Out of This Furnace: Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Mikie and Agnes visit Mary every day, while Dobie sends her a letter and money order every two weeks. Mary eventually stops asking when she can leave the sanitarium, yet she never doubts that “someday she would leave, as healthy and strong as ever.” She shares a room with a “fragile, rather homely girl from Uniontown” named Agatha Holloway. A former schoolteacher fated to the sanitarium by a bad haemorrhage, Agatha is relentlessly chatty, and she regales Mary with stories about her fiancé, a perfectly pleasant auto garage worker named Walt Button. He visits Agatha once a month. Mary tolerates Agatha, but her stories remind her of Mike.

Anna writes Mary to fill her in on developments back home. John still works in his saloon-turned-speakeasy, while Francka’s son, Andy, got married. Kracha is now boarding with Francka in Homestead, where she keeps him drunk on homemade moonshine. Lad Dexter was killed in an airplane crash during the war, and his family opened a new operating room in the hospital dedicated to his memory. Mary continues dreaming about Mike, so much so that she often wishes “the dead could take with them the memories of the living.”

Though she is confident that she will get well, Mary cannot help but think about death, especially how the children will react. She imagines Johnny and Mikie as grown men who find jobs outside of the steel mill and live in houses “away from the mill where there [are] grass and trees.” She hopes that Pauline will eventually find a husband but cherishes having her around to help with the housework. She smiles as she thinks about her future grandchildren. Mary tells the children stories about Mike, especially since Agnes and Mikie barely knew him before he died. She gives the girls every detail about how she and Mike met. “The first time he ever looked at me twice was when I came back to Braddock after being away with the Dexters all summer,” she recalls, “I was all in white.” The girls listen to her with rapt attention.

Still, Mary’s condition does not improve. Often alone with her thoughts, she wonders how and why her life took such turns. She marvels at “the contrast between what she and Mike had been and what they had become, between the dreams of their youth and the hard reality the years had brought them.” At one point, she nearly convinces herself that Mike’s death was all a dream, and that she will return home to find him there waiting for her. She falls asleep with a smile on her face and does not wake up.