Maine (18 page)

On those nights, Alice laughed more.

She seemed happiest of all during summers in Maine, surrounded by their cousins and aunts and uncles. There, she ran along the beach in her bathing suit, her long legs glistening with oil. Sometimes she would get right down on the cottage floor with them and play blocks or dolls.

But at other times, Alice grew cold and unkind. Kathleen was terrified of her mother’s outbursts, her short temper that seemed to spring from nowhere.

They were in the kitchen that afternoon—Kathleen was doing her homework at the table, Clare was running circles around the room, screaming at the top of her lungs.

Sternly, Alice told her to stop.

She had said she had a headache earlier, going up to her room to rest as she often did before their father got home from work. Some days, she drank whiskey. She thought it made her calm, but in fact it turned her angry, sad. Kathleen could smell it on her breath when Alice picked her up from school. She knew enough to be quiet.

It was three o’clock. Alice was unloading groceries. She had let them sit out all morning, so that the milk dripped with condensation, and the lettuce had begun to droop.

Clare kept running, playing Cowboys and Indians all by herself, pushing her palm repeatedly against her lips while she let out a steady stream of sound.

Alice shouted at her to hush up, or else. She had a fierce look in her eye, and Kathleen feared it. She willed her sister to stop. After another minute, her heart racing, Kathleen said, “Clare, come sit with me.”

Clare went right on yelling.

“Be quiet, goddamn it!” Alice yelled, so loud and harsh that Clare began to cry.

Patrick darted toward her with arms outstretched, to comfort her, and tripped over one of the grocery bags. He fell to the floor, hitting his head on a glass apple juice bottle, which broke in two.

A thick bloody inch opened up on his forehead.

Kathleen covered her eyes and shouted, “Oh no!”

“Jesus,” Alice said. She went to him, pulling a tea towel from the counter. She pressed it to his forehead, but the blood soaked through and onto her blouse. “Sweetheart!” she said. “Did you hurt yourself?”

Kathleen spoke softly, scared of what her mother might do, despite her measured tone. “Should I call the ambulance?”

“Don’t be so dramatic, he’s fine,” Alice said.

Patrick moaned.

“Mama,” Kathleen said. “Shouldn’t we take him to the doctor?”

“He needs a bandage and a cookie, that’s all,” Alice said. “And I need a drink. Isn’t that right, sport?”

Patrick didn’t answer.

A half hour passed. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. Their brother sat in Alice’s lap, crying. She held the cloth to his head, and Kathleen and Clare both cried too.

“Quit that, girls, you’ll upset him,” Alice said.

But after a few more minutes, she seemed to wilt. “He’s still bleeding. Oh God, I can’t handle this.”

Alice tried to call their father at the office, but his secretary said he had stepped out.

“Typical,” she said. She seemed weary, and more angry even than usual. “I guess I’ll have to take all of you,” she said, picking Patrick up. “Into the car. Now.”

She didn’t tell them to put on their coats, so they climbed into the backseat without a word, wearing only sweaters and dungarees. It was frigid in there—they could see their breath. Clare tried to catch hers in her hand.

The snow fell heavily outside. Kathleen and Clare held Patrick tight between them. He kept the towel pressed against his head with his fingers.

In the front, Alice began to cry softly. “I can’t do this,” she kept saying. “I cannot.”

Patrick raised his little voice. “I’m okay, Mommy. Don’t cry.”

She pulled the car out of the driveway. The snow came down in sheets. She switched the windshield wipers to high.

The chains on the tires grated against the street. Kathleen willed the sound to vanish. She recited the Lord’s Prayer in her head. She counted backward from one hundred, whispering the numbers softly, though somehow Alice heard her and jolted her head backward. “Stop. That,” she hissed.

Alice drove straight, crying loudly now. There were few cars on the road. She sped up. Kathleen watched the houses whiz by and held her brother tighter. They seemed to be going too fast. She wanted to tell her mother not to cry because she was scaring Patrick. Kathleen wished her father were there, that he might find them somehow.

They were moving along the road, same as ever, when suddenly it felt as though something had lifted them up. The car swerved to the side of the street, sailing, sailing across wet grass until it slammed into a tree. The impact hit Kathleen’s body and went straight through. Patrick flew into the front seat, landing with a thud against the dashboard before falling backward. Kathleen and Clare hit the backs of the front seats, and Alice’s head cracked the windshield.

There was silence for a moment, before Alice turned to them, her face covered in blood.

“Oh, my babies,” she said, hysterical. “Are you all right? Is everyone still here?”

   In the end, they were lucky. The doctor said God had been watching. Patrick was hurt the worst: he lay unconscious for several hours in a hospital bed, and when he woke up he had two broken arms and a shattered jaw. Kathleen got a slight concussion and lost two grown-up teeth, resulting in a painful string of root canals later that year. Clare somehow made it through with only bruises and scrapes, and Alice broke her wrist and sliced her face wide open. They used their savings for her to visit the best surgeon in Boston, but still she needed thirty stitches, some of them inside the skin. For months, she wore a bandage wrapped around her head and covered it with a navy blue turban, which made her look like Norma Desmond. She rubbed vitamin E on the scar every morning and night. Within a year, it had all but vanished.

They told neighbors and relatives that Alice had been in such a rush to get Patrick to the hospital that she’d driven too fast on a stormy day and lost control of the car.

But the night after the accident, Kathleen crept from her bed late and followed the sound of her parents fighting. She stood outside their bedroom door.

“Goddamn it, Alice, you could have killed them all.”

“I know it, I know.”

“You were drunk,” he said. “What have I told you about drinking when I’m not here?”

“But you’re never here!” she yelled bitterly. “I’m alone with them all day long.”

“I go to the insurance company every day, not because it’s so damn fun, but because it’s my job,” he said. “I have to do it for this family. You’re their mother! That’s your job. I can’t be here to watch you every minute.”

She sobbed.

“I told you I couldn’t do it years ago,” she said.

“That’s nonsense. You’re a wonderful mother,” he said, his voice a bit softer now.

“Oh yes, clearly.”

“Listen to me, Alice. I love you. I want to stand by you. But the drinking has to stop. I mean it. Cold turkey. I don’t care how you do it, but you’re going to do it. If you don’t, I’ll take those kids and I will leave. Do you understand me?”

Kathleen didn’t hear any response, but in the morning when she woke up, her father was standing at the sink, pouring the liquor from every last bottle in the kitchen down the drain. She never saw her mother take another drink until after the day he died.

Ann Marie

Around seven o’clock, Pat came into the kitchen in a pair of khaki pants and a polo shirt. He was looking down at his cell phone, typing away.

“Good morning,” he said, kissing her on the cheek without glancing up from the phone. “Were you awake at the crack of dawn preparing for dollhouse-palooza?”

“Yup. Couldn’t sleep. So much to do.”

“You could take a day off, you know,” he said.

“That lamb we had on Friday is in the fridge, thawing out,” she said. “There’s still mint jelly left too. And I’ll make you some potatoes before I go, just in case.”

He frowned. “In case you decide to leave me for a man who makes subway tiles for Barbie dolls?”

“In case you get hungry.”

“I can fend for myself,” he said, though they both knew he hadn’t set foot in a grocery store in years, or prepared a meal, possibly ever.

“I don’t mind. I wrote out directions for you on how to heat the lamb up. They’re on the fridge, under the Celtics magnet.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“I spoke to your mom,” she said. “She wanted me to remind you about the gutters.”

“I’m on it,” he said. “I called Mort up at the market and got a referral. I thought I already told her that. And the railing on the cottage porch is loose too. Did she mention it?”

“Actually, she said her priest is going to fix it.”

“Her priest?”

“You know, Father Donnelly. I think he’s sweet on her.”

“Well, that’s disturbing.”

“Oh, not like that,” Ann Marie said with a laugh. “He’s a nice young man, that’s all.”

“How did she sound otherwise?” Pat asked.

“A bit crabby. She said she doesn’t need any help, and I shouldn’t bother troubling myself to come out there in the middle of June after Maggie leaves. I didn’t have the energy to fight her on it. I’m still going to go, though.”

“You’re an angel,” he said.

“You know you have your doctor’s appointment tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pat said.

He was so cheerful this morning that she felt sorry for what she was about to say.

“Honey, we need to send Little Daniel’s check before I leave,” she said gently.

Usually they sent it by the last of the month, like clockwork. But somehow, in the whirlwind of her June plans changing, she had forgotten to remind Pat. He was a disciplined man, with a memory so sharp he could tell you what he had for breakfast on his first day of kindergarten. But he never seemed to remember this. She imagined that he put it from his head quite consciously, allowing himself to think about it for only that one minute a month when he signed the check and handed it over to her to be addressed and mailed.

Pat was disappointed, she understood that. Ann Marie told him to pray on it, to have faith that it would all work out. He was angry that he’d spent more than two hundred grand for their son’s education, and still, they were sending him money. Ann Marie didn’t see what was so wrong with it—she knew women at the club who had bought houses for their kids. Pat said no one had paid his way. He had figured it out, and he expected his children to do the same.

She had to bite her tongue on that one. Ann Marie had spent every weekend and summer of her teenage years bagging groceries at Angelo’s. Had any of the Kellehers ever had so much as an after-school job? How many times had she heard Kathleen complain that Pat was the only one whose education was taken seriously by their parents, meaning that Alice and Daniel paid for it in full? Yet it had never dawned on Kathleen that some people, including Ann Marie, paid their own tuition, waitressing all the way through college.

She had always warned Pat to be more conservative when it came to giving the kids money, but he had lavished gifts and cash upon them anyway. It seemed that now, right when Little Daniel really needed them, was not the time to draw the line in the sand.

Despite Pat’s protestations, they had been mailing the checks for five months, ever since Little Daniel lost his most recent job. It wasn’t the first time they had helped him out, but it was the first time he’d been let go for such a shameful reason. When Ann Marie thought about it, and about what might come next, she felt tired.

It hadn’t helped that it happened only a couple of weeks after Fiona told them her news. Why did bad things always occur in multiples like that? The combination made Ann Marie question what she had always known about herself—that she was a good mother, that theirs was a traditional family.

Little Daniel had graduated top of his class from business school; he was terribly bright, and charming. But he’d had lousy luck when it came to work. His first boss, at a boutique investment firm, just plain had it out for the kid: he had dared to call Daniel arrogant, saying he wasn’t deferential enough, when the boss himself was Daniel’s exact age.

At the next place, a huge company in downtown Boston, they didn’t challenge him. They gave Daniel paper to push around, and—no wonder—he got bored. So he started taking long lunches (he said all the executives did the same). He came in late. At his one-year evaluation, they told him it wasn’t working out.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pat had said that time, too testily for Ann Marie’s liking.

“Nothing! He’s off the charts smart, Patrick, like you. He was too good for that job.”

Pat pulled some strings with Ronald Allan at the club and found their son a good, high-paying position at another big firm. It seemed like he was really working hard this time, but then, without warning, they laid him off and told him to be out in two weeks.

“This is outrageous!” Pat had fumed, uncharacteristically worked up. “I’m calling Ron and I’ll give him a piece of my mind. And possibly a lawsuit.”

He went into his home office and slammed the door. When he came out twenty minutes later, his face looked pale.

“Well?” Ann Marie said.

“Apparently they did him a favor, laying him off like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“There were complaints from some of the secretaries about certain behaviors.”

Ann Marie pictured a gaggle of lazy girls in tweed, refusing to fetch coffee or answer the telephone, citing women’s lib.

She didn’t ask her husband to elaborate, might have preferred it if he did not, but Pat went on, “They found some very disturbing pornography on his computer. Bondage stuff, I guess.”

Ann Marie was aghast. “These secretaries just claim he was the one who put it on the computer? It could have been anyone who did that.”

“They found out because they do his expenses.”

“And?”

“He charged it all to his corporate credit card. Two thousand dollars’ worth.”

“Oh my God.”

She wondered if this had happened in other offices. She thought of poor Regina, who was so proud of the diamond on her finger, and cringed at the thought of her son—that all-American boy!—asking to tie her to the bedpost. And she thought of Fiona, too, the two affronts wrapped around each other. Her son was a pervert and her daughter was a lesbian.

It’s no one’s fault
. It was in vogue these days to say that whenever something terrible happened. But everything unpleasant was someone’s fault. What had she done to them?

“He’s made a goddamn fool out of me,” Pat said. “I’ll probably be the laughingstock of the club now.”

At that moment, a rush of estrogen, or maternal instinct, or who knew what, flooded her head and her heart, and all she wanted to do was protect that boy as best she could. Her only son.

“Oh, honestly, who cares,” she said. “Ron Allan has worse skeletons in his closet than some dirty movies.”

She called Little Daniel and told him to come over. He cried on the living room sofa and apologized for embarrassing them. He said he hadn’t realized that he’d used his corporate card until it was too late. (That made sense to her, though she had hoped he would deny the entire thing.) He went to sleep in his childhood bedroom, her strong, tall, handsome son, who everyone still called Little Daniel, though he had towered over Big Daniel by the end.

In bed that night, Ann Marie ran her fingers over the carved wood of the headboard they had found in a shop in Killarney. They had had it shipped all the way from Ireland. Pat was in bed with her since Daniel was home, and he was snoring. She didn’t know how her husband could sleep at a time like this.

Eventually, she went downstairs to her crafts room and stared at her dollhouse for a long while, deciding that the armoire in the living room would look better in the entryway. She picked it up and moved it, then carefully wiped down the sides with a Kleenex to get rid of any fingerprints. She thought of Fiona as a child. She had never liked dresses, not the way Patty did. Was that a sign? In high school, she hung around with a boy, David Martin. She always said they were only friends, and raised hell when Ann Marie wouldn’t allow them in her room together with the door closed. Their senior year, when she asked to go camping with David alone and Ann Marie said it was inappropriate, Fiona had said, “Jesus, Mom, he’s clearly gay.” It had never once dawned on her that Fiona might be too.

And what about her son? Ann Marie recalled a time when he was in high school, and she was in his room changing the sheets. Under the pillowcase, she found a copy of
Penthouse
magazine. Her eyes filled up with tears as she flipped through the pages—all those young, empty-eyed women with their legs spread, their mouths hanging open. He had walked in on her, catching her off guard, and she had shoved the magazine back under the pillow, as if he were the parent and she the guilty child. Ann Marie turned red and asked him how school was. Was that the moment? Could she have said or done something then? She should have told Pat, but even that seemed mortifying, and she reasoned that all teenage boys did a bit of exploring, probably.

At least she still had Patty. Suddenly, she hoped her older daughter might announce soon that she was pregnant again, even though she knew Patty and Josh planned to stop at three.

The following morning, she made Little Daniel pancakes stuffed with walnuts and chocolate chips.

“I’m not helping him,” Pat said after he left.

She didn’t have to speak; she just stared at him in disbelief.

Finally, Pat said, “Fine. But this is the last time.”

That afternoon, she bought a two-foot-tall antique carriage house on eBay for five hundred dollars. It was covered in silk roses and vines and matched the color of her dollhouse perfectly. She imagined escaping there, pressing her face up against the real glass windows and looking out on a rainstorm, safe inside.

   At Ann Marie’s urging, her son had softened the story when he told his fiancée what happened. As far as Regina knew, he had lost his job because the company was downsizing and had to cut the staff by a third, that was all.

They hadn’t told the girls, or anyone, what really happened. (They hadn’t told anyone about Fiona either, though she had said, “I would like to come out to the rest of the family in my own time.” Ann Marie hoped that meant never.)

When Pat got on the phone with his mother or his sister Clare, he boasted like crazy, said Little Daniel was bringing in a salary in the high six figures and making them proud. She appreciated her husband’s desire to shield their son from the Kelleher gossip mill, and she went along with it, even when that meant she had to lie right to Alice’s face.

   Pat reached into his wallet now and pulled out his checkbook. He made out a check for five thousand dollars and signed his name, ripping the page off with more intensity than seemed necessary. He handed it to her, and Ann Marie had the envelope waiting. She quickly placed the check inside and sealed it.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s get you some breakfast.”

“I’ll just have toast,” he said.

“I have some of that yummy Irish soda bread from my mother’s friend Sharon,” she said. “Want that?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“It’s going to be a gorgeous day,” she said. “It’s supposed to get up to seventy-seven degrees this afternoon.”

“That’s good.”

“Your mom said Maggie’s heading north sometime in the next few days,” Ann Marie went on. “Kathleen wouldn’t tell Alice exactly when. Typical. It’s really a shame she doesn’t go along too. But let us not forget how busy she is on
the farm
.”

Pat chuckled. “You can’t expect her to leave Farmer Arlo alone with all those animals to take care of,” he said. “Another Woodstock might pop up out there without my sensible big sister around to stop it.”

Ann Marie rolled her eyes. “Right. A billion worms and a hippie drug addict win out over her own mother and daughter. That makes good sense.”

“A friend of the devil is a friend of Kath’s,” he said. She frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It’s from a song. Never mind.” Pat paused, and then he said, “Poor Maggie.”

“I know! But what’s wrong with your sister? Doesn’t she miss her kids, all the way out there in California? Honestly, Patrick, it hurts me to even think it, but I don’t think she does.”

Pat didn’t have much of a relationship with his oldest sister, not anymore. When they were all young and Kathleen was still married, they were close. They spent almost every Saturday together. Twenty years had gone by, and Kathleen still blamed Pat for covering for her cheating ex-husband, even though he had done it to protect her. If she only knew how many times Pat had sat that guy down and told him to end his relationship with the other woman, to think about his family. Pat had genuinely believed he could talk sense into Paul, and maybe he might have eventually. They hadn’t known about Paul’s money problems until it was too late, but it wasn’t their fault that Kathleen had been clueless about her own bank account.

Ann Marie thought Pat had much stronger grounds on which to be furious. With their mother well into her seventies, Kathleen had squandered their father’s hard-earned money and up and moved across the country, leaving Alice in their care. Even back when Kathleen was religious, she was nothing but a Cafeteria Catholic. Maybe this was why she felt no obligation to her family, not one shred of guilt.

Pat’s other sister, Clare, wasn’t much better, and she lived only a few miles away in Jamaica Plain. Her husband, Joe, couldn’t stand Alice, and Clare had sided with him. She visited her mother once a month or so, and then Ann Marie would have to listen to Alice gush about the fact that Clare had brought her the most beautiful roses, or a bottle of cabernet with the fifty-dollar price tag still on, as if these petty gestures made up for the past four weeks of neglect.