“Good girl. Now I’ll just roll back the sheet and you’ll need to lift her head. Are you ready, dear?… That’s it, good.”
Alice watched in fascination as Coltrane removed the white fleece cap from her poor bald head. I looked like a rotted fetus by the end, she thought. After her hair fell out she couldn’t bear to look in the mirror anymore. Though it seemed a long time ago, Alice could still recall the agony of her bones poking through her skin, which had become so thin it hurt to have anything rub against it. Theresa had sewn the cap with the seams on the outside so they wouldn’t irritate her. What a relief it had been to have warm ears. She watched Mrs. Coltrane expertly wind the scarf, turban style, around her abandoned head, knotting it securely at the base of her neck.
“That’s better,” Theresa murmured as she gently eased her mother back to the pillow.
Together the two women removed the tubes from her arm and the catheter from below the sheet and disposed of the bags and needles. After taking a pair of white silk pajama pants from the dresser and a navy robe from the closet, they set about easing Alice’s corpse into them, gently, as if she could still feel it. The final step was to slide a pair of fleecy ballet slippers over her blue feet. Much to Alice’s surprise, all this Coltrane did with gentle matter-of-factness, saying when they’d finished, “Now, isn’t that better?”
For the first time since her passing, Alice was touched by the events surrounding it, and when Mrs. Coltrane took Theresa’s hand and said, “It’s time for us to say goodbye now, dear,” she was overcome with gratitude to this woman she’d given so little thought to for the past forty years.
“She never really loved me, you know,” Theresa blurted out. “If I’d been pretty like her or successful like Molly and Paul, or popular like Jack, maybe it would have been different, but I was just one disappointment after another to her. An embarrassment.” The emotion returned to Theresa’s voice, and as she spoke, she again began to sob, this time silently, her body shaking with the intensity.
It was true she’d expected more from Theresa than a teenage marriage and endless service to the Church. She’d been convinced that her first child, the one she miscarried just a few weeks after marrying Michael, had been a boy, and during her second pregnancy she’d been desperate for another one, only to deliver a plain, stern-faced girl who looked for all the world exactly like Michael and not a bit like herself. It wasn’t easy feeling connected to a child like that. She’d tried to be good to Theresa, and all her children, had always given them the best of everything. Didn’t that count at all?
Once again, Alice felt the suffocating pull of the smoke as she watched Coltrane slip an arm around Theresa. “It wasn’t you, dear, truly it wasn’t. She loved you as much as she could love anyone. No, I think it was herself your mother didn’t care for. She was an unhappy woman, and I suppose that was the reason for the drinking.”
“The drinking? The drinking! Why do you say it like that, Coltrane? And what’re you talking about, anyway?” In the silence of the room, Alice’s voice rose to a shriek. “The drinking!” The directness of the statement and the clear acknowledgment that both Theresa and Coltrane had talked about it catapulted Alice from tenderness to fury. Not only was Coltrane implying she’d had a problem, she was acting as if it had been a known fact that everyone, including the help, was entitled to discuss.
“That’s rich coming from you, Ina Coltrane,” she raged, “a twelve-stepping charity case from the slums of Limerick. That’s right, I know all about you. Well, let me tell you something, if you’d grown up with a cold bitch for a mother, got landed with a whoremongering dullard of a husband, and been stranded at home with four screaming children instead of having a career and a life outside Nowheresville, Maine, you might have occasionally dipped into the whiskey and wandered off the path of righteousness yourself!”
In the still room, Alice thrashed and raged unnoticed. Theresa drew a shuddering breath and pulled the white sheet back over her mother’s face. As she did, Coltrane lifted her eyes from the corpse and turned her gaze toward the big mirror over the dresser where Alice had been hovering. There was a question mark between her eyebrows, but she turned away at the sound of a car door slamming. Below in the driveway, the long black hearse containing Mr. Fell and his minions had just pulled up.
* * *
While the morticians plied their gruesome trade, Alice careened around the bedroom, her thoughts, like a sack of civets, hissing and clawing and spitting, too closely confined with no possibility of escape. The work of loading her corpse into the body bag and onto the stretcher went on methodically below, with Coltrane and Theresa looking on in silence. Theresa dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose; Coltrane scarcely blinked.
The two women brought up the rear of the procession as Alice’s body was taken down the stairs, past the assembled family members, and out of the house. Again Alice was yanked along by the smoky gray strands, now tighter and more constricting than ever.
The family spilled out the front door and watched the gurney roll along the walkway to the waiting hearse. In the cold blue light of the dying December day, old Mr. Nadler from around the corner was passing with his shambling white-muzzled retriever, Gerald, on a leash. At the site of Fell and his cargo, he stopped and signaled the old dog to sit, just shy of the mailbox that anchored the front walk. He removed his battered Red Sox cap and placed it over his heart, standing in solitary recognition of the family’s grief until the tailgate was closed and the car lumbered away. As the taillights receded down the Bridge Point Road, he gave a small, melancholy nod toward the house, replaced his cap and continued on his way, looking a little more stooped than before.
The gesture calmed Alice, and she began to wonder if she’d ever be released from this unholy limbo and the suffocating, smoky bonds. It was all getting to be too much; she yearned for relief. Then it occurred to her that maybe this was all there ever would be, that instead of healing lights, heavenly splendor, and the restoring warmth of almighty forgiveness, she was destined to spend eternity as a shadow, listening to conversations she didn’t want to hear, being hauled around like a helium-filled house trailer, and eventually fading from memory as her family returned to the business of living.
So preoccupied was she by this new line of thought, Alice didn’t realize she’d been pulled to Michael’s den, where Paul was sitting at his father’s mahogany desk, the telephone to his ear. From his tone, Alice assumed he was talking with his wife. She watched him tap his silver pen on the leather frame of a photo of herself and the kids that Mike had taken at Christmastime back in the early seventies, the last year the kids could be wrestled into matching holiday outfits. In front of the thickly tinseled tree, Alice was perched sidesaddle on an ottoman with Molly on her lap and Jack hunched on the corner, hands tucked between his knees. Paul, who must have been about eleven, stood behind her right shoulder, chest out, his hands clasped behind his back. Next to him, a teenage Theresa stood with one arm crossed over her middle, grasping the other elbow. They were all smiling, but no one looked happy. How was it she’d never noticed what a miserable photo it was?
Alice pushed the question from her mind and listened while Paul reeled off the sequence of recent events. He spoke with the easy intimacy of the long married, and as the conversation went on, Alice was relieved to be in the soothing presence of her handsome son.
“I’m fine, hon. Now that they’ve taken her body away, it’s a relief—for everyone, I think.” He took a deep breath, dropped the pen, ran his free hand through his thinning blond hair, loosened his tie. “Okay … yup … I will. Love you, too. Bye-bye.”
Paul put down the phone and exhaled deeply, letting his head fall forward into his upturned palms, then sat motionless. Was he weeping finally? Alice hoped so; however, when Paul lifted his head in response to a rap on the door, his fine, sharp features were arranged into the usual mask, his eyes dry.
Jack walked in balancing a tray with tea things and a sandwich on one hand.
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“Colie sent this,” he said, gesturing to the china pot with his chin. “Said you hadn’t eaten all day and dinner won’t be for a few hours. She’s making meat loaf, says we need a regular meal before people start bringing over food and we’re all living on casseroles and banana bread. She looks beat, but says she’d rather stay busy.”
After placing the tray on the desk, Jack asked, “Talk to Connie? Kids okay?”
Paul nodded as he poured out a cup of tea and laced it liberally with milk and sugar. “Bump?” Jack asked, producing a flask from his back pocket.
“Thanks, Jacko.”
Staring down into the cup, Paul asked, “What about your girlfriend, she coming to the funeral?”
“Nah, we’re not on family-crisis terms. Besides, she’s covering my shifts till I get back.”
Paul sipped with a thoughtful expression on his face. “You work together, huh? Dad ever tell you not to shit where you eat, Jack? No? He told me. More of a ‘do as I say’ rule, I guess.”
* * *
So Paul knew. Here it was, then, the final humiliation. Not surprising really, Alice thought. Apparently there were no secrets at Byrne, Pocket, Randall, and Culligan. Especially if your name was on the letterhead.
“Who was it?” Jack asked, though he didn’t look like he wanted to know.
“Who was it?” Paul repeated. “Who wasn’t it, Jack?”
“Jesus Christ, Paul, how’d you find out?”
“The tawdrier, the more shameful, the dirtier the story, the worse people want to tell it, my boy. It’s fun.”
Jack closed his eyes. Alice could almost see his illusions crumbling, a brick wall suddenly stripped of mortar. He slid from the arm of the green leather chair down onto the seat, nodding and cringing in one motion.
“Well, one day about, I don’t know, ten, twelve years ago, Theresa called me in hysterics. One of her friends had an aunt who was a secretary at the firm. Back in ’68 the aunt got pregnant and had to go ‘tend a sick relative’ in Boston for a few months. She wouldn’t say who the father was, but the family assumed he was a coworker, married. The friend put two and two together because the kid looked so much like Theresa and, by extension, Dad.
“Anyway, when the secretary got back from her ‘sabbatical,’ the firm bought her a little house in Augusta and set her up with a job in a partnership down there. She couldn’t get by on the salary, though, and so she asked for support, threatened to go to Mum and the papers if she didn’t get it. Anyway, long story short, Mum found out about it while she was pregnant with you and about had a nervous breakdown. So Nana hired Colie.”
“How do you know for sure?” Jack asked.
“Good question. Thank you for asking,” Alice said. Though she was horrified at the airing of their dirty laundry, she was mesmerized by the scene playing out before her.
“I asked Dad.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘Don’t ever shit where you eat, son.’ I told you.”
“That was it?”
“He told me the story, or a version of it anyway. The rest I got from Arthur Pocket. Artie was a regular washerwoman.”
“Arthur Pocket, that son of a whore,” Alice said. “He always did like to talk. So self-righteous, with that bucktoothed lump of a wife and all those cats instead of kids. And a summer cottage in Provincetown, thank you very much—who did he think he was kidding? Probably had his own little secret life.”
“So you’re telling me we’ve got a random half-brother out there someplace?”
“I imagine there’s probably more than one, but he’s the only one I know about,” Paul said, looking every minute of his forty-five years.
“So that’s why Mum was such an unholy bitch to Dad for all those years? Why she drank? How come she didn’t divorce him?”
“We’re Catholic,” said Theresa from the doorway, where she’d been standing unnoticed. “Besides, I think she’d’ve died before she ever admitted anything to anyone, and it was probably more gratifying to torment Daddy than throw him out.”
“Not exactly, dear,” Alice murmured. “Close, but no cigar, as they say.”
* * *
“Oh dear, I am sorry,” Sarah Byrne said without a trace of regret. Then without missing a beat she went on, “But look on the bright side, Alice, no one even knew you were pregnant, though I’m sure there was plenty of talk. God has a plan, you’ll see. Pretty soon you’ll be nothing but relieved. It’ll give you time to settle in with Michael. That’ll be fun.”
And so, after Alice miscarried her first child less than a month after her wedding day, that was all she got from her mother by way of comfort. It was no more or less than she’d expected.
Certainly her marriage had caused talk. In 1953, you got married before college graduation for one reason, and if people hadn’t put two and two together based on the timing of the union, they certainly figured it out when Alice and Michael held the ceremony on a Friday afternoon in the church sanctuary, attended only by Father O’Neill, their parents, and the two friends who stood up with them.
The few photos from the day showed Alice in the trim gray silk suit and matching hat she’d bought for the junior year in Rome she’d never get to have, and Michael, tall and dark in his one and only business suit, looking like a deer the moment before it was jacked.
“If he’d known what he was getting into, I suppose he’d have been well within his rights to refuse to go through with it,” Alice murmured, but in those days you didn’t, and certainly not when you were a dirt-poor third-year law student from the wrong side of the swamp, and the girl you’d gotten in trouble was the only child of the most powerful lawyer in your hometown. If her uncle just happened to be the chief of police, well, you might as well grin and bear it because there was only one way it was going to go.
As Alice’s thoughts drifted back over the years, she had to admit that she and Mike weren’t in love then; they never really had been. They were both young and beautiful, which helped, but lust took you only so far in a marriage, and they’d quickly discovered the limits of physical attraction in the years following the makeshift September wedding.
Of course, later there were the children, and with each one Alice hoped things might change. Her feelings, his feelings, anything really. It wasn’t so much that she loved her husband; she hadn’t, not in any profound sense. It was more that she wanted him to love her. After all, she’d given up everything: her long-anticipated, carefully planned year in Rome, her friends at Mount Holyoke, the glamorous career in Boston or New York that her art history degree would have made possible. Everything.
For Michael, it was different. The marriage gave him all the things he’d been working for: social standing, a partner-track job in one of the state’s biggest firms, plenty of money, and eventually his name on the brass plate of the office door in Fairleigh. “He had a good run for a fatherless boy from Moodyville,” Alice said to herself. “And look at him now, poor bastard, a mind like mashed potato and a heart that’ll never quit.”
The day she found the note from that whore of a secretary in Michael’s suit pocket, Alice had no one to turn to. Eight months pregnant with her third child, and the first two not even in school yet, she felt cornered. I should have had it out with Michael then and there. Maybe we’d have ended up getting divorced, or maybe he’d have straightened out. Who knows? One thing’s for certain, following Mother’s advice didn’t do much good.
“We’ll get you some help. After the baby’s born, you can start playing tennis again. It’ll give you your figure back. You know, dear, you need to get out and do more, maybe volunteer work or a bridge club—make yourself interesting,” she said.
Then in a confidential tone Mother added, “Alice, all married men think about straying, and most of them do. It’ll pass. Enough said. I’ll talk to Father O’Neill tomorrow and we’ll find someone to live in. Isn’t there an apartment over the garage? Perfect. Just leave it to me.”
So Alice
said nothing to anyone, chasing the bitter pill of betrayal with anything she could find in the liquor cabinet. When Mrs. Coltrane arrived, Alice simply handed over the children and the house and slowly retreated into her daily routine of wine with lunch, sherry before dinner and whiskey after, except on tennis afternoons, when she held herself to one blameless beer in public with the girls.
“And that was my life,” Alice said. “No, Theresa, you’re wrong. I took no pleasure in tormenting your father. There was no pleasure at all, just the oblivion of the drink. Then, when Michael got that diagnosis, when they told me his mind would be gone in a few years, all I could think of was getting him into a home so I could finally be shed of him and his filthy ways. Can you blame me? Can any of you?”
Alice thought back to the last time she visited her husband at the nursing home, the time he took her for a secretary, called her tootsie, and pointedly beckoned her toward his lap to “take some dick-tation.” She was mortified, but the smiling nurse’s aide told her, “He says that to everyone, even the nuns.” Consistent to the last, she’d thought.
Alice’s memories were interrupted by the familiar sound of Paul’s measured tones. “She held all the cards, Jack,” he explained with more patience than he probably felt. “Look, Dad was a shanty Irish bastard from Moodyville, about to become a partner in one of the biggest firms in the state, which just happened to be headed by his father-in-law. He couldn’t leave.”
“So what makes you think there were others?” Jack asked.
“Oh, Jack,” Theresa said with a sigh, “Fairleigh’s a small pond, and people saw him around. Someone ran into him in Bangor with a blonde a couple of times, and once when Molly was home from college, she saw him going into the Holiday Inn. On a Saturday afternoon when he was supposed to be golfing in Bar Harbor. It was no secret.”
The Northern Reach Page 17