Maine

Courtney Sullivan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780857894984
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857894977
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Kelleher's beachfront holiday house creaks under a weight of secrets.

A place where cocktails follow morning mass and children eavesdrop, it is home to matriarch Alice, who would trade every floorboard for a chance to undo the events of one night, decades before.

As summer arrives and the women in Alice's family descend on the shore, it soon becomes clear that these mothers and daughters have been deeply hurt by the people they love the most. But as this fierce, irrational love burns ever brighter, anger builds and painful secrets are unearthed.

Alice

After dinner, Alice went out to the screen porch and called Ann Marie.

“Your niece arrived today, and not with Gabe,” she said.

“Oh?” Ann Marie said, sounding distracted, not seeming to care.

“Instead she brought a woman,” Alice said.

“What do you mean, a woman?” Ann Marie asked.

“A woman who lives next door to her,” Alice whispered, as if Daniel were sitting there and liable to scold her for gossiping with their bigmouthed daughter-in-law.

“You mean, like a date?” Ann Marie said. “Hold on, Mom. Pat, honey, can’t you watch this in the other room?”

It hadn’t even dawned on Alice that Maggie and Whatever-Her- Name-Was might be together in that way. No, she was positive they weren’t. Then again, Alice had always been clueless about such things. She had once remarked to Daniel that it was nice how many pairs of brothers you saw walking around Ogunquit, arm in arm, and he had laughed like a hyena.

Now she replied, “I’m not sure what sort of relationship it is, to be honest. Just strange, that much I know. Maggie has the girl drive her here and tells me she’s leaving tonight. Well, I can see quite clearly that she hasn’t left. I’m not blind.”

“That’s odd.”

“Kathleen made such a mess of that child. I wish there was something I could have done to fix her. Now it’s probably too late.”

She was fuming from their dinner conversation, but she didn’t feel like getting into the specifics with Ann Marie.

“You’re always taking too much upon yourself,” Ann Marie said. “There’s nothing you can do. Lately I’m starting to think that children just become who they become.”

“Well, I thank God every day that your three turned out the way they did,” Alice said.

“Our three have their moments,” Ann Marie said.

It was precisely this sort of comment that made her so dear, because really her children were angels. They had probably turned out so well because of Ann Marie’s refusal to make excuses for bad behavior, as Alice’s own two daughters were prone to doing for their kids. Alice had sent Christopher and Maggie a twenty-dollar check on every one of their birthdays since they were babies, and had either of them ever bothered to write a thank-you note?

Little Daniel always mailed a card on Alice’s birthday and even sent her flowers on Mother’s Day. He was a handsome devil, a darling boy. He was quick as a whip, like his father, and engaged to a sweet young beauty, a Catholic, thank God. She was Italian, not Irish, but what could you do?

Patrick and Ann Marie’s daughter Fiona was a saint. Alice often thought that if Fiona had been around in her day, she would have been one of the girls who chose to become a nun. Perhaps she still would. As a child, Alice had loathed the nuns. They rapped her knuckles, and made her write with her right hand, her left hand tied to the back of her chair, though it was perfectly clear she was a lefty.

Even so, to have a granddaughter in the sisterhood would be a real point of pride at Legion of Mary meetings. Mary Daley’s son was only a deacon and she got so much attention for it, you’d think he was the pope.

Patty, Ann Marie and Patrick’s middle child, had gone to law school and was now working long hours, despite the fact that she had three small children. She had married a Jew, which had just about killed Ann Marie. She never said so, but Alice could feel it.

Still, Ann Marie and Pat’s three kids would always be her favorites, especially Little Daniel.

She found Maggie to be the most difficult of all the grandchildren. When the girl let her guard down and had a few drinks, she could really be a hoot. She had a good sense of humor, like Daniel’s. But there was a sort of forced quality about her most of the time, a formality that rubbed Alice the wrong way. Maggie was obsessed with getting to the bottom of every conflict, thanks most likely to the fact that Kathleen had shoved her onto a therapist’s couch as soon as she was in middle school. After Daniel died, when Alice didn’t want to think of him or Kathleen at all, there was Maggie, calling her every other day like clockwork. Alice tried to ask God for patience, to tell herself that her granddaughter meant well, but she felt annoyed even so.

Daniel had loved the stuffing out of that child, same as he had with Kathleen.

Once, when Maggie was six or seven, Alice had gotten up for a glass of water and found her crying in the cottage kitchen in the middle of the night.

“What happened?” Alice asked.

“I heard a scary noise,” Maggie said. “It woke me up.”

“Did you tell your parents?” Alice looked in vain toward their bedroom.

“They’re asleep,” Maggie said. She kept right on crying.

“Did you think it was a ghost?” Alice asked. She meant it as a joke, but Maggie’s face turned deadly serious.

“Oh, Grandma, I wish I could see a ghost,” she said. “Then death wouldn’t be so scary. Seeing a ghost would mean we get to keep on living. Well, sort of. Right?”

Alice was startled. What kind of child said a thing like that?

“Get back to sleep now,” she said sternly. “You’re fine. You only heard the wind off the dunes.”

When she got into bed beside Daniel a few moments later, having forgotten all about her glass of water, Alice felt so rattled she had to shake him awake to tell him the story.

Daniel just chuckled groggily. “What a clever munchkin that one is,” he said, before immediately falling back to sleep.

After she hung up the phone, Alice walked to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of wine, and then she set to washing the dishes.

Maybe she ought to be kinder to Maggie. After all, she was going through a breakup. She seemed a bit out of sorts. But why the hell did she have to bring that friend here with no notice at all? Why had she said those things about Daniel right in front of that Scottish girl?

Alice saw her grandchildren as extensions of their parents, so that Ryan’s ambition and disappointment had her praying for Clare, and Chris’s roughness made her light candles for Kathleen. But she also blamed her daughters for how their children had turned out. How could she not? Kathleen had no sense of propriety whatsoever, and so her child saw nothing wrong with coming to Alice’s dinner table and asking her about her life’s most devastating moments.

Maggie had said that Daniel would want to see her painting again. That alone made Alice want to slap her across the face. What did she know about any of that? Daniel was a wonderful man, and she had loved him dearly. But he had never been interested in seeing her become anything besides another mother, another proper housewife. He had insisted that she stop drinking because of it; he had consulted their daughter about his cancer treatment rather than worry Alice’s pretty little head.

Don’t you think it could be good for us to talk about him? her granddaughter had asked preposterously, and in front of a complete stranger. Alice assumed she wanted to know only for the sake of that goddamn book she was writing. She wasn’t about to bare her soul to fulfill Maggie’s literary aspirations. The story of how she met Daniel, of how she lost her sister, would remain hers alone. It wasn’t anyone else’s business. But now Maggie had her thinking about all of it, and she hated to think about it.

Alice walked back out to the porch for a cigarette. In the distance, the waves were crashing against the rocks. This had been Daniel’s favorite time of night, sitting out here with a cup of peppermint tea, listening to the surf before bed. She missed him—there was a pit in her stomach where he had once resided.

A short while later, she went to the bathroom and switched on the radio to have a bit of noise. She changed into a cotton nightgown and removed her teeth, brushing them gently before she placed them in a glass of cold water on the edge of the sink. The dentures were a new acquisition this year. She was happy at least that Daniel hadn’t lived long enough to see them.

Alice pulled back her hair and washed her face with cold cream. Her skin had gotten so terribly dry as she aged. It was as thin as tissue paper now, and could tear from the slightest bump. She dipped her fingers into a tub of Eucerin, as she did each night, rubbing the jelly into her cracked legs and pulling a pair of stretchy black pants over the top to seal in the moisture. Tomorrow she was having lunch with Father Donnelly. Maybe that would cheer her up.

She shut off the radio and got into her bed, which was far too big for only her. The memories plunged forth and she had to leave the light on, as if she were her own timid child.

The Holy Cross–Boston College football game at Fenway Park fell on November 28, 1942, two days after Thanksgiving. Alice’s brothers Timmy and Paul and so many of their friends were home on leave for two weeks, and they were giddy, running around town in their uniforms, making the girls swoon. Her other brothers hadn’t come home: Jack was on the USS Augusta, somewhere off the coast of North Africa. Michael, only fifteen, was fighting in the Pacific. He was technically too young, but he had snuck into the military, afraid to miss out on the excitement.

With two of the four boys home and their mother a nervous wreck, convinced that all of them might be dead by Christmas, that Thanksgiving was a feast unlike any they had ever had—their mother cooked a turkey and gravy, buttery mashed potatoes and au gratins, too, and Mary baked apple pie and peach cobbler. By the time Saturday came, they were still stuffed.

The boys all hoped to go to Boston College once the war was over. They had been rooting for the Eagles since they were kids. This year, BC was undefeated, and winning this game would mean a trip to the Sugar Bowl. But in an upset that sent her brothers into a tizzy (no doubt they’d lost plenty gambling on the game), Holy Cross won, fifty-five to twelve.

Alice didn’t give a fig about any of this; she hadn’t even gone to the game with the boys. But she had been preparing to meet Daniel Kelleher at the Cocoanut Grove later that night since right after breakfast. Mary wasn’t coming. She was supposed to, but at the last minute her Henry got tickets for a show at the Shubert, and she pulled out.

“You’re making me go alone?” Alice had moaned that morning in the bathroom as they washed their faces.

“You won’t be alone, you’ll have the boys there.”

“Mary, you’d better come meet us after the show.”

“We’ll see what Henry wants.”

“What Henry wants! Always what Henry wants!” Alice walked into the hallway and slammed the door.

“Oh, honestly!” came Mary’s voice from the other side.

She left the house a short while later. “Good luck tonight,” she said, pinching Alice’s cheek.

Alice spent the afternoon primping on her own, which was nowhere near as fun as doing it with someone else. But by the time she was ready, she felt like a million bucks. The silver silk dress she had picked out fell perfectly over her hips, pooling on the floor and covering the scuffed toes of her shoes. The dress belonged to Mary and was too big for Alice on its own—she had tied a blue ribbon tightly around her waist to give it some shape. She was wearing Mary’s favorite gray suede gloves, lined with mink, and her mink coat too. The coat had been a present from Henry, but Mary hardly ever put it on. Finders keepers, Alice thought. It was wintertime. Someone ought to be getting some wear out of it.

She herself didn’t have a single dress nice enough to wear to the Cocoanut Grove. Everyone would be in formal evening attire, and she wasn’t about to try to dress up a convertible suit with pearls, as her mother had suggested. But her brothers had invited her to come. A shipmate of Tim’s had an older brother named Daniel who’d gone to Holy Cross and was now home on leave from the Pacific for a week. Timmy had gotten it into his head that this older brother ought to marry one of his sisters.

For months he had been writing Alice about how wonderful Daniel was, even though he wasn’t a Boston College grad. He was sweet and funny and smart as heck, Timmy said. He had been born smack in the middle of ten kids and had the patience of a saint. (Perfect for a pain in the neck like you, ha-ha! he had written.)

Alice wrote back: If you like the man so much, why don’t you marry him?

Ha. Ha, Timmy responded. Just come out with us to the BC game at the end of the month, and afterward we’ll go somewhere special for dancing.

Having no intention of meeting a date in the freezing cold and wind of a football game, she had arranged to get together with the boys afterward at the Cocoanut Grove. Really, she had agreed to the setup only because she wanted an excuse to go.

Alice had been there twice before, once to see Joe Frisco perform, and the other time, Helen Morgan. She loved the place—the long oval bar beside the stage, the wide dance floor surrounded by tables covered in white linen cloths. The room was lined with palm trees and dripping with lights. In summertime, the roof could be rolled back for dancing under the stars.

She arrived at seven thirty, right on time, gliding through the revolving door, feeling like a movie star. She wore a bright red lipstick that her aunt Rose had sent from New York the previous Christmas. She had styled her hair in a soft wave, like Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels.

Inside the club, hundreds of people stood shoulder to shoulder: handsome men in uniform by the dozens, glamorous women in their finest gowns. Every corner was full, every table taken up. Alice scanned the room for her ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Maine
• Alice
• Maggie
• Kathleen
• Ann Marie
• Alice
• Maggie
• Kathleen
• Ann Marrie
• Alice
• Maggie
• Kathleen
• Maggie
• Alice
• Maggie
• Ann Marie
• Kathleen
• Alice
• Maggie
• Ann Marie
• Kathleen
• Alice
• Acknowledgments
• A note on the type