#fancy entourage

And maybe Cora feels like she’s stepping up for Sybil, who loved being a nurse and helping people. She understands the wanting and needing of a purpose, and she honors her late daughter by being there every day.

And so Robert does feel a little bit neglected sometimes, but he does his best to be supportive and after so many years his best is so much better than it was. He is proud of her, even if medicine and doctors and the like make him uncomfortable.

Still, he will talk the ear off anybody about her work at the hospital, something she isn’t aware of until Tom lets it slip that he’s getting a reputation for being insufferably braggy about his accomplished wife.

That evening when Cora is talking about the hospital when they are alone, Robert might miss the glint in her eye. Her confidence is up, she feels strong, and she feels playful.

He misses the humor in her tone (he often does, sweet man) when she tells him she ought to check his pulse.

Why, he wonders aloud? He feels perfectly fine.

Imagine our girl, reliving that night over and over again. Her concerns as a mother casually dismissed by her husband who now seems to be more concerned about getting back into her bed than her good graces.

(She’s wrong, of course, but…)

It has thrown her back, you see, to when she was inconsequential to the house as anything but a source of income and a willing body. Her moment of horror over the revelation of Ethel’s past quickly squelched by Robert attempting to exert his dominance and reminding her that once again, not terribly many degrees separated their agreement and Ethel’s choice - those degrees all concerning Robert’s love and respect for her, both of which she’s questioning.

And Robert - the kind of dad who knows his daughter’s favorite flower and wants to show her it’s blooming, who should have told Cora everything he revealed to Mary, sees Cora’s rejection as a reflection of him and not that she’s wrestling with old demons of loneliness and self-loathing.

“I also felt like Cora was doing some Parenting of Rose that we never saw. Rose transformed from a selfish flapper, sleeping with a married man into a poised young woman who helped care for Russian refugees. I don't know what parenting a girl who's nearly an adult looks like, but I guess neither does JFellz, but I also think Cora was doing it and doing it well.”

It wasn’t just Cora who did some parenting. So did Mary, Edith and even Anna. She was a selfish brat, for sure, but she also seemed to want to be helpful and kind. It’s just that Susan had created an environment in which Rose was always corrected, even if she wasn’t doing anything wrong. If you’re damned if you do as well as don’t, she chose to do whatever she could to hurt her mother and herself the most. Once she wasn’t under the constant barrage of criticism, things changed for her.

She was also allowed to make mistakes. Susan seemed almost pathelogically afraid of what rose would “do” and sought to control her so she wouldn’t have a chance to face consequences. It means Rose was only confronted with her mom’s consequences, not the rest. Both by going to the dance and pretending to be “regular” and thoughtlessly bringing down Matthew’s gramophone, she was given a front row seat to the results of her actions. She was beginning to realize she didn’t live in a vacuum and that the things she did impacted people other than herself and her mom.