She once insisted that “any story I reveal myself in completely will be a bad story.” Yet when she wrote “The Enduring Chill,” seven years after the event, her depiction of a homecoming was barely camouflaged. The playwright Asbury Fox, returning, ill, from New York City, is a young man, but he is also twenty-five, and the detail of putting three thicknesses of the New York Times between his blankets to stay warm in his apartment, during winter, reminded Robert Fitzgerald of conditions in Connecticut: “I know for a fact that she had to stuff newspaper in the window cracks; we did, too.” Although Asbury’s train, in the fictional rendering, is met by his widowed mother, the shock described is familiar from the recounting by Uncle Louis of Flannery’s disembarking. As soon as Mrs. Fox catches a first glimpse of her son, bracing himself behind the conductor, with a bloodshot left eye, “puffy and pale,” she gasps: “The smile vanished so suddenly, the shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was.”
