubious Mr.