Maine (19 page)

Clare was always telling Ann Marie that she wished she could do more. She was the sort of person who spent so much time telling you how busy she was that the complaint in itself seemed like a full-time job.
Try having three children
, Ann Marie wanted to say. Clare had a cleaning lady who came in once a week, and when Ryan was small she had employed a nanny. Ann Marie would never dream of paying someone else to do her job. Not because they couldn’t afford it, but because no one could ever care for your children or your home as well as you could, she was certain of that.

Most of the time, the work of caring for Alice was left to Ann Marie, even though she had her own mother to think about. She had lost her father at twenty-seven and gotten none of the sympathy that the Kellehers seemed to want for their loss, even though they were all in their forties when Big Daniel died. Ann Marie herself was hit hard by it. He was such a good man, so kind to her and to everyone. He had been the one who kept them all together. But it was clear that her in-laws expected her not to react, even as she made the arrangements for the funeral by herself.

What bothered Ann Marie most about the Kellehers was the way they all leaned on her, yet never quite let her in, or even said thank you. She was certain that her sisters-in-law, to whom she felt superior in many ways, to be honest, still thought of her as the poor white-trash girl who had conned their brother into marriage.

Pat sympathized, but really this was a woman thing. Though Alice was an ally, sort of, Clare and Kathleen were mostly unkind to her, as if Ann Marie were just a guilt-inducing reminder of how little they did for Alice, for the family overall. On holidays, Clare would bring one side dish—
one!
—and spend the entire evening griping about how hard it had been to make it, until everyone at the table praised her bland sweet potatoes or her runny green bean casserole.

Kathleen came empty-handed. According to her, this was because she had to travel. (Did travel preclude a person from picking up a bottle of wine or a box of crackers and some cheese?) Before she moved to California, she would bring her two huge slobbering German shepherds along on Christmas. Ann Marie would be forced to let the dogs stay in her kitchen, where they had once been caught licking the leftover roast.

Those dogs were ancient now. Alice had told her that a year ago, Kathleen paid something like ten thousand dollars to give one of them chemotherapy. Ann Marie had never heard of such a waste of money in her life. She had cousins in Southie who would have been put to sleep for less.

Now when Kathleen came home for the holidays, she often tried to educate Ann Marie’s children on the Gospel According to Her. A few months after Patty’s first baby was born, he cried at dinner, and she rose to take him into the bedroom and feed him, as Ann Marie had instructed.

“Nurse Foster right here at the table,” Kathleen had said. “It’s perfectly natural, honey. Don’t go lurking in the shadows. Don’t be one of those women pumping in the handicap stall at the Olive Garden.”

Maggie nearly spat out her wine. “Really, Mom? The handicap stall at Olive Garden?”

Ann Marie responded softly, mortified, “I think Patty feels, as I do, that some people are made uncomfortable when they see a woman’s bare breast. And so it’s really better for everyone, including the baby, to find a nice solitary spot.”

“That’s bullshit,” Kathleen said.

If this were her own sister, or if she were a different sort of woman, perhaps Ann Marie might have pointed out that Kathleen had bottle-fed both her kids from the time they were three months old. Instead, she swallowed her reply.

“I hardly think this is appropriate dinner conversation,” Alice had said, silencing them. Patty went into the bedroom and shut the door.

There was a long pause. A few years earlier, Daniel Senior would have been there to make a joke, lighten the mood. Ann Marie assumed they were all thinking as much.

Finally Clare said, “Could someone pass the milk?” and they laughed.

Three solid hours of storytelling followed, as if for Daniel’s sake.

The Kellehers allegedly hated one another, but when they got together and things were good, they stayed up all night, laughing and talking. More so when Daniel was alive, but still now from time to time.

Even after thirty-three years of marriage, Ann Marie sat at every family dinner and listened to them tell the same stories, over and over. She had never met a family so tied up in their own mythology.

What drove her around the bend most was when Alice would mention Sherry Burke, then put her hand on Ann Marie’s and say proudly, by way of explanation, as if Ann Marie didn’t know, “Patrick used to date her. She was the daughter of the mayor of Cambridge. A beautiful girl. She’s a senator now!”

“A state senator,” Ann Marie would correct her.

Her husband had dated Sherry Burke in high school, for goodness’ sake.

Sitting there on those nights as they drank countless beers and bottles of wine (the next morning she would be the one to pick up all the glasses and load the dishwasher and wipe down the surfaces), she sometimes dreamed of screaming at them: “If you tell that goddamn story one more time, I will tie up the lot of you and duct tape your big mouths shut.”

She meant the kids also—the nieces and nephews and even her own three, who were true Kellehers in their way. After letting the thought linger in her head a moment, she’d be overcome with guilt and do something ridiculous, like decide that she should go into the kitchen and whip up some brownies from scratch, then serve them warm with ice cream on top.

   On the way to the dollhouse show, she called Patty from the car. There was no answer on the cell or at home, so she tried the office number.

“What’s up, Mom?” Patty answered, sounding flustered.

“It’s a Sunday. What are you doing there?” Ann Marie asked.

“I’m swamped.”

“Where are the kids?”

“I think they went to a sports bar to watch the Sox game.”

“What?”

“They’re home with Josh.”

“Oh. Are they doing okay?”

“You saw them two days ago,” Patty said with a laugh.

“I know,” Ann Marie said. “Maisy’s coming over after school tomorrow for our special tea party, right? The teacher knows I’m picking her up?”

“Yes. Hey, Mom, I’ve got a brief I need to file first thing tomorrow, and I’ve barely made a dent. Can I call you later?”

“Sure, honey,” Ann Marie said.

They hung up. Ann Marie felt a bit sad, but couldn’t say why.

Turning onto Sycamore behind two twenty-somethings in a yellow convertible, she wondered whether Patty knew about Fiona. They had never been particularly close. Patty had always liked her cousin Maggie better. Ann Marie had once washed her mouth out with soap when she came across the child taunting her younger sister: “You’re not really my sister, Maggie is.” Fiona was crying her eyes out, but Patty kept on going.

Recently, Patty had remarked that she was shocked by how cruel her children could be.

“Sometimes they’re like animals,” she had said. “I want to lock myself in the bathroom and hide. How did you survive?”

Ann Marie waited in a short line of cars to turn onto the expressway. She glanced at the clock, even though she knew she was right on time.

Patty and Fiona seemed to start talking more after they moved out of the house, just as Ann Marie and her own sisters had. At Ann Marie’s urging, her daughters began writing letters to each other from college. (She had sent them the cutest stationery sets and plenty of stamps.) They chatted easily and went out for lunch when they were home for the summer. But then Fiona left for Namibia. Had she been running away? Was that what it was all about? Ann Marie didn’t know anyone with a gay child. Who could she ask?

She hadn’t spoken to Fiona about it since that first night at dinner. When she wrote to her daughter, she reported on the latest family gossip and the weather and her dollhouse. She could feel herself almost begging Fiona not to bring it up. Fiona, in turn, wrote about her work with children, the beautiful sunset over her village. Ann Marie felt relieved. She had long wanted Fiona to come home, but now, to her great shame, she almost wished she could freeze time: Fiona, caring, generous, far away, like she had always been. Not here, bringing a girlfriend over for Sunday dinner, adopting an African baby and carrying him around Newton in a sling while everyone whispered and stared.

Pat had said that it felt almost like a death: He was mourning the fact that Fiona would never have a wedding, never meet that charming do-gooder husband they had imagined for her, never have kids. Most painful of all, she could not possibly be a true, accepted Catholic now. If such places did exist, she would not go to Heaven with the rest of them.

Somehow Ann Marie had managed to raise three children who turned their backs on Catholicism in all sorts of ways. She had taught their CCD classes and taken them to church every Sunday. Pat was a eucharistic minister. She had forced Little Daniel to be an altar boy, and enrolled the girls in the choir. She had done all she could, and for what?

Patty had married a Jewish man, which was fine. Times had changed; Ann Marie still had to remind herself of that once in a while. She had held out hope for some time that Josh would convert. When he didn’t, she dealt with it. But the fact that they had chosen not to baptize the grandchildren was like a slap in the face.

For a long time, Ann Marie thought her younger daughter was the one true Catholic among them. Fiona was prone to strep as a child, and once, after several rounds of antibiotics failed to keep it away for long, they took her to get the blessing of Saint Blase, patron saint of throat ailments, as a last resort. The blessing seemed to cure her, which generated Fiona’s lifelong fascination with the saints. She had always been such a good girl. She worked in the service of the poor. But somewhere along the way Ann Marie must have failed her. She didn’t understand how it could have happened.

She was terrified at the thought of her mother or Alice finding out about Fiona. Or even Kathleen—wouldn’t this development just make her year?

Women like Kathleen who focused so much on what motherhood had cost them rubbed her entirely the wrong way. She had always thought the whole movement toward “me time” and all that was a bunch of selfish garbage. But now she wondered what exactly she had gained by being selfless. She had gladly been everyone’s chauffeur and cook and maid and advisor. Her children were a mess, even so. But each time she decided that she was done, that from now on she’d be carving out time for herself, something always came up: Alice wanted a ride to the eye doctor, or Patty desperately needed a sitter so she could stay late at the office. Was Ann Marie going to refuse them?

She turned off the highway at exit 10 and pulled onto a smaller road. After a few minutes she saw the yellow banner hanging on a plain building up ahead:
Wellbright Miniatures Fair
. She looked down at the seat beside her, where her photos sat in a plain white envelope: the dollhouse from the front, side, and back to show off the Victorian trim, and a shot of each room close up, which looked quite a lot like pages from
Better Homes and Gardens
.

Might she actually win? She’d never say as much to anyone, but she thought she had a chance.

Ann Marie got so excited that she rolled her eyes at herself. She pushed all the nonsense out of her head and pulled into the parking lot.

Alice

Alice put her paper plate in the trash and the tuna bowl in the sink. She filled the bowl with soap and hot water, letting it sit a minute before rinsing it out.

She and Patrick and Ann Marie had driven up to Maine four weeks earlier, at the beginning of May. Pat pulled the boards off the windows and mowed the lawn and fixed the smoke detectors, which were beeping from the far corners of the house in a whiny little chorus. Alice and Ann Marie moved efficiently through first the cottage and then the house, removing the sheets that covered the couches and chairs; unrolling the carpets; plugging the lamps back in; washing down every dusty surface; and vacuuming up the countless dead flies and yellow jackets that somehow managed to find their way inside but could never seem to get out.

There had been an elaborate spiderweb in the cottage shower. It stretched from wall to wall, probably three feet across. As she sliced through it with the broom and then turned the water on full blast, Alice had felt almost bad for the creatures that had spun it. They had had this tiny kingdom all to themselves for months, and then
poof
, it was gone.

She spent the rest of May alone, except for Ann Marie and Pat’s weekend visits. She continued preparing the house and the cottage for the kids, but also clearing things away. As soon as she had signed the papers to give over the property when she died, she realized that it might not be so long. She threw out bags of old sheets and bathing suits and tattered flip-flops that had somehow ended up in the loft. She pulled blankets and clothes from the bedroom dresser drawers and closet. She gathered what seemed like hundreds of shells and pieces of sea glass and the odd sand dollar or starfish, and put them all back on the beach one night at dusk. She gave Daniel’s collection of thrillers and political biographies to the Ogunquit library, their spines stained white by the sun that streamed through the bedroom window. She boxed up glasses and plates from the big house, but she had to be careful not to remove too much from the cottage too soon. She didn’t want the children asking questions.

Kathleen’s daughter, Maggie, would be the first family member of the season to arrive, with her photographer boyfriend, Gabe.

Maggie was the artist of the family. Sometimes Alice thought Maggie was what she herself might have become if only she had been born a generation or two later. Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate. Maggie got straight A’s at Kenyon College. At thirty, she had published a book of short stories about love gone awry.

“Wasn’t it marvelous?” Kathleen kept saying.

Alice did think the writing was quite polished. She even bragged about it to the librarians at her local branch. But how could she read a work of fiction by her own granddaughter without hunting for glimpses of herself, of Kathleen, and their marriages? Kathleen said Maggie was now at work on a novel. Would she come this summer, wanting to collect stories like a vulture? It always felt that way when she asked questions, as if Alice should be chronicled, each heartache and human connection and childhood memory an artifact in a museum exhibit, to be tagged and displayed, a life lived and finished, ready to be studied.

Then again, Gabe, the boyfriend, was one of the few summer guests Alice was actually looking forward to hosting. She was even willing to overlook the fact that he and Maggie shared a bed in the cottage. (Ann Marie’s kids had the manners and good sense to sleep in separate rooms if they weren’t married yet, but she knew she couldn’t expect that from Kathleen’s.)

In the past, when Maggie brought her pampered college friends to Maine, they acted as though Alice were running a bed-and-breakfast, the innkeeper next door. They didn’t bother to invite her to join them, and when Maggie stopped by in the mornings, presumably to do her familial duty, Alice would quickly create a story about all she had to do that day, to keep from looking pathetic.

But Gabe! Last summer, he told jokes and thanked her again and again for inviting him, and sang old songs with her late into the night. He reminded her of different times, when her brothers and Daniel’s would come up to the cottage for long weekends, singing and drinking, everyone merry.

And if she was really being honest, she liked him most of all because one night after dinner, while Maggie was in the bathroom and the two of them—Alice and Gabe—had each had about a bottle of cabernet, Gabe took Alice’s hand and said, “You’re beautiful, you know that? I mean, one of the most stunning women I’ve ever seen. I want to photograph you.”

He was flirting with her! No one had flirted with her in years. Her pulse sped up, and she felt a certain degree of regret when she heard the toilet flushing in the other room. She let him take her picture the next afternoon while Maggie was on the beach. He sent her the finished copy, and Alice cried to see how wrinkly she looked, how goddamn
old
. When he had snapped her in the bright sun, she had felt eighteen again.

Life had been so dreary the past several months. She hoped Gabe might put a spring in her step.

He was a charmer, but still Alice had her doubts about the relationship: generally speaking, Maggie had her mother’s bad taste in men. Kathleen had said once that Maggie was intent on settling down, but Gabe certainly didn’t seem like the marrying type. Kathleen had told Alice that he drank too much, though Kathleen thought everyone drank too much. She had also reported that he and Maggie fought all the time. “He reminds me a lot of Paul,” Kathleen had said, her ex-husband’s name a kind of shorthand for everything that was wrong with men.

Maggie and Gabe would be here any day now, Kathleen said.

“Well, when exactly will they turn up?” Alice had asked her daughter over the phone a few days earlier.

“I think it depends on Gabe’s work schedule. Don’t sweat it, Mom,” Kathleen said, in that faux-calm tone that could make Alice’s blood pressure soar twenty points. “They’ll get there when they get there.”

“I’d like some advance warning so I can get the cottage ready is all,” Alice said.

“Then call Maggie’s cell and tell her that,” Kathleen said.

“She’s your daughter,” Alice said.

“Yeah, well, she’s your granddaughter.”

“Oh Jesus, Kathleen, forget it,” Alice said.

“It’s forgotten,” Kathleen replied tersely.

And that was that. Typical.

The previous winter, after one of her many therapeutic retreats, Kathleen had returned home to Massachusetts for Christmas to tell Alice that she had tried hypnosis and had recalled painful memories from her childhood: Alice making her stay inside the cottage while the other kids played on the beach, because she had been sneaking cookies and had gotten too fat for her bathing suit. Alice leaving her behind at a carnival when she was eight to teach her a lesson after she had thrown a tantrum, coming back to get her hours later, her face streaked with dirt and tears.

“You were emotionally and verbally abusive to me,” Kathleen had said.

Alice wanted to slap her, the way her own father would have if spoken to like that.

“Shut the hell up,” she said finally.

“See? You’re doing it now. Why can’t you ever apologize for what you did, so we can move forward?”

“I have nothing to be sorry for,” Alice said. “You’re the one who should be sorry, Kathleen. You should be thanking me for all I’ve done, not tearing me apart for your own problems.”

She had always been strict with her girls, but what was the alternative? Look at the sort of mothers they had become, in an effort to be soft, to be supportive, and, in Kathleen’s case, to turn her daughter into her best friend. It was pathetic.

The problem with her children and grandchildren was simply that they wanted too terribly to be
happy
. They were always in search of it, trying to better themselves, improve upon their current situation so that they might feel no pain. They thought every problem on earth could be solved by turning inward.

Alice knew where this came from. It was perhaps her greatest failing as a mother that all of these children—her own, and her children’s children, and probably the great-grandchildren, too—were godless. Patrick and Ann Marie were the only ones who even went to Mass. Little Daniel had been an altar boy, and his sisters had sung in the choir, but now none of them seemed to have any involvement at all. Clare said she was still a Catholic in her heart and so was Joe, but they couldn’t stand by and be part of the Church after what had happened in Boston these past few years. Alice thought this was just an excuse to sleep in on Sundays, nothing more. They certainly didn’t stop selling those Catholic artifacts of theirs, so how offended were they, really? The “priest scandal,” as Clare insisted on calling it, was merely a case of a few bad apples. Everyone knew that.

“How can you believe, when the world is such a horrible place?” Kathleen had asked her once, and that was when she realized that she had somehow failed to teach them about the true meaning of faith.

She felt that the Catholic Church had made a horrendous mistake with Vatican II in the sixties. They had tried to make religion palatable, doing away with Latin Mass and head coverings and no meat on Fridays. Her grandchildren had grown up calling priests by their first names, as if they were waiters—Father Jim and Father Bob, and so on. It turned her stomach. The Church had taken the fear and the awe out of the whole equation, so that now her children and grandchildren and millions of others like them felt not even a hint of guilt for going out for breakfast on Sunday mornings instead of to church.

Kathleen called herself spiritual, one of those New Age words that Alice could never quite take seriously. Kathleen had picked it up, along with a whole host of other annoying and ridiculous beliefs, at Alcoholics Anonymous sometime in the late eighties, right after her divorce.

Daniel had made it far too easy for Kathleen to end her marriage. He had advised her to leave Paul as soon as she told them he had cheated. Daniel gave her eight thousand dollars and told her she and the kids could come live with them. When Kathleen said no to that offer, he came up with the plan that she should live in the cottage rent-free for as long as she wanted. No matter that Alice had been planning to have contractors come in and fix the warped floors that spring. No matter that he hadn’t even consulted her, for surely she would have insisted that Kathleen get a job, get herself together. It couldn’t be good for her to be cooped up in the cottage with the children and her depressive thoughts for months on end.

If Daniel had stayed out of it, Kathleen might have found a way to forgive Paul and move forward. Paul Doyle was an excellent son-in-law: he adored Alice. Maybe that’s what bothered Kathleen most about him. He made a decent father and a good provider, and he was a hell of a lot more fun than the AA guys Kathleen brought around later.

The drinking was something else her daughter blamed her for, the most preposterous of all her allegations over the years. Kathleen had become an alcoholic, she said, because of what she had internalized from watching Alice drink.

This made Alice laugh. From the time Kathleen was eleven years old until the day Daniel died thirty-three years later, Alice hadn’t had a single sip of alcohol, even in the moments when she wanted one so badly she could have burst, when she felt herself coming undone and thought perhaps it would be worth it to lose Daniel and the kids just for one measly sip of whiskey. In fact, it was quite possible that she had made it through her first decade of motherhood without killing them all thanks only to Canadian Club.

   After a church trip to County Kerry when the children were young, Daniel became obsessed with the idea of ancestry and getting back in touch with their roots. Neither his parents nor Alice’s had ever been attached to Ireland—her mother had once said that her own mother died trying to flee the place, so she didn’t see much purpose in ever going back. But sometime in the mid-fifties, couples they knew from St. Agnes and the children’s school began making noise about returning to the homeland. And so the parish organized a trip, and they all flew to Shannon and helped build a Catholic orphanage and toured the lush countryside in a rented bus. They photographed ruins and streets that were overrun with sheep. They ate boiled dinners and sang old songs in damp, dark pubs.

When they arrived back in Boston, Daniel bought a book of Irish names and meanings, and cracked it open over dinner.

“We are Kellehers,” he said proudly. “And that means—hold on here—wait a minute, I know you’re all on the edge of your seats.”

He flipped to the page, pretending to consult it with amazement until Alice said, “Oh Jesus, get on with it.”

“Kelleher,” he read, “is the Anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Céileachair, ‘son of Céileachair,’ a personal name meaning ‘companion dear,’ i.e., ‘lover of company.’ Hey, does that sound like your dad or what?”

“Do more!” Clare shouted, for she too was excited by ghosts of the past. “Do Mom’s maiden name,” she said. “Do Brennan.”

Daniel tapped her on the head with the book. “One step ahead of you, little lady. I’ve got it right here. Brennan!” he said loudly, then, reading it over, “One of Ireland’s most common surnames, Brennan derives from one of three Irish personal names: Ó Braonáin, from
braon
, probably meaning ‘sorrow,’ and Mac Branáin and Ó Branáin, both from
bran
, meaning ‘raven.’ ”

“So Mom is a sorrowful raven?” Clare asked. “A sad bird?”

Daniel smiled. “Precisely,” he said. “Mom is my lovely sad bird. What do you think of that, sad bird?”

Alice hated him in that moment. She looked at her three children sitting there, staring and demanding more—more food from the icebox, more time, more love—as if they owned her. She added an extra dash of whiskey to her drink and took a long sip.

“It’s time for your baths,” she said, to a chorus of groans that made Daniel chuckle.

“You head upstairs,” she told the kids. “I will be there in a minute.”

She went out to the back porch, glass in hand. She drank down what remained, hoping to soothe her nerves. It wasn’t working tonight. Alice sat on the top step and put her fist in her mouth, biting down so hard that a few minutes later, when she bent to shampoo Clare’s hair in the bathroom, her daughter balked and said, “Mommy, your fingers are bleeding.”