Paul's Case

Paul’s father is first seen at the disciplinary meeting at the high school. He obviously worries for his son’s future and about his current behavior. The reader learns from Paul that his father is aggressively disciplinarian. Thus, the image of his father waiting at the top of the stairs haunts Paul, to the point that he fears entering his home. Paul’s father tries to introduce him to a man whom he hopes will act as a model for Paul; the man has a good job, a wife, and children—all traditionally esteemed merits that Paul’s father, as a traditional man himself, would want for his son. Cather offers a succinct emblem of Paul’s homelife—and thus, indirectly, of Paul’s father—when the narration reveals that above Paul’s bed at home there hang pictures of both George Washington and John Calvin. The figures evoke political and religious tradition, respectively, and the pictures are almost certainly not Paul’s choice of décor, as he only thinks of them with dismay.

Paul’s father is one of the catalysts for his move to New York. When Paul’s behavior worsens at school and he is expelled, his father pleads with the theater to have him fired and asks Charley Edwards to stop letting Paul hang around him. These events spur Paul to steal money and flee to New York. Paul’s father returns later in the story when Paul reads in the paper that he is looking for Paul and that he has refunded the theater the money Paul stole; the gesture indicates that Paul’s father, for all his sternness and puritanism, does love Paul. While his disciplinarian and traditional views also lead to Paul’s feeling of otherness and displacement in Pittsburgh, Cather does not portray Paul’s father as unloving, uncaring, or dismissive. He is seen throughout the story acting in what he believes to be Paul’s best interests. 

While the freshman from Yale occupies little space in the plot of Cather’s short story, he is vital to any interpretation of Paul as a gay man. Nominally, the freshman—described as “wild” and, significantly, from San Francisco—meets Paul one afternoon, and they spend the night together drinking champagne. At 7:00 AM, Paul returns to his hotel, and the Yale student takes the morning train back to New Haven.

The omitted details are even more telling. Paul finds an affinity with the Yale student, likely in their shared desire for aesthetic pleasure, but the elliptical treatment of this plot point leaves space for multiple interpretations of the two young men’s relationship. The narration suggests they part on bad terms, and this complicates their dynamic, which may have a romantic or sexual component.

Charley Edwards is a young actor with whom Paul hangs around in Pittsburgh. Paul enjoys spending his time with singers, actors, and performers like Edwards. Paul wins Edwards’s favor by working as his attendant, but after Paul is expelled from school, Paul’s father asks Edwards to stop spending time with Paul, which Edwards honors. When Paul flees to New York, it comes forth that he has planned this maneuver with Edwards numerous times, clipping New York hotel descriptions from newspapers. Edwards is likely an aspirational character for Paul as he is a young performer with entrée into artistic and cosmopolitan milieux.

This is the man to whom Paul’s father introduces him one Sunday morning in November on Cordelia Street. Paul’s father hopes that this man—with a wife, children, and a good job as a clerk to a steel mill magnate—would serve as a template for Paul. Paul sees through his father’s attempt but does find the man’s stories of his boss’s travel very interesting; the man’s boss has been to Venice and Monte Carlo and has lounged on yachts on the Mediterranean Sea. Paul, always longing for such aesthetic and worldly pleasures, finds these stories compelling.