Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [124]
She joined St. Agnes, their local parish, and got to know other war brides. They’d 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 duty—saving the drippings from the frying pan and bringing them to the butcher shop every Thursday morning; trading ration coupons for butter 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 wouldn’t 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 jobs—building bombers with such excitement you’d 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 didn’t understand the exuberance all around her, as if war were the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. On her lunch hour, she declined to join the others for sandwiches and frappes at Brigham’s, 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. She’d 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 Sargent’s El Jaleo—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 wasn’t made to be a mother, though he didn’t understand what she meant and only responded, “Everyone worries they won’t know what to do, darling. It’s natural.”
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 couldn’t say so out loud: I’m 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 parents’ 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 Mary’s old tennis racquet and all of her beautiful gowns, which Alice’s mother had stupidly urged her to take.
After that, Alice began to do watercolors in the mornings before she