Chapter 5 Summary

Eliot is sleeping in his office. He has a medicine chest stuffed with various items like headache remedies, laxatives, hemorrhoid remedies, sedatives, and vitamins which he imbibes himself and gives to others. There are papers and forms stacked around the office and there are magazine pictures thumb-tacked to the wall. Lines from a William Blake poem adorn the walls of the stairway.

While Eliot sleeps, his father is at the Washington DC meeting, wishing that both he and his son were dead. McAllister suggests that Eliot and Sylvia try a reconciliation, but Sylvia refuses. "So it was with self-conscious, medically-prescribed, superficial opposition to total sacrifice that she said again, 'No'" (Chap. 5, p. 67). The Senator apologizes to Sylvia for his comments and actions. They discuss Eliot. Sylvia does not think of him in the same way as his father does. He is not a...