Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Alice’s parents prided themselves on being the first homeowners in their family: both sets of grandparents had immigrated to Boston from Ireland, both grandmothers died young, and the grandfathers were mostly useless. Her parents had been raised in boardinghouses and the spare rooms of charitable but not altogether kind cousins. Now they grew frightened of not being able to make the mortgage each month.

  Everyone in the family had to contribute. Alice and her sister, Mary, babysat for all the neighborhood kids, making fifty cents for a full day’s work, which they then had to turn over to their mother for the Christmas club. Mary was better at it—she had infinite patience, and she actually liked children. Alice only enjoyed sitting for the Jewish ones, since their parents had money. The fathers worked all hours and the mothers just wanted to play mah-jongg in peace. So they’d send Alice and the children to the movies, always the movies. They handed out dishes at the Magnet Theater in those days. A cup on Monday, a saucer on Tuesday, a soup bowl on Wednesday, and so on, no matter that hardly anyone had the food to fill them. Between the two of them, Alice and Mary got their mother five complete sets.

  Their brothers took on odd jobs after school. Timmy waited tables and Michael cleaned floors at city hall. Even their mother worked for a time—selling fruitcakes and embroidered handkerchiefs door-to-door like a proper hobo. Alice burned with embarrassment at the sight, hating her father for letting it happen. Their mother had been a schoolteacher before she married, but women were banned from teaching now, since so many men needed the work.

  The four boys were made to move into one bedroom, so that the family had a spare room to let. Alice and Mary shared a tiny room already, so at first Alice was pleased to see their brothers similarly cramped together. But the lodgers who came were often frightening: Some cried and moaned over what they had lost. There were women with infants who shrieked at dawn, and men who drank and pawed at Alice and Mary on their way to the bathroom at night or scratched at their bedroom door late, whispering to them to open up and give a guy some happiness.

  Mary would whisper back pleadingly from the other side of the closed door to those drunkards, telling them to get some sleep, sir, please call it a night. Alice would shoo her into bed, and then say gruffly, “Listen, you bastard, get away from here now or my father will cut you to pieces like he did the other one before you.”

  Their father had done no such thing. He’d hardly care if those men came in and dragged his daughters off by their fingernails.

  Mary’s eyes widened: “Gosh, you’re brave!” she would say with a sort of awe.

  At eighteen, Mary was older by two years, but even so, Alice felt protective of her sister. Mary was shy and sweet and well-behaved. She waited on their parents like a maid, considering it her duty. She even did Alice’s chores sometimes. She wanted to have a dozen kids someday, and she didn’t mind caring for their bratty brothers.

  Alice, on the other hand, just wanted to be left alone. She loved to paint and draw. She could escape into a picture for hours if allowed. Whenever she could, she sat by the window in their shared bedroom at the top of the house, painting the street below, their mother in the garden, Mary wearing her Christmas dress and muff. She’d hold her breath, waiting for someone to yell out and ruin her peace—telling her to do something, wash something, mend something.

  Her brothers protested when they were left in Alice’s care. She made them eat their dinner one at a time, all off the same dish she had eaten from first, so that she’d have to wash only one plate instead of five and would have more time to sit on the stoop and chat with Rita, or to go upstairs and draw.

  “The food’s always cold by the time the plate gets to me!” Timmy would complain to their mother, who would then give Alice a lecture on the virtues of etiquette and cleanliness.

  “You’ll make an awful housewife with an attitude like that,” her mother said once, and Alice felt almost proud. She couldn’t imagine herself as a mother or a wife. She had never taken to children, and she had too often been forced to care for the ones in her house—to look after them, to feed them, to scold them. By the time she reached high school, she was done with raising kids. She had begun planning her escape. Or, if not planning it exactly, then wishing for it.

  No respectable lady Alice knew had done anything but have children. The only single adult women in their family were nuns, or Aunt Rose, who had divorced her rumrunner husband and moved to New York City, where she now worked at the makeup counter at Macy’s in Herald Square. Their father referred to Rose as “that selfish harlot” whenever her name came up. He wouldn’t allow their mother to see her. Alice wanted to run away to New York and live with her aunt, but Rose had told her in a letter that she slept in a boardinghouse full of derelicts and drunks, and that was no place for a young girl.

  When she was fifteen, Alice was painting pictures with a babysitting charge one evening when his mother came home from work. Mrs. Bloom was a sophisticated Jewish lady with dark hair and eyes, and rumor had it she had married down. She and her husband owned a frame shop in Upham’s Corner, which always seemed to close for the day right after lunch.

  She put her purse on the table that night and looked at what Alice had done.

  “You’re very talented,” she said. “You know that? With the proper training, I think you might really blossom.”

  Alice perked up at the comment, but immediately shrugged it off. She imagined her father and brothers laughing when she told them. She left the picture behind on the table when she went home, to show how little she cared.

  The next time she came by, Mrs. Bloom said, “I showed that painting of yours to my husband, who may not have an ounce of business sense in his head, but what he does have is an excellent eye. He agreed with me. You’re good, Alice. You should study art.”

  Mrs. Bloom gave her a quarter to take the boy to the Gardner Museum on the trolley. He fussed all afternoon, but Alice hardly noticed: she had never been there before and she was mesmerized. A plaque that hung in the vestibule revealed that Isabella Stewart Gardner, a great patroness of the arts, had built a mansion in Boston made to look like an Italian palace. Later, her home was turned into a museum and named in her honor. She had been painted by John Singer Sargent, and she threw the most elaborate dinners, full of great thinkers and artists. She traveled the world and studied in Paris.

  This was the sort of woman Alice wanted to be. Right then and there, she decided that one day she would become a famous painter. She would attend college in Paris and sell her paintings to wealthy Frenchmen. She could get an apartment on the Seine and live in peace, without a hundred little boy feet rumbling around downstairs.

  A year passed. The Bloom family moved to Brookline. When they left, Mrs. Bloom gave Alice a beautiful sketch pad with a real leather cover. “Don’t give up,” she said.

  Alice promised she wouldn’t, though Mrs. Bloom’s tone sent a chill through her. She filled the entire pad with drawings in the span of two weeks. She went to the library and checked out the only biography they had about Isabella Stewart Gardner, which she had already read twice. She used her brother Timmy’s card to get another book, which she had no intention of ever returning. It contained black-and-white photographs of Paris. Alice ripped them out and stuck them to the wall behind her bed.

  Her main window onto the existence of the single gal was through a woman named Trudy, who she had never actually met. Their household and Trudy’s apartment shared a party line. Most every night you could pick up the phone in the Brennan family kitchen and hear Trudy gabbing away on her sofa in Beacon Hill. Sometimes Alice’s father would need to call in to work, and he’d try eight or nine times, eventually saying, “Pardon me, miss, but this is not a private line. Please keep your conversations brief or I’ll alert the telephone company.”

  Trudy was undeterred and Alice was glad of it, since her favorite pastime was listening in. Mary said she shouldn’t eavesdrop, but how could she resist? Trudy was better than any radio soap opera.<
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  Trudy spoke to her girlfriends about all the dates she went on to fine restaurants, and the flowers her suitors sent the next day. She once went to an office party and ended up dancing on a rooftop in Kenmore Square with her married boss, Mr. Pembroke. She hated her hips and had allowed herself to eat only a hard-boiled egg on dry toast for each of the last fourteen days. She was going to Los Angeles in April if her stepfather would cough up the cash already. She had read a book called Live Alone and Like It and decided to decorate her apartment all in lavender and start stocking cocktail ingredients, even though some people thought it was tacky for a woman to do that.

  Alice listened silently, taking it all in.

  One night Trudy mentioned that Mr. Pembroke had brought her along to an art opening in the city, where paintings of naked ladies had graced the walls and waiters in white gloves had handed out tiny pickles and nuts.

  “Honestly!” her friend had said. “Your boss is quite fond of you, isn’t he? I guess he’s just impressed with your typing skills.”

  “Those, and my impeccable manners,” Trudy had said. “It must have been the childhood cotillion classes my mama made me go to.”

  Alice was tempted to speak up and ask Trudy what cotillion was, but instead she asked her sister, and when her sister didn’t know, she asked the lady next door.

  “Lessons to make you more sophisticated and polished,” her neighbor explained.

  Alice stole a few dollars from her mother and enrolled in cotillion immediately. Most of the other attendees were years younger than she was—only twelve or thirteen, the sons and daughters of wealthy lawyers and businessmen. Alice hardly cared. Each Saturday morning she took the hour-long streetcar ride into Cambridge and learned the rules for holding a knife and fork, the right posture for sitting and standing, and the proper way to speak, even a few French words.

  After class, she brought her pastels to the banks of the Charles River and sat in the grass, sketching the passersby. She had swiped the pastels from Sister Florence, her high school art teacher, and they were usually a crumbling mess by the time she pulled them out, having been hidden for days in her coat pockets, where they made rainbows on the satin lining. In her imagination, some wealthy benefactor would stop in his tracks—You’re too talented for this place, he’d say. You have a gift, my dear. Let me take you away from here. Let me show you Paris.

  But no one ever asked what she was doing, and when she brought her pictures home, only her sister, Mary, ever praised them. Eventually, Alice got the guts to ask her father if she could go to art school one day, and he said yes, sure, if she kept her grades up and did as her mother told her. Alice reminded herself of his promise every morning and night from then on.

  She was shocked that he had agreed. Usually, whatever she asked for, he refused. Everyone in the family, other than Mary, seemed to think that Alice was greedy, trying to live beyond what God had given her.

  She liked the finer things, and had her ways of getting them every now and then. She would occasionally order a nice dress from the Lord & Taylor catalog, cash on delivery. As soon as the courier arrived, she dashed upstairs and watched from the second-floor landing as one of her younger brothers—Timmy, Jack, Michael, or Paul—fought with the kid, saying they hadn’t ordered any goddamn dress, and they sure as heck weren’t going to pay for it.

  They’d shout, “Alice! You know anything about a new dress?” and she’d shout back, “Ha! I wish!” as innocent as a lamb.

  The delivery boy would insist he had the right address, tough and unwavering because he knew the fate that awaited him if he returned to the store without the cash. On two separate occasions, her brothers had been so flummoxed that they’d actually paid up, and Alice had gotten a brand-new dress for free.

  In her heart, she knew that she was sinning every time she assumed she was entitled to another, better life. She knew it because her mother told her so, and because the Bible preached modesty and sacrifice. She had written a quote from Philippians on the inside of her nightstand drawer, and when she opened it to put her rosary away before bed each night, she read the words slowly: Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves.

  If only it were that easy. Alice believed in Jesus and knew that he would save her if she could try harder, pray more. She prayed to be selfless and content, like her sister. But the selfish parts of her seemed built in, every bit as much as Mary’s kindness.

  If Mary ever got a new dress, she was more likely to donate it to the church clothing drive than she was to wear it. Once, she had babysat for a neighbor’s kids for twelve hours and been paid with a hard-boiled egg. Alice was livid on her behalf, but Mary just said, “I suppose it was all they could afford.”

  Mary had always been plain. She wore a long gray cotton skirt and a simple old blouse to school every day of the week. She never went on dates, staying home to read a book while Alice and her girlfriends went to the square for ice cream with a group of boys from their class. Alice would suggest that Mary come along—she’d even tell her date that she’d go out only if he’d find someone for her sister. But Mary always refused.

  “I don’t want to be anyone’s pity date,” she’d say. “Besides, all the guys are younger than me. I’d feel ridiculous.”

  When Alice came home at night, she would tiptoe into their darkened bedroom, pulling her stockings off as Mary whispered, “How was it?”

  Alice hoped the stories might spark something in her sister, but Mary would always respond, “I can’t imagine what I’d say.”

  After Mary fell asleep, Alice would pray for her: Let my sister come out of her shell, Lord. Let her be happy.

  Once she finished high school, Mary got a typing pool position at Liberty Mutual and started to bring in a bit more money for the family. Their parents were glad, though Alice, still a junior, thought she would die of boredom at such a post. And she believed that the money her sister earned should belong to Mary, not to everyone else. Imagine what the two of them could do with those paychecks! But when she spoke these words aloud, Mary said, “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of keeping it for myself,” which made Alice feel rotten, all the way through.

  Alice saw less of her sister once Mary began working. She liked to go into Boston and pick Mary up at the office on Friday nights. Afterward, they’d go see a movie or split a sandwich in the Public Garden. Sometimes they would walk into a dark bar and drink a beer before heading home, though Mary had to be persuaded to do that.

  When Alice’s graduation came around two years after her sister’s, her mother told her to put on a dress. “I’m taking you into town today to look for jobs.”

  Alice shook her head. “Pop said I could go to art school.”

  Her mother sighed and whispered quietly, “Now, honestly, Alice, don’t be such a child. You know your father wasn’t serious. We don’t have the money for that.”

  So Alice started working at a stuffy law firm in a job she despised, pouring coffee and answering calls for Mr. Weiner and Mr. Kristal, a couple of pudgy, balding blowhards. She made it through the days by socking away a bit of money for herself (she had lied to her mother about the pay) and sketching cartoons on the back of her notepad—Weiner behind the bars of the monkey cage at the Franklin Park Zoo, Kristal being forced to walk the plank of a pirate ship.

  The war began. Soon the too-bustling rooms in the house stood empty, all four of their brothers gone off to fight. Even her beloved Paris was under the thumb of the Nazis, and Alice thought she’d have to go somewhere else. With so many young men away, their father’s job grew steadier, and with the extra money coming in from the girls, they were able to stop taking in boarders. They left the boys’ bedrooms untouched, as if they might come home any day.

  Their father’s angry drunken fits worsened. He terrorized Alice and Mary some nights, demanding that they give him more money for the rent, calling them lazy, fat, just screaming and screaming until they ran upstairs in tears, or he passed out on
the love seat.

  “If the boys were here, he’d never have the guts to speak to us that way,” Alice said, though she knew her strong brothers were scared of him too.

  Alice went to church at five o’clock each morning to pray for their safe return. She recited Hail Holy Queen in a dramatic whisper as many times as she could before someone came along and signaled that it was time for Mass to begin: Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears … Oh clement, oh loving, oh sweet Virgin Mary! Pray for us, Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

  She believed in God with all her heart, and knew that He would keep the boys safe if she prayed hard enough, if she could only learn to be good. She tried to stuff down all the bad feelings that came so quickly to her—envy, greed, anger. Something first-rate was coming, she told herself, if she could only wait for it and keep believing.

  She kept up with her painting when she could. Mary was always telling her that her work was every bit as good as the Degas drawings they loved at the Gardner Museum, which Alice had copied time and time again, sitting before them, sketching each soft line for hours. Alice was flattered, but sometimes she didn’t see what talent had to do with it. Degas had been born to a wealthy French family, and besides, he was a man. So he got great love affairs and Paris, while she got life at home with her sister and parents, each day no different from the one before.