The strange and ambiguous conclusion to Updike's Of the Farm

John Updike's Of the Farm (1965) concludes in a weird manner, as, first, we get a late night tete-a-tete in which the narrator's mother tells her son that his new wife, Peggy, is unintelligent (there is no evidence for this at all in her many conversations up to this point) and that he made a huge mistake in leaving his first wife for Peggy - and, amazingly, he agrees with her! So where does this leave things? He (Joey) gets in bed with Peggy, they kinda nuzzle, and get to sleep - no follow-up, no guilty - I'd kind of thought maybe she'd overheard the whole conversation, which would lead to some dramatics, but apparently not. The next morning they, Joey and his mother, go to church, where the sermon is about Eve and her subservience to Adam. Hm, everyone seems pleased with these observations (mother notes that the minister has a roving eye). On the way home for church, the mother has what appears to be a heart attack. Medical care differed tremendously 50 years ago, but even be standards of the era Joey seems to delay ridiculously in getting in touch w/ his mother's md. Eventually, she settles into bed, rebuffs Joey's offer to send Peggy and her son back to NYC while he would stay on to help at the farm, and the mother's parting words are that he should get as much $ as he can from developers when she dies and wills him her farm; ambiguously, he says he's always thought it was "their" farm - suggesting, to me, that he will never feel fully comfortable with Peggy and their life in NY. Overall, a fine, almost miniaturized novel and a demonstration, following two much more ambitious works, that Updike can work in a different key - as he continued to prove throughout his life.