Fitting Rooms

Mother of Sorrows Richard McCann Pantheon, 196 pages $20

"My name is Maria Dolores," the mother in Richard McCann's new story collection tells her young son and his playmates. "In Spanish," she goes on, "that means 'Mother of Sorrows.'" Indeed, Maria's sorrows echo through McCann's carefully interconnected fictions, as does her theatrical, nostalgic voice. A typical bedtime story: "Once upon a time," she tells her son, "my parents looked like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald."

If Maria starts off with drama, McCann begins his collection more quietly. Maria is living with her Pentagon-employed husband and two proto-gay sons (the unnamed narrator and his older brother Davis) in the Eisenhower-era Maryland suburbs. In one early story, "Dream House," the two brothers try to persuade their father to build a bomb shelter. In another, the narrator tries to keep a secret diary during a fishing trip on which he's supposed to be bonding with his father. Both projects fail. And, in "My Mother's Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame," the narrator and his best friend spend a hazy summer dressing in Maria's clothes; as the boys are caught, the summer and the friendship end.

McCann pays careful attention to childhood's supposedly small sorrows. But soon there are larger ones: the father's early, unexpected death, Davis' drug addiction and, eventually, his fatal overdose. There's alcoholism. There's AIDS. But, in contrast to Maria, McCann is never melodramatic or indulgent; his voice is always restrained.

In "The Universe, Concealed," the collection's final story, a man living with AIDS who has lost his lover and many friends vacations in the Adirondacks with a woman who has recently undergone a mastectomy and lost her son. How, the story asks, do two people who have suffered greatly talk to each other about their pain? Whose story, at any one moment, deserves priority? McCann describes calculations and conclusions: "Dead son trumps dead ex-lover, but AIDS trumps cancer. No matter how much the ante gets raised, no one ever wins the pot."

McCann is unafraid to raise questions that can't easily be answered, including the question of genre: These linked stories could easily be read as novel or memoir. As McCann moves deftly between surfaces of thought and deed, pain and pose, the reader is never sure what to countenance as fact, and what to suspect as fiction. In the end, McCann is perhaps suggesting, neither memoir nor fiction is adequate to the task of describing-let alone adumbrating-loss.

If these stories are full of questions (and questionable stories-within-stories), some comfort and certainty seem to be found in objects, in materiality. The narrator of "My Mother's Clothes" may be unable to comprehend the stories his father tells himself about his son: In the father's version, the son who spends his summertime dressing up as a girl is transformed into a boy who loves football and swimming. These are desires, dreams, classically feminine, though not here. In this reversal or transference, the contents of his mother's closet are more "real," tactile, accessible: "her black mantilla, pressed inside a shroud of lilac tissue paper; her heart-shaped candy box, a flapper doll strapped to its lid with a ribbon, from which spilled galaxies of cocktail rings and cultured pearls."

These stories, too, are most delicate objects, carefully constructed time capsules that manage to avoid sentimentality and nostalgia while recognizing the ways in which our own stories are built: always, on those we've been told long ago.