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in The Pastures of Heaven.
    The most charming and humorous story in the collection features the Lopez sisters, rotund, devout Roman Catholics left to their own devices after the death of their father. Part of the charm results from their attempts at self-deception, at convincing themselves that they run a restaurant and merely “encourage” their customers, the ones who buy three or more enchiladas, with sexual favors. As John H. Timmerman has observed, “Never would the sisters admit that their sex was for sale, a solely commercial venture relegated in their peculiar theology to fallen women.” Once they begin this practice, their business booms, and they make a comfortable place for themselves within the valley. It is again the intrusion of the Munroes into the situation that precipitates their demise and compels their admission that they are in fact prostitutes, and they leave the valley, as did the Maltbys, for San Francisco. They find the strength for this recognition in their simple faith and in their love for each other. This story, originally written as part of a manuscript called “The Green Lady” and then incorporated into Pastures, provides not only comic relief but another demonstration of the demands of “respectable” society for conformity. Essentially whores with hearts of gold, out of a tradition begun in the stories of Bret Harte, the Lopez sisters are only the first examples of Steinbeck’s use of prostitutes in his fiction, which he was to continue most graphically in his next book, Tortilla Flat, and later in East of Eden.
    The story of Molly Morgan is the most artistically complex of all the stories, particularly with regard to the handling of time and motivation. In most of the stories the use of the omniscient narrator simply provides a means of commentary and the establishment of character by exposition rather than dramatic revelation. In this story, however, Steinbeck’s skillful juxtaposition of memory with current action allows for the theme of the past living in the present. The great mystery in the background is the whereabouts of Molly’s father, an irresponsible parent and absent husband who nevertheless looms as a romantic hero in his daughter’s mind. When Molly arrives in the valley to interview for a teaching position with John Whiteside, who heads the school board, their conversation is interspersed with sections recounting Molly’s painful memories of her youth. This device also allows for the dramatic irony of the contrast between the tragic memories and the benign personal history she relates to Whiteside. She acquires the position and succeeds until the intrusion of Bert Munroe, who describes the profligacy of his new hired hand, and Molly is forced to confront the conflict between the image of her father as a romantic hero and the awful reality that he may well be the drunken sot sleeping in Bert Munroe’s car. It is her fear that her father may have returned, and her desire to sustain the respectability of society, that destroys her happiness.
    Respectability is not the issue for Raymond Banks but the confrontation of attitudes. One of the most successful farmers in the valley, Raymond conducts the affairs of his chicken farm in images of purity, with white buildings and chickens and ducks. What does not quite fit the picture is his interest in the hangings at San Quentin, where an old friend serves as warden and allows Raymond to observe the executions, an event he approaches with great detachment, scornful of those who have an emotional reaction. It is the
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intrusion of Bert Munroe, particularly his graphic depiction of a mutilated and dying chicken, that forces Banks to regard the hangings from a new perspective, and he cancels his trip. This is another of the stories in which the resolution consists of a change of perspective, not the outcome of a physical conflict, and it is a rich psychological study most closely