Trying to sort out the order of events in the two stories “Paper Pills” and “Death” from Winesburg.
Dr. Reefy is forty five when he begins his courtship with the dark haired girl.
He is described at that time as having a jaded grey horse.
At the beginning of “Paper Pills”, we are told that now Dr. Reefy is an old man with a white beard, but that long before he drove a jaded white horse from house to house, then later he married the girl with the dark hair and money.
I had thought that Reefy’s grey horse had turned white but it must be his white horse that has turned grey or else two different horses, both jaded.
In “Death”, Dr. Reefy’s beard is described as grey, but he doesn’t have it yet; he has a brown mustache at this point.
(Perhaps this is just random but, in the two stories involving him, there is an odd transposition at play, in that Dr. Reefy’s beard and horse are both described as having been both white and grey.)
Reefy is described, during his relationship with Elizabeth as being in “middle age”, which must be some years before he turned 45, when his relationship with the girl with dark hair occurred. (His relationship with Elizabeth preceded that with the girl with the dark hair.)
Elizabeth is described as being a “a tired, gaunt old woman at 41” when she has the decisive moment with Dr. Reefy, when Dr. Reefy observes the youthful force within her, a few months after which she dies.
Elizabeth died when George Willard was 18, and began seeing Dr. Reefy when George Willard was “12 or 14,” so she must have herself been in her mid to late thirties. (The implication is that she was 23 when she gave birth to Geoege Willard.)
“Paper Pills” takes us from the present day, when Reefy is 55, back ten years to when he married the heiress at 45. We don’t know anything about the period of Reefy’s life between his affair with Elizabeth and his marriage to the heiress.
Curiosity: do we have enough information to determine the age of George Willard at the time “Paper Pills” begins? Say Reefy was 30-35 during his relationship with Elizabeth, then George Williard (18 at the time of her death) would be 38 at the time Dr. Reefy has a large white beard at 55. That is close to the age Anderson would have been when writing these stories (Born 1876, Winesburg written over 1915-16.)
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