Class, Ethnicity, and the Boston Triple-Decker

I. A Map Built From Kitchens

Every regionalist fiction writer eventually produces a map, whether or not one is ever printed. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, worked and reworked across more than a dozen novels, is the most famous American instance: a single invented Mississippi county dense enough with recurring families, feuds, and geography that scholars have assembled its layout from internal textual evidence alone.¹ Alice McDermott has performed a comparable, quieter feat with the Irish-Catholic parishes of Brooklyn and Long Island in novels like Charming Billy and Someone, returning across decades of work to the same wakes, the same church basements, the same three-family houses.² James Mulhern’s fiction, read across his short stories and his novel Give Them Unquiet Dreams, has assembled a comparably specific map without, to date, being read as one: a fictional Greater Boston built from Jamaica Plain, Braintree, Revere, and the Jamaicaway, populated by Irish-Catholic and Italian-American families who share not a single household but a single architectural inheritance — the three-decker, or triple-decker, that most municipal of New England housing forms.

Mulhern’s own editors gesture toward this geography without fully mapping it, describing his fiction’s enduring subject as “the streets and kitchens of Irish and Italian Boston” and noting that his Boston functions as “McDermott’s Brooklyn’s cousin: a city of women running households on will and grievance and enormous, unspoken tenderness.”³ This essay takes that observation literally, tracing the specific neighborhoods named across the fiction and arguing that their differences — Jamaica Plain’s Irish-Catholic parish culture, Braintree’s aspirational lower-middle-class remove from the city, Revere’s dense Italian immigrant enclave — are not incidental color but the coordinates of a functioning social system, one whose central architectural unit, the triple-decker, actively produces the intimacy and the surveillance his plots require.

II. Jamaica Plain: The Irish-Catholic Enclave and Its Casualties

Peggy Fleming, the ruined, alcoholic center of “Assumptions,” is explicitly rooted in a single Boston neighborhood: she “grew up in Jamaica Plain, an Irish catholic enclave in Boston,” arriving in America in the nineteen-thirties on the sponsorship of her cousin Mary O’Malley, who had herself “preceded her from County Mayo fifteen years earlier.”⁴ The neighborhood is textured with the specific institutions of first-generation Irish-Catholic life — the “socials, weekly gatherings in the basement of Saint Thomas More Church,” the cousin’s husband loading mail at South Station, the cousin herself “cleaning the houses of the ‘filthy rich on the hill’ — Mission Hill she meant.”⁴ This is not decorative period detail; it is a precise class map in miniature, placing Peggy’s cousin’s family as domestic labor for the same hill their own parish overlooks, and placing Peggy herself, later, as the family’s trusted nanny — a woman who occupies every rung of unpaid and underpaid female labor available to an Irish immigrant of her generation before her decline into alcoholism and poverty completes the neighborhood’s tragic arc for her.

The novella “A Prayer for Home,” set amid the same Boston and Philadelphia interiors, and “A Bath” both return to the Jamaicaway, the “curvy four-lane parkway” that borders Jamaica Pond — the same pond where, the narrator’s mother recalls, “a mother and daughter drowned” before swimming was forbidden in the nineteen-seventies.⁵ The detail is characteristic of how Mulhern uses Boston geography: an ordinary, verifiable piece of city history (the pond, the ban) becomes, without any authorial signaling, an ominous frame for the domestic violence the scene is about to reveal, as Billy notices his mother’s bruises change color “like the trees along the water” while they drive past the site of an old drowning on the way to confess a new injury.⁵ Jamaica Plain and its pond function across Mulhern’s fiction as a specific, recurring site of loss carried by water — consistent with, and considerably more geographically anchored than, the more general water imagery scholars have traced through his poetry.

III. Braintree: Aspiration, Distance, and the Blessed Mother

Where Jamaica Plain is the enclave a family cannot fully leave, Braintree functions in Mulhern’s geography as the destination of a first, modest upward remove — the grandmother in the essay-memoir “Altogether Beautiful” material lives “on Kendall Road in Braintree, Massachusetts,” her devotion to the Blessed Mother made physical through “statuettes and pictures throughout her home,” and her daily geography extended outward toward “Paragon Amusement Park across from the beach” and a nearby square where Peggy Fleming, in her decline, is found “wandering the streets… bruised and beaten-looking.”⁶ Braintree is close enough to the old parish network that Peggy remains a next-door presence in the family’s life, but far enough from Jamaica Plain proper that the move itself registers, however faintly, as a class achievement — a family that has left the enclave without fully leaving the people who never could.

“A Bath” supplies the geography’s clearest architectural fact: Nana “lived on the second floor of a three-decker,” her building’s stairwell smelling of the Chinese food cooked by the family on the first floor, its walls thin enough that Billy can hear, through Nana’s bathroom door, “splashing and… sighs” but “no conversation” as his mother bathes his grandmother.⁵ The three-decker’s stacked intimacy — families audible to each other through floor and wall, doors that “never” lock because, as Nana explains with characteristic bluntness, “that way people could get in if they smelled her dead body” — is the essay’s central architectural claim: this housing form does not merely contain Mulhern’s plots, it generates them.⁵ A confession extracted in a bathtub behind a door that does not fully mute sound is a confession that has already, structurally, been half-overheard by the building itself.

IV. Revere: The Italian-American Enclave and Its Export

Molly Bonamici’s Italian-American geography runs through Revere, the dense immigrant enclave “about five miles to the north” of Boston that she names, with visible neighborhood pride, when a Boston University roommate asks about the Mafia: “I am from a very Italian neighborhood… One of my Nonna’s friends, Mr. Scarfone, has ties to the Mafia. He’s involved in small-time things like gambling, money laundering, and drugs.”⁷ The exchange is instructive precisely because of its comic surface: Molly is performing Revere for an outsider, converting the neighborhood’s reputation into a kind of social currency at the exact moment her roommate reveals her own geographic and class naivety, mistaking the African nations Mali and Guinea for cities and assuming Molly’s dorm-room crucifix collection means something it does not.⁷

Revere’s Mr. Scarfone reappears later in the same story cycle at a considerably darker register, when Molly, having narrated her own sociopathy in procedural, confessional prose, notes that “obtaining cocaine from Mr. Scarfone, the mobster friend of my grandmother’s, was easy” — the neighborhood’s low-level criminal infrastructure, introduced as comic local color for a roommate’s benefit, converts without any narrative flag into the actual supply chain for a murder.⁷ This is the geography essay’s point in miniature: Mulhern’s neighborhoods are never simply backdrop or dialect color. Jamaica Plain generates the specific, class-inflected grief that ruins Peggy Fleming; Braintree generates the aspirational distance from which that ruin is watched with pity but not full intervention; Revere generates both the ethnic pride Molly performs for outsiders and the practical means of the crime she goes on to commit. Each neighborhood is load-bearing.

V. A Coherent Geography, Read as One

Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha rewards a reader who tracks the Compsons and Sartorises and Snopeses across books, watching a single invented county accumulate psychological weight through repetition. McDermott’s Irish Catholic Long Island rewards a reader alert to how often her novels return to the same wakes and the same three-family houses. Mulhern’s Greater Boston, distributed across short stories that were not, on first publication, necessarily intended to be read as a single mapped world, rewards the same kind of attention once its neighborhoods are placed side by side: Jamaica Plain’s enclave Catholicism, Braintree’s modest remove and Marian piety, Revere’s dense Italian-American sociability and low-grade criminal economy, all connected by the Jamaicaway’s parkway and by a shared, recurring housing form, the three-decker, whose stacked and overheard intimacy is the architectural condition that makes his families’ secrets both possible and, eventually, impossible to keep. To read Mulhern’s Boston as a coherent fictional geography, rather than as scattered regional color, is to notice how precisely the social realism of setting underwrites the psychological realism of plot.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Domestic Violence and Silence → The Quiet Cartographer