Maine (14 page)

In the bedroom closet, Alice had stashed a paperback copy of
Live Alone and Like It
, the book she had heard Trudy raving about over the phone. She often riffled through its pages, reading a line aloud to her sister: living alone, according to
Vogue
editor Marjorie Hillis, was “as nice, perhaps, as any other way of living, and infinitely nicer than living with too many people or with the wrong single individual.”

One night Alice read to Mary in bed in an exaggerated, glamorous voice, a bit like Trudy’s: “You can, in fact, indulge yourself unblushingly—an engaging procedure which few women alone are smart enough to follow. Even unselfishness requires an opponent—like most of the worthwhile things in life. Living alone, you can—within your own walls—do as you like. The trick is to arrange your life so that you really do like it.”

She looked up from the pages smiling, imagining an apartment full of clean linens, pink bath towels, and untouched canvases ready to be painted, all hers.

“Can you imagine?” she said to Mary.

Mary shook her head, looking a bit sad. “I wouldn’t like it,” she said. “I want to live with someone, always.”

Alice sighed. “I know you do.”

Her sister grew silent, and after a moment Alice realized that she had begun to cry.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Never mind, go to sleep.”

“Mary. What?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Go on.”

“I’ve done things a woman isn’t supposed to do,” Mary said. “I’ve sinned in the worst way. But I’m in love, and I don’t understand how it can be wrong to—well, never mind, Alice; go to sleep.”

Alice didn’t respond. Her body shook with anger. She had kissed her share of boys, but she was saving her virginity until marriage. Everything to do with sex frightened her—the mechanics of it, the risk. One girl in the neighborhood, Bitsy Harrington, had gotten pregnant in the back of a Plymouth by a sailor who told her it was the only way for him to touch her heart. Rita and the other girls had made terrible fun of Bitsy, but Alice thought that she herself might not have known any better. Things in that department were a mystery to her. When she started her period at the age of fourteen, she had believed that she was dying and run home from school in tears.

Her sister had always seemed similarly foggy, but now here she was, saying that she had gone all the way with Henry. Mary was leaving her behind, making her feel like a stupid heel, when everyone knew that Alice had always been the more sophisticated of the two. More important, there was the issue of eternity to think about—her sister was sinning in one of the worst ways, damning herself, and for what?

Alice wanted to know where they had done it. Would he ever marry her sister now? It made her feel queasy, just thinking about it. Mary might have ruined everything for them both.

Alice went to Mass the next morning and in addition to praying for her brothers, which she always did, she lit a candle for Mary.

A few weeks passed. It was October, the first cool evening of fall. They sat down to dinner with their parents after work as usual. Mary had made a roast chicken and mashed potatoes. Alice was eager to get through the meal so she could pick up the extension in the pantry and find out what had happened at the office today when Trudy broke the news to her boss that she was moving to the suburbs to start a family and would have to quit working soon. Trudy had told her friend the night before that today was the day, and she was terribly nervous that he’d blow a gasket. Why, Alice did not know. How hard could it be to find another secretary?

She turned to Mary. “Trudy told her boss about Adam’s proposal today.”

“How did he take it?”

“I’m waiting until after supper to find out.”

Mary grinned. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring the phone right to the table.”

Alice took a bite of chicken. “I would have if I could manage to pull it out of the wall.”

“Alice,” their mother said. “You’re awful. Pass the peas to your father.”

He was at the far end of the table, reading the paper, several glasses of whiskey into the evening. He had strolled in from the bar down the corner a half hour earlier, looking like he wanted a fight. But now he seemed more likely to pass out in his potatoes.

Alice gave him the peas without even looking at him. She went on, “Trudy suspects Adam only asked her because he knows he’ll have to ship out soon. Sounds sort of unromantic if you ask me.”

“I don’t think so,” Mary said. “A proposal’s a proposal.”

“Maybe if Henry had been drafted, he would have asked you by now.”

“Alice!”

“Well—when do you think he’s going to ask?” Alice said. “It’s been a year. What’s the holdup?”

She wondered if perhaps he was one of those wealthy cads who thought he could just string a girl along forever, though Henry didn’t seem like the type.

“Honestly, Alice, the things you say!” Mary looked exasperated, but she began to laugh. “Why are you so excited to get rid of me, anyway?”

Alice thought,
Because the sooner you get married and start having babies, the sooner I’ll be free to live whatever life I want
.

But she wouldn’t say that—it would sound selfish. So she only responded, “I’m not!”

Suddenly there came a harsh voice from the end of the table. “Will you two stop yapping about it?”

Their father looked up from his paper, his eyes glassy. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, cleared his throat. “Every night, your poor mother has to hear you scheming and planning and it makes me sick. You’re living in a pathetic dreamworld.”

Alice found him revolting. He didn’t know what he was talking about, and it was wicked of him to pick on Mary of all people. Mary, who would never hurt a fly.

Alice thought she’d try to get him onto a different topic, and so she said, “Hey, Pop, what do you think about the Red Sox? Are they going to make it to the Series this year?” She had no clue about the Red Sox, they all knew that. But it was something to say and she felt the need to protect her sister.

“You shut up,” he slurred, fully worked up now. “Mary, you used to be the good one. Now look at you. Ever since you met that man, you’re a different girl. Too big for your britches. And for what? Someone like that—he’s never going to marry a girl like you.”

Though Alice had been thinking the same thing a moment earlier, she was livid. Of course he was going to marry her. Henry was going to save them both. Maybe that’s what made their father so mad.

“My daughter turned down by a cripple,” he said with a cruel laugh, and Alice imagined socking him clear across the jaw.

She looked at her mother, but she just sat there, silent. There was no telling what he might do to her when he got like this, or to any of them for that matter. Their mother had never once come to their defense, even when they were small.

“He will marry her,” Alice said defiantly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He rose from his chair, standing slowly, coming toward her. She vowed not to move, but at the last second, as Mary screeched, Alice got up and ran to the bedroom, with her sister close behind. He chased them up the stairs, grabbing hold of Mary’s skirt for an instant before she managed to pull away. Alice slammed the door right in his terrible face and stood holding it closed until she heard him slink off.

“He’s a fool,” she told Mary, who was crying hard now.

“Oh, come sit by me.” Her sister sat beside her on the bed, putting her head in Alice’s lap. “It will all work out, you’ll see,” Alice said, stroking her brown hair.

She was trying to sound certain, but she couldn’t sleep that night for wondering what would happen next. Three weeks later, she would know for sure. But by then Mary was gone.

   Alice folded the towels one by one, filling a plastic laundry basket to its brim. She had hoped that coming up to Maine would help her stop thinking about her sister, but she realized now how foolish that had been. Maine was for quiet contemplation, Daniel had always said. Or, in her case, just plain stewing.

She carried the basket on her hip like a toddler, out through the house’s screen porch and over to the cottage. She saw a cardinal swoop down from one of the pine trees and land on a bush by the grassy patch where they parked the cars, since there was no driveway. Daniel had fancied himself an amateur bird-watcher, and had always given them silly names. She imagined what he might have called this one: Miss Scarlet, maybe.

There was a ceramic plaque on the cottage door that read Céad Mile Fáilte. “A hundred thousand welcomes.” She and Daniel had gotten it on a trip to Dublin probably thirty-five years earlier. For some time, it had hung on the front door of their house in Canton, and then she tired of it, and so, like many other posessions with which she couldn’t quite part, she brought it to Maine.

Alice unlocked the door and took in the familiar musty scent. She went to the bathroom linen closet, piling the towels one on top of the other.

So much of her life had been defined by the loss of her sister. Daniel said it was the reason for her drinking when the kids were small. For her insomnia, her moods. She told him she didn’t know if all that was true—he had never known her before Mary’s death, so how could he be so sure?

For years at a time, Alice could go along fine, not dwelling on it, until something came along again to open up the wound. This year it had been that story in
The Boston Globe
. Two years ago, Alice was sorting through a box that had once contained Patrick’s ice skates and was now full of papers and photographs. At the very bottom, she found an envelope. Alice lifted the flap, and flipped through photos of her brothers in uniform; a few of a twenty-six-year-old Daniel on the porch in Maine, with baby Kathleen in his lap; and then a shot of two young women and one man, clad in long khaki shorts and button-down tops, their hair blowing wildly in the Newport breeze, all of them laughing gaily. On the back, in her sister’s handwriting, were the words,
May 28, 1943. Me, Alice, and Henry
.

It had been taken six months to the day before Mary died, and just the sight of it had sent Alice into a tizzy. She tore the picture up and threw it in the trash, only to regret doing so an hour later.

There were always small reminders: she still felt a twinge every time she drove by the Liberty Mutual headquarters on Berkeley Street where Mary had worked; or at Easter, remembering the silly rabbit-shaped cake Mary used to bake each year. She often wondered who Mary might have become. What sort of life would have unfurled from out of her youthful dreams, what sort of children she and Henry would have brought into the world. It was strange to think that Alice had turned into a mother of three, while her entirely maternal sister never had the chance to bear a single child.

Daniel had always tried to steer her away from the what-ifs, which he considered only wasteful, morbid thoughts. But now he too was gone. Since seeing that newspaper article so many months earlier, Alice was haunted by memories of her sister even more than usual. Maiden Mary, the newspaper had called her—anyone who was old enough to remember that night remembered her story.

The part they didn’t know was that Alice was to blame. Sometimes she thought that carrying the knowledge of it around was a piece of her penance. Lately, as if God were emphasizing this, she had become painfully aware of the pairs of old ladies everywhere she went. In church pews and at the beauty parlor, and walking along the sidewalks of Boston, arm in arm. The men didn’t last—that was something they never told you when you were young and desperately searching for one, thinking he’d make your life all that it was supposed to be. No, in the end, it was only women; in the end, just sisters. She had her friends, but that was different. Friends kept their distance after a certain age. She couldn’t exactly invite Rita O’Shea over for a slumber party or call her at midnight with her worries.

If Mary had lived, they might be here in Maine together. If Mary had lived, Alice’s whole life might have been different.

It was almost lunchtime. She thought she might as well stay in the cottage for a while and make herself a sandwich. She went to the kitchen—her old tiny summer kitchen, which she had complained about countless times over the years, yet so preferred to all the marble and stainless steel next door. She opened up a can of tuna, draining the water into the sink. She had cleaned out the fridge a week earlier and filled it with new condiments and pickles and seltzer and Pepsi and a dozen fresh eggs. In the freezer, there were Popsicles and several leftovers from her own kitchen back home, wrapped in tinfoil. On the counter, she had lined up a bag of onions and a stack of paper plates and cups. In the coming weeks, her children and grandchildren would come through, adding their own bits and pieces, so that by the end of the summer there would be four half-eaten boxes of cereal and several almost empty bags of chips in the cupboard; in the freezer, a lone frozen waffle and a gallon of ice cream from Brigham’s with one bite left in the bottom of the drum. But the staples came from Alice.

She had once heard her grandson Christopher ask Kathleen how it happened that the cottage was always fully stocked. “Magic,” Kathleen had said, and Alice had interrupted, “Actually, there’s nothing magic about it, Chrissy. It’s called your grandmother.”

Now she pulled a small onion from the bag and a knife from the block on the counter, part of a set she had bought off the TV a couple winters ago. She began chopping.

She chopped in silence for a minute or so, saying a Hail Mary in her head as she went.

Outside the window, something darted across the lawn, catching her eye. Her chest tightened. Her hand locked tight around the knife. She knew exactly who was out there.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she said out loud.

She stormed outside, just in time to see the blasted baby rabbit eat a hunk out of one of her beautiful pink roses.

“No! Out! Out!” she said, stomping toward the creature like a maniac, waving the knife in the air. He perked up his ears, and looked straight at her. The nerve!