Object lessons (9 page)

“He was as handsome as Francis X. Bushman—”

“Who’s Francis X. Bushmer?” said Teresa, who had a mind, John Scanlan always said, “like a sieve.”

“Shut up,” said Maggie. “An actor. Pay attention.”

“He was as handsome as Francis X. Bushman,” Mary Frances said, “with beautiful wavy hair and the prettiest teeth. I was all right when he got me up on the beach, only out of breath and a little scared, but Ruthie was screaming like a banshee and finally I had to tell her to be quiet so he could tell me his name. Roderick. Can you beat that? Roderick. Like a duke, I said to Ruthie. And right there on the beach he said, ‘May I take you to dinner tonight?’ And me still trying to catch my breath, so I just nodded. ‘May I take you?’ Like a duke, I said to Ruthie.”

“But you didn’t go,” said Maggie.

“I didn’t go, no,” said Mary Frances with a slight clicking noise, her mouth dry from the whiskey sours. “That afternoon I met your grandfather. And that was that.”

Maggie waited.

“He swept me off my feet,” Mary Frances said with a sigh.

It suddenly seemed very quiet and the noise of the ocean seemed loud. “I have to go to the bathroom,” said one of the twins softly, as though she was a toddler who needed to be taken and helped. “Well, go then, dear, don’t discuss it,” Mary Frances said impatiently.

“Grandmom, can I go for a walk on the beach?” Maggie asked, as her cousin slipped away.

“In your stockings?”

“I didn’t wear them tonight.”

“I wish I’d known that. I would have sent you back upstairs. Well, go ahead then.”

Maggie handed Teresa her white patent pumps and ran down the stairs. The road that separated the guesthouse from the beach was empty and the sand felt surprisingly cold. The night was so black that Maggie knew she had reached the water’s edge only when she felt the sea run over her feet. When she looked for the moon she realized that it must be hidden behind the clouds, and she wondered if it would rain, and what they would all do if it did, stuck together at the beach on a rainy day. To one side she could hear an odd whirring sound, and dimly in the dark she made out the silhouette of someone surf-casting. She began to walk in the opposite direction.

She felt at home walking on the beach. The lonely, empty feeling in her stomach, which seemed out of place in everyday life—at the pool, playing softball, at school, with her brothers—felt suitable at the beach. She walked for what seemed like a long time, and then turned at one of the stone jetties and walked back again, looking for the lights of the guesthouse beyond the dunes. She saw them from some distance away and began to climb to the middle of the beach.

She was perhaps a block away from the house when she almost stepped on a half-naked couple sprawled on a blanket. She drew back and then squinted in the darkness, able to make out the curve of the boy’s bare buttocks and the ridiculous welter of clothes gathered around his ankles. “Oh my god,” he kept repeating, moving up and down. “Oh my god.” Beneath him a girl seemed to be staring blankly at the sky overhead, the whites of her eyes visible even in the darkness. Maggie realized that the girl was staring at her, and that it was her cousin Monica, looking expressionless, grim, her fingernails sparkling on the boy’s shoulder as the moon momentarily emerged from the clouds. “Oh my God,” he said again, and Maggie drew back and ran across the sand to the break in the dunes.

She kept on running across the street, up onto the porch of the guesthouse; then she sat there hugging her knees for a few minutes before she went upstairs to the room she and Monica shared. One of the twin beds was lumpy with what Maggie knew would be an artful arrangement of pillows. She pulled out her own pillow and turned on her side, feigning sleep when she heard footfalls an hour later. She spent all night wondering what to do, but the matter was settled for her the next morning, as she and Monica walked to the beach together several steps behind their grandmother. Monica gave her a level look, not unlike the one she had given her the night before on the beach, and said quietly, “Who’d believe you? Grandpop says you have an overactive imagination.” Then she walked ahead, her carefully oiled calves shining in the sun, talking to Mary Frances.

Maggie lagged behind, and so it was she that Mrs. Polisky, the owner of the guesthouse, reached first as she came trotting up behind them, her fat face red. “Tell your grandmother you’ve got to come into the house,” she gasped. “You’ve got to go home. Your grandfather’s had an accident.”

9

J
OHN SCANLAN LAY IN THE HOSPITAL
bed, the left side of his face looking as though it was melting into his shoulder, a thick line of saliva edging his jawline. “Wipe his mouth,” Mark said to one of the nurses, but as soon as she had done so the spittle crept down again.

Except for the fact that his family stood behind a sheet of glass, kept out of the intensive care unit by regulations that even now her uncle James was appealing, Maggie thought that it looked like one of the deathbed scenes of the British royal family in her book about Queen Victoria. Her grandfather did not look dead; he looked ruined, as though he would have to be renovated from top to bottom to regain any semblance of his former self. Mary Frances was sitting beside his bed, stroking his hand and clutching the cord to the intravenous feed.

“Will he die?” Maggie asked, the only one of the grandchildren left there, the twins having been sent home by cab, Teresa sent to the cafeteria in hysterics, and Monica left in the waiting room with some of the aunts, reading an old copy of
Vogue
.

“What kind of question is that?” Mark asked. “Jesus. Of course not.” Maggie noticed that a tube running from underneath the covers down the side of the bed was bright yellow, and she began to feel sick. She had been in a hospital only twice before, once for stitches in her knee, once to visit her mother when Joseph was born, her father sneaking her in past the nurses’ stations, but it had not been like this. Even the smell was different; there was still the odor of disinfectant, but it was overlaid with that of rubber and dirty clothes. She went outside into the waiting area, where her father was talking on the pay phone.

“Did you find her?” Monica was asking him.

“Mind your own business,” Tommy Scanlan said, dropping in another coin.

“Maggie, honey, do you have any idea where your mother could be?” Aunt Cass asked.

“At home.”

“No, she’s not.”

“At Celeste’s?”

“Your brothers are there, thank God. But Celeste doesn’t know where your mother went.”

Tommy slammed down the pay phone and said, “She can’t even drive, for Christ’s sake. She hates the train. Where is she?”

“Did you call Grandpop?” asked Maggie, who thought it was probably a bad time to mention that her mother might be able to drive after all.

“He said he’d find her. How’s he going to find her? The closest Angelo Mazza’s ever come to driving is riding shotgun in the flower car at a funeral.”

“Perhaps she’s visiting a friend in the neighborhood,” Aunt Cass said.

“She doesn’t have any friends,” Tommy said, and Maggie flinched. “She has Celeste,” she said quietly.

Maggie went back inside and stared through the glass partition. Looking at her grandfather was like looking at the babies in the nursery. Occasionally she would see her grandmother’s mouth moving, but no sound traveled through the thick glass, which was crisscrossed with narrow silver ribbons of wire.

Her aunt Margaret was fingering the big black rosary beads that always hung around her waist, although whether it was a prayerful gesture or a nervous one Maggie could not tell. Maggie leaned up against her, something she would not have done with any other nun, or with any of her other aunts for that matter. “Pumpkin, pumpkin,” said Margaret, squeezing her around the waist. “Life is tough, isn’t it? You know what someone once said? ‘Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.’” Margaret squeezed her again and Maggie felt the tears fill her eyes, coaxed out by her aunt’s warm hand.

“I don’t know how anyone could ever think this was a comedy,” Maggie said.

Her aunt pulled two butterscotch drops from one of her seemingly bottomless nun’s pockets, handed one to Maggie, and sucked on the other herself. Maggie thought her aunt was being companionable, but she also knew from experience that in times of stress Aunt Margaret relied heavily on sweets. She had once told Maggie that she sucked lemon drops whenever she had to teach arithmetic, which was her weakest subject.

Maggie could hear her father out in the waiting room, swearing. “For a religious family, we sure take the Lord’s name in vain a lot,” her aunt said.

“Do you think Grandpop’s going to die?”

“It doesn’t look good, does it, sweetie? I don’t know, lots of people have strokes and get better. Lots of them don’t die. But they’re paralyzed, or they can’t talk, or something like that.”

“Grandpop would really hate that,” Maggie said, and she began to feel the pressure behind her nose and eyes that meant she might start to cry.

“I know,” said her aunt, turning the big wooden crucifix at the end of her rosary over and over in her hands.

“Do you think that crucifix is too large?” Mark suddenly asked his sister.

“What?”

“The crucifix. Is it too large? We’re thinking of scaling it down. I think it’s too large. I’d even like to remove the Christ figure and keep a simple wooden cross, which seems more in keeping with Vatican II to me. But Dad says he thinks the nuns wouldn’t stand for it. We could cut a good bit off the manufacturing cost of each one if we made the cross half again as big.”

“Mark, are we actually having this conversation, here, at this moment?” said his sister, staring at him with her big blue Irish eyes, nearly the same navy as a parochial school uniform. She was wearing what Maggie’s father always called her “For Chrissake, boys” look, and Maggie thought she looked very young and pretty.

Her uncle Mark was always saying it was such a shame that Margaret had joined the convent. Once Maggie had asked, very seriously, when she was in one of her religious phases, how her aunt had known that she had had the call from God. “That’s a complicated question, sweetheart,” her aunt had answered. But Maggie had heard her father say that the call from God was a lot of nonsense, and that when he had asked Margaret why she was ruining her life, his sister had answered a little sadly, “It’s quiet, and they’ll send me to college.”

“So it was your father’s fault?” Connie had said, and Tommy had sighed and said, “Yes, Concetta. The flood. The plagues of Egypt. The Second World War. My sister taking the veil. John Scanlan caused them all.”

Maggie remembered that she had not been quite sure whether her father was teasing or not.

The door to the hospital room opened and Uncle James came in, wearing his white coat. “They won’t let anyone but Mother and I inside,” he said, sounding testy. “The director said he didn’t care if our name was Kennedy.”

“Don’t let Daddy hear that,” Margaret said. “He’d have another stroke.”

“I don’t find that funny, Sister,” said James, who had called Margaret “Sister” even before she entered the convent. “This is serious.”

The door opened again and Connie slipped in. She was wearing shorts and sneakers, and she seemed out of breath. The fluorescent lights overhead turned her the color of skim milk, blue and sickly; looking around, Maggie realized they all looked that way, except for Uncle Mark, who cultivated a tan while playing golf and had only paled to a light coffee color. “Hi, Con,” said Margaret, who liked her sister-in-law.

“Oh, God,” said Connie, who had just caught sight of the figure behind the glass.

“Where have you been? Your husband has been worried sick,” said Uncle James, putting his hands on his narrow hips.

“Is he going to be all right?” Connie asked, pressed up against the glass, and for just a moment Maggie thought she was asking about Tommy. Mary Frances caught a glimpse of Connie and waved weakly. Maggie realized that her grandmother, who had made good posture her life’s work, was slumping in the straight chair. That, combined with the pathetic little whiffle of her fingers at the daughter-in-law she seemed to like least, and the helplessness of John Scanlan in the bed beside her, made it seem as though Mary Frances had suddenly been rendered old and powerless too.

Maggie had spent the ride home from the beach staring at Monica in the seat in front of her, looking for something, anything—a bruise, a shadow beneath her wide, amber-colored eyes, a look on her face—to testify to what she had seen on the beach the night before. Now she began to wonder if her uneventful life had suddenly taken a turn for the worse and would become one impossible scene after another, leaving her, as she was today, so tired she could hardly stand.

“It happened overnight,” Margaret said to Connie. “He called James but James didn’t realize who it was.”

“I thought it was a crank call,” said James. “All I could hear was breathing and moaning.”

“Oh God,” Connie said.

Tommy came in behind his wife, and clutched her shoulders as though he would lift her off the ground. He spun her around. “Where the hell have you been?” he said, his eyes wild. “Where? Everyone was here except for you. You disappeared off the face of the earth.” He was speaking so loudly that Mary Frances turned toward them. “He could have died. Where the hell were you?”

“Tom,” Connie said, trying to wriggle out from under his hands.

“Where
were
you? I got scared.”

“Stop it.”

“Tell me.”

“I went for a walk.”

“A
walk?
Who walks in our neighborhood? Who? Even people with dogs don’t walk.”

“I wanted to be by myself.”

“You’ve been by yourself your whole life. Now suddenly you like being by yourself? Then be by yourself.” He let go of her and she stumbled backward, falling against Maggie. Connie looked down at her daughter, as though she was seeing her for the first time. “You’re back,” she said, and Maggie began to cry.

“Stop it, Tom,” Margaret said, stooping to cradle Maggie in her black gabardine arms.

“She shouldn’t be in here,” said Connie, and she took Maggie’s hand and moved away from her husband, turning toward the door. “This is no place for children.”

“Where else should she be?” Tommy said. “Her grandfather’s dying.”

The tears had started to run down Maggie’s face, soaking the neck of her cotton shirt. She looked through the glass again and saw that what her father said was true. Mary Frances was staring at all of them, her eyes enormous, but Maggie couldn’t tell whether it was because of the dumb show of anger and grief she could see before her, or because of some dumb show of her own playing itself out inside her head.

“Send Maggie out to sit with Monica,” Uncle James said.

“No,” Maggie said. “I want to stay here.”

Connie dropped her daughter’s hand and sat down heavily in a straight chair.

“Ah, to hell with it,” Tommy said, all the heat and anger gone from his voice, and he leaned his head against the glass and began to cry. Maggie could see Mary Frances’s mouth behind the glass forming the word “Tom” over and over again, but there was no sound except that of Tommy sobbing. Finally Connie went over to him and put her hand gently on his arm, his arm with its pale down and tiny freckles.

“Go home, Concetta,” he said in a small voice, and then he moved away.