Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  “Your daughter-in-law seemed beside herself yesterday. I’m sorry that it had to come out that way, but—”

  “My daughter-in-law is the hysterical type,” Alice said. “Always has been.”

  “I’m confused about why you haven’t discussed this with anyone,” he said.

  “They’ll get used to it,” she said.

  “Well, that’s what I mean. I’m not sure I feel right about that.”

  “It was a momentary shock for Ann Marie,” she said. “But believe me, none of them value the place.”

  “Even so,” he said.

  “When you get old like me, you’ll start to view your life as a whole,” she said. “You’ll see the things you did right, the things you made a mess of. I’ve always tried to do right, Father, but usually I muck it up somehow or another. Just look.”

  “At what?”

  “Look at my children, for starters.”

  “I think you’ve raised a wonderful family, Alice. I’ve enjoyed getting to spend some time with Maggie these past few weeks.”

  “Maggie’s pregnant,” she said. “Kathleen hates me and so does my other daughter, Clare. Ann Marie only ever tolerated me because she wanted my house.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “As for Maggie—”

  She interrupted him. “Please. I can’t talk about that now.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” he asked, and she nodded. “Why did you decide to give your house to the church in the first place? It wasn’t to get back at anyone, was it?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. She felt embarrassed that he would even think so.

  “Then why?”

  “That church is incredibly important to me,” she said. “I gave a lot of thought to what you said about good deeds back when I called you about my sister last winter. This is a small way for me to atone. I know it’s nothing, compared to my sin, but—”

  “Alice, you can’t blame yourself,” he said. “There’s no sin here. It was a fire. You had gone home before it even started.”

  “That’s just it,” she said softly. “There’s a part I left out. If I tell it to you now, here, will you consider it a confession?”

  “If you like,” he said.

  Alice knew she would only ever manage the courage to say it once. For that reason, she wanted her brothers to hear it, but they were gone. She wanted Daniel, but he was gone too. As she heard herself begin to tell the priest the truth, in a way she felt like she was confessing to them all. She pictured Mary, twenty-four years old for the rest of time.

  “I didn’t go home,” she said quietly. “That’s what everyone always thought—even my husband—but I was there all along. I’m the reason Mary was in the club when it burned.”

  He looked confused, as if he was unsure of whether she was telling the truth.

  “There was this blasted pair of gloves, and I refused to go inside to get them because I was angry about Henry proposing. Not that I should have been, but—” She stopped herself. “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

  He gave her his warmest smile. “Take your time,” he said.

  Alice felt all riled up. Her heart pounded. She took a deep breath and started again. This time she told him everything. It surprised her how well she remembered exactly what she and Mary had said to each other, precisely how she felt watching her sister go back in to fetch her precious suede gloves. The high-pitched moan of the fire alarm.

  As the words came out of her mouth, she was back on that frigid Boston sidewalk, immersed in chaos, taking in the sight of the dead and wounded, too fearful to do a thing for Mary, who lay dying on the other side of a plain stucco wall.

  She recalled walking into her parents’ living room and feeling filled up with relief at the sight of her brothers. And then, moments later, how she had told them that Mary was inside the club, though that was as much as she could bear to admit.

  She spoke of how little she had felt for Daniel then, how cold she had been to him. But how his presence after the fact seemed like a way out of the horror and a means of living a more virtuous life.

  She confessed that she had never told Daniel the truth about that night, never told a soul.

  Father Donnelly was too young to remember that the Cocoanut Grove fire had remained a fixture in the Boston papers and in common conversation for years after it happened. She told him how she had devoured the stories, though they always made her morose, and Daniel warned her not to read or listen to them.

  After she read about a victim, she could never forget. She carried all of them with her. A family in Wilmington lost four sons, all servicemen home on leave. They were buried side by side in Wildwood Cemetery. Girls who worked with Alice at the law firm, who’d never even met them, would go to their graves and visit every Saturday morning.

  A twenty-year-old member of the Coast Guard named Clifford Johnson suffered burns over three-quarters of his body while helping twenty people to safety. He spent almost two years in Boston City Hospital. After hundreds of operations, he married his nurse and returned home to Missouri. In 1956, he was killed in a fire.

  Each time she read one of the stories, Alice thought of her last words to Mary, and the look on her sister’s face that night.

  You shouldn’t have gone to bed with him, she had said, planting fear in her own sister’s head when she knew full well that Henry intended to propose.

  She had allowed Mary to believe that Henry didn’t want her, and because of something she had done. Perhaps it was the last thought Mary ever had. And now she would never know the truth.

  When she finished talking, Alice looked across the table at Father Donnelly as if he were a stranger. She felt utterly exposed. She had thought of all of this over and over these past sixty years, but never said it out loud. Had it been worth it? She certainly didn’t feel any better.

  Her hands shook, and she had to place them in her lap.

  Until now, it had been between her and God, and she had assumed that His wrath would be strong, which was all that she deserved. But the priest looked as if he might cry. She could swear she saw tears in his eyes.

  He shook his head. “Oh, Alice, I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Here you’ve been, carrying this around all these years for no reason. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Of course I did.”

  He reached across the table and placed a hand on top of hers.

  “I’m concerned that this still brings you so much torment,” he said. “And you’ve never thought of talking it over with your children?”

  What could she possibly tell her children about all of this? That her only sister had died just a few hours shy of her engagement? That the event was a tragedy, but everyone always said that it led to new fire codes across the country and innovations in burn treatment? That you’d never find a door in Boston that opened inward, or a revolving door anywhere that wasn’t flanked by two regular doors, because of it?

  That she had not met her husband’s eye across a crowded room and fallen in love like in the movies, but rather, that she had seen him as a means of escape? That her sister had died because of Alice’s stubbornness and anger, two things she could never let go of, even so, even now.

  “No,” she said.

  “It might be a great comfort,” he said. “They’d tell you the same things I’m saying here, I know they would.”

  She wondered if he hadn’t understood. He was young, as young as some of her grandchildren, and maybe that made all the difference. Even though he was a priest, he wasn’t one in the old sense of the word. He didn’t believe in fire and brimstone. He probably didn’t even believe in Hell. She wanted someone harsher here, someone to take a Brillo pad to her sins and scrub until she bled.

  “I killed my sister,” she said.

  “No, Alice!” he said. He inhaled deeply. “Here’s something to think about. You told me at your house last winter that bef
ore your sister died you never intended to marry or have children.”

  She thought of what Kathleen had said the day before—you really weren’t that talented … a stupid childish dream. It was similar to something Daniel had said the night they met.

  He went on. “Mary’s death was a great loss. But consider how much joy—how many lives have come into being because of it. And because of you.”

  She felt uneasy with this sweetsy mumbo jumbo. If she had wanted positive affirmations that she was worthy and good, she’d be paying some cheerleader by the hour the way Kathleen did.

  “After she died, I promised God that I’d do better. I put all of my childish hopes away and tried, for Mary’s sake, to do everything she would have done. But I failed miserably. My children don’t respect me. They don’t even have faith in God. It should have been me that died that night.”

  “You’re being much too hard on yourself,” he said.

  “Please don’t try to make me feel better,” she said. “It’s not what I’m after.”

  “What are you after?”

  “I want to die in as close to a state of grace as I can,” she said. “So that I can see my husband and sister again.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll grant you an indulgence here and now if that will help, Alice. You don’t have to give away your family’s home for that.”

  “An indulgence comes from devoting oneself or one’s goods to those in need,” she said, snapping at him the way she might have at one of her children. “You can’t just give it to me.”

  “Alice. If this whole thing is motivated by guilt, I can’t accept it in good faith. You know that.”

  “It’s not guilt,” she said. “Giving you the house is my last chance to do something meaningful. It’s too late for anything else.”

  She thought of St. Agnes, her comfy old church in Canton, which was set to be demolished with a wrecking ball in the fall. How had she let that happen? Not since the months and years following Mary’s death had she spent so many sleepless nights wondering how something so beloved could simply slip through her fingers like water.

  “Understand the property is mine and no one else’s,” she said sternly. “Whatever hysteria you may have witnessed yesterday, no one loves the place more than I do. But let me be clear. I would burn that house to the ground today if it meant that St. Michael’s could still stand. If it wasn’t for the Church, I probably wouldn’t have made it. I probably wouldn’t be sitting here now. I don’t even want to think of a world where people won’t have that sort of thing in their lives.”

  He nodded. “I appreciate that. I just want to make sure you’re doing this for the right reasons.”

  “It’s done and it won’t be undone,” she said. “I gave it plenty of thought before I signed the papers.”

  “Well, then, I thank you again,” he said. “Your kind of generosity is rare in this world, Alice. You’re going to be the key to our survival.”

  She thought of an afternoon a few weeks earlier, when she had stood beside him in a hospital room, watching as he read a dying man his last rites. The man had been so truly comforted by it. She wished her children could understand that sort of power. She thought that perhaps she was being too hard on Father Donnelly this morning.

  “I think you’re the key,” she said, and she felt more confident in her decision than ever.

  Maggie

  The morning after the fight, Maggie woke up to find her mother and Ann Marie sitting out on the deck, drinking tea. It must have rained earlier—here and there were pools of water on the wood, drying up in the hot morning sun. Kathleen was reading the paper and Ann Marie appeared to be gluing tiny buttons onto squares of blue fabric. For a moment, Maggie thought that perhaps a miracle had occurred and the two of them were getting along. If that was the case, she would swear right now that peace in the Middle East would be achieved in her lifetime.

  But as soon as she slid the screen door open and said good morning, Kathleen looked up from her paper and said, “Mags, there’s this amazing story about Whitey Bulger in today’s Globe. You’ve got to read it.”

  Whitey Bulger was an Irish mobster from Southie who had risen to power mainly because of a shady relationship with the FBI. His brother had gone the other way—attending law school and eventually becoming president of the Massachusetts state senate. They had grown up in the same neighborhood as Ann Marie; her brother was once some sort of low-level criminal in Whitey Bulger’s gang. Kathleen loved mentioning anything vaguely related to this fact when Ann Marie was around, simply because she knew it would embarrass her.

  Now Kathleen said, “Did you realize Whitey Bulger had a child? It says here that the little boy died of some rare disorder and that’s part of what made Whitey and his boys so vicious. Fascinating, huh?”

  Ann Marie had been smiling seconds earlier, but now she looked at her lap.

  Maggie hated it when her mother went into bully mode. She shot her a look.

  What? Kathleen mouthed, as if she had no clue what she had done.

  This exchange, like so many other things lately, reminded Maggie of Gabe, even though it had nothing to do with him, really. Maggie had been obsessed with the Bulgers as a kid; she assumed everyone knew who they were. But when she mentioned them to Gabe once, he had laughed so hard that beer came out of his nostrils.

  “What’s so funny?” she had asked.

  “Whitey Bulger?” he said, incredulous. “That sounds like something a frat boy would name his dick.”

  Kathleen put her bare feet up on a plastic cooler that had probably been sitting there since the previous August.

  “Do you feel like going to the diner for breakfast?” she asked.

  Maggie was famished, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone with her mother. She felt annoyed that Kathleen had come, and mad at herself for being annoyed. She kept trying to shake the feeling, but truly, it had been better here without her.

  Kathleen wanted her to move to California. Each time they were alone, she brought it up. It was a preposterous idea, though Maggie wondered if it rubbed her the wrong way because she knew it was a real possibility. She was consumed by fears of not having enough money—in New York, she still struggled just to support herself. What if she couldn’t afford this child, and actually had to move in with her mother? There she’d be, raising a kid alone, in the shadow of Kathleen’s goofball hippie boyfriend and his worm farm; in the shadow of Kathleen herself, who would never be able to stop reminding Maggie of how little she wanted a baby around.

  “Aunt Ann Marie?” she asked now. “The diner?”

  “Oh, no, not for me, thanks, sweetie,” Ann Marie said. “I’m trying to slim down for Fourth of July week.”

  “Why?” Kathleen asked. “You want to wow Patrick with your hot bikini bod?”

  Ann Marie looked down at her buttons again.

  “What are you doing over there anyway?” Kathleen asked.

  “I’m making a slipcover.”

  “For?”

  “A couch.”

  “She’s a finalist in this really prestigious house decorating competition,” Maggie said.

  “Yes,” Ann Marie said. “Pat and I are going to London for the judging.”

  Kathleen stretched out her leg, pointed her toes. “House decorating?”

  “Small-scale house decorating models.” Ann Marie looked flustered. It seemed like maybe she was just making up terms now.

  “Dollhouses,” Maggie said, and before her mother could get a word in she continued, “It’s so cool. There was an entire exhibition of them at the Brooklyn Museum recently. Amazing stuff.”

  Kathleen looked at Maggie. “So go throw some clothes on and I’ll buy you breakfast, just the two of us.”

  “I’d love to, but I have to do some work stuff,” Maggie said.

  “Are you avoiding me?” Kathleen asked in a joking tone, though Maggie knew her well enough to know she was dead serious. It wasn’t even the first time she’d said it in th
e last twenty-four hours.

  They had gone to dinner the night before and then been trapped in the cottage together until they went to bed. Her mother had had plenty of time to lay out her absurd plan: Maggie should move to wine country and raise her child in the healthy surroundings of a teetotaler’s worm farm. Delightful! Maggie didn’t say that she thought Kathleen’s lifestyle was odd, or that visiting for a week was enough to put her over the edge. She didn’t say that Kathleen’s house was so damn filthy she’d be afraid to raise a hamster in it, let alone a child. Maggie understood how to hold back.

  Kathleen, however, had come in with guns blazing—with accusations and harsh words about Gabe, all of which might be true, but they still hurt. No one could ever injure Maggie with words the way her own mother could; that was just a fact. She’d rather not hear it, especially after the e-mail she had received from Gabe.

  “Where’s Alice?” she asked now.

  “We don’t know,” Kathleen said.

  “Do you mind if I ask what happened with the house?” Maggie said.

  Ann Marie shook her head. “I’m so angry, I can barely talk about it.”

  She didn’t seem angry. She sounded like her usual chipper self.

  Ann Marie went on, “Alice has signed this entire property over to St. Michael’s in her will.”

  Maggie felt stunned. “When did this happen?”

  “Apparently the papers were drawn up six months ago. But Pat’s looking into whether we have a legal right to somehow undo it. We built that house next door, you know.”

  “Oh, we know,” Kathleen said.

  Ann Marie ignored her. “We must have some legal right to the place. Anyway, Pat told me to stay calm while he sorts it out with the lawyers. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”

  Ann Marie smiled. Maggie wondered if maybe she was one of those women whose extreme agreeableness had to do with some sort of massive addiction to pills.

  “The whole thing is classic Alice,” Kathleen said. “I wish my dad were here.”