The Coming of Bill

Kirk Winfield

Kirk Winfield fills his own doorway — boyish, friendly, magnificently fit — and paints in a Greenwich Village studio kept in order by his accident-prone man George Pennicut. He is unhurried and unambitious, content to let the days drift, which makes him an easy mark for stronger wills and a puzzle to the Bannister family's expectations. His courtship of Ruth Bannister turns a bohemian idler into a man with something to lose, and the collision between his world and hers drives the novel's central struggle.

Ruth Bannister

Ruth Bannister is the beautiful, self-possessed daughter of old John Bannister, raised on Fifth Avenue under the fussy guardianship of her brother Bailey. She listens pleasantly to her aunt's hygienic theories, smiles, and ignores them — a habit that infuriates anyone accustomed to obedience. Her determination to choose her own life, and the family resistance it provokes, sets the marriage plot in motion and tests whether love can survive the collision of two very different worlds.

Steve Dingle

Steve Dingle is Kirk's loyal, resourceful friend — a man whose fists once did the talking and whose awkward tenderness now does the plotting. He steals a baby to give Kirk a day alone with his son, cooks an extravagant supper in celebration, and turns to fire when anyone insults Mamie, the mouselike nurse he has adored for three years without managing to propose. His mixture of muscle, mischief, and shy devotion makes him the story's warmest engine, pushing Kirk toward the life he keeps failing to seize.

Mrs. Lora Delane Porter

Mrs. Lora Delane Porter is a masterful woman with well-defined views upon man, physical fitness as her gospel, and a stare that makes grown men feel like purse-snatchers. She examines strangers, lectures relatives, and treats Ruth's household as territory to be governed — until Ruth's pleasant smile-and-ignore treatment leaves her unexpectedly powerless. Her gradual defection from the family circle marks the novel's shift from courtship comedy to the harder question of who actually gets to raise a child.

Bailey Bannister

Bailey Bannister is twenty-seven, faultlessly dressed, gold-rimmed, and convinced that Wall Street awaits only his father's permission to be astonished. With their mother dead and old Mr. Bannister absorbed in the firm, Bailey appoints himself Ruth's guardian and gallops up Fifth Avenue to forbid her marriage to a man he has never met. His self-important interference — and his instinctive retreat when Kirk looms up in a sleeveless vest — supplies the novel's sharpest social comedy and its clearest portrait of respectable obstruction.

Mamie

Mamie is the daughter of a newspaper compositor, hired on Steve's recommendation after raising three small brothers to office-boy age without mishap. She moves neatly through the studio, wins the baby at once, and fixes Steve with a baleful stare when she suspects him of letting the child fight. Her presence steadies the household through its turbulent years, and Steve's long-unspoken love for her gives the novel one of its gentlest, most patiently drawn threads.