SOURCE: “Mary Gordon's Final Payments: A Romance of the One True Language,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 94-110.

[In the following essay, Neary examines the problem of linguistic authority, religious truth, and metaphysical uncertainty in Final Payments. According to Neary, Gordon reacts to “the loss of certainty” and its attendant disillusionment through humor and shifted focus on the aesthetic qualities of language.]

“I was looking for miracle, mystery, and authority,” Mary Gordon says in a 1978 issue of Harper's, consciously echoing Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor; “I was interested in style, in spirituality.” Gordon is describing a visit to the Long Island headquarters of the Society of St. Pius X, a group of radically conservative followers of French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. But she could well be discussing the evolution of her first novel, Final Payments: this stylish, spiritual depiction of the American Catholic experience was published just a few months prior to the appearance of the Harper's article.

In the article, Gordon explains that the existence of the Lefebvrists represents for her the possible persistence of the Church of her childhood, a world of certainties—a world in which words and other signs represent, absolutely, the reality signified. And the fact that the society is located on Long Island just intensifies the nostalgia; Gordon feels on the verge of being swallowed up by the past:

I grew up on Long Island among radically conservative Catholics, and there is a particular aptness for me in the coincidence of a movement that embodies what I have left and lost being placed in the physical world of my childhood.

… My friends are worried. They kiss me on the forehead before I leave, as if they are afraid they will not see me again, as if they are seeing me off on a voyage of indeterminate length and destination in a vessel whose seaworthiness they seriously doubt.

That the society turns out to lack the miracle, mystery, and authority sought by Gordon may not be terribly surprising to readers of the article （we trust a smart contemporary novelist, a member of a breed who subsist on ambiguities and uncertainties, not to be entrapped by a band of absolutists）. Gordon herself, however, after professing that she felt “relief” when she escaped from the society, says that “there is loss, as well, or more properly disappointment.” And Final Payments is in fact about very similar loss and disappointment. The protagonist's central crisis is a realization that the human world and its symbols （particularly its linguistic ones） can no longer mediate an absolute, transcendent vision, a real presence of God, of parent, of ordered world.

But the vision presented in Final Payments is not tragic; this is a comic novel, filled with and even preoccupied with jokes and humor. The despair and loss experienced by the protagonist, Isabel Moore, is only half the story, just as Gordon's disappointment with the Lefebvrists is only half the story she has recorded of her adult relationship with the Church and with the idea of faith. Gordon tells the rest of the story in an article on her own devotion to the Virgin Mary published in a 1982 issue of Commonweal. This article is a corrective to the Lefebvre article; if the Lefebvrists merely reminded Gordon that the symbol-structure of her childhood Church had lost its ontological foundation for her, images of Mary suggest to Gordon that, even without metaphysical certainties, human symbols and words do have a tentative and at least hypothetical efficacy. A devotion to the Mother of God turns Gordon away from her yearning for a past, transcendent perfection—a perfection that seems predicated on a hatred of physicality—and toward an openness to the incarnate world of imperfect present and future contingency. And this is strikingly similar to the resolution achieved by Isabel in Final Payments.

The Harper's and the Commonweal articles, therefore, present in an expository form the problem and resolution that constitute the narrative movement of Final Payments: Isabel Moore nostalgically tries to regain her solid religious past, in which language transparently mediated divine reality, but the faith she finally achieves is founded on a new use of language—not fiercely literal but metaphorical, imaginative, lightly comic. So before examining Isabel's transformation of the grammar of her youth, it would be well to look at Gordon's articulation of these issues in the magazine articles.

The complete title of Mary Gordon's article on Archbishop Lefebvre contains the words, “a Romance of the One True Church” （my italics）. And there is much about the idea of a lingering remnant of the pre-Vatican II Church that sparks in Gordon a girlish sense of romantic dreaminess:

… l‘incident Lefebvre engages my imagination. It inspires in me an embarrassing richness of nostalgic fantasy: sung Gregorian Masses, priests in gold, the silence of Benediction, my own sense of sanctity as an eight-year-old carrying a lily among a hundred other eight-year-olds on Holy Thursday.

At the most personal level, therefore, the existence of Lefebvre's radically conservative movement suggests to this woman who grew up in a now-changed Church the possible persistence of childhood innocence. Her ideas about Lefebvre's societies are all lovely and exciting, like a fairy tale. And the Archbishop himself, in Gordon's imagination, is decked out in dashing fairy-tale splendor; he is an elegant old French gentleman, a monarchist, a man who would surely not have been at home among those original, seedy Apostles, but who would have been “a smash with one of the Medici popes” in a world of “chateaux silver, ancient and perfect servants, a chapel near the tennis courts.”

But for all the fancifulness, the rigor about what Lefebvre represents to Mary Gordon indicates a classical precision beneath Gordon's romanticism: “I was interested … in a movement that combined the classical ideal of the Gregorian mass with the romantic image of the foreign life.” This paradoxically romantic classicism is founded on Gordon's desire for linguistic exactness, a desire to possess and utilize a body of language that has a solid base—that does not, in the Derridean sense, “defer” meaning, but that presents it purely and immediately.

In the very first paragraph of the Lefebvre article, Gordon describes her childhood Church as

that repository of language never to be used again, words white-flat and crafted: “monstrance,” “chasuble”; words shaped to fit into each other like spoons, words that overlap and do not overlap, words that mark a way of life that has a word for every mode, a category for each situation: “gifts of the Holy Ghost,” “corporal works of mercy,” “capital sins,” “cardinal virtues.”

There is a grandeur about the words that Gordon chooses to remember （surely, like most young Catholics, she linked the word “monstrance” with “monstrous”）, but it is an absolutely clear grandeur. These are words that have no ambiguity; they describe definite objects that exist in one definite place, the Church. Even such seemingly huge categories as the “gifts of the Holy Ghost” and the “corporal works of mercy” have been precisely spelled out and delimited by the Baltimore Catechism: there are seven （that lucky number） of each, no more and no less.

And Gordon's description of Lefebvre, not surprisingly, focuses on his rhetoric, his grand and solid use of words:

His rhetoric is desperate, and it has the excitement of desperation. It has the excitement, too, of an archaism revivified: it is the language of conflict, but a conflict that seems ancient, and consequently grand. … “You cannot marry truth and error,” he said in a sermon delivered in Lille in 1976, “because that is like adultery, and the child will be a bastard—a bastard rite for mass, bastard sacraments, and bastard priests.”

Bastard. Bâtard. How exciting, from the mouth of an archbishop. The world is serious; the truth is obvious; the lines are clear.

Gordon is excited by the solidity the word “bastard” takes on in Lefebvre's mouth. It is not just a tag, a combination of sounds that has been arbitrarily granted meaning. It has substance, essence.

This is Gordon's notion of the language of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, which Lefebvre's societies are desperately attempting to keep alive in a hostile modern world. It is a language-system that leaves no gaps; it makes signified objects and concepts perfectly present, just as God is said to be simply and unambiguously present in the Eucharist. In her nostalgia for this lost linguistic perfection—best preserved, of course, in Latin, a language that has not been knocked around the common workaday world for several centuries—Gordon is exemplifying what Derrida calls “an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of purity of presence and self-presence in speech.”

Gordon does not find this “purity”; her romanticism is punctured. After beginning her article with a fanciful lyricism, Gordon ends up presenting a coolly ironic portrait of an actual Lefebvrist priest whom she interviewed. And although his notions of theology and sexuality are surprisingly enlightened, the priest is as repellently intolerant as the Grand Inquisitor himself; he thinks, for example, that the medieval way of dealing with Protestants was “perfectly acceptable”: “They were more or less removed from the scene … ＼b］y being executed.” Gordon's most deflatingly satirical touch, though, is a comically understated criticism not of the priest's cruelty but of his taste:

He tells me they ＼the society］ bought out the company that made St. Joseph Missals. I had one: I remember the glossy photographs beside appropriate feast days, the work of an artist who probably spent his secular life drawing for Ivory Snow. Before I know what I am saying I exclaim, “But St. Joseph Missals were the tackiest of any of them.” “Tacky?” he says, looking puzzled. I am again disappointed; I cannot take seriously the spiritual life of anyone for whom “the tacky” is not a lively concept.

This article is primarily a record of disillusionment. But it does reveal two important characteristics of Gordon's eventual strategy for dealing with the loss of certainty: beauty and humor. Though words and symbols no longer possess an absolute metaphysical base, Gordon finds that they can still be used with aesthetic care and tastefulness. （Indeed, the fact that the Society of St. Pius X displays not the elegance of the Middle Ages but the tackiness of the 1950s is one of her most severe disappointments.） And humor, people's ability to share a joke, gives language and erotic energy, a power to connect: comedy effects at least a hypothetical and analogous approach to the now-vanished presence. The Lefebvrist priest may be tasteless and bigoted, but Gordon maintains her own humanity and good spirits by writing about him gracefully and comically.

In her Commonweal article on the Virgin Mary, Gordon more explicitly sets forth her faith in the values of humor and of beauty, especially of physical beauty. The article begins, in fact, with a Catholic-school joke about the ridiculous lengths the Church used to go to in order to suppress bodily beauty:

Queens in the nineteen sixties had almost as many Catholic high schools as bakeries. Towards the spring of the year, the approach of Senior Prom meant big business for local merchants. There was one store—which girls in my school were urged to patronize—that had a special section devoted to what were called “Mary-like gowns.” The Mary-like gown was an invention of nuns and a coalition of sodalists, and its intent, I think, was to make prom dresses as much like habits as possible. We used to go and try the dresses on for a laugh. They were unbelievably ugly. The yardage of material could have dressed even an Irish family for a year.

This is a joke with deep significance, a joke that casts a shadow even on the grandest ages of that linguistically perfect Church. If the tackiness of the 1950s and the relativism of the 1960s had never occurred, Gordon might still have had serious problems with the Church: its focus on spiritual essences （attractive though that focus seems to Gordon in the Lefebvre article） has historically resulted in a denigration of the physical world. Particularly unsettling to Gordon is the fact that women have come under special attack: the desire of “nuns and a coalition of sodalists” to cloak girls' bodies under yards of ugly material is only a ludicrous modern version of the Church's long-time hatred of women and of all physical bodies.

The first section of this article, in fact, is not an attack on the styleless contemporary Church at all; this time it is the most revered thinkers of the Catholic tradition, the “Fathers of the Church,” that Gordon criticizes. Their thinking, she maintains, was “poisoned by misogyny, and a hatred of the body, particularly female sexuality.” She proceeds to quote hate-filled statements from Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome, among others, pronouncements that must have seemed to them as serious, obvious, and clear as Archbishop Lefebvre's use of the word “bastard”; this time, however, Gordon is not charmed or excited. She ends her attack by quoting a statement made by St. John Chrysostom, a man whose nickname （“Chrysostom” means “golden-tongued”） marks him as one of the supreme guardians of that ontologically solid linguistic system. Here is how Chrysostom describes female nature:

The whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum, and the fluid of digested food. … If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is merely a whitened sepulcher.

The great tradition of the Church may have possessed a sublime and stylish vision of transcendent perfection, but it was not very good on the subjects of physicality and of women. Her realization about the position of women throughout history （and Gordon opines that Christianity has treated women a little better, at least, than many other groups） frees Gordon from what she calls “historical romanticism,” in which she had indulged in the Lefebvre piece. Though the precision and the seeming solidity of the early Church remain enticing, the fact that she has a body—along with the fact that she is a woman—releases Gordon from her nostalgia for the past and pushes her in a new direction. And it is the image of Mary, the Mother of God, that forms the metaphorical bridge for Gordon, allowing her to take the best of the past Church （its spirituality, its clarity, and its aesthetic style） and project it into a limited, contingent world. One must, Gordon says, “sift through the nonsense and hostility that has characterized thought and writing about Mary, to find some images, shards, and fragments, glittering in the rubble.” As Gordon shows us these images, shards, and fragments, a coherent portrait of Mary begins to emerge, colored by a mixture of earthiness and aestheticism.

Gordon sees Mary's purity, her virginity, as indicating not a distaste for the temporal—and physical—human world, but rather an openness to it, expressed by the very curves and rhythms of her body: “I think of the curve of the body of a thirteenth century statue of the young Mother with her child. At ease in its own nature, swinging almost with the rhythms of maternal love, ready for life; radically open to experience, to love.” Mary's innocence, Gordon continues, is “an innocence that is rooted in the love of the physical world.” Even as the Queen of Heaven, Mary is not divorced from the temporal world, lost in some infinitely transcendent perfection; she is “enthroned, not above her children, but in the midst of them.”

It is important to note that Gordon achieves this vision of Mary not by ignoring the Church's traditional symbol-system, but rather by entering that system carefully and selectively. She draws her striking, and rather erotic, image of Mary's rhythmically curved figure from a thirteenth-century statue of the Madonna, and in other sections of the essay she meditates on some of the Church's other great artworks: Annunciations by Leonardo and by Fra Angelica, a Winchester Cathedral sculpture, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, Bellini's Pieta.

So even though the system of precise and definite symbols represented by Gordon's childhood Church has lost its vitality （being maintained, now, by a small band of Long Islanders who have no concept of “the tacky”）, Gordon still finds value in clarity and precision—but these have become for her ethical and aesthetic rather than metaphysical qualities:

I think, finally, it is through poetry, through painting, sculpture, music, through those human works that are magnificently innocent of the terrible strain of sexual hatred by virtue of the labor, craft, and genius of their great creators, that one finds the surest way back to the Mother of God.

Gordon's aesthetic basis for judging human sign-making no longer permits her to assert that words and images perfectly mediate a transcendent realm. Her own words about Mary cannot be final, a closed system like that presented by the Baltimore Catechism; they can only record a series of relations rooted within the contingent, temporal world:

I offer here, no system, but a set of meditations. I offer no final words, since, for a woman to come to terms with this woman who endures beloved despite a history of hatred, she must move lightly and discard freely. … She must put out for those around her scattered treasure, isolates without a pattern whose accumulated meaning comes from the relations of proximity.

This is a highly qualified statement about our ability to know. Its relativism sounds very nearly postmodernist; Gordon seems to imply that one cannot write about things, but only about differences—gaps—between things. Nonetheless, Gordon's field of interest is clearly substantive rather than negative. Though she is unable to speak definitively, to mediate absolute presence, she can still meditate at least hypothetically on a woman who is no less than the mother of God.

So the Lefebvre and the Mary articles together reveal Gordon's replacement of a metaphysically solid, perfectly defined system of words and other signs with a fragile, temporally limited, “scattered treasure”—which is nonetheless clear, beautiful, and often funny （one of Gordon's favorite statues of the young Mary has the girl looking amused; “Her mouth, a thin identured curve, turns up with pleasure”）. That previous perfect union with the ground of being has been exchange for a sort of aesthetic eroticism, a beautiful and humorous expression of radical openness to the world. And this movement from metaphysics to aesthetics, which Gordon describes in these articles, is much like the narrative movement of Final Payments, the story of a young woman who loses her religious certainty and then, after a period of despair, gains a real—though tentative and uncertain—religious and human faith.

The first chapter of Final Payments ends with Isabel Moore, the protagonist and narrator, thinking to herself, “This is no longer my father's house.” The novel has opened with the funeral of Joseph Moore, Isabel's radically conservative Catholic father, whom Isabel—alone, without a single day's respite—has nursed for the past eleven years. And as if this were not enough to have made him the most significant figure in Isabel's life, Joseph Moore has been no ordinary father: with his fierce Catholic absolutism he has reigned over Isabel with the power of an autocratic medieval pope, banishing her only boyfriend and expecting her complete submission, body and soul, to his needs and dogmas. From the novel's first pages, Isabel vividly conveys the way Joseph Moore has, for her, been not just a father but an image of the Father, both dreadful and loving. Wilfrid Sheed claims, in fact, that despite his physical absence （like God's）, Joseph Moore hovers over the novel as its most impressive and even attractive character:

… astonishingly he emerges as the most impressive and attractive character in the book—especially astonishing since he is never on stage but has to dominate from the clouds, and from memory. Gordon has conveyed his mere emanations, his perfectionism, his intelligence, his sheer size of spirit so well that the reader too half-sees that after him the outside world would seem trashy and pointless. The religious vocation has been made incarnate.

So when Isabel says that the house is no longer her father's, she is not simply recording the fact that Joseph Moore has died and that the building in which she grew up, with all its books and knickknacks and furnishings, no longer belongs to him. Rather, the statement “This is no longer my father's house,” with its unmistakably Biblical sound （it is as if the Holy of Holies had lost its holiness）, points toward the novel's large philosophical and religious themes. Isabel has to live in a world in which “the Father” is no longer immediately present; the death of a parent has effected an absolutely metaphysical rupture in Isabel's life.

Derrida has described the “rupture” that effected the “destruction of the history of metaphysics,” the advent of postmodernism:

The event I called a rupture … presumably would have come about when the structurality of structure had begun to be thought. … Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought of in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.

Isabel, with her nearly obsessive concern about centers （“center” is one of her favorite words）, connects herself with these Derridean issues. Her father's bed, she tells us early in the novel, occupied the exact center of his bedroom; without that center, she feels painfully abandoned: “I thought of my father and his sureness, his body in the bed at the center of the room, and I wanted to cry out, ‘I am terribly alone.’” Later she indicates that the loss of her father, her center, has even resulted in a loss of a permanent and unshifting self: “I was not ＼any longer］ the person who lived with my father's body in the center of my life, in my father's house, with his bed at the center of it.” Her unswervingly Catholic father was Isabel's “fixed locus,” her guarantee that particular words and things had ontological substance and significance, that they could not be replaced by Derrida's “infinite number of sign-substitutions.” We will see that Isabel's ultimate resolution of this problem of uncenteredness, like Gordon's in the Mary article, is a movement toward a tentative ethicality and faith rather than toward Derrida's “Nietzschean affirmation … of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin”; although it addresses postmodernist issues, this is certainly not a deconstructive text in the manner of John Barth or Thomas Pynchon. Nonetheless, Isabel's problem—the loss of father, of center—looks distinctly like a “destruction of the history of metaphysics.” So before leaping to Isabel's （and Gordon's） special resolution to the problem, we must look more closely at the problem itself and precisely identify the way in which Isabel has lost a “center.” We should first examine, therefore, the character of Joseph Moore.

Joseph Moore, as Isabel describes him, takes on an exotic romanticism similar to that of Gordon's Archbishop Lefebvre. Like Lefebvre, Moore was a grand, and fiercely intolerant, aristocrat （“In history, his sympathies were with the Royalists in the French Revolution, the South in the Civil War, the Russian czar, the Spanish Fascists”） whose mind had “the endurance of a great Renaissance sculpture.” He was the “neighborhood intellectual,” a professor of medieval literature at a small Catholic college on Long Island; even his McCarthyism and racism, therefore, were subordinate to a devotion to Old-World, aesthetic ideals. It is as if, like Wordsworth's quintessentially romantic Child, Joseph Moore trailed “clouds of glory”:

They should have had for his funeral a Mass of the Angels, by which children are buried in the Church. His mind had the brutality of a child's or an angel's: the finger of the angel points in the direction of hell, sure of the justice of the destination of the soul he transports.

Obviously, in spite of the references to angels and children and to medieval aestheticism, Moore—again, like Lefebvre—stood for a classical rigor rather than a romantic, lyrical softness; “softmindedness” was something he had no tolerance for. His childlikeness was brutal.

But he was most brutally childlike in his faith, which was absolute and unequivocal:

For my father, the refusal of anyone in the twentieth century to become part of the Catholic Church was not pitiable; it was malicious and willful. Culpable ignorance, he called it. He loved the sense of his own orthodoxy, of holding out for the purest and the finest and the most refined sense of truth against the slick hucksters who promised happiness on earth and the supremacy of human reason.

Predictably, Moore was not terribly interested in the frills of Catholicism—the rosary beads, the plastic Marys, the novena books held together with rubber bands. The tough core of the Church for him was the Mass, in Latin, with the responses recited by the congregation:

He wrote scornful letters to The Tablet about pastors who encouraged the faithful to say the Rosary during Mass. The Mass, he said, was the Single Most Important Act in History. The Consecration, the Transubstantiation, was the central drama of Salvation.

Gordon's use of capital letters at this point is telling. These words, describing the events through which the Church mediates God's “real presence,” have a powerful ontological weight for believing Catholics. According to orthodox Catholic theology, the recitation of five Latin words—“Hoc est enim corpus meum”—transforms the substance （the essential thingness） of bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ. It is hard to imagine language ever having a more substantive power to signify. And this, for Isabel, is the key to what her father and the Church of her childhood represent. When Isabel, after her father's death, expresses to her friend Liz a fear that her father was absurd, full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” Liz's answer sums up Joseph Moore: “Oh no. Jesus Christ, he signified. He signified all over the place.”

Isabel's eleven-year devotion to her disabled father has allowed her to live in this absolutely certain world in which words and symbols mediate a transcendent presence. She has given up her independence, her adulthood, her sexuality, but the spiritual returns have been enormous:

Does it suggest both the monstrosity and the confusion of the issue if I say that the day Dr. MacCauley told me about my father's stroke was of my whole life the day I felt most purely alive? Certainty was mine, and purity; I was encased in meaning like crystal.

She calls the event a “monstrosity”—a weighty word （remember “monstrance”）. It has offered her certainty and purity; it has encased her in meaning, “like crystal.” Meaning—significance—has not been a fragile and arbitrary thing; it has possessed a diamond-hard solidity.

But it is a thing of the past. As the novel begins, Joseph Moore is being buried. The world of bodily contingency has fractured Isabel's crystalline certainty, has deprived her of her father's presence. Her first feeling after the funeral, when she finds herself alone in the house which is no longer her father's, is that the universe has opened up, that its center has lost its substantiality and become “airy”: … “life was space, the borders seemed so far away from the vast airy center that there was no help and I remembered my childhood dream of falling out of bed, through the floor, and simply falling.” The physical world, which her father had always disdained, now seems to her the only thing that is real. And its reality is merely the reality of change, of instability, of decay. This discovery horrifies her; when she sees broccoli “liquefying” in her refrigerator, she wants to “run away and set a match to the whole house.”

Isabel does not set fire to the house, but what she does seems almost as bad to her father's staunchly conservative friends. She sells the house and moves upstate to Ringkill to direct a social-welfare project. （In this novel about substantial centers around which perfect circles—or rings—can spin, Isabel's move to a place called “Ring-kill” has particular significance.） Almost immediately she has an affair with her friend's husband, the glamorous but oafishly insensitive politician John Ryan—it would be hard to imagine a man more different from her father. And she falls in love with another married man, Hugh Slade, a rational humanist who coolly describes her Catholic upbringing as “barbarous.” And although Isabel maintains her sense of humor and her extraordinary care about clarity and precision, she is slowly and inexorably made aware that her life has no center, that her certainty has crumbled. Having once been enveloped by her father's faith that the world is a sort of Dantesque commedia with a metaphysical and everlasting significance, that human beings clearly and certainly were created to know, love, and serve God in this life and to share in God's happiness for all eternity, she must now confront the possibility that everything, including herself, is a signifier lacking a signified: “What,” she wonders, “if you represented nothing but were only yourself?” If people and things represent “nothing” beyond themselves, then it seems to Isabel that there can be no larger order beneath the chaotic surface of everyday life; randomness is all.

As a social worker Isabel becomes even more aware of the randomness of human life; “there was no way,” she asserts, “of predicting what would make people happy, no way of controlling it.” In her own personal life, too, she is becoming dependent for happiness on Hugh Slade, a man who is not tied to her by blood or religion, but who in fact is tied to other people by marital and familial obligations. She is desperately troubled by the realization that she has become a slave to contingency, that her love for a particular person—a person who may die or leave her—throws her into a world in which everything is as unstable as the broccoli that liquefied in her refrigerator. When she is confronted by Hugh Slade's wife, who shrewdly argues that Isabel will have to give up Hugh to prove she is “a good person,” she cracks; she makes a final, frantic attempt to reconstitute the world of absolute certainty by replacing love with “charity,” by devoting herself not to people whom she cares about particularly and emotionally, but to someone whom she does not even like. She decides to move in with Margaret Casey.

Isabel was taught in school that love and charity—eros and agape—are very different things. And at that time she distinctly preferred eros:

Love and charity. One was that feeling below the breast, and the other was doing something, anything, to take people's pain away. I remembered the lettering on a bulletin board at Anastasia Hall: LOVE IS MEASURED BY SACRIFICE. And I remembered thinking how wrong that was, because the minute I gave up something for someone I liked them less.

“Ah,” Sister Fidelis had said when I asked her, “you don't have to like someone to love them in God.”

But who wants to be loved in God? … We want to be loved for our singularity, not for what we share with the rest of the human race. We would rather be loved for the color of our hair or the shape of our ankle than because God loves us.

Now, however, Isabel feels that she was caught in a terrible error. To prefer love—based on accidental singularities （hair color, ankle shape, feelings shared memories, jokes）—is to throw oneself into the randomness of the physical world, a world that can never have the sureness of Isabel's father and his solid pre-Vatican II Catholic religious system. Charity, according to Isabel and Sister Fidelis, cuts through the surface of accidents, making immediately present the metaphysical idea that all human beings possess an immortal soul designed in God's image. This notion of charity, in fact, is analogous to the dogma of Transubstantiation, which states that the accidents of the Eucharist （the physical appearances of bread and wine） are unimportant, that after the words of consecration are spoken, only the substance （Christ's body and blood） matters. So Isabel's decision to live a life of charity reflects an attempt to return to dogmatic Catholicism, with an absolute symbol-system that purports to mediate pure presence—purports to “mean,” to “stand for.” “If we can love the people we think are most unlovable,” she says, “if we can get out of this ring of accident, of attraction, then it's a pure act, love; then we mean something, we stand for something.”

Within this “ring of accident,” Margaret Casey is, for Isabel, as unlovable as a person could be. The housekeeper who once wanted to marry Joseph Moore, Margaret is the one human being whom Isabel has always unequivocally loathed; the mere sound of her “slopping around the house in her slippers,” Isabel says, “is the sound of my nightmares.” Taking care of Margaret, therefore, seems to Isabel to be the purest of pure acts, an act that is utterly unconnected with the world of human particularity. Isabel will continue to feel disgust for this woman, and she surely will not be thanked; Margaret, incapable of gratitude, behaves as if Isabel's presence were in fact an imposition on her. But this now seems to Isabel much the better. Individual feelings, cravings for thanks, all partake of the random, accidental world; Isabel wants to experience perfect Catholic charity, unblemished by worldly eros:

There would be no more talk or thought of love that could be gained or lost by accidents, by jokes or the angle of a shoulder. I would love Margaret now as God loved His creatures: impartially, impervious to their individual natures and thus incapable of being really hurt by them.

Faced with the reality of a world in which the certain meanings of her childhood have fled, in which things represent no larger reality but are only themselves, Isabel has built a fortress against things and their randomness. Using appropriately Catholic language, she calls it a “sanctuary.” She has returned, she thinks, to her father's house.

But it is a house without a foundation, a sanctuary without God. Joseph Moore was able genuinely to represent for Isabel the certainty of the Catholic symbol-system; even after the grown-up Isabel began to lose her faith in the Church itself, her father continued to exist as a center, a “real presence.” This new attempt to attain certainty, however, consists of forms without substance, of Catholic behavior without Catholic conviction. Isabel starts again to employ the language of the Church, but she no longer believes that it has meaning. She begins to pray the rosary with Margaret, suffering like a martyr （“The bones in my knees began to grow into the floor like roots; my back was stiff and painful with kneeling”）, but the formerly efficacious words are now void of significance:

… I could no longer imagine a face who would be interested in me above all others, who cared for the nature and the quality of my prayer. I said these prayers because it pleased Margaret. But they brought me no comfort; there was no face, wise, amused, and dangerously open, listening to the words I sent out like cigar-shaped missiles to the neutral, heated air.

The language of traditional Catholicism is supposed to mediate God's presence. But like Mary Gordon visiting the Lefebvrists, Isabel has returned to her Catholic past and found only an absence.

Furthermore, Isabel's new experience of charitable martyrdom lacks the crisp rigor which her charity possessed when she nursed her father; in that earlier time, she felt her “visible martyrdom” as “sheer relief: a grapefruit ice that cleanses the palate between courses of a heavy meal.” But everything with Margaret seems hot and cloying rather than cool and invigorating. Isabel this time does not cleanse her palate; instead she grows fat eating sickeningly sweet foods that make her palate “heavy and dull.” The purity of her love for her father encased Isabel, as we saw, “in meaning like crystal.” Now, however, she sees herself “cased in the pink, sweating flesh of a pig; I could imagine my eyes grown small and light like a pig's. I wanted to sleep.”

By charitably adopting Margaret, Isabel was trying to recapture the one true Language, the perfect sign-system in which words and symbols provide a perfectly crystallized meaning. But something has gone wrong. With Margaret, in fact, words—not just prayers and religious language, but all words—simply cease to matter, to be different from one another. Margaret's statements to Isabel are deadeningly trite （“Good afternoon. Get your beauty sleep?”）. And even Isabel's rigorous need to differentiate between good literature and bad is quenched: when Margaret prefers tacky grocery-store romances, by authors like “Regina Carey,” to Jane Eyre, Isabel represses her disgust. “It was caring about things so strongly,” she says, “whether Charlotte Brontë was better than Regina Carey, that had caused my trouble.”

Isabel is overlooking the fact that a careful use of language, the sort of thing that distinguishes a Charlotte Brontë from a Regina Carey, was highly valued by the very sources of her present notion of charity: her father and the Catholic Church. Isabel has said that her father, unlike Margaret, “loved books, and jokes, and arguments, … loved my stories about impossible places when really I had just gone to the grocer's.” And the Church's “white-flat and crafted” words （“monstrance,” “chasuble,” “gifts of the Holy Ghost,” “cardinal virtues”）, memorialized by Gordon in the Lefebvre article, are founded on the belief that distinctions can be made, that one thing is not another.

So Isabel's “charitable” flight to Margaret is not a return to past certainty at all; it is a lapse into a despairing state in which all words and things—whether certain or hypothetical—have been dissolved. It no longer makes any difference to Isabel what she says, what she does, what she looks like. Her body becomes heavier and heavier, and she is dragged by Margaret to a beauty salon where she receives a hideously archaic haircut （a “bubble cut”）, yet her only response is, “What did it matter?”

But the novel ends optimistically. After her experiment with perfect charity toward Margaret has driven her to a nervous breakdown, Isabel returns to a tentative health. And her resolution of her problem is founded not on an acceptance of the Derridean mise en abyme but on a new understanding of the Catholic symbol-system itself; Isabel appropriates a sort of humorous, erotic Catholic aestheticism, similar to that articulated by her creator in the article on the Virgin Mary. Mary Gordon, as we saw, was able to reestablish a personal veneration for Mary, assembled from images and fragments gleaned from a largely misogynous storehouse. Gordon offered, in her article, “no system, but a set of meditations”—meditations filled with an earthy aestheticism and enlivened with humor. Likewise Isabel discovers that Catholic images and words, though for her no longer absolute, can have a hypothetical and perhaps metaphorical efficacy: the Greek root of the word “metaphor” （metapherein） means “to carry over,” and Catholic images, words, and stories serve Isabel as a bridge between a classically rigorous system in which words mean and a decentered, fleshly world in which words and objects have no stable significance or substance. This bridge allows Isabel to carry over her care for clarity and beauty into the physical, temporal world.

And the bridge's keystone is the crucial Christian notion of the Incarnation. The final chapter of the novel presents a series of epiphanies; events occurring during Holy Week—a time when the Church celebrates the belief that Christ had a body, which died and rose—awaken in Isabel a realization of the value and beauty of the bodily world, and of words that talk about it carefully, elegantly, and humorously.

Holy Week begins with a visit from Father Mulcahy, the kindly old priest who has always loved Isabel. He is not a “perfect” Catholic like Joseph Moore （he is an alcoholic）, and he is not capable of listening to the “absolute truth” （he has refused to hear Isabel's confession, afraid to learn about her recent un-Catholic activities）. But he is a man with whom Isabel can laugh, sing, be human:

His fine, cared-for fingers played chords. He began singing in his high, boy's voice, “I‘ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”

I joined in. I could sing the harmony; I had sung it with my father. And I had sung it with Hugh. I could never tell Father Mulcahy the truth about Hugh. But that was all right. I could not tell the truth, but we could sing at the piano.

The world of particular affections, of eros, is for Isabel given some symbolic—though not absolute—significance and value by virtue of the fact that a priest cares about the sensuous harmony of music. And the world of sexual pleasure is ritualistically joined with that of absolute religious rigor: Isabel has sung this harmony with both Hugh Slade and her father.

Father Mulcahy, furthermore, tells Isabel that even the Bible, the Word of God, can be interpreted as being concerned not just with transcendent substance （that absolute, suprapersonal perfection which Isabel has tried to make present for herself through her martyred practice of “charity”） but with temporal, physical accidents （those things that are components of eros）. The priest tells her to watch her weight, to take care of her body:

“Thou shalt not kill? What does that have to do with it?”

“It means slow deaths, too,” he said.

Isabel's most striking Holy Week epiphany is about to be inspired by other words from the Bible—but these words will have an evocative, personal, associative significance for Isabel rather than an absolutely substantive meaning. When Margaret, after Father Mulcahy leaves, begins to behave particularly obnoxiously, whining that she is “a poor woman,” Isabel explodes. Her feelings for this woman, which she has been repressing, come pouring out. And her emotions of anger and loathing borrow their particular form from a statement originally made by Jesus himself: “‘The poor you have always with you,’ I shouted, slamming the kitchen door.”

In the same epiphanic moment, Isabel discovers not only these words themselves, but the meaning of the words. And she discovers, in a broader way, that words carry their meanings not simply and unequivocally （the way, for example, policemen carry guns）, but gently, contextually—within narratives, chains of shifting relations. Isabel's strikingly insightful, though also strikingly personal, interpretation of Jesus's cryptic words is based on her seeing the words relationally, both in relation to the other characters within a Biblical story （Martha and Mary, Judas） and in relation to her own current, particular situation. Her insight, therefore, should be looked at in its full context, so I must quote at length:

It is one of the marvels of a Catholic education that the impulse of a few words can bring whole narratives to light with an immediacy and a clarity that are utterly absorbing. “The poor you have always with you.” I knew where Christ had said that: at the house of Martha and Mary. Mary had opened a jar of ointment over Christ's feet. Spikenard, I remembered. And she wiped his feet with her hair. Judas had rebuked her; he had said that the ointment ought to be sold for the poor. But, St. John had noted, Judas had said that only because he kept the purse and was a thief. And Christ had said to Judas, Mary at his feet, her hair spread around him, “The poor you have always with you: but me you have not always.”

And until that moment, climbing the dark stairs in a rage to my ugly room, it was a passage I had not understood. It seemed to justify to me the excesses of centuries of fat, tyrannical bankers. But now I understood. What Christ was saying, what he meant, was that the pleasures of that hair, that ointment, must be taken. Because the accidents of death would deprive us soon enough. We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of our extravagant affections. …

I knew now I must open the jar of ointment. I must open my life. I knew now that I must leave.

Religious language has regained a significance for Isabel, but it is a contextual, personal significance, involved with the changing world of human accident.

By the time Good Friday arrives, Isabel is ready to attend a service that will have meaning for her. But it will not be the sort of meaning that was mediated by the one true Language of her childhood Church, which purported to make present a transcendent substance or center, a permanent truth that is divorced from the human condition. The words and symbols of the Church now act as more limited—but also more rich and evocative—signifiers, simultaneously general and personal, tinged with tragedy and humanity:

The church was dark with the number of the congregation. And the statues, covered in their purple cloth, stole what light there would have been available. … I thought of Christ, of the death of Christ. We were here to acknowledge the presence of death among us. We were here to acknowledge our own inevitable deaths.

My father was dead; there was the pain. I had loved him, but my love had not been able to help him. … I would die; everyone in this church would die. Everyone I knew and loved would die. …

That was what we were kneeling to acknowledge, all of us, on this dark afternoon. We were here to say that we knew about death, we knew about loss, that it would not surprise us. But of course it would surprise us; it had surprised even Christ in the garden.

A priest begins the service, reading “in the voice of God”: “My people, what have I done to you? Or in what have I offended you, answer Me?” Isabel's reaction to the words of the service reflects a new compromise between the unquestioning dogmatism of her father and her own recent despairing attitude about the value of language. The issue of absolute truth or falsity no longer seems so pressing to her; the words of this service have an efficacy that is immanent and communal rather than transcendent:

… I had wanted to hear those words spoken, the harsh Old Testament words and then the words of John. I wanted to hear the story said aloud, and I wanted to hear about His rest in the dark tomb. I wanted to hear it in the presence of my kind.

For there was death; you had to know that, and betrayal, and the negligence of friends at crucial moments, and their sleep. I wanted that acknowledged in the presence of my kind also.

This realization of the certainty of death, of the ineluctable power of the world of decaying flesh, instills in Isabel a paradoxical appreciation of the value of bodies; if the death of bodies is important, even to God, then bodies themselves—“accidental” though they may be—are important:

I walked home with Margaret, feeling my body moving on its clever legs. Christ had suffered in the body, and I too had a body. I knew it false but capable of astonishing pleasures.

So the novel ends not with the nostalgic disappointment articulated by Gordon in the Lefebvre article, but rather with the sort of tentatively faithful meditativeness represented by Gordon's article on the Virgin Mary. When we demand that words refer to an absolute truth, the novel seems to say, they inevitably disappoint; language works, but even when it is used with aesthetic elegance and precise care it is capable only of expressing relative truths, of telling stories. At their best, though, these stories have an erotic energy, an ability to connect people （it is important to Isabel that she hear the Biblical words “in the presence of ＼her］ kind”）, by bringing the hearers more deeply and compassionately into the painful world of human accident.

Or by making them laugh. Although Isabel's story is painful, Final Payments, as I said earlier, is a comic novel. As Wilfrid Sheed has noted, the conditions Gordon has set for herself in this novel are “that the story must be sad, the telling funny.”

Sheed, however, claims that the sadness is primary, and that the comedy is sardonic and wry—“the best way to talk about” the fact that God “has died in this century.” But although he has appreciated Gordon's humor, Sheed has failed to note that this humor gives the novel a generous, affirmative tone. Gordon's comedy is about faith rather than despair; for Gordon, I think, one of the best proofs that words can signify, can go beyond mere self-referentiality, is that they unite people through laughter.

Indeed, after the long and moving church-service sequence, Gordon concludes Final Payments with a scene in which her characters' friendships are revivified by a joke. Isabel, in the final page of the novel, is escaping from Margaret; her long-time friends Eleanor and Liz have come to drive her away. It is the first time they have seen how she has allowed her physical appearance to deteriorate:

Liz looked at me, her eyes flicking up and down in quick judgment. “Who did your hair? Annette Funicello?”

This joke seems as filled with “miracle, mystery, and authority” as any Good Friday service; it is not about the death of God at all:

The three of us laughed. It was a miracle to me, the solidity of that joke. Even the cutting edge of it was a miracle. And our laughter was solid. It stirred the air and hung above us like rings of bone that shivered in the cold, gradual morning.

The death of her father had ruptured for Isabel the world's ontological solidity, effecting a Derridean “destruction of the history of metaphysics”; it had decentered the ring of her life, sending her to “Ringkill.” And now a mere joke has created a new solidity, stirring the air like new rings—and these are as sturdy as bone. Language may no longer have the “white-flat and crafted,” categorical certainty of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, but it still performs miracles.

The novel, in fact, implicitly affirms the value of language even in its gloomiest sequences: there are few novelistic characters for whom exactness of word choice and attention to the sheer beauty of language are more important than they are for Isabel Moore. Throughout the book, Isabel has used words like “clarity,” “purity,” “certainty,” and especially “center” with such frequency and care that they begin to seem as solid as the word “bastard” sounded in Archbishop Lefebvre's mouth. Although it is her lover Hugh Slade who, according to Isabel, is able to take words like “devoted” and “duty” and “polish them like stones,” it is really Isabel herself who is the novel's primary word-polisher. It is through her aesthetic, erotic, humorous care with language that a bridge has been created between the beautiful but rigid （and lost） world of Joseph Moore and the world of temporal humanity: “That, at least, I owed to my father—making the effort to find the proper words for things.”

The absolute ontological foundations of words have for Isabel become relativized; language has become for her a collection of metaphors （a “scattered treasure,” as Gordon calls it in the Mary article） rather than a closed system mediating “real presence.” But Isabel shows that language nonetheless can effect at least partial and hypothetical communication between people—and maybe even between human beings and God—if the words are polished like stones, if they tell stories, and if they are employed with humor.

And by presenting Isabel's ultimate faith that human beings in the modern world can still articulate a religious vision if they employ a narrative rather than a doctrinal discourse, Final Payments seems to be making a larger statement about the efficacy of storytelling for pursuing religious questions; this is a religious novel about the religious value of novels. Gordon demonstrates here that narrative can consider religious issues imaginatively, metaphorically, even playfully, without freezing them into dogma. This means that, for Gordon, religious truths cannot be stated definitively; there is no One True （and Literal） Language. But there are plenty of metaphors to weave, tales to spin, jokes to tell. The last words of Final Payments are, appropriately, “There was a great deal I wanted to say.”