In the Skin of a Lion: Part 1: Chapter 3: The Searcher Summary & Analysis

When Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto, he feels as though he is entering a new land that is vastly different from the one he has known until now. In the city, he realizes that the intensely natural world of his childhood, with its various sensorial stimuli—such as the freezing cold and overwhelmingly white snow in the winter, the smell of animals, and the pleasure of walking around naked in the summer heat—makes him feel like an immigrant in the city, as though he were abandoning his past entirely.

At the train station, Patrick notices a man with three suitcases screaming in a foreign language for two days in a row, seemingly lost and confused. In the large station, Patrick says his name out loud but no one notices him, and he concludes that they are all stuck in the belly of a whale.

In 1919, millionaire Ambrose Small disappeared. The Bertillon identification system, according to which people could be correctly identified according to the precise measurements of certain parts of the body, was used to search for him, although so many people were attracted by the monetary reward that thousands of people claimed to be or to have seen Ambrose Small. The press fueled people’s frenzy and published even the most improbable signs of Small’s existence or death.

Between 1910 and 1919, Ambrose Small dominated Toronto’s business life by buying theaters. Although his wife Theresa Kormann lived a life of moral righteousness and abstinence, Ambrose Small organized extravagant parties and had various lovers. One of them, actress Clara Dickens, was only twenty-one when Small was thirty-five.

Although Small was tyrannical and callous in business, either owning people or making them his enemies, he was generous with Clara. She encouraged him to stop taking part in wild parties and, instead, to go on excursions in the countryside. On such expeditions, Small would continue to buy property, explaining that he is a thief planning an “escape route.” In December 1919, Small disappeared after one million dollars was withdrawn from his bank account, and was never found, whether alive or dead.

The Ambrose Small case so excited people’s curiosity, as everyone followed the police’s investigations, that companies paid people to become “searchers,” in the hope that they might find Small and reap the $80,000 reward that Small’s family offered for information about Small’s location. After one year in Toronto, Patrick Lewis decides to take up a job as a searcher. He becomes interested in the various letters the police have received about Small. When he meets with Small’s two sisters, who appreciate his interest in these letters, they tell him that Clara knew Small best, because Theresa was too morally upright.

When Patrick first meets Clara, she tells him she does not want to talk about Small and asks him to leave. However, as Clara attaches an earring in front of a mirror, Patrick finds her beautiful and fascinating, in part because she is connected to a world of wealth. He becomes passionately curious about her. When he returns the next morning, he spends all day trying to seduce her with charm and humor. The two of them spend the evening debating and arguing, and Patrick tries to prolong their conversation to stay with her as long as possible.

The next evening, late at night, Clara too takes part in this process of seduction. She comes to pick Patrick up at the library, where he is looking through old files to find information about Small, and drives him back to the Arlington hotel.

Another day, Clara helps Patrick carry boxes of files to his apartment. Exhausted, they fall asleep holding hands and, later, make love, although when Patrick wakes up Clara is no longer there. Clara then calls him some time later, telling him that she is taking him  to her friend Alice’s house in the countryside. Patrick and Clara reach the farmhouse, where Alice would arrive in a couple of days.

One day, as they lounge naked in the bed, Patrick tells Clara he loves her and asks her about her past lovers, which prompts Clara to tell him she once fell in love with a man called Stump Jones when she was sixteen. As Patrick watches Clara sleep, he wonders about her love life, trying to find answers for his questions in the shape of Clara’s sleeping body.

Later, at three in the morning, behaving like a child, since love makes him feel free and unconstrained, Patrick wakes Clara up to show her a tree frog against the window—a rare sight at night. Patrick says that the frog is Ambrose and Clara gives the frog on the other side of the window a kiss, calling Ambrose her beloved. Patrick asks Clara to marry him but she says she will soon leave Patrick to join Ambrose, because she is convinced he is alive, which leads Patrick to conclude that he will probably never see her again. That night, Patrick dreams of Ambrose and Clara notices that he is twitching in his sleep.

Patrick and Clara spend the next day making love, driving around the country, and talking about their lives. Patrick asks her about Ambrose and learns some anecdotes from her. When Clara mentions that Ambrose gave her a piano, she comments that everyone needs a creative outlet to avoid going crazy: Ambrose, for example, enjoyed gambling, and she enjoyed playing the piano. She asks Patrick what he does but he doesn’t know. Clara also mentions that she considered becoming Ambrose’s friend Briffa’s lover, because he was clear-headed and had a strong creative vision, which Clara finds unique.

Although Patrick learns about some of Clara’s most intimate, erotic experiences, he does not feel comfortable talking about his own past, preferring to resort to vagueness. Clara finds that there is a wall in him that no one can move past. She asks him about his friends but Patrick says she is his only friend. When he expresses dismay at the thought of losing her, since Clara insists that she will leave him for Ambrose, Clara tries to reassure him by telling him that everyone is replaceable.

Reflecting on his feelings for Clara, Patrick wonders if he was attracted to her because she was so unreachable, living a life of wealth and extravagance as Ambrose Small’s lover, understanding the subtle exchanges implied in rich people’s gifts. As Patrick holds her after making love, he realizes that he does not know who she truly is.

When Alice finally arrives, Patrick watches Clara as the two women walk together. Clara recounts a childhood anecdote in which her father and she shaved their hunting dogs, using paint to number and mark the animals with their family name, Dickens. She recalls fond conversations with her father about a variety of topics, lamenting that her father died when she was fifteen. Patrick explains that his father also died, killed while setting charges in a feldspar mine, because the company made him go too deep. That is how Patrick learned that feldspar is used in a variety of everyday life materials, from tiles to artificial teeth.

While Patrick and Clara share episodes from their childhood, Alice prefers to talk about the present, revealing little about herself. Over the course of the night, Patrick soon becomes overwhelmed by the two actresses’ mode of talking, as they imitate people’s behaviors and laugh, making Patrick feel like their audience. Exhausted, Patrick decides to go to bed, while the two women are still chatting. Then, they decide to go “get him.”

At night, in the dark, Clara and Alice approach the bed where Patrick is sleeping. They place candles on a chair and, placing paper on the floor, begin to sketch Patrick feverishly, curious to see what he might reveal while sleeping. They are used to taking part in spirit paintings, which seek to extract hidden emotions from a person’s face, using everything they know about him in the process. Alice asks if they are witches and both of them laugh, before running outside and making wild animal-like noises under the rain and the moonlight.

Early the next day, Patrick walks around the house, looking out at the field and inside at the sleeping women, whom he discovered at dawn throwing rhubarb at each other across the kitchen, Alice laughing wholeheartedly and Clara a little shy at seeing him enter the room. He touches Alice’s elbow and tells her he needs to leave to catch a train. Alice tells him that they left him a present from the night before and that Clara will explain later.

Alice accompanies Patrick to the kitchen, where he eats a grapefruit and Alice watches him move efficiently in the kitchen, as though he were trying to make himself as invisible as possible. Patrick then leaves, telling Alice to tell Clara that he will see her at the hotel. While Alice goes back to sleep by Clara’s side, Patrick thinks about Alice, feeling as though the woman’s proximity to Clara has made her suddenly noticeable to him.

That night, at the Arlington hotel, Patrick looks at the sketched portraits that Clara shows him but does not believe her when she says his soul is flexible, because he feels as though his character is made of irreconcilable elements. However, he appreciates their gift and feels that he can learn from it. In general, Patrick admires Clara and Alice’s close friendship and, when Clara asks him about Alice, he says he liked her. Clara says that Alice, who is a stage actress (whereas Clara only acts on the radio), is much better than her. Patrick then recalls the moments before falling sleep when he saw the women enter his room with candles, and feels a deep sense of community.

Sometimes, Patrick takes part in a private activity: he blindfolds himself and moves around his room faster and faster, avoiding objects carefully. That night, after Patrick and Clara talk extensively about Clara’s intention to leave the next day to follow Small, Clara asks Patrick not to follow her. Patrick feels lost and alienated from Clara’s life.

After trying to convince Clara not to leave, Patrick blindfolds himself, telling her not to move, and begins to leap around the room, avoiding objects perfectly and impressing Clara with his agility. However, when Patrick begins to whirl around her and scream his love for her, Clara becomes overwhelmed and moves off the bed to a rug with her hands over her ears. Suddenly, Patrick hits Clara violently, knocking her over. Patrick’s nose is bleeding and, disappointed in the breaching of his trust, he tells her that she moved when he had warned her not to.

Reflecting on the novels he has read throughout his life, Patrick realizes that the stories in books always have clear endings—two lovers always have clear motives and are both capable of accepting the end of a relationship. Patrick, by contrast, recalls only feeling resentful and bitter when Clara left him at the train station. She gave him her blind iguana, whom she did not want to have to carry, and told him how to feed it, before climbing onto the train. Patrick realizes that he believes in romantic tales in which fate is predestined. He imagines himself as a hero, destroying Small and rescuing Clara with her own iguana.

Obsessed with Clara’s absence, Patrick imagines writing letters to her, sharing his reflections about her relationship with Ambrose, his dreams, and his notes about hearing lovers fight at night in the street. He recalls memories, such as the moment when he refused to let her go at the train station but she angrily got away from him. One night, he has a dream in which he approaches Clara at a dance but the man she is with and his friends beat Patrick.

One day, Patrick opens the door and is shocked to see Alice standing in the doorway. As she enters the apartment, she sees that Patrick is trying to repair the objects he broke in anger after Clara left. Alice asks him about these objects and Patrick explains that he is trying to put order in his life. Alice then asks him how  long Clara has been gone, but Patrick gives no clear answer to Alice’s hypothesis that it has been about two years.

Alice asks Patrick for some coffee and he notes that she looks strong and confident. She says that he, on the other hand, looks tired and Patrick explains that he is mentally exhausted but that his body is fine. He realizes that he has not spoken this much in months, and also that he is avoiding looking at Alice. Patrick then looks at her and suddenly hugs her, seeking comfort in this human contact, which he has not enjoyed in so long. He feels as though Alice must have come to bring him back to reality, and reflects that she must know where Clara is.

Patrick ran into Alice the day before, as she was exiting a theater. He told her he was currently working at a lumber yard and would see her play that evening, but all he wanted was to walk away, feeling as though Alice has taken part in Clara’s departure.

In Patrick’s apartment, after Alice and Patrick make love, Alice mentions that Clara’s mother probably knows where she is. She encourages him to look for her so that he might get rid of Clara’s dark influence on him. Despite Patrick’s seemingly noncommittal reply, he goes to sees Clara’s mother in Paris, Ontario. They have dinner and chat about Clara’s brief marriage with Stump Jones—a piece of information that shocks Patrick, who did not know Clara had gotten married.

Clara’s mother mentions that Clara said she had seduced Patrick. She enjoins Patrick to forget her, since it has been over two years since she left, but Patrick only laughs. He looks at old pictures of Clara with Stump and, when Clara’s mother says that Clara is somewhere Small knows Patrick will never go back to, Patrick becomes convinced that they must be at a place that is so familiar to him that he has forgotten about it: the place where he lived his childhood. At the Paris hotel and then their old room in the Arlington hotel, Patrick relives memories of the time he spent there with Clara and searches for traces of their frantic love-making.

When Patrick finds Ambrose Small in the early hours of the morning, both men seem excited by each other’s presence as though they were reflecting each other like a mirror. As Small prepares to talk about his own life, Patrick says he is only interested in Clara because she has cast a spell on him. After Small realizes that Patrick has told no one about Small’s whereabouts, he goes inside, supposedly to wake Clara.

In the meantime, Patrick sits outside, enjoying the various sounds and sensations of this countryside, in which he grew up. However, when he feels some water dripping on him even though there is no rain, he realizes that Small has poured kerosene on him from the roof and is about to throw a match at him. Patrick immediately begins to run toward the river, slicing his coat off of him with his knife, and finally reaches the water, where he turns on his back to drown the fire.

 Although Patrick does not feel any pain from being on fire, he has cut his hands with his knife. When he looks up, he sees Ambrose throw a burning bottle at him and, when it explodes against the water, Patrick feels as though his left eye might be blind. Patrick then steps out of the water and attacks Ambrose on the shoulder with his knife before running toward his hotel, a mile away. He runs past his old house and other places he remembers from childhood before finally reaching the hotel.

When Patrick wakes up, he cannot see well out of one eye. He looks out the window at the river and then hears Clara call him outside the door. Patrick pushes back the bolt but cannot turn the handle because of his wounded hands. When the door opens, Clara is shocked to see that it is actually Patrick, and Patrick feels his wounded eye crying uncontrollably. While Patrick does not know what to do with his hands, Clara touches his face, offering to clean him up and call a doctor for him.

As Clara washes Patrick’s cuts, she asks him how he is and Patrick laughs nervously. Clara finds that Patrick looks older and realizes that he is more fragile than she thought. When she shaves him, she writes “Dickens 5” on Patrick’s forehead and says that she doesn’t want him “lost,” even though she cannot stay with him. She then stands up to look at the landscape outside, while Patrick keeps on staring at the space in the wallpaper where Clara had leaned back.

After the doctor comes, Clara tells Patrick that Small is not actually interested in him, but only wants to protect himself and remain anonymous. Under the effect of the medication, Patrick falls asleep. Clara and he make love during the night, careful to avoid his wounds.

As she had said she would, Clara leaves at dawn without waking Patrick and goes to the beach by Ambrose’s house, watching the river and thinking. In the meantime, Patrick has woken up and discovered blood all over the sheets, from how they moved during the night, as well as the shape of Clara’s bloody hand on the wallpaper. Ambrose then exits the house with bandages around his shoulder and sees Clara looking out at Patrick’s river.