Object lessons (15 page)

“Jesus, that’s a horrible thing to say,” Mark said. “Jesus, Tommy, I’m ashamed of you.”

“What’d he tell you about me coming into the business?”

The question lay between them as Sal brought coffee and took their empty plates away. Mark took a long time putting milk and sugar in his cup. Finally he said, “The old man told me October first you start as vice president of operations. He says you make five thousand a year more than me.”

Tommy laughed. “And you’re ashamed of me?” he said, leaning across the table until his forehead almost touched his brother’s. “God, Markey, I don’t want to piss on your life, but look at you. You’re a lackey for him. You don’t even have kids because he said adoption was no good. Do you hold it when he takes a piss, too? He’s got you just where he wants you. I thought he gave up on me a long time ago, because of Concetta, because I stepped out of line. Now I think he just waited until he knew I thought that, and then he came in for the kill.”

“Do you hear yourself? You make your own father sound like a monster.”

“You remember when we were kids and Sister Ann Elizabeth asked us to make a drawing of God? You remember? You made him tall and you made his hair yellow and his eyes blue. And so did I. She got such a kick out of that, that our pictures of God looked like the same person. That wasn’t just a coincidence, Mark.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mark said. “I just want you to come into the business with me. You’d be good. We’d be good together. The old man doesn’t accept reality. The world is changing. The Church is changing. He’s not far off on his jokes about the kaiser rolls. What if they decide to go to using plain pieces of bread at communion? That’s a million bucks right down the toilet.”

“You’re talking to the wrong person about this. Go back to the hospital and talk to the owner of the company.”

“He’s not coming back, Tom,” Mark said.

Tommy felt a chill in his chest and, almost reflexively, his shoulders hunched in, like little wings. “Get out,” he said, but his voice was low.

“He’s in bad shape. He’s much worse than anyone thinks. James says the old man will never really be the same.”

“Get out,” Tommy said, his voice lower still.

“You come into the business with me, Tom. Take the house. It’s a nice house, much nicer than any of those development houses. Move your wife away from there. It’s not good for her. It’s not good for you.”

“She’s fine, Mark. I’m fine.”

“No you’re not,” Mark said.

“Yeah, we are.”

“Yeah? Where is your wife right now? Right at this very moment? I can tell you that Gail is at a white sale with Mom and that after that she’s going to play bridge with some of her friends and after that she’s having dinner with me. Where is Connie right now?”

“She’s home taking care of her kids,” Tommy said.

“If you’re sure of that, fine. If you’re sure of that I got nothing further to say. If you’re sure of that.”

14

M
AGGIE LIT THE FIFTH FIRE HERSELF
. She felt as though the match jumped from her hand to the big wet spot where the lighter fluid had collected on the plywood wall of the garage. The house was in the back of the development, up a little rise from the old creek, and its lumber was still orangy-yellow. It was the spot on the wall and the fresh look of the wood, she thought when she was finally alone, that made her think the flames would not spread, even as they covered the walls like a dazzling cape.

“Isn’t it incredible?” said Debbie, who was standing just behind her.

Maggie was struck by several things at once: by the damp smell of the night, by a persistent trickle of sweat down the back of her head and into the hollow at the base of her skull, by how hot the flames became so quickly. It crossed her mind that she was making a memory, and that she would never in her life be able to communicate the sick feeling that afflicted her the moment the fire began to leap around her, the nausea that rose up in her throat as she heard the three people behind her breathing heavily in the still air. She wondered if this was the way her mother felt when she was expecting a baby. If it was, she would never ever have children.

They were out in the development, in a two-car garage. The big square empty space was filled with boxes: a No-Frost refrigerator, a No-Rinse dishwasher, a host of other appliances and fixtures in corrugated brown cardboard. The younger kids had been having a field day, turning empty boxes into tunnels, caves, houses, hauling them out of the big refuse pile to one side of the development and dragging them home as their mothers screamed from the kitchen windows “You take that right back where you found it.” Damien had started collecting scraps of Formica, little punched-out circles and half moons where the kitchen installers had carved out holes for plumbing pipes or planed the edge of a counter into a curve. He had a big box full in his room, amid his butterflies and cacti, and sometimes he would take them out and look at them, feeling the smooth surfaces, even sniffing them, and smiling. “You’re nuts,” Terence said.

Maggie had gone to get Debbie after dinner, but Mrs. Malone had said she was not at home. “Did you two girls have a fight?” she added, frowning.

“Not exactly,” said Maggie.

“You come inside and have a Popsicle and tell me about it,” Mrs. Malone said, but Maggie had gone off by herself to the development. She knew exactly where to find Debbie and the others. She could smell them now, like a tracking dog; she could smell the accelerant and the sulfur.

The second fire had, like the first, flared and died. The third and fourth had happened when she was not there; one had leveled the walls of a closet, the other had left a black hole the size of the gym’s center court mark on the bedroom floor of a house that was barely a frame. She had become accustomed now to not being able to find Debbie when she wanted her, to discovering her at the pool, giggling behind her hand with Bridget Hearn. They would fall silent, their faces flat, as soon as Maggie appeared. It was halfway through the summer, and Maggie felt that the structure of her life had tumbled down around her, her safe haven at the cemetery somehow strange and unsatisfactory now, her invincible grandfather wasting away amid the white of his hospital bed, her parents absent in spirit and sometimes in fact, her best friend a stranger. She had only found out about the third and fourth fires because Joey Martinelli had told her mother one afternoon when the two of them were in the kitchen having coffee and didn’t realize that Maggie was in the house. When Maggie had come downstairs for lemonade, quiet in bare feet, her mother had leapt from her chair like a mouse caught in a spring trap, and Mr. Martinelli had been so discomfited that he had asked her how school was. Maggie had felt like an intruder in her own kitchen, and, lying on her bed afterward, had wondered if she would ever belong anywhere again.

She had gone over to the Malones’ that same afternoon, and found Debbie in her room, lying on the bed, still pink from a day at the club. Maggie had lain down on Aggie’s bed, too, and they had talked in a desultory fashion for a few minutes before lapsing into silence. Finally Debbie had cleared her throat. “I think before you come over you should call and see whether I’m here,” she finally said. “And make sure I’m here alone and not already with somebody else.”

Maggie had continued to stare at the ceiling. There was a crack that ran across one corner that she knew as well as she knew her own face in the mirror. She traced it with her eyes, back and forth, back and forth.

“Sometimes I might be with other people,” Debbie added. “There are things that I’m interested in now that you’re not that interested in.”

“Like what?” Maggie said.

“How should I know?” Debbie shot back. “Maybe we’re maturing at different rates. Bridget says she was friends with Gigi McMenamin for years and years and then they stopped being friends because Gigi just wasn’t interested in doing anything. All she wanted to do was hang around the house and read.”

“I know what you’re interested in,” Maggie said. “You’re my best friend.”

“Maybe I’m interested in other things now. Maybe I’m changing. Bridget says that being out of Helen’s shadow has changed me. She says I act more like I’m in high school than most people my age.”

“Bridget’s a bitch,” said Maggie, getting up and walking out.

That was when she had known that the next time there was a fire, she would be there.

But she never suspected that she would strike the match and start the fire. Richard had handed her the box of kitchen matches, his eyes flat, and when he had said, “Your move, Maria Goretti,” she knew there was no way back to the way things had been before, to the times of Indian clay in the creek and Ouija boards. She sniffed the air and thought that the scent was an amalgam of what had been and what was still to come, of the old smells of cut grass and plastic toys and stew cooking and the faint ripe odor of standing water, and the new smells of plaster and linoleum, cement and concrete, all nice smells somehow. Sometimes she tried to close her eyes and imagine the field the way it had been only two months before, its reeds hiding the earth and the field mice and the occasional discarded soda can. And when she did, she could envision a field, but it was her imagined idea of one, like an illustration in a book, perfect arcs of gray-green laid on a bias, and not what had really been there at all. She wondered sometimes whether she was doing the same thing to her memories of her own life.

“Your turn,” Debbie said.

Maggie knew why Debbie was angry. The day before, they had visited Helen in the city. They had put on summer dresses, because they always wore dresses when they went to the city, and they slipped out of the Malones’ front door, which was only used by salesmen and for important parties, while Mrs. Malone was busy warming a bottle for the new baby. Maggie carried an umbrella. It was still wet from the day before, and the day before that. It had been one of the rainiest summers on record, Mrs. Malone said. The weather was making all the mothers feel that perhaps they would lose their minds. “I’ll make you a deal,” Mrs. Malone had said to the children one morning at breakfast, after Maggie had spent the night. “I’ll stay out of your hair until Labor Day if you’ll stay out of mine.” No one stopped eating. The baby was in a corner, sucking noisily on his hand. He was a large boy, with no hair and an enormous mottled face. It often occurred to Maggie that what passed as an offhand remark from Mrs. Malone would have been a turning point for either of her own parents.

For days at a time there had been no work on the development, and water ran down the raw brown slopes that stood for lawns in great streams, until ridges were worn into them and piles of silt lay in front of all the new houses. The ones that were only framed in turned a henna color, and the water in the basements grew stagnant on those rare afternoons when the sun shone. Even the negligible little creek, which Maggie and Debbie had been able to negotiate with one good broad jump since second grade, rose and covered its steppingstones, sloshing aggressively up over its banks and whirring around the stanchions of the railroad trestle. After the fifth day, three workmen from the county public works department had come and stared silently at the foot of one of the stanchions, where a narrow groove of earth had been worn away to a depth of three feet. They brought a dump truck full of gravel and filled it in. Maggie was so bored that she went outside to watch; she had put on her yellow slicker, and her wrists poked like sticks from the wide sleeves. She had outgrown it in three months, and outgrown, too, watching workmen shovel stones. Sometimes she took the nail Bruce had given her out of her jewelry box, placed it in the palm of her hand and looked at it, as though at any moment it would turn into something else. When Connie was home, Maggie tried to stay out of her way. When her mother was gone, Maggie stayed in her bedroom, peering out through the window, looking for fires in the rain.

Maggie and Debbie had taken the subway to Helen’s building, walking three blocks from the station beneath one umbrella, and by the time they reached the apartment house, an ugly brick rectangle with a keyhole of an air shaft excised from the middle of the yellow-brown façade, their skirts were wet almost to the waist. “Nasty day, ladies,” the man mopping the marble floors of the lobby had said pleasantly, eyeing their shiny, skinny legs.

Maggie had assumed that Debbie had asked her to come along because she had realized that Bridget Hearn was a jerk, and that Maggie was a much more suitable companion for such an important excursion. This was not true. Debbie had told Helen that she might come by, and Helen had said that if Debbie brought Bridget she would not let them into the apartment. “Maggie saves you from yourself,” she had said.

Debbie had been to visit Helen three times before, each time with Aggie, and she was affecting an air of great nonchalance, although she was terrified. Nearly every apartment in Helen’s building was occupied by the widow of a Columbia professor, and the ladies all bore a great resemblance to one another, all small, slightly humpbacked elderly women with round hats like toadstools and pronounced foreign accents. When they spoke to one another in the elevators, they talked mainly of the price of produce, which they purchased in small quantities each day as part of their daily routine. When they shared the elevator with Helen or her roommate, they usually kept silent, their mouths as tight as the snap closures on their handbags.

One of them, who had herself been an anthropologist in Germany before her marriage, had written several letters in her ornate, rather spindly handwriting to determine how the girls had come in possession of the apartment, and whether they were old enough to be legally permitted to live alone. She was the one who entered the elevator with Maggie and Debbie now, staring down at the puddle on the floor their skirts made. Maggie noticed that the woman was wearing the same sort of shoes and boots that the nuns at school wore, low-heeled, black lace-up shoes with perforated uppers and translucent plastic boots that fitted the contours of the shoes exactly. Maggie’s aunt Margaret had once told her that she had found those shoes the greatest impediment to remaining in the convent.

The elderly woman looked at Maggie. “Alone?” she suddenly spat out.

“Excuse me?” Maggie had said.

Debbie giggled.

“You are alone?”

“We’re going to visit my sister,” Debbie said. “Eight-B.”

The elevator door opened. “Ah,” the woman said, and stepped off.

“Oh God,” said Debbie, when the door had closed.

Helen’s apartment was silent. The peephole shone in the yellowish rainy-day glow from the airshaft window. Maggie stood on tiptoe to look inside, but she saw only her own distorted face, her nose as splayed as a bloodhound’s. “We came all this way for nothing,” Debbie said, pressing on the bell with her thumb. Maggie could hear it ringing faintly inside. Finally Debbie started back toward the elevator. “Come on,” she said irritably. “They probably went out to lunch.”

Maggie leaned on the bell again, staring back at herself through the peephole. As she walked away, the door opened. A girl with long brown hair and a flowered kimono that barely covered her behind stood there looking down at Maggie. She was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Yes?” she said a little grandly, with a hint of an English accent. Then she saw Debbie skittering down the hall. “Oh, Christ,” she said. “Come on in. Helen, it’s your little sister.”

“Debbie,” said Debbie.

“Debbie,” the girl called to the back of the apartment.

Maggie walked in and sat down on the daybed, which was something like the sofa in her grandfather Mazzo’s house, brown and shiny, its shabbiness accented by an embroidered shawl arranged over the back. The fabric was worn away from both arms. There was no other furniture in the room except for a record player and a set of bookshelves made from bricks and planks. Atop the bookshelves was a plastic version of the
Pietà
, with a rosary hanging around the Blessed Mother’s neck. A Rolling Stones album cover was pinned to the wall.