Just How Old Is Dotty?

Having just “reached her majority” at novel’s end, which by Texas law would have meant turning 18 years of age, 18 years into which she has packed several lives’ worth of incident and grief and loss. — Someone, on Dotty

This afternoon, I revised my Dotty resource and started thinking about the novel’s somewhat murky chronology. Dotty is young at the end of the book, but eighteen can’t be right.

At the beginning of Chapter XII, “Dotty was sixteen (seventeen in the fall).” The chapter follows her life after Joe Smith and ends with “And in such ways did a couple of years go by.” Charles enters the story in the next chapter. This puts Dotty at about eighteen before their courtship, marriage, and all the tragedy that follows.

After Charles’s death, she tells God:

I begged You to give him to me for a year, and You gave him longer.

So if Dotty is eighteen when they meet, she is at least nineteen when Charles dies. Then another year passes. When the weekly letters stop arriving, Soft-Talk Susie tells her:

Well, you have had a year. There were fifty-two letters. He told you there would be, didn’t he?

Only then does Dotty begin reading them.

A word here about Texas. Texas didn’t lower its general age of majority to eighteen until 1973. Under the law of Dotty’s time, marriage could end a woman’s legal minority before twenty-one. Since Dotty had already married Charles, I take the closing reference to her majority as an age clue, pointing to her twenty-first birthday. The novel supports this reading: even while married, Dotty looks forward to registering to vote “as soon as she was of age.” The voting age in Texas was then twenty-one, and marriage wouldn’t have changed that.

But there is a complication. In Chapter XV, Lafferty dates the wedding:

They were married in 1950 probably, or a year very near to it, in the summer. July, as a month, would not be far wrong. It is all written down at the Church. You can go and see it in the records.

The year 1950 conflicts with the two years that pass after Dotty is sixteen. Putting the wedding around 1952 fits the sequence better, though that means reading “a year very near to it” too loosely for my taste.

That leaves a real loose end, but eighteen doesn’t work. Twenty-one fits the elapsed time and the closing statement that Dotty “had just reached her majority.” Since she was born on October 15, 1933, the novel ends shortly after her twenty-first birthday in 1954.

And here is a minor curiosity about Lafferty’s other Dotty, Dotty Yekouris. In Archipelago, Finnegan is shot on a Wednesday afternoon, apparently after his confession on July 15, then the feast of St. Henry the Emperor. The year is probably 1953: in More Than Melchisedech, he says in May 1946 that he will wander for seven years before being buried in Cuba. On that reading, Finnegan’s shooting and entombment precede Dotty Peisson’s twenty-first birthday, October 15, 1954.