Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [77]
And that was that. Typical.
The previous winter, after one of her many therapeutic retreats, Kathleen had returned home to Massachusetts for Christmas to tell Alice that she had tried hypnosis and had recalled painful memories from her childhood: Alice making her stay inside the cottage while the other kids played on the beach, because she had been sneaking cookies and had gotten too fat for her bathing suit. Alice leaving her behind at a carnival when she was eight to teach her a lesson after she had thrown a tantrum, coming back to get her hours later, her face streaked with dirt and tears.
“You were emotionally and verbally abusive to me,” Kathleen had said.
Alice wanted to slap her, the way her own father would have if spoken to like that.
“Shut the hell up,” she said finally.
“See? You’re doing it now. Why can’t you ever apologize for what you did, so we can move forward?”
“I have nothing to be sorry for,” Alice said. “You’re the one who should be sorry, Kathleen. You should be thanking me for all I’ve done, not tearing me apart for your own problems.”
She had always been strict with her girls, but what was the alternative? Look at the sort of mothers they had become, in an effort to be soft, to be supportive, and, in Kathleen’s case, to turn her daughter into her best friend. It was pathetic.
The problem with her children and grandchildren was simply that they wanted too terribly to be happy. They were always in search of it, trying to better themselves, improve upon their current situation so that they might feel no pain. They thought every problem on earth could be solved by turning inward.
Alice knew where this came from. It was perhaps her greatest failing as a mother that all of these children—her own, and her children’s children, and probably the great-grandchildren, too—were godless. Patrick and Ann Marie were the only ones who even went to Mass. Little Daniel had been an altar boy, and his sisters had sung in the choir, but now none of them seemed to have any involvement at all. Clare said she was still a Catholic in her heart and so was Joe, but they couldn’t stand by and be part of the Church after what had happened in Boston these past few years. Alice thought this was just an excuse to sleep in on Sundays, nothing more. They certainly didn’t stop selling those Catholic artifacts of theirs, so how offended were they, really? The “priest scandal,” as Clare insisted on calling it, was merely a case of a few bad apples. Everyone knew that.
“How can you believe, when the world is such a horrible place?” Kathleen had asked her once, and that was when she realized that she had somehow failed to teach them about the true meaning of faith.
She felt that the Catholic Church had made a horrendous mistake with Vatican II in the sixties. They had tried to make religion palatable, doing away with Latin Mass and head coverings and no meat on Fridays. Her grandchildren had grown up calling priests by their first names, as if they were waiters—Father Jim and Father Bob, and so on. It turned her stomach. The Church had taken the fear and the awe out of the whole equation, so that now her children and grandchildren and millions of others like them felt not even a hint of guilt for going out for breakfast on Sunday mornings instead of to church.
Kathleen called herself spiritual, one of those New Age words that Alice could never quite take seriously. Kathleen had picked it up, along with a whole host of other annoying and ridiculous beliefs, at Alcoholics Anonymous sometime in the late eighties, right after her divorce.
Daniel had made it far too easy for Kathleen to end her marriage. He had advised her to leave Paul as soon as she told them he had cheated. Daniel gave her eight thousand dollars and told her she and the kids could come live with them. When Kathleen said no to that offer, he came up with the plan that she should live in the cottage rent-free for as long as she wanted. No matter that Alice had been planning to have contractors come in and fix the warped floors that spring. No matter