J. Courtney Sullivan - Maine

ALSO BY J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN

Commencement

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by J. Courtney Sullivan

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following
for permission to reprint previously published material:
Arcadia Publishing: poem by Dana Perkins included in Ogunquit By-The-Sea
by John D. Bardwell (Arcadia Publishing, 1994). Reprinted by permission
of Arcadia Publishing, www.arcadiapublishing.com.
The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: excerpt from To a Young Poet
by Edna St. Vincent Millay, copyright 1939, 1967 by Edna St. Vincent Millay
and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett and
Holly Peppe, Literary Executors, The Millay Society.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sullivan, J. Courtney.
Maine : a novel / by J. Courtney Sullivan. 1st ed.
p. cm.
This is a Borzoi book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59681-9
1. WomenFamily relationshipsFiction. 2. Family secretsFiction.
3. MaineFiction. I. Title.
PS3619.U43M35 2011
813.6dc22 2011003396

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket photograph Ruggero Maramotti / Gallery Stock
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

v3.1

For Trish

Alas, a mother never is afraid,
Of speaking angrily to any child,
Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING ,
Aurora Leigh

Just do everything we didnt do and you will be perfectly safe.

a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, Frances

Alice decided to take a break from packing. She lit a cigarette, leaning back in one of the wicker chairs that were always slightly damp from the sea breeze. She glanced around at the cardboard boxes filled with her familys belongings, each glass and saltshaker and picture frame wrapped carefully in newspaper. There were at least a couple of boxes in every room of the house. She needed to make sure she had taken them all to Goodwill by the time the children arrived. This had been their summer home for sixty years, and it amazed her how many objects they had accumulated. She didnt want anyone to be burdened by the mess once she was gone.

She could tell by the heavy clouds that it was about to rain. In Cape Neddick, Maine, that May, you were likely to see a thunderstorm every afternoon. This didnt bother her. She never went down to the beach anymore. After lunch she usually sat out on the screen porch for hours, reading novels that her daughter-in-law, Ann Marie, had lent her during the winter, drinking red wine, and watching the waves crash against the rocks until it was time to make supper. She never felt the urge she once did to put on a swimsuit and take a dip or muss her pedicure by walking in the sand. She preferred to watch it all from a distance, letting the scene pass through her like a ghost.

Her life here was ruled by routine. Each day, she was up by six to clean the house and tend her garden. She drank a cup of Tetley, leaving the tea bag on a dish in the fridge so she could use it once more before lunch. At nine thirty on the nose, she drove to St. Michaels by the Sea for ten oclock Mass.

The surrounding area had changed so much since their first summer in Maine, all those years ago. Huge houses had gone up along the coast, and the towns were now full of gift shops and fashionable restaurants and gourmet grocery stores. The fishermen were still around, but back in the seventies many of them had started catering to tourists, with their breakfast cruises and their whale watches and such.

Some things remained. Rubys Market and the pharmacy were still dark by six. Alice still left her keys in the car at all times. She never locked the house eitherno one up here did. The beach had stayed untouched, and every one of the massive pine trees dotting the road from her door to the church looked as if it had been there for centuries.

The church itself was a constant. St. Michaels was an old-fashioned country chapel made of stone, with red velvet cushions in the pews and brilliant stained-glass windows that burst with color in the morning sun. It had been built at the top of a hill off Shore Road so that its rooftop cross might be visible to sailors at sea.

Alice always sat in the third row to the right of the altar. She tried to remember the best bits of wisdom from Father Donnellys sermons to pass along to the child or grandchild who needed them most, not that they paid her any attention. She listened intently, singing out the familiar hymns, reciting the prayers she had recited since she was a girl. She closed her eyes and asked God for the same things she had asked for all those years ago: to help her be good, to make her do better. For the most part, she believed He heard.

After Mass on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the St. Michaels Legion of Mary met in the church basement and said the rosary for ailing members of the parish, for the hungry and needy around the world, for the sanctity of life in all its stages. They recited Hail Holy Queen and drank decaf and chatted. Mary Fallon reminded them whose turn it was to bring muffins next time and who would accompany Father Donnelly on his weekly trip to the homes of the infirm, where he prayed for a recovery that usually never came. Though it was terribly sad, watching strangers her own age dying, Alice enjoyed her afternoons with Father Donnelly. He brought such comfort to everyone he visited. He was a young man, only thirty-four, with dark hair and a warm smile that reminded her of crooners from the fifties. He had chosen a vocation from another era, and he was thoughtful in a way she didnt know young people could be anymore.

Alice felt a sense of deep dedication watching him pray over his parishioners. Most priests today didnt make time for house calls. When they were done, Father Donnelly would take her to lunch, which she knew for a fact he did not do with the other gals from the Legion. He had done so much for her. He even helped her around the house now and thenchanging the high-up lightbulb on the porch, hauling away tree branches after a storm. Perhaps this special treatment was only a result of the little arrangement they had made, but she hardly cared.

Father Donnelly and the seven members of the Legion of Mary (no fewer than five of them actually named Mary) were the only people Alice interacted with on a regular basis at this time of year. She was the lone summer person in the group, their foreign exchange student, she called herself as a joke. The year-rounders were suspicious of outsiders. But they had agreed to let her join just for the season after the archdiocese shut down St. Agnes two years back.

St. Agnes was her church at home in Canton, the church where Alices children were baptized, where her husband, Daniel, was eulogized, where she had gone to Mass every day for the past six decades and run both the Sunday school program, when her children were small, and the Legion of Mary once they had grown. She had co-chaired the campaign to save the church with a young mother of four named Abigail Curley, who had translucent skin and a soft, childlike voice. Together, they gathered five hundred signatures; they wrote dozens of letters; they petitioned the cardinal himself.