Chapter 37 Summary and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens at the Skull and Bones society house at Yale, which the seniors call the Tomb. Fifteen newly tapped juniors and fifteen outgoing seniors gather for a dry (alcohol-free) dinner. The narrator notices a portrait of Otto Maier among the past members—former presidents and senators—and is struck by the resemblance between Otto, Matthew, and himself. Timothy is also there, and the two embrace warmly, relieved to see each other without needing to discuss the time that had passed. Timothy points out other new members, including a football captain, the school paper editor, and a chocolate heiress.

The narrator then spots Miranda, who is also a member. He is furious that she never mentioned her membership, given how much she rails against the patriarchy and the powerful. He sits far from her, unable to make small talk, and feels her trying to catch his eye.

After the dinner, the narrator drives to the Hamptons with Timothy, Timothy's new boyfriend Saul (a management-school student), and Megan, a tennis player the narrator is seeing on and off. They arrive at Matthew and Otto's estate, passing a gate, a green lawn, and a fountain. Matthew and Otto sit in rocking chairs on the porch. Otto's hair and glasses are both silver; he speaks warmly but his gaze unnerves the narrator, as if he is being assessed.

The group spends several days together—playing touch football, tennis (which Megan dominates), and lounging on the beach. The narrator and Megan sleep together in the pool house, but he already knows she won't mean anything to him in the end.

On the last morning, Matthew announces he will take everyone sailing. The narrator stays behind, hoping to speak with Otto alone. Otto confirms he hoped the narrator would stay. The narrator asks, directly, why Otto did it. Otto explains that he and his colleagues had the best of intentions: they wanted to eliminate genetic diseases passed down by one parent. They gave the therapy to their own children—the narrator's mother and Otto's son Thomas—because they believed it would improve their lives. Otto pauses, collecting himself, and notes that if it had worked as intended, the narrator's mother would never have known, and perhaps Thomas would still be alive.

When the narrator's parents were trying to conceive him, Otto says, it was a second chance—an opportunity to finish what they began. The therapy was a success. Otto tells the narrator that the results exceeded their wildest dreams: the narrator took after Matthew so completely that he is living proof that outcomes can be changed for the better.

The narrator feels special. His existence, he thinks, proves that fates don't have to be inevitable. He had wanted to do something worthwhile, and Otto is telling him he already has.

Matthew gives the narrator a set of keys. Over the following months, the narrator returns to the Hamptons repeatedly, each time with a different girl. He notices that the girls who are drawn to him think they can mend what is broken in him, and he begins to recognize the breakups before they happen—the same litany: he is distant, incapable of intimacy, closed off. To him it feels like the opposite: there is so much inside him that he doesn't know how to communicate it.

On a spring day before finals, the narrator comes alone. Otto and Matthew sit on the porch, and the narrator is struck by how much the three of them resemble one another—like different versions of the same man. He asks why Samuel is never there; Matthew says Samuel prefers his friends' company.

A deer has fallen into the pool. The narrator and Matthew lift the bloated corpse out together, and animal services takes it away. While cleaning the pool, the narrator finds a golden clover earring—a four-leaf clover, the logo of a jewelry company that rich girls wear. He pockets it. He can't stop thinking about the drowned deer, trapped in a completely wrong atmosphere.

Matthew swims laps in the refilled pool. The narrator notices Matthew's ribs, like prison bars, and his knobbed knees that turn in—the same way his own do. Sitting at a small round table with Otto and Matthew, the narrator feels that his family has never resembled him, and now it does. Seeing them is like looking into a funhouse mirror that ages him by decades. He thinks of Otto and Matthew not as separate people but as his future selves. He had wanted to be normal—something he once shouted at his mother—and with them he finally feels part of something, exactly in his place.

Otto offers the narrator a summer job at the foundation, citing his interest in the sciences and his language skills. Matthew has told the narrator that he and Otto once had a difficult relationship, but Matthew now sees that Otto meant well—that Otto wanted to spare Matthew's brother pain. The narrator accepts. He thinks of Samuel, wonders if Samuel even knows of his existence, and realizes that without Samuel there, he can easily think of Otto and Matthew as his father and grandfather, his alone.

Back in New York, the narrator is a changed person: he navigates the subway, walks quickly, greets Matthew's doorman Mario by name, and asks about Mario's family. He notices how quickly he has gotten used to the apartment's size—triple the size of the place he shared with Miranda—and how he can sprawl on the couch without feeling like he shouldn't be there.

One night he visits his old restaurant. Georgie and Harriet are delighted to see him. Harriet places an old-fashioned before him, made by a new bartender who isn't as good, she confides. They insist he doesn't pay, and he leaves double the cost in tips.

The foundation's projects include vaccination campaigns, addressing health inequities, and screening against diseases in utero in poorer nations. The narrator feels he is finally doing something worthwhile. His coworkers are remarkable people, and their debates feel more consequential than the ones at school about long-dead philosophers. He thinks of his mother, who volunteered every Christmas serving food to the same forty men—it wasn't enough. Working with the Maiers, he finally would.

He reflects that there are two types of people: those who feel they have to earn their existence, and those who take life less seriously. He envies the second group but knows he belongs to the first.

Two weeks into the job, Samuel starts as an intern. He walks in breezily, familiar with the building's layout, eating a Danish and letting crumbs fall to the carpet. On the narrator's first day, he had eaten a granola bar in the bathroom. Samuel introduces himself as Sam and is assigned to the cubicle diagonal to the narrator's. The narrator is six inches taller. Sam is about to start his freshman year at Penn and will intern with the foundation's PR team. The narrator tries small talk; Sam doesn't respond.

Sam is easily bored, harasses coworkers with jokes they laugh at uncomfortably, and seems to carry a live wire of resentment under everything he says. Matthew remains cloistered in his office, occasionally summoning the narrator, which the narrator hates because Sam is always watching. Once, meeting Sam's gaze, the narrator sees it clearly: the anger that he was invited and Sam was not.

Matthew privately tells the narrator that Sam is lazy, irritable, not personable—somehow both lazy and aggressive. Matthew says,