Authors: J. Courtney Sullivan
Maine
ALSO BY J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN
Commencement
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by J. Courtney Sullivan
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following
for permission to reprint previously published material:
Arcadia Publishing: poem by Dana Perkins included in
Ogunquit By-The-Sea
by John D. Bardwell (Arcadia Publishing, 1994). Reprinted by permission
of Arcadia Publishing,
www.arcadiapublishing.com
.
The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: excerpt from “To a Young Poet”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay, copyright © 1939, 1967 by Edna St. Vincent Millay
and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett and
Holly Peppe, Literary Executors, The Millay Society.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sullivan, J. Courtney.
Maine : a novel / by J. Courtney Sullivan. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-59681-9
1. Women—Family relationships—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction.
3. Maine—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.U43M35 2011
813′.6—dc22 2011003396
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket photograph © Ruggero Maramotti / Gallery Stock
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1
For Trish
Alas, a mother never is afraid,
Of speaking angrily to any child,
Since love, she knows, is justified of love.
—
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
,
Aurora Leigh
Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.
—a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, Frances
Contents
Alice
Alice decided to take a break from packing. She lit a cigarette, leaning back in one of the wicker chairs that were always slightly damp from the sea breeze. She glanced around at the cardboard boxes filled with her family’s belongings, each glass and saltshaker and picture frame wrapped carefully in newspaper. There were at least a couple of boxes in every room of the house. She needed to make sure she had taken them all to Goodwill by the time the children arrived. This had been their summer home for sixty years, and it amazed her how many objects they had accumulated. She didn’t want anyone to be burdened by the mess once she was gone.
She could tell by the heavy clouds that it was about to rain. In Cape Neddick, Maine, that May, you were likely to see a thunderstorm every afternoon. This didn’t bother her. She never went down to the beach anymore. After lunch she usually sat out on the screen porch for hours, reading novels that her daughter-in-law, Ann Marie, had lent her during the winter, drinking red wine, and watching the waves crash against the rocks until it was time to make supper. She never felt the urge she once did to put on a swimsuit and take a dip or muss her pedicure by walking in the sand. She preferred to watch it all from a distance, letting the scene pass through her like a ghost.
Her life here was ruled by routine. Each day, she was up by six to clean the house and tend her garden. She drank a cup of Tetley, leaving the tea bag on a dish in the fridge so she could use it once more before lunch. At nine thirty on the nose, she drove to St. Michael’s by the Sea for ten o’clock Mass.
The surrounding area had changed so much since their first summer in Maine, all those years ago. Huge houses had gone up along the coast, and the towns were now full of gift shops and fashionable restaurants and gourmet grocery stores. The fishermen were still around, but back in the seventies many of them had started catering to tourists, with their breakfast cruises and their whale watches and such.
Some things remained. Ruby’s Market and the pharmacy were still dark by six. Alice still left her keys in the car at all times. She never locked the house either—no one up here did. The beach had stayed untouched, and every one of the massive pine trees dotting the road from her door to the church looked as if it had been there for centuries.
The church itself was a constant. St. Michael’s was an old-fashioned country chapel made of stone, with red velvet cushions in the pews and brilliant stained-glass windows that burst with color in the morning sun. It had been built at the top of a hill off Shore Road so that its rooftop cross might be visible to sailors at sea.
Alice always sat in the third row to the right of the altar. She tried to remember the best bits of wisdom from Father Donnelly’s sermons to pass along to the child or grandchild who needed them most, not that they paid her any attention. She listened intently, singing out the familiar hymns, reciting the prayers she had recited since she was a girl. She closed her eyes and asked God for the same things she had asked for all those years ago: to help her be good, to make her do better. For the most part, she believed He heard.
After Mass on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the St. Michael’s Legion of Mary met in the church basement and said the rosary for ailing members of the parish, for the hungry and needy around the world, for the sanctity of life in all its stages. They recited Hail Holy Queen and drank decaf and chatted. Mary Fallon reminded them whose turn it was to bring muffins next time and who would accompany Father Donnelly on his weekly trip to the homes of the infirm, where he prayed for a recovery that usually never came. Though it was terribly sad, watching strangers her own age dying, Alice enjoyed her afternoons with Father Donnelly. He brought such comfort to everyone he visited. He was a young man, only thirty-four, with dark hair and a warm smile that reminded her of crooners from the fifties. He had chosen a vocation from another era, and he was thoughtful in a way she didn’t know young people could be anymore.
Alice felt a sense of deep dedication watching him pray over his parishioners. Most priests today didn’t make time for house calls. When they were done, Father Donnelly would take her to lunch, which she knew for a fact he did not do with the other gals from the Legion. He had done so much for her. He even helped her around the house now and then—changing the high-up lightbulb on the porch, hauling away tree branches after a storm. Perhaps this special treatment was only a result of the little arrangement they had made, but she hardly cared.
Father Donnelly and the seven members of the Legion of Mary (no fewer than five of them actually named Mary) were the only people Alice interacted with on a regular basis at this time of year. She was the lone summer person in the group, their foreign exchange student, she called herself as a joke. The year-rounders were suspicious of outsiders. But they had agreed to let her join just for the season after the archdiocese shut down St. Agnes two years back.
St. Agnes was her church at home in Canton, the church where Alice’s children were baptized, where her husband, Daniel, was eulogized, where she had gone to Mass every day for the past six decades and run both the Sunday school program, when her children were small, and the Legion of Mary once they had grown. She had co-chaired the campaign to save the church with a young mother of four named Abigail Curley, who had translucent skin and a soft, childlike voice. Together, they gathered five hundred signatures; they wrote dozens of letters; they petitioned the cardinal himself.
At the final Mass, Alice cried quietly into her handkerchief. These closures were becoming common practice; you read about them all the time. But you never thought they’d impact you. At St. Agnes, Abigail Curley and some of the other congregants refused to leave. Thirty months later they were still occupying the church around the clock, holding vigil even though there was no priest there anymore, no lighting or heat. Alice started going to a new church in Milton, but she felt no connection to the place or the people there. Now her summer church was her main link to her faith and her past. The Legion members seemed to understand as much.
They were mostly widows who had let themselves go. They wore sweat suits and chunky white sneakers, and their hair was a uniform disaster. Alice was the sole one among them who had kept her figure. Only her deep, deep damn wrinkles even hinted at the horrifying fact that she was eighty-three. But like the rest of them, she was alone. Sometimes she wondered if they all took their morning prayer sessions so seriously because they each needed someone to bear witness to their presence. Otherwise, one of them might have a stroke at the kitchen table some morning, and simply go unnoticed.
Her husband, Daniel, won the property in 1945, just after the war ended, in a stupid bet with a former shipmate named Ned Barnell. Ned was a drunk, even by the standards of his fellow navy men. He had grown up in a fishing village in Maine, but now spent his time squandering his paychecks in some of Boston’s finest barrooms and underground gambling clubs. He made a fifty-dollar wager with Daniel on some basketball game, which absolutely enraged Alice. They had been married two years then, and she was pregnant with Kathleen. But Daniel said the bet was a sure thing, that he never would have made it otherwise. And he won.
Ned didn’t have the money to pay him.
“Surprise, surprise,” Alice said when Daniel came home that night and told her the news.
He had a wild grin on his face. “You’ll never guess what he gave me instead.”
“A car?” Alice said sarcastically. Their twelve-year-old Ford coupe sputtered and pooped out whenever she started it. By then, they were so accustomed to gas rations that they mostly walked everywhere anyway, or took the streetcar. But the war was over now, and another New England winter was coming. Alice had no intention of being one of those mothers on the train, shushing her screaming newborn while others looked on with disapproving stares.
“Better,” Daniel said.
“Better than a car?” Alice asked.
“It’s land,” Daniel said gleefully. “A whole big plot of land, right on the water in Maine.”
She was skeptical. “You better not be joking, Daniel Kelleher.”
“I kid you not, Mrs. Kelleher,” he said, coming toward her. He pressed his face to her stomach.
“You hear that, jelly bean?” he said to her belt.
“Daniel!” she said, trying to push him away. She hated when he talked directly to the baby, already attached.
He ignored her.
“This time next summer we’ll be making sand castles. Daddy got you your own beach.” He straightened up. “Ned’s grandfather gave all his grandkids some land, but Ned’s got no interest in his piece. It’s ours!”
“For a fifty-dollar bet?” Alice asked.
“Let’s just say it was the last in a long line of fifty-dollar bets that may or may not have gone unpaid.”
“Daniel!” Despite the good news, her blood boiled a bit.
“Honey, don’t worry so much, you married a lucky guy,” he said with a wink.
Alice didn’t believe in luck, though if it existed she was fairly sure that hers was lousy. In two years of marriage, she had already miscarried three times. Her mother had lost two babies in infancy before the rest of her children came along, though Alice wouldn’t dare ask her about it. All her mother ever said on the topic was that she assumed God had taken away the things she loved most as some sort of test. Alice wondered if in her case the children simply vanished because they knew they weren’t quite wanted or, more to the point, that she was no mother.
She was used to the routine—no dark spots on her delicates at the usual time of the month, followed by a few weeks of nausea and vomiting and headaches, and then the sight of blood in the white china toilet, another soul gone.
She had overheard a gal in the elevator in her office building whispering to her girlfriend that a doctor in New York had fitted her for a diaphragm.
“Such a relief!” the girl had said. “Lord knows Harry’s not doing anything to make sure I don’t get knocked up.”
“If the men had to push the babies out, then they’d take the precautions,” her friend said. “Can you imagine Ronald, huffing and puffing?” She closed her mouth and filled her cheeks up with air, squinting her eyes until they both began to giggle.
Alice wished she could say something to them, find out more. But they were strangers to her, and it was a vulgar thing to be talking about in the first place. She didn’t know who to ask, so she went to a priest before work one morning—someone a few parishes away from her own. Everyone acted as though penance was an anonymous process, but you could see the priest before he went into the confessional, and he could just as easily see you. This one was old, with pure white hair.
FATHER DELPONTE
, it said on a plaque on the outside of the box. Italian, she supposed. Everyone knew Italian girls were fast. She hoped he wouldn’t mistake her for one of them. She was married, after all.
In the dim box, she kneeled down, closed her eyes, and crossed herself.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one month since my last confession,” she began, the same words she had uttered so many times before.
Her cheeks blushed a fiery red as she told him about the babies she had lost.
“I wonder if perhaps now isn’t the time for me,” she said. “I wonder if there’s something I might do to hold off. My sister died a couple years back, and I’m still not myself. I’m afraid of being a mother. I don’t think I have it in me to love another person enough, at least not yet.”
She wanted to say more, but then he asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
Alice could swear she saw him make a baffled face through the screen.
“You’re more than old enough, my dear,” he said softly. “God has a plan for each of us. We have to believe in it, and do nothing to put it off course.”
She did not know if he had understood. Perhaps she should have been clearer.
“There are ways I’ve heard of to delay,” she began, fumbling for the words. “I know the Church frowns on it.”
“The Church forbids it,” he said, and that was all.
She cried for a moment in the parking lot and then set off for work. She never told Daniel what she had done.
This pregnancy had lasted six months so far. Alice was terrified. She tiptoed everywhere, afraid to breathe. She had to drink half a glass of whiskey each night to get to sleep. She smoked twice as many cigarettes as usual and paced around the block in the afternoons—she had been reprimanded by her boss three times now for being away from her desk when she wasn’t supposed to be. Mr. Kristal was downright wretched to her, probably because he recognized her condition, and knew from experience that she’d be giving her notice soon enough.
The Saturday after Daniel won the land, they took a ride out to Cape Neddick. Alice didn’t know what to expect. She had been to Maine only once before, on a day trip with her brothers and sister when she was a teenager. All six of them were jammed into their father’s Pontiac, barreling along with the windows rolled down. They ate lunch at a clam shack and then drove east until they found a slip of beach to relax on. The boys skipped rocks into the water, and Alice and Mary sat in the sand, talking. Alice did a sketch of the dunes in her notebook. They didn’t know what town they were in, and they didn’t linger for long. They couldn’t afford to stay overnight, not even at one of the cheap roadside motels that lined the highway.
Only a few years had passed since then, but it seemed like another lifetime.
Daniel drove the car through downtown Ogunquit, past a motor inn and a dance hall and Perkins Drugstore, and the Leavitt Theatre, where
Anchors Aweigh
was playing at two o’clock. They went straight, past the stone library and the Baptist church and a row of grand hotels, until they reached the tip of town, where fishermen’s shacks and lobster traps stood on the land, and fishing boats bobbed up and down in the harbor. There was water on three sides: the Atlantic’s rocky coastline to the left and in front of them, and to the right a small inlet with a footbridge leading to the other side. Carved into a stone at the base of the bridge were the words
PERKINS COVE
.