Empire Falls

Grace would be interested in full-time employment as a personal aide to a woman who’d fallen during the winter and broken her hip. She would be confined, for some time, to a wheelchair, and in this diminished capacity was unequal to the task of managing a large house and garden. What the lady would require, for possibly up to a year, was a reliable person upon whom she might depend for a wide variety of services. She would need assistance keeping the house in order and putting in her spring flower and vegetable garden. Bookkeeping, letter writing, and other business skills would come in handy as well. Also, there was a child who would need attending to. Hours might be long one week, short the next, and if Grace chose not to reside at her employer’s house, she would have to be “on call” around the clock. Finally, and Mr. Vandermark was cautious in his phrasing here, the position would no doubt require a certain strength of character, since the woman in question was considered by some to be “difficult.”
    Grace, then in her late thirties, was confident of her mettle. She’d held down a responsible position for all those years at the Empire Shirt Factory, and of course she’d been married to Max Roby for two decades, a test of character if ever there was one. It was almost as if the job description had been written with her in mind. Still, there was something odd about Mr. Vandermark’s remarking on the woman’s character, and so Grace, who had already decided to accept the offer, admitted that she had no training as a nurse and wondered why the woman didn’t hire a professional. Mr. Vandermark seemed to have anticipated this question, and he reminded Grace that while a professional nurse might be advantageous in some respects, they generally frowned on housework, were indifferent letter writers and unskilled with accounts, and he’d never known one to garden. He didn’t entirely conceal his opinion that, indeed, no one person could reasonably be expected to function in so many capacities. Also, he added, a professional nurse would likely have to be hired from someplace like Portland or Lewiston, and his client preferred not to have a stranger in her house .
    “Wouldn’t I be a stranger?” Grace asked .
    “Actually, no,” Mr. Vandermark explained. “I believe you are known to the lady, and she to you.”
    When he paused, Grace intuited in that moment the house, the woman, the circumstances, the entire truth .
·  ·  ·
    D URING THE YEARS that Grace worked for Mrs. Whiting, Miles saw his mother lose the last bloom of her womanhood. Though not yet forty, she would never again buy a dress like the one she’d worn on Martha’s Vineyard for Charlie Mayne, and gradually men’s heads stopped rotating to look as she passed them on the street. Before going to work for Mrs. Whiting she had attended Mass every day and in the early-morning light that filtered through the stained-glass windows of St. Catherine’s, a hint of her former beauty remained, but she emerged into the gray day looking gaunt, drained of both vitality and desire, despite her conviction that Mass gave her strength and hope for the future. To Miles, his mother was beginning to resemble the handful of other women, widows mostly, in their sixties and seventies, who attended daily worship .
    When it was his turn to serve at Mass, one week every two months, Miles accompanied her to St. Cat’s. He disliked getting up so early, but once there, still half asleep as he pulled on his cassock and surplice, he found the experience pleasant enough. For reasons he wasn’t able to articulate, the world seemed a better place and himself a better person for beginning each day at church, and before long he began to attend Mass even when he wasn’t required to serve. Other altar boys quickly learned that Miles would be there to cover for them if they were sick, and after a while they stopped bothering to ask this favor of him. And it was he whom Father Tom became annoyed with, not the boy scheduled, on those rare occasions when Miles himself became ill .
    At St. Catherine’s, Miles came to understand that responsibility could be enjoyable. He wasn’t sure that what he felt there in the warm church, with the day dawning outside, was exactly a religious experience, but he enjoyed the cadence of the Latin Mass and often was jolted out of some reverie just in time to ring the bell at the consecration. He’d recently discovered the existence of a