41 pages • 1 hour read
Robert James WallerThe Bridges of Madison County
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Bridges of Tuesday”
Before dawn, Robert drives past Francesca’s house on his way to Roseman Bridge. He thinks of her and her unappreciative husband. Francesca, for the first time lying naked in her bed, hears his truck and thinks of him at the wheel, a cigarette in his hand.
Robert parks well away from the bridge, puts on knee-high rubber boots, and brings cameras, lenses, and a tripod to a spot on the edge of the stream. As the sun clears the horizon, he begins taking shots. He notices a piece of paper tacked to the bridge entrance, hurries up to it, removes it, stuffs it into a pocket, and hurries back to continue taking photos as the sun edges upward.
Capturing several photo series with varying compositions and tonalities, he meticulously adjusts and re-adjusts his camera’s lens and film and explores different vantage points. He takes advantage of the remaining early-morning light and its sparkling effects upon the water.
Hoping to capture similar shots at another covered bridge, Robert drives quickly back up the road, again past Francesca’s house, where his eyes search briefly. He tries to remind himself that getting involved with someone like her would be too complicated. At Hogback Bridge, still mist-shrouded, he gets another good series of shots, including a lucky few of an old-fashioned farmer riding a horse-drawn wagon. It’s a successful morning of photography.
Clearing out his pockets, he finds the paper from Roseman Bridge. It’s from Francesca, referencing Yeats: “If you’d like supper again when ‘white moths are on the wing,’ come by tonight after you’re finished. Anytime is fine” (78).
Back in town at a gas station, he thumbs a phone directory, finds Francesca’s number, and calls. He tells her he’d love to accept but won’t be finished working until late. He invites her to visit him at Cedar Bridge, where he’ll take sunset photos. She hesitates, worrying about being seen with another man. Then she agrees.
Robert spends hours at the newspaper office, paging through old editions. He breaks for lunch and walks over to the local cafe, where heads turn. Already the locals are gossiping about him, that he’s taking pictures at the bridges and visiting the newspaper office. Because of Robert’s longish hair, they wonder if he’s one of those hippies they’ve heard of.
Noticing their stares and murmurs and worrying that gossip might hurt Francesca, he calls her and suggests she might want to cancel her visit with him at the bridge this evening. She thinks a moment, then says she wants to see him do his work anyway.
He returns to his motel, cleans up, then stops at a tavern and buys bottles of beer. Again, people stare. He drives to Cedar Bridge and finds her leaning against her truck, wearing a white t-shirt and jeans. At first, he’s tongue-tied, but he says he’s glad to see her, and her heart leaps.
She helps by carrying one of his knapsacks and handing his equipment. As she watches him work, she’s deeply impressed by his subtle grace. He compliments her on her assistance, and for a moment she’s overcome with shyness. He takes several more pictures of the bridge, then several of her. When he’s done, he wants to return to his motel to wash up before dinner, but she says he can do that at her house.
Already today Francesca has driven to Des Moines and bought wine and some brandy, a light summer dress with a low neckline, and expensive sandals, then returned and prepared stuffed peppers, salad, cornbread, and apple soufflé.
They caravan back, and Robert uses the upstairs bath to clean up. Francesca gets a brief phone call from Richard, who updates her on the fair and that he and the kids will return on Friday. He asks if she’s okay, adding that she sounds odd, but she says she’s merely hot.
Robert appears in a button shirt, khakis, and sandals. It’s her turn to shower; he gives her a beer to take with her, and she pours it into a glass and goes upstairs while he cleans cameras on the kitchen table. Lying in the tub where Robert had just lain, she feels intensely erotic. She wonders why the people around her, especially Richard, are so un-sensual, so un-poetic. She chalks it up to tradition and stubborn men afraid of change.
She towels off, applies light makeup, puts on the summer dress, bracelets, and hoop earrings, and walks downstairs. Robert looks up. Awed by her beauty, he tells her she’s elegant and stunning. In that moment, basking in each other, they fall in love.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Room to Dance Again”
Francesca and Robert look at each other steadily, “locked in to one another, solidly, intimately, and inextricably” (99). The phone rings, and she answers; it’s Marge, a friend who wants to get together on Thursday. Wishing that day free for Robert, Francesca begs off with an excuse. While talking, she puts her hand on Robert’s shoulder and feels a warmth from him that courses through her body.
Marge says she heard that a stranger stopped at Francesca’s house. Francesca says it was someone asking for directions who left two minutes later. Marge says he was shooting pictures of the bridges and might be a hippie, but Francesca replies that she wouldn’t know a hippie if she saw one.
After the call, they linger in the kitchen as soft music plays on the radio. He offers to dance with her. As he takes her hand, a commercial comes on, and they laugh at the interruption. From a drawer she pulls two candles that she bought earlier in Des Moines. He lights them, and she turns off the overhead light.
The radio plays “Autumn Leaves,” and they dance. The song changes, and they keep dancing, their bodies moving closer together. They kiss, and the kiss continues.
Twenty-two years later, Francesca recalls every detail of that evening—how she led Robert upstairs to her room, how they made love for a long time, again and again, how gently powerful he was, and how sex with him contained both a primitive wildness and a spiritual quality. The narrative resumes the romantic evening: For his part, Robert senses that all the exotic roads he has traveled led him to her. Early in the morning, he says:
This is why I’m here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you (114).
He asks her to wear the t-shirt, jeans, and sandals from yesterday. They go outside, and he takes the picture that, every year since, she brings out to look at on her birthday.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Highway and the Peregrine”
Francesca and Robert spend most of the next two days talking or making love. They drive to Des Moines, where Robert mails film rolls to his New York editors, and they eat lunch at a fancy restaurant. They also talk about their future. He offers to speak to her husband and explain things, but she says Richard will never understand. They agree that they’ve fallen in love and that, together, they’ve created something that has absorbed both of them.
Robert says he’s among the last of a dying breed of wandering adventurers. Still, he asks her to travel with him around the world. She answers that she’d merely hold him back, and she loves him too much to do that to him. If he asks, she’d go with him, but abandoning her husband and children would tear her up inside and change her into someone different from the woman he now loves. He says that what they share comes only once to anyone, but he understands and relents.
They spend Thursday night together, and the next morning he packs up to leave. He’ll be in town a few more days. He gives Francesca his address and phone number and invites her to call him anytime collect, so the charges don’t show up on her phone bill. She agrees that he can send her a letter now and then—she’ll make excuses to Richard if needed.
Tears streaming down their faces, they walk to his truck and embrace for several minutes. He drives down the lane to the road, then stops, gets out, and looks at her. They gaze at each other, and he memorizes her standing there. Still shedding tears, he gets back in and drives away.
That night, Richard and the kids return with tales of the fair: Their steer won a ribbon before they sold it to a meat packer. Carolyn calls a friend, and Michael drives into town for a Friday-night get-together with high school buddies. Francesca sits on the porch swing, and Richard comes out, asking, “You okay, Frannie? You seem a little tired or dreamy or somethin’” (126). She says she’s fine and glad he’s back. He invites her to join him in bed, but she declines.
For a few days, she avoids going into town, fearing she might run off with Robert. On Tuesday, she drives in with Richard to do shopping. At one point, they fall in behind Robert’s pickup and follow it for a few blocks. Richard notices the out-of-state license plate and guesses that the long-haired driver must be the rumored photographer.
Looking at Robert in his truck, Francesca suddenly realizes that she “badly underestimated her feelings” (129). She wants to jump from Richard’s truck and run to Robert’s, but responsibilities hold her firmly in place. Robert’s truck turns onto the highway west and disappears down the road. Francesca bursts into tears. Robert demands to know what’s been the matter with her. She insists she just needs a few moments. He shakes his head in bewilderment.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
These chapters are the novel’s centerpiece, the buildup and release of great tensions—sexual, emotional, and spiritual—and their discovery of a loving connection more intensely intimate than either protagonist could have imagined. They also realize, tragically, that their affair must be as brief as it is wonderful.
In Chapter 6, the plot once again jumps back and forth in time between the main story of the lovers’ brief encounter and Francesca’s memories of it. The author’s purpose, in this narrative shifting, is to remind the reader that, every year on her birthday, Francesca recalls the entire romantic interlude between herself and Robert. It’s a tradition meant both to honor the single most important moment in her life and limit its power over her by restricting the reverie to a single day each year. Were she to indulge it more than that, she might wallow in unfulfilled yearnings and drown in bitter remorse.
The author makes extensive use of imagery and metaphor. One of his chief purposes is to characterize a kind of masculine archetype that Robert embodies—one who leans into the headwinds of adventure, living heedless of the petty responsibilities to which most people tether themselves. Imagery of the faraway ports of call that Robert has visited stand in for the soul of the man himself. Francesca puts it another way: “You’re old knapsacks and a truck named Harry and jet airplanes to Asia” (120). When they make love, she sees Robert as a “fine leopard.” He whispers to her “of blowing sand and magenta winds and brown pelicans riding the backs of dolphins moving north along the coast of Africa” (113). The images convey a realm of experience that literal language cannot reach.
Chapter 6 is the author’s extended essay, in dramatic form, of how love-making should unfold between kindred souls. In Chapter 7, Francesca and Robert wax philosophical—eloquently, they pour out their thoughts to each other, two lonely people who finally meet and appreciate one another’s wide-ranging spirit. These words serve double duty as brief treatises on the power of the primitive, the high price of responsibility, the way love unifies two souls, and the end of old-fashioned masculinity in the modern age.
These two chapters convey the soaring intimacy of two people who make love even when they’re just sitting and talking. The intensity of the relationship comes partly from its invitation—to both protagonists—to jump from a strait-laced world and rush off to share life with a fellow adventurer. The story asks readers to consider whether their own lives fulfill their deepest longings—and, if not, to find out why and then dare to reach for authentic, full-blooded living.
