The Confessor Archetype and the Ethics of Listening

I. The Sacrament Without the Sacrament

Catholic fiction has a long tradition of confessional scenes that take place nowhere near a confessional box. James Mulhern’s stories and his novel Give Them Unquiet Dreams are full of people who perform the priest’s oldest function, hearing what cannot otherwise be said and deciding what to do with it, while standing at kitchen sinks, sitting in recliners with a cat on their laps, or remembering how they once scraped sea lettuce from a boulder in County Mayo. The structure is specific. An unauthorized confessor, usually a grandmother or a woman in a grandmother’s place, receives a confidence from a child or a wounded adult and must then choose between absolution, indictment, and silence. Unlike a priest, these listeners hold no institutional warrant for the power they exercise, and that is what makes their use of it worth reading closely.

The structure has a second face. If confession can happen without a priest, it can also happen without contrition. Two of Mulhern’s darkest stories are narrated by poisoners who tell the reader exactly what they did, in the calm diction of a checklist, and ask for nothing. Read together, the two faces describe one subject. In this fiction, to hear a confession is to take custody of something, whether a daughter’s bruise, a dead woman’s guilt, or a murderer’s method, and the custody is never returned.

II. “A Bath”: The Confession That Is Earned

A strain of North American short fiction has made an art of what a family declines to say about violence in its own history. Alice Munro returns again and again to women who absorb, manage, and eventually half reveal violence that the community, and often the narration, treats as ordinary domestic weather. Her past tense is rarely a simple record of what happened. It records what a family has agreed, without ever meeting to agree it, to call it. Andre Dubus, writing from inside a Catholic, working-class New England close to Mulhern’s own, built a body of work around suffering bodies and the euphemisms families build to absorb that suffering into daily life, most famously in Adultery & Other Choices and Voices from the Moon. Both writers share a conviction that the sentence which does not say the true thing directly is the story’s real subject, not a loss of nerve.

“A Bath” opens with the lie already in motion. Billy’s mother, Grace, has bruises that “seemed to grow” as she talks, and when her son asks if it hurts, she shifts to a different kind of harm: “Not any longer . . . Don’t worry, Billy. Your mother’s a survivor.” The euphemism proper arrives at Nana’s building: “I said I fell off a stepladder when I was hanging a curtain. I told her you were helping me. Promise me you’ll stick to the story.” The boy is recruited as co-author before the reader knows what the lie covers, so the reader meets the deception exactly as Nana will, already rehearsed. Mulhern is precise about how it is built. It is not a lie about whether an injury happened, since the bruises are visible and undenied. It is a lie about cause and agency, turning a man’s violence into an accident with no human author. Nana senses its function before she names it: “It needs to breathe, Grace. Wash your face straightaway.” The command to remove makeup will soon become a command to remove concealment of another order.

What follows borrows the shape of penance. Nana demands to see what has been hidden (“I want to see. I’m your mother”), examines the wound with her hands (“She gently placed her palms on my mother’s face and scanned closely”), and presses for the true account beneath the story (“This is the second fall you’ve had in three months. I don’t understand it, Gracie”). Yet the lie does not break under accusation. It breaks because Nana confesses first. Grace, catching an offhand remark about her dead father’s temper, asks, “Did he ever hit you?” After some evasion Nana answers, “A few times. When he was drunk. Men were different back then.” Grace’s reply, “Not so different,” finally brings the euphemism into the open. The scene goes both ways, with neither person above the other, and in that it departs from the sacrament it resembles. A priest’s authority to absolve depends on his freedom from the penitent’s particular sin. This grandmother earns the confession by revealing that she shares its inheritance.

When Grace confirms that a man named O’Toole “smacked me twice. Said I was a bitch,” the absolution is strikingly unceremonious. There is no demand for detail and no scene of weeping recognition, only Nana’s immediate absorption of the fact into practical comfort: “You’re not that horrible word, Gracie. You’re opinionated and strong . . . Forget about that bastard O’Toole. I didn’t like him . . . He’s out of your life, I hope?” It reads less like a priest’s pardon than like women closing ranks around a shared history that the men will never be made to answer for. Nana handles the news of violence in about as many sentences as she used for the cover story, and that brevity is the story’s argument. In this family, receiving news of violence and receiving a cover story for it have become routine in the same way. Billy’s own confession is almost an afterthought: “So you lied about the curtains?” “Yes.” “Promise me you’ll never lie to your grandmother again.” “I promise.” He has now made, broken, and remade the same kind of promise twice in a few pages, and nothing suggests either is binding. A secret, in this household, is not information that stays hidden. It is information passed from hand to hand on condition that it stay verbally denied.

The ending holds back in the same way. Once Grace helps Nana into the bath, the act of care that gives the story its title and the intimacy the confessions require, Billy is placed outside a closed door, and the narration stays with him: “I listened through the door. There was no conversation. I heard splashing and my grandmother’s sighs as my mother rubbed her back. I suppose they were preoccupied by memory.” The story withdraws its own access at the moment the reader expects the most disclosure, leaving Billy, and the reader with him, to infer meaning from splashing and sighs. The final sentence, “For a few moments, the three of us had all we ever needed,” offers presence instead of resolution. The man who hit Grace is dismissed with one epithet and never appears. Billy’s father remains a set of secondhand details, “a gentle voice and light blue eyes.” Like Munro’s and Dubus’s endings, this one offers a small, provisional stability that exists alongside the violence without resolving it. What the family needs, the story suggests, is not disclosure so much as the ritual occasion for it. The content of the confession matters less than the fact that it was heard by someone who did not flinch.

III. The Child as Confessor

“Assumptions” reverses the roles and makes the child the confessor. Peggy Fleming, alcoholic, diabetic, and widowed, treats the young narrator, Jimmy, as her confidant across a series of scenes that mimic confession’s intimacy without its gravity. She tells him about a girl who mocked her in childhood and embeds a violent fantasy in the story: “I think that’s who pushed Margaret Mary Fawny off the cliff . . . What must she have thought as she fell through that cloudy air?” Then she withdraws it: “I’m just codding ya, Jimmy, just an old story is all. A fib, my love.” The retraction is a kind of absolution granted backward. Peg confesses a cruelty and then unconfesses it, and the boy cannot tell which version, the fantasy or its disavowal, holds her real feeling.

What makes Peg a penitent and not just someone confiding is that Jimmy is placed in the position of judge and comforter. After she insists that she is ugly, he tells her, unprompted, “You’re not ugly.” The child absolves the adult of the shame she has just confessed, and she receives it with visible relief: “You’re a charmer, you are.” He is also the one entrusted to pour her whiskey sours and to keep his grandmother’s “not too much, sweetheart” a working fiction between them. He is confessor, bartender, and finally eulogist. The story ends with Jimmy imagining Peg’s soul rising “altogether beautiful,” an echo of the Song of Solomon epigraph that opens the story: “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.” The child’s last act of listening becomes a verdict, delivered after death, of unconditional acquittal.

IV. Absolution Relayed

Give Them Unquiet Dreams stages its most explicit confession in the Public Garden, when Rita, who once had an affair with Aiden’s grandfather, finally meets the boy to hear what his dying grandmother, Catherine, wanted to tell her. The penitent’s procrastination comes first. For months Rita “had an excuse—lunch with friends, an art class, a meeting of her book club, a lecture.” When she learns that the message is only gratitude, “She wanted to thank you for listening when she talked about her mother,” Rita weeps and confesses unprompted: “My relationship with your grandfather was wrong. I betrayed a friend and I will live with that for the rest of my life.” Aiden answers, “She forgave you, Rita.” A boy pronounces absolution on behalf of a dead woman, and the novel does not treat the transfer as strange. It is consistent with his role throughout. He is the one permitted to move between the living and the dead, and here his second sight extends into moral accounting.

What Rita cannot receive is peace: “I know she did, but I could never erase her pain.” Forgiveness granted and guilt discharged do not track together, and Rita’s confession changes nothing about how she carries it. She explains that Catherine could never accept the same distinction: “She confessed her feelings to me and repented many times. I told her she was absolved. But it was fruitless. She would tell me the story again and again, always seeking absolution and forgiveness.” The chain of listeners forms a closed loop. Catherine confesses to Rita, Rita confesses to Aiden, and Aiden forgives on Catherine’s behalf. Guilt in this world is not dissolved by confession. It is relayed to the next available listener. The grandfather’s ghost names the condition a few chapters earlier: “we all carry needless feelings inside, and they can hurt us to the core.”

V. The Grandmother Who Hears

Every grandmother in Mulhern’s fiction performs a recognizably similar function before she shows a similar personality. She is the household’s final court of appeal, the one to whom a child brings a secret too dangerous to bring to a parent. Three of them can be read as variations on one composite figure that the work keeps rebuilding under different names: Nana in “A Bath”; the grandmother of “Assumptions,” called Helen by the narrator’s grandfather and aunt; and Agnella across the Molly Bonamici stories (“Useless Things,” “Mia Bambina,” and “Myra Bocca”). On the surface they differ widely. Nana is Irish Catholic, working-class, and gentle in her bluntness. Helen is Irish Catholic, more genteel, and complicit in her family’s casual cruelty toward a disfigured neighbor. Agnella is Italian-American, connected to organized crime through her friend Mr. Scarfone, and finally an accomplice to murder. What unites them is structural position. Each has the least formal authority in her family, with no wage, profession, or legal headship, and the most actual authority. Her word ends every argument, and she is turned to first when something has gone wrong. Once such a woman has heard a confession, what does she do with the power it gives her?

Nana’s authority never curdles into hazard. She extracts from Billy a vow of honesty, not of silence, which is the opposite of what Agnella will ask of Molly. She represents something like the figure’s unfallen state: total authority, used only for disclosure and comfort. Helen is a harder case, because her authority is real but passive. At the card table where Peggy’s ruined life is evening entertainment, her response is sympathy without action: “Well, the poor thing!” Yet when the police find Peggy “wandering the streets of a nearby square, bruised and beaten-looking,” it is Helen’s house they bring her to. Helen absorbs Peggy into her household’s care, as far as the Feast of the Assumption outing that gives the story its climax, without ever confronting the drinking and grief behind her decline. It is authority used to contain, neither healing nor harming, the version easiest to overlook because it produces no dramatic consequence. Peggy is cared for but never repaired.

In Agnella the figure’s two faces, moral authority and moral hazard, become indistinguishable, because the qualities that make her Molly’s most reliable protector are the ones that make her an accomplice. Her protective ferocity is first played for comedy. Cutting the line at a faith healer’s parlor, she lies without hesitation, “explaining to them that I had leukemia ‘very bad’ and the doctors gave me three months at most . . . She’s my granddaughter!” At the graduation party, when Mr. Scarfone jokes, “No one calls Agnella’s granddaughter an Angel of Death,” Agnella laughs: “If anyone is an Angel of Death, it’s Jimmy here.” By then the reader can no longer fully enjoy the joke. Then Molly asks for help with Ashley’s cookies, and Agnella agrees in the same warm voice she has always used: “Sure mia bambina. What’s one more ingredient? Not a problem.” She does not stop being a loving grandmother in that sentence. She performs love exactly as she always has, which is the most uncomfortable claim the stories make.

Read in sequence, Nana’s reciprocal honesty, Helen’s passive containment, and Agnella’s active complicity are not three moral types. They are three points on one spectrum defined by a single unvarying trait, absolute loyalty to the family member who comes in trouble. What varies is not the grandmother but what she is asked to absorb. Nana is asked to receive an honest disclosure and offers one in return. Helen is asked, implicitly, to keep watch over a woman she cannot save. Agnella is asked to become an accessory to homicide, and she does so in the voice she has always used to call her granddaughter mia bambina. The difference between a protective grandmother and a dangerous one is not a difference in the grandmother at all. It is a difference in what her grandchild asks of her, and in how far her love will follow the request. That question moves the essay from the listener’s chair to the speaker’s voice, because Molly, who made the request, is also the one who tells the reader about it.

VI. Confession Without Contrition

Nabokov’s Lolita offers the best-known version of a narrative problem. Humbert Humbert’s ornate, seductive, allusive English becomes a moral obstacle, because the reader may be charmed by the sentence while recoiling from what it describes.¹ Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley approaches the problem from the opposite stylistic direction, in plain, practical, nearly affectless prose that narrates murder as evenly as Ripley might describe packing a suitcase.² Mulhern’s “Peppermint Candy” and “Mia Bambina” belong with Highsmith. Their narrators confess in plain, procedural diction and substitute professional or clinical vocabulary for moral vocabulary, so that a sentence describing a poisoning can resemble one describing a lesson plan or a form.

Mr. Darnell, the teacher who narrates “Peppermint Candy,” confesses in the language of product labels. Having decided to poison a student’s candy, he narrates not deliberation or guilt but procedure: “I took the Visine out of my drawer. I found the paper listing the poisonous effects from tetrahydrozoline, the active ingredient in the eye drops. If swallowed: difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, and coma, among other effects.”³ The sentence resembles a safety data sheet because it borrows that language, the bureaucratic language of incident reports and education plans. The confession keeps the same language: “I thought of the care I had taken to lightly rub Visine onto the candy before rewrapping it. Then I searched through the trash barrel for Helen’s wrapper. I placed it in the zipper pocket of my satchel with the printout about the drug.” There are no verbs of feeling. He does not report satisfaction, anxiety, or triumph. He reports actions in sequence (took, found, thought, searched, placed) in the syntax of a checklist. The last line extends the pattern: “I retrieved the peppermints from my desk drawer and placed them in my satchel. I would share them again another day.” Grammatically it is a plain statement of future intention, like a note about returning library books. The horror depends entirely on what the reader supplies.

“Mia Bambina” varies the technique with one crucial difference. Darnell never uses the word that would indict him. Molly names her own condition outright, and the naming becomes part of the same flattening. Having arranged her roommate’s death with doctored cookies and a drug obtained through a family associate, aimed at a heart condition she learned of in confidence, she narrates the method with Darnell’s precision: “I knew Ashley loved sweets during her workouts, and I had placed the cookies on top of my dresser, the direction she faced while doing her ‘fitness dancing.’ I also knew that whenever she paused or was interrupted, she ate a cookie.”⁴ The reasoning reads as competent tactical planning, like a coach describing an opponent’s habits. Then comes the self-diagnosis:

One of the perks of being a sociopath is that you learn how to quickly gather necessary information by manipulating people, using their weaknesses to your advantage . . . Ironically, Ashley and I had something in common—a genetic inheritance. I guess you could say we both had heart conditions. Of course, mine was more useful. Sociopathy wouldn’t kill me.

The passage supplies the moral vocabulary and turns it into wry self-description, “a perk,” not a confession that needs defending. Molly has already used the word the reader may have been reaching for, so the sentence sounds confident, not sorry. The ending keeps the procedural tone with grim comedy. Molly plans to “call to thank her, and remark on the effective wording in her note,” turning murder into a collaboration between grandmother and granddaughter, and the last sentence reports that “the chocolate chip cookies were a perfect hit,” a pun on baking success and a lethal strike delivered with Ripley’s deadpan.

Set side by side, the two narrators show variations on one machine. Darnell withholds the word for his condition and leaves the reader to supply it. Molly supplies the word herself and so defuses some of its power to indict, turning confession into something like a credential. Both treat the reader as an audience whose moral reaction is not their concern, and in both the prose stays clear and sequential whatever it describes. The settings are ordinary, a public-school classroom and a Boston University dormitory, not Humbert’s motels or Ripley’s European resorts. An unreliable confession, it turns out, can be staged with a desk drawer, a mixing bowl, and a narrator who describes both without raising her voice. That leaves the reader in a familiar position, the one this whole body of work keeps assigning to its listeners. The confession has been heard, and no one with any warrant is present to absolve or to judge it.

VII. The Ethics of an Unlicensed Sacrament

Read together, these scenes suggest that Mulhern is less interested in whether confession works, whether it produces genuine absolution, than in who is granted the authority to hear it and what that authority costs the listener. None of his confessors are priests. Nana absolves her daughter only after implicating herself. Jimmy absolves an adult he is too young to judge. Aiden absolves on behalf of the dead, a proxy sacrament that leaves the living penitent no less burdened. Agnella hears her granddaughter’s request and answers it with love. And the reader of “Peppermint Candy” and “Mia Bambina” hears confessions from narrators who want nothing from the hearing. In every case the listener carries something away. Billy inherits a family script of denial. Jimmy inherits the first “throb of death’s glower,” which enters his consciousness as he listens to Peg sing of her dead husband. Aiden inherits knowledge of a guilt older than he is that will outlast his ability to resolve it. The reader inherits the moral commentary the poisoners declined to supply.

The fiction therefore proposes an ethics of listening that has almost nothing to do with the ecclesiastical machinery whose form it borrows. To be a confessor in this work is to take custody of someone else’s unresolved feeling. The custody is never returned, only passed on. It is a domestic, largely female inheritance, separate from and often working in the shadow of a Church these families still nominally practice but do not trust to do this particular work. The recurring image is a private rite performed in defiance of, or indifference to, the sacrament it resembles: a bathtub instead of a confessional box, a basement piano instead of an altar, a park bench under a weeping willow instead of a rectory. Grace is found, when it is found, not through the authorized channel but in the improvised confessionals of kitchens, cellars, and public gardens. Mulhern’s characters build these spaces for themselves because the official one has, for reasons the fiction never fully states, become unavailable to them.

Notes

Works Quoted

Author’s NotesTeaching as Vocation and TrapThe Comic-Grotesque Tradition →