Yellow Roses

In her second and final collection, from 1977, Irish American author Cullinan’s expertly crafted short stories illuminate the changing roles and expectations of women, and particularly Catholic women in an increasingly permissive post–Vatican II world. In “The Sum and Substance,” a young woman undergoing surgery for ovarian cysts finds her ideas and beliefs brought up short against the inescapable corporeality of her situation: “The body took the blows. Nothing was lost on it…. The body remembered.” Acutely observed scenes of love and loss often turn on the mutable meaning of objects in “Yellow Roses,” “The Accident,” and “A Foregone Conclusion,” a trio of stories about a woman’s doomed affair with a Protestant married man in which his gifts of roses and an heirloom ring stand as hollow tokens of love that belie their intended significance. On a lighter note, in “Voices of the Dead,” the errant musings of a devout matriarch turn a domestic Easter Mass into a sanctified Tin Pan Alley sing-along. Such moments of everyday transubstantiation are revealed with unforced grace through precisely chosen details and lifelike dialogue.