Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [92]
“I was the first to ship out,” Uncle Tim said. “The other boys hadn’t gone yet, but we knew they would soon. So I wanted to get them revved up. This was before Mary died,” he added, a rare reference to the sister they had lost. “I was going on and on about what a looker Dietrich was. She was a good person, too, you know—a German, but she renounced Hitler. He had all her films banned. Anyway, there I was going on and on about how sexy she was, how much all the guys were falling all over one another imagining what they might do with five minutes alone with her. I’ll admit, I got carried away. My brothers were egging me on. We were all crazy about Dietrich.”
Kathleen tried to picture her bald old uncles as a posse of horny young guys.
“So then Alice said, ‘What do you mean? What would you do?’ and then Mary said, you know, ‘They’d have their way with her.’ ”
He paused, took a sip of his drink. This was all that Kathleen had ever heard about her aunt. There were no pictures of her anywhere; no one ever told stories. She wanted more.
“All of a sudden,” Tim continued, “Alice stormed out of the room crying.”
“Why?”
“No one knew. I thought she’d like the story. She was always nuts about those old movie stars. Anyway, we ignored her. Typical drama queen Alice. But the next day she told me that she’d been up praying for me all night, for me and the rest of those souls in my squadron. She said we’d go to Hell for thoughts like that.”
“How old was she?”
“Twenty or so? You see, she was always an innocent,” Uncle Tim said. “A flirt, but a clueless one. She pretended she never wanted to get married, but I think that was just because all of that man and wife stuff scared her. You wouldn’t think it to interact with her since she can be such a pain in the ass and she’s always acting so fancy, but the truth is, she’s never changed. Her whole life she’s been asking God for help, and really expecting it to come. She’s been to Mass every morning since me and my brothers shipped out, as far as I know. She actually wants to be good.”
It dawned on Kathleen that the church was Alice’s public forum, the place where she went and behaved herself, the place where others viewed her as she wished to be viewed. At St. Agnes over the years, Alice had organized the Sunday school classes and the canned food drives, the fund-raisers for the retired priests and the Christmas swap meet. No one there knew what kind of cruelty she was capable of at home. They all saw her as a saint.
She actually wants to be good.
Kathleen had thought of this at her father’s funeral, as she watched Alice with her eyes fixed on the priest, as if his words might provide an explanation, an answer. She envied her mother that level of faith, especially at that moment.
They were in Maine when he told them he was dying. It was the last time Kathleen had been there, probably the last time she ever would. The whole family had gone up for Labor Day weekend, and everyone was getting along unusually well—no blowups or heated words or incidents of someone (usually Kathleen) storming out and checking into a motel. Ann Marie and Alice had made a big dinner of grilled steak, corn on the cob, potato salad, and tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. Afterward, the kids stood out on the porch roasting marshmallows over the charcoal grill, like they had done when they were small.
Daniel put a hand on Kathleen’s shoulder and said, “Take a walk with me?”
They headed toward the beach, and she looked back at the cottage, thinking that everything seemed perfect, at least for the moment. The sun had set, and there was her whole boisterous, bizarre family outside their favorite spot in the world. Patrick and Ann Marie and Clare and Joe were drinking beers and sitting in beach chairs, while the kids stood over the coals. Alice was in one of her moods. She buzzed around them, picking up stray napkins and paper plates in a huff, but no one paid her much attention.
“Are you doing okay with the drinking?” her father asked. He asked this