The Voices That Would Not Be Tidied

I. Who Gets Corrected

A careful reading of Mulhern’s dialogue shows first how selectively “incorrect” English is distributed across each story’s social hierarchy, and how closely the distribution follows education, class, and nearness to institutions. Catherine, an Irish immigrant who arrived in Boston in the late 1930s and became a licensed practical nurse without formal secondary schooling, speaks in a voice full of nonstandard contractions, elided consonants, and inherited idiom: “Will ya have a cup of tea?”; “Ya know what I think?”; “You gotta toughen up, Aiden”; “It’s hotter than a pig’s ass out there.” Her husband’s ghost, described as “an autodidact” who “never went to college” because “he couldn’t afford it and wasn’t allowed admission because he was an Irish immigrant,” speaks with the same phonetic markers laid over a stratum of half-absorbed, half-garbled book learning: “’Goodness is the only investment that never fails.’ A smart man by the name of Toreau said that.” The narration names the family trait outright: “Like my grandfather, her ‘th’ often sounded like ‘t’ or ‘d.’”

Set against them is Nurse Nancy, a credentialed hospital employee of about the same generation as Aiden’s mother, whose speech is uniformly standard, slightly stilted, and free of regional markers: “I want to do things right”; “Let me get in touch with the psychiatrist on call.” The contrast is doing sociological work. Nancy’s correctness signals her institutional authority and, at the same time, her distance from the family’s inner world. The satire is gentle, but it consistently ties her correct grammar to a kind of interpretive blindness. She “didn’t even know” her own patient’s name, having memorized “that board” instead of the person.

The mapping recurs consistently. The priest at Mission Church speaks in a Latinate, liturgical style (“Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God”) that is comically impenetrable to Catherine: “I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. Sounds like a bunch of palaver.” It is institutional language at its most alienating, a language the family can navigate strategically, well enough to con him, but never inhabit. The policeman who stops Catherine for running a red light speaks flat, procedural English (“Ma’am, you ran a red light. . . . Consider this a warning”) that carries legal authority because it has no trace of the vernacular that would mark him as one of the community, bound by its unspoken codes of mutual forgiveness. Throughout this fiction, standard English is the language of institutions that can hurt you: hospitals, courts, and churches speaking in their official voice. The vernacular is the language of the kitchen table, where mercy, complicity, and love are actually transacted.

II. The Malaprop as Inherited Wisdom

The most intricate part of this dialect work is its handling of malapropism and mispronunciation. Examined closely, these errors are never simply comic markers of ignorance. They show knowledge passed by mouth, not by book, a distinction with real moral weight in these stories. When the grandfather cites “Toreau,” or when Catherine’s scriptural geography of “Rephidim and Kadesh” comes out in her grandson’s retelling as “Repapah” and “Kadiddle,” the text is documenting more than a laugh. It is documenting how wisdom moves through a culture systematically denied the institutions (universities, seminaries, the world of the footnoted book) that would have taught the citations “correctly.” The grandfather absorbed Thoreau’s aphorism not from a syllabus but through some oral chain the novel never specifies, a borrowed book, a conversation, a half-remembered lecture, and the mispronounced name is the visible fingerprint of that unauthorized route. The wisdom arrived intact. The footnote did not.

Catherine improvises authority with the same breezy confidence when she invents a chalice’s provenance: “A friend of mine loaned it to me. . . . You could call Joshua that. He works for a reputable institution. Started it from the ground up. The building is as grand as a temple.” “Where is it?” “Jerusalem, New York.” The joke is a small, tight structure: a real place name, an absurd modifier, total conviction, her daughter’s gentle disbelief (“Jerusalem? . . . I think you’re telling me a fib”), and then nothing, because the scene has other business. A whole personality, confident, improvisational, contemptuous of scrutiny, and devoted, arrives in a handful of words and a place name.

The fiction consistently grants real interpretive and moral authority to characters whose grammar marks them, by any institution’s standard, as uneducated, and consistently undercuts characters whose grammar marks them as credentialed. The grandfather’s imprecise Thoreau is not treated as a lesser version of the “real” Thoreau available to a university reader. By the story’s moral reckoning it is more urgently true than most of what the credentialed authorities say, because it is invoked, rightly if not accurately, at the moment a boy needs it, as an argument for returning a stolen chalice and as a code of ethics improvised under pressure. The malapropism is not an obstacle between the character and the wisdom. It is the wisdom’s native accent.

III. Two Kitchens, One Theory

Read beside the Aiden stories, the Molly Bonamici material shows that the method travels across ethnic communities without becoming generic. The Italian-American speech of Agnella’s household has its own markers. It is not the Irish dialect with new proper nouns. Catherine’s idiom draws on Irish-inflected constructions, on Catholic vocabulary put to domestic use (“tribulation,” “venial sin,” “God will understand”), and on proverbs identified as sayings “from the old country.” Agnella’s draws on different endearments, a different relationship to food and family obligation, and a different stock of inherited sayings, with Italian words such as mia bambina and “Ffangul’!” at its warmest and angriest points. The underlying mechanism is the same in both: dialect as inherited property, malapropism as evidence of oral transmission, and grammatical correctness correlated with institutional and often untrustworthy authority. That the pattern recurs without either dialect borrowing the other’s vocabulary suggests something closer to a general theory of working-class immigrant speech than a single dialect known from personal history. Distilled, the theory might run like this. The vernacular a family speaks at its own kitchen table is a technology of trust, used nowhere else and understood fully by no institution, and it is lost the moment it is corrected into something a stranger could grade.

The most intimate part of that technology is the part most readers would edit first, its profanity.

IV. Profanity as Intimacy

A common assumption, popular and critical alike, holds that profanity in fiction signals a breakdown of composure, civility, or relationship. In these stories it more often appears among people who know one another well, and its absence can signal distance or caution. Agnella herself states the distinction. She has “spoken with me several times about perceptions and how important it was for me to foster interpersonal skills,” Molly reports. “She said that my directness was admirable, but others might perceive it as rudeness.”¹ Agnella, who is frequently profane, does not object to bluntness itself. She warns against talking that way to people who do not know Molly well. The working principle is therefore a tentative one: profanity among family can be affectionate, while profanity aimed at strangers creates a social risk that a grandmother coaches her granddaughter to manage.

Agnella’s cursing is inseparable from her tenderness, often in the same sentence as an endearment. Of Mr. Scarfone she tells Molly, without embarrassment, “Oh, he’s just a good fuck,” and when Molly reacts with shock, Agnella “whacked me playfully with the bag of fruit and Italian bread she had brought,” a gesture of affection delivered in the same breath as the vulgarity.² The scene recurs, nearly verbatim, later in the volume. Mulhern treats the joke as a fixture of how the two get along, worth repeating because it is so like them. The pattern holds even when Agnella is most frightened. Fleeing Lady Jane’s parlor after the Angel of Death prophecy, her parting word is “Ffangul’!” and Molly, taking up her grandmother’s way of talking at the moment of greatest anxiety, silently mouths “Fuck you” at the healer.³ They share a private language because they are frightened together. The profanity is the sound their intimacy makes under pressure, a sign of how completely they are on the same side.

“A Bath” supplies the control case. Nana is markedly less profane than Agnella, and the difference lies not in her capacity for intimacy but in what each scene requires. Her one sharp, bodily insult is spent on a lesser offense, her son’s absence and his wife’s falseness: “Darlene’s a phony through and through. Even her body is fake. I know those breasts aren’t real.”⁴ When she learns that her daughter has been hit, she does not curse the man or curse in anger at all. Her response comes in plain tenderness: “You’re not that horrible word, Gracie. You’re opinionated and strong.” Casual, comic, everyday intimacy can carry profanity. Grave disclosure, in these stories, tends to withhold it in favor of plainer diction. Billy’s single profanity in the story, “You fucked him, didn’t you?” asked of his mother about the father he has never known, earns him an immediate slap. It is the clearest case of profanity driving people apart. Billy turns familiar language on his mother’s trauma as an accusation, and the exchange lacks the shared comic history that Agnella and Molly bring to their jokes about Mr. Scarfone or Lady Jane.

Taken together, the two grandmothers suggest a pattern. It is not a rule. Profanity in these stories marks more than class, schooling, or loose morals, and it is more than comic relief, though it is often funny. It accompanies relationships able to absorb it, and it is withheld or punished when a character reaches for it before trust exists or when a subject is too raw for its casualness. Agnella curses often and warmly. Nana curses rarely. Billy curses once, at the wrong moment, and is slapped. Vulgarity becomes an instrument for hearing shifts in intimacy and distance, which is exactly why it cannot be cleaned up without loss.

V. The Promise Not to Improve

The author’s own stated commitment names the stakes: “I have proofread the narration in this book. I have not touched a single line of dialogue. That is a promise I make to the people who lent me their voices, most of whom are dead now, and none of whom needed to be improved.” An outside reading should be cautious about accepting an author’s description of his project as literary analysis. Taken at face value, the claim makes dialect preservation an act of filial and historical fidelity. These are remembered voices, and the debt owed them is to leave them unimproved. Whether every line is in fact drawn from remembered speech is something no outside reader can verify, and this essay does not try. The effect on the page is consistent with the intention. The nonstandard usages hold their tone steadily, and no character’s dialect is allowed to slip, soften, or clean up for a scene’s convenience, even where smoothing a grandmother’s grammar would make her grief more legible. Catherine’s hardest confession, “Your grandfather and I had been arguing. He was drunk again. I just left him in the chair. I should have made him come with me,” comes in grammar only slightly looser than her joking elsewhere. The pain does not buy eloquence the character has not earned.

Consider what would be lost if an editor, for readability, “corrected” a line the stories return to, “’Goodness is the only investment that never fails.’ A smart man by the name of Toreau said that,” into pristine prose: “A wise man named Henry David Thoreau wrote that goodness is an investment that never fails.” The corrected sentence loses the specificity of oral transmission in the hedging “a smart man by the name of.” It loses the phonetic evidence of the speaker’s history in the mispronunciation. And it loses the intimate, unbookish relationship to the quotation that makes the citation moving, not just learned. The correction would do more than smooth a sentence. It would erase the evidence of how, and at what cost, this family came to possess its wisdom. Correct Agnella’s “Ffangul’!” into something politer and the same loss happens at the other end of her range. What disappears is the sound of a frightened grandmother and granddaughter standing together.

That is why these are, in the fiction’s own moral accounting, voices that would not be tidied. They belong mostly to the dead, and they are handed down through grandchildren who do not fully understand what they have inherited until, like the narrators of these stories, they are old enough to write it down, misspellings and all. The misspellings were never the point being missed. They were the point being made.

Notes

Works Quoted

Author’s NotesThe Remembering VoiceThe Comic-Grotesque Tradition →