The Allusive Mulhern

1Epigraph—the Song of Solomon

You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.—Song of Solomon 4:7

Literal reading an epigraph, a declaration of love set at the head of the story.

Allusive reading the declaration names the book itself and its Marian movement: the homely woman who is, by the end, “altogether beautiful”—the same phrase returned verbatim in the closing lines.

Why it matters the epigraph is not borrowed ornament but the story’s own end spoken in advance; the title “Assumptions” is already the assumption of beauty where none appears to be.

2Peggy Fleming

I always thought it a cruel irony that she had the same name as the graceful and beautiful skater who had won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1968.

Literal reading a narrator remarking on the coincidence of a name.

Allusive reading the name carries the entire theme in miniature: Peggy Fleming the toothless, hairless, “homeliest damn woman,” named for the embodiment of American grace on ice.

Why it matters the irony is stated outright and then earned: by the end the homely Peggy is literally lifted and transfigured, so the two Peggys come together.

3“You Stepped Out of a Dream”

“other songs like ‘You Stepped Out of a Dream’ by Sarah Vaughan” . . . closing, “Completely awake—laughing, altogether beautiful, and divine—she rises once again.”

Literal reading a listing of the old songs Peg sang in the Back Bay nightclub.

Allusive reading the title names the story’s waking structure: the whole plot is a step out of dream into being, concluded by the narrator’s “Completely awake.”

Why it matters the song is genuinely part of Peg’s repertoire; the allusion does not invent the music, it discovers that the music has been stating the plot all along.

4“When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New”

“My grandmother goaded Peg to sing ‘When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New,’ Peg’s favorite.”—sung against the story’s epigraph, “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you” (Song of Solomon 4:7).

Literal reading a widow singing a secular love song to a dead husband.

Allusive reading it doubles the Song of Solomon, scripture’s own wedding song, the love lyric that frames the story and lends the book its title.

Why it matters Peg’s grief is real and self-sufficient; the allusion reveals the secular devotion was scriptural all along. It does not borrow holiness to give it weight.

5Titian’s Assunta

a copy of Titian’s Assunta caught my attention. A startled Mary, arms spread above her upturned face, is being lifted on a cloud toward heaven.

Literal reading a remembered canvas in an art book, described in a college dormitory.

Allusive reading the painting is the story’s master key: Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin is the unseen template behind Peg’s rising from the sea.

Why it matters the allusion is itself the plot’s source, openly named; the story tells us its own icon and then re-enacts it in salt water.

6The Fleecy Cradle

The cloud, which you’d expect to be a soft fleecy white, is a cradle of thunderhead gray.

Literal reading a note on the color and texture of the painted cloud under Mary.

Allusive reading “fleecy” and “cradle” are Lamb-and-manger language, the Nativity folded into the Assumption.

Why it matters the words describe a real painting’s real cloud; the theological sense arrives through ordinary description.

7“For Christ’s sake”

“For Christ’s sake, Peg! The point is to get wet. How else are you going to get the cure?”

Literal reading Helen’s exasperation coaxing her neighbor Peg into the ocean, nothing more than idiom.

Allusive reading the scene is explicitly Marian, a “cure in the water” sought through “Mary’s blessing”; the curse is, word for word, an appeal to Christ in the very moment that becomes an Assumption.

Why it matters the profanity and the prayer share one syllable; the invocation is already inside the idiom whether or not anyone hears it.

8The Head of John the Baptist

Beth caught the wig, then raised it in the air like the head of John the Baptist, giggling and tiptoeing a slow dance across the sand.

Literal reading children playing with a blown-off wig at the beach.

Allusive reading the lifted wig becomes a comic reliquary, the Baptist’s head raised after Salome’s dance.

Why it matters the image begins as a simile the narrator half-remembers; the wig’s rising is the low burlesque of Mary’s own rising—the sacred plot told once as comedy before it is told as vision.

9Razed / Raised

“. . . surprised by a spirited breaker that razed them in its wake.” . . . “she rose from the sea.” . . . “Completely awake—laughing, altogether beautiful, and divine—she rises once again to sing her favorite song.”

Literal reading a wave knocks two women down, then one gets to her feet in the surf.

Allusive reading razed puns on raised, so the wave that knocks the women down foreshadows the Assumption; the “spirited” breaker is both a lively wave and the Holy Spirit.

Why it matters the pun operates on the ear before the page; the theology lives in the sound.

10The Closing Vision

Completely awake—laughing, altogether beautiful, and divine—she rises once again to sing her favorite song. And the Sun’s great light shines upon and caresses her warm skin, like the flesh of a Father’s hands as He cradles His child’s head before lifting His crossed arms to kiss her soft cheek.

Literal reading a child’s imagined image of Peg reunited with Jim after death.

Allusive reading “divine” is prolepsis; “Sun” is also the Son; “crossed arms” are the Cross; the Father cradling the child is the Nativity and the Pietà at once.

Why it matters every sacred term is doing ordinary work first; the theology is what the sentence already says.

11White as Snow

my grandmother and Peggy waved to us, transfigured figurines on the earth below, their clothing white as snow.

Literal reading two women in pale clothing seen from the height of a roller coaster.

Allusive reading “transfigured” names the Transfiguration, and “white as snow” is both cleansing and glorification.

Why it matters the sentence supplies the theology in its own adjective.

12“Permanent”

My grandmother said that her “permanent is all ruined” while she fussed with her hair.

Literal reading a woman lamenting that the sea has spoiled her hairdo.

Allusive reading “permanent” is a doubled word: the woman’s permanent (curled hair) and the permanent (the eternal), spoken in the scene of an Assumption.

Why it matters the pun arises from a real, comic vanity and also names the story’s deepest assurance.

13The Blinds

The blinds were pulled down on the window beside the kitchen table behind her.

Literal reading window coverings drawn in a kitchen.

Allusive reading blinds are also blindness: Peg is the one who cannot see her own beauty.

Why it matters the second sense builds up through repetition, not in one pointed moment.

14God-awful

“Aren’t your feet hot in those God-awful boots?”

Literal reading “awful” in its everyday sense: unbearable.

Allusive reading awful also means awe-inspiring, full of awe; the word that names Peg’s ugliness already contains the reverence she will be owed.

Why it matters a single common adjective holds both verdicts.

15The Kindergartner’s Rendering

Spindly, awkward limbs stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person.

Literal reading a child’s crude drawing used to describe an ungainly body.

Allusive reading the figure is an uncorrected primitive icon, the flat, direct rendering that is exactly how the sacred is pictured in another tradition.

Why it matters the simile begins as insult and ends as the story’s aesthetic: Peggy is drawn the way icons are drawn.

16The Cure in the Water

“a ‘cure in the water’ . . . ‘Mary’s blessing’ seemed like a gyp.” . . . “How else are you going to get the cure?”

Literal reading the family’s belief that the sea at Nantasket could heal Peggy.

Allusive reading the “cure in the water” is Lourdes transposed to a New England beach.

Why it matters the allusion is the characters’ own lived faith, not the narrator’s reference; it is what the people believe.

17The Convent Gate

“I’m so hungry I could eat a nun’s arse through a convent gate.”

Literal reading hyperbolic complaint, telephoned in while the narrator impersonates Mrs. Muldoon to order takeout on her account.

Allusive reading the “convent gate” is the cloister’s threshold, the boundary that separates the sacred enclosure from the street; the phrase shoves the obscene mouth-first through it.

Why it matters the profanity is doing comic work on its own—it is a fine, nasty joke—but it is also the title, and the title concentrates the collection’s whole habit: the profane and the sacred held on two sides of a single threshold, crossed in a syllable.

18Specks of Dust

“Do you know there’s approximately 153,400 deaths per day, or a little more than 100 per minute? Just think of how many people died while we’ve been sitting here. We are all specks of dust floating in an enormous universe.”

Literal reading a precocious girl’s cold meditation on mortality, spoken to a woman who has not asked for it.

Allusive reading “dust” is Ash Wednesday’s “remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return,” the Church’s own sentence about death, rewritten as cosmology.

Why it matters the girl is an atheist arguing against piety, yet the phrase she reaches for is the Church’s; the sacred word is inside her skepticism without her noticing.

19“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph”

“Where does she come up with these things? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

Literal reading an old woman’s exasperated oath.

Allusive reading the Holy Family, the Church’s central household, reduced to an interjection.

Why it matters the oath is the way the story talks: the sacred names worn down into the everyday speech of the tenement, where they still carry their old weight.

20“God bless the people who make us laugh”

“God bless the people who make us laugh.”

Literal reading Mrs. Muldoon’s tender aside, remembering the comedian Vivian Vance.

Allusive reading the sentence borrows the shape of the Beatitudes (“blessed are . . .”), Christ’s formal bestowal of blessing, and spends it on a sitcom actress.

Why it matters the benediction is sincere; it is the story’s own small theology, a working-class beatitude for the people who make grief bearable.

21O’Neill’s Last Words

His last words were “Born in a hotel room and goddammit, died in a hotel room.”

Literal reading the move-in helper recounting the playwright’s death in suite 401.

Allusive reading the ghost-story premise is anchored in a real literary biography; the suite is “haunted” by one of American drama’s great names.

Why it matters O’Neill drives the plot—the prank literally impersonates his estranged daughter; the historical detail is the foundation of the fiction.

22“Baptized her ‘Candice Kox’”

We screwed the mannequin together and baptized her “Candice Kox” after the missing suitemate.

Literal reading two students assembling a mail-order mannequin and giving it a name.

Allusive reading “baptized” is the sacrament of naming and cleansing; the word is spent on a plastic substitute for an absent person.

Why it matters the joke is funny without any theology, but the verb makes the mannequin a kind of reliquary figure—a body that stands in for an absent soul—which is exactly what a mannequin is.

23The Word

“I like the Gospel of John, especially its Prologue: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The idea of words being portrayed as divine appeals to me. I’m an English major.” . . . “‘But it’s not words that the Gospel is talking about,’ she said. ‘“The Word” means Jesus.’”

Literal reading a quarrel between a bookish atheist and a devout roommate over a Bible passage.

Allusive reading the passage is the thesis of this entire concordance made literal in dialogue: Molly, the English major, hears “Word” as language; Ashley, the believer, hears it as Christ. One word, two readings, both present at once. In the novel the same verse becomes the narrator’s one kept belief: she has read everything and believed almost none of it, and her eventual salvation is made of words.

Why it matters this is the one place the story says the doctrine aloud, and it stages the exact operation the prose performs elsewhere without announcement: a word that means one thing and, beneath it, another, neither cancelling the other.

24“Methinks she doth protest too much”

“Methinks she doth protest too much.” . . . “Hamlet.” . . . “I read that. Edgar Allan Poe, right?”

Literal reading Molly quoting Shakespeare at Ashley; Ashley’s comic misattribution.

Allusive reading a doubled allusion: Shakespeare misquoted, then the misattribution to Poe—a joke about allusion itself, about who “owns” a line and how texts drift.

Why it matters the misattribution is the point; it shows allusion as a field of half-remembered debt, which is the climate Mulhern’s echoes live in.

25Like Eve

Ashley’s Christian values had evaporated in the face of temptation. Like Eve, she had eaten the forbidden fruit.

Literal reading Molly’s cold satisfaction that Ashley, who condemned sin, ate the very cookies she was told not to touch—the cookies that killed her.

Allusive reading the orchard of Eden reversed: the “forbidden fruit” is literal food, and the serpent—the tempter—is the narrator herself, who poisoned it.

Why it matters the allusion does not import the Fall; it discovers that the Fall is already happening in a dorm room. The cookie is really a cookie; the story notices it is also the fruit.

26Died for Her Sins

Nonna would be happy to know that Ashley had died for her sins and was now resting in peace.

Literal reading the narrator’s bitter pun on her roommate’s piety.

Allusive reading “died for her sins” is Christ’s redemptive death—but here the death is murder, and the “sin” is against the narrator, not against God. Salvation language bent to a vindication.

Why it matters the sentence horrifies because it keeps the Christian grammar intact while emptying it; the surface is a murderer’s joke and the echo is the Passion, and the gap between them is where the story’s morality lives.

27Saint Paul

“On the back was written, ‘Mom, Dad, Joey, me, and Saint Paul.’”—“‘Who the fuck is Saint Paul?’ David laughed.”

Literal reading the family photo’s back-labeled dog, Saint Paul.

Allusive reading the apostle’s name on the pet—the sacred name absorbed into the household, so ordinary that it is mistaken.

Why it matters the gag works as character (Ashley’s piety is so conventional it names the dog a saint); the allusion is the lowered, homely form of the sanctified name.

28“A Long Day’s Journey into Night”

When I said he wrote Long’s Day Journey Into Night, he snapped that I should get to the point before this became a long day’s journey into night.

Literal reading a homicide detective, ignorant of the playwright, punning on the title.

Allusive reading O’Neill’s title—a masterwork about a family’s buried guilt—is bent into a tired cop’s complaint, even as the interrogation is, in fact, a family’s guilt laid bare.

Why it matters the pun is comic on its face, but it is the story naming its own darkening: the prank has indeed become a long day’s journey into the night of Ashley’s death.

29“Tossing Cookies”

I turned to look at Emily who was ironically, “tossing cookies” onto the azure blue carpet.

Literal reading Emily vomiting from shock.

Allusive reading the slang “tossing cookies” lands on the very cookies that killed Ashley—the weapon named in the moment of its realization.

Why it matters the pun is the story’s structure surfacing in idiom: the poisoned object returns, as language, at the scene of the death it caused.

30Smoke Rings

“She placed the ashtray beside her, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke rings. ‘See those puffs of smoke.’” . . . “Here one minute, gone the next.”

Literal reading an old woman demonstrating the brevity of things with cigarette smoke.

Allusive reading smoke is the Bible’s own figure for vanity and mortality: “a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away”; “here one minute, gone the next” is the psalmist’s account of the human lifespan.

Why it matters the lesson is spoken by the character, not imported by the narrator; the smoke is real smoke, and its vanishing is the story’s actual event.

31As God Is My Witness

She stood up and pointed to the Vatican. “As God is our witness.”

Literal reading Nonna, swearing an oath and gesturing at the bruise on her body that she jokes resembles the Vatican.

Allusive reading an oath invoking God as witness to a fraud she has just staged; the sacred is summoned to authenticate a lie.

Why it matters the perjury is funny, but it is the collection’s central irony played straight: the divine is invoked over the body, and the body is where the truth will catch up with Nonna.

32The Vatican on the Body

“I think it’s the Vatican. I got the pope’s house on my ass.”

Literal reading comparing the shape of a bruise to the papal palace.

Allusive reading the seat of the papacy located on profane flesh; the Church’s central institution reduced to a mark on an old woman’s body.

Why it matters the comedy is blunt and physical, but it states in one image the whole argument of the book: the sacred here lives in—is written on—the worn, mortal body, not above it.

33The Fall That Comes True

“I slipped on ice and had a bad fall.” . . . “When I was in the kitchen, I heard her fall down the stairs. ‘Oh shit!’ was the last thing she said.”

Literal reading the staged fall, later answered by a real, fatal fall down the stairs.

Allusive reading the lie is made literally true: the fiction of the fall becomes the fact of the fall; “last thing” is spoken by a woman whose last thing it is.

Why it matters here the doubling happens in the plot, not in a phrase: the distinction between the fake and the real collapses in a single event, which is the book’s deepest conviction about how the world punishes performance.

34Bocca

“I’m Myra. Myra Bocca.” She had a large toothy smile.

Literal reading an introduction, a name.

Allusive reading bocca is the Italian for mouth; the name points to the Bocca della Verità, the Mouth of Truth—the Roman stone mask that bites the hand of the liar.

Why it matters a woman whose entire business is speech—reading people, telling stories, lying—is named “Mouth,” and the irony is earned the length of the story.

35Lazarus

“‘After Lazarus died,’ she said.” . . . “‘I thought you said Lassie, but I guess you wouldn’t have married a dog.’”

Literal reading Myra’s rich husband, Lazarus Bocca, dead and at the center of a trust dispute; the narrator’s joke about the name.

Allusive reading Lazarus is the man Christ raised from the dead, and the beggar at the rich man’s gate in the parable; the dead husband’s money, fought over by stepchildren and a greedy widow, is the parable’s rich-man-and-Lazarus reversed.

Why it matters the name is there in the text, not imported; the joke that dissolves it into “Lassie” is itself the point—the biblical name worn down into a dog and a sitcom.

36Sacred Ashes

I assumed this is why the store was called Sacred Ashes.

Literal reading a New Age shop named for its incense.

Allusive reading “ashes” is Ash Wednesday, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the Church’s sentence on mortality; the word is spent on a counterfeited sacred, a shop of crystals and tarot.

Why it matters the liturgical name on a false religion drives the story’s satire: the counterfeit wears the true word, and the reader is asked to tell them apart.

37“I’ll tell you the God’s truth”

“I’ll tell you the God’s truth,” she said. She held up her hand like a boyscout.

Literal reading a liar’s preface, sworn with a raised hand.

Allusive reading the oath-form “God’s truth” is invoked by the one character who has no relation to it; the gesture of swearing is a parody of witness.

Why it matters the sentence does its work entirely through its surface—the raised hand is already the tell—and the blasphemy is structural: truth’s own name is the liar’s instrument.

38“Stayin’ Alive”

“‘Think “Staying Alive.”’” . . . “The tall black guy stepped forward and began to sing, ‘Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.’”—“The crowd joined in.”

Literal reading a nurse coaching CPR rhythm with the Bee Gees; a crowd actually singing it over a dying woman.

Allusive reading the disco anthem of survival is sung over a woman who will not survive; the title of the song becomes the precise thing being denied.

Why it matters the song is doing a real, practical job (its beat sets the compression rhythm), and the irony is not imposed but lived: “staying alive” is sung in counterpoint to a death.

39A Stone Has No Uncertainty

“‘A stone has no uncertainty—Carl Jung,’ it read.” . . . “I tossed it towards the base of her stretcher and watched it roll past her body into the shadows.”

Literal reading a gift-shop card quoting Jung; the narrator’s black obsidian stone, thrown away at the end.

Allusive reading the stone is certainty, the thing without a doubt, cast into the one place where nothing is certain—a death; Peter (“the rock”) and the stone the builders rejected hover behind it.

Why it matters the sentence is a plot object first—the stone was the hook of Myra’s con—and its meaning arrives only when the narrator lets it go.

40All About Eve

“‘It’s All about Eve.’” . . . “Bette Davis had just said, ‘Everybody has a heart—except some people.’” . . . “‘Fasten your seatbelts,’ Bette Davis said, ‘It’s going to be a bumpy night.’”

Literal reading a black-and-white film on the café television.

Allusive reading the film is the story of a young woman’s ruthless manipulation and performance—the exact subject of the story around it, which is about a woman performing sincerity.

Why it matters the movie is genuinely playing, unremarked, in the background; the allusion works because the fiction is simply there, and the reader who recognizes the title sees the story’s own subject named in the dark.

41“Show Me the Way to Go Home”

Show me the way to go home / I’m tired and I want to go to bed.

Literal reading the drinking song that opens the story, a weary request for direction.

Allusive reading “home” is the story’s whole subject, and it splits in two: the passage home to Ireland and the passage home to death; the song names the one so the other can echo beneath it.

Why it matters the song is not commentary but the story’s tuning fork; every later use of “home” is heard against it.

42“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”

She was surprised when he quoted Emily Dickinson, a writer I had been reading quite a bit of lately: “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”

Literal reading Nonna quoting a poet she found in her granddaughter’s book, counseling tact.

Allusive reading Dickinson is the poet of the slant, of the thing said indirectly that is truer for being oblique—the patron saint of this entire method.

Why it matters the line is quoted in the act of teaching the reader how to read the story: by indirection.

43Angel of Death

“I guess you might say that you’re an Angel of Death.”

Literal reading a faith healer’s pronouncement to Molly.

Allusive reading the malakh ha-mavet, the destroying angel of Passover and of the Hebrew Bible, the one who passes over and through the house; Molly, a survivor who witnesses every death in the book, is named it.

Why it matters the prophecy is given by a charlatan and later borne out by the plot; the word “angel” is exactly doubled—messenger and killer in one.

44The Assumption

“Well, she was raised into heaven three days after her death.” . . . “At last she rose from the sea.”

Literal reading Mrs. Muldoon explaining the Feast of the Assumption; later, rising from the waves.

Allusive reading the doctrine of Mary bodily assumed into heaven is re-enacted by an old drunk rising from the salt water; the sacred event is performed by the least likely priestess.

Why it matters the doctrine is stated aloud by the character, and then—literally—done; the allusion is the plot’s choreography.

45Razed / Raised, again

“surprised by a spirited breaker that razed them in its wake.” . . . “‘Now raise me up quickly, Molly, before the next wave.’” . . . “At last she rose from the sea.”

Literal reading two old women knocked down and helped up in the surf.

Allusive reading the same razed/raised fold as “Assumptions”: lowered and lifted by the same wave, the “spirited” breaker as the Holy Spirit, burial and Assumption in one sound.

Why it matters the wordplay recurs between the two stories as a shared spine; the collection, not just the story, is doubling.

46“My permanent is all ruined”

Mrs. Muldoon said, “My permanent is all ruined,” while she fussed with her hair.

Literal reading a beached woman mourning her spoiled hairdo.

Allusive reading the doubled “permanent” again: the cosmetic and the eternal, spoken in the sea that has baptized them both.

Why it matters the pun is a running refrain across the collection; the eternal word keeps hiding inside the salon word.

47“Our last supper”

Mrs. Muldoon made a joke about this being our last supper. “Well, it is in a way, don’t you think? I won’t be seeing either of you again after tonight.”

Literal reading a diner joke about a final meal together.

Allusive reading the Last Supper, Christ’s farewell meal before his death, transposed to a seaside diner and a tray of scallops.

Why it matters the reference is in the character’s own joke, and it proves literally true: she will die before they see her again.

48The Sign of the Fish

“Did you know that a fish is the symbol of Christ, Molly?” Mrs. Muldoon said.

Literal reading a stray remark, pointing at the fish in the diner wallpaper.

Allusive reading the ichthys, the oldest Christian cipher, spoken by the woman who is about to “go home”; the fish and the baptismal water and the Assumption all in one room.

Why it matters the symbol is named aloud by the character, turning the wallpaper into scripture and the diner into a church.

49“The Conqueror Worm”

“Its hero the Conqueror Worm.” . . . “going home to the earth, to her ‘conqueror worm,’ a worm that had already begun to feast on her body.”

Literal reading Molly reciting Poe’s poem in her mind at the sight of the corpse.

Allusive reading Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm”—the worms as the true audience and hero of the human tragedy—answers the story’s question of where “home” is.

Why it matters the poem is quoted at the exact moment faith fails; it is the atheist counterweight to “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” the two songs of death set against each other.

50Her Own Assumption

“‘August 15th, 1954. The happiest day of my life.’” . . . “She had created her own Assumption.”

Literal reading the back of a wedding photo, dated the Feast of the Assumption; Mrs. Muldoon choosing to die on its anniversary.

Allusive reading the wedding and the Assumption coincide on one date, and death on that day makes the old woman’s “going home” a self-willed Marian event.

Why it matters this is the story’s doublest moment: the marriage, the feast, and the death are literally one and the same date, so the doctrine and the fact cannot be told apart.

51“A useless thing”

“Inside was a gold necklace with an emerald and diamond cross.” . . . “‘A useless thing.’”

Literal reading Molly dismissing a gift left to her by the dead woman.

Allusive reading “useless things” is the collection’s own governing paradox—the material world’s things, worthless and yet bearing the cross—the cross itself called a useless thing.

Why it matters the line closes the story’s argument about what survives: the only thing left is a cross, and the narrator calls it useless.

52“Drenched to the Bone”

And admit that the waters / Around you have grown / And accept it that soon / You’ll be drenched to the bone.—Bob Dylan, quoted on the radio at the close

Literal reading a song on the car radio as the rain falls.

Allusive reading Dylan’s flood is the story’s title; to be “drenched to the bone” is to be saturated past the surface—the very condition of a man who has felt nothing and is now immersed.

Why it matters the song is playing while the man calls his ex-wife to apologize; the title is justified by the last line of the story.

53Mary Grace and Turpin

“Mary Grace snaps her teeth and turns down her lip. She throws her psychology textbook at Turpin and almost hits him in the head.” . . . “she likes to read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.”

Literal reading a disturbed student throwing a textbook at a bully.

Allusive reading the names “Mary Grace” and “Turpin,” and the hurled book, are O’Connor’s “Revelation” almost verbatim—the fat girl who throws Human Development at Mrs. Turpin and calls her a wart hog from hell.

Why it matters the novel is named only once, in passing, but the names and the gesture perform the allusion without saying it; the echo is in the structure, not a footnote, and it rewards the reader who knows where to look.

54The Wages of Sin

“We are all sinners and the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Literal reading the believer Mary Grace shouting scripture in the middle of a classroom fight.

Allusive reading Paul’s sentence on sin and grace, quoted in full, by a girl on a chair with raised arms—a would-be prophet in a public high school.

Why it matters the verse is the character; it is the character’s entire language, and the story neither mocks nor endorses it, only lets it stand against the surrounding chaos.

55Pearls Before Swine

“Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”

Literal reading the same girl’s prayer amid the fight, having just called the class “a bunch of pigs.”

Allusive reading Christ’s warning against casting the sacred to the profane, spoken by the one believer in a room of mockers; the “pigs” of the verse are the “pigs” she has just named.

Why it matters the scripture and the insult are the same word; the allusion is the character’s live speech, not the narrator’s ornament.

56Religion Is the Opium of the People

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Literal reading the teacher correcting a student’s garbled misquote of Marx.

Allusive reading Marx’s dismissal of religion set against the believer’s verse two desks away; the two great modern readings of belief are literally in the same classroom, arguing.

Why it matters the story does not choose between Marx and Mary Grace; it holds both in the same room, as the prose does everywhere.

57The Words of St. Francis

“We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”

Literal reading the sign outside a church, read from a parked car.

Allusive reading the prayer of St. Francis, the saint of healing, is answered at once by the narrator’s physics: entropy, the law that things fall apart.

Why it matters the sign and the doubt are the same beat: “unite what has fallen apart” stands against “objects in our world eventually fall apart,” and the story is the space between them.

58The Way Home

“I hope that before long I will be able to see the way home.” . . . “the moon was too high, the river was too wide.”

Literal reading a man in a windshield waiting out the rain.

Allusive reading “home” is the word that ties this story to “A Prayer for Home” and “Moon River”; the collection asks, across stories, whether there is a way home, and declines to answer.

Why it matters the echo is the book’s own; the final stories answer each other across the collection, so the allusion is not to a text outside but to the work itself.

59“Arise and Go Now”

the title itself, first words of Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.”

Literal reading a title for a story about a boy crossing town to visit his grandmother and his institutionalized mother.

Allusive reading Yeats’s poem of arising and going to a healing lake-isle is the story’s buried wish: a child who cannot rise and cannot go, except to the women who hold what is left of home.

Why it matters the title is not quoted inside the story; it simply is the poem’s first clause, so the reader who knows Yeats hears the whole wish behind the plot, and the reader who does not loses nothing.

60The Cardinal

“That was your grandfather’s favorite bird.” . . . “The cardinal flew to a crossbeam above us and looked down, as if it were listening to our conversation.”

Literal reading a red bird that keeps appearing as the boy and his grandmother speak of the dead.

Allusive reading the cardinal is the grandfather’s sign, the dead man returned as bird; the folk belief that cardinals are visiting spirits is relied upon without being stated.

Why it matters the story itself argues about whether the bird is the ghost (“Have you seen a ghost, Aiden?”); the allusion is held in the same question the characters ask, so the reader is never told which is true.

61Audrey Rose

She held a book entitled Audrey Rose. A girl in a red dress stood in front of a grave. The ground was on fire.

Literal reading a paperback held by the grandmother as the boy arrives.

Allusive reading Audrey Rose is the twentieth-century novel and film of reincarnation, a child haunted by another’s death; in the grandmother’s hands it names, by title alone, the story’s central question—whether the dead return.

Why it matters the book is genuinely there, cover description included, and its subject is the story’s subject; the allusion does the work of epigraph without being lifted to the head of the page.

62“For Laura”

As she held the chalice, she murmured, “for Laura” and kissed the side.

Literal reading a grandmother speaking a name over a stolen cup.

Allusive reading a name said as if in prayer over a sacred vessel, the naming become a kind of lay sacrament; the story elsewhere calls the woman Lorraine, so “Laura” is itself a double of a double.

Why it matters the murmur is the story’s softest moment and its hinge; the name is offered like the body of the Mass, and the allusion is the gesture, not the word.

63The Chalice

“I need to get that chalice, Aiden. I read an article in the Boston Globe that said some people believe it has incredible curing powers. It’s a replica of a chalice from long ago, over 100-years old, with lots of pretty stones on it. If I have your mother drink from it, maybe she’ll get better and come home to us.”

Literal reading a grandmother planning to steal a chalice from her parish altar to cure her daughter.

Allusive reading the chalice is the Grail, the cup of healing, and the story is the Grail quest transposed to a working-class Boston church and a schizophrenic mother.

Why it matters the cup is physically stolen, and the faith in it is the characters’ own; the legend sits under the plot like the chalice under the grandmother’s coat.

64“The water that gushed from the rock”

“You certainly have the power of the Holy Spirit in you. It came out of you like the water that gushed from the rock at Rephidim and Kadesh.”

Literal reading flattery spoken to the priest while the theft is concealed.

Allusive reading Moses striking the rock in the desert to bring forth water, named aloud at the exact moment the grandmother is committing her own sacrilege—the miracle of water invoked over the theft of the cup.

Why it matters the scripture is the cover for the crime, and the reader who knows the passage sees the irony; the reader who does not still sees a woman lying to a priest.

65“Why aren’t there miracles today?”

“It’s hard to believe that Jesus could have done all that. Why aren’t there miracles today?”

Literal reading a neighbor’s honest doubt at the kitchen sink.

Allusive reading the question is the entire story: a present without miracles, a family reaching for the one miracle it remembers, a chalice stolen to force the miracle that faith no longer supplies.

Why it matters the line is spoken by a minor character in passing, and it is the thesis the whole collection answers.

66The Dust in the Sunbeams

“I saw bits of dust in the sunlight streaming through the bay window.” . . . “until the sunbeams dimmed and the dust disappeared and her tears stopped.”

Literal reading motes of dust in a shaft of light.

Allusive reading dust again, the collection’s Ash Wednesday token of mortality, made visible and then vanishing in the light.

Why it matters the image closes the scene with no announcement; the dust is just dust.

67“Useless Things”

“When you get old you accumulate a lot of useless things, Molly. And eventually you become one of them. So live while you can.”

Literal reading an old woman’s remark about the junk she is giving away.

Allusive reading the “useless thing” is the collection’s paradox: the material thing and the human self reduced to the same word, and the cross left by the dead woman (in “A Prayer for Home”) called “a useless thing.”

Why it matters the phrase is the title and the refrain; it does not point outward to a text but inward to the work’s own recurring question of what, if anything, survives its use.

68Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”

Helen threw the candy wrapper into the trash barrel, then walked to her desk as I read a line from Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”: “For many hours the immediate vicinity of the low framework upon which I lay had been literally swarming with rats.”

Literal reading a teacher reading Poe aloud in class.

Allusive reading Poe’s tale of confinement and prey is read in a classroom whose real predator is the teacher herself; the text of torture stands in for the story’s hidden subject.

Why it matters the quotation is a real classroom event, but it is the story naming its own atmosphere—the pendulum, the pit—through the only text the scene allows.

69Peppermint Candy

Helen threw the candy wrapper into the trash barrel.

Literal reading the title’s candy, reduced to its wrapper.

Allusive reading the peppermint is the story’s recurring lure and trace—sweetness as bait; the wrapper is the evidence the resolution will recover.

Why it matters the candy is a plot object first (the plan’s motif is the locked drawer and the Poe-inflected classroom); its meaning builds up as it returns.

70The Green Light

“we were reading The Great Gatsby in school, a book I despised. Daisy was a pain in the ass and Gatsby was anything but great.” . . . “But unlike the dog’s lure, my lure, my green light, would be real—to be as authentic as possible, regardless of what people thought.”

Literal reading Molly’s school reading and her stated ambition.

Allusive reading Gatsby’s green light, the unattainable thing reached for across the water, is claimed and renamed by a girl who has just told us she hates the novel; she rejects the book and keeps its central image as her own.

Why it matters the allusion works because she quarrels with it; the green light is not borrowed as ornament but argued with, so the reader sees the debt and the defiance in the same sentence.

71Mary in Jesus Christ Superstar

I was Angela in West Side Story and Mary in Jesus Christ, Superstar. My favorite song in the latter play was “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” . . . “He’s a man, he’s just a man” perfectly expressed my feelings about Jesus of Nazareth.

Literal reading the school plays Molly was cast in.

Allusive reading in the rock opera the “Mary” who sings “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is not the Virgin but Mary Magdalene, the Gospel woman whose love for Jesus is doubtful, bodily, yet abiding; Molly is cast, literally, as the Magdalene, and her favorite song is the Magdalene’s demystifying aria—“He’s a man, he’s just a man.”

Why it matters the casting plants the novel’s central identification at the outset: the title character belongs to the Magdalen line (the woman of ill repute who may yet be saved), not to the sinless one.

72Gabriel Callaghan

My instructor, Gabriel Callaghan, was a tall dark-skinned Irish guy, close to my age, with thick black hair and blue-green eyes.

Literal reading the name of Molly’s love interest.

Allusive reading Gabriel is the archangel of the Annunciation, the messenger who announces to Mary; the novel names its Marian protagonist’s beloved “Gabriel” without a word of explanation.

Why it matters the name does its theological work invisibly; the reader who never hears the angel still has a plausible Irish-American name, and the reader who does hears the Annunciation ringing through a health club.

73“The Dead” at Christmas

“My Michael died five years ago. I’m still trying to get over it.” . . . Mary Jane plays “Moon River” and then “began singing ‘The Christmas Song’ by Nat King Cole.” . . . the next morning, at St. Joseph Cemetery, in the snow.

Literal reading a Christmas dinner and a graveside visit with a widowed mother.

Allusive reading Joyce’s “The Dead”: the Christmas party, the dead love named Michael (Joyce’s Michael Furey), the protagonist Gabriel (Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy, and here Gabriel Callaghan), and the snow falling over the dead. The novel’s names and its snow-triangled Christmas are “The Dead” re-enacted without ever naming Joyce.

Why it matters this is the corpus’s deepest unannounced allusion: two names, a season, and a grave aligned with a story that is never once mentioned, so the echo exists entirely for the reader who already carries “The Dead.”

74Her Own Assumption

“the day that Catholics celebrate the Blessed Mother’s Assumption into heaven.” . . . “I imagined she was going to demonstrate the Assumption and fly into the sky.” . . . “She had created her own Assumption and I thought, ironically, consumption.”

Literal reading the Feast of the Assumption, and an old woman’s death timed to it.

Allusive reading the doctrine of Mary’s bodily assumption is performed by Mrs. Muldoon, whose death on the feast day is her “own Assumption”—and the rhyme “Assumption / consumption” folds the doctrine into the body’s decay.

Why it matters the doubled word is the novel’s method in small: the sacred ascent and the physical consumption held in one near-rhyme, so the reader hears both meanings at once.

75The Assumption of Mary

The Assumption of Mary caught my eye: arms folded against her chest, blue shawl over her white robe, sunlight behind her, surrounded by a sphere of purple clouds.

Literal reading a stained-glass window in a church.

Allusive reading the window is the novel’s own Titian: the image of the Assumption set in glass, the template the surrounding deaths will re-enact in salt water and in a hot room.

Why it matters the window is genuinely there, and it is the novel telling us its own icon, the way “Assumptions” tells us Titian’s Assunta, so the image and the plot are one.

76Mary Grace and Turpin

“Mary Grace snickered and opened Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.” . . . “Mary Grace put down O’Connor’s novel, her face bright red. She took off her glasses; her eyes twitched, and her forehead was sweating. ‘You’re all a bunch of assholes, especially you Turd!’”

Literal reading a disturbed student reading O’Connor and turning on a bully named Leo Turpin.

Allusive reading O’Connor’s “Revelation,” where the fat girl named Mary Grace hurls a book at Mrs. Turpin and calls her a wart hog from hell: the novel re-enacts the gesture with the names and the flung book, while naming only Wise Blood.

Why it matters the allusion is half-hidden—the novel names one O’Connor book and enacts another—so it rewards the reader who knows O’Connor by name and by gesture.

77“More things in heaven and earth”

“Or to quote Shakespeare—I loved rereading Hamlet by the way—‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

Literal reading a character quoting Hamlet to argue for openness to the unseen.

Allusive reading Hamlet’s line to Horatio about the limits of philosophy is the novel’s apology for its own ghost-work—the cardinals, the psychics, the returned dead.

Why it matters the quotation names the novel’s central argument against Molly’s skepticism, and it is allowed to stand as the counterweight to her clever atheism.

78The Fake Last Supper

grotesques such as a domed-shaped glass Madonna, figurines of Italian peasants, and the awful fake painting of the Last Supper that hung on the dining room wall.

Literal reading the kitsch of the family dining room.

Allusive reading the Last Supper, Leonardo’s image of Christ’s final meal, degraded to a “fake” hanging in a room kept shut behind velvet ropes.

Why it matters the degraded sacred object is the novel’s whole world: the holy held cheaply, behind a cord, still understood to be special enough to rope off.

79The Pooka

“A pooka is an evil spirit not to be trusted. In Ireland, the rural folk believed that nature was full of spirits who inhabited every place in the natural world. . . . If a human disturbs these spaces, the spirits get mad and seek revenge. The dwelling of a pooka is the worst place to unsettle. . . . A shape shifter, the Irish call them.”

Literal reading a character explaining Irish folk-belief to the boy.

Allusive reading the pooka, the shape-shifting spirit of Irish folklore, drives the novel: a revenge force that can assume any form.

Why it matters the spirit is explained, then made to move the plot; the whole novel exists to give the folk-belief flesh, allusion used as structure.

80Second Sight

“Like you, she has the gift, and it is horrible that she is being punished for it.” . . . “Second sight has been in your family for years.”

Literal reading a family inheritance of clairvoyance, passed down like a curse.

Allusive reading the an-da-shealladh, the Celtic gift of second sight, feared and half-believed; the novel lets the gift be real and unbearable at once.

Why it matters the gift is the lens through which the boy sees everything else; it is the narrator’s own instrument.

81“Toreau”

“‘Goodness is the only investment that never fails.’ A smart man by the name of Toreau said that. You must return the chalice to the church.”

Literal reading a dead grandfather’s ghost quoting an aphorism and mangling the name.

Allusive reading Thoreau, misnamed “Toreau” by the dead: the half-remembered name is the form allusion takes among the unlettered, the source worn down to near-recognition.

Why it matters the misfire is the point; the quotation reaches the boy through a ghost who cannot get the name right, so the debt is felt even where the learning is imperfect.

82“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”

“There are four angels at my head. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,”

Literal reading a child’s bedside prayer.

Allusive reading the four evangelists invoked as guardian angels over a sleeping child, the oldest English prayer against the night.

Why it matters the prayer is spoken by a boy who can see spirits, so the old invocation against harm is not superstition but the child’s nightly defense—the allusion is the character’s armor.

83“The fish. And the water into wine”

“Let’s not forget about the fish. And the water into wine,” my grandmother said.

Literal reading a grandmother listing Christ’s miracles.

Allusive reading the loaves and fishes and the wedding at Cana, the two feeding miracles, named as the family’s household memory of the sacred.

Why it matters the miracles are spoken as ordinary family shorthand, the way a grandmother might list groceries; the sacred is domestic before it is anything else.

84The Rock That Gushed Water

“You certainly have the power of the Holy Spirit in you. It came out of you like the water gushing from the rock at Rephidim and Kadesh.”

Literal reading flattery to a priest, precisely as the chalice is stolen.

Allusive reading Moses striking the rock in the desert; the same line the concordance records in “The Weight of Small Mercies” (entry 64), here replayed in the novel that grew out of those stories.

Why it matters the recurred line shows the corpus’s clearest pattern: the same allusion carried from story to novel, where it does the same concealed work.

85“A Land Where There Is No Water”

“Now I live in a land where there is no water. God help me,” she cried.

Literal reading the pooka-woman’s lament, spoken to the boy.

Allusive reading the wilderness, the place of thirst and exile, the condition of the unshriven; a spirit who exists where there is no water, in a novel built on baptismal water.

Why it matters the line gives the revenge-spirit her one moment of grief, and it is scriptural—the damned defined by the absence of the water the rest of the book is soaked in.

86“Dark City”

From Athlone on the Shannon River, / dead center of Ireland - / you walked, / somehow reaching Southampton, / where you boarded the Adriatic, / a name that means dark city.

Literal reading the grandfather’s emigration, ending on the ship’s deck.

Allusive reading the immigrant vessel, the Adriatic, is glossed by the poem’s own title: the crossing given a dark name, the sea-voyage into an unknown called a city of darkness.

Why it matters the title and the gloss are the same word; the poem does not borrow a dark city, it discovers that the grandfather’s passage already was one.

87“Songs of Spring”

sad like the speaker in Keats’ Ode, / longing for “songs of spring,”

Literal reading the speaker’s weighting sadness.

Allusive reading Keats’s “To Autumn”—“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?”—the season’s passing named as loss; the poem borrows the exact phrase for its own grief.

Why it matters Keats is named, and the quoted phrase is his; the debt is open, and the sadness is shared, not just borrowed.

88The Rosary and the Well

Most mornings, she knelt, / said her rosary, / then stepped across / a broken-planked porch, / hugged a wooden pail, / and trekked to the water.

Literal reading the grandmother’s morning ritual, prayer then well.

Allusive reading the rosary and the well conjoined, the two sources of the family’s water—prayer and the drawn pail—in a single morning movement; the well is the sacred source made twice over.

Why it matters the ritual is recorded flatly, without a single sacred word beyond “rosary,” and the silence is the reverence.

89The Our Father

said an Our Father / kissed his father’s forehead.

Literal reading a son at his father’s coffin.

Allusive reading the Lord’s Prayer and the dead father collapsed into one gesture: the “Our Father” spoken over the father, the prayer and the man sharing a name in the same line.

Why it matters the poem’s doubleness is its whole craft here: the sacred word and the mortal man meet in one phrase, and neither displaces the other.

90“Hope”

“A blindfolded woman wearing a green gown sat atop a light brown globe, her head bent to the left as she played a lyre with a single string.” . . . “Printed underneath the reproduction was ‘Hope, 1886, George Frederic Watts.’”

Literal reading a reproduction in the mother’s sketchbook.

Allusive reading Watts’s “Hope”: the blindfolded figure who cannot see, who plays the one string left—the story’s title and the collection’s whole posture, hope held in the dark.

Why it matters the painting is the last image of the story and the title of it; the blindfold is the condition of the family, and the single string is what remains to be played.

91Elaine and Galahad

“I’m Elaine, and this is my grandson Galahad.”

Literal reading false names given as the stolen chalice is returned.

Allusive reading Elaine of Astolat and Galahad, the purest knight of the Grail quest; the pair who return the Grail give each other Grail names, so the Arthurian legend is stated in the one moment it is acted out.

Why it matters the names are a lie (the grandmother is not Elaine), yet truer than the truth: the chalice is the Grail, and the boy is its innocent knight.

92“Children of God”

“See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.”

Literal reading the priest reading scripture as the chalice is returned.

Allusive reading the epistle on adopted divine sonship is read at the exact moment the family reclaims its daughter; the “children of God” are the boy and his mother being reunited.

Why it matters the lectionary is not chosen for the scene; it simply is the scene, and the story lets the scripture say what the plot is already doing.

93Keep Calm and Carry On

“You know what the British people used to say when the Germans bombed London during World War II?” . . . “Keep calm and carry on.”

Literal reading an old slogan the grandmother teaches the boy.

Allusive reading the Ministry of Information’s stoic poster, spoken as the family’s own creed of endurance under bombardment.

Why it matters the slogan is explained, then made the title, then whispered at the story’s close to “me or to herself. Or to both of us”—philosophy and comfort in one borrowed phrase.

94“There but for the grace of God go I”

“Say it with me. ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

Literal reading a grandmother teaching her grandson a prayer as they give charity.

Allusive reading the old acknowledgment—it is grace, not merit, that keeps one from the neighbor’s misfortune—made into a shared recitation.

Why it matters the sentence is the story’s theology of the poor; it is said, together, so the doctrine becomes something done.

95Lorraine / Laura

“That was my mother’s name, her formal name. I’ve told you a thousand times to call her Laura.”

Literal reading a quarrel over what to call the hospitalized daughter.

Allusive reading the double name of the whole cycle resolved: Lorraine is the formal name, Laura the spoken one, so the murmur “for Laura” (entry 62) is the prayer said over the woman’s true name, not a slip.

Why it matters the name is argued over on the page, which is the story admitting that naming itself is the sacrament it has been performing all along.

96Dickens’s Ghosts

“Scrooge sees ghosts.” . . . “I think you’re a sad guy, like that Ghost of Christmas Past.”

Literal reading a boy and his father discussing Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.

Allusive reading Dickens runs the length of the story: Pip and the convict in the graveyard mirror the boy’s own abandonment, and the father who leaves for Arizona is named the Ghost of Christmas Past—Dickens’s ghosts set against the mother’s “ghosts” the father will not believe in.

Why it matters the allusion is the argument itself; the boy uses Dickens to defend his mother’s visions, and the fiction is shown to be one way the true is told.

97“The Wrong Way”

“You’re going the wrong way.”

Literal reading a boy correcting his father’s driving.

Allusive reading the title is the father’s literal mistake and his moral one—the road to Arizona, away from the family—so geography and conscience collapse into one phrase.

Why it matters the direction and the abandonment are the same word; the story never needs to say which “wrong way” it means.

98“All We Ever Needed”

For a few moments, the three of us had all we ever needed.

Literal reading a mother, son, and grandmother together in a kitchen.

Allusive reading the sentence is the collection’s title and its whole argument: what the family needs is not the chalice or the cure, but this—the ordinary held for a moment.

Why it matters the closing line states the thesis in the plainest possible words; the allusion is to the work’s own title, so the text and its meaning are one.

99The Bath

“The only swimming I do now is in the bathtub.” . . . “That was Clew Bay in County Mayo.”

Literal reading a grandmother helped into her bath.

Allusive reading the great water of the grandmother’s youth—Clew Bay, where she once waded for sea lettuce—reduced to a tub; the daughter now bathes the mother, and the ocean becomes the ablution.

Why it matters the bath is literal and the baptism silent; the water of the entire corpus is poured into one enamel tub, and the story lets it stand.

100Glencar

“We’re here to visit my daughter, Laura Glencar.”

Literal reading the mother’s surname.

Allusive reading Glencar is Yeats’s landscape in “The Stolen Child,” where “the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car”; the name of the woman lost to visions carries the poem of the child stolen by the fairies.

Why it matters the name is not pointed out, only given, so the echo waits for the reader who knows the poem—the strictest form the corpus’s method takes.

101Joyce by Name

. . . the James Joyce House of the Dead across from the River Liffey, and Trinity College, where we saw the Book of Kells.

Literal reading a Dublin sightseeing list.

Allusive reading the novel that re-enacts “The Dead” through Gabriel and Michael (entry 73) at last names Joyce outright, at the very house where “The Dead” is set. “The dead” are named twice—the street of the living and the title of the story—as if the city itself carried the allusion.

Why it matters the name appears only once, in a travel list, so the reader who has felt the echo all along meets its source at the last possible moment, the way an allusion should arrive.

102Innisfree, Quoted in Full

Someone, I suppose my grandmother, had copied a poem by William Butler Yeats—“The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” / I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Literal reading a handwritten copy of the poem found among the grandmother’s things.

Allusive reading the title “Arise and Go Now” (entry 59) is shown to be Yeats in full: the grandmother wrote the poem out by hand, so the allusion the reader has been hearing all along is, in the end, a real page.

Why it matters the family does not quote the poem; they copy it out, and it becomes an heirloom.

103Dickinson’s Epigraph

The distance that the dead have gone does not at first appear—/ Their coming back seems possible for many an ardent year. —Emily Dickinson

Read with entry 173, where this epigraph to Give Them Unquiet Dreams is read in full.

104Rossetti’s Damsel of the Grail

Underneath was a gold plaque: “The Damsel of the Holy Grail—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874.”

Literal reading a painting’s plaque in a museum.

Allusive reading Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite damsel of the Grail stands beside Watts’s “Hope” (entry 90): the corpus pictures the Grail through actual Pre-Raphaelite canvases, so the Arthurian material is always seen through Victorian art.

Why it matters the painting is present in the scene, unremarked beyond its plaque, and the reader who knows the Rossetti sees the Grail legend the way the novel keeps showing it—framed and hanging on a wall.

105The Scarlet Letter

“Shakespeare?” / She smiled. “Good guess. But it was Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. You’ll read the book in high school.”

Literal reading a grandmother testing and correcting a guest’s guess.

Allusive reading the guess of Shakespeare corrected to Hawthorne: the novel lets a character be wrong about an allusion and sets it right, a lesson in the naming of sources the whole corpus practices.

Why it matters the error and its correction teach the reader how this world alludes: by near-miss and recovery.

106Time Is a Stream

Like Thoreau, I believe time is merely a stream we swim in. Someday the current of water will slip away, taking us with it, but the sandy bottom, eternity, will remain.

Literal reading a meditation on time held beside a river.

Allusive reading a second Thoreau, distinct from the grandfather’s “Goodness is the only investment” (entry 81): here Thoreau’s river becomes the novel’s own image of time, hope, and love.

Why it matters the allusion is the entire passage’s frame; the thought is built inside Thoreau’s metaphor, so the debt and the idea are one.

107The Boston Latin Pantheon

Some of the distinguished alumni are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Charles Bullfinch, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Literal reading a teacher listing his school’s famous graduates.

Allusive reading the American literary and political pantheon—Mather, Franklin, Adams, Emerson—invoked as the boy’s own school’s inheritance, so the national tradition is made the personal one.

Why it matters the list is a fact of the school, and it plants the novel’s heroes in the narrator’s own hall; Emerson appears here as the same figure the Molly stories quote elsewhere.

108The Catalogue of Totems

I’d like to be / the Wife of Bath’s scarlet stockings / poor Yorick’s skull / Dickinson’s sherry in the glass / Gatsby’s dock / Hulga’s wooden leg

Literal reading a poem listing objects the speaker wishes to be.

Allusive reading five allusions in five lines: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (her scarlet hose), Shakespeare’s Yorick (Hamlet), Dickinson’s sherry, Gatsby’s dock (the green light), and O’Connor’s Hulga (the wooden leg of “Good Country People”). The poem is a totem-pole of the corpus’s reach.

Why it matters the whole poem is allusion, each object a line from a different master; the speaker asks to become the very echoes this concordance has been tracing, one per line.

109The Dickinson Dash

I long to be singular—distinct as a Dickinson dash.

Literal reading a wish to be unlike others.

Allusive reading Dickinson’s dash—the poet’s signature mark, the pause that sets her apart—made the figure of individuality itself.

Why it matters the image is drawn from the very typography of the borrowed poet; the mark and the meaning are one.

110Thoreau’s Wood Thrush

In a forest, sitting on a sycamore, Thoreau’s wood thrush sings.

Literal reading a bird in the woods.

Allusive reading the wood thrush is Thoreau’s bird, the singer of Walden evening; naming it “Thoreau’s” makes the natural world his text.

Why it matters the bird is real and the debt is explicit in a single possessive, the calmest form an allusion can take.

111Coleridge and Keats

Lines of Coleridge or Keats—words you love.

Literal reading a poet’s remembered reading.

Allusive reading the Romantics held as the words one loves, the canon as comfort rather than burden.

Why it matters the names are offered without a quotation, so the allusion is the company the poem keeps, not a borrowing it must justify.

112Molly—the diminutive of Mary

“My name is Molly Bonamici.” . . . and the novel: “I was Angela in West Side Story and Mary in Jesus Christ, Superstar.”

Literal reading a girl’s name, and a school-play cast list.

Allusive reading Molly is the old English diminutive of Mary: the corpus’s central figure is named for the Virgin, hidden in a nickname. The novel makes the secret visible once, casting her literally as Mary on a stage; everywhere else the Marian name runs as a buried current under the Marian plot.

Why it matters the name is the character’s whole design: a woman called Mary, who does not believe, who is made to play Mary, in a body of work built on the Assumption.

113Bonamici—“good friends”

“our restaurant eponymously named ‘Bonamici’s,’ which means, by the way, ‘good friends.’ I have always found our surname ironic because my father was an unhappy person who rarely smiled.” . . . “‘Your last name means “good friends.”’”

Literal reading a surname, and its meaning stated in the text.

Allusive reading a sociopath whose name means “good friends”: the woman who cannot feel is named for the bond she counterfeits, and the text itself calls the surname “ironic.”

Why it matters the name is glossed by the narrator, so the irony is the character’s own discovery, not the critic’s; the allusion is the self of the protagonist.

114Agnella—the lamb

“Call me Agnella. Janssen is my married name.”

Literal reading the grandmother correcting the doctor to her first name.

Allusive reading agnella is the Italian for a female lamb; the grandmother is named for the lamb—the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God—in a corpus where “fleecy” and “cradle” (entry 6) keep the Nativity’s lamb-language running.

Why it matters the name is never glossed; it sits in the text as a silent given, the way the sacred does everywhere else in this work.

115Joshua

“You could call Joshua that. He works for a reputable institution.” . . . “Jerusalem, New York.”

Literal reading a grandmother inventing a museum curator to explain the stolen chalice.

Allusive reading Joshua is the Hebrew name of Jesus (Yeshua), paired here with Jerusalem and the healing cup; the grandmother conjures a man named Christ, from the holy city, to vouch for the Grail—the name that is God, used as a lie.

Why it matters the allusion is blasphemy doing the work of plot: the name of Christ is the cover story for a theft, and the irony is the scene’s entire weight.

116Finnegan

“Emily Finnegan. And this is my mother.”

Literal reading a roommate’s introduction.

Allusive reading Finnegan is the surname at the center of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; a living Finnegan moves through a corpus that re-enacts “The Dead” (entries 73, 101), so the name is one more Joycean hinge the text never announces.

Why it matters the name costs nothing to carry and everything to catch; it is the allusion as a surname, worn like an ordinary coat.

117Grace

“That’s not true. I visit you at least once every two weeks.” . . . “I suppose you do, Grace.”

Literal reading the mother’s name, in an argument about visitations.

Allusive reading the battered mother in “A Bath” is named Grace; the word runs the whole corpus’s ethic of mercy (“There but for the grace of God go I,” entry 94), so the woman who survives is named for the grace that spares her.

Why it matters the name is spoken only in rebuke and tenderness, never explained, and the story lets “Grace” mean what the theology has meant all along.

118Mary Grace

Mary Grace snickers and opens Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

Literal reading a student’s name.

Allusive reading Mary plus Grace: the Virgin and the Hail Mary’s “full of grace” folded into a single name, worn by the girl who quotes Romans and Matthew (entries 54–55) and who re-enacts O’Connor’s “Revelation.”

Why it matters the double-sacred name is O’Connor’s own choice, and the corpus borrows it whole, so the character arrives already carrying her allusion.

119Peggy—the pearl

“I always thought it a cruel irony that she had the same name as the graceful and beautiful skater.” . . . and, in the Aiden cycle: “Sean and I were the only people who knew about the pearls.”

Literal reading a nickname, and a dead man’s secret.

Allusive reading Peggy is the diminutive of Margaret, whose name means “pearl”; the pearls the grandfather hid (entry on the pearls) are the literal form of the name, so “Peggy” and the pearls are the same word in two keys—one a woman, one a buried treasure.

Why it matters the connection is never spoken; the name and the object sit in the two collections and rhyme silently, the way the pearl of great price hides in the field.

120The Dante Epigraph

Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing.—Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, epigraph to the novel

Literal reading an epigraph, a classicist’s call to attentive reading, set at the head of a contemporary novel.

Allusive reading the novel announces its deepest structure before the first chapter: Dante’s pilgrim is escorted through the afterlife by a guide, and Molly will be escorted through her own descent—by a policeman named Virgil and a cab driver named Beatrice—toward a final opening she never names as conversion.

Why it matters the epigraph is the book’s own promise about reading: what Molly cannot yet “hold”—her mother, her guilt, her doubt—is exactly what the novel asks her, and us, to hold fast.

121“Call me Virgil”

“Call me Virgil.” . . . “I smiled. ‘Okay, Virgil.’ I thought it was a strange name.”

Literal reading a policeman introducing himself by a Christian name that strikes the narrator as odd.

Allusive reading two debts in three words. In the Commedia, Virgil is Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory, and here the officer who walks Molly through her parents’ funeral and, later, through the truth of Agnella’s crimes, carries the name outright; the phrasing “Call me Virgil” also folds in Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” so the guide is at once Dante’s pagan poet and the American novel’s first confessional narrator.

Why it matters Virgil leads Molly through the worst of it (the grave, the murder, the mob), and the name is doing real structural work, not ornament: the guide’s function is imported with the guide’s name.

122“Bea. Short for Beatrice”

“I’m Bea. Short for Beatrice.”

Literal reading a cab driver giving her name.

Allusive reading the Commedia’s other guide, Beatrice, is the one who intercedes from heaven and leads the pilgrim into paradise; the novel’s last driver, who carries Molly toward home, is named for her, and—like the woman clothed with the sun in the same chapter—she delivers the novel to its close without once being asked to explain herself.

Why it matters the name arrives at the exact moment the novel turns from descent toward possibility, so the allusion marks a turn in the structure.

123“A gentle Lady is in Heaven”

Words of Dante popped into my head, “A gentle Lady is in Heaven, who grieves at this distress through which I must conduct thee.” I thought of my mother.

Literal reading a grieving daughter remembering a line she once read.

Allusive reading the quotation is Virgil’s, from Inferno II, spoken of Beatrice; Molly’s mother is cast as the interceding lady in heaven—so the Dantean frame reaches even into a moment of private grief, and the dead mother becomes, for that instant, the one who conducts her daughter through distress.

Why it matters the allusion carries the novel’s central untended grief: a mother the narrator never fully knew, remembered through the very poetry she would have dismissed.

124The Selva Oscura

Molly’s language of being “lost” and of “dark woods” recurs as she asks who, if anyone, will “show us” the way.

Literal reading a lost, frightened woman speaking plainly about confusion.

Allusive reading Inferno’s opening—“midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark”—is the template; St. John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul” sounds in the same breath, so the novel borrows the two great Western images of being lost toward God at once.

Why it matters the echo names the book’s actual plot: a soul mid-life, in a dark wood, unsure whether there is a way out or a guide.

125Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Sacred Heart

“Molly is a nickname for both Margaret and Mary. And today is October 17th, the Feast of Saint Margaret Mary.”—and the keepsake box holding “a small framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a quartz locket with the same image.”

Literal reading the explanation of a nickname and a box of a dead woman’s things.

Allusive reading “Molly” joins Margaret and Mary into the name of the seventeenth-century mystic of the Sacred Heart; the novel has been rehearsing that devotion all along in the Bleeding Heart vine that droops and revives with Molly’s state, and in the final pages she gives the locket away—the Sacred Heart passed, unforced, across a religious line.

Why it matters the name plants the book’s central devotional image (a wounded, flaming heart) before a word of it is spoken; it is the single deepest key to the novel’s title and its method.

126Miriam

The novel reaches the Hebrew “Miriam”—the root of Mary—“variously glossed as ‘beloved,’ ‘bitter,’ or ‘rebellious.’”

Literal reading an etymology, offered by the novel through its naming.

Allusive reading Miriam the prophetess is the older sister who watches over the infant Moses on the Nile and leads the Israelites in song after the Red Sea (Exodus 2; 15:20)—the sister who keeps faith while a helpless child is carried toward deliverance. That a woman named Molly, a keeper of the faithful watch, should bear the name’s root is the novel’s quiet claim about all the uncredited women who hold things together.

Why it matters the root name turns a common diminutive into an inherited devotional identity, so the allusion is what the protagonist’s name means.

127Martha and Miriam

In the final chapter two sisters are named “Martha and Miriam.”

Literal reading two women with ordinary biblical-era names.

Allusive reading the Gospel’s best-known sisters, Martha and Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:38–42), are paired again, with Miriam standing in as the Hebrew original of the second name—the active sister and the listening sister, both present at the book’s close.

Why it matters the pairing restates the novel’s question—action or attention, service or receptivity—at the moment Molly finally chooses.

128The Lost Lamb

A child near the novel’s end spontaneously repeats the parable of the lost lamb (Luke 15:3–7).

Literal reading a child’s unremarked recitation.

Allusive reading the parable of the rejoicing shepherd recovers the lost—and the novel’s movement, toward a woman who has been lost and is, at last, walked home, is staged in miniature through a child who does not know what she is doing.

Why it matters the scripture arrives through innocence, so the novel declines to preach and lets the parable do its work unannounced.

129The Woman Clothed with the Sun

A cab driver wears an earring patterned after the sun, a crescent moon, and twin stars; Venus rises beside stargazer lilies at the close.

Literal reading a piece of jewelry and a flower, described as set-dressing.

Allusive reading Revelation 12:1’s woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” is the Marian figure afloat behind the final scene, and the stargazer lily is a flower of both mourning and rebirth—book, body, and heaven set down in the room so the reader gradually notices how much belief is present.

Why it matters the imagery is not argued but furnished, so the final swim accumulates sacramental weight the narrator never once claims for it.

130“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani”

“A reading from Mark, Chapter 15 . . . ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”—and, moments later: “Fuck you, Lord Jesus Christ, and fuck your mother, father, and the Holy Ghost too.”

Literal reading a girl reading scripture at her parents’ funeral, then cursing.

Allusive reading the cry of dereliction on the cross is read over the loss of both parents, and the narrator’s obscene refusal in the next breath keeps the sacred and the profane side by side—an apostasy the novel deliberately lets stand rather than resolve.

Why it matters the verse is the novel’s honest center: belief and its failure are held side by side, and neither is forced to yield.

131“Beware of false prophets”

I turned to Matthew 7:15 . . . “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”

Literal reading a verse bracketed in a dead mother’s Bible.

Allusive reading read in retrospect, the warning lands on Agnella, whose manipulations are dressed as piety and whose con drives the book; the mother’s own marked verse becomes, posthumously, the novel’s indictment of the woman who raised Molly.

Why it matters the verse is a plot key hidden in a Bible, doing the work of foreshadowing the reader only recognizes later.

132“Do not throw your pearls before pigs”

Mary Grace . . . began praying: “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”—Matthew 7:6

Literal reading an enraged student praying aloud after attacking a classmate.

Allusive reading the verse is aimed, through the classroom and the pigs, at Molly herself; it also gathers the novel’s pearl imagery—Nonna’s pearls, Mrs. Muldoon’s name—into a single image of holy things thrown where they will be trampled.

Why it matters the “pearl” is in the protagonist’s own name (Peggy/Margaret, “pearl”), so the verse convicts Molly by the very word that names a woman she has failed to save.

133“In the beginning was the Word”

“I like the Gospel of John, especially its Prologue: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The idea of words being portrayed as divine appeals to me.”

Read with entry 23, where this exchange is read in both its story and its novel settings.

134Jonah and the Whale

“Are we supposed to believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and lived inside that thing for three days? ’Cause I think that’s crazy!”

Literal reading a student’s classroom objection.

Allusive reading the question of miracle versus meaning is argued before Molly, whose own life has been full of signs she rationalizes away; the whale is a test she watches a student fail or pass without settling.

Why it matters the scene puts the novel’s central idea about belief as a question and leaves it there.

135The Fish and “the symbol of Christ”

The diner wallpaper’s fish is named “the symbol of Christ.”

Literal reading a throwaway line about décor.

Allusive reading the ichthys, the early Church’s secret sign, surfaces in a roadside diner, the sacred set down in the shabby—the novel’s standing habit of letting devotion appear where no one is looking for it.

Why it matters the symbol does no plot work and asks nothing; it is pure atmosphere.

136“Our own private Eden”

“It would be like our own private Eden.”—with a snake arriving in the same Florida setting.

Literal reading a couple’s joke about a sunlit house.

Allusive reading Eden is a garden with a serpent, and the novel plants both—the paradise and the temptation/fall it contains—in a Florida suburb, so the couple’s dream already holds what will go wrong.

Why it matters the name is spoken lightly and then honored by the plot, so the joke becomes prophecy.

137Josephine

The name Josephine is glossed by the novel as “may God give increase.”

Literal reading an etymology offered in passing.

Allusive reading the name’s prayer (from the Hebrew, of Joseph) is ironic against its bearer, the same reversed logic the novel applies to its other loaded names—Felicity (happiness), Bonamici (good friends), Gabriel (the messenger)—so a name that asks for increase is worn by a life of diminishment.

Why it matters the name is one more instance of the book’s discipline: names carry pressure only where the novel wants judgment applied.

138The Visitation

Molly’s mother Maria is born on May 31, the feast of the Visitation.

Literal reading a date in a keepsake box.

Allusive reading the Visitation is Mary carrying Christ into Elizabeth’s house, where the unborn John leaps (Luke 1:39–56); the feast of a mother bearing grace into another woman’s home is the hidden calendar under the whole novel, and its three turns fall on three feasts—Visitation, Assumption, and Margaret Mary.

Why it matters the liturgical calendar is the novel’s unannounced structure, so the dates do the narration’s theological work in secret.

139Moll Flanders

The prototype of “Moll” is Defoe’s sexual and thieving rogue, a woman who survives by her wits and confesses in the first person.

Literal reading a shared diminutive, nothing more.

Allusive reading Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) establishes the confessional rogue as a mode: a woman of dubious virtue narrating her own survival; Molly Bonamici inherits the name and the form, so her cold, confessed first person descends from Defoe’s as much as from anyone. The rest of the title is in the family too. Nonna “had been married once, to a man from the Flanders section of Belgium,” and her married name, Janssen, is a name of Flanders, where its variant Janssens is the second most common surname (Statbel). Moll goes to the granddaughter, Flanders to the grandmother. The grandmother’s “Don’t call me that” repeats Moll’s own disowning of the name, which she first took as a widow, “Mrs. Flanders,” and which had “no more of affinity with my real name . . . than black is of kin to white.” Agnella also plays Moll’s governess, the older woman who plans the thefts and trains the younger in them: “What we did isn’t going to hurt a soul.” The full argument, including the Flemish cloth fortune and Defoe’s own South Sea Janssen, is in “Molly Bonamici: A Comprehensive Study.”

Why it matters the allusion identifies the genre the novel is written in, and that matters.

140The Awakening

The closing swim “closely reworks The Awakening”—“retaining its sensory pressure and solitary movement into water while reversing its terminal direction.”

Literal reading a woman swimming at the end of a novel.

Allusive reading Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier swims out and does not return; Molly rises and walks back to shore. The novel borrows Chopin’s scene—solitary, sensuous, decisive—and reverses its conclusion, so the same gesture that is suicide in Chopin is, in Mulhern, a homecoming.

Why it matters the reversal is the novel’s whole argument: it answers its key predecessor by refusing the predecessor’s ending.

141“The Cask of Amontillado”

The prank dummy is crowned with “one of those conical jester caps with bells”—Fortunato’s costume—and after Felicity falls, “every so often there was a jingling of bells”; Mark cries “For the love of God, let her be OK!”

Literal reading a lethal prank and a bystander’s plea.

Allusive reading Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” ends in “the jingling of the bells” as Montresor walls Fortunato in, and its taunt “For the love of God, Montresor!” is here turned inside out into a genuine cry; the “good friends” irony of the name Bonamici is Poe’s “Fortunato” (good fortune) hung over a betrayal.

Why it matters the details of Poe’s entombment are borrowed whole and turned from Gothic revenge toward the novel’s own subject of accident and guilt, so the homage is exact in its words and transfigured in its meaning.

142“The Tell-Tale Heart”

At Felicity’s death Molly checks for a pulse and finds none, in a claustrophobic room, and registers her “remorse for the first time.”

Literal reading a girl confirming a death and feeling guilt.

Allusive reading the guilt-haunted proximity to a body, the pulse that will not be found, and the narrator’s unnerving calm all rework Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” whose narrator cannot escape the heart he has stilled; here the guilt is real rather than hallucinated, and it is carried forward into years.

Why it matters the echo deepens the scene’s moral center: Molly’s guilt is the only noise the heart makes.

143“Call me Ishmael”

The policeman’s “Call me Virgil” folds Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” into the name of Dante’s guide.

Literal reading an introduction.

Allusive reading two openings at once: Moby-Dick’s narrator, the survivor who “alone escaped to tell thee,” and Inferno’s guide—so the survivor and the guide are one figure, a man who will lead Molly through the wreck and let her tell it.

Why it matters the compressed allusion names both the novel’s form (confession) and its frame (guided descent) in three words.

144Emerson

“To be great is to be misunderstood” is quoted to Felicity; “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” appears in Molly’s classroom.

Literal reading quotations from a New England writer.

Allusive reading Emerson is the novel’s secular counter-tradition to its Catholic one: the self-reliant voice Molly is trying to become, and the authority she invokes against the doctrine she inherits.

Why it matters the quotations mark out the book’s real conflict—inherited belief against self-integrity—with named sources, not a hunch.

145Thoreau

Walden’s counsel to “make the most of your regrets . . . to regret deeply is to live afresh” sits beside “Civil Disobedience” in Molly’s reading.

Literal reading an assigned list of American authors.

Allusive reading Thoreau’s insistence on the examined, self-owned life is the secular mirror of the novel’s religious question, and the line about regret is the book’s own ethical program: Molly’s salvation is made of exactly this—living afresh through what she regrets.

Why it matters the quotation is the novel’s stated moral, borrowed openly.

146Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”

A “barbaric yawp” sounds in the bear subculture, “no fat sweeter than that which sticks to their bones.”

Literal reading a description of a loud, fleshy subculture.

Allusive reading Whitman’s “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” is the American celebration of the body and the self, and its appearance among the bears is a knowing salute to a community that lives Whitman’s creed of the fleshy, democratic self.

Why it matters the allusion imports Whitman’s whole valuation of the body into a subculture the novel treats without judgment.

147Dickinson’s Slant of Light

“There’s a certain Slant of light” is read on the Christmas night that begins Molly’s turn, its “certain Slant” made literal by a streetlight that “crossed his eyes.”

Literal reading a poem read on a winter night.

Allusive reading Dickinson’s slant light is the “Heavenly Hurt” that falls “on Winter Afternoons”; Mulhern makes the metaphor literal first—the actual slant of a streetlamp on Gabe’s face—so the poem and the world illuminate each other, the hallmark of his method.

Why it matters the poem is not borrowed as mood but activated as perception: Molly opens the book and finds the very light she has just seen.

148“I dwell in Possibility”

Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility” closes the novel, its “spreading wide my narrow hands / To gather Paradise” enacted by Molly’s final swim.

Literal reading a poem’s last lines, quoted at the end.

Allusive reading the poem’s claim—the hands spread wide to gather Paradise—is acted out as well as quoted, by a woman who ends the novel “spread[ing her] arms wide” and swimming to shore: Dickinson’s possibility becomes the book’s last, unargued word.

Why it matters the novel hands its final sentence to Dickinson, so the allusion is the ending itself.

149“The Undiscovered Country”

. . . living now in Hamlet’s undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, though I doubted there was any such place.

Literal reading a girl lying awake, skeptical, musing on the dead she imagines above her bed.

Allusive reading Hamlet’s “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”—the speech in which the prince weighs whether to endure a life of suffering or to end it—is quoted as Molly counts the long-gone dead, then undercut by her own flat doubt, “though I doubted there was any such place.”

Why it matters the quotation names the novel’s central terror (what, if anything, waits after death) and its skepticism in one line, so the borrowed words hold the book’s whole question without resolving it.

150“A tale told by an idiot”

their lives, as Macbeth says, tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Literal reading a cynical citation.

Allusive reading Macbeth’s despairing verdict on life—“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”—is the skeptical floor the novel must rise from; that Molly can quote it and still arrive at “possibility” marks the distance the book travels.

Why it matters the line is the novel’s counter-position, imported to be argued with.

151“The world’s mine oyster”

Shakespeare’s “the world’s mine oyster” is the proverb Molly literalizes when she pockets Agnella’s pearls.

Literal reading a proverb about opportunity.

Allusive reading the pearl inside the oyster is the novel’s hidden trope—Agnella’s pearls, Mrs. Muldoon’s pearl-name, the pearls of Matthew 7:6—so when Molly takes the pearls she is, literally, opening the oyster and finding the wealth that names the women around her.

Why it matters the proverb is enacted as plot, so the allusion is the deed, not the phrase.

152How “The Dead” Is Built

Two sisters named Mary Jane and Lily receive Molly; the dead father is Michael; Gabe carves the turkey; “Moon River” does the work of “The Lass of Aughrim”; and Molly’s “soul swooned” borrows Joyce’s cadence.

Literal reading a Christmas dinner and a song, their ordinary particulars.

Allusive reading the whole scene recreates Joyce’s “The Dead”: the Morkan sisters, Michael Furey, Gabriel carving the goose, the Aughrim air calling Gretta back to her dead boy—here the song carries Molly back to Mrs. Muldoon, and the “swooning” soul is Gabriel Conroy’s last page.

Why it matters the borrowing is structural and exact, but the character carrying the shadow this time knows it, so the homage is also a quiet, knowing joke at Joyce’s expense.

153“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Agnella’s superstition, her manipulations dressed as piety, and her part in Felicity’s death descend from O’Connor’s grandmother.

Literal reading a scheming matriarch.

Allusive reading O’Connor’s grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—whose big mouth and self-serving religion get the family killed—is the template for Agnella; Molly’s final refusal of the “Angel of Death” role answers the Misfit’s theology that people need the threat of death to be good.

Why it matters the allusion is an argument: the novel borrows O’Connor’s grandmother to test and refuse her.

154Wise Blood and Hulga

Wise Blood sits open on Mary Grace’s desk; the name Hulga arrives straight out of Flannery O’Connor; Dr. Diver out of Fitzgerald.

Literal reading books on a desk, names in the text.

Allusive reading O’Connor’s Hazel Motes and Hulga (of “Good Country People”) and Fitzgerald’s Dr. Dick Diver (of Tender Is the Night) are imported by name and book, so the novel keeps its predecessors visibly in the room—the source acknowledged inside the scene it borrows from.

Why it matters naming the book inside the borrowed scene is the opposite of concealment; it is citation.

155Eugene O’Neill

Shelton Hall is said to be haunted by O’Neill, who died muttering “born in a hotel room and goddammit, died in a hotel room”; the prank dummy is dressed as his daughter Oona, who married Charlie Chaplin.

Literal reading a campus ghost story and a costume.

Allusive reading O’Neill’s ghost and his daughter’s scandalous marriage supply the prank’s plot (the missing Chaplin derby, the jester’s cap that substitutes), so American drama’s master of the haunted family haunts the very scene that kills Felicity.

Why it matters the playwright is atmosphere and plot: the ghost story the novel treats as a joke until the joke turns lethal.

156Myrtle Wilson, Michaelis, and the Yellow Car

Myra Bocca is “a near-anagram and auditory match for Myrtle Wilson,” run down by a car in a scene that imports Fitzgerald’s yellow car—the color of counterfeit wealth. The witness against her is “the Greek guy that owns the coffee shop . . . Alexander Michaelis.”

Literal reading a grifter killed by traffic.

Allusive reading Gatsby’s Myrtle Wilson is struck down in the Valley of Ashes by Gatsby’s yellow car; Mulhern’s grifter, Myra, meets the same fate, the near-name and the yellow car making the borrowing exact, transposed from Fitzgerald’s ash-heaps to a Florida strip mall. The bystander comes too. Fitzgerald’s principal witness to Myrtle’s death is “The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ash-heaps”; Mulhern’s principal witness against Myra is a Greek coffee-shop owner with the same surname, so the borrowing carries the scene’s neighbor as well as its victim.

Why it matters the allusion re-stages one of the novel’s central deaths so that the careless wealth of Gatsby becomes the counterfeit wealth of the grifter’s world.

157“Sacred Ashes”

“a New Age bookstore called Sacred Ashes”—a shop named for what it sells, incense and cremains and “glass skulls.”

Literal reading a strip-mall storefront with an apt, slightly morbid name.

Allusive reading Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes is the grey moral landscape between West Egg and New York, watched over by the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg; a shop named for ashes, run by a grifter who will die by a car, plants that valley in Florida—the ash-heap of American desire imported whole, along with its watcher and its victim.

Why it matters the name brings in Gatsby in the same scene that delivers Myra/Myrtle, so the two deaths of Fitzgerald’s novel arrive together, unannounced.

158Marlowe’s Pastoral

“Come live with me and be my love,/And we will all the pleasures prove/That valleys, groves, hills, and fields/Woods or steepy mountain yields.”—which Molly dryly corrects as “not exactly Fort Lauderdale terrain.”

Literal reading a lover quoting a classic seduction poem.

Allusive reading Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is the pastoral ideal of an idyllic retreat; Gabe courts Molly for Florida with it, and her flat retort grounds the pastoral in a real, unromantic place—exactly the doubleness the novel runs on.

Why it matters the allusion is used, deflated, and still allowed to do its work, which is the method at work.

159Langston Hughes’s “Salvation”

Hughes’s “Salvation” is the essay Molly teaches—a child’s crisis of belief set beside her own.

Literal reading a classroom text.

Allusive reading Hughes’s boy, saved-not-saved at a revival, weeps because he hasn’t seen Jesus and lied about it; Molly, who has refused belief her whole life, teaches this very text—the child’s unbelief as her own, rendered in someone else’s words.

Why it matters the essay named “Salvation” is the novel’s own subject, taught by a woman who may finally be reaching toward it.

160“In my beginning is my end”

T. S. Eliot’s “In my beginning is my end” sounds as Molly returns to the hospital where Agnella once staged a fall.

Literal reading a remembered line at a place of return.

Allusive reading the opening of Eliot’s “East Coker” is the poem of return and circular time; the line marks Molly’s own return to the scene of a deception, and the circle of the novel closing.

Why it matters the quotation names the book’s temporal shape at the exact point it turns back on itself.

161The Scream and Starry Night

Munch’s The Scream and Van Gogh’s Starry Night hang on the therapist’s wall where Molly is asked to name what she feels.

Literal reading two famous reproductions in an office.

Allusive reading Munch’s figure externalizes the panic Molly keeps flat; Van Gogh’s turbulent, spiritually charged sky is its unspoken alternative—so the two canvases stage the choice between despair and a wild, luminous belief without a word being said.

Why it matters the paintings are the scene’s silent argument, furnishing the room with exactly the two registers the novel moves between.

162Socrates, Kierkegaard, and Jung

Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing,” Kierkegaard’s “there are two ways to be fooled,” and Jung’s synchronicity (named outright when Molly opens Dickinson by “coincidence”).

Literal reading the furniture of an educated mind.

Allusive reading the three supply the novel’s epistemology: Socratic ignorance as the start of Molly’s confession, Kierkegaard’s two misleading ways as her skepticism’s limit, and Jung’s meaningful coincidence as the name for everything the rationalist narrator can’t explain.

Why it matters these are the novel’s intellectual frame, kept in plain view.

163Freud and Hunter S. Thompson

“If I had penis envy, I’d cut your dick off and shove it up your ass”; and Thompson’s “we are all alone, born alone, die alone” is the creed Molly carries into the deaths that follow.

Literal reading a retort and a quotable nihilism.

Allusive reading Freud’s infamous idea is deflated by wit rather than argument; Thompson’s lonely creed is the novel’s secular floor—the conviction Molly must be talked out of before her ending can land.

Why it matters both quotations do argumentative work, the first by mockery, the second by being the position the novel spends itself overturning.

164La Traviata

Verdi’s La Traviata, the opera of the courtesan Violetta, plays in the background of Molly’s childhood.

Literal reading opera on the radio in an Italian household.

Allusive reading Violetta, the “fallen woman” who refuses to be condemned, is the novel’s unlikely patron saint; her music, heard in childhood, is the seed of a story about a woman who will not be judged by the roles assigned her.

Why it matters the opera is the novel’s buried aria, sounded early and answered only at the close.

165“Moon River”

Mrs. Muldoon, sober and gentle at the graduation party, sings it to Molly—“my huckleberry friend”—and dies within weeks.

Literal reading a drunk, briefly sober, giving a gift.

Allusive reading Mercer and Mancini’s “Moon River,” the song of a dreamer setting off, becomes the moral center of the book: a hundred pages of comic exasperation are spent so that the song can land as earned love, not sentiment—carried, like Joyce’s Aughrim air, by the woman about to die.

Why it matters the song pays off the novel’s entire investment in Mrs. Muldoon, so it carries the feeling and is more than a soundtrack.

166The Title from “The Stolen Child”

The title Give Them Unquiet Dreams is lifted from Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” (1889), printed in full at the novel’s close—its last words “Come away, O human child!”

Literal reading a title and a closing poem.

Allusive reading Yeats’s faeries coax a human child away from a world “more full of weeping than you can understand”; the novel’s child is Aiden, and the title turns the faeries’ promise—of a place without sorrow—into the novel’s own darker gift of unquiet dreams.

Why it matters the poem is the book’s bookends: it names the novel and closes it, so the Yeatsian frame is the work’s actual shape.

167Glencar

The family name “Glencar” is drawn from the third stanza of “The Stolen Child”: “From the hills above Glen-Car”—a place in County Sligo the poem makes enchanted.

Literal reading a surname, taken for granted through hundreds of pages.

Allusive reading the family is literally named for the poem’s enchanted landscape, so the novel’s central question—what the faeries (or the dead) took from them—is present in every “Glencar” spoken; the name is the allusion worn as identity.

Why it matters the name stakes the novel’s claim—this family belongs to the Stolen Child’s story—before any plot is told.

168“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

The grandmother has copied “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” into the photograph album—“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree”—above photographs captioned “Our Trip to Innisfree.”

Literal reading a poem pasted into a family album.

Allusive reading Yeats’s dream of a cabin on a lake, the peace of “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” is stitched into the grandmother’s own past—her siblings in a rowboat, the island growing closer in each photograph—so the poem and the family’s memory of home are the same page.

Why it matters the poem is kept, not cited, made into the family’s own keepsake: allusion as inheritance.

169“The Wild Swans at Coole”

Rita recites “The Wild Swans at Coole” in the Boston Public Garden, its closing question—“Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day / To find they have flown away?”—beside the swan boats and live swans.

Literal reading an older woman reciting a poem at a fitting moment.

Allusive reading Yeats counts the swans at Coole and grieves their eventual flight—the question of what endures against what departs; Rita’s recitation in a Garden of swans makes the poem’s elegy the novel’s own question about Martin, about loss, and about whether anything delights us again.

Why it matters the poem is the elegy the novel will answer, delivered at the exact spot where its swans still float.

170“The Cat and the Moon”

The black cat on the plane, a pooka in feline form, is named Minnaloushe, after Yeats’s own cat in “The Cat and the Moon.”

Literal reading a passenger’s emotional-support cat, named for a poet’s pet.

Allusive reading Yeats’s Minnaloushe, “the nearest kin of the moon,” is the poet’s familiar and the poem’s shapeshifting dancer; the novel’s Minnaloushe is the pooka wearing a cat—so the poet’s own familiar is turned, in Mulhern’s hands, into the shapeshifter’s mask.

Why it matters the name is a wink that lands as plot: the cat is the pooka, and naming it for Yeats’s cat announces the borrowing while the shapeshifter hides in plain sight.

171“Horseman, pass by!”

Yeats’s epitaph—“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”—is present in the pooka’s most classic form, the “dark horse with golden eyes.”

Literal reading a horse, the pooka’s shape, seen at the water.

Allusive reading Yeats’s own gravestone command to the horseman—pass by, and pass judgment as a cold eye does—becomes the novel’s pooka-horse, the death-bringing spirit whose golden eyes watch; so the poet’s epitaph is borrowed as the novel’s very image of death.

Why it matters the epitaph and the horse are one figure, so Yeats’s last words are walked into the novel as its ghost.

172Fairy and Folk Tales, and the Celtic Twilight

Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and The Celtic Twilight (1893), with the essay “Magic” (1901), frame the novel’s treatment of second sight as reality rather than superstition—alongside Croker’s Fairy Legends (1825) and Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends (1887).

Literal reading the scholarship and folklore a novelist drew on.

Allusive reading the novel borrows Yeats’s poems and also adopts Yeats’s whole conviction, argued across those books, that faeries, púcas, and second sight are a way of seeing—so the book reads as “a late work of the Celtic Twilight,” complete with the folklorists Yeats himself collected.

Why it matters the frame is the book’s worldview, not its garnish: second sight is the novel’s technology, inherited from Yeats’s own argument that such seeing is real.

173Dickinson’s Epigraph

The distance that the dead have gone does not at first appear—Their coming back seems possible for many an ardent year.—Emily Dickinson, epigraph

Literal reading a poem set at the head of a novel about the dead.

Allusive reading Dickinson’s claim that the dead feel near, their return possible “for many an ardent year,” states the novel’s whole subject—the grandfather’s return, the pooka, the mother’s second sight—before the prose begins, so the supernatural is announced as grief’s own conviction, not as plot device.

Why it matters the epigraph authenticates the book’s central premise: the dead come back because the living cannot stop expecting them. Dickinson appears elsewhere in the corpus as well (“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” entry 42).

174“Borne back ceaselessly into the past”

So I remember my origins. I am borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Literal reading a narrator explaining why he recalls his beginnings.

Allusive reading the closing line of The Great Gatsby—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—is quoted almost verbatim in the novel’s second paragraph, so the book announces its Gatsby inheritance at once: the backward-pulling current of memory and the unrecoverable past.

Why it matters opening with Gatsby’s ending tells the reader this is a novel about being carried backward, and the allusion is the book’s own thesis stated before its story.

175“They contain multitudes”

I tell my students, in whatever ways I can, they contain multitudes.

Literal reading a teacher’s reassurance to a room of teenagers.

Allusive reading Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (“Song of Myself,” §51) is turned from a claim about the self into a promise made to others—the pronoun swung from “I” to “they,” the same liberal selfhood handed to students who have never heard of Whitman.

Why it matters the borrowing states the essay’s whole creed (each student is a crowd, a continent) in the exact words of its source, so the allusion is the lesson.

176“The integrity of your own mind”

. . . that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of their own minds.

Literal reading a sentence in a teaching essay.

Allusive reading Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is imported almost unchanged, its pronouncement turned outward from the solitary reader to a classroom; the one doctrine the essay keeps verbatim is the American one it was written to deliver.

Why it matters the sentence is the essay’s thesis, and it is Emerson’s sentence—the method at its most direct: the master’s words kept whole because they already say what must be said.

177“Find your eternity in each moment”

the real business of life is to live in the present, find eternity in a moment.

Literal reading a distillation of practical advice.

Allusive reading Thoreau’s 1859 journal—“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment”—is compressed to a clause and handed to sixteen-year-olds, so the transcendentalist doctrine becomes a working philosophy rather than a quotation.

Why it matters the compression is the craft: Thoreau’s sentence is absorbed until only its living core remains, and that core is taught, not quoted.

178“We dwell in possibilities”

We dwell in possibilities, I say, and possibilities are endless.

Literal reading a teacher’s encouragement.

Allusive reading Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than Prose –” supplies the essay’s guiding verb, the “I” widened to “we”; the house of possibility the poet built for herself becomes a room the whole class is invited into.

Why it matters the allusion recurs in the fiction too—“I dwell in Possibility” closes Molly Bonamici—so this essay records the same debt the novel pays, the recurrence itself the proof of method.

179“Explore the circumference of your life”

Explore the circumference of your life.

Literal reading an assignment’s instruction.

Allusive reading Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “My Business is Circumference”; the essay turns the poet’s self-description into a command to students, so the poet’s own words about the shape of a life become the teacher’s charge about how to live one.

Why it matters circumference is Dickinson’s term for the reach of consciousness; borrowing it is borrowing her whole subject, and the essay knows it.

180“The infinitude of the private man”

what Emerson calls the infinitude of the private man.

Literal reading an attribution.

Allusive reading Emerson’s summary of his own lifelong doctrine is imported by name, inside the essay, so the essay borrows Emerson’s sentences and also names the creed those sentences serve—the self as infinite, the private as sacred.

Why it matters the phrase is the essay’s stated frame, and naming its source is the author’s openness: the debt is credited, not hidden.

181“Celebrate yourself!”

Celebrate yourself! I urge.

Literal reading an exhortation to students.

Allusive reading a second Whitman, not the multitudes of “Song of Myself” but its opening line, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” turned from declaration into command; the “I” becomes an imperative, the poet’s self-announcement a teacher’s instruction.

Why it matters the essay borrows the first word of its patron saint’s great poem to open the door of the classroom, so the allusion is the very gesture of beginning.

182“Hope eternal”

. . . but always, hope eternal.

Literal reading a commonplace, almost an idiom.

Allusive reading Alexander Pope’s “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” (An Essay on Man, Epistle I) is compressed to three words, so thoroughly absorbed into ordinary speech that the casual reader takes it for idiom while the knowing reader hears Epistle I underneath.

Why it matters the allusion is a test case of the method’s range: the source is hidden in plain hearing, and the borrowing is pitched to an educated ear without demanding it.

183“The ladder . . . close to the side of the schooner”

Literature, as I see it, is the ladder hanging close to the side of the schooner.

Literal reading a teacher’s metaphor for reading.

Allusive reading the rigging is lifted from Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” whose ladder hangs “close to the side of the schooner” and leads a lone diver down to a sunken self among “the book of myths”; Mulhern rigs the same ladder to a different hull—the descent is no longer solitary, the whole class climbs down together—but the destination is Rich’s: not a shipwreck, but a self that has to be dived for.

Why it matters the borrowed image carries the essay’s argument (literature is the descent into the wreck of the self), so the allusion is the metaphor itself.

184“Run fast . . . at the halfway part, looking back”

All of us run fast, stretch our arms farther, until one fine morning we are older, at the halfway part, looking back.

Literal reading a teacher musing on time and his former students.

Allusive reading the last page of The Great Gatsby—“tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—”—is all but transcribed, its future-that-keeps-receding turned into a past-that-keeps-arriving: middle age glimpsed in former students “in their thirties now.”

Why it matters Fitzgerald’s sentence about longing forward is reversed into one about looking back, so the borrowed cadence does exactly the work the essay needs—and matches the novel’s own opening, which also quotes Gatsby’s last line.

185“Students come and go . . . a formulated phrase”

“Students come and go.” . . . “knowing them all, how they would fix you in some formulated phrase.”

Literal reading a teacher’s plain observation about the classroom.

Allusive reading two lifts from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in one paragraph: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” and “I have known the eyes already, known them all—/ The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.” Where Prufrock dreads being reduced and filed by others’ eyes, Mulhern borrows the same vocabulary and turns it toward the opposite: a willingness to ask what verdict the students’ eyes wrote—“What did they see when they looked at me?”

Why it matters the doubled allusion reverses its source’s fear, so Eliot’s paralysis is answered by the essay’s open question to the memory itself.

186“Epiphanies, transcendental revelations”

insights or epiphanies, transcendental revelations.

Literal reading a near-synonym string about what teaching produces.

Allusive reading “epiphany” is not a generic synonym here but Joyce’s critical term from Stephen Hero—“a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture”—the exact mechanism the essay stages again and again: the sacred arriving in a curse word, a red couch, a homeless man rolling on a church floor.

Why it matters naming the Joycean “ordinary epiphany” names the essay’s—and the fiction’s—central device, so the allusion is the method’s own name.

187“Midway . . . the halfway part”

at the halfway part, looking back.

Literal reading a phrase about middle age.

Allusive reading Dante’s opening, “Midway upon the journey of our life” (Inferno, in Longfellow’s translation, the same word Mulhern reaches for), sits one clause from Fitzgerald’s boats—a resonance of position rather than phrase: the backward-looking account a soul makes midway through a life.

Why it matters offered as a possible echo, not a certainty, it shows the method working at its faintest—position, not quotation—and the essay is honest about the difference.

188“Delectable places”

The essay’s “rare and delectable places,” and the classroom as “a delectable place.”

Literal reading a fond word for the classroom.

Allusive reading the Delectable Mountains of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—the pilgrim’s resting stage, reached only after hardship—echo beneath the word “delectable,” so the classroom is cast as that place on the road where the traveler may rest.

Why it matters an echo, not a borrowing, but worth naming; it completes the essay’s careful range from verbatim borrowings down to a single quiet word.