[In the following essay, Mahon examines the depiction of love, family, and personal attachments in Gordon's novels. “Gordon seeks in all her work,” writes Mahon, “to explore how people love, or fail to love, each other in a world where belief in God is either a memory or an inconceivability.”]

Mary Gordon's third novel, Men and Angels （1985）, introduces, for the first time in her fiction, a family in the ordinary sense of the word. Also for the first time, she eschews the Irish Catholic subculture that permeates her earlier novels, Final Payments （1978） and The Company of Women （1980）. Despite this change in focus, Gordon seeks in all her work to explore how people love, or fail to love, each other in a world where belief in God is either a memory or an inconceivability. While the conventional family unit occupies the center of Men and Angels, Gordon's real concern extends beyond Anne and Michael Foster and their children to the wider human community outside their comfortable home.

In the first two novels, Gordon portrays communities where the traditional nuclear family plays little part. Final Payments opens on the day that Isabel's father is buried. Feeling responsible for her father's stroke eleven years before, she has devoted her life to nursing him. Ultimately, the novel is about coming to terms with death and accepting life with all its risks. It is only near the end that Isabel really mourns her father and begins to move beyond her guilt and self-hatred.

The narrative of Final Payments covers the several months following Joe Moore's death. Through flashback we learn that when Isabel is two her mother dies and her father hires the spinster Margaret Casey to keep house. Margaret, an odious, unlovable person, dislikes Isabel and schemes to marry Joe, but Isabel uses her influence on her doting father to secure Margaret's dismissal. For the next seventeen years, until Joe's death, Isabel's family consists of her father, her school friends Eleanor and Liz, and Father Mulcahy. She finds a home with these three at various times after her father's death, until she gets involved with the “saintly” Hugh Slade. Chastened by the violent reaction of Hugh's wife to this latest adultery, Isabel relinquishes self-indulgence in favor of masochistic denial; she moves in with the hideous Margaret Casey, who, as ever, makes Isabel's life an ordeal. In the end, Isabel makes a “final payment” to Margaret by writing a check for all the money her father left behind. She then escapes Margaret in the company of her friends Eleanor and Liz, determined to try again for happiness with Hugh.

In The Company of Women, Felicitas, named for the virgin martyr mentioned in the Canon of the Mass, loses her father when she is six months old. She grows up surrounded by widows and spinsters, all under the domination of the dictatorial Father Cyprian. The importance of community here is implicit both in the title—the working title for this second novel had been Fields of Force—and in the name of Felicitas, which appears in the Canon after these words: “We ask some share in the fellowship of your apostles and martyrs” （emphasis mine）.

In Cyprian's look Felicitas reads the message: “You are the chosen one. Make straight the way of the Lord”; like Isabel she is Mary, not Martha, destined for contemplation and study rather than concern about practical problems （Luke 10:40）. Trained in the doctrines and ritual of the Church, Felicitas as an adult will provide her elders with vicarious satisfaction as she defeats the dragons of the secular culture. But the precocious Felicitas chooses to rebel, converts to the counterculture of the late sixties, sleeps with Robert Cavendish and another member of his “turned-on” community, and gets pregnant. Deciding literally at the last minute against an abortion, she returns to her mother, who takes charge and moves them both upstate to live permanently near Cyprian. Eight years after Linda is born, Felicitas elects to marry a local man who is simple but loving: “It is for shelter that we marry and make love.”

In these first two novels, Gordon writes virtual allegories of the search for community and love after the collapse of old certainties. The dilemma is exemplified in the life of Cyprian Leonard, one of Gordon's most important “minor” characters. His baptismal name was Philip, but he took the name of the early Christian martyr Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, when he entered the Paraclete Order. （“Paraclete,” a title applied to the Holy Spirit, means “advocate,” “intercessor.”） Like Felicitas, Cyprian is invoked in the Canon of the Mass. He reacts to change in the Church by growing more conservative, until he feels unwelcome among the Paracletists and begins a long exile, moving from one diocese to another before settling permanently in his hometown on his parents' property. Thus, Philip Leonard rejects his nuclear family to embrace the community of Paracletists: feeling betrayed by change, Cyprian Leonard rejects the community, returns home, and develops his own community, the “company of women” with Felicitas as the promise of a new generation. His reaction to upheaval is rejection; he thus anticipates the rebellion of his protégé, Felicitas, against him.

The experience of Isabel Moore and Felicitas Taylor also mirror those of the Catholic community from which they spring and against which they rebel. Both women spend years in a cloistered existence, and their break with the “cloister” mirrors the experience of Catholicism, especially American Catholicism, following the Second Vatican Council—long years of life in a carefully guarded fortress vanish before the onrush of the secular world and all its blandishments. Both Isabel and Felicitas function on one level as types, confronted with fundamental changes and loss of personal faith, forced to abandon familiar patterns and live outside the Catholic ghetto.

Both women break free of their cloistered environment through sex, an obvious route for repressed Catholic girls of their generation. The strictness of the cloister accounts in part for the extremity of their breaks. Isabel visits a gynecologist to get “some kind of birth control” and chooses the IUD: “Never had I felt such pain, and there was an added sense of outrage in knowing that I had invited it.” Desperate to leave the doctor's office, she makes light of the pain: “I tried to make myself look Protestant.” After submitting in a moment of weakness to the odious John Ryan, husband of her friend Liz, she takes on the kindly Hugh Slade as a lover. Slade, every Catholic's idea of the solid WASP, talks of the “barbarous background” Isabel and her friends had; his unbelievably bland goodness is as grotesque as Ryan's chauvinism.

Felicitas rejects the control of the sternly conservative Cyprian only to fall into the lubricious arms of the odious Robert Cavendish, whose free-love harem is less attractive than the celibate community headed by Cyprian. Already under Cavendish's spell, Felicitas is unimpressed when her “aunt” Elizabeth tells her that Cyprian “loves you so much that he can hardly bear it.” Felicitas responds that Cyprian “doesn't know anything about love.” When Elizabeth observes that “None of us knows much,” Felicitas thinks of Cavendish: “He knew about love.” In fact, love in any meaningful sense is a dirty word to Cavendish, and Felicitas learns to appreciate, if grudgingly, the love and shelter offered by her extended family, the company of women.

Shelter is an important word in Gordon's work, sought by all of her characters with more or less success. （It is no accident that the title for her collection of short stories ＼1987］ is Temporary Shelter.） In the first two novels, love and shelter must be searched for outside the traditional family setting. Both Isabel and Felicitas find themselves members of a family in the extended sense. Struck by Eleanor's jealousy of her friendship with Liz, Isabel realizes, “We are connected. … I am not entirely alone.” Reflecting on the relationship among her friends, Felicitas's mother Charlotte realizes that “there was something between them, between all of them. They were connected to something, they stood for something. … When all of them came together, they were something.” It is this “something” that Felicitas rejects, to seek security in the Cavendish ménage, “more like a family, and Felicitas needed a lot of support.”

In The Company of Women, there is only one nuclear family, the one Cyprian leaves behind to enter the priesthood: “I would not be the son of my father, the brother of my brothers, bumbling and heavy and uncouth. I would be part of that glorious company, the line of the apostles. I would not be who I was.” The few families in Final Payments lack love. Liz and John Ryan find marriage more of a convenience for raising two children than a meaningful relationship. Liz finds fulfillment in a lesbian liaison, while John regularly commits adultery. Cynthia Slade has tricked Hugh into marriage and now taunts him with his infidelities.

The real love in the novel is between Isabel and her friends. Liz loves Isabel enough to confront her on occasion with difficult questions: Why fall for John Ryan? Do you realize the complications involved in loving Hugh? When Isabel retreats into her masochistic shell, it is Liz who tells her to get out of bed and confront life. It should be noted that Hugh, also, tries to jolt Isabel out of her self-hatred. How, after all, can you love others if you do not love yourself? Ultimately pushing Isabel to the decision to leave Margaret Casey, Father Mulcahy offers her money to improve her appearance, reminding her of the commandment against self-destruction.

Isabel's work for the county involves visiting families who are paid by the government to provide shelter for old people. Shelter can be provided, but love is not so easy to come by. Visiting one women, Isabel wishes she could really help but thinks of St. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 13:4: “Charity suffereth long and is kind”:

That was it, unless you were willing to suffer in your kindness, you were nothing. Barbarous, Hugh would have said. He would have said that most people feel nothing, that you can be kind in simpler ways. But with me I carried the baggage of the idea. 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? I had thought then, and still thought. 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.

Isabel learns that some of the old people are happy while others are miserable. One old man gives her good advice about her relationship with Hugh and asks that, in return, she show him her breasts; she agrees. An old woman spends her days weeping and begs Isabel to recommend her transfer to a nursing home—there she can use the medication she has been saving to kill herself. She has, after all, nothing to live for, with both her son and husband dead: “What I want is to be with someone who wants me. Wants me. …;Or else I want to die.” Isabel agrees to recommend her transfer: “That was charity, then. You let someone die if they wanted to. … If that was what you wanted—someone to love you for yourself more than anyone else （What I wanted from Hugh）—there was nothing worth living for once you lost it.”

In distinguishing between love and charity, Isabel blurs the seamless nature of love in the Christian understanding, which is that God has a deeply personal love for each human being. Christians believe in the uniqueness of the individual and hold the cognate belief that Jesus died not for the race but for each person. The obligation of the Christian is to love others as God has loved each of us. By this definition the real lovers in Gordon's work are the mothers, who would die for their children “without a thought” （Men and Angels）; interestingly, Cyprian, not related to Felicitas by blood, feels the same way about her as Charlotte does and as Anne Foster feels about her children.

The “charity” that Isabel practices in exposing herself to the old man and helping the old woman commit suicide is a perversion of Christian love. Through the love of her son and her husband, the old woman has experienced the kind of deeply personal love God has for each individual, but she has failed to find in human love the promise of God's love that would keep her from despair and suicide. Instead of helping the old woman to recognize the richness of the love in her life and to confront the pain of loss, Isabel helps her to opt out and fears the same end for herself if she risks loving Hugh.

Isabel has only a dim sense of what she knows her father would call the “error” in this line of thought and action because, long before her father's death, she has lost her faith. Operating on the purely human level, she tries to give Hugh up and embrace life with Margaret: “If we can love the people we think are most unlovable, if we can get out of this ring of accident, of attraction, then it's pure act, love; then we mean something, we stand for something.”

In fact, if she really loved Margaret, she would recognize her responsibility for Margaret's fate: Margaret reached out for human love with Isabel's father, but Isabel defeated the attempt. If she could love Margaret, Isabel would see her not as an ogre to be fobbed off with a check but as a person who has never been loved as Isabel herself feels people must be loved. If she really loved Margaret, who has hurt many people （including Father Mulcahy） and spread scandal, she would heed the advice of Jesus: “If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother” （Matt. 18:15）. In short, if Isabel really loved Margaret, she would relate to her, and this she never does. Margaret Casey is an important “type” for Gordon, who will create a similar character in Laura Post in Men and Angels. Like Isabel, Anne Foster will encounter the unlovable; her actions will be somewhat different, but they too will be circumscribed by the limitations inherent in a response that cannot, or will not, transcend the human level.

Of course, Gordon's own experiences lie behind the struggle with love in all her work, behind the unconventional communities of the first two novels and behind the obsessive motherhood of the third. These experiences include her Catholic education in the fifties, when she would have learned by rote most of the Church's doctrines, as summarized in the Baltimore Catechism. My guess is that Mary Gordon, consciously or not, was profoundly influenced by the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ. In The Company of Women, Robert Cavendish praises Felicitas's abilities as a writer and declares: “‘I think the three women in this room could be at the vanguard of the new movement. Felicitas the head, Sally the hands and Iris the heart.’ The mystical body of Christ, Felicitas thought, but said nothing.”

According to the Catechism, “the Catholic Church is called the Mystical Body of Christ because its members are united by supernatural bonds with one another and with Christ, their Head, thus resembling the members and head of the living human body.” Since Catholics were also taught that every human being, either directly or by extension, belonged to the Church, the Mystical Body is, in fact, the human race with Christ as its head. The Church derives the notion of Mystical Body from Scripture: in John's gospel, Jesus says that “I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” （15:5）. Writing to the Ephesians, St. Paul says that the Father has made Jesus “head over all things to the church, which is his body” （1:22-3）. In the chapter of I Corinthians that immediately precedes the famous disquisition on love that Gordon refers to in Final Payments and uses in the title Men and Angels, Paul writes most eloquently on this concept: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. … And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” （12:12-13; 26-27）.

Every human being, then, is a member of the same family; blood ties matter far less than the unity all people share in Christ. The doctrine of the Mystical Body lies at the heart of Catholic belief; its concept of a community that makes no distinctions based on such human accidents as race or sex is an ideal the church has always sought to realize. Mary Gordon has said, “I guess what I see as valuable in the Church is a very high ethic of love which exists in the context of the whole of European civilization.”

Schooled in this approach to life, Gordon explores the boundaries of love, hopelessly limited on the merely human level but transformed when viewed in relationship to the transcendent. Very revealing are her selections for a 1985 symposium on “The Good Books: Writer's Choices”:

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, George Herbert—a 17th-century poet—and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. In Herbert, it is the perfection and the understatement of the language that allows for a simple encounter with the divine; the understatement allows for tremendous expansiveness. Simone Weil writes of a vision of God as love, and the relationship of the love of God to human life. It is rigorous, absolute, and passionate. In all three works, it is the link between spirituality and passion, as well as the absoluteness of vision. Much of my work deals with the limitation of human love; the vision of the absolute is the ideal that we as humans are striving against. If one talks about a spiritual quest, it is about this pursuit of absolute love.

Gordon's choice of preposition in the penultimate sentence says a great deal. “We … humans strive against ＼emphasis mine］,” not toward, the vision of the absolute, the ideal explored by Weil, Herbert and Donne. So far, her fiction has avoided the “spiritual quest,” which would make “absolute love” its goal, and has focused instead on “the limitation of human love.”

Therefore, her protagonists fail to acknowledge the divine dimension in human love; like the narrator in Francis Thompson's “The Hound of Heaven,” they flee from the demands of absolute love, which is God, and try desperately to find substitutes for transcendence. In the first two novels, Isabel and Felicitas reject the Church at least partly because they do not really understand the substance of Christianity that lies beneath the accidents of discipline and ritual. Isabel seeks in vain for shelter in sex or in masochism. Felicitas seeks in vain for shelter in sex or in motherhood.

In her review of Men and Angels, Margaret Drabble notes that “this is a deliberately domestic, at times claustrophobic novel,” one, indeed, in which very little happens on the surface. The Fosters plan to spend a year in France, where Michael will teach while a French colleague replaces him at Selby College in Massachusetts. But Anne decides to stay in Selby with the two children because an old friend, the art dealer Ben Hardy, offers her an opportunity to write the catalogue for an exhibition of paintings by Caroline Watson, an American artist who died in 1938. “Her misfortune was to be a merely first-rate painter in an age of geniuses.”

From the start, then, Gordon makes this “ordinary” family extraordinary by physically separating the parents; the Foster family is seriously weakened. Anne's decision to stay home precipitates the action, since she needs a live-in baby-sitter so that she can work. She reluctantly hires Laura Post, having conceived an instant dislike for this twenty-one-year-old who reads only the Bible. Laura is convinced that she is God's specially chosen creature （compare the status of Isabel and Felicitas!）, destined to rescue Anne and her children from their pagan ways, their attachment to the flesh. Ultimately, she decides that she can rescue Anne only by taking her own life. Her suicide and its aftermath comprise the final movement of the novel.

In the earlier novels, the protagonist incorporates two extremes of behavior. Here, the extremes are split into two characters, who are meant to reflect one another; the masochist and the mother confront each other as distinct individuals. Early in the novel, Gordon goes to some trouble to suggest that Laura and Anne physically resemble each other. Thus, Anne has white skin and blue eyes, reddish hair, “a small bosom and no waist,” and “comical size-eleven feet.” Laura has “the light blue watery eyes of many redheads, which her thick glasses clouded and enlarged. There was something opulent about her skin: it was white, translucent.” If Anne has big feet, Laura has “large, protruding ears.” Later, Anne notes that Laura is wearing the same perfume and eye shadow Anne herself uses.

It would seem that no two people could be less alike than Laura and Anne, but this physical resemblance haunts the novel and forces the reader to consider that the all-too apparent obsessions of Laura are somehow related to the obsessive motherhood of Anne. Indeed, they share more than physical resemblance and makeup. With Michael they share the experience of mothers who failed them in one way or another. Lucy Foster, abandoned by her husband when Michael was four, could not handle domestic life: “Anne often wondered how Michael had physically survived his early childhood.” By the age of eight, he did all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning. But he never had cause to doubt his mother's love for him, despite her neglect of the house. Anne's mother not only disliked home life and failed during the simplest domestic crises; she never cared for Anne as Anne's father does; the mother has always feared that Anne's success would overshadow her sister, who even in adulthood resents Anne. Both Michael and Anne “had been, as children, mothers, both involved in the conspiracy at the center of the lives of children of deficient parents.”

Anne's only real failure in life occurs in 1974, when she loses her job at Boston's Gardner Museum: “She had felt shame then, as she had never in her life felt it before. … She knew, for the first time then, that failure made you feel like a criminal.” Unfortunately, Laura has never known success, and her lunacy derives directly from her brutal childhood. In The Company of Women, Felicitas recalls that, for some months, she was unable to treat Linda as her child: “I neglected Linda; I neglected her shamefully, but she is all right. I have read that a mother's rejection can cause autism and schizophrenia.”

A mother at seventeen, Mrs. Post rejects Laura because Laura's birth represents the end of her freedom. （Interestingly, Anne and Mrs. Post are the same age: Anne could also have a twenty-one-year-old daughter; instead, her older child is only nine.） The damage is compounded by the passivity of Laura's father, who makes no effort to intervene when the mother mistreats Laura and favors their younger daughter. Mrs. Post withholds love from Laura and also destroys Laura's innocence, not only by tossing bloody menstrual napkins anywhere but by committing adultery in the middle of the afternoon.

The Spirit first comes to Laura after a particularly vicious attack by Mrs. Post; her mother's rejection causes her to “find the Lord.” From the start Laura's “Christianity” scorns and fears human love; so badly hurt by her mother, she avoids risking love and thus cripples her Christianity. Rejecting the possibility of human love, Laura leaves home and takes up with a sect of religious fanatics whose leader insists that the Lord desires the joining of his body and Laura's “flesh to flesh.” Later, she sleeps with Anne's philandering friend Adrian, whom earlier she had fantasized marrying, because she wants to keep him from Anne. “Laura did not understand marriage; the idea of it disgusted her: choosing a partner for the urges of the flesh, in filth creating children to be hurt and caused to suffer.”

Laura abhors sex and fears human attachments. When she fantasizes about marrying Adrian in Anne's house and living with him nearby, she catches herself: “They would love her but she would not love back as much. Because she still would have the Spirit. They would have to stay but she might leave at any time because she knew that attachments meant nothing. … She would have to be careful. Careful that she did not start to need, careful to remember that it was all nothing.” Ironically, Laura eventually dreams of a kind of celibate marriage with Anne; when Anne fires her for neglecting the children, she takes her life in order to win Anne's love, to win love that she has never known.

Presenting Laura with Fear and Trembling and Waiting for God as Christmas presents, Michael “tried to tell her about them. But she didn't care. Books would lead no one to the Spirit. In the Scripture she found all she needed.” Laura's tragedy is that she cannot find a human love to validate her love of God. She is completely isolated; she excommunicates herself from all human and religious community. Laura Post is the unloved child who never really understands the “whole point of the Gospels. She read them over and over, and she never got the point. … That she was greatly beloved.” Unfortunately, “the love of God means nothing to a heart that is starved of human love.” The deranged Laura kills herself to save Anne Foster; ironically, her suicide does have a lasting effect; it destroys forever Anne's illusion that she can shelter her children from life and its dangers simply by the force of her motherly will.

Desiring to save her children from life, Anne exposes them to it sooner than she ever was exposed herself—indeed, she doesn't learn how awful it can be until confronted by Laura's suicide. Isabel in Final Payments decides that life is “monstrous: what you had you were always in danger of losing. The greatest love meant only the greatest danger. That was life; life was monstrous.” Anne recognizes this truth in the abstract, but it takes Laura to incarnate it for her, when she is thirty-eight years old. Gordon demonstrates Anne's obsessive love for her children in as much detail as she documents Laura's lunacy.

Anne's mother-love demonstrates the truth of a remark addressed to her at one point in the novel: “You're a great believer in the power of blood. A real primitive you are, aren't you?” Early in the story, Gordon writes: “No one would ever know the passion she felt for her children. It was savage, lively, volatile. It would smash, in one minute, the image people had of her of someone who lived life serenely, steering always the same sure, slow course. As it was, they would never know, she was rocked back and forth, she was lifted up and down by waves of passion: of fear, of longing, of delight.”

At the crisis of the story, when Laura inadvertently allows the children to walk on an icy pond probably not firm enough to hold them, Anne brings the children to safety and then turns to Laura. “The desire to put her hands around Laura's throat, to take one of the large rocks on the shore and smash her skull, to break the ice and hold her head under the water till she felt her life give out was as strong as any passion Anne had ever known.” The gravity of the situation justifies Anne's anger. But it is also clear that Anne lives far from the extended families of the earlier novels and is unfamiliar with the concept of the Mystical Body, with its promise that blood is not all-important, that there are relationships that transcend the physical.

Long before this crisis, Gordon makes clear that religious belief is foreign to the Fosters; Anne's mother admits that her daughters “were both brought up quite irreligiously. I went to convent school for twelve years and had all I could take. Perhaps that was rash.” Consequently, “Anne had never understood the religious life. She could be moved by it when it led to some large public generosity. … But there was another side to it she couldn't comprehend. People led religious lives in the way that people wrote poetry, heard music.” As for the children, “Peter and Sarah hadn't been told anything about the devil.”

Yet someone Anne greatly respects and admires, Caroline Watson's daughter-in-law Jane, has a religious life and articulates some of the most important insights in the novel. It is Jane who realizes that Laura missed the “whole point of the Gospels” and who identifies Anne as “a great believer in the power of blood.” Out of a sense of guilt over the death of her husband, Stephen, Caroline's illegitimate son, Jane “turned to faith because it showed the possibility of forgiveness for the unforgivable.”

Caroline's inability to love Stephen, her own flesh and blood, angers Anne, and Caroline's mistreatment of her son threatens Anne's ability to write about her objectively. “Whenever Anne thought of Caroline's treatment of Stephen she came upon a barrier between them that was as profound as one of language. … She couldn't imagine Peter or Sarah marrying anyone she would prefer to them, as Caroline had preferred Jane to Stephen.” Stephen's death at the age of twenty-eight was the result.

When Michael returns from France for Christmas, the Fosters visit Jane Watson. Michael notes that she has many of Simone Weil's books. Ben comments:

“Michael, be a dear boy and don't go on about Mademoiselle Weil. It's bound to make Jane and me come to blows. All that hatred of the flesh. …”

“It was Simone Weil who brought me to a religious life. Well, she and George Herbert.”

“How so?” asked Michael.

Anne was embarrassed. She thought that religious people shouldn't talk about such things in public. … But Michael, she knew, had no such qualms. To him a religious disposition was only one more example of odd human traits quite randomly bestowed, like buckteeth or perfect pitch. Anne felt it was something powerful and incomprehensible. It made people behave extraordinarily; it made them monsters of persecution, angels of self-sacrifice.

From her curious vantage point, Laura recognizes the emptiness of the lives around her. The reader is forced to wonder how long Anne and her family can survive in the culture of secular materialism that surrounds them. It is no accident, surely, that Laura's choice of suicide—slitting her wrists and bleeding to death in a bathtub that overflows down to the basement—destroys much of the fabric of the Foster home; possessions will not provide shelter, any more than mother-love can.

Laura's suicide is the desperate act of a deranged person. Yet it may force Anne to move beyond “blood” and mother-love to some concept of love that can embrace even the unlovable. Like Isabel with the old people in Final Payments, she practices “charity” on Laura, buying her beautiful clothing and fussing to celebrate her birthday. Unable to like Laura, Anne fails to love her, fails to provide her even a foster home. Loving Laura would mean taking some responsibility for her, providing her with real help, probably with psychiatric care.

Laura's death brings her the recognition she was denied in life: Anne could not love her, but she pledges to mourn for her. Weeping in Michael's arms, Anne reflects on the love that features so prominently in Gordon's work:

People were so weak, and life would raise its whip and bring it down again and again on the bare tender flesh of the most vulnerable. Love was what they needed, and most often it was not there. It was abundant, love, but it could not be called. It was won by chance; it was a monstrous game of luck. Fate was too honorable a name for it. … ＼Laura］ was starved, and she had died of it. And Anne let her husband's love feed her. Let the shade of its wing shelter her, cover her over. But no wing had ever covered Laura. The harsh light had exhausted her until she could only go mad. And then the whip had fallen. And Anne knew that she had helped the whip to descend.

In partially recognizing love's power, Anne may come to understand the love that transcends human love, that consoles even in cases like Laura's. At Laura's funeral service, for the first time in their lives, Peter and Sarah hear religious language as the priest recites several Psalms, including Psalm 121: “The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.” The Fosters may come to recognize that familial love is not enough. But Gordon's focus, always, is on “the limitation of human love,” and that limitation is nowhere more brilliantly presented than in Men and Angels.

Mary Gordon uses various strategies to explore how people live and relate to each other in the late twentieth century. In Final Payments and The Company of Women, she studies the Catholic subculture in disarray as certainties fade; shelter is offered by extended families, earthly echoes of the Mystical Body. But these families are flawed, even that of Father Cyprian, whose “company of women” is insular and isolated. There is no sense here of the universal community predicated by St. Paul or the Canon of the Mass. The third novel, Men and Angels, shifts the focus to an “average” American family. But the shelter offered here, in an a-religious environment, is so fragile that it cannot include the troubled Laura.

“Nobody wants to write about yuppies,” Gordon herself has remarked. “It's much more interesting to write about a closed, slightly secret, marginal group.” This preference explains the first two novels, some of the short stories, and the work in progress, a treatment of the Irish immigrant experience. Yet Men and Angels is her “yuppy novel.” As such it dramatizes forcefully the dilemma of our culture, which has left God and Church behind but not yet found a satisfactory substitute—the best it can offer is a Foster family.