Saints for All Occasions Read online

  Also by J. Courtney Sullivan

  The Engagements

  Maine

  Commencement

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by J. Courtney Sullivan

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

  www.aaknopf.com

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sullivan, J. Courtney, author.

  Title: Saints for all occasions : a novel / J. Courtney Sullivan.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016048931| ISBN 9780307959577 (hardback) | ISBN 9780307959584 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Sagas. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.U43 S25 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016048931

  Ebook ISBN 9780307959584

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

  Cover photograph of Dorchester Heights, Massachusetts, by James L. Woodward via Wikimedia Commons

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: 2009

  Chapter 1

  Part Two: 1957–1958

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three: 2009

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Four: 1958–1967

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Five: 2009

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Six: 1975–1976

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Seven: 2009

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Eight: 2009

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Jenny Jackson, Brettne Bloom, and Ann Napolitano, who kept the faith

  I exist in two places,

  here and where you are.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD, “Corpse Song”

  Part One

  2009

  1

  IN THE CAR on the way to the hospital, Nora remembered how, when Patrick was small, she would wake up suddenly, gripped by some terrible fear—that he had stopped breathing, or spiked a deadly fever. That he had been taken from her.

  She had to see him to be sure. They lived then on the top floor of the three-decker on Crescent Avenue. She would practically sleepwalk through the kitchen and past Bridget’s door, and then down the hall to the boys’ room, her nightgown skimming the cold hardwood, the muffled sound of Mr. Sheehan’s radio murmuring up from downstairs.

  The fear returned the summer Patrick was sixteen, when they moved to the big house in Hull. Nora would awaken, heart pounding, thinking of him, and of her sister, images past and present wound up in one another. She worried about the crowd he ran with, about his anger and his moods, about things he had done that could never be undone.

  She met her worries in the same old way. Whatever the hour, she would rise to her feet and climb the attic stairs to Patrick’s bedroom, so that she might lay eyes on him. This was a bargain she struck, a ritual to guarantee safety. Nothing truly bad could happen if she was expecting it.

  Over the years, there were times when one of her other three consumed her thoughts. As they got older, Nora knew them better. That was something no one ever told you. That you would have to get to know your own children. John wanted too much to please her. Bridget was a hopeless tomboy. They had carried these traits along with them into adulthood. When Brian, her baby, moved away, Nora worried. She worried ever more so when he moved back in.

  But it was Patrick who weighed most on her mind. He was fifty now. For the past several months, the old fear had returned. Ever since John kicked things up again. Things she had long considered safely in the past. Unable to check on Patrick on those nights when the feeling arose, Nora would switch on the lamp and shuffle through her prayer cards until she came to Saint Monica, patron saint of mothers with difficult children. She slept with the card faceup on Charlie’s empty pillow.

  Tonight, for once, she hadn’t been thinking of Patrick. Of all things, she was thinking about the boiler down cellar. It had been clanging since just after supper. Adjusting the temperature didn’t help. Nora thought she might have to bleed the pipes. As a last resort, she tried saying a rosary to make it stop. When this seemed to do the trick, she went to bed with a fat grin on her face, thus assured of her own powers.

  She was awakened not long after by the ringing telephone, a stranger’s voice saying there had been an accident, she should come right away. By the time she reached the emergency room, pink flannel pajamas under her winter coat, Patrick was already gone.

  —

  The ambulance had taken him to the Carney.

  It took Nora forty-five minutes to get from home to the old neighborhood.

  They were waiting for her by the door: a doctor and a nurse and a priest about her age. The presence of the priest made it clear. She thought of how they left Dorchester all those years ago for Patrick’s sake, but as soon as he was old enough he moved right back. This would be where his life had started, and where it came to an end.

  They took her to a windowless office. She wanted to tell them she wouldn’t go in. But she followed right along and sat down. The doctor looked terribly young for such a job, but then a lot of people were starting to look terribly young to her. He wanted Nora to know that they had tried to revive her son for close to an hour. They had done all they could. He explained in calm detail that Patrick had been drinking. That he lost control of the car and slammed into a concrete wall beneath an overpass on Morrissey Boulevard. His chest struck the steering column. His lungs bled out.

  “It could have been worse,” the doctor said. “If he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, he would have been ejected from the car.”

  How could it be any worse than death? she wondered, and yet she clung to this detail. Patrick had worn his seat belt. He wasn’t trying to die.

  Nora wanted to ask the priest if he thought all her fears had pointed to this moment. Or if they had been the thing to stave it off for so long. She felt that she should confess something. Her guilt. She knew they would think she was crazy if she said any of it out loud. She sat there with her lips pressed together, holding her pocketbook tight to her chest like it was a fidgety child.

  After the signing of papers, the nurse said, “We’ll give you a minute with him, if you like.”

  She led Nora to a room down the hall and closed the door.

  Patrick was lying on a gurney, a white blanket covering his body, a breathing tube protruding from his mouth. Someone had closed his eyes.

  From the hall and the roo
ms all around came the beeping of machines, the scurry of feet, and low voices. A burst of laughter from the nurses’ station. But in this room, everything was impossibly settled, final. Still.

  Nora tried to recall what the doctor had said. It seemed that if she could just piece it together, figure out what was to blame, she might still have him back.

  She felt overcome with anger toward John. She returned to that moment last May, when he first asked if she remembered the McClain family from Savin Hill. Their oldest son had approached John to run his campaign for state senate.

  “They weren’t very nice people,” she said. “I don’t think you should do it.”

  What she meant was Don’t do it. But John went right ahead. It had led to that terrible fight at Maeve’s confirmation. Patrick and John hadn’t spoken since. Patrick hadn’t been himself.

  Nora had seen another article in the paper just yesterday, a slight agitation taking root in her chest, as it did whenever she saw Rory McClain’s name in print.

  There was a photograph of Rory looking every bit the politician, that face so familiar to her, all black hair and toothy smile. His wife stood by his side, and three teenage boys, lined up according to height. Nora wondered if beneath the collared shirts and school picture day haircuts they were as wicked as their father and grandfather had once been. It seemed to her that a duplicitous nature must run in a family, like twins or weak knees.

  She hadn’t read the article. Though she knew John would call to make sure she had seen it, Nora turned the page.

  She took in a deep breath now and told herself to put these thoughts aside. There wasn’t much time left.

  Patrick had had a horrible mustache for the last two years, despite her begging him to shave it off. She let her hand hover in the air just above it, so as to hide the proof, and then she looked at him. She looked and looked. He had always been handsome. The most beautiful of all her children.

  After a while, the nurse knocked twice, then opened the door.

  “It’s time, I’m afraid,” she said.

  Nora pulled a small plastic hairbrush from her purse and smoothed his black curls. She checked his pulse, in case. She felt as if a swarm of bees were darting around inside her, but she managed to let Patrick go, as she had on other occasions when it felt impossible. When he was five and frightened about the first day of kindergarten, she slipped a seashell into his pocket as the yellow school bus came into view. To get you through, she said.

  In the fluorescent-lit hallway, the priest placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re in better shape than most, Mrs. Rafferty,” he said. “You’re a tough cookie, I can tell. No tears.”

  Nora didn’t say anything. She had never been able to cry in front of other people. And anyway, tears never came right away at a moment like this. Not when her mother died when she was a child, and not when her husband died five years ago, and not when her sister went away. Which was not a death, but something close to it.

  “Where in Ireland are you from?” he asked, and when she stared back blankly, he said, “Your accent.”

  “County Clare,” she said.

  “Ahh. My mother came from County Mayo.” The priest paused. “He’s in a better place.”

  Why did they send the clergy at times like this? By design, they could never understand. Her sister had been just the same. Nora pictured her, in full black habit—did they even wear those anymore? She would wake up this morning at that tranquil country abbey, free from all attachment, free from heartache, even though she had been the one to set the thing in motion.

  —

  All the way home, unable to think of how she would tell the children, Nora thought of her sister. Her rage was like another person sitting beside her in the car.

  When the children were young, Charlie was always telling stories about home. The one they liked best was about the Bone Setter.

  “Did I ever tell you who came when you broke a bone in Miltown Malbay?” he would ask.

  They would shake their heads, even though they’d heard it before.

  “The Bone Setter!” he’d cry, clasping the closest child in his arms, the child squealing in delight.

  “You didn’t go to the doctor unless you were dying,” he said. “No, if you broke something, like I did—my ankle—this fine man would come to your bedroom and snap you right back into place with his hands, as good as new.” Charlie made a popping sound with his tongue. “No drugs. Didn’t need them.”

  The children went green when he told it. But then they begged him to tell it again.

  As usual when he spoke of home, Charlie left out the worst bits. The man had set his ankle slightly off. It led the rest of his body to be out of balance so that eventually, his knees bothered him, and later, his back.

  The lies they had told were like this. The original, her sister’s doing. All those that followed, an attempt on Nora’s part to try to preserve what the first lie had done, each one putting Patrick ever more out of joint. She had accepted it as the price of keeping him safe.

  John always complained that Nora favored Patrick. Bridget said that until she was five years old, she thought his name was My Patrick, since that’s all Nora ever called him. She had thought that someday they would understand, they would know the whole story, though she could not imagine telling it. Patrick had asked, but she could never bring herself to answer.

  She hadn’t even told them that she had a sister.

  Her mind wandered again to the abbey. Those women outside the world, capable of casting off everything, even their own names. Nora had realized long ago that the walls the nuns used to keep others out could just as easily wall a person in, imprison her with her thoughts. Let her sit with this, then. The weight of it. It wasn’t right that Nora should have to carry it on her own.

  As soon as she reached the house, she went to the junk drawer and found her old address book. She called the abbey for the first time in more than thirty years. She told the young one who answered that her name was Nora Rafferty and she needed Mother Cecilia Flynn to know that her son Patrick had died late last night, in a car crash, alone.

  Outside, she could hear the first of the commuters driving down the hill, headed for the highway that would take them to the city, or else to the ferry, where they’d drink a cup of coffee as the boat cut a course across the darkened harbor.

  Nora took a notepad from the counter and made a list. She brewed a pot of tea in case company should arrive sooner than expected. She sat down and wept, her elbows on the table, her face cupped in the cool palms of her hands.

  Part Two

  1957–1958

  2

  THEIR FATHER HIRED A HACKNEY to drive them as far as Ennistymon. From there, a bus would carry them the rest of the way to Cobh.

  At six in the morning, he stood smoking by the kitchen window, tapping his foot, waiting for Cedric McGann’s black Ford to come chugging up the road.

  Nora hadn’t slept. While the house was silent, by the light of an oil lamp, she made certain they had everything they needed. She checked three times to be sure. Now, their suitcases by the door, she sat at the table, hoping he might tell her not to go. But her father wouldn’t look at her.

  “Are you all right?” she managed to ask.

  “Right as the mail,” he said.

  An hour ago, she had fixed him a boiled egg. It was still on the plate, untouched.

  In one of his letters, Charlie said his father’s cousin in Boston was a marvelous cook, that Nora had never seen the likes of her food. Nora had told her father that the woman was strict so he wouldn’t worry, but in fact Charlie reported that she barely noticed the family members who came to stay. Girls lived on the second floor, and boys on the third, and as long as you minded your manners, Mrs. Quinlan didn’t bother you.

  Charlie said they wouldn’t live in her house for long. Once they were married, they would get their own apartment. What about Theresa? she asked him when she wrote. She can come with us if you li
ke, he replied. Or she can stay on at Quinlans’. We won’t be going far.

  Nora watched her father at the window. She felt like there had been a death, that mix of sorrow and anticipation that arose to fill the space when someone vanished.

  Her sister came bounding into the room, giddy, wearing her nicest dress.

  Nora was about to tell her to have some porridge, to fill herself up for the journey.

  “Oh!” Theresa shouted as she reached the threshold. “My hat!”

  She ran out as quickly as she’d come in.

  “Quiet,” their father called after her in a hush. “You’ll wake Herself.”

  Their gran had said her good-byes the night before. She said she couldn’t stand to see them go. Didn’t want to hold the memory of it.

  When the taxi arrived, Nora thought that she would simply not leave. How could your legs walk someplace when you had no desire to make them? Yet here she was, placing one foot in front of the other, body betraying mind, exchanging a long embrace with her father and a quick one with her brother, who slunk out of his room at the last minute, head down. Martin had been protesting their leaving ever since it was decided upon, ignoring his two sisters, as if rehearsing for a life in which they no longer existed.

  Her father’s eyes were glazed with tears that threatened to spill over but wouldn’t. He looked tired, he looked old, his face brown and leathered from the sun.

  He had terrified Nora when she was a girl, once her mother was gone, his temper raging over a cup of spilled milk as if his children were a punishment. They ran screaming, they hid from him in corners of the house he could not reach, behind heavy furniture, or under their grandmother’s bed, a meaty, menacing hand coming toward them.