Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [164]
“At what?”
“Look at my children, for starters.”
“I think you’ve raised a wonderful family, Alice. I’ve enjoyed getting to spend some time with Maggie these past few weeks.”
“Maggie’s pregnant,” she said. “Kathleen hates me and so does my other daughter, Clare. Ann Marie only ever tolerated me because she wanted my house.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “As for Maggie—”
She interrupted him. “Please. I can’t talk about that now.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, and she nodded. “Why did you decide to give your house to the church in the first place? It wasn’t to get back at anyone, was it?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. She felt embarrassed that he would even think so.
“Then why?”
“That church is incredibly important to me,” she said. “I gave a lot of thought to what you said about good deeds back when I called you about my sister last winter. This is a small way for me to atone. I know it’s nothing, compared to my sin, but—”
“Alice, you can’t blame yourself,” he said. “There’s no sin here. It was a fire. You had gone home before it even started.”
“That’s just it,” she said softly. “There’s a part I left out. If I tell it to you now, here, will you consider it a confession?”
“If you like,” he said.
Alice knew she would only ever manage the courage to say it once. For that reason, she wanted her brothers to hear it, but they were gone. She wanted Daniel, but he was gone too. As she heard herself begin to tell the priest the truth, in a way she felt like she was confessing to them all. She pictured Mary, twenty-four years old for the rest of time.
“I didn’t go home,” she said quietly. “That’s what everyone always thought—even my husband—but I was there all along. I’m the reason Mary was in the club when it burned.”
He looked confused, as if he was unsure of whether she was telling the truth.
“There was this blasted pair of gloves, and I refused to go inside to get them because I was angry about Henry proposing. Not that I should have been, but—” She stopped herself. “I’m not making any sense, am I?”
He gave her his warmest smile. “Take your time,” he said.
Alice felt all riled up. Her heart pounded. She took a deep breath and started again. This time she told him everything. It surprised her how well she remembered exactly what she and Mary had said to each other, precisely how she felt watching her sister go back in to fetch her precious suede gloves. The high-pitched moan of the fire alarm.
As the words came out of her mouth, she was back on that frigid Boston sidewalk, immersed in chaos, taking in the sight of the dead and wounded, too fearful to do a thing for Mary, who lay dying on the other side of a plain stucco wall.
She recalled walking into her parents’ living room and feeling filled up with relief at the sight of her brothers. And then, moments later, how she had told them that Mary was inside the club, though that was as much as she could bear to admit.
She spoke of how little she had felt for Daniel then, how cold she had been to him. But how his presence after the fact seemed like a way out of the horror and a means of living a more virtuous life.
She confessed that she had never told Daniel the truth about that night, never told a soul.
Father Donnelly was too young to remember that the Cocoanut Grove fire had remained a fixture in the Boston papers and in common conversation for years after it happened. She told him how she had devoured the stories, though they always made her morose, and Daniel warned her not to read or listen to them.
After she read about a victim, she could never forget. She carried all of them with her. A family in Wilmington lost four sons, all servicemen home on leave. They were buried side by side in Wildwood Cemetery. Girls who worked with Alice at the law firm, who’d never even met them, would go to their graves and visit every Saturday morning.
A twenty-year-old member of the Coast Guard named Clifford Johnson suffered burns over three-quarters of his body while helping twenty people to safety. He spent almost two