Trust Chapter 26 Summary: Mockery, Jealousy, and the Immigrant Father

⚠️ 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 with Ida recalling her first book, published when she was nine. Titled Sept histoires, it was a single copy printed and bound by her father. The stories included a fish conspiracy, a girl dismembered limb by limb, and a nine-year-old girl helping her jewel-thief father escape prison. Her father also made her eccentric business cards and together they produced a short-lived neighborhood newspaper, L'Hebdomadaire de Carroll Gardens, for which Ida wrote interviews, a serial under a pseudonym, and a horoscope.

Ida then reflects on a period in her childhood when she and her father would read poems by Arturo Giovannitti, an Italian poet and labor activist, and laugh uncontrollably. They performed the poems in exaggerated Italian accents, mocking what Ida later recognized as bad poetry written with good intentions. For years she believed they were mocking the poet. But decades later, after publishing an essay about her father in her own book Flèche dans le grand vent, she reconsiders those evenings.

She realizes her father was jealous. Giovannitti and her father had nearly identical backgrounds: both born in the same region of Italy, both emigrated to the United States, both worked as typesetters and activists. But Giovannitti became nationally famous for his role in the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, during which he and others were tried for the killing of a striker, Anna LoPizzo, though he was acquitted. He published poetry with a preface by Helen Keller. Ida's father, by contrast, lived in obscurity, toiling in his Brooklyn shop.

Ida understands that her father directed the mockery toward himself. By having her perform a caricature of an overly pretentious Italian, he was asking her to ridicule him, his own failures and his unattainable ambitions. She now cherishes this self-deprecating gesture, even though her father would have found that appreciation detestable.

The chapter then delves into her father's past. He was born in Oliveto Citra, Campania, and was nearly illiterate until a young priest taught him. He left the Church during adolescence after working in a marble quarry. He became an anarchist, printed propaganda, and eventually fled to the United States with a friend as police closed in. Ida notes that his stories are often the only source, and he was an unreliable narrator who tailored tales to his audience. Some versions suggest he was a minor figure; others imply he was a prominent speaker linked to Carlo Tresca.

In America, her father faced racism and discrimination against Italian immigrants, which drove him deeper into his Italian enclave in Carroll Gardens and deeper into his anarchist circle. He took pride in the obsolescence of his trade: he was a hand compositor who refused to adapt to Linotype and other automated machines. He printed elegant invitations for bourgeois ceremonies he despised, but his perfectionism earned him a reputation. Business was slow during the Depression.

Ida, meanwhile, taught herself stenography and typing on a borrowed Smith Corona to find better paid work. Her father disapproved, calling secretarial work degrading—a false promise of independence that perpetuated women's subjection to men.

Key Events

Ida recalls her first book Sept histoires, printed and bound by her father.
She and her father produce the neighborhood paper L'Hebdomadaire de Carroll Gardens.
Ida and her father mock the poetry of Arturo Giovannitti in exaggerated performances.
Ida later publishes an essay about her father in her fourth book.
She reinterprets their mockery: her father was jealous of Giovannitti's fame.
The chapter summarizes Giovannitti's background and role in the Lawrence strike.
Ida describes her father's childhood in Italy, his turn to anarchism, and his emigration.
Her father's stubborn refusal to learn automated typesetting is highlighted.
Ida learns stenography and typing to improve her work prospects, against her father's wishes.

Character Development

Ida Partenza: She moves from a childhood of complicity in mockery to an adult understanding of her father's psychology. Her realization that she was really mocking her father shows her growing empathy and ability to reinterpret family history.
Ida's Father: His character deepens from a merely strict, anarchist printer to a man consumed by jealousy, bitterness, and a sense of failure. His pride in obsolescence and his self-directed mockery reveal a tragic figure trapped between two worlds.
Arturo Giovannitti: Though not a direct character in the narrative, he functions as a foil to Ida's father, representing the path to fame and impact that her father never achieved.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Jealousy and Envy: The central theme. Ida's father cannot tolerate that another man of identical background became a celebrated public figure while he remained obscure.
Mockery as Self-Parody: The performances were not about Giovannitti but about the father himself. His laughter was directed inward.
Voice and Voicelessness: Giovannitti had a public voice; Ida's father was silent outside his Italian enclave. Ida's own voice as a writer emerges through her early publications and later essays.
Obsolescence and Resistance: Her father's refusal to learn Linotype symbolizes his rejection of a changing world and his pride in craft. It also reflects his broader resistance to assimilation.
Immigrant Isolation: The father is marooned between the Italy he left and the America that does not fully accept him, feeding his bitterness.
Generational and Gender Roles: Ida's secretarial training represents a path to independence her father sees as degradation, highlighting the generational and gendered split over work and autonomy.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter is the emotional core of Ida's narrative. It transforms a seemingly playful childhood memory into a profound examination of her father's soul. The revelation of his jealousy recasts all prior depictions of him, making him more human and pitiable. It also explains Ida's drive to become a writer: she is seeking a voice her father never had. The chapter provides essential context for the family dynamics that shaped Ida and that underpin the larger story of the novel. It also contextualizes the broader conditions of Italian-American immigrants and labor activists in the early twentieth century.

Study Questions and Answers

1. Why did Ida initially believe she and her father were mocking Giovannitti's poetry, and what later realization changes her view? Ida accepted her father's framing that the poems were poorly written and thus worthy of ridicule. Later, she understands that her father's focus on Giovannitti was not aesthetic but personal: Giovannitti had achieved the fame and influence her father lacked. The mockery was a way for her father to belittle his own failed aspirations.

2. What does Ida's father's refusal to learn Linotype tell us about his character? It shows his stubborn pride, his resistance to technological and social change, and his desire to preserve the human element in craft. It also reflects his broader impulse to stand apart from mainstream society; by sticking to hand typesetting, he affirms his identity as an artisan and as a holdout against a system he despises.

3. How does the chapter characterize the experience of Italian immigrants in the early twentieth-century United States? The chapter references real events: the 1891 New Orleans lynching, the Palmer Raids targeting Italian leftists, the Emergency Quota Act limiting Italian immigration, and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. These details, combined with Ida's description of her father's insular life, paint a picture of systemic racism and hostility that forced Italian immigrants into enclaves and fueled their radical politics.