Marital Estrangement and Hidden Identities in Buckeye
Defining the Thematic Claim
In Buckeye, Patrick Ryan traces how two marriages—Cal and Becky Jenkins and Margaret and Felix Salt—run on parallel tracks of emotional distance and concealed selves. The novel argues that maintaining a facade of marital normalcy while hiding core aspects of identity (sexual orientation, paternity, spiritual disbelief, or the trauma of abandonment) leads to profound estrangement. Only when these hidden truths are forced into the open does any possibility of healing emerge—yet the novel insists that reconciliation is partial, uneven, and often painful.
Hidden Identities in Cal and Becky’s Marriage
From the start, Cal and Becky build their marriage on unspoken tensions. Cal, rejected from WWII service due to his shortened leg, carries deep guilt and a sense of purposelessness. Becky, a spiritualist who hears voices from the dead, conducts séances that Cal privately dismisses as nonsense. In Chapter Three (retrieved evidence), Cal discovers Becky has placed an ad offering her services without consulting him. His discomfort reveals a fundamental divide: he cannot believe in her gift and resents her independence. When he asks if she even believes in it herself, Becky turns the question back on him: “If you don’t believe in it, your opinion on how I do it shouldn’t carry a whole lot of weight, should it?” This exchange exposes the hidden identity each spouse maintains—Cal hides his skepticism behind silence, while Becky hides the full extent of her spiritual calling from a husband she knows would disapprove.
Their estrangement deepens after Cal’s affair with Margaret produces a child (Tom) born into the Salt household. The secret of Tom’s paternity becomes a gulf between Cal and Becky. In Chapter Twenty (retrieved evidence), after the truth emerges, Becky insists Cal move out. He takes a small apartment, and we learn: “Secrets, regrets, and apologies. These made up the stuff of his life.” Cal’s hidden identity as a man who betrayed his wife and fathered a child he cannot acknowledge corrodes the marriage from within. Becky distances herself not by leaving town but by erecting emotional walls.
Margaret and Felix: A Marriage Built on Blindness
Margaret and Felix’s marriage is the novel’s most complex portrait of hidden identities. Felix, a war veteran, has suppressed his homosexuality his entire life. He marries Margaret believing she can “fix” him. In a pivotal confrontation in Chapter Eighteen (retrieved evidence), Felix admits he thought he “could become attracted to” her. Margaret learns that Felix’s hidden identity includes a long-past love for a fellow sailor named Augie, who died at sea. Felix confesses that he turned to Becky, who contacted Augie’s spirit, giving Felix a kind of closure his marriage never provided.
Margaret, too, has hidden a crucial part of herself. She was abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage—an origin she conceals from Felix for years, fearing he would see her “as a charity case.” She also hides an affair that occurred while Felix was overseas, which produced her son Tom. When Margaret finally leaves the marriage, she retreats to Columbus and inhabits a new hidden identity: a childless divorcee who tells no one about the son she left behind. In Chapter Twenty-One (retrieved evidence), the narrative captures her self-imposed erasure: “You could live your life without answering too many questions or encountering too many expectations. Right up to your last moments, if you wanted…the most lasting impression you left on your neighbors was that they’d known nothing about you.” Her hidden identity as a mother who abandoned her child becomes a prison of silence.
The Crisis That Forces Truth: Tom’s Paternity
The secret of Tom’s biological father ties the two families together and forces multiple hidden identities into the open. In Chapter Twenty-Three, Felix reveals to Tom that Cal is his father and that Skip was his half-brother. Tom is devastated. The revelation shatters his understanding of both families. Felix’s lifelong concealment of his sexuality, his wife’s affair, and his own complicity in the deception all come crashing down. The crisis does not bring immediate reconciliation; Tom becomes estranged, consumed by anger. Only after Felix’s terminal diagnosis does a slow reunion begin—and even then, Margaret cannot face her son until after the funeral.
This arc shows that hidden identities do not simply collapse when exposed; they require years of fallout. The novel resists a neat resolution. Tom writes to Margaret, who arrives belatedly and offers a halting apology. They embrace briefly, but Margaret’s explanation—that she was abandoned as a baby—only begins to unpack a lifetime of concealed pain.
Symbol Connections
The novel’s key symbols reinforce the theme. The buckeye tree in the Jenkins yard stands for rootedness and the false promise of domestic stability—a tree that shelters a house where the marriage is hollow. The séance parlor represents Becky’s hidden world, a space Cal cannot enter, both literally and figuratively. The basket in which Margaret was left as an infant becomes a recurring emblem of abandonment and the hidden identity of being unwanted. The kapok life preserver links to Felix’s war experience and to man’s desperate attempt to stay afloat in a life built on deception—the life preserver cannot save the marriage from drowning.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel refuses to treat exposure as a cure. Margaret never returns to Bonhomie permanently. Cal and Becky, after decades of separation and grief over Skip’s death, find a fragile peace but not a return to their early intimacy. In the final chapter, they visit Huron, and Becky hears Skip’s spirit deliver a message of “love and forgiveness,” but the earlier hurts are not erased. Cal reflects that his life’s work has been “correcting mistakes”—a task that never fully ends.
Felix’s hidden identity as a gay man is presented without judgment, yet his choice to marry Margaret and hide his orientation causes collateral damage. Margaret, in turn, hides her origin and her affair, driven by the same fear of judgment. The novel suggests that the impulse to conceal oneself is rooted in a culture that punishes difference—whether that difference is sexuality, spiritual belief, or a traumatic past.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Cal’s disability relate to his hidden identity?
Cal’s shortened leg prevents him from serving in WWII, leaving him feeling purposeless and emasculated. He hides this shame beneath a surface of normalcy, never fully articulating his guilt to Becky. His physical lack becomes a metaphor for the emotional lack in his marriage—both a missing part he cannot recover.
2. Why does Margaret choose abandonment as the legal reason for divorce?
Felix insists on “Abandonment” rather than “Adultery,” even though both are true. For Margaret, accepting this label wounds her, but she sees no point in fighting it: “Neither of them wanted anything else from the other anymore. All the wanting was over.” The choice underscores how both parties hid their true feelings until nothing remained.
3. What role does Becky’s séance parlor play in the theme of hidden identities?
The séance parlor is the one domain where Becky is fully herself—yet it also becomes a place where others’ hidden identities are revealed. Felix goes there to contact Augie’s spirit, a confession he cannot make to his wife. The room thus becomes a space where the truth about hidden love and loss surfaces, even as it deepens the marital secrets.
4. How does the buckeye tree symbolize marital estrangement?
The buckeye tree stands in the yard of the house Roman provides, a marker of the life Cal and Becky are supposed to have. But it is also a silent witness to the gulf between them: Cal mows the yard, Becky ignores it. The tree’s annual cycles of growth and decay mirror the marriage’s slow erosion—outwardly stable, inwardly hollow.
5. Does the novel suggest that full honesty is necessary for a successful marriage?
No—the novel suggests that honesty is almost impossible when social pressures force people into roles they cannot inhabit. Cal and Becky’s final bond is built not on total transparency but on acceptance of their shared history of mistakes. Margaret and Felix only achieve peace after Felix’s death. The novel values the attempt to correct mistakes over the fantasy of a clean start.