Suddenly, Last Summer

Sister Felicity comes in, followed by Violet, who orders the doctor to call her niece back. Dr. Cukrowicz asks Catharine to tell the “true story” of her cousin’s death. Catharine says she believes it began with Sebastian’s birth but agrees to tell the events of the previous summer. She says that on their cruise ship to Paris, the other passengers mistook them for a honeymooning couple because Sebastian was so sweet and attentive to her. However, soon she responded to him with too much warmth and affection, and he became “restless.” Catharine then alludes to Sebastian’s Blue Jay notebook, in which he recorded his notes for his yearly poem, and Violet orders Miss Foxhill to fetch the notebook. Triumphantly, she shows Dr. Cukrowicz the notebook’s pages for that summer—all blank—proving (she says) that Catharine failed to sustain Sebastian’s poetic life. She says that she herself had a special “covenant” with her son, which he broke when he abandoned her to go abroad with Catharine.

Catharine agrees that she did fail Sebastian in some way and that something had broken—a sort of “umbilical cord” that old mothers use to keep hold of their sons. Sebastian no longer seemed “young,” and at Cabeza de Lobo, a Spanish resort town, he suddenly changed his habits: He stopped going out in the evenings to fashionable clubs and instead paid daytime visits to a public beach near the harbor.