A Prayer for Home

I. A Title Borrowed from a Drinking Song

The novella opens not with narration but with an epigraph — the old music-hall song “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” sung by a drunk looking for his bed after “a little drink about an hour ago.”¹ The choice is a small act of misdirection typical of Mulhern's method: a title that sounds devotional, A Prayer for Home, is in fact drawn from a maudlin drinking song about being lost and tipsy, and the novella spends its length working out the distance between those two registers — the sacred request implied by the title and the boozy, undignified reality of how “home” actually gets sought by the adults in Molly's world. Mrs. Muldoon, introduced on the first page as a woman “drunk as a skunk,” wandering the street “looking for her husband Jim,”² is the novella's first literal enactment of the epigraph's stumbling, sung request to be shown the way home.

II. Nonna's Moral Economy

Much of the novella's early comedy is built from Nonna's casual, unbothered amorality, delivered in the same warm, grandmotherly register she uses for affection. She steals Christmas ornaments off Mrs. Muldoon's tree while visiting her — “She won't notice them missing. And it's a shame not to have them appreciated”³ — and dismisses her own late husband with the same breezy indifference she applies to organized religion: “Men are a pain in the ass,” she says, and of her lover Mr. Scarfone, “he's just a good fuck.”⁴ Her single most important piece of instruction to Molly is explicitly a lesson in performed rather than felt faith: “Of course I don't” believe the Bible is the literal word of God, she admits, “But that's not the point. Most people do. And you gotta fit in.”⁵ Nonna is teaching Molly the exact operating principle the later novel will diagnose in Molly herself: that belief is a social performance layered over a private skepticism.

III. Lady Jane and the Origin of the Angel of Death

The novella's most consequential scene, and the one every later description of Molly Bonamici on this site alludes to without quoting in full, takes place at a storefront psychic's parlor on Tremont Street, where Mrs. Muldoon has brought Nonna and Molly to be “cured” before her trip. Nonna secures a place at the front of a long line by lying outright to a stranger: she tells an Indian couple that Molly “had leukemia ‘very bad’ and the doctors gave me three months at most,” instructing Molly to perform the part — “I tried to appear sick. I started shaking a little and drooled… I managed to create a string of saliva that dropped like the thread of a spider's web hanging off the bottom of my chin.”⁶ The scene is a small, complete demonstration of the novella's moral world: a fabricated terminal illness, staged convincingly enough to move strangers to pity, deployed casually to skip a line, with no consequence and no remorse from either grandmother or granddaughter.

The healer, “Lady Jane,” delivers her verdict on Molly directly and without preamble: “I hate to tell people things like this… but I see gruesome deaths in your future… You have the unlucky fortune of being someone who will either find dead people or be near them when they die in violent situations. I guess you might say, ‘You're an Angel of Death.’”⁷ The scene deliberately declines to resolve whether Lady Jane possesses any real gift or is simply a competent showman reading a room — she then giggles “like a little girl,” a detail that undercuts her own pronouncement's gravity even as the novella's plot will spend the rest of its length seeming to confirm it.⁷ Nonna's furious reaction, dragging Molly out while cursing in Italian, and the family's own competing theories in the car afterward — police officer, doctor, murderer⁸ — establish the designation as contested and uncertain from its very first appearance, exactly the interpretive posture a companion essay on this site identifies in the fuller novel, where Molly's “Angel of Death” status is treated as “more a curiosity than an obsession.”⁹

IV. The Beach as a Staged Assumption

The novella's other major set piece sends Molly, Nonna, and Mrs. Muldoon to the beach on the Catholic feast of the Assumption, ostensibly so Mrs. Muldoon can seek “the Blessed Mother's cure” in the water. Molly's characteristically literal-minded interrogation of the doctrine — “What do you mean raised? She just flew into the air?”¹⁰ — produces one of the novella's most carefully constructed images: as Mrs. Muldoon removes her housedress to reveal a swimsuit, her “round hard belly” makes her look “almost… pregnant,” and Molly, for a moment, “imagined she was going to demonstrate the Assumption and fly away.”¹¹ An aging, alcoholic widow's ordinary, unglamorous body becomes, for one absurd beat, a stand-in for the doctrine of a body raised bodily into heaven — precisely the technique the site's essay on “Assumptions” identifies elsewhere in Mulhern's fiction as granting “a flawed, ordinary body the imagery reserved for the sinless one.”¹² Nonna's own gloss on the scene redirects the theology into the novella's real creed: “Who gives a damn if Mary flew into the sky or not?… The world is made up mostly of sheep. You have the good fortune… of being a lion in a world full of sheep.”¹³

V. Two Kinds of Home: Ireland and the Grave

What the Lady Jane scene establishes, and the beach scene deepens, is that Mrs. Muldoon's “going home” is, for most of the novella, meant and understood literally: she is planning an actual trip back to her family in Ireland, donating her furniture to Goodwill, and telling Nonna, when asked about her flight, “I'm going the third week of August.”¹⁴ The novella tracks a real softening in her toward Molly over these middle chapters — at Molly's graduation party she is, in the narrator's own words, no longer “so bitchy” but “genuinely excited” to see her, singing “Moon River” softly across the table and offering an old Irish proverb as a parting gift: “Your feet will take you where your heart is… you must follow yours, too.”¹⁵ The novella's title and its central irony both depend on this literal Ireland trip existing as a real, planned, believed-in future, so that when Mrs. Muldoon's actual departure turns out to be a deliberate overdose timed to her wedding anniversary rather than a flight to Shannon, the narrator's retrospective correction lands with its full weight: “I did think it was a bit silly to believe that she would be ‘going home’ to her husband Jim, when she was, in fact, going home to the earth, to her ‘conqueror worm.’”¹⁶ The novella's whole architecture turns on this substitution of one home for another — Ireland, then the grave — and the reader is made to feel the substitution exactly when Molly, characteristically, does not.

VI. Mr. Scarfone and the Graduation

Molly's high school graduation party, held at her family's restaurant, gathers the novella's secondary cast for its fullest scene of family dysfunction and introduces Mr. Scarfone directly rather than by rumor. Nonna, drunk on whiskey, needles her son-in-law about the restaurant's failing finances in front of the whole party — “If you had managed the restaurant wisely… you wouldn't have to ask your wife's mother for money”¹⁷ — while simultaneously appraising Mrs. Muldoon's hidden cash as a solution to the same problem, telling Mr. Scarfone she keeps “a stack of cash… in her bread box” and speculating about what remains of her belongings before she leaves.¹⁸ Mr. Scarfone's single direct scene with Molly is brief but ominous, delivered with his hand “firmly” on her shoulders and his eyes fixed on hers: “If you ever need anything, and I mean anything… call me,” a line the narrator reports as spoken “almost menacingly.”¹⁹ The scene establishes, in a single gesture, both his protective utility to the family (confirmed later when Nonna invokes his connection to the police chief) and the low-grade menace that makes the site's essay on the corpus's benign mafiosi describe such figures as sources of “domestic comfort rather than menace” only from a certain angle²⁰ — from Molly's angle, in this scene, the comfort and the menace arrive in the same handshake.

VII. The Corpse Scene and the Limits of Innocence

The novella's discovery scene is unsparing in what it reports and precise about what it withholds. Molly catalogues Mrs. Muldoon's decomposing body with the same clinical precision she brought to Lady Jane's parlor and the beach — “I kneeled and pressed my finger against a dark purple spot above her right ankle; the skin was so cold. The flesh broke, and blood trickled slowly”²¹ — and her curiosity is explicit rather than displaced onto some other object, as it will be with the toad in the later novel: “I guess you could say I was mesmerized.”²¹ When the responding officer asks whether touching the maggot-infested corpse “bothered” her, Molly's answer is characteristically literal and characteristically undisturbed: “No. A maggot is just a baby fly.”²² This is the scene a companion essay on this site cites directly as evidence for the corpus-wide pattern of childhood affect withheld rather than perception failed²³ — and reading it here, in its original context, clarifies that the trait is not an invention of the later novel but a documented, textually prior feature of the character. Nonna's anxious aside that “it's a good thing Mr. Scarfone knows the chief of police” and can supply an excuse for Molly's behavior²⁴ closes the loop the graduation scene opened, confirming Mr. Scarfone's utility exactly when the family needs it.

VIII. The Conqueror Worm

Molly's own interpretive frame for the death arrives not from Catholic doctrine but from Poe, whose “The Conqueror Worm” she has been assigned to recite for English class and recalls, unprompted, while riding in the patrol car: “A crawling shape intrude!… The mimes become its food… Its hero the Conqueror Worm.”²⁵ The citation lets Molly resolve the day's theology on her own terms, converting Mrs. Muldoon's chosen death into a private, literary Assumption: “She had created her own Assumption and I thought, ironically, consumption”²⁶ — the pun turning the Marian miracle of a body raised whole into its precise physical opposite, a body consumed by rot and by the insects Molly examined with her own hands an hour earlier.

IX. Conclusion: The Moon Too High, the River Too Wide

The novella's closing movement returns to song, as its title did, but shifts from the comic drinking ballad of its epigraph to “Moon River,” the same song Mrs. Muldoon sang at Molly's graduation, now recalled with its promise inverted: “We're after the rainbow's end,” the song promises, “But there was no rainbow's end for her. Her end was several days of rot and decay in a hot, humid room.”²⁷ Nonna's offered comfort — “Everything will be all right, Molly” — is met with the novella's most direct admission of its own unresolved despair: “I would like to say that I was comforted, but I wasn't… prayers for home, wherever we believed we were going, would never be answered.”²⁸ The novella's final sentence borrows the song's own geography to deliver its verdict — “The moon was too high, the river was too wide, and our hearts would be broken after all”²⁸ — refusing the genre convention that would let a coming-of-age narrative close on hard-won consolation. Read whole, with Lady Jane's storefront prophecy and Mrs. Muldoon's real, believed-in trip to Ireland restored to view, A Prayer for Home emerges as considerably more than a preliminary sketch for Molly Bonamici: it is the scene in which the “Angel of Death” designation, the family's casual moral economy of theft and performed illness, and the narrator's own unnerving calm in the presence of death are all first assembled, a full novel's length before the later book would confirm that none of it was ever a phase to be outgrown.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Molly Bonamici → Altogether Beautiful