Good Harbor by Anita Diamant Read Free Book Online Page B

right? Joyce thought. And things are relatively good.
    Then she remembered the blank, almost frightened expressions on her friends’ faces
     when she’d said “romance novel.” Not one of them had asked the name of her book. Not
     even Alice.
    Joyce brushed her teeth, swallowed two aspirin, and picked up Anna Karenina again. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
     way.” Joyce couldn’t remember if that sentence had seemed wise when she’d read it
     in college.
    She left the book on the couch and crawled into bed, careful not to wake Frank. She
     tucked herself into the far side of the comforter and thought about her book group.
     Compared to them, her family seemed rock solid. But Joyce wasn’t so sure she would
     go as far as “happy.”

     
    KATHLEEN COULDN’T remember the last time she had used the Sabbath candlesticks. Buddy’s parents had
     worked in the store seven days a week, so her husband had no childhood attachment
     to the Friday-night rituals of wine and bread and candles. But Kathleen loved the
     weekly celebration she’d studied in her conversion class, especially the candles.
     As a little girl she’d looked after her grandmother’s votives, which burned in every
     room, sending up prayers to the Blessed Mother, to Saint Jude, to Saint Teresa, the
     Little Flower. At Christmas, there were red and green candles everywhere — even the
     bathroom.
    She welcomed the Jewish routine and made it her own. Every week when Hal and Jack
     were growing up, she’d polished the candlesticks, warmed a challah bread in the oven,
     and polished the sideboard with lemon oil. Her sons told her they still associated
     those smells with Fridays.
    Holding a match to the bottoms so they would stay in place, Kathleen wondered if her
     candle lighting was for Jewish purposes or out of Catholic nostalgia, but decided
     it made no difference. “Light is a symbol of the Divine,” she said, quoting a line
     from a long-ago sisterhood Sabbath service.
    Kathleen had cooked Buddy’s favorite dinner, the fat grams be damned: orange-glazed
     chicken, pan-fried potatoes, green beans, and chocolate mousse. When he saw the container
     of cream on the counter, he said, “Trying to get rid of me, eh?”
    “Well, now that I’m going to live to be ninety, I thought I’d find myself a younger
     fella,” she said from inside Buddy’s lingering hug. “I do have a favor to ask, though.”
    “That mink coat you’ve been hinting at?”
    “I won’t need that until November,” she said, teasing back. “But I would like to go
     to temple tonight.”
    Kathleen had converted to Judaism the week before they married, thirty-three years
     earlier. It didn’t bother Buddy that Kathleen Mary Elizabeth McCormack wasn’t Jewish.
     He had been one of a handful of Jewish kids growing up in Gloucester. The working-class
     Italian and Portuguese boys in school never bothered him about being different, maybe
     because he was a head taller than most of them. For Buddy, Judaism was a matter of
     holiday foods and honoring his parents’ traditions. But Mae and Irv Levine both wept
     for joy when Kathleen told them she was going to convert.
    It hadn’t felt like a momentous decision to Kathleen at the time. Catholicism had
     stopped making sense to her at the age of fourteen, and no one in her own family had
     objected to her becoming Jewish. The grandmother who would certainly have objected,
     and loudly, on the grounds of Kathleen’s immortal soul, was dead by the time she got
     married. Kathleen had no memory of her father, who had walked out when she was three.
     She didn’t recall her mother saying anything, but then, her poor mother seemed congenitally
     unable to object to any awful thing life laid in her lap. As a teenager, Kathleen
     had secretly prayed, “Please, God, make me be different from my mother.”
    Pat heard her calling to religious life in college and was Sister Pat by the time