Object lessons (12 page)

“They’re smoking cigarettes,” Bruce said. “Richard stole a pack of his mother’s Salems.”

There was a funny clicking sound from inside the development house, and then a little scream. Maggie saw Debbie stick her head out the window. “Come here,” she hissed.

“Leave me alone,” Maggie said, and her voice sounded loud in the still air.

“It’s important,” Debbie said, and suddenly behind her there was a flash of orange, like the sun over the horizon of the beach first thing in the morning.

“Oh, hell,” Bruce said.

“What?”

Silently he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, and they began to run across the field, leaping over the bigger clods of earth. Maggie stumbled a little. She knew she should concentrate on where she was going, but all she could think of was his hand holding hers.

Inside the development house the smell of smoke was stronger, and a glow was coming from the open square at the top of the ladder. They scrambled up. In one corner a pile of cardboard boxes was burning brightly, the flames hugging a corner of the wall and blackening the two-by-fours of the ceiling. A stray breeze seemed to lift the center of the blaze and send it higher, and in the orange light Maggie could see that Debbie’s eyes were dazzled, and Richard was smiling faintly and running his long fingers through his hair.

“Jesus,” Bruce whispered.

“I’ll get some water,” Maggie said, but Richard reached for her arm and held her there, turned toward the fire.

“Don’t be a jerk,” he said.

“You’re crazy,” Maggie said. “You’re really crazy.”

“You’re crazy,” Richard said, mocking her in a high voice, twisting her arm a little.

“We’re going to burn the whole place down,” Debbie whispered, but even as she spoke the flames began to shrink, the boxes collapsing into a pile of rose-gray ash, the wood concave where the heat had eaten it away. The four of them stood and stared until finally there was only a great cloud of gray smoke.

“Damn,” Richard said. “The wood must be damp.”

“You did that on purpose?” Maggie said.

“Wasn’t it cool?” Debbie said. “You should have seen it at first. It just went
woosh
like a wave. It almost caught our hair.”

“Lighter fluid,” said Richard.

“You could have burned the whole house down,” Maggie said.

“Jesus,” said Richard, “are you always like this? It’s not a house. Nobody lives here. Nobody got hurt. Don’t you want something to do? Can’t you stand a little excitement?” Richard twisted her arm some more. “I give excitement lessons free.”

Debbie giggled.

“You’re all crazy,” said Maggie. She started down the ladder again. “God, is she always like that?” she heard Richard say again.

“I’ll walk you home,” said Bruce, coming up behind her.

“I know how to get to my own house.”

“I want to.” They walked together in silence, not looking back, until finally Maggie said, “I wish I could figure out what’s going on with people.”

“He’s easy to figure out. He gets bored.”

“That can’t be the only reason why people do the things they do. It’s got to be more complicated than that.”

“I think it’s pretty simple.”

Maggie could feel the nail in the pocket of her shorts. They walked along in silence until they got to her backyard and then Maggie ran ahead, across the lawn. She thought she heard a small voice call “good-by”; then there was no sound except the crickets. But when she got upstairs to her bedroom, before she turned on the light, she looked out and she could see Bruce still standing at the edge of the yard. She thought he’d seen her, too, because as soon as she’d looked out the window he’d turned and walked back into the development, his head down.

Her door opened, and her mother was standing in the doorway. The light from the hallway fell through the pale folds of her nylon nightgown, and Maggie looked away.

“I thought you were staying at the Malones,” Connie said.

“I changed my mind.”

“I could hear your voice outside,” Connie said, still standing in the half-dark. “Were you with some boy out there?”

“I was talking to a boy I know. Bruce.”

“That poor boy whose mother died?”

Maggie winced. Connie added, “Aren’t you a little young to be hanging out at night with boys?”

“How old is old enough to be hanging out at night with boys?”

Connie shrugged. She looked tired. The lines from her nose to her mouth seemed deeper than usual. “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

“Don’t ask me. You’re the mother.”

“Then I think you’re too young.”

“I’m getting older,” Maggie said, wanting to say much more. “I’m getting a lot older.” She expected her mother to ask her what she meant by that, but instead she just sighed. “Yes,” Connie said, “I know.” She sniffed and Maggie was afraid she could smell the smoke, then realized it must be the Tabu. Connie turned on the bedside lamp and looked at Maggie sadly. Then she smiled. “That’s pretty,” she said, pointing to Maggie’s head.

Maggie took the clover chain off and held it, limp and dying, in her hand. “Where did you get that?” Connie said.

“I made it,” Maggie said. “It’s easy. You just tie them together. Mrs. Malone taught us. Don’t you know how?”

Connie shook her head.

“Your mother didn’t teach you?”

Connie shook her head again. “I don’t know whether she didn’t know how or she just didn’t want to teach me.”

“I think if she didn’t do it, it was probably because she didn’t know how. If she could have, she would have.”

“Maybe,” said Connie. “Go to sleep.” Then she ran her hand along Maggie’s upper arm. “What did you do?” she asked, and Maggie looked down to see the marks of fingers purpling on the tan skin above her elbow.

“I fell,” she said, drawing back. Her mother looked at her for a long minute, and then turned and left, closing the door behind her.

When her mother was gone Maggie stared at herself in the mirror. She looked at the bruises and put the nail from her pocket into her jewelry box, the red leather one Celeste had given her for her birthday. She lay in bed, the moon casting a silver shaft of cold light across the ceiling, and wondered whether in the morning she would be saddled with another dreamlike memory, half real, half incredible. For a long time she kept her eyes open wide in the darkness, and finally, still smelling smoke, she fell asleep.

11

J
OHN SCANLAN
’
S HOSPITAL ROOM
looked like a committee meeting of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, A half dozen men, sleek and florid in their sharkskin and seersucker suits, came in after work to pump his good hand and make jokes about pinching the nurses. Tommy stayed out in the hall, wandering around the nurses’ station, buying a bag of M & M’s from the vending machine and eating them in the stairwell, reading the newspaper. It was cool in the hospital, and after ten days the nurses were accustomed to seeing the Scanlan family and didn’t take much notice of them.

The day before, a student nurse had seen Tommy looking through some papers near her desk and had snatched them from him, her little freckled face as agitated as an infant’s. “Mr. Scanlan,” she had said, the white cotton curving over the shelf of her bosom, which vibrated with indignation, “that is your father’s chart.” “Damn straight,” Tommy had replied. The doctor had a horrible scrawl—not a Catholic boy, that’s for sure, no wonder only the Jews were doctors, the nuns would have their rulers out over this stuff—and the only part Tommy could make out appeared again and again, day after day: “No improvement.”

Tommy had been having trouble sleeping. There was a bend in the street just in front of the house, and when a car came by he would watch the diamond-shaped patterns of the lights roll across the ceiling and over the top of Connie’s head, like a searchlight. He had black dreams that he could remember only in bits, a rodent face here, a free fall there, a chase, a pursuit, a knife, a gun, but no tale to wrap around them. He would wake with adrenaline throbbing in his chest and look over at his wife, who slept with her hands folded on her chest, her hair fanning out on the pillow. He wondered what was in her dreams.

He was not willing to connect his nightmares to the sight of his father in the hospital bed. He was not even willing to concede that the man was very sick. John Scanlan had turned his hospital room into an office, with piles of invoices and correspondence on the window sill. His former secretary, a square and silent woman named Dorothy O’Haire, who had faded blond hair and dark eyes, came for three hours each day to help him keep up and to read him the newspapers. Tommy knew that. Dorothy was there a great deal, but somehow he never managed to see her when he was at the hospital. She had stopped working for John Scanlan nine years ago, when her daughter had been born, but when she heard of the stroke she had volunteered to come back and help. John had told the chief of staff that they would never see another penny of Scanlan money if they didn’t discharge him at the end of the week, but the doctors had steadfastly refused to let him go home, and the best the old man had been able to do was to bully them into letting Dorothy in outside visiting hours. “I have my ways,” he told his son when he asked about the arrangment. “Mind your own business.”

When Tommy was at the hospital, his father seemed much as usual, except that he wore striped pajamas especially bought for the hospital stay. (“Goddamn pansy clothes,” he said, when they brought them in. “Sixty-five years and I never wore a pair of these things until now.”) During the day, he was at his best: swearing at the staff, demanding more pillows, making the nurse take the crucifix down from the wall so he could determine the model and estimate how much the hospital was paying for its religious articles, bullying Dorothy while she stared at him fixedly.

Tommy never saw his father at night, when he seemed almost as ill as he had been at the beginning, when the corner of his mouth hung low so that his face looked like the masks of both comedy and tragedy; when, although his mother had been dead for nearly half a century, he talked to her about the beginnings of his business and James’s whooping cough; when he cried like a baby against the pleated dress front of some night nurse and said, “I don’t know, I don’t know” over and over again. Even John did not fully remember those times.

Tommy could tell his father was thinking about the more distant past, carrying it with him like a bad taste in his mouth. Occasionally John would lie back on the pillows, his shoulders slipping into the two comfortable narrow grooves worn in the mattress, and then Tommy knew his father was remembering all the others who had dreamed their lives away in taverns, slept them away on sofas in small front rooms, all the men from his boyhood in the tenement buildings who had squandered their lives sitting on stoops, taking their time, telling their stories, being “That Jack, now what a fine fellow he is” and “That Joe, you can’t beat him for a good yarn,” wasting away from lack of ambition until they were only death’s-heads with a lifetime of jokes to their credit. Sometimes John Scanlan thought he owed them everything, because they had haunted him every day of his life, his own old man among them, putting in his time at the Department of Public Works, leaving a life insurance policy just large enough to cover the two-night wake and the plot at St. Ann’s. In the hospital they danced in his head whenever he rested, and he would sit up suddenly and begin to add up columns of figures as though possessed, as indeed he always had been. Tommy could tell when his father had been having these spells because John would look at his middle son suspiciously, noticing his resemblance to those hail-fellows-well-met of years gone by.

Tommy came to the hospital every day, apologizing for Connie’s absence, saying she was sick, which was true but not the problem. She said she hated hospitals, although she did well enough in them when she was having the kids. She said sometimes that it was a good thing that her own mother had died suddenly, turning a lavender blue one evening at the kitchen table and sliding to the linoleum floor, dead somewhere between the edge of the table and the legs of the chair, because Connie could not have borne being with her in the hospital. Connie could not have borne being with her anyway, Tommy thought.

Margaret was there most afternoons, too, and after a while it occurred to Tommy to wonder how she had so much time on her hands. “It’s summer,” his sister had said, but that didn’t seem reason enough. She had taken to carrying a book with her whenever she came to the hospital, and for the first few days Tommy thought it was the New Testament. Waiting out in the hall for his father’s room to empty of visitors, he had looked at the title:
Jane Eyre, An Autobiography
.

“How come you’re reading
Jane Eyre?”
Maggie asked her aunt, peeking over her father’s shoulder.

“Just for fun,” Margaret said.

“You’ve never read it before?” said Maggie. “It’s a great book.”

“Is it religious?” Tommy asked.

Margaret laughed. “Tom, honey, underneath this habit—it’s me. Average girl. Good dancer. I’m allowed to read books that aren’t necessarily religious, or even edifying.” Tommy looked skeptical.

“Inside every nun is a woman,” she added.

“Do me a favor, Peg,” Tommy replied, using her old childhood nickname. “Don’t tell Dad that. He’s had one stroke already.”

After the men had left, all the men who did business with John Scanlan, and all the ones who wanted to, the ones who owned the cement and construction and candle and casket companies, Tommy went into his father’s room, his daughter and his sister behind him. Buddy Phelan had brought a fruit basket, which was still wrapped in its tinted plastic. There was a bottle of Canadian Club and two cans of ginger ale on the bedside table.

“That Monica was in here an hour ago,” John said to Maggie, “sweet as can be. More there than meets the eye, I bet. She said all you girls were having a grand time at the seashore before I gave you such a scare. What’s your problem down there, little girl?”

“I’m tying my shoe,” said Maggie, who did not want him to see her face.

“You shouldn’t be coming to see me here wearing those sneakers, like you’re going to play basketball instead of going to call on your grandfather. You girls don’t have good sense. Your cousin Teresa was here yesterday, wearing a scapular under her little shirt. Can you beat that? The Sacred Heart shining through the white of her blouse, like a big stain. The girl’s an imbecile.”

“She has Sister Luke. She’s very religious. She loves stuff like that.”

“Nuns,” John Scanlan snorted, and Margaret laughed. “The only one I’ve ever known with the sense God gave her is your aunt. Don’t be a nun, girl. Give me your word.”

“I don’t know, Grandpop,” Maggie said, thinking of the scene at the Malones, and the flames licking the corner of the development house. “It sounds kind of peaceful.”

“Ha,” her grandfather said. “Peaceful. Who gives a damn about peaceful. That makes for a dull life, girl. Remember that. How’s your brother?”

“Which one?”

“All of them, for Christ’s sake. How the hell am I supposed to keep track of all these children?” He reached into the bottom drawer of the bedside table and drew out a Mason jar that glowed amber in the hospital lights. “They would have killed me days ago if it wasn’t for the Scotch,” he said. He poured two fingers’ worth into a plastic cup and added water from a pitcher. “Don’t tell on me,” he said to Maggie, as though his children were not there, and drank it down.

“You better watch the booze, Pop,” Margaret said.

“You watch your mouth, Sister,” John Scanlan said. “I’m still your father even if you are a bride of Christ. I need some time alone with your brother here. Take your niece to the cafeteria and buy her a chocolate bar.”

When they were gone the old man leaned back and closed his eyes.

“Jesus, Dad, you’re killing yourself,” Tommy said, moving empty glasses to the windowsill, but his father just lay there and looked at him, his eyes dull. With the departure of his daughter and his granddaughter, John Scanlan seemed to shrink and grow gray. Tommy sat down in the visitor’s chair and waited for some sort of tirade.

“I don’t know, Tommy,” John finally said, sounding half asleep. “I don’t know what the hell to think. I’m tired of this damn hospital. Father McLeod came in here today to talk to me. Scots-Irish, for God’s sake. Who the hell ordained him? He says I’ve had a rare treat in devoting my business life to the business of God. He’d been practicing that one all the way over in the black Buick, right?” The brogue was beginning to creep into his father’s voice and Tommy inhaled deeply. The room felt close and smelled of Clorox. “I said ‘There’s my problem, Father. I should have been devoting my business life to the business of making money.’ Now I’ve got your brother in here, wants to have one of the Manila factories making little blouses for girls. Says that down there in the city the girls are dressing up like fortunetellers and buying embroidered blouses. Big market. I said ‘Jesus Christ, Mark, why don’t we just change over to dresses?’ He thought I was serious. Told me he wanted to discuss that next. Jesus Christ. I’ve wasted my life.”

“Stop,” Tommy said.

“The priest asks me if I want the last rites. He said there’s nothing to be afraid of, that he knows I know the rewards of life eternal. Life eternal, shit.” The old man’s face was beginning to redden, his long fingers on the sheets to shake. Tommy came over to the bed. He thought about taking his father’s hand, but instead held onto the button that summoned the nurse. “I don’t give a good goddamn about life eternal, I told him. I got everything in my life the way I wanted it, everything all lined up right, and I want it to stay that way. Everything. It’s not the dying I mind, it’s the changing. You see what I mean.” He looked up at Tommy, and the younger man began to cry at the terrible light in his father’s eyes, as though John Scanlan was seeing visions. “Everything the way I want it. After all this time. You want to keep it just the way it is. Right? Right?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Tommy said.

The big head fell, the silver hair looking greasy and gray. John Scanlan reached over for a jelly glass on the bedside table and sipped slowly. “Stop whimpering,” he said without looking up. “Your daughter’s a funny girl. Takes things too seriously. Always stewing over something. Not like that Monica. She’s a slick one, that Monica. She’s not pulling anything over on me. I knew a girl just like her once. Went off to Hollywood and took a screen test. Married a man old enough to be her father who owned half of Los Angeles. What was I telling you?”

“Connie apologizes for not—”

“Ah, don’t give me that crap, Tommy,” said the old man, waving his hand. “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s coming over later with a piece of pie. Rhubarb pie that your sister Anne made.”

“Oh Jesus. The kids must really think the end is near, they’re sending me pie.” John Scanlan always called his younger brothers and sisters “the kids.” He saw them once a year, at a party he held in the reception room of Scanlan & Co. Last year his youngest brother had gotten so drunk that he had approached John, jabbed him in his red boutonniere with his index finger, and said, “I hate your guts.” “I know, Jamie, I know,” the elder man had said, putting his arm around his brother’s shoulder. “And well you should.”

“And your mother, too, carting pie from Annie over here,” John said now, sipping his drink. “She must be scared.”