Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [3]
She had overheard a gal in the elevator in her office building whispering to her girlfriend that a doctor in New York had fitted her for a diaphragm.
“Such a relief!” the girl had said. “Lord knows Harry’s not doing anything to make sure I don’t get knocked up.”
“If the men had to push the babies out, then they’d take the precautions,” her friend said. “Can you imagine Ronald, huffing and puffing?” She closed her mouth and filled her cheeks up with air, squinting her eyes until they both began to giggle.
Alice wished she could say something to them, find out more. But they were strangers to her, and it was a vulgar thing to be talking about in the first place. She didn’t know who to ask, so she went to a priest before work one morning—someone a few parishes away from her own. Everyone acted as though penance was an anonymous process, but you could see the priest before he went into the confessional, and he could just as easily see you. This one was old, with pure white hair. FATHER DELPONTE, it said on a plaque on the outside of the box. Italian, she supposed. Everyone knew Italian girls were fast. She hoped he wouldn’t mistake her for one of them. She was married, after all.
In the dim box, she kneeled down, closed her eyes, and crossed herself.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one month since my last confession,” she began, the same words she had uttered so many times before.
Her cheeks blushed a fiery red as she told him about the babies she had lost.
“I wonder if perhaps now isn’t the time for me,” she said. “I wonder if there’s something I might do to hold off. My sister died a couple years back, and I’m still not myself. I’m afraid of being a mother. I don’t think I have it in me to love another person enough, at least not yet.”
She wanted to say more, but then he asked, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
Alice could swear she saw him make a baffled face through the screen.
“You’re more than old enough, my dear,” he said softly. “God has a plan for each of us. We have to believe in it, and do nothing to put it off course.”
She did not know if he had understood. Perhaps she should have been clearer.
“There are ways I’ve heard of to delay,” she began, fumbling for the words. “I know the Church frowns on it.”
“The Church forbids it,” he said, and that was all.
She cried for a moment in the parking lot and then set off for work. She never told Daniel what she had done.
This pregnancy had lasted six months so far. Alice was terrified. She tiptoed everywhere, afraid to breathe. She had to drink half a glass of whiskey each night to get to sleep. She smoked twice as many cigarettes as usual and paced around the block in the afternoons—she had been reprimanded by her boss three times now for being away from her desk when she wasn’t supposed to be. Mr. Kristal was downright wretched to her, probably because he recognized her condition, and knew from experience that she’d be giving her notice soon enough.
The Saturday after Daniel won the land, they took a ride out to Cape Neddick. Alice didn’t know what to expect. She had been to Maine only once before, on a day trip with her brothers and sister when she was a teenager. All six of them were jammed into their father’s Pontiac, barreling along with the windows rolled down. They ate lunch at a clam shack and then drove east until they found a slip of beach to relax on. The boys skipped rocks into the water, and Alice and Mary sat in the sand, talking. Alice did a sketch of the dunes in her notebook. They didn’t know what town they were in, and they didn’t linger for long. They couldn’t afford to stay overnight, not even at one of the cheap roadside motels that lined the highway.
Only a few years had passed since then, but it seemed like another lifetime.
Daniel drove the car through downtown Ogunquit, past a motor inn and a dance hall and Perkins Drugstore, and the Leavitt Theatre, where Anchors Aweigh was playing at