A Canary for One | Summary
First published in 1927, “A Canary for One” occurs in the early 1920s on a train headed toward Paris. Its three characters, an older wealthy woman and a couple in their late twenties, are all Americans; only at the end do we realize that the young husband is the actual narrator of the story. As they sit together on the train, the older woman initiates and then dominates the conversation. She first voices her concern that modern trains move at such rapid rates that wrecks are bound to occur but then turns to the topic of marriage, asserting that only American men are suitable husbands for American women. This, in turn, brings the woman to what is really on her mind, her daughter. While on a family vacation to Switzerland two years beforehand, she confides to the young couple her daughter had met an eligible Swiss bachelor, and the two had fallen in love. But the woman would not let her daughter wed a foreigner, and she forced the family to return to America. Her daughter, she notes, is still distraught about this, and the woman says that she has bought a singing canary to cheer he up.
Throughout the conversation, the young wife says very little, and her husband says virtually nothing at all. The young woman does reveal that she and her husband had spent their honeymoon at the same Swiss resort, and that they had lived in Paris but were then forced to leave by the coming of World War I. She adds that they are now headed back to Paris. Meanwhile, her husband merely looks out the window of the speeding train, as the passing landscape is described through his eyes. It features a wrecked train, an incinerated farmhouse, and other scenes of devastation. When the train pulls into Paris, the young man finally reveals the hidden twist: he and his young American wife are going to Paris to begin divorce proceedings.
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