Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [49]
So Alice started working at a stuffy law firm in a job she despised, pouring coffee and answering calls for Mr. Weiner and Mr. Kristal, a couple of pudgy, balding blowhards. She made it through the days by socking away a bit of money for herself (she had lied to her mother about the pay) and sketching cartoons on the back of her notepad—Weiner behind the bars of the monkey cage at the Franklin Park Zoo, Kristal being forced to walk the plank of a pirate ship.
The war began. Soon the too-bustling rooms in the house stood empty, all four of their brothers gone off to fight. Even her beloved Paris was under the thumb of the Nazis, and Alice thought she’d have to go somewhere else. With so many young men away, their father’s job grew steadier, and with the extra money coming in from the girls, they were able to stop taking in boarders. They left the boys’ bedrooms untouched, as if they might come home any day.
Their father’s angry drunken fits worsened. He terrorized Alice and Mary some nights, demanding that they give him more money for the rent, calling them lazy, fat, just screaming and screaming until they ran upstairs in tears, or he passed out on the love seat.
“If the boys were here, he’d never have the guts to speak to us that way,” Alice said, though she knew her strong brothers were scared of him too.
Alice went to church at five o’clock each morning to pray for their safe return. She recited Hail Holy Queen in a dramatic whisper as many times as she could before someone came along and signaled that it was time for Mass to begin: Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears … Oh clement, oh loving, oh sweet Virgin Mary! Pray for us, Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
She believed in God with all her heart, and knew that He would keep the boys safe if she prayed hard enough, if she could only learn to be good. She tried to stuff down all the bad feelings that came so quickly to her—envy, greed, anger. Something first-rate was coming, she told herself, if she could only wait for it and keep believing.
She kept up with her painting when she could. Mary was always telling her that her work was every bit as good as the Degas drawings they loved at the Gardner Museum, which Alice had copied time and time again, sitting before them, sketching each soft line for hours. Alice was flattered, but sometimes she didn’t see what talent had to do with it. Degas had been born to a wealthy French family, and besides, he was a man. So he got great love affairs and Paris, while she got life at home with her sister and parents, each day no different from the one before.
“The only way anyone in this family sees Europe is if they enlist,” she told Mary one night, and Mary laughed, but then they both fell silent, remembering their boisterous brothers, the peril they might be facing right this moment, while they, Mary and Alice, sat on their beds in cotton nightgowns, their hair still damp from the tub.
The streets and the dance clubs and the movie theaters looked like the house, hardly a young man in sight. Only the Coast Guard boys remained in Massachusetts, and everyone said they were a bunch of cowards. None of the girls in town wanted to date them. Alice and her best friend, Rita, sometimes went to dances without a single male in attendance. They’d laugh, dancing up a storm with each other, doing a sort of foolish and full-hearted jitterbug that they’d never dare to do in front of men. Rita was newly married, her husband on a navy ship, off at sea. She was only biding her time, waiting for him to come back. After that, she’d be truly married, poor thing, the fun over for good.
It was that winter, when men were as scarce as lilacs, that Alice’s sister, Mary, finally met one. Henry Winslow had walked into her office for a meeting with her