The correct answer is:
The full contents of the chest never came quite clear, perhaps because he didn't want to know.
His mother had once tried to explain the paper to him, but he didn't want to listen.
John Hoyer Updike (1932 – 2009) was an American novelist, poet, and short-story writer. The Brown Chest is a story about Family tradition and is centered in a brown chest containing family memorabilia. It was part of The Afterlife (1994), one of his many short story collections.
