Review of: Saints for All Occasions
Author: J. Courtney SullivanPublisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Source: Purchase, Half Price Books
Grade: A
There’s only one thing more
horrifying for widowed Nora Rafferty than learning her oldest son, the one she
always called “my Patrick” has been involved in a drunken car crash, a crash
that will end his life before she can even reach him in the hospital. It’s
having to call her long-estranged sister with the news. The sister who, unknown
to Nora’s three surviving children, is the woman who really gave birth to
Patrick 50 years earlier. The sister who, in J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions, fled to a
convent soon after the birth, leaving her infant son to be brought up by Nora
and her newly-married husband, Charlie Rafferty.
It started with the 1958 voyage of
Nora Flynn and her younger sister, Theresa, from their farm in Ireland to a new
life in the United States. Nora was engaged to Charlie, the son of a
neighboring farmer, who had already immigrated to the States and was waiting to
marry Nora when she arrived.
But Theresa had never known any
mother except Nora, who had cared for her since the death of their mother while
Theresa was still a baby. How could she leave Theresa, still in her teens, at
home, to the mercy of their father’s uncertain temper and increasing thirst for
whiskey?
What will happen to Theresa when
Nora and Charlie are married? “She can come with us if you like,” Charlie
replied when Nora wrote to him. Little did he realize, an ocean away, that Nora
is having second thoughts about marriage, that she dreads the whole prospect of
leaving everything she knows to go to a strange land, bearing the
responsibility for the increasingly lively and rebellious Theresa.
Or that Theresa, never the
stay-at-home, will defy her sister’s too-gentle authority to sneak out of the
rooming house where they live until Charlie and the increasingly-reluctant Nora
can wed. Or that Theresa will meet a dashing man who will leave her pregnant
and unwed, a desperate situation for a naïve Catholic teenager in the 1950’s.
When Theresa refuses to give her baby up for adoption, Nora proposes an alternative: that she and Charlie will house Theresa and the child, with Nora counterfeiting pregnancy to pass baby Patrick off has her own. In return for Charlie’s participation in this well-intentioned but disastrous charade, Nora will finally agree to their immediate marriage.
When Theresa walks out in the
middle of the night, Nora at first hopes she will return, then comes to dread
Theresa’s return. Because Patrick is really and truly Nora’s son. Or isn’t he?
From one seemingly small evasion
of truth, more spread ripple outward. If Patrick’s mother can’t be
acknowledged, perhaps, Nora thinks, she shouldn’t acknowledge that she even has
a sister who is that unknown mother.
If Nora’s husband Charlie isn’t
the father of Patrick, Nora doesn’t dare acknowledge the source of funds she
blackmailed the true father out of, money that enabled the Rafferty family to
move to a neighborhood where nobody knew their history. Finally, no family
member’s issues can be acknowledged, not the same sex partnership of Nora and
Charlie’s daughter Bridget; not the infertility of son John and his wife, and
certainly not the reason for Nora’s extraordinary dislike of John’s political
clients; not Patrick’s alcoholism or the possibility that his death was a
suicide; or the failed career of the Raffertys’ youngest son, Brian.
And so on, as the family guilt,
lies, and resentments rise to a climax with Patrick’s death.
Despite her good intentions, Nora is not a likeable character, but Sullivan makes even her worst
aspects understandable, even pitiable. And Saints
for All Occasions keeps the story moving with shifts between its host of
secondary characters, and between past and present time periods, tantalizing
the reader with the possibility that even a clan as entangled as the Raffertys
can find redemption.
