The Truth About Tristrem Varick

Tristrem Varick

Tristrem is the only son of Erastus Varick, raised on ample funds and a liberal education that fitted him for everything except the money-getting age he lives in. When his father's seven-million-dollar estate goes to a hospital and he is bequeathed only a hat and some letters, he accepts the slight without a fight, a piece of old-world folly his world never forgives. His finer-than-ordinary fibre, the thing that sets him apart from the herd, is precisely what makes his friendships and his judgment so dangerously absolute.

Royal Weldon

Weldon has been Tristrem's intimate since their school days at St. Paul's, the kind of friend whose watch bears the motto Well done, Weldon. In one silent minute he crosses a room, looks Tristrem full in the eyes with mute defiance, and walks out, leaving a lie behind him that Tristrem cannot reconcile with a lifetime of stanch affection. His betrayal is the hinge on which the early story turns, forcing Tristrem to bid farewell to a man he realizes he never actually knew.

The Girl

She hovers at the center of the book's emotional weather, invoked in the narrator's warning that truth is not always dressed like a girl on her wedding-day. When Weldon's lie detonates, she is the one who sinks into a chair with her face hidden in her hands, and when Tristrem turns toward her for sympathy she looks up at him. Her silence and her position between the two men make her the story's most charged absence, a figure whose meaning the reader must assemble.

Miss Raritan

Miss Raritan belongs to the drawing-room world where Tristrem's tragedy unfolds, present at the scene where his closest friend exposes himself as a stranger. When Weldon departs, she throws herself into a chair and buries her face in her hands, and when Tristrem approaches her for sympathy she looks up at him. Her reaction registers the shock that Tristrem himself is too stunned to name, making her a barometer for the social damage the lie has done.

The Doctor

In a story where the newspaper public and the world agree on exactly one theory, that Tristrem Varick was insane, the doctor's verdict carries weight. The narrator insists Tristrem was not insane, only possessed of a fibre more or a fibre less than ordinary men, and the doctor stands as the figure who might confirm or complicate that claim. His presence turns the central question of the book into something diagnosable, a matter of nerves and inheritance rather than mere gossip.

Alphabet Jones

Alphabet Jones carries a name that announces him before he speaks, one of those eccentric fixtures of old New York society that Saltus delights in cataloguing. He belongs to the same drawing rooms as Tristrem and the Raritans, a supporting presence whose peculiarity sharpens the contrast with Tristrem's fatal earnestness. In a novel that refuses to sprinkle its mud and blood with ottar of rose, Jones supplies the worldly texture against which the tragedy reads as genuinely tragic.