Object lessons (18 page)

Joey laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the Scanlan family to me,” he said.

“I know. But who knows what really goes on with other people? My father-in-law, who’s Superman, is in the hospital. My mother-in-law, Emily Post, is reading Dear Abby. Tommy’s brother’s daughter, who has never been seen in public with a spot on her dress or her hair uncurled, turns up pregnant. And my own daughter, who seemed as if she’d stay a kid forever, has two fancy grown-up bathing suits in the bottom of her underwear drawer and goes out at night to talk to boys in those damn houses you’re building.”

“She does?”

“They all do.”

“Ask her if she knows who’s setting these fires. They burned down an entire garage last night. If there’d been a breeze, it would have taken half a block with it.”

Connie sighed. “My God, what a summer. Will we live through it? I feel like all hell started to break loose as soon as you showed up.”

“Hey,” Joey said, “don’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame anyone for anything. People just believe what they want. That if you’re a kid, you’ll stay that way forever. That if you look like a Shirley Temple doll, you’re a good girl. You live in a big house, everything’s fine.” Connie shrugged. “You know who my husband’s family thought I was going to be like? Doris Delgaudio.”

Connie and Joey both began to laugh. Doris Delgaudio had lived down the block from the Martinellis. She had worn red lipstick as thick as her ankles, crystal costume jewelry, and Capri pants. When she walked, her bottom swayed from one side of the sidewalk to the other, and she made a noise like Oriental wind chimes from the sound of all the crystal knocking together.

“I swear,” Connie said, gasping for air, “the Scanlans were all waiting for me to fill the house with crushed velvet and red curtains, waiting to see if I’d stamp grapes with my bare feet in the backyard. I think what bothers them as much as anything else is that I didn’t turn out to be what they expected. Their son married a guinea, she ought to at least
act
like a guinea. I think it drives them crazy, that I’m not one thing or another.”

“Yeah, you are,” Joey said, “you’re terrific.”

For just a moment, before it happened, Connie could see what was coming, but in the same way she was always convinced people who were hit by a bus froze in the middle of the street, she found herself incapable of doing anything about it. She saw his face move, then his arm and his shoulder, and then he had his arm around her and he was kissing her. Her mouth opened in amazement and she could feel his teeth.

It was the oddest feeling, being kissed by someone who wasn’t Tommy. She kissed him back, and her body warmed and she shifted a little in her seat so she was turned toward him. She put her hand on the back of his neck and felt the short hairs, and try as she might, all she could think, while pleasure welled within her, was: This is different from Tommy. And this. And this. He put one hand on her bare knee and she felt a throb inside her groin, and then in her stomach.

“Oh, my God,” he groaned, “you are so beautiful.”

She imagined this was what she had read about in
Reader’s Digest
, an out-of-body experience. She felt that she was looking at herself from somewhere near the inside light of the car, and thinking: Why, it’s true. I look wonderful, all white whites and black blacks. Joey ran his thumb over one of her nipples, and the her that was still inside her body felt her joints grow warm. She whimpered softly. She had forgotten all about the baby in the back seat. When he put his hand between her legs she started to slide down, her shoulders jammed between the steering wheel and the seat, and the woman watching it all, the other woman she was, thought to herself, “This is exactly the spot I was in when I got pregnant the first time.” She did not know whether it was the power of that suggestion, or the prone position, or the hormones that-flooded her body as her excitement rose, but she suddenly realized she was going to be sick.

She opened the door of the car with one hand over her head and lurched out somehow onto the grass. She gagged a little, and the ground beneath her felt liquid.

When she got back into the car she left her door open because of the sharp vinegar scent of her mouth. Joey was sitting with his head in his hands, and she felt so sorry for what had happened that she started to reach out to stroke his hair and then stopped in midair. She wondered what would have happened if her stomach had not betrayed—or saved—her. When he finally looked up, she could see herself again in his dark eyes; her hair was ruffled and she looked seventeen, and beautiful.

“My being sick had nothing to do with you,” she said. “From what I remember about kissing, you’re a good kisser.” She tried to laugh but no sound came out and he kept his head down. “I always feel sick like that when I’m going to have a baby.”

“You’re pregnant?” he said, and when she saw how dead his eyes looked she knew that she had been careless and mean without even suspecting it. Marriage had done that to her, she thought. Marriage had made her feel so safe and inviolate that she had felt free to let some man drive her around without ever thinking about how
he
might feel. It had made her secure enough to be surly with her husband and to ridicule his family. Once she had thought being married would make her part of a group, but instead it seemed to have made her a person so complete that she could refuse to look outside her own borders. Or maybe this was how she had become whole, by doing something selfish and wrong, just for herself, just so she could see herself in the mirror for the first time in her life and say: Ah. There you are.

“I thought you knew,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She supposed that was how it looked to someone from the outside when you complained about your life, when you were lonely and confused. It looked as if you were ready to leave, as if you were looking for something else. She knew that was how Monica would think of her own marriage, would think that something you were forced to do, something that you hated sometimes, could not be something you might want. But she would be wrong to think that.

In the back seat the baby started making the wet sucking noises that meant he was waking up. Connie closed the door on her side. “I need to get home,” she said softly, and she smiled at him.

“You drive,” he said, and he looked out the window again, his chin in his hand.

When they pulled into the driveway, Maggie was sitting on the front steps. When she saw her mother she went inside. Connie thought again about how marriage could make you feel safe enough to hurt people without even knowing it.

“I’ll come and get you for the test next week,” Joey said.

“I don’t think so,” Connie said. “I think I’ll go myself.”

“You can’t do that. You can’t drive without a licensed driver.”

“I’ll get Celeste,” Connie said. “Or Tommy.”

“I’m sorry,” Joey said. “I really feel like a jerk.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Connie said.

“Yeah.”

Connie lifted Joseph out of the back seat. “You’re not a jerk,” she said. “You’re a great guy. I meant what I said about being a good kisser, too. You’re going to make somebody a terrific husband.”

His face hardened, and for the first time that afternoon, he looked mean. “You sound like my mother,” he said, and there was no humor in his voice.

“That’s a good way to think of me.”

“No. I meant what I said. I don’t care about the other thing. About the baby.”

“It’s a pretty major problem,” said Connie with a tight smile.

“It didn’t feel like a major problem back there,” Joey replied, and Connie felt that warmth again.

“I’m a married woman.” Connie could hear the quaver in her voice.

“You didn’t feel so married back there. Admit it, Connie; you made a mistake. You and I, we’re the same kind of person.”

“I’m not sure what kind of person I am,” Connie said.

“You’re the kind of person who should be appreciated. You’re not the kind of person who should be treated like some kind of outsider.”

“Maybe I’ll always be some kind of an outsider,” she said. “Maybe that’s the kind of person I am.” She turned and began to walk into the house. When she looked back over her shoulder, he was staring at her. “Thanks for teaching me to drive,” she said.

“That’s not enough,” he said, starting the engine. He leaned out of the window.

“I’m coming back,” he said.

“We forgot the sawhorses.”

“I’m not coming back for any sawhorses. I’m coming back for you. I’d worry about taking you away from the Scanlans, but they never had you in the first place.”

Connie looked at him levelly. “I’m a married woman,” she repeated.

“
Arrivederci
, Concetta Mazza,” Joey said, and he peeled out of the driveway, leaving two heavy black stripes of rubber tread behind him.

16

T
HE FRONT HALLWAY OF THE HOUSE HAD
a faint odor, a pleasant mixture of wax, cut grass, and what Tommy supposed was the smell of emptiness, a musky smell that was a bit like the smell of the classrooms in the Catholic boys’ high school he’d gone to. Everything he did echoed: closing the heavy oak door, walking across the parquet floor, placing the freshly cut key, its edges still a little sharp, on the white wooden mantel in the living room. The only thing in the house was a bottle of window cleaner on the kitchen counter, left there by the black woman who took the train up from the Bronx to clean his mother’s house once a week.

The living room was long and cool even in the summer heat, with four big windows along the outside wall and the brick fireplace across from them, with small flowered tiles laid on the hearth and cabinets built in on either side. Across the hall was a dining room with wood paneling halfway up the walls. The kitchen was enormous, with room for a big table and lots of chairs. Beyond it was a screened porch, and a yard with grass so smooth and green it looked like a golf course.

Tommy had gone to Sal’s for lunch and hadn’t had the heart to go back to the office, where Buddy Phelan kept looking at him sideways, wondering when he was going to say that he was leaving. He’d had lunch alone at Sal’s, a roast-beef sandwich and a draft beer. He liked to eat alone, although he never admitted it. It seemed an eccentric kind of thing, like something you heard murderers had liked to do before anyone found out they were murderers. But after years of sharing a table, first with his four brothers and his sister, then with his wife and children, he found it soothing to sit with the
Daily News
propped between his plate and his cup and eat his sandwich without having to talk to anyone.

Sometimes, while he had his coffee, he and Sal would talk. He thought that Sal must be lonely, living upstairs above the bar in two rooms, alone since his mother died three years before. Sal was an only child, and now an orphan. Whenever Tommy tried to think about that, it was like imagining a man from Mars. Tommy thought how quiet it must be upstairs, and how Sal must have all night to read the papers, even the box scores for teams not in New York.

That morning Sal had just looked at him. Finally he said, “Word is you’re getting a promotion.”

“Word is sometimes wrong,” Tommy said.

“I’d miss you,” Sal said, wiping the bar with his rag. “But don’t cut off your nose to spite your dad, Tom.”

Perhaps that was why he had driven out here. He had parked his car down the street and walked up, so that none of his brothers would see the station wagon and report back that Tommy had given in. Or perhaps it was that he thought he might discover here how he felt about everything that was going on in his life, and what that everything was. Two nights ago he had gone upstairs to bed and heard his daughter crying behind the closed door of her bedroom, a high and lonely sound, like the sound the house made when it creaked in a high wind. He had stood outside for a minute, and then gone into his own room. For an hour he had strained to hear that sound, sometimes thinking he heard it, other times that it had stopped. Then Connie slid into bed beside him, and he fell asleep.

“Connie,” he said aloud, as he went upstairs in this big house, and the word came bouncing back from the clean white walls.

Upstairs there were six bedrooms and four bathrooms. The bathroom off the biggest bedroom had a glass shower stall and a dressing room with big red roses climbing up the papered walls. In the ceiling of the dressing room there was a pull-down door and steps to the attic. As Tommy hoisted himself up he heard tiny footsteps, like fingers drumming on a tabletop, and he thought to himself, “We need an exterminator.” He wondered if that thought meant that he was going to live here. For a moment he looked down below him, at the luminous oak beneath his feet, at the edge of one florid rose where the wall met the molding. He wondered if he was looking at the rest of his life.

The attic was surprisingly clean, and empty except for a big trunk, wood banded with metal. He lifted the lid slowly, afraid he’d hear the little feet again. The trunk was full. On top was a manila envelope, and beneath it a welter of lace and satin the color of tea. He could tell it was a wedding dress without even lifting it. Some dried flowers lay to one side.

He slid the contents of the envelope out and sat crosslegged on the unfinished pine floor. There was an old wedding picture, the bride wearing the sort of shapeless veil and straight, midcalf-length dress his own mother wore in her wedding pictures. There was a marriage certificate—Jean Flaherty to Harold Ryan, April 8, 1924, in Most Blessed Sacrament Church, Brooklyn, N.Y. There was a faded white ribbon, a scrap of material, and a postcard from Niagara Falls. Tommy could feel something small and hard in the bottom of the envelope. He shook it and into his palm fell a tiny tooth.

The attic seemed to have been cleaned, and the trunk stood in the center of the floor as though it had been abandoned. Did people think so little of the past? Tommy thought again of eating at Sal’s, of a lunch he’d had the week before. A shaft of sunlight had been shooting through the cheap stained-glass fleur-de-lis in Sal’s front window, so that bars of red and green and blue fell right across the plate placed in front of the third stool in from the end. Some of the men said that it was enough to give you indigestion, this big spot of color atop your corned beef and slaw, but Tommy liked it. He supposed it reminded him of church, perhaps of serving Mass when he was an altar boy, when he had felt solemn and important as he poured the water from the cruet over the priest’s consecrated fingers—his father’s cruets, his father’s chalice. As he had taken the seat, he thought of what a creature of habit he was, and it made him afraid.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Sal had said, and Tommy had found, to his great amazement and shame, that at the words tears welled in his eyes. It was dim in the bar at all hours of the day, and he hoped that Sal could not see.

“Your dad worse?” Sal asked, putting the cream in front of him, making Tommy suspect that the light was better than he thought.

“Ah, who knows,” Tommy said, playing with his teaspoon. “The doctors never tell you anything. I don’t think they know anything. Half the time he’s full of piss and vinegar and the other half he’s talking like a baby.”

Sal wiped the bar and emptied an ashtray.

“My brother’s daughter is getting married,” Tom went on, “my niece, very pretty girl, very smart, all the best things. And suddenly my mother calls and says Monica’s getting married, three weeks’ notice, with her grandfather in the hospital. I understand these things, it happens every day, but jeez, I don’t know, maybe it’s better that my father can’t come. She’s marrying a Polish boy, my brother says he’s a nice enough boy, but my father thinks that anybody who’s not Irish should get out of town, you know?”

Sal nodded. He’d heard about Mr. Scanlan from the Italian guys who worked for First Concrete.

“I guess I figured these things didn’t happen anymore, that girls were smarter, that guys were smarter. My brother was figuring on her finishing college, becoming a nurse or something. Now the boy will have to leave school, get a job.” It flashed through Tommy’s mind that the job would probably wind up being at Scanlan & Co., and that the news of the Polish grandson-in-law was going to be even more horrible for his father than he had at first imagined.

“Remember after the war,” Tommy said, “how everybody talked about how tough the changes were going to be? I didn’t fight, I was just a little kid, but I can remember everyone saying there would be changes, and there were changes, but they were all good. The wives stopped worrying, everybody bought houses, had a couple of kids, they were damn glad to be home. Now there’s no war but there’s changes, and they’re all bad. You go to Mass, the kids are fooling around, no hats, they’re changing the prayers, they’re changing the music, the rules. I go downtown the other day for a meeting, and there’s two young girls crossing Broadway in front of me, they’re wearing dresses as long as one of my shirts. No stockings. No underwear, for all I know.” He didn’t say that one of the girls was Helen Malone, that he had leaned forward and peered through the windshield incredulously, that when a stray summer breeze had lifted the corner of her short Indian sack dress he had begun to feel very warm indeed and had looked down to see the fabric at his crotch straining visibly, until a car behind him had honked to let him know the light was green. It reminded him of the new bookkeeper in his office, the one with the bleached hair flipped up on her shoulders and the little-girl dresses with the collars and cuffs and the low waists, the one who always rubbed up against him when she passed behind his desk.

Sal reached beneath the bar and brought out the coffee pot. He poured a cup for himself, and a second cup for Tommy.

“You know my sister who’s in the convent? I don’t know what’s going on with her, either. She’s reading
Jane Eyre
. A nun! It’s a book my daughter read in school. I never read it—I had to read
Moby Dick
—so I asked my daughter what it’s about. Some woman is a governess and winds up marrying the man of the house. My sister the nun is reading this? The other day she went to buy a bathing suit. A bathing suit! My sister told me I was behind the times. Maybe that’s it. I’m behind the times. I’m still back in the good times.”

The two men stared at each other. “Jesus Christ,” Tommy whispered, as though he was witnessing a miracle, “that’s the voice of John Scanlan, coming right out of my mouth.”

“It always has, Tom,” Sal said with a smile. “You just never noticed it before. I think that’s what parents are for. You need to learn to talk. They give you the voice.” In the silence Tommy could hear the television, could hear some woman on one of the soaps say stridently, “Doctor, will I ever be a whole person again?”

“I don’t know, Tom,” Sal added, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Nothing ever changes much around here. My mother died. I put the pinball by the door. I got a new TV. On St. Patrick’s Day I have corned beef and cabbage on the menu and put food coloring in the beer. Girls get knocked up, old men die. Excuse me, nothing personal. I don’t know about nuns. Your sister can’t stop being a nun, can she?”

“Who knows anymore?”

“No, forget it, I don’t think you can stop being a nun without a whole lot of rigamarole from the pope. But your father—I don’t know. It sounds like he’s pretty bad.”

Tommy looked into his coffee cup again. The sun was moving and he had to move his cup to make it change colors. He wanted to tell Sal that his father was not the trouble. In some strange way he liked talking like his father, thinking like his father. When he thought about running the company with Mark, all he could think of was reining his brother in, telling him to watch it with the crazy ideas. As he watched his father’s life ebb, day after day, he began to feel as if his father was flowing into him.

Now he sat on the attic floor and all he could think of was changes, how he hated them, how he wanted them to stop, how he sounded like the old man wasting away in his hospital bed. He looked at the wedding picture in his hand and wondered whether the people in that picture had intentionally left it in the dust, whether they had soured on their old dreams or simply had new ones. Tommy felt his own old dreams slipping away, but he was not sure what the new ones would be. He only knew that they would revolve around his wife. He walked to the edge of the ladder and looked down. He could see his wife in that dressing room, black and white and beautiful amid the roses, in her black bra and black half slip, fixing her hair in front of a mirror that would hang on the one wall.

This house felt too grand for him, like the house of an adult, not the house of an overgrown boy, but he knew she would seem at home here, small and elegant in the large, well-proportioned rooms. He remembered leaving Sal’s the other day, driving aimlessly, his eyes clouded by tears, through the Bronx to Westchester, where he was to see about giving an estimate for the foundation for a new wing of the high school. As he turned into the entrance, a sedan had almost sideswiped him, driving too close to the center of the road, and he had yelled “Jesus Christ” and raised his middle finger to the driver before he saw that it was Connie, hunched over the wheel, her lower lip tight between her teeth, with that Martinelli guy in the seat beside her. He had pulled the car over in the parking lot, next to some sawhorses, and rested his head on the wheel until the sick feeling in his stomach had passed.

For hours after that he had driven around, listening to Sinatra on the radio. The day had faded quietly into night, the way it did on these hot August days, and the back of his shirt was drenched with perspiration, but still he drove around, until finally he took a right-hand turn and found himself in the parking lot of the hospital.

“Good evening, Mr. Scanlan,” the youngest of the nurses said when he approached his father’s room. Dorothy O’Haire was sitting in a plastic chair outside, working on some dun-colored piece of knitting. Seeing her there, Tommy assumed that his father was up and around, raising hell, but when he sat down by the bed he could tell that the old man was in a deep sleep; his eyes were still beneath the blue-veined lids, and his breathing seemed to stop between each inhalation, so that Tommy thought each breath was the last. On the bedside table there was an envelope with “Ryan house” written on it in the old man’s florid handwriting, the pride of the nuns at St. Aloysius School; it had been there for weeks, and for the first time Tommy picked it up. As though the gesture had reached deep inside his failing consciousness, John Scanlan’s eyes opened slowly, and he stared at his son.