62 pages • 2 hours read
Nita ProseThe Maid
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Monday”
Prologue Summary
The protagonist introduces herself. She is the maid who cleans your hotel room, erases the grime you leave behind, and disappears without a trace. If she does her job well, she is invisible, but she sees everything. She seems so insignificant, yet knowledge is power. She says, “I am your maid. I know so much about you. But when it comes down to it: what is it that you know about me?” (3)
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Molly says she knows her name is ridiculous: Molly the maid. But she loves her job at the Regency Grand Hotel, returning every untidy room to a state of perfection. She loves the hotel with its ornate Art Deco features and the grand marble staircase. She loves her black-and-white uniform—her second skin, her invisibility cloak—and she loves her cleaning cart, a cornucopia of delicate, sweet-scented individually wrapped treasures of soap and shampoo.
Molly acknowledges that she isn’t good in social situations. She offends people without meaning to and doesn’t read their body language. Her grandmother used to help her understand the social rules, but Gran is dead. She didn’t pass away or go gently. She died.
One Monday afternoon, she walks into Mr. and Mrs. Black’s suite to clean it and finds Mr. Black dead. She calls the front desk for help. As she hangs up, she looks into the mirror and sees not only her face but everything she failed to notice when she entered the room—including the presence of another person. Shocked, she faints, as she is prone to do when reality becomes overwhelming. Previously, in the morning, Molly had almost been knocked over by Mr. Black at the door of the suite. When Molly entered, Giselle was in the bathroom crying.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Alone in the office of Mr. Snow, the hotel manager, Molly tries to calm herself by going through her day from the beginning: she entered the hotel through the front doors and greeted Mr. Preston, the doorman. He has worked at the hotel for over twenty years, and he greeted her as “my dear girl” (20). Molly asked after his daughter Charlotte, a lawyer. Mr. Preston is the kind of man Molly would want as a father.
Molly then changed into her uniform and checked her cleaning trolley. She was not surprised to see that it hadn’t been replenished; her supervisor, Cheryl Green, had been on duty the night before. Cheryl is lazy and sloppy and steals tips from the other maids. Molly respects the other two maids on her shift, Sunshine and Sunitha, because they know how to clean a room spotlessly.
Molly then went to the kitchen to visit Juan Manuel. She passed him a key card for Room 308, which will be empty that night. Molly’s friend Rodney told her that Juan Manuel lost his work visa and has nowhere to sleep. His family lives in Mexico, and they need the money he sends them. Every day, Molly stashes Juan Manuel’s bag in a room that will be empty. That morning, Molly noticed burns on Juan Manuel’s arms.
Her next stop was Social, the hotel’s restaurant, to collect the newspapers she delivers to guests. Molly has a crush on Rodney Stiles, the head bartender. She has only had one boyfriend, Wilbur, and he turned out to be a liar and a cheat. Rodney greeted her and pointed to an article in the newspaper. Molly noticed he was wearing a Rolex watch and felt pleased that Mr. Snow recognizes Rodney’s superiority as a bartender pays him accordingly.
The newspaper article was about the Blacks. It said that Mr. Black’s daughter Victoria is a 49 percent shareholder of his company, and Mr. Black wants those shares back. His first wife, however, the first Mrs. Black, said the only way Black Properties & Investments would survive is if Victoria controlled the company. The article implied that the company started to decline when Mr. Black married his second wife, Giselle. Molly said that she felt sorry for Giselle, and Rodney agreed. Molly wondered how well Rodney knew Giselle.
When Molly reached the Blacks’ suite, she was almost knocked over by Mr. Black leaving. Giselle was in the bathroom, crying, so Molly cleaned everything but the bathroom and left, planning to come back later. While cleaning, she noticed the safe was open and saw a flight itinerary sticking out of Giselle's purse showing two one-way tickets to the Cayman Islands.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Sitting in Mr. Snow’s office, Molly hears footsteps in the hallway. A female police officer enters with Mr. Snow. Mr. Snow introduces the officer as Detective Stark. Molly doesn’t know the protocol for meeting police detectives, so she curtsies. Detective Stark says she would like to take Molly to the police station to interview her.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Watching Molly across the table in the interview room at the police station, Detective Stark says that Molly seems to be in shock and perhaps that’s why she has trouble expressing her emotions. Molly decides not to explain that she is behaving perfectly normally—for her.
Detective Stark asks whether she saw anything out of place or unusual when she entered the Blacks’ suite. Molly takes the time to consider what the detective wants to know and what she wants to share. She reports that there was nothing out of the ordinary except the pills on the bedside table. She doesn’t mention the safe door, the flight itinerary, or what she saw in the mirror.
The detective asks Molly how well she knows Giselle, and Molly flashes back to their first meeting: Molly arrived to clean the room and Giselle shook hands with her as if they were equals. Giselle seemed genuinely interested in Molly’s life. Over the months, they built up a friendship, exchanging personal histories. Giselle liked the things about Molly that other people considered odd. “You’re a bit weird,” she said, “but I like you” (46). She mentioned that Molly talked like Eliza from My Fair Lady.
Giselle seemed to recognize that Molly didn’t always understand other people’s nuances. Molly told her that the other staff members make fun of her, and Giselle told Molly that Mr. Black’s children from his first marriage hate her. The first Mrs. Black, Giselle said, was strangely nice to her. Molly agreed with the first Mrs. Black that Giselle should leave her husband.
Giselle once noticed Molly admiring a little brass hourglass that had symbolic meaning for Giselle—it was given to her by someone she considered a mentor. Giselle gave the hourglass to Molly. One day, Giselle gave Molly a makeover. When Giselle rolled up her sleeves, Molly noticed bruises. Giselle admitted that Mr. Black sometimes hurt her. When the makeover was done, Giselle showed Molly the results and said it was like a duckling becoming a swan or Cinderella at the ball. Molly found the change off-putting.
Detective Stark distracts Molly from her recollections by asking if she had any dealings with Giselle and if Giselle ever said anything that might help the investigation. Molly considers the question carefully and replies, “I’m a hotel maid. Who would want to talk to me?” (54)
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Molly returns home. Entering the empty apartment, she looks down at the pillow on the chair by the door. The needlepoint cover is the serenity prayer: 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.
Molly goes through the nightly cleaning routine she did with her grandmother. When Gran was alive, their cleaning ritual was both a chore and a form of intimacy. Her grandmother used to say that a clean home led to a clean conscience and a clean life. Molly reflects on how right that was.
As she cleans, Molly looks back on her life. Her mother left her with Gran when Molly was a toddler. Molly earned good grades in school but was teased by her classmates. When she grew older, Gran asked her what she wanted to do with her adult life. Molly’s dream was to be a maid.
After Molly started work at the hotel, Gran began talking about post-secondary education. Molly decided she would like to study hotel management at the community college. Gran’s savings (in the form of a Fabergé egg) would cover the cost of tuition. However, before classes began, Molly met Wilbur. They dated, then Wilbur stole the egg and disappeared. Molly was so ashamed of being duped that she never told her grandmother.
Shortly thereafter, Gran told Molly that she had pancreatic cancer and didn’t have long to live. She said she didn’t want to die in a hospital. Molly understood that her grandmother was asking her to help her die when the time came.
Molly comes back to the present clutching her grandmother’s serenity pillow to her chest.
Part 1 Analysis
The author never identifies where the Regency Grand hotel is located, but Nita Prose lives in Toronto. The general tone of the characters and setting—neither explicitly British nor American but English-speaking—suggests that the setting is a city in Canada. The lack of a stated location gives the story an anywhere feeling.
The Prologue directs the reader to focus their attention on the maid. Understanding Molly is the key to solving the murder; whom does she trust? What would motivate her to hide information? When does she follow rules and when does she break them? As the reader gradually builds a picture of Molly in their mind, the final revelation of the murderer seems inevitable.
Molly is an unreliable narrator. She is naïve and frequently trusts people she shouldn’t. The reader must pick up clues that Molly inadvertently drops, like the fact that Rodney wears a Rolex—much too expensive for anyone on a bartender’s salary. Molly interprets the Rolex to mean that Rodney is paid more than an ordinary bartender because he is good at his job. The reader recognizes that Rodney is almost certainly involved in crime.
This is also a coming-of-age story. In archetypal terms, coming of age is the story of a maiden (Molly the maid) leaving the shelter and safety of the tower or the palace to assume her place in the adult world. Ordinarily, coming of age occurs earlier in life, but Molly has been sheltered by her difficulty in understanding and interpreting other people. Her grandmother kept her at home longer than is usual for a young woman because Molly needed time to adapt to adulthood. The Regency Grand Hotel is a shelter, a palace protecting a vulnerable maiden until she is ready to establish her place in the world.
The narrative in Chapter 1 doesn’t follow chronological order. Molly begins with a description of herself and her life. She lists and describes the things she loves—tiny shampoo bottles, individually wrapped toilet paper rolls—all perfect, discrete, contained. Most people wouldn’t see their beauty just as most people don’t see Molly’s beauty or the beauty that she brings to the world. Most of the story is told in the present tense, but Part 1 is primarily in the past tense as Molly goes over her day trying to reorient herself after the shock of discovering Mr. Black’s body.
Molly tries to ground herself by putting her memories in order, but the discovery of Mr. Black’s body is especially disorganized in her mind. The time distortion—the way Molly’s memory jumps back and forth in time—reflects her disorientation and shock. The author also uses this temporal displacement to distract the reader from the fact that Molly doesn’t say what or who she sees in the mirror before fainting. It is later revealed that Molly sees Mrs. Black, Mr. Black’s first wife. Withholding this detail from the reader and from Molly (who forgets what she sees after fainting) preserves the mystery and heightens the suspense.
According to the informal rules of the mystery genre, the author should give the reader the information they need to solve the crime themselves. This scene, however, subverts that expectation; readers are left in the dark and share Molly’s uncertainty. Molly broaches the subject again, however, keeping it in the readers’ minds. Rather than trying to figure out who murdered Mr. Black, the reader tries to figure out what—who—Molly saw. The puzzle is to understand Molly: Is she cunning enough to shield Giselle if she knows Giselle was the murderer? Did Molly see Giselle in the room but see something else that exonerates her?
In Chapter 4, the author tells the reader again that Molly is shielding someone when Molly considers what she is willing to share with the detective. She leaves out several things: the open safe, the flight itinerary in Giselle’s purse, and what she saw in the mirror. It’s an obvious step for the reader to assume Molly saw Giselle in the mirror. Bed this is a red herring. The clue is when she says the wife is always the first suspect. There are two wives in the story. The reader is meant to overlook the first Mrs. Black.
The author shows the reader examples of Molly’s moral ambiguity. When speaking of her grandmother’s death, Molly says, “She did not go gently” (11). This is a reference to the poem by Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” The poem is best known for its final couplet addressed to Thomas’s dying father: “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems, 1934-1953. Phoenix, 2000). At first, the reference suggests that Molly was not resigned to her grandmother dying. Later, we see an additional layer of meaning. Gran did not slip away gently; she asked Molly to help her. Molly, then, is capable of murder in the right circumstances. In addition, Molly’s remark that Mr. Preston is the kind of man she would want as a father foreshadows the revelation that he is quite probably her grandfather.
