The Marys of Molly Bonamici

I. A Dedication with Three Altars

A novel that opens with the dedication “For my father, for my mother, and for Mary” has already told the reader how to read it.¹ Mary stands third and alone, uncoupled from the parental pair, unqualified by surname or relation. She is not a person in the story; she is the name the story keeps arriving at. And she arrives more than once. Molly Bonamici contains at least six Marys, and they do not divide into the sacred and the profane. Each one carries a light for the length of a scene, hands it off, and goes dark. Read together, they make the novel’s real theology, which is not a doctrine but a rhythm: the self appears, consoles, recedes, and reappears as someone else.

Set them side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. Maria, Molly’s mother, born on the feast of the Visitation. Mrs. Margaret Mary Muldoon, the Irish widow next door, who dies with the feast of the Assumption forged on the back of her wedding photograph. Mary Jane Callaghan, who sings at the Christmas piano in West Roxbury. Mary Grace, the student who throws a book and speaks a truth. Molly herself, whose name, as a taxi driver named Beatrice explains, “is a nickname for both Margaret and Mary.”² And behind all of them, the Blessed Mother: a statuette in a keepsake box, a stained-glass Assumption in a funeral church, and the reflexive oath in Nonna’s mouth — “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” — which the novel repeats until profanity and prayer become the same sound.³

That last detail is the interpretive key. In this book the holy name is most often uttered in exasperation, by an unbeliever who is also, by the novel’s close, its exposed murderer. The book does not treat this as blasphemy. It treats it as the ordinary condition of a divine name in human mouths: worn, misused, and still working.

II. Maria: The Mother as Visitation

Molly’s mother is the faintest character in the book and the most structurally loaded. Aunt Bianca introduces her by contrast — “She’s not at all like her mother. Maria always gives us hugs and kisses when she sees us” — and Aunt Helena defends her as “a gentle, kind girl. Not everybody is ‘in charge’ like you.”⁴ Later Nonna dismisses her: “Maria was a weak girl. She went along with whatever your father said.”⁵ Maria is defined entirely by other women talking about her. She is a report.

So it is fitting that her one intimate fact reaches Molly the same way. Sorting keepsakes after Nonna’s death, Helena hands over “a small framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and a quartz locket with the same image on the outside and a timepiece inside,” together with “a small statuette of the Blessed Mother,” and says: “Those belonged to your mother. Maria loved the Blessed Mother. She was so proud to be born on May 31st, the feast of the Visitation.” Molly asks what the Visitation is. Helena’s answer is imperfect and lovely: “Something about when Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth who told her she was pregnant with Jesus.”⁶

The feast recalls Luke 1:39–56: Mary, newly pregnant, goes “with haste” into the hill country to her elderly cousin, at whose greeting the unborn John leaps for joy and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, names her “the mother of my Lord.” Mary answers with the Magnificat, the canticle in which the proud are scattered and the lowly lifted up. Catholic tradition calls her the Ark of the New Covenant here — the one who carries divine presence into another household, where joy breaks out.⁷

That is precisely the shape of Maria’s presence in the novel. She is the mother who arrives in someone else’s house, secondhand, as news, and makes something leap. Molly, who has spent the book insisting she felt nothing for her parents, receives her mother at last through an older woman’s speech and a box of objects. A birthday is the one purely natal fact about a person, and Maria’s falls on a feast of pregnancy, fixing her forever in the aspect of bearer — the woman whose meaning is the child she carries.

Two ironies sharpen it. First, the transmitter is a believer and the braggart was not: “Agnella used to brag that her daughter was born on that day. I would get disgusted when she did that. She wasn’t even a believer.”⁶ Grace passes through a woman who used the feast as social currency and who, the novel’s evidence finally says, had her own daughter killed. Second, the reader meets the Visitation only after Molly has watched the Assumption in stained glass at Maria’s funeral — “arms folded against her chest, a blue shawl over her white robe, sunlight behind her, surrounded by a sphere of purple clouds” — and rejected it: “Home was six feet under the ground in an expensive shiny brown box.”⁸ The novel gives us the mother’s end before her beginning, and lets the beginning do the consoling.

III. Margaret Mary Muldoon: The Woman Who Rose from the Sea

If Maria is the Visitation, Mrs. Muldoon is the Assumption, and she is the novel’s greatest achievement. She begins as a gin-soaked grotesque: “Mary is so far gone. She has squash rot,” Bianca says.⁹ Nonna calls her house a pigsty and, at Molly’s graduation party, points out to a mobster where she keeps her cash. Yet she is the only adult who offers Molly a metaphysics. At that same party she sings “Moon River” in the voice of a woman who once played nightclubs on Beacon Street, and asks: “Are you romantic, Molly? Do you believe that anything is possible? … I mean, do you believe in things beyond the obvious.” She leaves Molly with a proverb — “Your feet will take you where your heart is” — and a role: “We were two drifters off to see the world, searching for our rainbow’s end. And I was her huckleberry friend.”¹⁰

The beach chapter is built as a liturgy. The date is August 15, and Mary insists on it: the saltwater has “a cure in it” because it is the feast of “the Blessed Mother’s Assumption into Heaven,” and she wants to “purify” herself before she goes home to Ireland to begin her new life.¹¹ Nonna, irritated, delivers the theology of the practical: “How you gonna get the Blessed Mother’s cure if you don’t get wet?” Molly, seventeen and imperious, refuses the whole premise — “What do you mean raised? She just flew up into the air?” — and Mary answers, “Darling, you got to have faith.”¹¹

Then the novel does what argument cannot. Mary strips to a black-and-white swimsuit, and Molly notices “what a round hard belly she had. She almost looked pregnant. For a second, I imagined she was going to demonstrate the Assumption and fly into the sky.” A mourning dove startles from a cleft in the rocks, whistling “as it rose,” then descends over the water where the two women stand; the waves “glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire.” A breaker knocks both old women down. They laugh until they cry. And then, in the plainest sentence in the book, the miracle is delegated to a granddaughter: “Now raise me quickly, Molly, before the next wave.” Molly raises her. “At last she rose from the sea.” “Molly, you’re an angel.”¹²

There is the Assumption — performed, not believed; horizontal, not vertical; accomplished by two arms and a laugh. And there is the annunciation to Molly, who feels the pull of it despite herself: “mesmerized by the wet silvery scalp that showed through her hair. I resisted the urge to touch the crown of her head.”¹² A crown she declines to touch, because she does not yet know she is an acolyte.

A week later Molly finds her decomposing in a purple chair and reads the scene as a chosen death on a wedding anniversary: “I think it’s kind of sweet and perfect.”¹³ She is wrong twice over. Years later Officer Connolly corrects the record: the woman’s name was Margaret — “Mary was her middle name” — she was married in May, not August, the photograph’s inscription was forged, and the “suicide” was staged.¹⁴ Molly built an entire private religion of dignified self-ending on a forged caption.

This is the novel’s central formal joke and its deepest consolation. The full name is Margaret Mary: Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, the sickly girl whose visions launched the devotion to the Sacred Heart, the very image sitting in Maria’s keepsake box in a quartz locket with a clock inside it. The murdered neighbor and the dead mother turn out to be devotees of the same heart. And the woman Molly assumed had flown to heaven had in fact been dragged down by the person Molly trusted most. The Assumption was real, but it happened earlier, in the surf, at the hands of a seventeen-year-old who did not believe in it.

IV. Mary Jane: The Voice at the Piano

The Christmas dinner in West Roxbury is the novel’s Joycean set piece, and it hands the Marian office to a musician. Gabe’s sister — “My sister Mary Jane. She plays in a band” — sits at the mahogany Steinway, visible through the archway, closes her eyes, and plays the opening riff of “Moon River.”¹⁵ The reader recognizes it before Molly can explain it. Later, weeping in the car, she can only say the title: “‘Moon River.’ I laughed, crumpling the tissue he had given me.” Then: “I told Gabe everything. The words gushed out of me.”¹⁶

The scene works on two frequencies at once. Structurally it is “The Dead” — a Mary Jane at the piano, a Lily pouring drinks, a dead father whose ugly navy chair still holds the room, a carved bird, a song that opens a wound, and snow. Thematically it is a resurrection: a dead woman’s song returns through a living woman’s throat, in a stranger’s house, at Christmas. Mary Jane does not know whose song she has sung; noticing Molly’s face, she simply changes to “The Christmas Song.” That is the point. The vessel need not understand the errand. Mrs. Muldoon’s song is the leap in the womb, arriving years late and by another mouth.

V. Mary Grace: The Annunciation as Assault

The most audacious Mary is the student in Molly’s Florida classroom, and readers of Flannery O’Connor will hear the door open before she speaks. Mary Grace is “a pimple-faced obese white girl from Georgia,” always reading, lately consumed with the Bible, who sits in the back with O’Connor’s Wise Blood on her desk. She contradicts the lesson on Thoreau — “You can read all you want but it won’t make you a better person. You need to act in the world, not retire from it … Helping others is what God wants us to do” — then, mocked by a boy, throws her psychology textbook at him, charges him, and chokes him. His name is Leo Turpin, whom the class calls Turd. Afterward she kneels on the floor and prays, and leaves the room with “a strange smile on her face.”¹⁷

In O’Connor’s “Revelation,” a girl named Mary Grace hurls a book titled Human Development at the self-satisfied Mrs. Turpin, seizes her throat, and delivers the sentence that cracks her open: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”¹⁸ Mulhern transposes the whole apparatus, keeps the animal — “You are all a bunch of pigs, especially you, Turd” — and, crucially, moves the target. The book is thrown at Turpin, but the revelation lands on the teacher: “And you’re no better than Turd, Ms. Bonamici. I know you think that because you’re a teacher you know everything, but you don’t!”¹⁷

Molly, alone in the empty classroom, becomes Mrs. Turpin at the pig parlor: “Mary Grace, as deranged as she had acted, uttered a truth about me. I did think I knew a lot about everything.” Driving home through thunder, she asks, “And what exactly was the way? Who would show us? Had Mary Grace been trying to show me?” Gabe names the office outright: “Maybe Mary Grace was the universe trying to speak to you. A sign of sorts. … Your redemption is near, Molly.”¹⁹

Grace here is violent, ugly, and unwelcome, delivered by someone the room regards “with both pity and fear.” The novel refuses to make the messenger admirable. It insists only that the message is true. This is the book’s hardest and most Catholic proposition, and it is also its most Whitmanian: no self is disqualified from carrying light by the ugliness of the hand that holds the lantern.

VI. Molly: The Mary Who Does Not Know Her Name

Molly spends the novel refusing every Marian role handed to her, and playing them anyway. As a schoolgirl she is cast as Mary in Jesus Christ Superstar, and the song she loves is the one about not knowing how to love him — “He’s a man, he’s just a man” — a Magdalene’s aria of demystification.²⁰ At her parents’ funeral she stands at the lectern and reads from Mark’s Gospel, beginning with Christ’s cry of abandonment — “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — and ending with the announcement at the empty tomb: “Don’t be alarmed … You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.”⁸ The sequence matters. She speaks these words aloud, correctly and solemnly, as the appointed reading; she does not curse God at the altar. Only after she returns to the pew — after Father Costa’s “The Gospel of the Lord,” the congregation’s response, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” and Nonna’s praise for her reading — does she answer inwardly, in fury: “Fuck you, Lord Jesus Christ, and fuck your mother, father, and the Holy Ghost too.” That evening she rips up the copy of the Gospel that Nonna had given her and flushes the pieces down the toilet. She proclaims the resurrection with her mouth while denying it with her mind — a woman speaking the Magnificat she does not believe.

The distinction changes the scene’s meaning. In Mark the words Molly reads are not spoken by Mary Magdalene but by the young man in the tomb; Mary Magdalene is among the women who come to the tomb and hear that Jesus is no longer among the dead. Molly therefore occupies both positions at once. She gives the messenger’s announcement a voice, and she stands, within the pattern the novel has been building, among the women who confront the emptied place of burial. She is an unwitting Marian witness: she speaks a resurrection she cannot yet admit she has been placed to speak. The words precede belief. Her angry inward reply confirms the depth of her resistance, but it does not cancel the pattern — it makes it more paradoxical. She is the resistant Mary, the woman who voices what she cannot yet receive. And that is her Assumption: drawn, against her declared convictions, into a grammar of burial, water, grief, and return whose name she will not say, a Mary precisely because she cannot bring herself to admit it.⁸

The name closes on her in the last chapter, in a taxi, from a stranger. “I’m Bea. Short for Beatrice.” A retired professor of “Linguistics and Theology.” She says: “Molly is a nickname for both Margaret and Mary. And today is October 17th, the Feast of Saint Margaret Mary.” Asked why she is a saint, Bea answers: “She was a sickly young girl for many years but when she recovered, she began experiencing visions of Christ. She claimed that Christ chose her as an instrument to spread devotion to His Sacred Heart.”²

So the dead neighbor’s legal name, the mother’s locket, the saint’s feast, and Molly’s own nickname converge in a single sentence spoken by a woman named Beatrice. Molly’s guides have been named all along: Virgil, the police officer who took her down into the truth about her family, named not for the poet but for an Irish saint who believed the world was round when “it wasn’t kosher to think so”; and Beatrice, who drives her to the water.¹⁴ Descent, then ascent. “I felt my pulse race. This was all too strange. So many coincidences.” Then: “Can you take me to the beach?”

The ending repeats the Assumption with the roles reversed. Molly strips, as Mrs. Muldoon stripped; swims out and floats on her back under “a scintillating blue” sky; thinks of the dead woman’s eyes and “their impregnable beauty,” knowing now “that behind them was sheer compassion.” The faith healer, the day at the beach, the emerald cross, the song — “acts of pure love.” She hears her father’s voice, smells stargazer lilies, hears “a faint hum, like bees,” and sees Venus. Then: “Believing in possibility, I spread my arms wide and swam slowly to the shore. Where the water became shallow and frothy, I rose and walked onto the beach, grateful to be home at last.”²¹

No one raises her. She rises. And the gesture is Dickinson’s, from the poem that closes the book — “The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise” — in a house “Impregnable of eye,” whose visitors are “the fairest.”²² The novel ends on the word for what it has been doing all along: visitation.

VII. The Multitude

Why so many Marys, and why let a murderer’s oath and a mother’s feast day and a schoolgirl’s violence all wear the same name? Because the novel is not tracking a person. It is tracking an office. Mary in this book is both human and divine, and she contains multitudes — not as paradox but as method. Each Mary carries the flame for the length of one scene: Mrs. Muldoon at the beach, Mary Jane at the piano, Mary Grace in the classroom, Maria in a keepsake box, Bea in a taxi. Then the light recedes to an ember and the person is again only a drunk widow, a sister in a band, a girl who needs medication, a weak daughter, a stranger driving north on Federal Highway.

This is the Emersonian premise the author has stated elsewhere — the soul “joined, through the Oversoul, to every other soul that has been or will be” — made narrative.²³ If there is one Oversoul inhaling and exhaling through all of us, then no single self can hold the whole flame, and no self is excluded from carrying it. Selves surface at the moments they are needed, to connect, to console, to convey, and then subside. Nonna is the proof of the doctrine’s hardest edge: the grandmother the novel finally exposes as the killer of her friend, her daughter, and her son-in-law is also the woman who drives an old neighbor to the ocean for a cure she does not believe in, because “I’m not gonna deny an old friend a last request,” and who lies laughing in the surf while her granddaughter pulls her up.¹¹ The novel does not resolve that. It watches her die on the vertical axis it has been building all along — two planes crossing the hospital window, “one ascending, one descending, a metaphor for life” — and reports Molly’s response without apology: “my soul swooned, and I felt great peace.” Then the elevator, and “the feeling of weightlessness as the elevator went down.”²⁴

Descent and ascent are the same motion seen from different ends. The mourning dove rises whistling and descends over the water. Mrs. Muldoon goes down in the surf and is raised; goes down into the earth and is raised in a stranger’s song. Nonna falls; Molly floats. The Magnificat’s grammar — cast down, lift up — turns out to be a description of the tide rather than a verdict.

Which is why judgment keeps failing in this book. Every judgment Molly renders is overturned: the suicide was a murder, the beloved grandmother was the killer, the ridiculous believer was the guide, the lunatic student was the prophet, the neglected mother was a feast day. What survives the collapse of her certainties is not a doctrine but a disposition — “Believing in possibility” — and a recognition that the love was there the whole time, in forms she was too intelligent to see. The Marys are how the novel says this without saying it: love is one, however many selves it has to borrow to reach you, and it usually arrives in the wrong body, at the wrong volume, on a day you did not know was holy.

The dedication, then, was not a courtesy. “For my father, for my mother, and for Mary” names the book’s three altars, and the third is plural. Mary is whoever shows up.

VIII. A Note for Readers

Three feast days organize the novel’s calendar, and readers who follow them will find the architecture. May 31, the Visitation, is Maria’s birthday and the book’s image of arrival. August 15, the Assumption, is Mrs. Muldoon’s day at the beach and the date forged on her photograph. October 17, the feast of Saint Margaret Mary, is the day Molly learns her own name and walks into the water. Arrival, ascent, recognition — and in each case the sacrament is administered by an unlikely woman who does not know she is administering anything. The readings offered here of the Visitation, the Assumption, and O’Connor’s “Revelation” are interpretive: the novel names the feasts and puts Wise Blood on Mary Grace’s desk, but it never explains the pattern, and the argument that the Marys form one office is this essay’s inference from the text, not the author’s statement.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Pastiche and Undertow → The Comprehensive Study