Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [91]
Maggie got to her feet then. “Oh, Mom, please don’t be upset.”
“I’m fine,” she said sharply. “I’m going to bed. There’s a sunrise meditation in the morning, but I’ll go ahead and assume you two will be too hungover to come along.”
She stomped back toward the bungalows. Maggie didn’t follow her.
Kathleen felt stupid now. Perhaps she had overreacted. But she worried about Maggie and Alice spending time together. As far as Kathleen was concerned, her mother was like Hannibal Lecter: you’d be a fool to get too close, but sometimes her charm made it hard to resist. Kathleen herself still told Alice things she shouldn’t from time to time, only to have them thrown back in her face.
When they got home from the Bahamas, Kathleen called Alice and said, “You know, I brought you there to help you figure out a way to cope.”
“I don’t need help. What you people get from headshrinkers and gurus and meditation, I get from my faith,” Alice responded. “I need to focus on going to Mass more, that’s all.”
“You already go every day,” Kathleen had said.
“I go for all the Sundays you’ve missed in the last twenty years,” Alice replied.
Well, she had walked right into that one.
At the end of every AA meeting, before coffee, they joined hands and said the Lord’s Prayer: Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name … The defiant teenager in Kathleen always rose up at that moment: these words, forever synonymous with the spicy air and somber music of the Catholic Church. They evoked countless Sunday mornings spent standing in a pew with her parents, brother, and sister; wearing a ridiculous hat on her head; glancing nervously at the Stations of the Cross, the crucifixion displayed so graphically on the walls. She didn’t understand a word of the Latin Mass, though she had memorized the entire thing somewhere along the line. She stood there each week, waiting for the hour to pass, thinking of Hell and pancakes and high school boys.
Kathleen’s days as a practicing Catholic were all based in fear. She spent most of her time searching for the loopholes. No sex before marriage, unless you really truly intended to get married. Absolutely no drinking during Lent, except out of state.
In recent years, she had come to detest the Church. She knew one of those grown men on the news in Boston, with his head lowered, telling the tale of how some priest had forced sex upon him when he was an altar boy. His name was Robert O’Neil. He had been in her class in grade school. Kathleen pictured him as he had been then—freckle-faced, dressed in corduroys and crocheted sweaters, a slight gap between his teeth. She seethed to think of the private hell the poor kid was in all along. Now, he said, he was ruined—estranged from his wife, afraid to let his own children so much as sit in his lap.
Alice’s parish had shut its doors two years back, and she had mourned that church as if it were a loved one. Kathleen felt for her, imagining what it might be like to have to let go of the community that you felt was the most essential part of you. But what about the fact that her church and dozens of others like it were in financial trouble to begin with because the archdiocese of Boston could hardly afford all the legal bills associated with the accusations made against priests? She tried to engage her mother in a conversation about this, but Alice would not hear it. Though she lived to criticize pretty much everything else, she plain refused to see anything bad in the Catholic Church.
Until she was in her mid-twenties, Kathleen had always thought of her mother’s religiosity as semi–trumped up, just another way in which Alice could pose and be dramatic. Did she really need to go to church every day, with that ridiculous white scarf covering her hair? Kathleen imagined she did it only to make her children feel guilty about their comparative lack of devotion.
But then one Easter, her uncle Timothy told her a story about the time he was home on leave from the war and bragged to Alice and the rest of their siblings about how