The Housemaid's Secret

Wendy Palmer Garrick began life as the child of hardworking parents who struggled due to her father’s back injury and resulting disability. Wendy spent her childhood feeling ashamed of her lack of money and became determined to find a way to become rich as an adult. To this end, Wendy sought out and seduced Douglas Garrick in an attempt to satisfy her desire to be rich. While Millie hides her disillusionment with the world behind her desire to be a savior to people who have experienced abuse, Wendy doesn’t hide hers at all. Wendy is quite clear with everyone that she wants to be rich, even Douglas to a certain extent.

Upon marrying Douglas, Wendy believes she can mold him into the person she wants him to be. However, Douglas is an older man who is set in his ways, and perfectly happy with his life. He refuses her attempts to alter him, and this causes Wendy to become frustrated. Wendy begins cheating not because she is unhappy in her marriage, but because she no longer respects her husband. Wendy finds in Russell the man she believes Douglas could have been if he had followed Wendy’s advice on his weight and eating habits. In this way, Wendy is actually a very real perpetrator of emotional cruelty and is Using Domestic Violence to Manipulate Others, in this case, Douglas.

Wendy begins the novel as a self-centered woman who believes only in fighting for her own needs and desires. In this way, she is the opposite of Millie. While Millie struggles to put other people’s needs and desires ahead of her own, and occasionally fails, Wendy never tries. Even with Russell, the man she claims to love, Wendy becomes disillusioned when he doesn’t handle the death of Douglas with as much celebration as Wendy does. Russell is struggling with everything he helped Wendy do, showing cracks in his character and showing a weakness that will likely lead to Wendy ending their relationship. Wendy has already shown that she easily loses interest in men when they do not live up to expectations.

Wendy doesn’t change at all throughout the novel and never shows any character growth. She does display a great deal of intelligence, but in coming up with a complicated scheme to kill Douglas and blame it on Millie, Wendy missed some very obvious facts that could have saved her a great deal of trouble. First, Wendy could have easily killed Douglas with his digoxin the same way Marybeth killed Wendy, something Millie points out at the end of the novel. Second, Wendy should have read her prenup. Third, Wendy could have verified that Douglas hadn’t changed his will before she went to the trouble of killing him.

There are two Douglas Garricks in the novel: the one Russell pretends to be around Millie, and the real Douglass. Russell’s Douglas is a stiff, formal sort of man who has strict rules about the food he wants purchased and prepared for his home as well as about the way in which he wants his home cleaned. Millie initially finds him to be a loving husband who went to the trouble of hiring help for his wife when she was ill and brought home expensive gifts on a whim. However, as time passes, Millie sees cracks in Douglas’s behavior, including a sadistic need to control the women around him and a roving eye. This Douglas displays behaviors that Millie finds easy to attribute to the kind of man who would cheat on and abuse his wife.

The second Douglas is the real one. He is a “nerdy” guy who likes to go to the movies and shop at discount stores, someone who doesn’t really care much about his social game or his appearance. Douglas is highly intelligent and very successful, but he grew up poor and remembers how that felt. Douglas, rather than desiring all the money in the world the way Wendy does, wants to give back and support those who are struggling as he was when he was young. Douglas is a kind man who truly loves his wife and is willing to forgive her anything as long as she continues to show him love. Even in the last moments of his life, Douglas wants to believe that Wendy loved him once. Douglas is the complete opposite of Wendy, and he was fooled by her false intentions.