The title carries two meanings at once, and the story never lets go of either. “Assumptions” names the small cruelties of a family that has already decided, before the beach trip even starts, what Peg is worth — “the homeliest damn woman” in the family, good for a joke, not much else. But capitalized, in Catholic usage, an Assumption is a specific and singular doctrine: the teaching, defined by Pope Pius XII in the 1950 apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus, that the Virgin Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory at the close of her earthly life, spared the ordinary corruption of the grave. The story’s theological ambition sits exactly at the friction between these two senses of its own title: it asks whether the privilege named by the second sense — a body received into glory rather than left to decay — can be extended to a body that has already failed every test implied by the first.
The epigraph does the doctrinal work before a single scene begins. “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you” is drawn from the Song of Solomon, a text with its own long history of Marian reading. Patristic and medieval exegetes, and later the Church’s Marian liturgy itself, applied the Song’s bridal imagery to Mary as tota pulchra — wholly beautiful, without stain — the same freedom from “flaw” that underwrites both her Immaculate Conception and, by extension, her Assumption. A body without sin does not require the general resurrection to wait for; it can be received directly. Mulhern borrows this exact interpretive tradition and relocates its object. The verse that theology addresses to the one woman held to be sinless, the story addresses instead to a woman defined, on its opening page, by a catalog of ordinary affliction: alcoholic, diabetic, asthmatic, gouty, bald, mocked at her own family’s card table. The displacement is the argument.
It matters that the doctrine being invoked is specifically about the body, not only the soul. Catholic eschatology holds that the resurrection of the body is universal but deferred — a promise for the end of time. The Assumption is the single anticipation of that promise granted within history, and the Church has always tied the privilege to Mary’s sinlessness: a body untouched by the corruption that sin introduces need not wait to be glorified. The story’s closing images borrow that vocabulary of glorified flesh with unmistakable precision — Peg “shone like a miniature sun” under suntanning oil, and in her final description “her countenance reflect[s] the brightness of a blazing fire.” These are not generic images of light. They are the specific grammar of a body assumed rather than merely dead, applied to a woman whose life the narrative has spent its length proving is anything but sinless by any worldly accounting. The theological claim smuggled inside the imagery is a quiet rebuttal of merit as the precondition for glory: what is glorified here is not purity but a body that has been loved and has suffered.
A second scriptural register reinforces the first without collapsing into it. Peg’s shining skin also recalls the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor — “his face shone like the sun” — and the Sun of Righteousness, Sol Iustitiae, of Malachi 4:2, an image the essay on fire imagery elsewhere on this site traces through the story’s final pages. The Transfiguration and the Assumption are distinct events in Catholic doctrine — one a temporary preview of glory granted to Christ before witnesses, the other a permanent translation of Mary’s body beyond death — but they share a single image-vocabulary of radiant, altered flesh. “Assumptions” deliberately does not keep these vocabularies apart. It borrows the light of one doctrine and the finality of the other, and folds both around a body that qualifies, on paper, for neither. The effect is a kind of unauthorized hagiography: sainthood’s visual signature, granted without sainthood’s credentials.
The doctrine of the Assumption, as the Church defines it, is solitary — declared of one woman, without reference to bystanders. The story insists on the opposite: that whatever grace reaches Peg arrives through the same flawed family that has spent the day mocking her. Helen invents the mocking nickname “Lovely Peggy” and rolls her eyes at Peg’s singing, then in the same breath helps her into the water and calls her cruelty toward her a lesser thing than the sin of wasting bread. None of this is resolved into consistency, and it does not need to be. Catholic sacramental theology has a term for grace that does not depend on the worthiness of the one administering it — ex opere operato, valid by the act itself rather than the merit of its minister. Mulhern secularizes the principle at the level of family rather than clergy: Helen does not have to stop being unkind for her small, exasperated tenderness toward Peg to still count as care, and the story treats that care as sufficient to carry Peg into the water that becomes, by its final page, the site of her transfiguring light. Grace, in this account, is not withheld until the people who carry it become good enough to deserve carrying it.
What the title ultimately asks the reader to notice, then, is the assumption — lower-case, ordinary, the kind a family makes about a relative it has already sized up — that a body like Peg’s could never be a candidate for the Assumption—capitalized, doctrinal, reserved. The story spends its length building the case against that certainty, one shabby, unglamorous image at a time, until the sea itself catches the light and an aging, drunk, diabetic woman is described in the precise register scripture and dogma reserve for the sinless and the transfigured. Read this way, “Assumptions” is not a story that borrows religious imagery for atmosphere. It is a story built to interrogate a doctrine by testing it against the one body the doctrine was never written to include — and to suggest, without ever stating it as argument, that the test is the whole point.