The Maid

“There’s nothing quite like a perfectly stocked maid’s trolley early in the morning. It is, in my humble opinion, a cornucopia of bounty and beauty. The crisp little packages of delicately wrapped soaps that smell of orange blossom, the tiny Crabtree & Evelyn shampoo bottles, the squat tissue boxes, the toilet-paper rolls wrapped in hygienic film, the bleached white towels in three sizes—bath, hand, and washcloth—and the stacks of doilies for the tea-and-coffee service tray.”

The cornucopia is a horn or horn-shaped basket from which pours a never-ending bounty. To Molly, every tiny, individually wrapped item is a small treasure. When she is promoted to head maid, she fills each of her maids’ trolleys with this magical bounty, including occasionally a small additional treasure just for the maids.

“When I don my maid uniform—not the frumpy Downton Abbey style or even the Playboy-bunny cliché, but the blinding-white starched dress shirt and the slim-fit black pencil skirt (made from stretchy fabric for easy bending)—I am whole. Once I’m dressed for my workday, I feel more confident, like I know just what to say and do—at least, most of the time. And once I take off my uniform at the end of the day, I feel naked, unprotected, undone.”

Molly feels safest in her black-and-white world where the rules are clear, and nothing is ambiguous. She is anonymous and invisible. When she takes off her uniform, she becomes Gray again in a world of moral ambiguities where she seems to be perpetually making mistakes.

“Yes, dead. Why call it anything other than what it is? She did not pass away, like some sweet breeze tickling the heather. She did not go gently. She died. About nine months ago.”

Going gently references the Dylan Thomas poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” The speaker in the poem begs his father to fight against death. In fact, Molly’s grandmother did not resist death. It is Molly who fought it and eventually gave in.

“That’s just the kind of person she is—a cheater—and not the Robin Hood kind. The Robin Hood kind takes for the greater good, restoring justice to those who’ve been wronged. This kind of theft is justified, whereas other kinds are not. But make no mistake: Cheryl is no Robin Hood. She steals from others for one reason only—to better herself at the expense of others. And that makes her a parasite, not a hero.”

Although Molly has not yet achieved the authority of adulthood, she nevertheless has a fierce sense of justice and is capable of perceiving moral ambiguity—she can see that sometimes rules against theft or murder are overridden by what she sees as a higher law—protecting others from pain.

“‘Giselle is good like that. Instead of making me feel stupid, she helps me understand things. ‘Molly, you stand too close to people, you know that? You have to back off a bit, not get right in people’s faces when you talk to them. Imagine your trolley is between you and the other person, even if it’s not really there.’ ‘Like this?’ I asked, standing at what I thought was the correct distance. ‘Yes! That’s perfect,’ she said, and she grabbed both of my arms and squeezed. ‘Always stand that far away, unless it’s, like, me or another close friend.’”

For people who struggle with social interactions, this can be one of the kindest things a friend can do—alerting them without judgment when they are behaving oddly. Giselle does this while still conveying that she loves and accepts Molly by referring to herself as a close friend.

“The Caymans are my favorite. I could live there forever. Charles owns a villa there, and the last time he took me, I filled this timer with sand from the beach. I turn it over sometimes and just watch the sand run through. Time, right? You gotta make things happen. Make what you want out of your life before it’s too late.”

Giselle talks about making things happen, but Giselle doesn’t make things happen. She waits for rescue, first by a wealthy man who will take care of her, then by Rodney. Giselle watches the sand run through the hourglass, but like that sand, she never goes anywhere.

“‘A clean home, a clean body, and clean company. Do you know where that leads?’ I could not have been more than five years old when she taught me this. I looked way up at her as she spoke. ‘Where does it lead, Gran?’ ‘To a clean conscience. To a good, clean life.’”

Can simply being clean lead to a clean conscience? In the last lines of the epilogue, Molly will state that she sleeps soundly because she has a clean conscience, which she achieved not by keeping a clean house but by embracing moral ambiguity and her power. Gran imparted a great deal of wisdom, but she also taught Molly to live by black-and-white rules. They were necessary rules for a child, and they helped Molly navigate her life thus far, but to become an adult, Molly must embrace a certain amount of dirt.

“I do not like to lie outright, and this was not an outright lie but rather a truth that remains the truth provided no further details are requested. And Gran didn’t inquire further.”

This is a very black-and-white rule—that deception by omission becomes a lie only if questioned. Molly tells only one outright lie in the story when she tells Rodney that she told Detective Stark about Juan Manuel. In every other case, everything she says is true—just not the whole truth.

“‘There’s one thing you must promise me,’ she said. ‘I will not go to the hospital under any circumstances. I won’t spend my end days in an institution surrounded by strangers. There’s no substitute for family, for the ones you love. Or for the comforts of home. If there’s anyone I want by my bedside, it’s you. Do you understand?’ Sadly, I did. I’d tried as hard as I could to ignore the truth, but it was now impossible. Gran needed me. What else was I to do?”

Gran tells Molly that she will have to help Gran to die. When Mr. Preston relates the story of how Gran helped him understand that he had to let his wife go, we see that Gran regards death as a family affair—in which one’s loved ones are intimately, sometimes directly involved. This idea will help Molly to justify the first Mrs. Black's murder of Mr. Black.

“I truly am grateful for her guidance. With Gran gone, much of the time I feel like a blind person in a minefield. I’m constantly stumbling upon social improprieties hidden under the surface of things. But with Giselle around, I feel like I’m wearing a breastplate and am flanked by an armed guard.”

Giselle is in some ways a less-than-ideal friend. She is weak and trapped in an immature role as both vixen and damsel in distress, but she loves Molly to the best of her ability. She demonstrates that sometimes even a single friend can make a profound difference.

“We are a team, a unit, a family, a colony. When we adopt a hive mentality, it means we are all working toward the greater good, the greater good of the hotel. Like bees, we recognize the importance of the hotel, our hive. We must cultivate it, clean it, care for it, because we know that without it, there will be no honey.”

This passage is Mr. Snow’s motivational speech to the hotel staff. The principles of working together and recognizing the importance of every member of the hive from top to bottom are good values. The problem with a hive mentality is that it relieves individuals of autonomy and responsibility. Mr. Snow tries to inspire his employees with pride in their “hive,” but in doing so, he limits their individuality.

“‘You want this mess cleaned up, and so do I. We both seek a tidy closure to this unfortunate situation. A return to normalcy.’ ‘What I’m seeking is the truth, Molly. About how Mr. Black died. And right now, I also want to know the truth about you.’”

Two moral codes are at odds here. Molly’s highest good is protecting others from pain. In her mind, Mr. Black’s murder is an unfortunate situation, but what’s done is done. Nothing good would come from naming the first Mrs. Black as the murderer. The detective serves the law and objective truth. Unfortunately, the objective truth would, in Molly’s mind, cause unnecessary pain. It would simply create more mess.

“Her eyes drill into mine. ‘Whatever it is you’re hiding, whoever you’re trying to protect, we’ll find out. One thing I’ve learned in my business is that you can hide dirt for a while, but at some point, it all comes to the surface. Do you understand?’ ‘You’re asking me if I understand dirt?’ Smudges on doorknobs. Shoe prints on floors. Dust rings on tabletops. Mr. Black dead in his bed. ‘Yes, Detective. I understand dirt better than most.’”

The detective may think that she is intimidating Molly by using a metaphor so close to her home ground, but it is Molly's home ground. For all of Molly’s naiveté, she has a core of ruthlessness that will not let her give way when someone violates her boundaries.

“That’s the trouble with pain. It’s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most. Truth isn’t always the highest ideal; sometimes it must be sacrificed to stop the spread of pain to those you love. Even children know this intuitively.”

There is a saying that a trouble shared is a trouble halved. Molly believes the opposite. She talks about the incident in which she was bullied by her classmates. Her grandmother’s finding out about it didn’t relieve Molly’s pain; it only forced Gran to share it. In the case of Mr. Black’s death, telling the truth wouldn’t bring him back; it would only cause pain to his daughter and ex-wife.

“‘Molly, we’ve spoken with many of your coworkers. Do you know how they describe you?’ I pause my regimen to shake my head. ‘They say you’re awkward. Standoffish. Meticulous. A neat freak. A weirdo. And worse.’ I reach ten chews and swallow, but it does nothing to alleviate the lump that has formed in my throat. ‘Do you know what else some of your colleagues said about you? They said they could totally picture you murdering someone.’ Cheryl, of course. Only she would say such a heinous thing.”

Detective Stark is deliberately hurting Molly. The detective may have thought this would demoralize Molly to the point that she would allow the detective to dominate her, but as deeply as Molly is hurt by the revelation, the fact that Stark is bullying her merely makes Molly more stubborn.

“I should not have pawned that ring […] I applied the wrong rule in my head, ‘the finders-keepers rule,’ when I should have applied the ‘do unto others’ rule. I regret that choice, but it doesn’t make me a thief.”

Molly’s mistake—applying the wrong rule—illustrates her growth. A hard and fast rule would be, “It’s not mine, so don’t take it.” Instead, she juggled more than one possible rule. In this case, her decision was complicated by the fact that she could see no way that pawning the ring would cause pain, and it would relieve a great deal of suffering on her part. Some of that suffering was caused by Mr. Black, so it seems reasonable that he should recompense her.

“‘It sounds good,’ Juan Manuel says. ‘The way you speak, it’s so nice all the time. More people should talk like you, Molly.’”

Giselle once called attention to the oddness of Molly’s speech—like Eliza Doolittle’s in My Fair Lady. Juan Manuel, on the other hand, prefers Molly’s style of speech over anyone else’s. With him, Molly can be loved completely in a way that no one else has been able to do.

“‘Perhaps you jumped to some conclusions about me. You expected certain reactions that you consider normal, and when you didn’t see those reactions, you assumed I was guilty. You made an A-S-S out of U and Me.’ ‘That’s one way to put it,’ she says. ‘My gran always said that to live is to learn. Maybe next time you’ll avoid assumptions.’ ‘We’re all the same in different ways,’ Juan Manuel adds. ‘Huh,’ she says. ‘I suppose.’”

Detective Stark seems dubious, and it seems likely that she doesn’t understand the idea of being the same in different ways. She may, however, have learned from Molly at least one way in which a person can be different without being a criminal. In fairness to her, she was not wrong in believing that Molly knew something about the murder that she wasn’t telling. If she hadn’t tried to bully Molly, she might have had half a chance to persuade Molly to confess what she knew.

“We’d discussed it. I’d promised. She was always so rational, so logical, and I could not deny her this last wish. I knew it was what she wanted. She did not deserve to suffer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I took her serenity pillow from behind me on the chair. I put the pillow over Gran’s face and held it there.”

This is the first step of Molly’s Coming of Age. She does something that goes against her instincts and the law. She obeys what she believes is a higher law: to protect her grandmother from pain. All her later struggles, especially the decision to shield Mrs. Black, stem from this moment. It does not seem to occur to Molly to get rid of the pillow afterward. Another person might associate it with the pain and grief of death, but Molly takes comfort from it. It reminds her that she did the right thing in accepting that she could not prevent her grandmother’s death but she could prevent further suffering.

“Justice is like truth—it, too, is subjective. So many of those who deserve to be punished never receive their just deserts, and in the meantime, good people, decent people, are charged with the wrong crimes. It’s a flawed system—justice—a dirty, messy, imperfect system. But if the good people accept personal responsibility for exacting justice, would we not have a better chance of cleaning the entire world, of holding the liars, the cheaters, the users, and the abusers to account?”

Molly sees the justice system as dirty, messy, and imperfect—all the things she feels driven to fix. She refers to decent people being charged with the wrong crimes, but she knows that Rodney didn’t murder Mr. Black and she still contrived for him to be convicted of that crime. She felt he deserved it for the crime of using, abusing, and deceiving her and Juan Manuel; the extra (and probably most severe) punishment was the one she imposed on him herself. Her idea that people should personally exact their ideas of justice expresses the novel’s theme of Vigilante Justice.

“I started to put it together then, only then. ‘Mrs. Black,’ I asked. ‘Did you…did you kill Mr. Black?’ ‘I suppose that depends on your point of view,’ she said. ‘I believe he killed himself, slowly, over time, that he became infected by his own greed, that he robbed his children and me of a normal life, that he modeled corruption and evil in just about every way a man can.’”

Mrs. Black shares Molly’s view of justice. She argues that Mr. Black had corrupted himself. Eventually, he became so destructive he had to be put down like a rabid animal. His actions led him to that point, and Mrs. Black was just doing what was necessary.

“‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Do you ever feel like the world is backward? Like the villains prosper and the good suffer?’ It was as though she were reading my deepest thoughts. My mind flitted through a short list of those who had taken from me unjustly and had caused me to suffer—Cheryl, Wilbur…and a man I’d never met, my own father. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I feel that way all the time.’ ‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘In my experience, there are times when a good person must do something that’s not quite right, but it’s still the right thing to do.’”

This passage could be simplified to “the ends justify the means,” but it is actually more complex. A society establishes laws because it cannot trust every individual to act justly. Everyone considers themselves a good person, yet they may differ widely on what they consider justice. Because laws are necessarily rigid, they allow a certain amount of injustice as a necessary evil. In archetypal terms, Molly and Mrs. Black, being queens, are entitled to judge beyond the letter of the law. In the real world, as the people most harmed (by Mr. Black and Rodney respectively), they could be said to have the right to judge them.

“‘I’m largely invisible. Just another gray-haired, middle-aged woman in loose-fitting clothes and sunglasses walking out the back door of the Regency Grand. Just another nobody.’ [Mrs. Black was] invisible in plain sight, just like me.”

Their invisibility is another connection between Molly and Mrs. Black. Molly is a person of low status who lives in the background of other people’s lives. Middle-aged women also sometimes feel overlooked by society as having lost their value when they cease to be of interest to men. In Mrs. Black’s case, this is exemplified by her being cast off by Mr. Black and replaced with a younger woman.