Object lessons (24 page)

“You’re nuts,” Debbie said. “You got me in a lot of trouble. I fell asleep and didn’t get up till two o’clock. I had to go sleep at Bridget’s house. Now I’m not allowed to go anywhere. And my mother says you and I can’t be friends anymore.”

Maggie looked over at Mrs. Malone. For a moment Debbie’s mother looked at her, and then she tilted her chin up in a way she had when she was angry, and stared past her. Maggie could not imagine why Mrs. Malone would be angry at her.

“How am I in trouble with your mom for what you did? What did you say?”

“You should have taken me home, Mag.”

“You shouldn’t have had anything to drink. We’re only thirteen. I could see right down the front of your blouse.” Maggie stared at her friend’s neck. There was a very faint purple mark, ineptly concealed with what looked like Max Factor pancake.

“Oh, grow up,” Debbie said. “What are you, my conscience? If you think you can handle everything, then do it. But don’t do it halfway. If you’re going to save somebody’s life, then save it
all
the way.”

There was a long silence. The two girls looked down at their shoes, hazy with dust.

“My mother said Richard’s father is paying for everything,” said Maggie finally, not looking up.

“He’s okay,” Debbie said. “Bridget says they’re sending him to military school. He’s going to need plastic surgery on his arm, Bridget said, and one of his fingers was burned off. That’s pretty disgusting, but at least it wasn’t his face. God, that would have been bad. It didn’t even touch his face, just his arm. And it was the arm he doesn’t use to write or throw, Bridget said. He’ll write and tell me soon. I don’t know how I’m going to see him at military school.”

Maggie said nothing, only fingered the tissue in her hand. She looked at Debbie, her hair frizzing in the heat, and knew that she would always think of her as her best friend. She looked at Mrs. Malone, who still avoided her eyes, and knew that that was over, too, and she thought that maybe it was Mrs. Malone she would miss most. She would miss having a mother she didn’t have to push away, having a mother nothing like herself, having a family with no complications. Her eyes swam with tears, until the sunlight broke into little pink particles and she saw everything as a blur. She had known her grandfather would die. She had gotten used to the idea, little by little over the summer, that he was not invincible. But she knew that she had still believed that some things lasted forever.

“’Bye Deb,” she said.

“God, you’re always so dramatic,” Debbie said. “That’s what Bridget says.”

Maggie looked away and saw that now her grandmother had the monsignor on one side of her and Mr. O’Neal on the other. Suddenly her grandmother crouched down and lifted one side of the grasscloth. “Oh, God,” Maggie heard Connie say, and the two of them moved away from the Malones and stood behind Mary Frances.

“Could you get your father, sweetheart?” said Mr. O’Neal, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

Mary Frances wheeled and brightened. “Maggie, these gentlemen are confused. Go get your uncle James and your father.” And suddenly all the boys were there, in their dark suits, looking so alike, so flushed and full of blood. For the first time Maggie saw the family resemblance, and saw it in herself, too.

“I just wanted to know on which side the baby was buried,” Mary Frances said, her voice loud enough that people began to look over. “He is under the mistaken impression that there is nobody else in the Scanlan plot.” The five men, their hands folded in front of them, turned as one to Mr. O’Neal, who wiped his forehead again.

“Perhaps one of you could show your mother to the car,” he said.

“Is there another casket there or not?” Tommy said.

Mr. O’Neal looked at Mary Frances, and then his narrow nostrils flared. “Absolutely not,” he said. “And I can assure you that I had a number of conversations with your father about these arrangements over the years and it was understood—twelve places. He and your mother. You five and your wives.”

Tommy grimaced. “What about my sister?” he said.

“The sisters make their own arrangements,” said Mr. O’Neal, as though that settled everything.

“My parents had a child who passed away at birth,” Tommy began. “A little girl.”

“My understanding was that at the time she was buried at a cemetery in the Bronx,” Mr. O’Neal said.

“And he promised to move her,” Mary Frances said, and Maggie could see that her face was beginning to fall, as though the pouchy cheeks were melting just a little. “He promised to bring her up here so that we could all be together.” Mary Frances looked imploringly at Mr. O’Neal. Then she took Tommy’s arm. He looked around at his brothers, but they were staring down at their clasped hands. Maggie heard her father say, very softly, “He didn’t do it, Ma. Maybe he forgot.”

He put his arm around Mary Frances’s shoulder. A path opened for them through the people who were left, and he guided her to a car and climbed in after her; his long arm was the last Maggie saw of him, pulling the door closed with a loud
thunk
.

“This is not my fault,” Mr. O’Neal was saying as Maggie and Connie walked to another limousine. Margaret was already inside, and in silence they drove to the big fieldstone house. There were plates of cold cuts, and Swedish meatballs in a chafing dish with a little candle underneath to keep them warm, and fried chicken and potato and macaroni salad. But Mary Frances never came downstairs. Maggie spent most of the afternoon fetching Mr. McAlevy a fresh drink and listening to him tell a long story about a policeman, a bar in Brooklyn, a colored man, and an Irish gang that seemed to have no point and certainly nothing to do with John Scanlan. She excused herself when she saw Margaret climbing the stairs with a plate of food, and followed her to the door of the girls’ room. Across the hall she could see her grandparents’ room, neat and empty, her grandfather’s gray suit laid out on the bed.

“Have you seen the stone doorstop?” Maggie asked.

“What, sweetie?” her aunt said, balancing the plate of chicken and potato salad on one hand and pushing a piece of hair under her wimple.

“Remember the doorstop? The big round ball with the flat sides that always held the door back?”

“I haven’t seen that for years, Maggie,” Margaret said impatiently. “Would you go get me a 7-Up with just a splash of Canadian Club in it and bring it here?”

“A cherry?” Maggie said.

“Not necessary,” Margaret said, opening the door and taking the food inside.

When Maggie came back, her grandmother was sitting up in bed, eating chicken and patting her face with a tissue. Somehow it was the sight of Mary Frances in the single bed, Elizabeth Ann’s bed, that finally got to Maggie, so that when she handed her the drink she began to cry, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand until Margaret handed her one of her big plain white cotton handkerchiefs.

“You were his favorite,” Mary Frances said, and as Maggie looked at her grandmother, so small and raddled-looking, lying in the small bedroom with the two Scanlan & Co. crucifixes over the two beds, she knew that their lives would never be the same again. On the table next to the bed was a copy of
Wuthering Heights
.

“It’s really good,” said Maggie, picking the book up and sniffling. “There’s some boring stuff at the beginning and end but the main story is great.”

“As good as
Jane Eyre?”
Margaret said.

“Better.”

“What?” said Mary Frances querulously, eyeing them over the edge of her glass.

“Maggie was asking about the doorstop for some reason,” Margaret said loudly, as though her mother was deaf.

“The what?”

“That big stone doorstop we used to have downstairs.”

Mary Frances beamed. “You may have it, dear,” she said to Maggie.

“But where is it, Mother?” Margaret said.

Mary Frances thought for a moment. “It’s in the cabinet to the left of the stove, on the bottom shelf near the back. I put it there last year after your grandfather threatened to throw it out the window. He’d stubbed his toe on it in the dark.” Mary Frances patted her face with the tissue again. “I know he’d want you to have it, dear,” Mary Frances added.

“Although maybe some time you’ll explain to me why you want it,” Margaret added, eating potato salad from her mother’s plate.

Maggie thought for a moment. “I think it’s displacement,” she said.

Her aunt Margaret narrowed her eyes, and Maggie could tell that she was trying to decide whether Maggie was being smart or not. Margaret leaned back on the bed, the skirt of her habit hiked up to her knees, her black legs crossed at the ankle. “This family has a future,” she said finally.

“What?” asked Mary Frances.

“Nothing, Mother,” Margaret said, and she winked at Maggie.

22

I
T WAS
C
ONNIE, OF ALL PEOPLE, WHO
had taken her mother-in-law to the grave of her daughter, back in one corner of the cemetery where Connie had grown up. Connie had called Angelo Mazza the morning after the funeral, and then she had called Mary Frances, and picked her up in Tommy’s station wagon. Mary Frances slid into the passenger seat, clutching her black handbag as though this excursion was the most natural thing in the world. There was no conversation. Mary Frances took out her rosary and said it soundlessly, the silence punctuated by the clicks of her crystal beads on their silver chain. When they drove through the gates to Angelo’s little house she let them slither back into the blue velvet pouch in which she kept them.

“This place is very pleasant, Concetta,” Mary Frances said as she emerged from the car.

Connie actually thought the flowers looked tired at this time of year, a little florid in their color, like a woman wearing too much makeup to disguise her age. The rose of Sharon and the hollyhocks were ragged, and the daisies had gotten leggy and fell over in untidy clumps. Most of the day lilies were gone, and the handsomest parts of the cemetery were those that had turned a deep green, in a final burst of good health before the early frosts defoliated them. As though he had been thinking the same thing, Angelo emerged from his house carrying a small pair of clippers. He looked neat and elegant in his gray pants and white shirt.

Connie felt as tired as she’d ever been in her life. Part of it was the pregnancy, and part was the heat, and part were the events of the last few days. That morning two police officers had arrived at the front door. They were young, boys really, ten years younger than she was, and they wanted to talk to Maggie.

“I understood that the builders would not be pressing any charges, that they had agreed to receive restitution from the family of the boy responsible,” Connie said.

“We have to do our own investigation, ma’am,” one of the officers said quietly, and Connie flinched at that last word, and felt very old. She was glad Tommy had gone over to Scanlan & Co. for the day. She called Maggie down from her bedroom. Maggie was barefoot, her hair wet from the shower, and she froze at the bottom of the stairs as she saw the blue uniforms.

“We’re particularly interested in the last fire,” the officer said.

They sat on the couch and Maggie sat on the floor cross-legged, her shoulders slumped, her arms limp. “Why are you talking to me?” she said.

Connie started to speak, but before she could the officer, flipping through a spiral notebook, answered, “We talked to a Miss Hearn, who said she had no association with the fires. She sent us to a Miss Malone, who said the same. She sent us to you.”

Connie could see Maggie only in profile. She had always known that the day would come when her daughter’s transformation would be complete, when she would not only be separate but equal, when she would become adult. Connie knew that this could take a long time; she felt that for herself it had happened just the other day, in the parking lot at the high school and in John Scanlan’s hospital room. She had expected it to happen when Maggie got her first period, developed breasts, fell in love. But it was happening here, now, horribly. There was a tightness around the square jaw, a hard glint in the eye, that was the look of a woman. It was like that just for a moment, and then it was replaced by the soft vulnerable look of a child who has been mistreated. Maggie’s mouth was open, but nothing came out. Then Connie had said, “My daughter was here with me that night. She couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

The older of the two cops had looked at her for a long time. Connie was quite sure that they’d heard such a story from a mother a hundred times before. Finally he said, “We’re happy to know that, ma’am,” as he slapped his notebook shut and rose.

On the ride with Mary Frances to the cemetery, Connie thought of that moment, and of the moment when she saw Maggie’s face change and watched the end of innocence right before her eyes. She still did not know how much of it was knowing that Debbie had betrayed her, and how much was what Maggie had seen the night of the fire, the things she had meant when she had said, her eyes blazing, “You’ve done worse than I have tonight.” She did not know whether her daughter had seen Joey Martinelli kissing her in the car, trying to undress her in the construction trailer, or arguing with her when Connie finally had pulled away, empowered by knowledge and not this time by nausea.

Connie wondered, too, what Joey had seen in her own face when she handed him the key to the trailer, what had made him finally crumble and grow still after hours of argument. She knew what she had seen in his: it was that same glaze her daughter had had beneath the watchful eyes of the police, the awareness of the world the way it truly was.

“Life is a terrible thing,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Yes, dear,” said Mary Frances. “But then, what else is there?” And she slid out of the car as Angelo Mazza came forward to greet her.

Connie realized it was only the third time her mother-in-law and her father had met. Mary Frances seemed to have regained some of her aristocratic manner now that her husband’s illness was over, but it was a little weary and worn, like something familiar she had fallen back on purely from fatigue.

“Good morning,” Mary Frances said to Angelo quietly. “This is very kind.”

Angelo gave a slight bow and then held out his arm. “Shouldn’t we drive, Pop?” Connie said, but Mary Frances said, “I would rather walk.”

In silence, under a lowered, pale gray sky, the thick air smelling of rain, they trod the asphalt, springy beneath their feet, until they came to a freshly cleared spot by the wall. Connie could see that her father had cut back the wisteria, sinuous and predatory here in the old section, and that some years ago he had planted violets around this stone, their heart-shaped leaves large and plentiful now, the little facelike flowers gone this late in the season. A small square headstone bore only the word SCANLAN, with the disembodied head and wings of a cherub above it. Time’s grime, the decades of snow and rain, summer and winter, had left black rubbed deep into the design and the letters. Mary Frances stood with her head down, still holding on to Angelo Mazza’s arm.

“I have kept it very good,” he said quietly. “Very nice. In the springtime it is always purple, first with the wisteria, then the violets. Very sweet.”

“Yes,” Mary Frances said. “Thank you.”

Connie was sure that there was something strange about this, about the fact that Tommy’s sister had been in her own backyard, as it were, even before she first set eyes on Tommy. But it seemed no stranger than anything else she could think of, no stranger than the fact that two people sometimes cleaved together their whole lives long because of something they’d done in the back seat of a car, no stranger than the fact that two people could cleave together their whole lives long, while one thought she’d been made a promise and another that the promise didn’t matter much. Or that people could have hard feelings for so long and have them evaporate overnight. Connie put a hand on her mother-in-law’s shoulder. “You can have her moved as soon as you want,” she said.

“No,” Mary Frances said. “This is fine. I just wanted to know where to come. It would be a shame to disturb this.”

“Maybe that’s what John thought,” Connie said.

“No,” said Mary Frances sadly, slipping her rosary beads out of her bag. “He just couldn’t be bothered. He thought it was a whim. God rest him,” she added reflexively.

Connie stepped away from the corner, to give her mother-in-law privacy, and she and her father walked out to the road. Damien was back by the rosebushes, doing the fall fertilization. He had waved to her across the expanse of bushes and headstones, but he had not gotten up from his work. Once she saw his lips move and thought he was talking to a bug.

There were no funerals today, although somewhere across the way Connie could see the garish display of color upon one mound that showed where a grave had been recently filled and all the funeral baskets and wreaths laid atop it. The gladiolus had always repelled her just as they had her father, but she minded them less because they were dead than that they had always been such a symbol of death itself. She remembered shuddering at her wedding when she saw those frilly spears, so unnaturally tall, standing on the altar. Between two rows of headstones she saw Leonard Fogarty running the hand mower, the skin of his flat head pale white beneath the stubble of his brush cut. He would be pleased when he turned and saw her, would come running over with his awkward gait, smiling all over his face, calling “Hi Hi Hi.” She remembered him on her wedding day, too, and the sound he had made, like a calling bird:
oooooooh
, as she came out of the house in her pale cream dress, the color of eggnog.

The cemetery was a beautiful place, although she had had enough of the accoutrements of death during the past week to last her a lifetime. It shamed her to know that she was thinking of a new life as well; not the one inside her, but the one around her. They all were. Even Mr. O’Neal had been happy at John Scanlan’s wake, although he had done his best to hide it. The family had taken the heaviest, most expensive bronze casket he had for what he knew would be the largest funeral he would handle all year. The Scanlan family had printed up a thousand holy cards in anticipation of the crowd. When all of the nuns from Margaret’s convent entered at once, Mark had turned to Tommy and whispered, “Call and get more cards.”

“Get the sewing machines converted quick for blouses and table runners,” Tommy whispered back, and Connie, overhearing, had had to stifle a laugh. Tommy turned and grinned at her, and then, very softly, he ran his hand over the down of her upper arm. She had shivered and then slowly smiled.

For part of the evening she had found herself alone in one corner with her sister-in-law Gail, who had never become accustomed to the lively air of Catholic funerary rites, particularly the position of the departed at the front of the room like a table centerpiece. Nevertheless she had tried to join in. “He looks good, doesn’t he?” Gail had said to Connie.

“He looks dead, Gail.”

“You two are certainly taking this hard,” Gail said. “Tommy has seemed so moody. It wasn’t like him to snap at Mother the way he did.”

Connie sighed. “He loved his father,” she said, thinking of how little nuance the sentence contained.

“Yes,” said Gail piously, adjusting the lapels of her black suit. She looked down at Connie’s belly, draped in black wool. “Aren’t you hot?”

“It’s the only black maternity dress I have,” Connie said. “Tomorrow I’ll have to wear a blue one.”

Gail looked down at her hands in her lap and twisted her wedding ring. “We’re going to adopt a baby,” she said.

“That’s wonderful, Gail,” said Connie, feeling a surge of pity for her sister-in-law, her hair so carefully barretted back, her fingers turning, turning her ring. “That’s great. You’ll love it. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world, being a mother.” She wondered what it was about this situation that made her say so many things that sounded right but felt suspect. She was afraid that if she stayed here much longer, among the liverish pink and pale green brocades, she would find herself, like the head of the carpenters union now standing behind her, talking of what a good man John Scanlan was, and how much he loved his sons.

“We couldn’t have done it while he was alive,” Gail said, her voice still lowered as though she was afraid her father-in-law would hear. It was a testimonial to John Scanlan’s vivid personality that even Connie, who had no illusions about death, had looked up several times during the evening and momentarily expected him to leap from his prone position and throttle someone who had done him dirty over the years.

“How do you feel about all this?” Gail said suddenly, in what sounded like an accusatory tone.

“Do you mean am I glad he’s dead?” Connie asked, and without waiting for an answer she went on, “Not really. I thought I would be, but I think it will probably upset things more than it will help them. And it will be hard to be happy at the wedding on Saturday. But I’m glad for you about the baby.”

“Mark can do what he wants,” Gail said. “I can do what I want. So can you.”

Connie was silent for a minute. She could see John Scanlan’s nose, beaklike and fierce, and then two more visitors knelt in front of the casket and blocked her view.

“No one can do what they want,” she said, thinking of the look on Joey Martinelli’s face when she had given him back the key to the construction trailer.

“I guess I can understand if you’re sad,” Gail went on as though she hadn’t heard. “The way he talked about you—how Tommy was the only one to marry a girl with looks, how the rest of the grandchildren, even Monica, were washed-out from too much Irish inbreeding and your children were the only ones who were halfway decent-looking or had half a brain. If I had had to hear one more word about what great legs you had, I would have screamed.”