I. The Same Hand: Poetry and Fiction in the Work of James Mulhern
Sources: the poems of Crossings and the short story “Assumptions.”
James Mulhern writes in two forms that return to related materials: a grandmother’s kitchen, a grandfather’s silence, a body failing, a small mercy offered instead of an explanation. Reading the poems of Crossings alongside the short story “Assumptions” suggests how related concerns take different shapes in each form.
Both bodies of work return to grandmothers as the household’s central moral authority, often speaking in a register that mixes piety with plain talk. In “Assumptions,” the unnamed grandmother explains the Feast of the Assumption to her grandchildren, Beth and the narrator, with the same mixture of certainty and evasion she brings to everything else: “It’s a mystery, Bethie. Just one of those things.” The neighbor Peggy Fleming, called “Lovely Peggy” at the grandmother’s insistence, occupies the story’s comic and tragic centers at once — a woman shaped by alopecia, diabetes, and grief for her late husband, Jim. The poem “Catherine” performs a related maneuver in miniature: a grandmother eased into a warm bath while she remains, in her own mind, swimming decades and an ocean away.
The two forms diverge most clearly in their handling of time. “Assumptions” moves forward through a sequence of remembered scenes, accumulating incident until the narrator’s understanding of Peg deepens by accretion. The poems compress this same accretive method into a single stanza or image. “The Crosswalk” collapses an entire relationship with a father into one gesture recalled at a funeral: “Your hands on mine. / Proof that we had closeness for a moment.” Where the story has room to let a decline unfold scene by scene, the poem must locate an equivalent weight in a single image and trust the reader to supply the years around it.
What the comparison finally suggests is not that the poems are compressed stories or the story an expanded poem, but that both forms are governed by the same instinct: withhold the statement, trust the object, let the reader arrive at the feeling through what a hand touches or what an old woman remembers about a swim decades gone.
II. Epiphany and Its Withholding: James Joyce’s “Araby” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions”
Source for Joyce: “Araby,” Dubliners (1914), public domain.
James Joyce’s “Araby” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions” are separated by more than a century, a nation, and forms of Catholicism practiced differently in Dublin and in an Irish-American household outside Boston. Both use a first-person boy narrator looking back at a formative period, making the comparison useful for considering how religious language may meet disappointment rather than consolation.
Joyce’s unnamed narrator turns his infatuation with Mangan’s sister into something close to devotion, imagining that he bears “my chalice safely through a throng of foes.” The bazaar he finally reaches dissolves into overheard trivial flirtation, and the story ends with the narrator seeing himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” his eyes “burned with anguish and anger.”
Mulhern’s narrator encounters a quieter disillusionment, structured around an actual religious feast. Told that August 15th commemorates the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven, the boy and his sister, Beth, receive an explanation that satisfies nothing: “It’s a mystery, Bethie. Just one of those things.” Unlike Joyce’s narrator, who sees his own vanity against a bazaar’s cheap glamour, Mulhern’s narrator encounters the limits of inherited piety alongside a more ordinary childhood want — and finds, in the neighbor Peggy Fleming, an act of care that complicates rather than resolves the story’s religious framing.
III. Grotesque Grace: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions”
Source for O’Connor: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953), still under copyright; quotations kept short.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions” each place tenderness within comic scenes that also attend to physical vulnerability. O’Connor’s grandmother is vain and self-regarding for most of the story; her moment of grace arrives only at gunpoint, when she reaches toward the escaped convict and says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”
Mulhern’s story treats comic discomfort in a gentler register. Peggy Fleming is introduced through a childhood catalog of her physical difference — her alopecia, her toothlessness — even as the story reveals her grief for her late husband and her generosity toward the narrator, whom she defends and calls “sweetheart.” Where O’Connor concentrates the grandmother’s grace in a single gesture at gunpoint, Mulhern presents Peg’s care in several small, unglamorous scenes, allowing readers to see a quality initially obscured by comedy.
IV. The Hand That Guides: Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and James Mulhern’s Poems
Source for Carver: “Cathedral,” in the collection Cathedral (1983), still under copyright; quotations limited to the story’s most widely cited closing lines.
Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and several poems by James Mulhern both use touch where talk proves insufficient. Carver’s narrator spends most of the story walled off by irony toward Robert, his wife’s blind friend; the turning point arrives when language fails and Robert proposes they draw a cathedral together, his hand resting over the narrator’s. “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper,” the narrator says, closing the story with its famous last words: “It’s really something.”
Mulhern’s poems approach a related concern in scenes far removed from Carver’s living room: a hand placed over another hand when words run out. “The Crosswalk” recalls a father teaching a son to knot a tie, then jumps years ahead to a funeral photograph of that same posture. “Moving Forward” makes the claim explicit: “touch a hand to show we care … All are acts that make us whole again.” Carver lets contact narrow the gap between two people; Mulhern’s poem “Water” leaves that gap unresolved, ending on a reaching hand and water still out of range.