East of Eden

Chapter 11

John Steinbeck · Mountaineers 10th–12th

Teaching Companion Print Adapt for your student

Copywork

Secretly then, as though he were afraid he might be caught, he straightened her hand and touched the little cushion pads on the fingertips. Her fingers were pink and soft, but the skin on the back of her hand seemed to have an underbloom like a pearl. Adam chuckled with delight.

When he was gone Cathy got up from her bed and moved unsteadily to the bureau. She leaned forward and looked at her face. The bandage was still on her forehead. She raised the edge of it enough to see the angry red underneath.

Read both passages aloud. Adam sees a glow under the skin of her hand, “like a pearl.” Cathy lifts the edge of her bandage and sees “the angry red underneath.” Why does Steinbeck call the wound angry?

For the educator Two passages, one from each side of the bed. The first, three sentences long, comes in the second part: the doctor has gone, Charles has gone to work, and Adam sits by the sleeping girl. Its first sentence holds the main verb back behind a long opening (“Secretly then, as though he were afraid he might be caught”), so the reader feels the hesitation before the touch. The second turns on “but”: soft pink fingers, then skin with “an underbloom like a pearl”, a word that puts a glow beneath the surface. The third is four words long. The second passage, four sentences long, comes in the fourth part, just after Adam proposes and goes out to his brother. Its first sentence carries Cathy across the room; the next three are short and plain, and the last ends on “underneath”, the wound under the bandage. Students copying them practise a long opening before the main verb, a sentence balanced on “but”, and a run of short sentences that close on the word that matters. For the talk prompt, listen for students who take “angry” as plain description: a healing wound looks red, and Cathy sees exactly that, where Adam, on the first day, saw a pearl. Others will hear her own anger in it: the same paragraph says Mr. Edwards had really frightened her, that it was the only time in her life she had lost control of a situation, and that she “determined never to let it happen again.” A student may notice that both passages look under something, a glow under the skin and the red under the bandage, and ask which is nearer the truth about her. Let them argue it from the page.

Discussion

Narration Tell the chapter back, from Charles’s new respect for Adam to Charles’s laugh at eleven o’clock.

As Adam washes the blood from her face, he remembers his stepmother at this same bed. She said something over and over, but he cannot remember what. Then he hears himself talking “almost as though he were a stranger listening.” Whose voice is he hearing? Character
Cathy hears Adam ask the sheriff, “How do you know she can remember?” Then the sheriff asks her name, and her pencil writes “I don’t know” in huge letters. How much of that lie belongs to Adam? Inference
Charles tells Cathy, “I think you’re a devil.” She laughs softly. “That makes two of us,” she says. Two of what? Character
Charles tells Cathy she talked a lot while she was drugged. Then, behind the henhouse, he slaps his leg and laughs. “I thought she was smarter,” he says to himself. What has the bluff won him? Plot structure
By the county road, Alex Platt has found a suitcase of a man’s clothes with no labels, an empty purse, and almost four thousand dollars. Steinbeck puts this news right after we learn that Cathy needs “protection and money.” What do you wonder here that neither brother does? Author's choice

Make a Connection Think of a time you distrusted someone the first time you met them. Looking back, was it something in them, or something in you?

Vocabulary

underbloom: Her fingers were pink and soft, but the skin on the back of her hand seemed to have an underbloom like a pearl. A glow that seems to come from beneath a surface; built from under and bloom, the soft glow of healthy skin or the dusty sheen on a ripe plum. It is a rare word, and Steinbeck spends it at the moment Adam is most taken with her: he touches her fingertips in secret and sees light under the skin. The word tells what Adam sees, and leaves the reader to ask what is really under there.
craftily: He regarded her craftily, almost with pleasure at the thought of combat. In a sly, scheming way, planning a move the other person will not see; from craft, an old word for skill and strength that came to mean cunning. Charles is about to bluff, and the narrator gives him the word that fits Cathy best. It marks him as the one person in the house who plays her kind of game.
convulsively: Her face tightened and her hand closed convulsively. In a sudden, jerking way that the body does on its own, before the mind decides anything; from convulse, to shake hard and helplessly. It is the one moment in the chapter when Cathy’s body answers before her plans do: Adam has just proposed, and her hand grips shut. A moment later the narrator says she “recovered in an instant”, which tells you there was something to recover from.
unsteadily: When he was gone Cathy got up from her bed and moved unsteadily to the bureau. In a shaky, wobbling way, not fully in control of one’s balance; the opposite of steadily. Cathy’s body is still weak from the beating, and she crosses the room unsteadily. Her mind is the opposite: in the same paragraph she has already decided to marry Adam and knows she can control him. The word marks the gap between how she moves and how she thinks.

Critical thinking

Adam stands in the back doorway, and time seems to stop. When he looks back at his brother, Charles is “still struggling with the same large stone.” Then Adam goes in and asks Cathy to marry him. What does his brother have to do with the proposal?
Adam loves Cathy without knowing her, and Charles knows her without loving her. By the end of the wedding night, which of the brothers has been fooled?