Maine: A Novel Part 15

A newspaper delivery truck was allowed to come through, and Alice watched as the two men inside began to carelessly toss folks into the back. She raised her voice to protest before realizing that all of them were dead.

Alice vomited into a sewer grate. Her head throbbed. She felt like she might faint. She leaned forward a bit, losing her balance. A young guy in uniform came up to her, taking her by the elbows.

aMiss,a he said. aAre you all right? Miss, weave got to get you home.a She did not remember getting on the streetcar, or walking up the block to her parentsa house. But she found herself on the front porch, the stillness of the neighborhood impossible to comprehend after what she had just seen. Then she was turning the doork.n.o.b and stepping inside, removed from her body as if in a dream.

They were all sitting in the den. Their faces lit up when she walked through the door.

aYouare alive!a her mother said, excited to see Alice in a way she never had been before. aThereas a horrible fire at the Cocoanut Grove. We heard about it on the radio. Oh Lord, thank you.a The boys jumped to their feet and held her close, and even her father hugged her. Alice felt so loved for an instant, before she remembered: aMary was inside.a aWhat do you mean?a Timmy said.

Alice thought of telling them the whole story, but she couldnat do it.

aI saw her there and I donat think she came out,a was all she could manage. aI was already outside when the fire started. I couldnat get back in.a aMaybe she left before you,a her mother said. aMaybe you just didnat know.a Alice sobbed. She could not tell them the truth. aI hope so.a At the mortuary the next day, a freezing rain fell, and Mayor Tobin himself read the names of the dead. Their father didnat come. It was only Alice, her brothers, and their mother. After almost every name, someone screamed, the most shrill and awful sound Alice had yet to hear in her life, or ever would. The rare name that was met with silence made her wonder whether that personas loved ones had no idea yet. Maybe they were on the Cape, walking along a frigid beach with a thermos full of coffee, and they hadnat switched on the radio all weekend long. She wished that for herself, for her mother.

The mayor finished the list off after an hour, but Maryas name wasnat mentioned.

aThat means she might still be alive,a their mother said, hopeful. Alice wanted to believe it, but she saw the looks on her brothersa faces and knew.

They drove from one hospital to the next, searching.

Those who had died on the way to help the night before had been piled in hospital lobbies while doctors and nurses scrambled to save the living. The bodies were still there. The stench made Alice ill as she pa.s.sed through. She had to cover her nose with the sleeve of her coat.

Hundreds of people were lined up on gurneys in the halls of Boston City Hospital, some of them burned beyond recognition. Every medical examiner in the state was brought in to help identify the dead. It was hardest to figure out who the women were. Most of the men had their licenses in their wallets. But the women, dressed in gowns, had nothing that revealed them.

They walked in silence up and down those hallways for hours. Alice looked only at the gowns, telling herself that it was because she knew what Mary was wearing. In fact, she did it because she could not bear to look at the faces. She had always bossed her sister, but she had protected her too. Now Mary was probably dead, and it was Aliceas fault.

A nurse told them that there was the threat of a blood shortage, so the government had allowed access to the emergency blood banks that had been set up for air raids. And, she said, the police were using the method set in place for an air raid, of receiving calls from relatives and loved ones, of a.s.signing cards to the victims: white for the missing, green for the injured, and pink for the identified dead. Everyone had been focused on the war for so long, expecting a catastrophe tied to it somehow. Now something else entirely had taken its place.

Alice tried to bargain with G.o.d: if they found Mary alive, she would never eavesdrop on Trudy again; she would never have one of her temper tantrums; she would learn to cook and to be quiet. She looked at the sky and told Him that she knew her sister had sinned in one of the very worst ways, but if He would just let her live, Mary would redeem herself. She would marry the man she had sinned with and raise a good Catholic family.

In the days that followed, they would learn that the fire got started when two young lovers kissed in a corner of the Melody Lounge and, perhaps as Alice herself once had, the girl said it was too indiscreet, too bright under the lights like that, with a hundred other people in the room. So her date reached up over their heads and removed a lightbulb from where it hung on a wire stretched from one palm tree to another. Minutes later, they had forgotten ita"they were interrupted by a teasing friend, maybe, or drawn out to the dance floor, where the piano player had just started another verse of aBell Bottom Trousers.a Meanwhile, a bartender instructed a sixteen-year-old busboy to replace the missing lightbulb, so he climbed onto a chair and lit a match to see by, wobbling a bit as he held the match in one hand and the bulb in the other, and accidentally setting fire to one of the artificial palms.

Holiday ornaments, newly strung around the bas.e.m.e.nt bar, caught fire. Flames flew up the stairs and tore through the flimsy silk draping, all the way up to the roof. Fireb.a.l.l.s dropped down onto the tables and the bar and the bandstand and the floor, where seven hundred people were crammed in, dancing, drinking, flirting, and thena"a moment latera"pushing toward the doors, fighting to get out alive, which precious few of them did.

The room was dim enough on its own and quickly filled with smoke.

At the auxiliary doors, people were crushed to death, pushing in vain to get out. The doors had been bolted shut. Others ran aimlessly in all directions, scrambling like mad to escape before they died of smoke inhalation or were trampled where they stood. By the end, bodies were piled six feet high at all of the entrances, to the tops of the doors. There were bodies everywhere. They fell into the stone bas.e.m.e.nt when the ballroom floor collapsed.

Later, four hundred fur coats and evening wraps were found in the coat check, destroyed by water and smoke. The redheaded gal with the crush on the Boston College fullback lay dead in the midst of them.

The fire chief told the Globe that really, the fire hadnat been so particularly bad. If people hadnat panicked and flooded the sole exit, if they had allowed the firemen in, if they hadnat had to dig through heaps of bodies at every door to reach the fire, he estimated there would have been at most a handful of deaths.

The chief loss of life resulted from the screaming, clawing crowds that were wedged in the entrances of the club, the paper read the next day. Smoke took a terrific toll of life and scores were burned to death.

Four hundred ninety-two people died in all.

Maryas body was identified after five days of searching, at a morgue in Scituate. She had been trampled, her face crushed by the boot of a man twice her size. It was impossible to say how long she had lived that way, or how much she had suffered.

At home that night, Alice drank half a bottle of whiskey, stolen from her fatheras secret hiding place under the bas.e.m.e.nt steps, and pa.s.sed out in her bed upstairs. Maryas bed, beside it, stood empty, and Alice had to turn her face to the wall. She woke up long after dinner had ended. She went to the bathroom and threw up, the whiskey like gasoline in her throat, her temples throbbing. Down on her knees, she noticed a pearl hair comb of her sisteras that must have fallen behind the sink. Alice took it in her hand, sat down with her back against the tub, and ran her fingers over every inch.

She was positive that she would go to h.e.l.l for what she had done. She felt desperate to tell someonea"her mother, her brother Tima"that it was because of her that Mary was inside the club to begin with, that she had murdered her own sister in a way.

Their father wept openly at the kitchen table and glared at Alice through drunken eyes. The sight of him terrified her.

The day after they discovered Maryas body, she went down the front hall early, her throat tightening, her hands shaking. She wanted to hide the newspaper before her father saw it and searched for Maryas name in the listings, as if this might make him forget.

When Alice opened the door, a burst of cold wind shot through her. She shook open the paper and saw his picture there, right on the front page: Maryas Henry, a formal shot from his college days.

Alice began to read the storyas first paragraph, and her chest locked up: Henry Winslow, son of Charles Winslow III, died of smoke inhalation, the story began. Mr. Winslow, who lived through a 1931 bus crash that killed two of his fellow Harvard students and a driver, was an executive with Winslow Shipping Enterprises. A diamond ring was found in his shirt pocket after he collapsed at Boston City Hospital. His sister, Betty Winslow, says that he was planning to propose to his girlfriend, Mary Brennan, the very next day. Doc.u.ments indicate that Miss Brennan perished in the fire as well, and so she will remain, evermore, Maiden Mary.

At that moment, grief filled Alice completely. She thought she might not be able to go on living. She still attended the early Ma.s.s each day. But the sermons and prayers that had always roused her, soothed her, helped her understand the world, now seemed like only hollow words. She felt nothing and always left the church thinking the same thought: she wasnat worthy to receive G.o.das love now; she had committed a sin worse than any other.

Alice had failed her sister. She prayed, not for forgiveness, but for a sign, a signal from G.o.d as to how she could repent. She vowed to stop wishing for something better than she deserved. She would behave from now on, and expect nothing in return.

When, on the morning of the wake, her aunt Emily said, aNow, Alice, itas time for you to grow up. You will care for your parents and bring them some joy, I hope,a Alice realized fully that her dreams were done for, and only answered, aI will.a She wondered what this would mean, how she could best serve them. She pictured a lifetime of being alone, but not in the way she had wanted. Shead be working her days away at the law office, spending her nights in front of the radio while her father got drunk and angry, and her mother ignored it all. She would spend her life fixing them dinner and caring for them in their dotage, all the things that Mary would have done.

That same morning, a letter arrived, addressed to Mary and Alice. It was a cheerful note from their brother Jack, written on Thanksgiving, two days before the fire.

Greetings from the Tin Can! Happy Turkey Day! Thereas a festive mood on board today, despite the fact that we are all so far from home and missing our families. The dinner menu is fit for a king, or at least it seems that way from the way they dress up the names of everything: Hot Parker Rolls du Lyautey, Baked Spiced Spam la Capitaine de Vaisseau, and for desserta"apple pie, strawberry ice cream, cigars, and cigarettes! The captain told us weave survived so many attacks adue not alone to skill or to good luck, but unquestionably to the intervention of divine providence.a So donat you worry about me, my lovelies. Iave got G.o.d on my side.

Your Jack.

At the wake, Alice walked to the ladiesa lounge every half hour or so and drank a long sip of vodka from a flask her aunt Rose had brought.

They had been forced to use a closed casket, and Alice was happy for that. Still, it felt torturous, standing beside that cold wooden box, calmly shaking the hands of so many neighbors and cousins and friends.

aIam here for you,a theyad say, or aIam sorry for your loss.a Alice wanted to tear their hair out. She wanted to tell them that they could never understand this. She wondered how many of them were there merely to be a part of the tragedya"I knew a girl once, from Sunday school, who died at the Cocoanut Grove, they might say years later. I was at her wake. She was so disfigured they couldnat even have a proper viewing.

She stood by the casket with her family. Her brothers were still as stone in their dark suits, rarely speaking a word. Her mother couldnat even stand, and had to sit in a folding chair with Aunt Rose fanning her. Their father was at the end of the receiving line, with tears at the corners of his eyes that never once fell.

The afternoon wore on. Alice tried to focus on a window at the back of the room, a thin slice of blue sky. Her head swam with dark thoughts that she wanted to scream out loud. They were here, burying her sweet young sister, and it was Aliceas fault. For most people in the world, today was a day like any other. Out there, women were buying groceries and teaching children how to ride bicycles and getting dressed for a movie. But Alice would never have another pure day like that; she didnat deserve to. Her life was as finished as Maryas.

Then she saw them come through the door: Daniel Kelleher, the scarecrow she had met at the Cocoanut Grove, and his brother.

Alice moved out of her place at the front of the room, feeling her familyas eyes on her. She walked through the winding line of mourners, past a long table of cold sandwiches and cake. She met him at the back wall, reached for his hand, and whispered, aCome outside for a smoke?a He squeezed her hand tight. Though his palm was clammy, he didnat let go.

Out on the sidewalk, the bright sun hit her eyes, and she had to squint. He wasnat a handsome man, not by a long shot, but he was here. She was surprised to feel something like elation at the sight of him, something like grat.i.tude.

aIt was good of you to come,a she said, as he lit her cigarette.

aOf course,a he said. aHow are you holding up?a She shrugged.

aIam so sorry for your la"a aPlease donat say it,a she said.

He nodded. aThen Iall just say thank you.a aFor what?a she asked.

aBy finding me one hundred percent resistible, you saved my life.a She smiled weakly.

aYour sister knew you loved her,a he said.

aHow do you know?a aBecause sisters always do. You shouldnat blame yourself.a aWhat makes you think that Ia",a she began, but she started to cry and couldnat complete the thought.

aPut that bad conversation you had before we left out of your head,a he said. aIt never happened.a aIt wasnat just that,a she said.

She wanted to tell him the rest, but she could not manage. She needed someone now, and if she told him, there was no way he would stay.

aIt should have been me,a she said through her tears.

aNo,a Daniel said.

aI killed her.a aNow, listen,a Daniel said, more stern and strong than she would have thought him capable. aIt was a terrible accident. People all over this city are wondering right now what they could or should have done. But itas not your fault.a She sniffed. aThank you.a aLetas get back inside,a he said.

She wondered if she could possibly love this person, who seemed excessively kind, but not much of a man in her opinion, nothing like shead ever imagined for herself. At best, he could give her the common sort of life she had come to fear. Though it seemed only marginally better than living with her folks, that was still something. She remembered her auntas words: You will care for your parents. Itas time for you to grow up.

Perhaps this was what G.o.d had been trying to tell her all along. She hadnat listened when her mother told her to stop putting on airs. She had seen her sisteras love affair as having to do with her own happinessa"selfish even thena"and now G.o.d had taken her sister away. Finally, she had been punished.

Daniel wrapped his arms around her, and she let herself sink in.

They were married six months later. Daniel was allowed a weekas leave after the wedding. They moved into their first tiny house in Canton, where their honeymoon consisted of unpacking boxes and listening to Tommy Dorsey records for six days straight before he had to reboard the ship.

Daniel wanted to talk constantly and he wanted to make love nearly every night, when Alice just wished not to be touched. He asked her what felt good to her, which she happened to know from talking with Rita was a rarity, and a first-cla.s.s thing. But Alice couldnat imagine saying the words, even if she knew what they were. It all felt wronga"sweaty and hot and uncomfortable, unholy. It wasnat painful, not after the first couple of times. But it never once compared to a good warm bath. When he had to leave at the end of that week, she was almost happy to see him go. She was pregnant, but it didnat last.

She joined St. Agnes, their local parish, and got to know other war brides. Theyad gather on Thursday evenings to pray for safe returns or for the unlucky among them whose husbands had already been killed.

The war carried on for two more years. Alice did her dutya"saving the drippings from the frying pan and bringing them to the butcher shop every Thursday morning; trading ration coupons for b.u.t.ter and sugar and coffee with the other women on the block; darning old stockings she had worn for years, even though they bunched at her ankles and sagged around her waist; drawing all the curtains at dusk when she switched on the lamps, so German subs wouldnat sink the ships in Boston Harbor, miles away.

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 jobsa"building bombers with such excitement youad 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 didnat understand the exuberance all around her, as if war were the Macyas Thanksgiving Day parade. On her lunch hour, she declined to join the others for sandwiches and frappes at Brighamas, 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. Shead 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 Sargentas El Jaleoa"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 wasnat made to be a mother, though he didnat understand what she meant and only responded, aEveryone worries they wonat know what to do, darling. Itas natural.a 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 couldnat say so out loud: Iam 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 parentsa 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 Maryas old tennis racquet and all of her beautiful gowns, which Aliceas 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 Danielas fedora or a single winegla.s.s with a tinge of purple left over from the previous night. She painted on bits of sc.r.a.p paper she had saved for the war efforta"the backs of envelopes, receipts from the drugstore. Shead 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 shead 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 sc.r.a.p 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 Sat.u.r.day 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.

aThis is swell,a he said. aThis is what Iave been imagining all these months away from you.a She had wanted him home, but now tears sprang to her eyes. She quickly pushed them away. She thought of all she had lost.

aOh gosh, did I say something wrong?a Daniel asked.

aNo. Iam sorry. Iam feeling a bit sad today, thatas all.a aYouave been through a lot,a he said, getting to his feet, coming toward her and wrapping her in his arms. aYour sister, the pregnancies. Itas all just going to take time. And Iam sure itas been made all the harder by the fact that your husband was hardly ever here. But the war is over, and itall get better now, youall see.a aI know,a she said. It seemed like the easiest thing to say.

Early in their marriage, Danielas 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 didnat 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.

aWhat on earth is this?a she asked.

aItas the Artistsa Ball,a he said with a big smile. aMort and Ruby told me about it. They have it to raise tuition for poor students in the art school. Itas supposed to be a real gas.a Daniel remembered what she had told him about her dream of becoming an artist, and he mentioned it an embarra.s.sing amount, to strangers and co-workers and friends. He tried every summer to get her to take a cla.s.s in the Perkins Cove school.

aA ball?a Alice said. aIam not dressed for that.a aNo, no. Itas a costume party,a he said. aBesides, we donat go in, we just watch the artists on parade. Apparently they do it every year. Iave never heard of it before, have you?a 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 Pomeroyas s.e.xtet would perform and c.o.c.ktails would be served. It sounded like heaven.

aI want to go home,a she said. aI donat feel well.a aHoney!a he said. aI thought youad be excited. These are real live artists!a They got out of the car and joined the pathetic mob, looking on as if at a bunch of Hollywood stars. There they werea"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 fishermenas cottages had been torn down, and a big tar parking lot went up smack in the middle of the Cove. The artistsa 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.

aI hope I didnat make the Gabe situation worse,a she whispered to Maggie, who was still lying in bed.

aNo, itas good that you told me,a Maggie lied. She didnat 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 hadnat slept much. She kept thinking that she was going to be a single mother, the young woman in the doctoras 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, donat procreate with an a.s.shole. Perhaps get married first.

He hadnat 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 head read it. If not, maybe she should delete the message. Then she decided that that would be going too fara"she should not lower herself to that level. And then she did it anyway, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d had changed his pa.s.sword. She knew it was crazy of her to feel this way, but she was actually kind of offended by that.

Maggie didnat want to return to Brooklyn, afraid to reenter her real life without Gabe in it. Would she stay there? Move to a c.r.a.ppy 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 Maggieas 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.