Maine

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “The only way anyone in this family sees Europe is if they enlist,” she told Mary one night, and Mary laughed, but then they both fell silent, remembering their boisterous brothers, the peril they might be facing right this moment, while they, Mary and Alice, sat on their beds in cotton nightgowns, their hair still damp from the tub.

  The streets and the dance clubs and the movie theaters looked like the house, hardly a young man in sight. Only the Coast Guard boys remained in Massachusetts, and everyone said they were a bunch of cowards. None of the girls in town wanted to date them. Alice and her best friend, Rita, sometimes went to dances without a single male in attendance. They’d laugh, dancing up a storm with each other, doing a sort of foolish and full-hearted jitterbug that they’d never dare to do in front of men. Rita was newly married, her husband on a navy ship, off at sea. She was only biding her time, waiting for him to come back. After that, she’d be truly married, poor thing, the fun over for good.

  It was that winter, when men were as scarce as lilacs, that Alice’s sister, Mary, finally met one. Henry Winslow had walked into her office for a meeting with her boss late one morning and asked her to have lunch with him that very day. Mary said yes.

  When she told Alice about it at home afterward, Alice gave her a look.

  “What?” Mary said.

  “That’s not like you.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “He could be a murderer for all you know!” Alice said. “He could be from a family of gypsies. All the boys I’ve tried to set you up with and you’ve refused. Now you’ll suddenly go out with any old stranger?”

  Mary stuck out her tongue. “Maybe I wanted to meet a boy on my own. He invited me to dinner on Friday night.”

  “Why hasn’t he been drafted yet?” Alice asked, suspicious. “Is he terribly old or something?”

  “He’s thirty,” Mary said.

  “Thirty! That’s positively ancient. Gosh. But still, why hasn’t he gone to the war?”

  “He’s 4-F,” Mary said.

  The same classification as Frank Sinatra. Their brother Timmy said he didn’t respect Sinatra anymore since he’d avoided the draft. (“Listen to that voice! Does that sound like someone with a punctured eardrum to you?”)

  This Henry seems like a coward, Alice thought. Like a flat-footed weakling.

  “Do you know why he’s 4-F?” she asked.

  “An old injury from a bus accident in his Harvard days,” Mary said. “He walks with a bit of a limp.”

  Alice’s ears perked up. “Harvard?”

  She could tell Mary was trying to suppress a smile. “I get the impression he’s rather wealthy.”

  They went out on Friday, and Alice tagged along with the understanding that Henry was bringing a friend for her. The friend, Richard, was a real flat tire—too old and perspiring, with badly yellowed teeth and a pocket watch that he kept checking every few minutes, as if to make it clear that the tepid feeling between them was entirely mutual. Even though it would have been more trouble had he liked her, Alice felt offended by the reception. She had a policy of never eating on dates, but that night she ordered a martini and a steak.

  It was true that Henry walked with a limp, a characteristic that Alice wasn’t sure she’d be able to tolerate in a date. And he had little specks of gray hair here and there. But he was handsome enough for someone his age. He worked for his father, an honest-to-God shipping tycoon, and was soon to inherit the whole company. Alice watched closely as he interacted with Mary—what did he see in her, anyway? She wasn’t beautiful. But Henry seemed smitten. He laughed at all her corny jokes, and he ordered for her when the waitress came.

  When Henry asked about Alice’s job, Mary interrupted, “She’s an artist. Very talented. You should see her work.”

  “I’d love to see it,” Richard the dud said, perking up. “I’m a budding collector.”

  It turned out, by his own whispered admission after several more cocktails, that he was also light in the loafers. But three days later, Alice sold him her first painting. Falling madly in love with Richard couldn’t have brought her half as much joy as watching him hand over the cash that morning on her front stoop. Someday they might hang a plaque: THE ARTIST ALICE BRENNAN LIVED HERE FROM 1921 THROUGH 1941.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. Then he lowered his voice as if someone else might be listening: “Alice, I’ve adored Henry Winslow since he was my freshman-year roommate, but please watch out for your sister with him. She seems like a sweet girl. And he’s a bit notorious for breaking hearts.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, feeling like she wanted to punch Henry all of a sudden.

  He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Keep an eye out, that’s all.”

  In a matter of weeks, Mary and Henry were inseparable. They went out to dinner and went dancing. Mary seemed filled with a sort of confidence she had never known. She started to wave her hair and began dressing properly. She rubbed a bit of blush on her pale cheeks—all the things Alice had been telling her to do for years.

  In her more charitable moments, Alice was pleased to see her sister so well matched, so happy at last. But sometimes she felt jealous of Mary for finding him. Not that she wanted Henry for herself; she didn’t. But someone like him maybe, a bit more handsome, a bit younger. His existence had changed things. Mary had so much less time to spend with Alice now. Occasionally, on the streetcar and sitting at her desk at work, Alice imagined ways she could break them up. Afterward, she’d say the Lord’s Prayer for forgiveness, burning with shame when she thought of how devastated her sister would be if the relationship were ever to end.

  After six months, Henry still hadn’t introduced Mary to his family, and this caused her great distress. He said he was only waiting for the right time, but Mary was convinced it meant something more. Alice wondered if this was what Richard had been trying to warn her about.

  Finally, he brought them both to what he called his father’s beach shack in Newport for the day. Mary baked his mother a blueberry cake and spent an hour fixing her hair. “The shack” turned out to be an enormous ten-bedroom home, complete with its own staff and a tennis court. But Henry’s parents weren’t there. It was just his sisters and a few friends, one of whom had brought along a pair of chubby, grubby two-year-old sons. On the terrace that afternoon, Henry introduced them as, “My sweet girl, Mary, and her sister, Alice, the artist.”

  Henry had been to Europe as a child. That day, when Alice told him how badly she had always wanted to go to Paris, he said, “Tell you what, kiddo. I’ll take you and Mary there as soon as all this mayhem ends.” She believed that he would. Alice pinched her sister’s arm, imagining the world that was about to open up for them.

  Later, the group walked down to the beach. Mary, predictably, ended up with the children. She held the fat hand of one in her left palm and the other in her right.

  “Has she always been so perfect?” Henry asked.

  Alice grumbled. “Yes.”

  “I take it that bugs you.”

  “It’s just that sometimes next to her, I look like a monster, that’s all.”

  “I think you and I are alike,” he told her. “We both need to be the stars.”

  Perhaps that explained his feelings for Mary. Henry was the type who liked a nice stable girl, someone who’d take care of him and cook for him and fret over him whenever he got so much as a sniffle.

  “I suppose so,” Alice said, looking down at the glorious white beach. The rich, it seemed, could even improve upon sand.

  “I’d be lost without her,” Henry said. “You’d be amazed how cruel women can be. We’re all fragile, but we don’t like to be reminded of it.”

  “What do you mean?” Alice said.

  He pointed at his foot. “I played baseball at Harvard, and every girl at Radcliffe wanted to date me. But after this happened—I felt that my chances for happiness were gone.”

  Alice shook her head. “Someone like you? I can’t believe
it. There must be a million girls out there who would gladly have played Florence Nightingale.”

  “But that’s just it,” he said. “I wanted someone who would look at me like women used to look. And that’s what Mary does.”

  Alice’s jealousy faded then. He was right, of course: her sister never even complained about the limp, or the horrible pains Henry suffered from time to time that rendered him immobile.

  She might have said that her jealousy vanished completely after that, if not for the presents. Alice tried not to feel envious over the fact that frumpy old Mary thought nothing of wearing a brand-new mink stole, a silver bracelet with a heart-shaped charm, or a pair of dove-gray suede gloves with fur trim and heels to match, even though such items had never interested her in the slightest before.

  “It must be nice, having someone to buy you whatever you want,” Alice said, watching her sister dress for work one morning.

  “Oh, you know I don’t care about all the fancy things he gives me,” Mary replied, making Alice seethe.

  “You shouldn’t brag,” she said.

  Mary looked perplexed. “I wasn’t. Was I? Besides, the gloves I bought myself, with my own money. They’re the only objects I really care about. Otherwise, it’s just Henry that I want.”

  Six more months slipped by without a proposal, or even an introduction to his parents.

  “My old man’s business is taking a bad hit,” Henry told Mary. “I know he’ll come to adore you like I do, but now’s not the time to rock the boat.”

  She loved him terribly; her moods fluctuated between undiluted joy and pure sorrow, always, it seemed to Alice, dependant on him. Mary tried to act calm about it, but she was certain his family would never accept their marriage. Sometimes she wept in bed, and Alice wondered if this was really what being in love did to a person. If so, love seemed downright dreadful.

  Alice worried too—she wanted her sister to marry him, perhaps as much as Mary herself wanted it. Once Mary married Henry, she would give their mother grandchildren. Then maybe Alice could go off and do as she liked. Henry and Mary would give her money when she was starting out, and Henry might have more friends like Richard, who wanted to buy her work.

  Somehow Mary kept up with all her duties around the house—cooking dinner and sewing and cleaning up the parlor. She rarely invited Henry over. Alice assumed this was because their home wasn’t grand enough, and also because of the way their father was likely to behave. On the one hand, she understood. But on the other, she couldn’t help but feel a bit insulted. Mary cared so much about what Henry thought. It was as if she lived in two worlds at once, and Alice just happened to be a part of the world Mary was trying to leave behind. Still, she reminded herself of what Henry had said: One day they would all go to Paris.

  Alice had begun to see her friends grow giddy and joyful about their weddings. Even Trudy from the party line had met a nice young army doctor and was moving out to a house in Winthrop (this felt almost like a betrayal to Alice, though she knew her reaction was foolish).

  Alice wanted no part of being a wife, cooped up in some house full of rug rats, constantly serving a man you liked less and less with each passing year. But she was twenty-two, and it seemed once a girl reached a certain age, that’s what everyone expected her to do. Dating had become a chore because of it. She had always had suitors, and she still went on dates. But the boys who courted her now were mostly the same old ones she had known in high school, and they came through only briefly, on leave, or else there was something plain wrong with them—a vision defect or a skittishness that meant they weren’t even fit for war.

  Plenty of boys wrote her letters. A few, who she had been out with only once or twice, now wrote to tell her they were in love and wanted to make an honest woman out of her when they got home. She’d do her duty by writing back, but always remind them that absence made the heart grow fonder, and it had never really been all that rosy when they went to the movies, or to the ice cream parlor, way back when.

  In the bedroom closet, Alice had stashed a paperback copy of Live Alone and Like It, the book she had heard Trudy raving about over the phone. She often riffled through its pages, reading a line aloud to her sister: living alone, according to Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis, was “as nice, perhaps, as any other way of living, and infinitely nicer than living with too many people or with the wrong single individual.”

  One night Alice read to Mary in bed in an exaggerated, glamorous voice, a bit like Trudy’s: “You can, in fact, indulge yourself unblushingly—an engaging procedure which few women alone are smart enough to follow. Even unselfishness requires an opponent—like most of the worthwhile things in life. Living alone, you can—within your own walls—do as you like. The trick is to arrange your life so that you really do like it.”

  She looked up from the pages smiling, imagining an apartment full of clean linens, pink bath towels, and untouched canvases ready to be painted, all hers.

  “Can you imagine?” she said to Mary.

  Mary shook her head, looking a bit sad. “I wouldn’t like it,” she said. “I want to live with someone, always.”

  Alice sighed. “I know you do.”

  Her sister grew silent, and after a moment Alice realized that she had begun to cry.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Never mind, go to sleep.”

  “Mary. What?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve done things a woman isn’t supposed to do,” Mary said. “I’ve sinned in the worst way. But I’m in love, and I don’t understand how it can be wrong to—well, never mind, Alice; go to sleep.”

  Alice didn’t respond. Her body shook with anger. She had kissed her share of boys, but she was saving her virginity until marriage. Everything to do with sex frightened her—the mechanics of it, the risk. One girl in the neighborhood, Bitsy Harrington, had gotten pregnant in the back of a Plymouth by a sailor who told her it was the only way for him to touch her heart. Rita and the other girls had made terrible fun of Bitsy, but Alice thought that she herself might not have known any better. Things in that department were a mystery to her. When she started her period at the age of fourteen, she had believed that she was dying and run home from school in tears.

  Her sister had always seemed similarly foggy, but now here she was, saying that she had gone all the way with Henry. Mary was leaving her behind, making her feel like a stupid heel, when everyone knew that Alice had always been the more sophisticated of the two. More important, there was the issue of eternity to think about—her sister was sinning in one of the worst ways, damning herself, and for what?

  Alice wanted to know where they had done it. Would he ever marry her sister now? It made her feel queasy, just thinking about it. Mary might have ruined everything for them both.

  Alice went to Mass the next morning and in addition to praying for her brothers, which she always did, she lit a candle for Mary.

  A few weeks passed. It was October, the first cool evening of fall. They sat down to dinner with their parents after work as usual. Mary had made a roast chicken and mashed potatoes. Alice was eager to get through the meal so she could pick up the extension in the pantry and find out what had happened at the office today when Trudy broke the news to her boss that she was moving to the suburbs to start a family and would have to quit working soon. Trudy had told her friend the night before that today was the day, and she was terribly nervous that he’d blow a gasket. Why, Alice did not know. How hard could it be to find another secretary?

  She turned to Mary. “Trudy told her boss about Adam’s proposal today.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “I’m waiting until after supper to find out.”

  Mary grinned. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring the phone right to the table.”

  Alice took a bite of chicken. “I would have if I could manage to pull it out of the wall.”

  “Alice,” their mother said. “You�
�re awful. Pass the peas to your father.”

  He was at the far end of the table, reading the paper, several glasses of whiskey into the evening. He had strolled in from the bar down the corner a half hour earlier, looking like he wanted a fight. But now he seemed more likely to pass out in his potatoes.

  Alice gave him the peas without even looking at him. She went on, “Trudy suspects Adam only asked her because he knows he’ll have to ship out soon. Sounds sort of unromantic if you ask me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said. “A proposal’s a proposal.”

  “Maybe if Henry had been drafted, he would have asked you by now.”

  “Alice!”

  “Well—when do you think he’s going to ask?” Alice said. “It’s been a year. What’s the holdup?”

  She wondered if perhaps he was one of those wealthy cads who thought he could just string a girl along forever, though Henry didn’t seem like the type.

  “Honestly, Alice, the things you say!” Mary looked exasperated, but she began to laugh. “Why are you so excited to get rid of me, anyway?”

  Alice thought, Because the sooner you get married and start having babies, the sooner I’ll be free to live whatever life I want.

  But she wouldn’t say that—it would sound selfish. So she only responded, “I’m not!”

  Suddenly there came a harsh voice from the end of the table. “Will you two stop yapping about it?”

  Their father looked up from his paper, his eyes glassy. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, cleared his throat. “Every night, your poor mother has to hear you scheming and planning and it makes me sick. You’re living in a pathetic dreamworld.”

  Alice found him revolting. He didn’t know what he was talking about, and it was wicked of him to pick on Mary of all people. Mary, who would never hurt a fly.