Maine (32 page)

She walked around in a state of despair that felt like it had actual weight, pulling her down, making her feel exhausted. No one took much notice, but she grew nervous wondering what it would be like when Daniel came home.

She knew girls who were taking highly paid defense jobs—building bombers with such excitement you’d think Jimmy Stewart himself was going to fly them. Rita would call her in the evenings, gasping with excitement over wearing slacks to work, and having to pick specks of steel out of her hair and wiping grease from her cheeks.

Alice kept her job at the law firm, preferring to be solitary. She didn’t understand the exuberance all around her, as if war were the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. On her lunch hour, she declined to join the others for sandwiches and frappes at Brigham’s, and instead rode the streetcar to the Gardner Museum and walked from room to room, each of them so familiar to her after a time that she felt as though she were in her own home. She’d watch other women make a beeline for the Tapestry Room, or the courtyard, with its palm trees and flowers and pretty mosaics, but she herself was there for the paintings. She could spend the entire hour just gazing at John Singer Sargent’s
El Jaleo
—a woman dancing, the flamenco perhaps, as female admirers and men with guitars cheered her on from the sidelines. It hung alone in the Spanish Cloister, a room that Isabella Stewart Gardner had built specifically for the painting, years before she even owned it.

A year after they married, Alice had her second miscarriage. Daniel cried, but in a way she felt relieved. She told him in a letter for the hundredth time that she wasn’t made to be a mother, though he didn’t understand what she meant and only responded, “Everyone worries they won’t know what to do, darling. It’s natural.”

He wrote to her almost every day, sending jokes and stories and poems he had copied from a book of Yeats that his bunkmate kept under the bed. He told her tales of his childhood and his teenage years, and over time Alice began to feel that she was falling in love with him. Of course, she couldn’t say so out loud:
I’m falling in love with my husband
. What sort of a comment was that? Still, it brought her some degree of comfort.

She grew terrified that he, too, would die. Having the house to herself was a gift, Alice realized that. But it felt lonesome there, not at all what she had imagined on those nights when she listened to Trudy and her fellow bachelor girls gabbing away on the telephone.

One night after dinner at her parents’ house, Alice went up to her old bedroom. The twin beds were neatly made, as if she and Mary might slip into them after their baths like always. She took her paints down from a high shelf in the closet. Next to them lay her earmarked copy of
Live Alone and Like It
. She held the book in her hands for a moment, before throwing it into the back, behind Mary’s old tennis racquet and all of her beautiful gowns, which Alice’s mother had stupidly urged her to take.

After that, Alice began to do watercolors in the mornings before she left for work, small pieces, depicting the teakettle or Daniel’s fedora or a single wineglass with a tinge of purple left over from the previous night. She painted on bits of scrap paper she had saved for the war effort—the backs of envelopes, receipts from the drugstore. She’d let them dry on the windowsill before laying them flat in a line on the counter. The sight of them cheered her and she imagined showing them to Daniel. But one morning a few weeks after she started, as if coming out of a trance, Alice looked at what she’d done and burned with shame. She needed to put that childish part of her away now, the part that had believed she deserved more.

She stacked the pictures into a pile and tossed them in a burlap sack for the scrap drive at Town Hall. She threw the rest of the paints in the rubbish and told herself to stop being self-indulgent. She went to confession. She joined the St. Agnes Legion of Mary. She ended her visits to the museum, and took to eating lunch alone at her desk.

When the war ended and Daniel returned from overseas for good, Alice tried to be a model wife: sunny and cheerful and domestic, as she imagined Mary would have been. She managed fine in the kitchen and she took on more and more responsibilities at the church, but she could never quite shake her moods.

On his first Saturday back, as she did the ironing in the living room, listening to the same radio melodrama she had once teased her mother for loving, Daniel sat in an armchair reading the newspaper.

“This is swell,” he said. “This is what I’ve been imagining all these months away from you.”

She had wanted him home, but now tears sprang to her eyes. She quickly pushed them away. She thought of all she had lost.

“Oh gosh, did I say something wrong?” Daniel asked.

“No. I’m sorry. I’m feeling a bit sad today, that’s all.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” he said, getting to his feet, coming toward her and wrapping her in his arms. “Your sister, the pregnancies. It’s all just going to take time. And I’m sure it’s been made all the harder by the fact that your husband was hardly ever here. But the war is over, and it’ll get better now, you’ll see.”

“I know,” she said. It seemed like the easiest thing to say.

   Early in their marriage, Daniel’s idea of a big night out was going to a Red Sox game with his brothers and their boring wives, or taking the children on a long car trip, even though Kathleen whined and Clare always got nauseous.

Not that he didn’t try; he did. But even that often caused Alice pain. They might go dancing or to a party, and she would have a wonderful time for a few hours. But afterward she only felt guilty that her sister would never again know such a night.

In Maine one evening when she was eight months pregnant with Patrick, Daniel took her out to dinner while his sister watched the girls back at the cottage. Afterward, he told her he had a surprise, and they drove out to the Cliff Country Club, where an enormous crowd had gathered in the parking lot.

“What on earth is this?” she asked.

“It’s the Artists’ Ball,” he said with a big smile. “Mort and Ruby told me about it. They have it to raise tuition for poor students in the art school. It’s supposed to be a real gas.”

Daniel remembered what she had told him about her dream of becoming an artist, and he mentioned it an embarrassing amount, to strangers and co-workers and friends. He tried every summer to get her to take a class in the Perkins Cove school.

“A ball?” Alice said. “I’m not dressed for that.”

“No, no. It’s a costume party,” he said. “Besides, we don’t go in, we just watch the artists on parade. Apparently they do it every year. I’ve never heard of it before, have you?”

She said no, though in fact she had seen the signs around town and heard that it was near impossible for summer people to get in. She remembered from the posters that tickets cost two dollars and forty cents apiece. Herb Pomeroy’s sextet would perform and cocktails would be served. It sounded like heaven.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”

“Honey!” he said. “I thought you’d be excited. These are real live artists!”

They got out of the car and joined the pathetic mob, looking on as if at a bunch of Hollywood stars. There they were—the real live artists, men and women dressed as pirates and fairies and oversize babies, laughing gaily, soaking in the night, resting in Maine for a spell before going back out into the wide wide world. And there was Alice, with her swollen belly and her two children in bed down the road, waiting with their ears perked up for her to return home.

   In the early sixties, they dredged the riverbed in Perkins Cove to allow bigger boats to come through. The dredging brought up gold-rich alluvial gravel, causing a small gold rush in Ogunquit that year. By the time the expansion was done, some of the fishermen’s cottages had been torn down, and a big tar parking lot went up smack in the middle of the Cove. The artists’ colony disbanded then, and though everyone else said it was a pity, Alice was happy enough to see them go.

Maggie

Rhiannon left before seven the next morning.

“I hope I didn’t make the Gabe situation worse,” she whispered to Maggie, who was still lying in bed.

“No, it’s good that you told me,” Maggie lied. She didn’t get up and walk Rhiannon out. She knew she ought to, but she was still feeling injured by what Rhiannon had told her the night before.

Maggie hadn’t slept much. She kept thinking that she was going to be a single mother, the young woman in the doctor’s waiting room with a swollen belly and no wedding ring. Could she afford it? Would Gabe pay child support? Maybe his dad would write her a check for a million dollars in exchange for her going away forever. That would be fine by Maggie. Even scarier than the thought of doing this alone was the thought of some custody split with Gabe, not knowing what he was telling their child.

Note to self: Next time, don’t procreate with an asshole. Perhaps get married first
.

He hadn’t responded to her e-mail. It had only been eight hours and she had specifically told him to leave her alone, but still. An hour ago, she had thought of getting up and logging into his e-mail account to see if he’d read it. If not, maybe she should delete the message. Then she decided that that would be going too far—she should not lower herself to that level. And then she did it anyway, but the bastard had changed his password. She knew it was crazy of her to feel this way, but she was actually kind of offended by that.

Maggie didn’t want to return to Brooklyn, afraid to reenter her real life without Gabe in it. Would she stay there? Move to a crappy but cheap rental apartment in the suburbs somewhere?

By the time late morning rolled around, she wanted to spend several hours lying in a ball on the hardwood floor. But she had to get up and puke anyway, so she dragged herself into the shower afterward to ward off the fear that had gripped her during the night.

Maggie remembered standing in that yellow plastic stall with her mother when she was four or five, the two of them peeling off their bathing suits, sand slipping from their bodies and gathering around the drain. They giggled as Kathleen mashed shampoo into Maggie’s scalp.

She missed her mother.

Now she let the water fall warm over her shoulders, and rubbed her palm gently across her stomach. Beneath all the fear there was something unexpected and beautiful, like a crocus bud peeping out of the snow in early spring. She was going to be a mother. Her life was about to change.

She stepped out of the shower and glanced in the bathroom mirror. The skin around her eyes was gray and lined. She really ought to apply some concealer, but she couldn’t be bothered. She decided not to blow-dry, either—she was at the beach and her life was falling apart. Who did she have to impress? She toweled off and slid into a pair of jeans, taking note of the dresses she had pulled from Gabe’s closet a few days earlier. Life could change so quickly; you learned that as you aged. Yet it never ceased to surprise her.

Maggie glanced at the pink alarm clock on the nightstand. Had it once belonged in her mother’s old room at her grandparents’ house? She thought she remembered seeing it there. She felt like lying down, but instead decided to take a walk on the beach. Staying in motion seemed the best way to ward off insanity.

   It was after eleven now. Maggie sat on the jetty, her feet immersed in the chilly water. A busted-up lobster trap had washed into shore and landed on the rocks. New York seemed a million miles away.

All around her were tide pools full of periwinkles and algae, which turned the water brilliant shades of red and green. She thought of childhood days, when Chris and her cousin Daniel would wrest the periwinkles from where they lay, grabbing hold of their shells and dropping them into iced-tea bottles full of salty water, shaking them hard for no apparent reason, other than the fact that little boys sometimes got a strange kick out of being cruel.

The ocean stretched out before her, with nothing in the distance but a lone sailboat. Behind her, the cottage and the big house next door sat quiet and still. This place had been one of the few constants in her life. Perhaps next summer she’d be sitting on these rocks with a baby in her arms. Maybe she could even stay in the cottage through the off-season, as her mother had done leading up to the divorce. It wouldn’t be as gruesome as that spring had been. She could spend afternoons writing at the big table in the living room, while her child slept in a crib by the window, bathed in sunlight.

Maggie held a cup of herbal tea in her hand as she looked out over the choppy water. She wanted to tell her mother, but she felt terrified. Maggie knew all too well that Kathleen saw motherhood as the end of independence, growth, fulfillment. And yes, yes, we were at war, and terrorists might kill us all, and it seemed like a dreadful world to bring a child into. But when had the world been any better, really? When was it ever a safe time to create a life?

She took in a deep breath of ocean air and climbed to her feet, brushing sand from her tree-trunk legs, which were entirely resistant to the elliptical machine, thank you very much Great-grandma Dolan. As she walked back toward the beach, she saw an elderly couple in the distance practicing Tai Chi. They looked ridiculous, adorable. Some annoying reflexive part of her wished Gabe were there to see them. He would have taken their picture, preserving the sight forever.

She went up toward the cottage, planning to enter through the side door so she wouldn’t have to pass by her grandmother’s porch, where Alice was probably chain-smoking and reading a library book. Maggie felt guilty for avoiding her, but told herself she’d go visit Alice later in the afternoon, maybe bring some fresh cherries from Ruby’s Market.

As she came up the path from the beach, Maggie heard a repetitive banging sound that seemed to get louder as she approached. Then she saw him: a handsome, dark-haired guy about her age, wearing a blue sweater over jeans. He was standing at the side entrance’s railing with a hammer in his hand.

This must be the handyman Alice was yapping on about at dinner the night before, though he didn’t appear to be Mexican. He looked like one of those dashing Englishmen Alice so loved in BBC adaptations of Jane Austen books.

“Hi,” Maggie said, feeling her cheeks blush.

“Hello there,” he said with a wide smile. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said slowly.

“Connor Donnelly,” he said, extending a hand.

“Maggie Doyle.”

“So nice to meet you,” he said.

Attractive straight men rarely came across as friendly—they usually either flirted or ignored you. Maggie felt skeptical.

“Have you seen my grandmother?” she asked.

“Oh yes. She’s around front,” he said. “Uh-huh. Thanks.”

Maggie turned the corner. Alice was down on her knees in the garden a few feet away, tending her roses and wearing a netted hat to ward off mosquitoes.

“Hello there,” she said when Maggie approached. She struggled to get up, and Maggie rushed forward to help her.

“I’m absolutely fine,” Alice said. “Don’t make me feel like an old lady, please.”

Even though Alice would never say exactly how old she was, Kathleen put her age somewhere around eighty. She didn’t ever seem to change much. (“Too evil to grow old,” Maggie’s father often joked.) But here in this moment, she appeared frail, fragile.

“You look too thin, Grandma,” Maggie said, fully aware of the risk involved in making such a statement to Alice. “Are you eating enough?”

Alice scoffed. “There’s no such thing as too thin.”

“Seriously, are you eating enough?” Maggie asked.

Alice sighed. “Okay, you got me. My secret’s out. At the age of one hundred and five, I’ve decided to become an anorexic.”

It was a horrible joke, but Maggie couldn’t help but laugh.

“Where’s your friend?” Alice asked.

“She went back to New York,” Maggie said.

“Yes, I saw her drive off very early this morning. Did you two have a spat?”

“What? No.”
How did she know?

“She slept over; I saw her car,” Alice said.

“Yup. It got late.”

Alice nodded. “How is it down at the beach?”

“Glorious. Cold, but glorious.”

“Well, that’s good,” Alice said. “Did you meet Father Donnelly on your way back?”

“Father Donnelly?”

“My priest. He’s an absolute peach,” Alice said. “He helps me with whatever I need done around here. He takes me to lunch.”

He hadn’t been wearing a white collar. Weren’t they supposed to wear those at all times?

There were people, even now, who trusted a priest implicitly, based only on his vocation. And then, based on the same fact, there were those who instantly found everything he did suspect. Maggie fell into the latter category. Since when did priests make house calls to fix a wobbly banister? For less than an instant she envisioned him and Alice, wrapped up in some sort of intergenerational love affair, but then she willed the revolting thought to vanish.

“We’re going to a new place in Kittery around one o’clock if you want to come,” Alice said, smiling now, in one of her good moods.

Maggie exhaled a bit. “That would be nice.”

“Good. That’ll give you time to change out of those play clothes.”

Maggie didn’t see a reason to change out of her jeans and tank top in order to have lunch with her grandmother and a priest, but she responded, “Yup!”

Then she added, “I’m sorry it got so tense last night. I should have warned you more directly that Gabe wasn’t coming and Rhiannon was.”

Alice waved her hand through the air in front of her, as if shooing away a fly. “Water under the bridge,” she said.

   The three of them drove to Kittery Point at one o’clock sharp. Maggie sat in the backseat feeling a bit like a little girl, not minding the sensation at all. While Father Donnelly and Alice spoke about the women in Alice’s prayer group and their assorted ailments, Maggie stared out the window at the houses—white and blue and pale yellow with American flags flapping in the breeze.

The restaurant they had chosen was right on the beach, with pink picnic tables out front. They ordered lobster rolls and chowder and iced tea. The waitresses wore crisp white shorts and pink polo shirts. Instead of
MEN
and
LADIES
, the signs on the bathroom doors read
BUOYS
and
GULLS
.

They took a table overlooking the water.

Maggie thought it sounded like the perfect setup for one of her grandfather’s bad jokes:
An unwed mother, a priest, and an old biddy walk into a lobster pound …

When the wind whipped up, threatening to blow the napkins away, the priest covered them with a saltshaker. Inside the glass shaker were grains of white rice. Maggie remembered asking her mother about this when she was a kid: the rice soaked up the moisture in the air, Kathleen had explained, leaving the salt dry. (
But why?
Maggie thought now. And how was she supposed to imbue herself with all that motherly knowledge? How did it happen?)

Alice started in on the current family gossip, while Father Donnelly (“Call me Connor”) went to ask for more tartar sauce for her sandwich. Little Daniel was getting married to someone named Regina, who everyone loved, though it seemed to Maggie that he had known her for all of nine minutes.

When she said this, Alice smiled curtly and replied, “Well, he’s always had such a good head on his shoulders. I think he’s the type who really understands what he wants from life. He’s settled, professionally speaking. Ready for the next step!”

Unlike me, you mean
, Maggie thought, but she pressed on, reminding herself that in her grandmother’s eyes, Ann Marie and Patrick’s three kids could do no wrong.

“How are Aunt Clare and Uncle Joe?” she asked.

“How should I know?” Alice said. “They never call me. They’ve always kept to themselves, you know, but lately they’ve been worse than ever. Ann Marie told me she’s invited them over twice in the past month, and they haven’t even called her back. So rude!”

Maggie nodded. “Are they coming to Maine this summer?”

“No one tells me a thing,” Alice said grumpily, then, “As far as I know, yes, they’ll be here in August as usual.”

Father Donnelly returned with two miniature paper cups full of tartar sauce.

“Oh, thanks, Father, you’re a doll,” Alice said. She gave him her brightest smile. She always was at her best around good-looking men. Maggie thought of her grandfather: even when he was young, he was never particularly handsome. She had seen old pictures. The women in his family came up thick and freckly. The men were spindly, pale. She wondered why Alice had picked him. Surely someone so vain would have been disappointed by such a plain-looking husband.

“Will you lead us in grace, Father?” Alice asked.

Maggie glanced around at the other patrons in their shorts and sandals and flimsy plastic lobster bibs.
Grace? Really?

“I’d be honored,” he said. To Maggie’s horror, he extended his arms. They all joined hands.

Luckily, he spoke fast: “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bountiful hands through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

They dropped hands. He immediately turned to Maggie and said, “So how long will you be visiting?”

She shrugged, glad that was over, at least. “Not sure. A few days, maybe.”

“Is that all?” Alice asked. “I thought it was two weeks.”

“Well, my plans changed, as you know, and I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do.”

“She broke up with her boyfriend,” Alice said happily. “She’s hiding out.”

Maggie laughed, because it was sort of true, and because laughing was really the only alternative to getting pissed off at the comment. Besides, it was nice in a way, to pretend for a moment that the breakup was the worst of her worries.

“I can’t think of a better place for it,” he said. He bit into his lobster roll, leaving a speck of mayo on his bottom lip. To Maggie’s great amazement, Alice reached over and wiped it off.