Esther Blau

Character Analysis

The Family Glue

Like most moms, Esther feels like she has to be the glue that holds the family together. But Esther likes to use a brand of glue that covers everything up so it looks nice and shiny on the outside, even if it's broken and crying on the inside.

Taking charge, making decisions, and rewriting events so they sound better when bragging at family and social gatherings—these are Esther's coping mechanisms of choice. When she and Jacob are at the diner on the way to take Deborah to the mental hospital, for example, Esther is upset about the situation, but she inwardly thinks, "On my surface…there must be no sign showing, no seam—a perfect surface. And she smiled" (1.7).

So where does this obsession with putting on a happy face, even under emotional duress, come from? Well, we get one clue when Esther's father Pop, dotes on Deborah and says that she's like him—unlike Esther, who he says isn't that smart. We also find out that Esther has a brother and sister who are described as the "favorites of the family" (4.3).

So she may have some teensy-weensy feelings of inferiority.

Trying to make everything seem better on the outside than it really is a defense mechanism for Esther. It's how she deals with her fear of others' judgment, not to mention her feeling of not being good enough for daddy. This might also be why she lies to almost everyone about what's really going on with Deborah's mental illness. She doesn't even tell her younger daughter, Suzy, how sick Deborah is until after Deborah's been in the mental hospital for over a year.

We'll say this for Esther: this woman is committed to putting on a good show for family and friends.

When she gets a letter about how Deborah is doing after the first month of treatment, for example, "Esther extracted every particle of hope, going over and over the words, magnifying each positive sign, turning the remarks this way and that for the facets of brightest reflection" (4.5). Translation: Esther is cherry-picking details she knows she can spin in a positive way later.

This lady is the kind of person who practices arguments with people in the mirror. Seriously. She does this.

But Esther, despite the fact that she wants to keep up appearances, also wants to deal with Deborah's sickness once she and Jacob have committed to sending her away. She's fearful about what part they played as parents in Deborah's illness, and she's curious about what would have happened even without their influence. So underneath all that veneer lives a real-life concerned mother who just wants her daughter to get better.

Dr. Fried Digs Deeper into Esther

What does Dr. Fried think about Esther? "On Esther's impeccable surface Dr. Fried saw intelligence, sophistication, and straightforwardness. There was also an intensity that made her smile a little hard. How those two blunt wills must have struggled over the years!" (5.1). Basically, the doctor thinks it must have been hard for Deborah to live with such a meddling mom, even one who had good intentions.

It also must have been awful for Deborah, who hates lies, to deal with a mom whose obsession with making everything look fine on the outside must have felt like lying a lot of the time.

Now, despite her polished surface, Esther occasionally shows that she can break under the strain to keep up appearances. When she talks to Dr. Fried, for example, she notices how nice the office where Deborah receives therapy is. "Relief showed on the carefully composed surface. 'It's pleasant. No—bars.' She got the word out, straining so hard for relaxed matter-of-factness that the doctor almost winced" (5.5).

Esther's forced good humor actually makes Dr. Fried uncomfortable. Perceptive and sensitive people, like Dr. Fried and Deborah, can pick up when someone is forcing a happy face.

It's often easy to feel sorry for Esther, especially when she shows her fears of inadequacy, guilt, and shame. Esther doesn't want her daughter to be sick, she doesn't want her daughter to have to be in a mental hospital, and she doesn't want the stigma of that hospitalization, either.

These feelings come out when she talks with Dr. Fried; Esther sounds exasperated as she explains that there's no real reason for Deborah's illness—even when she knows there is. "She had spoken louder than she wished, trying to convince the chairs and tables and the doctor and the whole institution with its bars and screaming people whose reasons for being there must be different...must be" (5.10).

Esther is desperate for answers about Deborah, especially in the beginning. She wants to wave a magic wand and just have her daughter be better. Realizing that in reality, the situation is much more difficult than that, is something many parents face.

Daddy Issues

Esther's father, Pop, was a do-it-yourself kind of guy who had some pretty humble beginnings. Pop immigrated to America from Latvia. He'd been poor, started his own business and eventually, after struggling, became pretty rich. But he had an attitude problem—for some good reasons. As a Jew, he encountered a lot of prejudice at a time when it was unfortunately acceptable to be openly anti-Semitic. He also had a clubfoot that a lot of people made fun of.

All of these factors kind of piled up on Pop, wore him down, and made him angry. He was described as someone who "attacked life" rather than lived it. That attitude had an effect on Esther for sure.

Pop expected Esther to marry someone who was at least as rich as he was. But she fell in love with working-class Jacob, and Pop freaked out about it at first. Even though he eventually calmed down, Pop has always thought of Jacob as being not good enough for his daughter. It's been a major sticking point between Pop and the Blaus.

Pop tried to make up for Jacob's lack of money by paying the Blau's bills, which was the only thing that allowed them to live in a fine house. This was a blow to Jacob's ego, for obvious reasons. Esther knew it, but said nothing. In fact, instead of sticking up for her husband, she sided with her father for years.

Esther confesses this betrayal to Dr. Fried. She says she feels responsible for the happiness of everyone in the family. She's the glue, remember? She also feels pretty guilty about how her behavior might have had negative impacts on her family.

Looks like no one promised Esther a rose garden, either.

Helicopter Parent

After Deborah, and before Suzy, Esther delivered stillborn twin sons. The novel doesn't delve into that event other than to explain how it made Esther nervous and on edge during her pregnancy with Suzy. This pregnancy coincided with the development of a tumor in Deborah's urethra. That's a lot of emotional baggage on a mother all at once.

Esther handles her baggage with the only coping mechanism she seems to know—she acts like everything is fine in front of people, while she panics inside and doesn't tell anyone about what's really going on. Esther takes pride in the fact that even though she was worried, she still would walk into Deborah's room with a smile on her face and show strength.

Esther was in denial about the string of events that started when Deborah was five and that gradually revealed Deborah was ill. She eventually, though reluctantly, accepts that Deborah is mentally ill—but only after Deborah attempts suicide at sixteen. We'd say that's a pretty serious wake-up call no parent could ignore.

What that means is that there were eleven years of mental decline that Esther witnessed before she sought extensive professional help for Deborah. That's a long time. Esther acknowledged Deborah's strangeness, but she also tried to dismiss it out of fear. She even tried to pass Deborah's behavior off as just a side effect of having an artistic temperament. Hey, people, our daughter is just a funky artist. They're all a little crazy, right?

Yeah, no.

Another thing that hasn't panned out well is Esther's meddling. This lady thinks that meddling is showing love and guidance. She explains to Dr. Fried, for example, how she took some kids from Deborah's class on a trip to the zoo because Deborah was having problems with these kids. Esther thought some forced fun togetherness would help the kids grow to love Deborah.

Yeah. Also no.

Esther has also gone out of her way to befriend school counselors to help smooth over Deborah's other issues at school. "She had great trouble with one of the teachers at the public school in the city. I had the teacher in to tea and just talking a bit, explaining Deborah's fears of people and how sometimes they were misinterpreted, I helped her to understand Deborah" (5. 41).

Dr. Fried asks Esther what Deborah's reaction to all this "help" was, and Esther says she thinks Deborah was relieved: she's confident that Deborah "never felt unprotected or alone" (5.45). She resents the doctor's suspicion that she was smothering Deborah, and she gets all defensive. Yeah, well, people who get super defensive usually feel a little guilty about something.

Yeah, we'll say it: Esther is the ultimate helicopter parent.

Esther and Self-Awareness

Esther might be overcompensating with Deborah so much because her own mother wasn't there for her. As she tells Dr. Fried, "I was glad to be a real mother to her, helping in things like that. My own mother never could" (5.43). And that's the only mention we get in the entire novel of what kind of grandmother Deborah had. We get lots of description on Pop, but Esther's mom is just kind of not there.

In other words, Esther goes to the other extreme as a parent because her own mother made her feel like garbage as a kid.

For all of Esther's practice in deception, she does have a light-bulb moment while talking with Dr. Fried. "It's not enough then, just to love. My love for Jacob didn't stop me from hurting him and lowering him in his own eyes as well as my father's. And our love for Deborah didn't stop us from…well, from causing…this…sickness" (5.57). That's a huge admission for a mother to make, especially one like Esther.

Later in the novel, after a few more visits to the hospital, Esther comes around to some even deeper self-awareness. She decides to drop the act when it comes to letting family members know how sick Deborah is. She even decides to tell Suzy the whole truth about the mental hospital:

Esther could not bear the thought of Suzy replacing the familiar image of her sister with the wild-eyed face of the strait-jacketed stereotype chained in an attic. She realized now that it was this stereotype that she and Jacob had begun to imagine the first time they heard the grating of the locks, when they saw the barred windows, and when they shuddered to the screaming of a woman from some high gable. Still Suzy had to know; it was past time. (16.2)

Finally.

At this point, Esther realizes how she judged her own daughter—and how this probably got in the way of getting Deborah the help she needed.

The thing is, trying to act like everything is perfect when it's not doesn't allow you to dig in and do the hard work of figuring out your own emotions and making authentic and meaningful connections with the people who matter most to you. Sorry, Esther, but there's just no substitute for toughing out the hard stuff in life.

In Esther's defense, of course, no one ever modeled how to have a healthy relationship for her. She's winging it, and she's doing the best she can. In the end, she's proud of her daughter for getting her GED and leaving the mental hospital. Of course, the first thing she says about the news is this: "Oh, wait until I can call all the family! They are all going to be so proud!" (29.79). She still wants to put the positive spin on everything, but here we can kind of forgive her.

Deborah's come a long way, and Esther's made some progress, too.