Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  John and Maeve sat at the table, each looking at a cell phone screen. Julia was bent in front of the fridge, trying to jam a large platter into it. She sighed and tried the freezer, exposing several quarts of Brigham’s vanilla ice cream, Nora’s only vice.

  “Hey,” Brian said, bending to rub Rocco’s cheek.

  “Hi,” Bridget said.

  She wanted to ask if he was all right. He and Patrick were so close. But Brian never said much and Bridget didn’t know where to start. Not with everyone standing around.

  “How was the drive?” Julia said. “We just got here ourselves.”

  She came over and hugged Natalie, and then Bridget. Bridget stood limp in her arms. As a rule, the Raffertys were not huggers.

  Her sister-in-law looked perfect, as usual. She wore heels over black stockings. Her dress seemed like just a plain black dress to Bridget, but later Natalie would tell her who had made it, what it cost.

  Bridget had always thought of Julia as low-key, thrifty. She was forever bragging to Nora about deals she had scored while shopping. But when Natalie first met them, at a casual backyard barbecue, she took one look at Julia and whispered, “I can’t believe she’s playing volleyball in those sandals.” “Why not?” Bridget said. “They cost twelve hundred dollars.” The information was like a firecracker in her pocket that she might choose to light up at any moment, making her mother’s head explode.

  Maeve came and hugged them now too.

  “Dad, come on,” she said. “Give Aunt Bridget a hug.”

  John made a grudging show of getting up, ambling toward her. They pretended to recoil from each other.

  “God, you people,” Maeve said.

  Bridget smiled.

  She felt something crack open in her when she and John embraced. She started to cry. Her stupid brother, the big idiot, her companion through this life. She had always felt safest with him.

  John looked so sad when they pulled apart. She couldn’t stand the look on his face.

  “New car?” Bridget said.

  “Yeah. Nice, huh?”

  “Oh yeah. Cool bumper sticker too. Though wouldn’t it be more efficient just to tape a sign to the window that says I’m a douche. Please slash my tires?”

  Brian snorted, beer bubbling out of his nose.

  “Fuck off,” John said with a smile.

  “Dad!” Maeve said. “Pay up.”

  She charged them five dollars for the F word, as she called it, and a dollar for everything else. She cleaned up at Rafferty family functions. She had once told Bridget that she’d never made a cent off Julia’s side.

  “Put it on my tab,” John said.

  Maeve looked like she might protest, but instead she returned to her phone.

  John had given Maeve a claddagh ring to match his own when she was ten. She had worn it ever since. But Bridget noticed now that the ring was no longer on her finger.

  Recently, Maeve had texted Bridget: I feel like my parents don’t want me to be Chinese. Not really.

  Bridget texted right back, wanting to pick up the phone and call but knowing it was unlikely that Maeve would answer. Maeve conducted all serious conversations over text. Bridget said she didn’t think it was true. She reminded Maeve how John and Julia had kept in touch with some of the families who adopted at the same time they did. They got the girls together every year. She told her niece that if she were their biological child, there would have been other issues. No girl felt like she belonged in her family at thirteen.

  Talk to them about it, she said.

  Privately, she thought there were things John and Julia might have done differently. Natalie agreed. They themselves would have handled the situation with more sensitivity.

  It was so nice to be on the cusp of parenthood, to be able to judge other people’s choices with confidence, not yet having made any mistakes of their own.

  When Charlie was still alive, he and John were always talking to Maeve about Irish pride. They told her she was Chirish—Chinese and Irish. But no one ever said two words about China. She was the only child of her generation in the family. Nora and Charlie had expected a dozen grandkids, but instead they just had Maeve to carry on the legacy. Even her name had been chosen for this reason. Julia resisted at first. She thought it was a ridiculous name to saddle her with. Maeve Rafferty. For the rest of her life, every job interview she ever went to, they’d be expecting a freckle-faced redhead to walk through the door.

  Bridget remembered Maeve, in second grade, assigned to write about her ancestry for school. The family had gathered at her mother’s house for dinner. Charlie was already sick then, with only a few months left. Still, he was as exuberant as ever, looking over the family tree of Raffertys and Flynns Maeve had created on a green poster board.

  It seemed odd to Bridget then that Maeve knew nothing about the family she was born to, not even the woman who gave birth to her. But she could rattle off the names of her great-great-grandparents on both Charlie’s and Nora’s sides. She wondered if Maeve ever thought about it.

  Maeve had prepared a list of questions for them about life in Ireland.

  Nora never spoke about the past. So they all turned to Charlie, even when Maeve said, “What did girls wear to school where you grew up?”

  “They wore a uniform,” Charlie said, looking to Nora to complete the thought.

  Nora sighed, as if it were a great effort to tell them. “A jumper and a skirt, navy blue. We never wore navy after that.”

  “What did you do on your birthday and at Christmas, to celebrate?”

  “Birthdays just came and they went,” Nora said. “At Christmas, we might get a doll, or a holy picture, which was a real novelty then. We were reared very plainly. Our parents were strict but we never knew the difference. Not at all.”

  It came out as one word when she said it. Notatall.

  Even this amount of candor from her mother surprised Bridget. Perhaps she was willing to talk about Ireland now because it was for school. Or because she was sweeter with Maeve than she was with the rest of them. Or maybe spending her days tending to a dying husband made reminiscing seem a more appealing distraction than it otherwise might.

  “There was no such thing as anything going to happen to us,” Nora continued. “At six or eight, I’d take my brother to the sea alone. But it was a hard life. None of the pampering and the presents you’re used to. Children were put to work.”

  “Did you get an allowance at least?” Maeve asked.

  “Heavens no. An allowance!”

  Nora said it as if an allowance were a baby giraffe or a Lamborghini.

  “In the town we came from, they didn’t get electricity until the early sixties,” she said. “Even then there was just one plug, in the kitchen. It took another ten years before you had them in every room. And no one had telephones until 1984. My best friend, Oona Donnelly, was the first to have one. People lined up on a Sunday at her front door to make a call. Of course, two years after that, the knitwear factory in town closed. A shock to everyone. Poor Oona lost her job. Lots of people had to move away. They went off to Shannon or Limerick or London.”

  “Jesus,” John said. “Isn’t there anything positive you can tell her?”

  Charlie cleared his throat. “Maeve, we come from the west of Ireland. Cromwell drove us there. To hell or to Connacht, he said. The ones who survived were made from the toughest stuff. Those were our people. Your people.”

  They had all heard it a million times.

  “He makes it sound very grand,” Nora said. “But we were both raised on filthy farms, for heaven’s sake.”

  Impossible to picture it, knowing Nora as they did. As a woman with a four-bedroom house, wall-to-wall carpeting. A woman who hated dust and dirt and counted frozen vegetables among man’s greatest inventions.

  “You can put this in your report,” Charlie said. “Your grandmother was so courageous that she came to America all by herself, at twenty-one. Alone completely.”

  Bridget�
�s mother was giving Charlie the deep frown she made in response to half the things he said.

  Bridget hadn’t ever thought of it before, but it was remarkable.

  “What was it like, Nana?” Maeve said.

  Nora forced a smile. “I met other girls. We danced and sang the whole way here. We had a grand time. There was even a swimming pool on the ship!”

  Bridget saw her father light up, the face he made when it was time to turn from serious to joking. “It wasn’t so easy for my lot!” he said. “We were in steerage, beneath all the rich people. There were rats and dead bodies in the hold. One day the boat took on water. We knew we were going down. I peeked into a doorway and there was this little old Irish couple hugging in their bed, waiting for death to take them home to Jesus.”

  “Dad, shut up, you’re reciting the plot of Titanic,” John said.

  “Was I?” Charlie said. He gave Maeve a wink.

  “Maeve and I have a little announcement,” John said. “Do you want to tell them?”

  Maeve nodded vigorously.

  “We got a brick at Ellis Island!” she said.

  “A brick?” Bridget said.

  “If you donate a certain amount, they put a brick in the walkway with your family name on it, to commemorate relatives who came through there,” John said. “As of next week, the Raffertys will get their very own brick. We’ll put a picture of it in Maeve’s report.”

  Nora and Charlie were silent.

  “What?” John said.

  “It’s very nice,” Nora said to Maeve.

  “But no one in our family went to Ellis Island,” Charlie said.

  “What?” John said. “You said you came through New York.”

  “We did, but Ellis Island was closed by the time we got there.”

  “All right, but what about all your relatives who came over at the turn of the century?”

  “They came straight to Massachusetts,” Charlie said. “New Bedford. And a few through Gloucester.”

  John’s face sank. “Gloucester,” he said. “That’s not very exciting.”

  Charlie pretended to hear a voice from inside the wall. “Your ancestors say they’re sorry to disappoint you.”

  —

  When Nora walked into the kitchen, her view of Natalie was temporarily blocked by the open refrigerator door. Natalie had joined forces with Julia, the two of them trying to fit two large platters into an overstuffed fridge.

  “Julia, what on earth are you doing?” Nora said. “Bridget, you’re not dressed.”

  “Hi, Mom,” Bridget said.

  “John, did you get it?” Nora said.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out something tiny. “Is this the right one?”

  Nora squinted and went up close. “Yes!” she said. “Oh, thank God. Before we go, I need to talk to you all.”

  Natalie stood to her full height now. Nora regarded her as if she were a stranger selling encyclopedias door-to-door.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

  “Hi, Nora,” Natalie said. “I’m so, so sorry. How are you?”

  Bridget’s mother looked about a thousand years old in her black skirt suit. She wasn’t wearing her usual pink lipstick. Without it, you could see how terribly thin her lips had gotten, or maybe they were always that way underneath.

  “I brought some appetizers for later,” Julia said. “I’m just trying to make room.”

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Nora said. “Careful you don’t let all the cold air out. The neighbors keep dropping things off. They think we’re going to starve. Eileen brought enough for an army. Oh! Bridget, Tommy will be there tonight. His divorce is final now, but don’t say anything.”

  There was a shift in the room’s energy. Julia gave Natalie a sympathetic shake of the head.

  “Mom,” John said. “Who cares about Tommy Delaney?”

  He looked flabbergasted. Bridget loved him for that look.

  She felt a sudden urge to escape.

  “I should iron my shirt,” she said. She looked at Natalie. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Bridget felt bad leaving her there, but her stomach tightened and didn’t unclench until she had the shirt in hand and was descending the basement stairs, toward the ironing board beside the washing machine.

  Nora had a yard sale after someone in the family died and donated what she could to the Morgan Memorial. Whatever was left ended up down here, as if maybe—even though she literally could not give it away—somebody might want it someday. The Ping-Pong table was heaped with relics. It had buckled in the center, around the net, where enormous Tupperware bins were stacked, all filled. A stranger’s smiling face in an old photograph was pressed against the side of one bin, like the poor woman was trying to escape. You could tell she was at a party, her head thrown back in laughter.

  Nora’s own relatives back in Ireland were long dead. The family in America was Charlie’s, but she took care of them all. Visiting them in the hospital in their old age, and later handling the details of their deaths. If someone hadn’t saved for a proper funeral, Nora and Charlie paid. One long-lost great-uncle in Seattle to whom nobody had spoken since 1967 was flown back to Boston and laid to rest for all eternity with the very Rafferty clan he had gone to great lengths to escape in life. “That’ll show you, Seamus,” Charlie said at the burial.

  As she waited for the iron to heat up, Bridget poked through the odd container. A box that once held ice skates now overflowed with black-and-white pictures, curling in at the edges. The lid on a lobster pot could be lifted to expose a naked doll, a red Magic Marker wound slashed along one arm, and a bright blue ball glove, the tag still on. Her father had gotten the glove on sale at Caldor. John pointed out that it was for a lefty—none of them could use it. But Charlie’s enthusiasm was undiminished. It was marked down seventy percent!

  Bridget replaced the lid now. She told herself not to look any further and went to do the ironing. Snooping around down here once when she was twelve or so, she had found what seemed to be a love letter at the bottom of a shoe box, addressed to her mother.

  No one can know about what we’ve done, it said. My wife couldn’t bear it. Nor your husband, I would imagine.

  Bridget showed the note to John but they never discussed it again. It was the kind of thing that disturbed you so thoroughly, you had no choice but to put it out of your head and go on. She only thought of it every now and then, a quick, unpleasant zap of recognition.

  Why did people save what they didn’t want found? Maybe because you never dreamed you’d actually die. There was always time to get rid of your ghosts.

  —

  When Bridget returned to the kitchen, everyone had retreated to his or her separate corner, but for Brian, who sat alone drinking a beer, lost in thought.

  She walked on and found John coming down the stairs.

  “Hey,” he whispered. “I have to tell you something. Don’t say anything to Mom.”

  He paused, and it was as if they were ten again, him waiting for her to swear on a stack of Bibles.

  Bridget nodded. “What?”

  “Rory McClain called me a little while ago, and—”

  The look of concern on his face morphed into a huge smile. Bridget turned to see Maeve standing behind her.

  “Hey, kiddo,” she said.

  Maeve gave her a salute.

  “Bookmark that for later,” John said.

  “Bookmark what?” Maeve said.

  “Just something about—” John said, and Bridget could see the wheels turning. “The stock market.”

  Maeve sighed. “Sure.”

  “Later then,” Bridget said and carried on to her bedroom, where Natalie stood, hanging their clothes.

  “Hi,” Bridget said. She could tell from Natalie’s expression that she wasn’t happy. “I’m sorry for leaving you alone with the crazies.”

  There was a long silence, and then Natalie said, “Look, I know it’s a hard time. But I feel like we’re so close
to doing the whole parent thing, really doing it. And then I get a reception like that from your mother and then you just flee. You have a sudden need to iron? It makes me feel like I’m kidding myself.”

  Bridget regarded Natalie, the one person who had accepted her in all her oddness, all her sorrow. Something fell away.

  “Okay. I’m going to tell her about the baby right now.”

  Natalie widened her eyes. “Now?”

  “Yes. Right now.”

  Bridget kissed her and then turned on her heel, the freshly ironed shirt still slung over her shoulder.

  She found Nora sitting alone in the living room, waiting for the rest of them to be ready.

  “Mom,” she said. “Can we talk a minute?”

  “Yes,” Nora said. “I want to talk to you too. Come and sit. There’s something we should discuss. I wanted to tell all of you at once, but you’re never together.”

  They had all been together fifteen minutes ago. Bridget thought of her mother’s performance in the kitchen and wondered if Natalie’s presence had stopped her from saying whatever it was she wanted to say.

  Bridget sat on the sofa beside her.

  She was overtaken by a fear that her mother somehow knew already. She would try to talk Bridget out of the baby, poison her mind against the whole idea. Of course it would seem terribly odd to her. Just as it had when John and Julia announced they were adopting. Nora wouldn’t get to have any uncomplicated grandchildren. It had all been so easy for her generation. There was nothing to think about then. They got married, they had babies the old-fashioned way, the end.

  “There might be a nun at the wake,” Nora said.

  “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

  Her mother nodded.

  Bridget rolled her shoulders back. Nora bringing up the idea of a baby, she realized, was not her fear but her fantasy. That her mother might see her as she was.

  “Anyway,” Bridget said. She searched for a way in. How could it be so hard to say this? “I was thinking about you and when you first became a mother. It must have been difficult for you.”

  She thought Nora looked almost suspicious. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, just that you were in a new country, you didn’t have your own mother to help you. If a woman has her mother on her side, then—”