Object lessons (13 page)

“Stop,” said Tom again.

“Do me a favor,” John Scanlan said suddenly, his eyes narrow, shrewd as a predatory bird’s. “Help us out in the business or your brother will be pushing ladies’ lingerie with the sheenies down on 38th Street. I don’t think he knows his ass from his elbow.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tommy said.

“How’s the building going, out by you?”

“They’re working fast.”

“The men are coming this week to clean out your new house. Your mother has them waxing the floors and washing down the walls.”

Tommy squared his shoulders, and all the sympathy he had felt evaporated, as though the blood was draining from his body. He was cold with the emptiness of his antagonism and his fear, and he knew how scared he was when he began to wonder if his father’s despair and weakness had all been a ploy to lead to this moment.

“We don’t want the house,” he said. “We’re fine where we are. Really. Give it to Joe. He and Annette will be thrilled.”

John Scanlan closed his eyes, and Tommy wondered if he had drifted off to sleep. Then slowly the heavy lids came up, and Tommy saw that his father’s eyes were like blue bullets, aimed straight to the heart.

“No mortgage payments,” he said.

“I can handle my mortgage payments,” Tommy said.

“Not without a job you can’t,” John Scanlan said, and Tommy heard in his voice the word “Checkmate.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it out, buddy boy. I’ve done my part. I gave you a good job at that concrete company, and I’ll give you a better one over to the factory, and I bought you and your wife a house fit for a king and queen. I’ve done my part. It’s time you did yours.”

“Why are you doing this? I’m a grown man. I run my own life.”

John Scanlan let out a great snort, and then began to cough, a cough so long and hacking that Tommy thought he would never catch his breath. For a minute Tommy thought he’d like to just let him choke to death, and then he poured his father a glass of water and handed it to him. Finally John was quiet again, his chest heaving. The two men stared at each other. Tommy knew that his father was going to die, and he knew that John Scanlan had set himself a task before he did so and that that task was to see that the last of the Scanlan boys was exactly where he wanted him to be. He knew, too, that the family would gather round, waiting, waiting, for Tommy to do this one small thing for a dying man, and that if he did it, that which made him who he was would be lost forever, and he would become what he had so often been called: one of the Scanlan boys. One of the old man’s sons. A fight to the finish, they called it in cowboy movies, and so it was, and Tommy knew he would lose. Suddenly John Scanlan smiled at him, and Tommy knew that they had both been thinking the same thing.

“This won’t work,” Tommy said.

“You want to bet?” John said. “I’ll bet you a baby grand piano for that new living room.”

Tommy stood up. He could hear his mother outside, talking to the nurse. “Why?” he said again.

“I owe it to you, son,” John said. “You’d only make a mess of it yourself.”

“No.”

“Tom,” the old man said when Tommy was at the door, “your wife’s expecting again, James said.”

Tommy nodded.

“Good,” said John Scanlan. “I’m happy to hear that.”

There was a long silence. Tommy could hear his father’s breathing, a rumbling trapped inside the sunken chest. His father’s eyes narrowed, and the breathing become more labored. “This one last thing,” the old man said, his hand over his heart.

“Jesus,” Tommy said, “you’re really doing it. Pat O’Brien and the deathbed scene. The old Irish dad and his last request.”

“I’m more alive than you are, sonny boy,” John Scanlan said.

“Go to hell.”

“Listen, Tommy. Let me let you in on a secret. There is no hell. There’s no heaven, either. There’s only this. You have to make the best of it. I’m going to make the best of it for you. You and your pretty wife.”

“No.”

“Yes,” John Scanlan said. “Now send your mother in. And give your brother a hand before he drives the whole kit and caboodle into the goddamn ground.”

12

C
ONNIE LAY BACK AGAINST THE SEAT OF
her brother-in-law Mark’s new car and thought that it smelled like the inside of an expensive purse. It looked like the inside of a purse, too, come to think of it, or at least like the inside of Mark’s wife’s purse. Connie remembered one evening going into Gail’s black clutch bag to get some aspirin and discovering that aside from a wallet that looked brand new, a set of keys, a lipstick, and a comb, there was nothing inside, not even a stray bobby pin. Just for a moment it had crossed her mind that the reason Gail was unable to have children was because she didn’t leave any crumbs, or pennies, or used tissues floating around in the bottom of her purse. She knew it was a mean thought, and reflexively, the way her aunt Rose had taught her to do when she was small, she had made the sign of the cross.

Gail was driving her home from the party because Connie felt sick. She felt sick all the time now. It was a struggle to breathe in the heavy hot July air, the cannonball of her womb lodged just below her ribs, crowding her lungs. She stared out the window, knowing she must represent some kind of reproach to her childless sister-in-law.

The road was edged with black-eyed Susans; Connie could remember she and her father digging them up not far from here one long-ago Sunday. It had been the summer she was twelve, when Anna Mazza was spending most of her time in Brooklyn. The aunt who had taken Anna in when she came to America was old and sick, her belly grown big and blue from cancer. Connie had been left alone with her father, working with him in the garden for the first time. It had begun with a hollyhock covered in black bugs, its tall stem dirty and withered. It had ended when her mother came home, scowling her disapproval at the grass stains on Connie’s clothes. Or perhaps it had been when Celeste came back from the shore, walking up the drive and through the gates, her swelling behind encased in a kind of playsuit in a shiny blue-and-red synthetic print of cowboys and Indians. “Movie star,” Connie had said a little disdainfully, kneeling in front of the tomatoes. “Who are you, Lana Turner?”

“Rita Hayworth,” said Celeste, who actually did resemble Rita Hayworth, and then she gave her uncle Angelo a big kiss. He drew back as though she had bitten him on the nose, and he looked her full figure up and down with an expression of shock and horror. And then he turned and stared at his daughter and that expression was still there, the kind of look Connie imagined God must have given Eve in the Garden of Eden.

“You all dirty,” was all he said.

It was many years later that she had realized that that was the day her father discovered she was female. She had never felt close to him again, and she was convinced that he had never felt close to her.

She thought she saw a shadow of that same look pass over his face when he saw her in her wedding dress, coming down the stairs with her bouquet in one hand. She remembered what she had thought at the time: he’s just a man, an ordinary man.

She had thought that, too, when she first saw John Scanlan in the hospital, a vulnerable, ordinary, shrunken man surrounded by white cotton. She even sometimes thought it of Tommy, when she lay beside him at night, although it did not make her angry at him the way it did with his father, and her own. It only awakened her sympathy. When her father had first given her that look, it had made her feel ashamed; now she merely thought that men were somehow afraid of the things they loved best, that they were the real children of the world, without bringing with them any of the joys you had with children, at least for a time.

She knew the contours of her bedroom in the dark as well as she knew anything; the shadow of the two-pronged light fixture like the letter W on the ceiling, the pale-yellow light through the drape of the curtains from the streetlight across the lawn, the odd blotches, like old faces, made by the cabbage roses on the wallpaper, the sliding shadows of the six-paned windows as a car came up and around the street, its engine wheezing in the still night air. Against the wall was a composite picture of her three oldest children: Maggie holding Terence holding Damien, ages seven, six, and one, and then individual portraits of each, the baby a little spastic propped on a platform, the other two wearing fixed, forced smiles. Between the first two and the next two she had had two miscarriages, surges of odd clots that had made her think she was being punished for not loving her children enough, for not believing they were what she had always thought they would be to her. The pregnancies were always difficult, too, kneeling on the bathroom floor, staring into the water in the toilet bowl. The first time she had thought she was dying, or would have a retarded child, a baby with no fingers, or seven fingers, or a mongoloid like Leonard Fogarty. “Listen, kid,” Celeste had said, “everybody throws up when they’re in the family way. That’s how you know you are.” Like almost everything her cousin said, it sounded improbable; like almost everything she said, it turned out to be right.

Connie had never had a pregnancy test. One night soon after Maggie was born she had eaten a bad clam at a Coney Island clam bar and had spent the next week wondering how they would afford another baby. It had seemed sort of ridiculous until two months later, when she was sick again and it turned out that she was pregnant with Terence.

Her sisters-in-law were never ill when they were pregnant. Joe’s wife, Annette, had played tennis up until the week before she had the twins, although everyone had made such a fuss about it that Connie was more amazed by her ability to withstand the criticism than to rush the net. James’s wife had admitted to “a little gas,” but quietly and with a guilty manner, as though she thought it might be seen as some reflection on her husband’s professional skill.

This afternoon Connie had been at a card party with all of them, at one of the boys’ schools just north of Kenwood, a big Gothic building with a Latin inscription over the double doors, and they had all exchanged glances when she had leapt up to find the one women’s bathroom in the whole cavernous place. “She really has a hard time, doesn’t she?” Jack’s wife, Maureen, had said, with an air of assumed sympathy, and they all nodded and thought to themselves: God, the fuss.

But their eyes all seemed to meet in the vicinity of Gail’s long, faintly equine face. Then they looked at the cards in their hands, which they busily rearranged. “She certainly does,” Gail said, looking around. She often felt that she was unfairly lumped with Connie, that because she had been born Protestant and converted to marry Mark she too was considered an outsider. She made every attempt to show that this was not the case.

“Are you all right?” Annette had asked when Connie came back to the table, her face newly powdered, fresh lipstick dark against the white. She had not been able to find the right bathroom, and had thrown up in a stainless steel sink in the chemistry lab.

“Fine. I’m used to it.”

“What about some tea with milk?” Cass had said.

“Nothing. I think I’d better go.”

The women had looked around at one another. One of them would have to drive Connie home, and the petits fours had not even come around yet, nor the door prize been announced. The prize was a black cashmere sweater with a dyed mink collar, and everyone had exclaimed over it except for Mrs. O’Neal, who said she already had one, and Mrs. Malone, who said she’d give it away if she got it. “You could give it to Helen,” someone said. “It’s just the color of her hair.” Everyone was quiet for a moment. “Helen’s lost her mind,” Mrs. Malone said drily, “but I haven’t.”

Finally Connie said, “Gail, could you give me a lift?”

“Of course,” her sister-in-law said, and the others had leaned back and looked at their cards as the two women gathered up their pocketbooks and their white summer gloves. “Tommy looks tired these days,” Cass said, as she watched them walk away and they began to play cards again.

“Tommy looks tired these days,” said Gail as they drove along in her black sedan, Connie thinking to herself that Gail really did not know how to negotiate a corner properly.

“He
is
tired,” Connie said. “He works hard all day and he goes to the hospital a lot in the evening.”

“How does he think Dad looks?” Gail asked.

“Like hell.” There was silence for several blocks, then Connie said. “Tell Mark to get John to leave him alone. He’s driving him nuts with all this about the house and the company. Tom feels bad enough about his father. It’s not fair to be holding him up on this now.”

Gail touched her barrettes and smoothed back her hair. She had never heard Connie say so much before. “I think Tommy should talk to Mark about it. I don’t get involved in his business.”

“Oh bullshit, Gail,” Connie said, plucking at the fingers of her gloves. She realized it was the first time she had ever said the word out loud, and she liked the feel of it in her mouth, the sound of it, like a powerful and disdainful sneeze. “Everybody’s business is everybody else’s business in this family. Nobody’s made a decision on their own in all the years I’ve been around.”

“That may be how you feel—”

“Who picked out your house, Gail?”

Her sister-in-law’s narrow lips tightened. “I did.”

“John Scanlan did. He heard it was for sale the day after the old man who lived in it died and Mark bought it that afternoon. So don’t tell me about keeping your business private. If you hadn’t bought it, he would have tried to get Tommy to buy it. If not Tommy, Joe. Margaret gets passed over because of the convent. Pull over.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pull over,” Connie said, “or I’m going to throw up on your upholstery.”

When she was finished and they had pulled away from the curb, they were both silent again. Finally Connie reached out tentatively and touched her sister-in-law’s arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want Tommy to worry. He worries all the time.”

“He has to take some responsibility for the family, Connie,” Gail said primly.

“Why? Why does he have to? They’re all adults. He takes enough responsibility in his heart.”

They turned onto Park Street and the trees arched over them, a tunnel lined with brick and stucco façades, closed doors with impenetrable screens. From somewhere they could hear children yelling, and the sound of bulldozers. As they pulled into the driveway, the windows of the car a blur of reflected sunlight and tree branches, Connie thought she saw Terence sitting on the steps of the house, his big shaggy head hanging heavy between his knees. But as he looked up she realized it was Joey Martinelli, and she swung open the car door fast, feeling for the ground with her patent-leather high heels, still a little faint. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he called, not moving.

“Thanks for the ride,” Connie said.

“Is that—?” said Gail, and stopped.

“Is that who, Gail?”

“Mark said that you were—friendly with one of the—workers at the construction sight.” Gail got the words out as though she was speaking English as a second language, and Connie smiled.

“Now, I managed to figure out that
workers
meant greasy dagos but I’m not quite sure about
friendly
. Does friendly mean I talk to him in the kitchen when he comes over for a drink of water, or does friendly mean I’m meeting him in my slip behind the bulldozers?”

Gail inhaled audibly. “I don’t know why you have to be like this,” she said. “No one means anything by what they say and yet you take everything as an insult. Any other woman would be thrilled to have her in-laws buy her a big house. It’s much bigger than any of the rest of us have, but I don’t begrudge it, with all these children. But to have a family that takes an interest, and then to be so critical—I just don’t understand it. At the smallest thing you take offense, you assume that somehow you are being insulted, you …”

“What does my illicit relationship with the Carpenters’ Union have to do with a big house I don’t want or need?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Gail said, her face unpleasantly mottled with emotion. “Everything with you is a struggle. What would be just part of life for other people has to be some sort of big complicated thing with you. You isolate Tommy from his family, you make it clear you have contempt for all of us—”

“I have contempt for you? That’s a good one.”

“No one cares about ethnic differences any longer, Connie. No one thinks about those things.”

“How come John says my oldest son has guinea eyebrows?”

“You see, that’s just the point. He makes a little joke—”

As Connie climbed out of the car, a favorite expression of Celeste’s popped into her head, and without thinking she said, “Button it, Gail.” She walked over to Joey as her sister-in-law backed out of the driveway. “Sorry,” he said as she approached, pale beneath her powder, her nose beginning to shine. “It’s okay,” she said, sitting down beside him.

“You’re going to get your dress all dirty. Plus your lady friend is still watching you.”

Connie looked up and waved at Gail, then put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. It occurred to her suddenly that her heart was beating fast, and that she was having a good time. It was difficult to tell whether it was because of Gail, or because of Joey. When she looked at him she could see herself in his eyes. “I don’t know what’s come over me,” she said, talking almost to herself. “Why were you waiting for me?” she added.