There is a way of reading Catholic fiction that consists mostly of spotting the furniture. Count the candles, note the priest, tally the Latin, and declare the work devotional or subversive depending on the total. It is a poor method, and “Assumptions” defeats it completely — not because the story is short on religion, but because its religion is almost entirely conducted in words that no such inventory would flag.
Set the obvious facts down first. The story takes place on the fifteenth of August, the Feast of the Assumption. Its epigraph is the Marian antiphon from the Song of Solomon, Tota pulchra es, amica mea, et macula non est in te — you are altogether beautiful, my love, and there is no stain in you. It ends by turning the language of a papal definition on a woman her family has spent the day mocking. Nobody could call this a secular story.
And yet: in a little over five thousand words, the following do not appear once. Altar. Amen. Baptism. Canonization. Forgive. Mercy. Rosary. Sacrament. Sacrifice. Resurrection. Veil. Worship. Not one of them. Nor, more surprisingly, do grace or spirit ever occur as nouns. The story permits only “gracious” and “spirited” — the adjectives, kept down at the level of manners and temperament, describing how people behave at a beach rather than what moves in them.
The near-misses are the most telling part of that list. Gracious does occur, exactly once, and look at what it is doing: “Of the people who listened to our tale of woe, most were gracious and polite.” Paired with polite, governed by most, applied to strangers being decent about a fraud — the word has been demoted from a theological condition to a standard of manners. Spirited behaves the same way. The story lets the adjectives in and keeps the nouns out, which is a precise instrument rather than an oversight: it can describe how people behave without ever claiming to describe what moves in them.
What stands in place of the missing nouns is folk speech and plain speech: “Mary’s blessing,” “a cure,” “miracles,” “Lovely Peggy,” and a practical, repeated vocabulary of getting wet, helping, and rising. The ceremony happens; the ceremonial nouns are refused entry.
Once you notice the absence, the presences reorganize themselves. The words doing the sacred work in this story are household words, and they always arrive in their compromised sense first.
Take cure, a word with a long devotional history — the holy well, the shrine, the miraculous bath. Here is how the story first uses it. Peg hesitates at the water’s edge and her sister loses patience: “For Christ’s sake, Peg! The point is to get wet. How else are you going to get the cure?” The oath in the first clause is not reverence, and the cure being urged is a dip in the Atlantic at Nantasket. The sacred sense of the word is present, but it arrives inside an irritable command, wrapped in a blasphemy, and attached to nothing more numinous than cold water. The story keeps the theological freight and refuses the theological tone.
White is the clearest case, because it can be counted. It appears five times in the body of the story, and the first is this: Peggy “suggested that she could take off her wig and tell the people ‘just a little white lie’ about her dying of cancer.” A white lie — the most domestic, most compromised use the word has. The last is this: “my grandmother and Peggy waved to us, transfigured figurines on the earth below, their clothing white as snow.”
That is Revelation 1:14 and Matthew 28:3 arriving at a Massachusetts amusement park, and it works only because of what came first. The reader has already spent the story with the other whites — the lie, a flare of white light, a cloud that turns out not to be “a soft fleecy white” at all, a white and gold sundress. By the time the clothing goes white as snow, the word has been used for weather, for clothing, and for untruth. Nothing asks the reader to forget the lie. The transfiguration is built out of the same five letters that told it, which is why it reads as earned rather than announced. Had the story reached for raiment, the effect would have collapsed into pastiche.
The same discipline governs the rest. Body is a judged physical body, remarked on by relatives, long before it is body and soul. Cross is mostly a verb, for getting over a street or a threshold. Wine is never consecrated; it is a smell in a kitchen. Each word carries its sacred sense in reserve and spends its ordinary sense first.
This seems to me the honest account of how the story works, and it is more interesting than the alternative. “Assumptions” is not sacred language draped over a shabby afternoon. It is household language put under enough pressure to bear a sacred reading, without ever conceding that it is doing so. The dogma is named once, in a grandmother’s explanation, and then the story goes back to sunburn, sandwiches, and family unkindness — and does its real work there.
There is a reason a writer might proceed this way. The vocabulary of official holiness is exhausted; it arrives pre-interpreted, and a reader who distrusts it stops reading. The vocabulary of a bad afternoon at the beach arrives with nothing attached. If a woman is going to be declared altogether beautiful at the end of a day in which she has been called the homeliest in the family, the declaration has to be built from materials the reader has already accepted. Anything grander would simply be a claim.
Which returns the story to its title. An assumption is a thing taken up. It is also a thing taken for granted — the family’s settled verdict on what Peggy is worth. The story spends five thousand words dismantling the second sense with the plainest words available, so that the first sense can arrive in the last paragraph without a single word of church Latin to prop it up.