What happens in Part Two, Chapter 20 of East of Eden?
The chapter opens pleasantly in Faye's room at her Salinas brothel. Cotton Eye, the blind piano player, asks to skip work, and Kate discerns he has been smoking opium. After he leaves, Faye tells Kate she does not want her working upstairs and proposes she become a live-in daughter and house manager instead. Kate deflects, insisting she needs money. Faye then hints at a surprise waiting after closing time. That night the expected crowd of Woodmen of the World never arrives—their member Clarence Monteith has died of a heart attack during their meeting. The girls wait in the parlor; Kate is distracted and silent, claiming to be worried about Faye, whom she tells the other girls fainted that afternoon. After the others go to bed, Kate dresses herself to look childlike and goes to Faye's room, bringing a gold watch as a gift. Faye has decorated the room as a party and reveals her surprise: a legal will leaving all her worldly goods, valued at over sixty thousand dollars, to Kate. The two women toast each other with champagne. Under the wine's effect, Kate's cultivated warmth dissolves; she becomes cold, mocking, and menacing, describing sadistic practices she uses with her private clients. Horrified, Faye demands she leave. Kate silences her and doses her with paregoric until she falls unconscious. Alone, Kate makes herself vomit the wine with mustard water to clear her head. Through the remaining night and into dawn, she methodically torments Faye at the edge of waking—using ammonia, an ivory crochet hook, and finally cold water poured into Faye's ear—engineering a scenario that makes it appear she is Faye's devoted nurse rescuing her from nightmares, witnessed by the cook and the other girls.
Analysis
The chapter is built on a sustained ironic contrast between surface and concealed intent. Its three numbered sections move from warm daylight through a candlelit party to a cold predawn vigil, and the light itself tracks Kate's performance: in section one she is bathed in soft dusk glow, in section two the Japanese lanterns warm the room into false festivity, and in section three dawn light creeps in while she works in methodical darkness.
Point of view is close third person but deliberately withheld: when Kate stands in the hall after the maternal exchange, the narrative pauses on her physical gestures—fingertips on her chin, a luxurious stretch, hands sliding down her sides—rather than her thoughts, forcing the reader to read her body as her true text. The same technique returns at the chapter's end when Kate "studied" the sleeping Faye; the verb is cold and clinical, not tender.
Faye's innocence is rendered through repeated domestic imagery: cake, chocolates, champagne, red ribbon, a mahogany box, lace dress. These party props make the scene simultaneously touching and sinister, because the reader watches Kate receive them while already half-suspecting her motives.
The wine functions as a dramatic mechanism: it strips away Kate's layered self-control and briefly reveals her authentic cruelty. The mustard-water purge that follows is structurally significant—Kate literally expels the revelation and rebuilds her mask before dawn.
The chapter's final movement is a tightly choreographed piece of theater: Kate stages herself as the alarmed rescuer, complete with robe and slippers, while the evidence of her actual work—the ammonia cloth, the crochet hook—has already been put away.
Key quotes from Part Two, Chapter 20
“Kate’s eyes seemed to peer into and beyond Faye’s eyes—to penetrate the brain behind the eyes.”
The narrator describes Kate's reaction just after she has read Faye's will silently to herself, before she speaks her carefully composed reply.
“She went over the evening in her mind, moving from scene to scene like a sniffing animal.”
After purging herself of the wine in the kitchen, Kate mentally reviews what she has done and said during the night.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Two, Chapter 20
- irreproachable
- Completely beyond criticism or blame; so proper and correct that no fault can be found. Here it describes a document that is legally airtight and impossible to challenge.