But Dial’s more vulnerable moments can make this statuesque six-footer crumble: “Who could imagine her made so small and worthless, heartsick for a little boy.”
Carey does imagine and does portray with a sustained poignancy and convincing force from the very beginning of His Illegal Self. In a flashback to when Dial babysat and “carried the weight of his squirming life,” contending with “cruel ear infections long ago, jagged teeth … high fevers, cold baths. … She thought she loved him then.” Such emotions, even when conflicted then or as they've led to fugitive fleeing now, seems to have crowded out other concerns, including those of her career.
“They called her Dial because she said dialectic had been invented by Zeno. … She was the truth teller,” not unlike — as depicted in Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang — outlaw Ned Kelly, raised on “lies and silences” a hundred years earlier but in his chronicle, dedicated to the baby daughter he will never live to see, pledged to the truth.
Dial “only lied to the boy to keep him from hurt.” Like Zeno and his paradoxes, too, she contains Whitman’s multitudes, tells Twain’s most beautiful lies, and brazens out Australia’s bush, seemingly “beyond acres, beyond hope or forgiveness.”
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