Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [47]
Her main window onto the existence of the single gal was through a woman named Trudy, who she had never actually met. Their household and Trudy’s apartment shared a party line. Most every night you could pick up the phone in the Brennan family kitchen and hear Trudy gabbing away on her sofa in Beacon Hill. Sometimes Alice’s father would need to call in to work, and he’d try eight or nine times, eventually saying, “Pardon me, miss, but this is not a private line. Please keep your conversations brief or I’ll alert the telephone company.”
Trudy was undeterred and Alice was glad of it, since her favorite pastime was listening in. Mary said she shouldn’t eavesdrop, but how could she resist? Trudy was better than any radio soap opera.
Trudy spoke to her girlfriends about all the dates she went on to fine restaurants, and the flowers her suitors sent the next day. She once went to an office party and ended up dancing on a rooftop in Kenmore Square with her married boss, Mr. Pembroke. She hated her hips and had allowed herself to eat only a hard-boiled egg on dry toast for each of the last fourteen days. She was going to Los Angeles in April if her stepfather would cough up the cash already. She had read a book called Live Alone and Like It and decided to decorate her apartment all in lavender and start stocking cocktail ingredients, even though some people thought it was tacky for a woman to do that.
Alice listened silently, taking it all in.
One night Trudy mentioned that Mr. Pembroke had brought her along to an art opening in the city, where paintings of naked ladies had graced the walls and waiters in white gloves had handed out tiny pickles and nuts.
“Honestly!” her friend had said. “Your boss is quite fond of you, isn’t he? I guess he’s just impressed with your typing skills.”
“Those, and my impeccable manners,” Trudy had said. “It must have been the childhood cotillion classes my mama made me go to.”
Alice was tempted to speak up and ask Trudy what cotillion was, but instead she asked her sister, and when her sister didn’t know, she asked the lady next door.
“Lessons to make you more sophisticated and polished,” her neighbor explained.
Alice stole a few dollars from her mother and enrolled in cotillion immediately. Most of the other attendees were years younger than she was—only twelve or thirteen, the sons and daughters of wealthy lawyers and businessmen. Alice hardly cared. Each Saturday morning she took the hour-long streetcar ride into Cambridge and learned the rules for holding a knife and fork, the right posture for sitting and standing, and the proper way to speak, even a few French words.
After class, she brought her pastels to the banks of the Charles River and sat in the grass, sketching the passersby. She had swiped the pastels from Sister Florence, her high school art teacher, and they were usually a crumbling mess by the time she pulled them out, having been hidden for days in her coat pockets, where they made rainbows on the satin lining. In her imagination, some wealthy benefactor would stop in his tracks—You’re too talented for this place, he’d say. You have a gift, my dear. Let me take you away from here. Let me show you Paris.
But no one ever asked what she was doing, and when she brought her pictures home, only her sister, Mary, ever praised them. Eventually, Alice got the guts to ask her father if she could go to art school one day, and he said yes, sure, if she kept her grades up and did as her mother told her. Alice reminded herself of his promise every morning and night from then on.
She was shocked that he had agreed. Usually, whatever she asked for, he refused. Everyone