A woman of ninety-six, four foot two in flat shoes, arrives at a police cordon in Times Square where her granddaughter is being held. She asks what has happened. She is told nothing. And she decides he is the kind who only talks to people he has in custody, and cracks him across the shin with her lion’s head cane. It works. The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins opens with a run of scenes like this, and a group should be warned that the opening pace is not the book’s.
The Same Name, Three Times Over
Every chapter of The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins carries a name at the top, and there are only ever three: Graziella, Grace, Ella. All three are legally Graziella Valentini, and all live within a hundred yards of each other by page forty.
The eldest is a widow and former novice nun who runs a parish food pantry, a feral cat programme and a litter patrol, and is openly contemptuous of being thanked for any of it. Her daughter is a Columbia psychology professor of sixty whose husband has just announced he has met someone and whose house has flooded the same month. Her granddaughter is twenty-seven, diabetic, newly out of a commune in a Brooklyn warehouse, and sure she washed out of MIT a fortnight short of her degree.
The naming goes back to a prologue in 1900, when a ten-year-old sails out of Rome having walked past a marble statue of the three Graces every morning of her life. Her surname, Tuttoilmondo, means something like the whole world, and Rollins holds that for four hundred pages before cashing it.
What The Three Graces of Pearl Street Keeps Quiet
Underneath the domestic comedy is a novel about money, and it is better.
The grandmother taught herself to trade out of a postman’s widow’s savings, and the figure she reaches is one of the book’s two genuine shocks. She has been dispersing it for twenty-six years and made concealment a condition of every gift: no plaques, no named funds, no letters of thanks, a parish priest sworn to silence. Entire families on her street have been rehoused and do not know by whom.
This is the engine of The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins, and the structural choice that makes it land is the withholding. The reader learns the scale at almost exactly the moment the woman’s own daughter does. Nobody notices the quiet neighbour until the quiet neighbour stops.
Opposite her sits a cardinal who will take her endowment for the parish kitchen if seventeen per cent comes off the top for the diocese and another tenth for its schools. She declines, declines a papal honour, declines an audience in Rome, and the archdiocese closes her kitchen and briefs a reporter against her. It is the sharpest institutional writing in The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins, and it is also where the novel’s reach exceeds its grip.
The Chapters That Carry It
The final stretch is remarkable, and groups that gave up at page ninety threw away the point of the book.
Rollins gives the oldest woman her own chapters as she fails, and the writing in them is specific rather than decorative: hearing sharpening instead of dimming, Italian coming back as the language she thinks in, the sense of drifting out into water and having to choose to step back onto land. A long set piece built on the Feast of the Seven Fishes recipes does more emotional work than any funeral scene could.
The best supporting character in The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins is a man who nursed his own mother through a death she fought. He explains what is coming, and his advice is practical in the way only experience is: that a dying person can rally twice before the end, that the feet go cold first, and that someone who is not given permission to leave will stay and fight, and that the fighting hurts. Rollins puts that speech in a kitchen between a washed frying pan and an espresso cup, and it is the most useful page in the novel.
Where The Three Graces of Pearl Street Asks Too Much
Four reservations about The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins, and the first is the one a group will argue about.
- Saint inflation. By the close the grandmother has rehoused dozens of families, rescued roughly ten thousand animals, delivered twins in a church lavatory and given away a nine-figure sum. Her dying instruction is that nobody put her on a pedestal. The preceding hundred pages build the pedestal, and the epilogue adds a plinth.
- The cardinal is a cartoon. A percentage, a sneer and an aggrieved face in the front pew. A churchman with an actual argument would have made the critique far more dangerous.
- The husband is beneath contempt and therefore weightless. A forty-year marriage collapses, and the man inside it has no redeeming trait, down to the overpriced lilies sent to a funeral he skips.
- The epilogue over-delivers. A revelation in a Roman piazza about why one child was sent to America and not another is beautiful and sufficient. What follows is one image too many.
For the Group
Start with the eulogy, because it is the book’s own argument against itself. A character stands up and asks the parish not to canonise a woman who refused all credit, in a novel that has spent its final act cataloguing her miracles. Ask the room whether a story can honour anonymity by publishing it, and then whether any of them would have accepted a gift on her terms, with no way to say thank you. Several characters call the secrecy a form of control.
Then money, which is where The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins is least comfortable. She gives away roughly everything and leaves her granddaughter a temporary job and an old car. Is that generosity or a lesson taught at someone’s expense? The granddaughter is relieved; a group will not agree that she should be.
Then faith and institution. The novel is warm about a parish and cold about a diocese, and never asks whether you can keep one without the other. A group with churchgoers in it will have plenty to say.
Then grief, if the group can take it. The last four chapters of The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins are written from inside a dying woman, a daughter and a granddaughter in turn, and anyone caring for a parent should know that going in.
Content notes: a protracted death at home, described clinically and at length, with the dying woman arranging her own funeral and refusing medical intervention; a second death from cancer recalled as a fight to the end; adult children undone by grief; type 1 diabetes managed on the page, including blood sugar crashes; polio recalled; a long marriage ended by serial infidelity; a club that bars women and a church that punishes one; radioactive material found by an untrained civilian, with exposure and isolation; domestic violence recalled in a letter; hunger and a food bank at work; brief sex.
More for the group: The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke by Jane Green is the obvious companion, another older woman whose real life was not the one her family described. Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm suits a group drawn to what gets passed down a family unsaid. Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild is the pick if the dying and the instructions left behind are what held you. And The Sisters of Crimson House by Melissa Anderson Sweazy works if the house itself was the draw.
Where It Leaves You
What a group carries out is a list of objects, none of them worth anything. Seed packets labelled years ahead for a garden the labeller will not see. A chipped measuring mug that has carried broth to every bedside in the family since the First World War. Lasagnas stacked in a cellar freezer with a note saying you will be all right so long as you eat.
The Three Graces of Pearl Street by Elizabeth Wellington Rollins is at its most persuasive when it argues that this, not the fortune, is the inheritance, and that the fortune was only ever a way of buying more of it for other people. Whether it trusts its own argument is the question worth two hours and a bottle of something red.