Object lessons (4 page)

“For your information, we invented the Renaissance,” Connie had said in a huff, going up to their room until he came and kissed the frown from between her eyebrows.

But it was not her looks that had so compelled him. Tommy had never been able to put it into words, but it was the blankness of her he was so mesmerized by, the feeling of an empty bottle waiting to be filled, and filled by him. He had been waiting for so long for someone to take him seriously, to listen to him. Looking at her great bottomless eyes he got the feeling that that was what she was doing, although as the years went by he would sometimes wonder if it was simply that nobody was home in there. He could never get a word in edgewise with his family, and he was a little afraid of both his parents, his mother with her patently false patina of elegance and control, his father with his seemingly effortless ability to rise in the world and his disdain for those who did not. It had not escaped Tommy’s notice that Connie Mazza would rise in the world simply by moving to a place where people lived, instead of one where they were buried. He was also sexually enthralled by her. When she would lean forward to tune the car radio and he would get a whiff of her, his blood felt as if it would burst from his body.

He had suspected that there would-be trouble when, after a highly public breakdown by Mary Roe in the ladies’ room at Sacred Heart Academy, his sister Margaret had come home and asked him, meaning no harm, whether he was really going with a Puerto Rican girl from Spanish Harlem. But there was little talk of the affair until, six weeks after they had begun dating, and five weeks after Tommy decided he meant to marry Connie, he had brought her home for Sunday dinner.

Connie had shopped for a week and had spent all the money she had saved from her secretarial job on a red satin dress with a sweetheart neckline and a tiny tight waist from which her bust loomed like a stretch of cream crepe de Chine. As they drove up the long driveway to the Scanlan house and saw Tommy’s sister and one of her friends sitting on the steps in navy-blue skirts and pale-blue sweater sets, Connie had known she had made a dreadful mistake.

At dinner no one spoke to her except Mary Frances, who handed dishes across the table and said “Peas?” and “Potatoes?” as though she and Connie were characters in
The Philadelphia Story
. After Tommy had driven Connie home, he had come back to find his father sitting in the living room in the dark, his cigar burned to the nub at one end and chewed to the nub at the other. “If you think I busted my ass so you could marry some goddamn guinea from the Bronx, you’ve got another think coming,” said Mr. Scanlan, who was quite drunk. Tommy went upstairs while his father continued to talk; the only other word Tommy caught was “wop.” The following Friday Connie told him that her period was late.

And that had been that. They had gotten caught, and Tommy had felt that the ties had tightened with each of the babies, each of them unplanned, each of them making the ties more fast, each of them keeping them from—what? He did not know. His feeling about what their lives might have been were as vague as his feelings about Connie, formed of odd, intense, momentary yearnings. He sometimes wondered what they would have been like as a couple, what life would have been like had they not instantly become a family, had not his empty vessel been filled year after year with the babies she loved so much and watched grow so sadly. Sometimes he would wake in the morning, the sky blue-gray as a dolphin’s back, and for just a few moments he would wonder who this was in bed beside him, and whether he was going to be late for his nine o’clock class. It would come to him slowly that the house was filled with people, created by him, connected to him for life, and he would be weak with incredulity and fear. He knew what it meant to be a father; it meant being sure, outspoken, critical, bold, controlled. It meant being John Scanlan. This life of his was a masquerade.

Then he would roll over, embrace his wife, lift her frilled nightgown and straddle her narrow body, as he had this morning. And he would be all right again, throwing off the sheets afterward, pulling on his shorts, going to the bathroom, thinking only for a moment of another baby next year, wondering if it was a safe time, putting on his T-shirt and his suit pants and going down to breakfast.

“So I hear you and your boss drove a half hour out of your way to get his oil changed,” Tommy said to Mark, running his hand along his damp forehead. “What did I screw up now?”

“Is it a possibility that the owner of this company just might want to stop in occasionally and see how things are going?” said Mark, who had flushed at the words “your boss.”

“Is it a possibility that he wanted to see how things are going? No,” said Tommy. “Is it a possibility that he wants to give me a hard time about something? You know it. What’d I do this time, except let the goddamned candy canes get dirty?”

“He says you and Connie and the kids should come to the house Sunday,” Mark said, running his finger around the inside of his collar.

“Why?”

“Would he tell me?” said Mark. “I’m just carrying the message. He was smiling when he said it.”

“That’s the worst news I’ve heard all day,” Tommy said. “That means something’s up. Maybe he finally got my marriage annulled.”

Looking out the window again, his back to his brother, Tommy watched his father climb into the cab of the cement mixer. There was a low rumble as the engine turned over, and then John Scanlan began to drive the thing around the lot in circles, like a child with a new bicycle.

Tommy began to examine his conscience. Before confession you were supposed to consider your sins; as a boy, Tommy had tried to do this, and come back time and time again to petty theft, disobedience, and self-abuse. But when he had to face his father there always seemed to be an infinite number of sins to consider, although lately he had felt as if he might be in a state of grace. First Concrete was not losing money. Maggie had justified John Scanlan’s investment in her school tuition by getting the highest average in her class. Connie had actually agreed to attend a card party with the other Scanlan wives. He was trying to figure out why his father wanted to see all of them at once when Mark added, “He said something about some new construction behind your house. I think he’s pissed we didn’t get any of the contracts. Particularly cement.”

“I didn’t know a thing about it until all hell broke loose this morning,” said Tommy. “The company’s in the Bronx. Who says we have to get work in Westchester? We’re plenty busy with city work.”

“Come to the house on Sunday,” said Mark. “What’s the harm? The kids can play outside. Maybe he’s just trying to be sociable.”

“Get real.”

“We don’t see you enough, anyhow. Gail never sees Connie. She asked her over for bridge last Thursday but she said she couldn’t come.”

“Connie’s not feeling too well.”

Mark’s mouth narrowed into a bitter line, making him look as if he was trying to hold his teeth in. “What, again?” he finally said.

“Maybe, maybe not. It’s too soon to tell.”

Below them the cement mixer was still circling the lot. John Scanlan narrowly missed taking the passenger side off his own freshly waxed car as a mechanic backed the Lincoln out of one of the bays. The old man laid on the horn, which gave off a deep throaty honk, like some big water bird.

“I have to go,” Mark said. “I’ll see you Sunday.”

Tommy did not reply. He watched his father climb down from the cement mixer. The old man stopped to talk for a moment to the mechanic, and Tommy saw the man begin to grin and bob his head.

So many people were drawn to John Scanlan—drawn by his power, and by his personality, too; by the big voice, the vigor, the gift he had for colorful language, the sheer force of the man. On the wall behind his desk at Scanlan & Co., he had hung a framed copy of a quotation about Teddy Roosevelt: “The baby at every christening, the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.” No one who knew John Scanlan had to ask what it meant. Anyone who had ever been to a christening, a wedding, a funeral he attended knew he outshone the baby, the bride, the corpse. He could inspire love in an instant from anyone who happened to be in his good graces. It was just that so few people ever were.

Tommy could not remember a time when he had ever been in his father’s good graces. As he watched, Mark loped across the parking lot and got into his father’s car.

Tommy turned the radio back on. Sinatra was singing “A Foggy Day in London Town,” Tommy’s favorite song. He closed his office door and sat down at his desk. From his file drawer he took out the photograph of his wife and placed it on one corner of the desk. Another baby. More saddle shoes. Another place at the table to be filled. His stomach had turned sour and his head hurt.

In a half hour, he would go over to Sal’s for lunch. He could think things over. Not whether he would go to his father’s or not; he’d be there, and he’d have Connie with him, even if it meant another argument. It was a question of what he’d do when he got there. He looked at the photograph, at those beautiful eyes. Another baby. He could only push his father so far. The last time he’d taken him on had been the now unimaginable night when he’d won his wife. Tommy would always think of that as his greatest triumph.

“Shit, what can it be now?” he said, as the strings swelled and Sinatra finished singing.

4

N
AME THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
,”
JOHN
Scanlan said absently as he stood in the kitchen of his house mixing martinis.

“Sloth,” Maggie said. “Gluttony, envy.” She stuck her finger into a jar of olives, trying to coax out the three remaining in the bottom. “Avarice,” she added. “Lust.”

“The twelve apostles.”

“John,” Maggie began, as she always did.

Her grandfather had something on his mind. She had known it as soon as she’d seen him that morning, his blue eyes dim, as though turned within. For just a moment, when he saw Connie and Tommy enter the house together, Maggie’s father’s hand held protectively at the small of Connie’s back, John’s eyes had brightened, blazed, danced. Now he seemed preoccupied.

Maggie had been able to recite the deadly sins since first grade. The apostles were a throwaway question. Most recently her grandfather had asked her to recite from memory the Passion According to St. Mark, and Maggie had been amazed when she had learned it successfully. She was even more amazed to be corrected by her grandfather on two small phrases. When she got home and looked at the New Testament, she had seen that he had been right. She wondered who had made him memorize the Passion; she couldn’t imagine anyone making her grandfather do anything.

John filled the glasses from a silver shaker with his initials on it which his wife had purchased because she thought it might make a good heirloom someday. He picked up the matching silver tray and turned to Maggie. “Come into the living room for the entertainment,” he said, and his eyes glistened, his wide mouth creased into a humorless tight-lipped grin.

“What entertainment?” Maggie was still going after the olives.

“Ha!” her grandfather said, pushing through the swinging door.

Maggie heard a little stage cough behind her and knew that her cousin Monica had entered the room. She was wearing the moiré taffeta dress with the high waist and enormous puffed sleeves she had worn the week before for her high school graduation. In it she looked beautiful and virginal, her honey-colored hair flipping up on her shoulders, her nails polished the same color as the add-a-pearl necklace her parents had completed as a graduation gift. When Maggie had stopped after the commencement ceremony to congratulate Helen Malone, who had been in the same graduating class as Monica, Helen had smiled slowly and said, “Your cousin wins the award for best disguise.” Looking over her shoulder at Monica now, Maggie thought she knew exactly what Helen meant. With her pretty face and her curved smile, Monica looked kind and sweet. She stared at Maggie with the cool, direct look she did so well. Then she looked pointedly at Maggie’s fingers in the olive jar. “How attractive,” she said, and Maggie withdrew her hand so quickly that the jar toppled over onto the counter, and brine splattered onto her flowered skirt and the linoleum floor. “Most attractive,” Monica said, leaving Maggie to clean up the mess and wish she was back home in her shorts.

On Sundays, when Maggie went to her grandparents’ house, it was usually with her father. Her mother stayed home with the younger children. Maggie had known everything she needed to know about her mother and her father’s family when she had started to page through Tommy and Connie’s big white leatherette wedding album when she was four years old. She could never understand what had moved the photographer to go up into the choir loft, look down, and take a picture of the congregation, which showed a great massing of relations on the bride’s side of the church and no one behind the groom except his brothers, the ushers, who had appeared in their cutaways in defiance of their father’s wishes. She could never understand why her mother chose to put that picture in the album. “It’s a sad picture, Mommy,” Maggie had said once when she was young, before she had begun quietly to take sides.

“It shows something,” her mother had said, her lips closing like a red metal zipper. Maggie supposed that whatever the something was, it was long-lived, for her mother came to her in-laws’ home only when a special invitation was issued.

Maggie was there often. She liked the order, the cleanliness and the smell of polish, smells that were absent from her everyday life. In her grandmother’s living room there was a baby grand piano, a painting of flowers over the fireplace, a corner cabinet filled with china statues of characters from Shakespeare, and enormous quantities of brocade in a color her grandmother called mauve. There was a big kitchen with geraniums on the wallpaper, and curtains that matched, and a pantry with glass-fronted cabinets. All the food behind the glass was arranged in alphabetical order; the family joke was that Mary Frances Scanlan never served mixed vegetables, because she wouldn’t know whether to file the cans under M or V.

It was the house of people who had money. “Mag, are you rich?” Debbie had asked her once when they had ridden up the long driveway on their bicycles, the lawn stretching away on either side. Maggie had answered, honest as always, “They are. We aren’t.”

Now the brocade furniture in the living room was full of people. Her mother was sitting in the corner of the couch, Joseph slumped against her, his eyes half closed as he sucked his middle fingers. Next to her mother was her aunt Cass, Monica’s mother. Uncle James was sitting next to his wife.

“Delivered twins last night, Concerta,” James said with a grin.

“Oh, God,” Connie said, her stomach fighting the martini her father-in-law had pressed upon her. “That poor woman.”

“No, no,” said James, waving his left hand, his wedding band sunk a little into the flesh of his finger, “Very easy delivery. Just popped right out, one after another.”

“For God’s sake,” said Mary Frances Scanlan, putting her drink down on a coaster on the coffee table. “It’s bad enough, shop talk, but your shop talk is the worst, Jimmy.”

“Sorry,” said James pleasantly. “All part of life, Mother. No sense denying it.”

“No sense discussing it,” said Mary Frances as Maggie came in with another tray of drinks. “Maggie, here’s your cherry. Come quick or I’ll give it to one of your brothers.”

Her grandmother held a maraschino cherry by the stem, dangling it, dripping, over her whiskey sour. Maggie always ate the cherry from her grandmother’s drink, trying not to feel the bite of the liquor before she got to the syrupy taste of the fruit. Like so many other customs in her family, it had continued long past the time that those involved enjoyed it. In fact, Maggie could not remember that she had ever enjoyed it; it had simply become tradition and could not be tampered with. By the time she had eaten the thing, the back of her tongue was usually numb. For a moment she thought of refusing, but instead she took the cherry and held it over her cupped hand, hoping for a chance to throw it away. She looked across the room and saw Monica smiling at her, and she opened her mouth and popped the whole thing in, stem and all. When she wiped her hands on her skirt, Monica laughed.

“Well, gentlemen,” said her grandfather, coming up behind Maggie and lifting his Scotch from amid the martinis on the tray, “The Roman Catholic church is going to hell in a handbasket.” John Scanlan had a tendency to choose phrases and stick with them. “Hell in a handbasket” was one of his favorites.

“Shop talk,” said Mary Frances, crossing her legs and pulling at a stray thread on the brocade chair with her index finger and thumb.

“It’s shop talk that pays for this house,” her husband said. “It’s shop talk that pays for that Lincoln Continental and the private schools for all these children.”

Maggie heard a sigh from the hallway. Monica had moved back into the shadows.

“And for your orthodontia, miss,” John Scanlan said without turning around to look at Monica, whose teeth as a child, before she became perfect, had been as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery.

John Scanlan said it nice and evenly, the way he said almost everything else. The oldtimers at the factory always said that it took a man a couple of hours after he’d been fired to take it all in, because John Scanlan said “You’re fired” in the afternoon in exactly the voice in which he said “Good morning” each morning. Maggie had noticed lately that it was a good bit like the voice in which she answered catechism questions: Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

“Today in church I see four women without hats,” he continued. “Without anything on their heads. Never mind those flimsy little black veils that all you girls are wearing”—her grandfather looked over at Maggie, whose rayon mantilla was sitting on top of her little patent handbag on the hall telephone table—“now we’ve got women bareheaded. Bareheaded! As though they were going to Coney Island instead of the House of the Lord of Hosts.

“This is all because of that woman,” he added, meaning the president’s widow, who had begun wearing the mantilla to Mass on summer Sundays several years before, “who has probably never given a thought to the millinery industry in her life.

“Similarly, Johnnie, who runs the hat shop on Main Street, tells me that business is bad. Men are not wearing hats anymore, he tells me. Now whose fault is that?”

They all knew the answer. Mary Frances, who was her husband’s straight man as well as his wife, sipped her drink, put it down, folded her hands in her lap, and said obediently, “The president.”

“Exactly!” John Scanlan slammed his broad flat hand down on the table next to him.

From behind her Maggie could hear Monica sigh again. She looked over at her mother, whose eyes were shiny from alcohol. Connie looked as though she had left her consciousness at home in Kenwood and sent her body on to the Scanlans without her. Maggie realized that that was how her mother always looked when she was around Tommy’s family. She also realized that her parents never sat together when they were at John and Mary Frances’s house. Maggie’s father was sitting on the piano bench across the room.

Variations of this conversation took place every Sunday at the Scanlan house. John hated the Kennedys, whom he saw as a bunch of second-rate Scanlans with too much hair. And he hated what was happening to the Catholic church because of Pope John XXIII, not because, like his contemporaries, he thought the changes were blasphemous, but because he thought they were bad for business. “The two Johns,” he called the men he thought responsible for unnecessary change in America, although both were now dead: the boy president and the populist pope.

While all around him in Our Lady of Lourdes people slowly, painfully adapted themselves to the Mass in English, John Scanlan whispered the Latin. It was disconcerting to share a pew with him. The priest would intone “The Lord be with you,” and from John’s seat would come a sound, like a snake exhaling, the carrying sibilants of “Dominus vobiscum.” Occasionally when they were together her grandfather, a tall handsome man with yellowing white hair, would turn to Maggie and inquire, “Confiteor deo?” and Maggie would be expected to answer “omnipotenti,” or, on occasion, to finish the entire prayer. “A plus,” Monica sometimes called her, and, like everything else Monica said, the tone was pleasant, the smile ubiquitous, and the meaning mean as hell.

John Scanlan had started manufacturing communion hosts when he was twenty-one, a newlywed with two years of college, eleven younger siblings, and a mother dying of the same lung cancer that had killed her husband ten years before. For a week after he quit school John had thought about growth industries and then he had rented a pressing machine and space in a garage on a back street in the South Bronx and begun to stamp out little wafers of unleavened bread. The Jews who rented him the place thought he was crazy. Two years later he had his own factory and twenty-two employees.

He began to make holy cards, vestments, and assorted communion veils and confirmation robes, and the three sons who worked in the business knew how to market them all: buy from a Catholic. It was as simple as that. John Scanlan’s only real competitor had been a company in Illinois owned by a Methodist; the year Maggie was born it had gone out of business, only six months after its founder had gotten drunk at a convention and made a joke about Scanlan & Co., the Irish, and booze.

John Scanlan now had a plant in Manila doing machine embroidery on vestments and altar cloths, a plant in White Plains that employed 160 people, and a not-so-hidden interest in three construction companies, two garment factories, and the cement company for which Tommy worked. He was very, very rich.

He was rich enough to retire and be rich for the rest of his life, but he had no wish to. All he wanted to do was to manage the lives of his children, and to be left alone so he could become richer still. Already there were a few parishes in progressive suburbs which were simplifying their altars and the rites that took place upon them. John Scanlan predicted that by the year 2000 priests would be saying Mass in Bermuda shorts, handing out kaiser rolls at communion, and Scanlan & Co. would be bankrupt.

“Now he’ll say ‘Then, good-by easy street,’” Maggie thought, looking down at her skirt.