Object lessons (23 page)

“What’s happy?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said, dropping her hands. “But I know I haven’t been it, whatever it is.”

Oddly enough, he felt happy now, with just the two of them in their own living room, with his stomach full of beer. He remembered how, one evening in the hospital, his father had asked him to play a game of pinochle, beating Tom as he did all his sons. Then he had fallen back into the pillows, his collarbone like a wooden yoke beneath his pajamas, and said, “There’s nothing like a game of cards to make you feel alive.”

Tommy looked at his wife now and he loved her, loved how the veins showed blue around her neck just above the little collar of her shirt, how her hair fuzzed out uncontrollably in the heat, how she had joined him to make a life of their own, however flawed, however constraining. He loved all the little things. He did not want her to be like other people. He would never have loved her if she had been. He thought of her pulling into the driveway with such assumed competence, but with her bottom lip caught between her front teeth as she turned the wheel. He began to cry.

“No, Tom, no,” she whispered, going to kneel in front of him and cradling his head on her shoulder. “No, no, no. It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.” Tommy started to choke on it, the hot salt, the booze, the grief, the loss of the father he wished he had had, the death of the world he loved.

“I was afraid …” he began, but she didn’t let him finish.

“I know,” Connie said. “I know. But there was nothing to be afraid of.”

Tommy pulled away and looked at her and she smiled, inscrutable and wise. He couldn’t tell her that somehow the driving seemed like a great infidelity all by itself, the separation, the pulling away. There was nothing to be done about that now, and he couldn’t afford to lose her. He realized that she was the closest he would ever get to not being alone. His parents would die, and the children would change and leave, and there the two of them would be, in their living room, perspiring and talking in fragments.

“I love you,” he said, and he started to cry again.

“Yes, honey. Yes, I know.”

“Don’t go away.”

“Where would I go?” Connie said, and she held him for a long time. Slowly, almost in a dream, he began to undress her, there in the living room. It made him remember the first Friday night they had spent in this house, after they had moved from her aunt Rose’s. Maggie and Terence were babies, and they had stayed behind in the Bronx while he and Connie came to arrange the furniture, put away the dishes, make up the bare beds. They had had dinner that night on the floor, on a blanket, with a bottle of Rose’s Chianti for a kind of celebration, and by the time it was dark they were both drunk. They had pushed everything to one side—he could still feel the scratch of the wool blanket on his bare skin—and fell on each other right next to the dirty plates. Connie’s bra had stayed looped around her neck throughout, as if she were a corpse in a
Daily News
rape-and-murder story. There were no curtains on the windows and Tommy had averted his eyes, afraid to see someone peeking in. But when they were finished they walked around brazenly, their clothes on the floor, staying up way past midnight as though they both knew it would be a long time before they would have this kind of freedom again. Tommy remembered walking through the half-empty rooms with one word going through his head: Mine. Mine. He had meant his wife, too. He said it again, now, as he pulled impatiently at her shorts. Their skins stuck together in the heat, and made sucking noises when they pulled apart. As they lay side by side on the carpet afterward, Tommy realized that he had forgotten, for once, that she was pregnant. She, he realized from her response, simply did not care.

“We have to get dressed,” she said after a few minutes. “One of the children might come in.”

But he was already half-asleep by that time, and he only pulled on his pants and fell into his chair, his head thrown back, his mouth open. She covered him with one of Joseph’s blankets, a small square over the middle of his long body, and then she went upstairs to sleep by herself. In the middle of the night he woke up once, his head buzzing with a swarm of hangover gnats, filling his ears with noise and his eyes with little white lights, and he thought suddenly that he had been had once again. This was what his entire married life had been like: long stretches of tedium illuminated by moments, unexpected, when he knew that without her he would be lost. For weeks or months they moved through their separate lives and slept side by side as though they were two strangers who had mistakenly been assigned the same hotel room. And then something would happen and he would find himself staring at her as though he could see the soul of her, looking for an end to his troubles inside the loop of her arms, and he would be snagged with the fishhook of herself, with the barbed hook of his powerless infatuation with something that she seemed to have, some answer that she seemed to offer. She was the one, really, who had always had the power over him, and who always would; his father’s bluster was nothing compared to it. He tried to remember all this as he lay there, the aftertaste of liquor awful in his mouth. He wished he had a pen and could write it down, but instead he vowed—perhaps aloud, he thought he heard some muttering in the room—to remember it the next morning.

When he woke again the watery blue of the sky told him that it was dawn. The pressure behind his eyes was enormous. The buzzing had reawakened him, and he pressed his hands over his ears. After a moment he realized that the noise was not inside his head, but in the kitchen, and as he took his hands away Connie appeared at the top of the stairs, her face very pale above the white of her nightgown. He felt embarrassed to look at her.

“Tommy, James is on the phone,” she said. When he got up from the chair the room tilted a little. He picked up the kitchen phone and it was only when he actually said “Hello” that he realized he had never received a call this early in the morning, and even before James spoke Tommy knew what he would say.

“He’s dead,” his brother said.

21

G
ATES OF HEAVEN CEMETERY WAS NICE
, Maggie thought, but not as nice as her grandfather Mazza’s cemetery. It had a slight rise and fall to it, little hills and valleys crisscrossed with wide roads. Whole areas were empty, the grass stretching bright green and unbroken for a long way. There were no trees. They took good care of the lawns. Just inside the entrance there was a sign:

NO:
PLANTING AT GRAVESITES
FLAGS
MILITARY MEDALLIONS

GRAVE BLANKETS PERMITTED ON CHRISTMAS, EASTER, AND MOTHER’S DAY
.

NO UNAUTHORIZED VISITORS. PLEASE RESPECT THIS PLACE OF REST
.

Maggie thought the last sentence was sort of nice, but the rest of the rules seemed harsh. Strangers strolled around Angelo Mazza’s cemetery all the time, and no one thought anything of it. Mrs. Martini left photographs of the grandchildren on her husband’s grave, weighted down with small stones. Women were always coming with pots of hyacinths or gardenias. They would kneel with their trowels in front of the headstones and dig a little hole and put the flowers in and then pat the earth around the roots gently, as though they were patting the person beneath. They never worried about the plants dying. Angelo took care of them once they were in the ground. It would have been nicer if her grandfather Scanlan could have been buried at Calvary Cemetery, but Maggie knew he never would have allowed it. She could picture him lying under his shirred white satin blanket, his black rosaries twined around his fingers in the stagy position that would never allow you to say the rosary in real life, thinking to himself, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m surrounded by guineas.” She laughed a little to herself, and her father frowned at her.

She knew that she should feel sadder than she did, but the fact was that she did not believe that her grandfather was dead, although she had knelt before the coffin and looked down at the waxy hands, still so big and powerful looking. He had made her recite the seven deadly sins just two weeks before. She had forgotten one. “Sloth,” John Scanlan had thundered, the violence of the sound bringing two nurses to the door of his room. “And don’t you forget it, little girl.” Her grandfather had looked better, his mouth less elastic, his eyelids matching, both at half-mast. Sometimes when she would arrive at the hospital he would be sleeping, his breath rippling through his lips like that of an old horse, and when she left he would still be sleeping, even though she had sat there for an hour or two, watching the white light of the sun lay bright rectangles on the linoleum floor. Sometimes they played Parcheesi, and most of the time he told her stories about his childhood, about beating up Billy Boylan behind the garage on Lexington Avenue or being taken into the precinct house by the cops after he stole penny candy from the Greek’s place around the corner from the tenement building where his family lived. Some of the stories had been new. Some Maggie had heard before, but they were transformed. For the first time Billy Boylan got some punches of his own in, and was not simply decimated by John Scanlan’s invincible right hook; for the first time it turned out that some lemon balls had indeed been stolen from the Greek’s. “The cops took ’em, and ate ’em!” her grandfather said loudly, as though consumption was the real crime. Occasionally the stories would be interrupted by her grandfather’s doctor, a man named Levine who was ugly and very kind, and who disliked John Scanlan very much but was always cheerful around him. When Maggie first came to the hospital, Dr. Levine and some other doctors would often enter and make her move outside, pulling the white curtains hanging from the ceiling tight around the bed. Their shoes moved at the bottom of the curtain, their shadows made a kind of mime show. But after a few weeks Dr. Levine just felt for her grandfather’s pulse, and then left. Maggie had imagined this was because her grandfather was getting better. Now, of course, she knew it had been because he was dying.

“What?” she had said, when her father told her. Tommy was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of Pepto-Bismol, his face gray. “What? Are you sure?” She had gone upstairs to her room to think, looking out over the asphalt shingles of the new roofs to the place where the house that had burned had stood. For some reason she had thought of the picture in the Baltimore Catechism of mortal and venial sin: first the milk bottle with the little flecks of black in it, then the milk bottle dark as a moonless night, and then the bottle pure white again after confession. In some way she felt pure white.

She had not talked to Debbie since that night. She had barely talked to her mother, only watched her walk around the house with the wary eyes of the guilty. Now her grandfather was dead. She felt as though she was bereft of any connections at all. As she lay on her bed, she felt as though she was floating, the motion in her body like the motion of Cap’n Jim’s big tug as it plied the Jersey coastline. She looked at the blackened supports of the burned house from her bedroom window, and although she couldn’t explain why, she felt that the worst was over. Down in the kitchen, she had watched her mother making macaroni and cheese, to be heated in between visits to the funeral home, and she realized that it was the first proper meal Connie had made in weeks. Maggie wondered if that meant that Connie had come back to them.

The next three days had passed in a welter of small details: the boxes of tissues on every table at the funeral home, the black mantillas laid on the chair in the hallway at her grandmother’s house, the holy card with the Sacred Heart on one side and her grandfather’s name and the prayer of resurrection on the other. “Accept our prayer that the Gates of Paradise might be opened for your servant,” it said. Her grandmother kept changing her mind about whether her husband should wear his blue or his gray suit, as though he was going to a communion breakfast. “For Christ’s sakes, Mother,” Tommy finally said, “if it matters so much to you we’ll dress him in the gray the first night and the blue the next. Can we drop it now?” Mary Frances had started to cry, and been helped up to her room by Margaret. Looking back over her shoulder, Margaret had said quietly to her brother, “Displacement, Tom honey. Thinking about the small things so you won’t have to think about the big ones.” Maggie had watched with a great full feeling in her throat as tears rose in her father’s eyes. For three days, she thought, they were all displacing. She had learned a new word. The only time any of it felt like real life was driving home in the car from the funeral home one night, stretched out on the back seat, her hot cheek against the cool vinyl of the seats. Frank Sinatra was on the radio, and her father was singing while her mother hummed and beat time with the toe of one patent-leather pump. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me,” Tommy roared happily. When the last few notes died away, he reached across for Connie’s hand. Maggie could see their twined fingers in the space between the seats, the lights of the dashboard making blue stars in her mother’s engagement ring. Then her father said, “Did they get whoever torched that house?”

“I think one of the boys did it. Mary Joseph’s son. He was badly burned. They say he may lose a couple of fingers, and some of the use of his hand.”

Tommy whistled. “Police?”

“I think they’re handling it privately. The father has a bundle, and he’s going to need it. The construction people want $25,000.”

Maggie saw her father look over at her mother, his profile sharp against the windshield. “Yeah?”

“I get that from your sister-in-law,” Connie said with a wary look. “That’s where I heard it. I don’t know if it’s true.”

Tommy grunted, satisfied. “The kid set these fires all by himself?” he added.

“He was the ringleader,” Connie had answered.

Maggie stared again at her mother in the limousine stopped in front of the Gates of Heaven sign. Connie’s eyes looked clear, her face smooth. This was how she always looked after the baby had settled in, once the bad part was over. The lines of her mantilla melted into the black of her hair. Everyone was stopped behind them, the cars with their headlights on, dim in the sunshine, snaking out onto Westchester Avenue. There were 111 cars in the procession: John’s children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, the workers from Scanlan & Co., the leaders of the unions that represented those workers, the leaders of the dioceses that bought what they made, a great long chain of procreation and commerce. There was one friend, a man named McAlevy who said he’d gone to high school with John Scanlan and had read his obituary in the newspaper. “A helluva pitching arm,” the man had told Maggie’s father at the funeral home. “Jesus, I’ll never forget it. A helluva pitching arm.” Maggie had seen the Malone car in the parking lot as she got into the limousine, but she knew she shouldn’t wave. She saw it again now, as the limousine inched forward and the family slid from the cars and gathered under the tent that sheltered the old man’s bronze casket from the noonday sun.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” said the archbishop’s representative, a monsignor with a deep, powerful, effortlessly dramatic voice, which alone had ensured his elevation in the church. Uncle James had implored him to say the words in Latin, had hinted at free vestments for the cathedral. The priest had reluctantly refused. The new order was inviolate.

Maggie could not concentrate on the words. A piece of green grasscloth was draped around the base of the casket, but it gapped near her feet and she could see the hole beneath. She knew that they would wait until everyone was gone and then the cemetery workers would lower the straps that let the box down into another box made of some kind of cement. And then they would fill the hole in and place the flowers on top. And by next year the grass would have covered it, and the scar would be gone. There was a largish headstone that said only SCANLAN. The stonecutter would come in a few weeks to finish it. Maggie was struck by the difference between knowing the routine and having it happen to someone she loved.

There was a movement behind her, and she turned to see her cousin Monica, her hand clapped over her mouth, retreat to the lead car, the one in which her grandmother and her uncle James had been riding. Monica seemed somehow to have lost her power, too. At the funeral home they had stood side by side in the ladies’ room, and Monica had asked her coldly if she was bringing a date to the wedding. “Elvis Presley,” Maggie had said in a monotone. “Paul McCartney. Marlon Brando. James Dean.” Monica had smiled. “A comedian,” she said. “A real ball of fire.”

“Stuff it, Monica,” Maggie said. “I’m tired of being afraid of you.”

“Remember man …” the priest was saying, and Maggie finished the sentence in her mind, just as she would have done for her grandfather if they had been in his living room. Her lips moved: “that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” It was a good feeling, to be able to do that, like knowing the answer in a spelling bee. Maggie suddenly remembered the doorstop her grandparents had kept against the door to the house in summertime. It was a three-dimensional octagon, like a faceted ball, made of milky green stone. Maggie had loved to play with it when she was small, to turn it from side to side to side. One day she had asked her grandmother which was the top and which was the bottom, and Mary Frances had tried to explain that all the sides were the same. “There really is no top or bottom to it, dear,” she said softly, not noticing that John Scanlan was standing behind her until he reached clear over her shoulder and took the thing away. He turned it and turned it in his big hand, the hairs on the back catching the light so that they glinted silver and gold, and finally he hit on one side, identical to all the others except that there was a small nick at one edge. He crouched next to Maggie.

“This is the top, little girl,” he said, and then he turned to the opposite side. “And this is the bottom. Top. Bottom. Bottom. Top.” Mary Frances had faded away, and Maggie had been happy. She liked answers. When they went to her grandparents’ house, after this was over, she would look for the nick. She knew now that her grandfather had been making a point, not telling the truth, but she agreed that the first was more important than the second.

It was nearly time to go. The heat was drying the drops of holy water the priest had sprinkled on the metal lid of the casket. Her grandmother stood with her arm through Uncle James’s. The monsignor had turned to speak to her, and she blinked at him as though she could not quite place him.

Maggie followed her parents back to the car. Mrs. Malone stopped to talk to Connie, and Debbie hung back, she and Maggie standing awkward and silent in their black patent-leather shoes, their Teenform garter belts itchy above their pelvic bones. Debbie was wearing her Easter hat, white with black daisies, and a black piqué dress that had once been Helen’s and was still too big on her.

“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” she said to Maggie softly.

“That’s all you have to say to me?” Maggie said. “I saved your life.”