55 pages • 1 hour read
Susan MeissnerA Fall of Marigolds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Taryn”
Chapter 1 begins in New York in September 2011. Taryn, after “[f]our years of textile school” (1), works at a fabric store in New York. The shop is owned by her friend Celine, and its motto is “[e]verything beautiful has a story it wants to tell” (2). Taryn is responsible for helping customers find or match old or discontinued fabrics, which she describes as her “favorite thing to do” (3) as well as waiting on customers in the store. Celine remarks to a customer that Taryn is “brilliant” (3) at her job, which reminds Taryn that there is one fabric she’s never been able to find, though she has been searching for it for 10 years.
After picking up her 9-year-old daughter, Kendal, from school, Celine shows Taryn some pictures that have just been released on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The pictures are of Taryn and a man who helped her during the attacks. These pictures had never before been released, and Taryn is shocked. In fact, she has an anxiety attack remembering the events of the day. Her daughter is worried and confused; Taryn had never told her that she was there. The pictures show Taryn clutching a scarf, which “shone like a flame as [she] held it to her mouth” (11) and is the elusive pattern she has never been able to match. What Taryn remembers most, however, is the guilt and regret she felt that day, which she describes as both “[a]n old, familiar companion” and “a rush of sound” that “[a]ll the fabric in the world could not muffle […]” (12).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Clara”
This chapter goes back 100 years to August 1911. Clara, a nurse, works on Ellis Island and treats immigrants who are sick. If they recover, they will be free to leave the island, but if they do not, they are kept there until their deaths or are sent back to their homeland. Clara is on Ellis Island because it is the “most in-between of places” for the immigrants who arrive there, neither “back home where their previous life had ended” nor “embracing the wide horizon of a reinvented life.” Instead, they were “poised between two worlds” (14).
The same is true for Clara who is still reeling from witnessing the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire six months ago. Clara worked in the same building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and had been meant to tour the factory floor the day of the fire with the factory’s accountant, Edward Brim, with whom Clara had been flirting for several weeks. She had been hoping he would ask her out on a date, but instead, she watched as he jumped from the windows. Now she stays on Ellis Island while she tries to “make sense of what [she] had lost and yet never had” (19). Clara believes that even though she never really knew Edward, she loved him, and she believes he felt the same. Like Taryn, she is tortured by regret and guilt.
Chapter 3 Summary
Clara is originally from Pennsylvania and had been enthralled with New York prior to the fire, claiming that “the vibrant hues of New York had attracted” (22) her after a visit when she was just a child. Unlike her sister Henrietta, for whom “there was only one shade to every color,” Clara has “always been drawn to color. […]. The more vibrant or intense or deep or unique, the better” (22). It is that same attraction to color that makes her notice Welsh immigrant Andrew Gwynn. Andrew’s wife died of scarlet fever on the journey to America and, while waiting to be examined, Andrew wears her “copper-colored scarf,” which Clara notices because it “resembled the necklace of fire Edward had around his neck when he took to the sky” (23). The unusual scarf attracts Clara’s attention, and her sympathy for Andrew—who will be quarantined because of the scarlet fever—moves her to help him when he asks her to retrieve “his father’s pattern book” (30) from his trunk.
Andrew is a tailor, as was his father, and asks for the book because it “is all [he has] left” and “[i]f the trunk is stolen [he] will have nothing” (30). Clara is sympathetic but, at first, unwilling to break the rules to get the book for Andrew. However, when he also reveals that he and his wife only knew each other for 12 days, Clara agrees to help because she understands “how fast the heart could learn to love someone” (32-33).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These introductory chapters establish the central, connected stories of the book. It begins with Taryn’s story, revealing many important details: Taryn was close to the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks; she used a scarf to protect herself from the toxic dust that resulted from the towers’ collapse; and she experienced some kind of tragedy in addition to the attacks themselves. This section does not provide a great deal of detail about what that tragedy might be; throughout the text, Taryn’s story is given less space than Clara’s story. The text then goes back to the New York of 1911. Unlike the suspense built in the first chapter, the next two chapters provide most of the details of Clara’s story: her love for Edward, killed in the fire, and her sense of isolation, brought on by doubting whether she even has a right to mourn Edward when she did not know him that well.
The scarf links the two women, and it is clearly the same scarf: Taryn describes it as shining “like a flame as [she] held it to her mouth” (11), whereas Clara states that it reminds her of the “necklace of fire Edward had around his neck” (23). Taryn describes it as “surely a hundred years old” with “a repeating pattern [of] a burst of marigolds” (5), a pattern that Clara comments on as well, noting that “[i]n the sunlight it looked less like fire and more like a burst of monarch butterflies” because of the “cascading fall of marigolds splashed across the fabric” (33). The scarf foreshadows a physical connection between the two protagonists, in addition to the emotional connections between the two. It symbolizes one of the central concerns of the text: the idea of love at first sight and how to differentiate between true love and mere attraction.
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