Object Lessons Part 2

NAME THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS," JOHN JOHN Scanlan said absently as he stood in the kitchen of his house mixing martinis. Scanlan said absently as he stood in the kitchen of his house mixing martinis.

"Sloth," Maggie said. "Gluttony, envy." She stuck her finger into a jar of olives, trying to coax out the three remaining in the bottom. "Avarice," she added. "l.u.s.t."

"The twelve apostles."

"John," Maggie began, as she always did.

Her grandfather had something on his mind. She had known it as soon as she'd seen him that morning, his blue eyes dim, as though turned within. For just a moment, when he saw Connie and Tommy enter the house together, Maggie's father's hand held protectively at the small of Connie's back, John's eyes had brightened, blazed, danced. Now he seemed preoccupied.

Maggie had been able to recite the deadly sins since first grade. The apostles were a throwaway question. Most recently her grandfather had asked her to recite from memory the Pa.s.sion According to St. Mark, and Maggie had been amazed when she had learned it successfully. She was even more amazed to be corrected by her grandfather on two small phrases. When she got home and looked at the New Testament, she had seen that he had been right. She wondered who had made him memorize the Pa.s.sion; she couldn't imagine anyone making her grandfather do anything.

John filled the gla.s.ses from a silver shaker with his initials on it which his wife had purchased because she thought it might make a good heirloom someday. He picked up the matching silver tray and turned to Maggie. "Come into the living room for the entertainment," he said, and his eyes glistened, his wide mouth creased into a humorless tight-lipped grin.

"What entertainment?" Maggie was still going after the olives.

"Ha!" her grandfather said, pus.h.i.+ng through the swinging door.

Maggie heard a little stage cough behind her and knew that her cousin Monica had entered the room. She was wearing the moire taffeta dress with the high waist and enormous puffed sleeves she had worn the week before for her high school graduation. In it she looked beautiful and virginal, her honey-colored hair flipping up on her shoulders, her nails polished the same color as the add-a-pearl necklace her parents had completed as a graduation gift. When Maggie had stopped after the commencement ceremony to congratulate Helen Malone, who had been in the same graduating cla.s.s as Monica, Helen had smiled slowly and said, "Your cousin wins the award for best disguise." Looking over her shoulder at Monica now, Maggie thought she knew exactly what Helen meant. With her pretty face and her curved smile, Monica looked kind and sweet. She stared at Maggie with the cool, direct look she did so well. Then she looked pointedly at Maggie's fingers in the olive jar. "How attractive," she said, and Maggie withdrew her hand so quickly that the jar toppled over onto the counter, and brine splattered onto her flowered skirt and the linoleum floor. "Most attractive," Monica said, leaving Maggie to clean up the mess and wish she was back home in her shorts.

On Sundays, when Maggie went to her grandparents' house, it was usually with her father. Her mother stayed home with the younger children. Maggie had known everything she needed to know about her mother and her father's family when she had started to page through Tommy and Connie's big white leatherette wedding alb.u.m when she was four years old. She could never understand what had moved the photographer to go up into the choir loft, look down, and take a picture of the congregation, which showed a great ma.s.sing of relations on the bride's side of the church and no one behind the groom except his brothers, the ushers, who had appeared in their cutaways in defiance of their father's wishes. She could never understand why her mother chose to put that picture in the alb.u.m. "It's a sad picture, Mommy," Maggie had said once when she was young, before she had begun quietly to take sides.

"It shows something," her mother had said, her lips closing like a red metal zipper. Maggie supposed that whatever the something was, it was long-lived, for her mother came to her in-laws' home only when a special invitation was issued.

Maggie was there often. She liked the order, the cleanliness and the smell of polish, smells that were absent from her everyday life. In her grandmother's living room there was a baby grand piano, a painting of flowers over the fireplace, a corner cabinet filled with china statues of characters from Shakespeare, and enormous quant.i.ties of brocade in a color her grandmother called mauve. There was a big kitchen with geraniums on the wallpaper, and curtains that matched, and a pantry with gla.s.s-fronted cabinets. All the food behind the gla.s.s was arranged in alphabetical order; the family joke was that Mary Frances Scanlan never served mixed vegetables, because she wouldn't know whether to file the cans under M or V.

It was the house of people who had money. "Mag, are you rich?" Debbie had asked her once when they had ridden up the long driveway on their bicycles, the lawn stretching away on either side. Maggie had answered, honest as always, "They are. We aren't."

Now the brocade furniture in the living room was full of people. Her mother was sitting in the corner of the couch, Joseph slumped against her, his eyes half closed as he sucked his middle fingers. Next to her mother was her aunt Ca.s.s, Monica's mother. Uncle James was sitting next to his wife.

"Delivered twins last night, Concerta," James said with a grin.

"Oh, G.o.d," Connie said, her stomach fighting the martini her father-in-law had pressed upon her. "That poor woman."

"No, no," said James, waving his left hand, his wedding band sunk a little into the flesh of his finger, "Very easy delivery. Just popped right out, one after another."

"For G.o.d's sake," said Mary Frances Scanlan, putting her drink down on a coaster on the coffee table. "It's bad enough, shop talk, but your shop talk is the worst, Jimmy."

"Sorry," said James pleasantly. "All part of life, Mother. No sense denying it."

"No sense discussing it," said Mary Frances as Maggie came in with another tray of drinks. "Maggie, here's your cherry. Come quick or I'll give it to one of your brothers."

Her grandmother held a maraschino cherry by the stem, dangling it, dripping, over her whiskey sour. Maggie always ate the cherry from her grandmother's drink, trying not to feel the bite of the liquor before she got to the syrupy taste of the fruit. Like so many other customs in her family, it had continued long past the time that those involved enjoyed it. In fact, Maggie could not remember that she had ever enjoyed it; it had simply become tradition and could not be tampered with. By the time she had eaten the thing, the back of her tongue was usually numb. For a moment she thought of refusing, but instead she took the cherry and held it over her cupped hand, hoping for a chance to throw it away. She looked across the room and saw Monica smiling at her, and she opened her mouth and popped the whole thing in, stem and all. When she wiped her hands on her skirt, Monica laughed.

"Well, gentlemen," said her grandfather, coming up behind Maggie and lifting his Scotch from amid the martinis on the tray, "The Roman Catholic church is going to h.e.l.l in a handbasket." John Scanlan had a tendency to choose phrases and stick with them. "h.e.l.l in a handbasket" was one of his favorites.

"Shop talk," said Mary Frances, crossing her legs and pulling at a stray thread on the brocade chair with her index finger and thumb.

"It's shop talk that pays for this house," her husband said. "It's shop talk that pays for that Lincoln Continental and the private schools for all these children."

Maggie heard a sigh from the hallway. Monica had moved back into the shadows.

"And for your orthodontia, miss," John Scanlan said without turning around to look at Monica, whose teeth as a child, before she became perfect, had been as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery.

John Scanlan said it nice and evenly, the way he said almost everything else. The oldtimers at the factory always said that it took a man a couple of hours after he'd been fired to take it all in, because John Scanlan said "You're fired" in the afternoon in exactly the voice in which he said "Good morning" each morning. Maggie had noticed lately that it was a good bit like the voice in which she answered catechism questions: Why did G.o.d make me? G.o.d made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

"Today in church I see four women without hats," he continued. "Without anything on their heads. Never mind those flimsy little black veils that all you girls are wearing"-her grandfather looked over at Maggie, whose rayon mantilla was sitting on top of her little patent handbag on the hall telephone table-"now we've got women bareheaded. Bareheaded! As though they were going to Coney Island instead of the House of the Lord of Hosts.

"This is all because of that woman," he added, meaning the president's widow, who had begun wearing the mantilla to Ma.s.s on summer Sundays several years before, "who has probably never given a thought to the millinery industry in her life.

"Similarly, Johnnie, who runs the hat shop on Main Street, tells me that business is bad. Men are not wearing hats anymore, he tells me. Now whose fault is that?"

They all knew the answer. Mary Frances, who was her husband's straight man as well as his wife, sipped her drink, put it down, folded her hands in her lap, and said obediently, "The president."

"Exactly!" John Scanlan slammed his broad flat hand down on the table next to him.

From behind her Maggie could hear Monica sigh again. She looked over at her mother, whose eyes were s.h.i.+ny from alcohol. Connie looked as though she had left her consciousness at home in Kenwood and sent her body on to the Scanlans without her. Maggie realized that that was how her mother always looked when she was around Tommy's family. She also realized that her parents never sat together when they were at John and Mary Frances's house. Maggie's father was sitting on the piano bench across the room.

Variations of this conversation took place every Sunday at the Scanlan house. John hated the Kennedys, whom he saw as a bunch of second-rate Scanlans with too much hair. And he hated what was happening to the Catholic church because of Pope John XXIII, not because, like his contemporaries, he thought the changes were blasphemous, but because he thought they were bad for business. "The two Johns," he called the men he thought responsible for unnecessary change in America, although both were now dead: the boy president and the populist pope.

While all around him in Our Lady of Lourdes people slowly, painfully adapted themselves to the Ma.s.s in English, John Scanlan whispered the Latin. It was disconcerting to share a pew with him. The priest would intone "The Lord be with you," and from John's seat would come a sound, like a snake exhaling, the carrying sibilants of "Dominus vobisc.u.m." Occasionally when they were together her grandfather, a tall handsome man with yellowing white hair, would turn to Maggie and inquire, "Confiteor deo?" and Maggie would be expected to answer "omnipotenti," or, on occasion, to finish the entire prayer. "A plus," Monica sometimes called her, and, like everything else Monica said, the tone was pleasant, the smile ubiquitous, and the meaning mean as h.e.l.l.

John Scanlan had started manufacturing communion hosts when he was twenty-one, a newlywed with two years of college, eleven younger siblings, and a mother dying of the same lung cancer that had killed her husband ten years before. For a week after he quit school John had thought about growth industries and then he had rented a pressing machine and s.p.a.ce in a garage on a back street in the South Bronx and begun to stamp out little wafers of unleavened bread. The Jews who rented him the place thought he was crazy. Two years later he had his own factory and twenty-two employees.

He began to make holy cards, vestments, and a.s.sorted communion veils and confirmation robes, and the three sons who worked in the business knew how to market them all: buy from a Catholic. It was as simple as that. John Scanlan's only real compet.i.tor had been a company in Illinois owned by a Methodist; the year Maggie was born it had gone out of business, only six months after its founder had gotten drunk at a convention and made a joke about Scanlan & Co., the Irish, and booze.

John Scanlan now had a plant in Manila doing machine embroidery on vestments and altar cloths, a plant in White Plains that employed 160 people, and a not-so-hidden interest in three construction companies, two garment factories, and the cement company for which Tommy worked. He was very, very rich.

He was rich enough to retire and be rich for the rest of his life, but he had no wish to. All he wanted to do was to manage the lives of his children, and to be left alone so he could become richer still. Already there were a few parishes in progressive suburbs which were simplifying their altars and the rites that took place upon them. John Scanlan predicted that by the year 2000 priests would be saying Ma.s.s in Bermuda shorts, handing out kaiser rolls at communion, and Scanlan & Co. would be bankrupt.

"Now he'll say 'Then, good-by easy street,'" Maggie thought, looking down at her skirt.

"Then, good-by easy street," said John Scanlan, picking up his drink.

"Pop," said Mark, "we can diversify. We can modify. If the Church decides to simplify the vestments, change the altar cloths, it would take us three days to change the machines over from the old lamb motif to a simple plain cross. The church changes, we change with it."

"We are not talking about embroidery. We are talking about disaster."

"Jesus, why do I bother?" Uncle Mark said, refilling his gla.s.s from the c.o.c.ktail shaker.

"I often wonder the same thing," his father said flatly.

Maggie's father pumped the piano pedals and stayed out of the way. His gla.s.s was empty but he made no move to refill it. Connie's gla.s.s was still half full. She had a sheen of sweat on her upper lip, which even for early July seemed a bit extravagant.

"Concerta?" said Mary Frances, leaning forward with a pleasant smile, like a woman in a magazine. "Another?"

"No. Thank you. Really," said Maggie's mother, who had never been able to think of a term of address for her mother-in-law and so for thirteen years had called her nothing at all.

"Well, let's talk about Tom here," Mr. Scanlan said, without looking at his middle son. "They're ripping Tom's backyard up. Making a shantytown. I have knowledge of this only secondhand, because no one saw fit to give us any of the contracts for this development. Be that as it may, it will be all over in that part of the world by next year."

"They dug six foundations in one day," Maggie said.

"Good girl," said her grandfather. "Six foundations. Soon it'll be thirty-six. They're planning seventy-two houses for that site, and not houses I'd want to live in. That plasterboard stuff you can put your elbow right through. Maybe even septic tanks. Cheap kitchens. You know the idea: Come live where the other half lives."

"Maybe the development will bring property values up," Tommy said. "Nice new development behind the old houses. Lots of people think those houses are better than the old ones."

"I think they'll be beautiful," said Connie. "I heard they're going to have laundry chutes and garbage disposals in the kitchens. And sunken living rooms and patios."

There was a long silence. Maggie picked at a cuticle and avoided looking at her mother. It was a canon of the Scanlan household that old things were better than new ones. It was not to be argued with, like eating the cherry. Maggie chewed her little finger.

"The first thing a man looks at is your hands," Mary Frances said softly to Maggie, pulling at her granddaughter's fingers, frowning at the dried blood in the corner of each bitten nail.

"I heard they're very nice houses," Connie added, and Maggie could hear the anger in her voice.

"No such thing, little girl. When you see them you'll tell me different. Half bas.e.m.e.nts. Wall-to-wall on slab. Property values over there will land in the toilet. Sheenies to the right of you. Sheenies to the left of you." John took a big sip of his martini and smiled, a smile Maggie noticed was oddly like Monica's. Maggie thought her grandfather's eyes looked like the sapphires in her grandmother's big sapphire-and-diamond earrings. She remembered when she was a little girl thinking that she could see through the blue of her grandfather's eyes into his head, see wheels and cogs and clicking things, like the inside of a watch. She could almost hear the clicking now.

"But you two won't have to worry about all that," John said, pulling something from his pants pocket, tossing it with a grin into Connie's lap, where it made a little metallic sound as it hit her engagement and wedding rings. Maggie turned to her father, but he was looking down at the piano keys. The room was very still.

"Congratulations," Mary Frances said brightly, but still Connie had not lifted her hands from her lap. Joseph murmured softly in his sleep and turned to tuck his head into his mother's side. Finally James said, "Those look like keys to me."

"Oh, brilliant," John said under his breath, and aloud he said, "And the door they open is oak, four inches thick with a mullioned window in it, and the rooms inside, none of them are smaller than twenty by fifteen, not even the kitchen. Six bedrooms, four baths, a fireplace you could stand in in the living room. The prettiest azaleas on the block."

"Remember the Ryans, Tom?" Mary Frances said brightly. "They've moved to Florida. Only three houses down from us. Maggie could walk up the hill to have Sat.u.r.day lunch with your father."

"We could never afford that house, Mother," Tommy said quietly, and Maggie looked down at her patent-leather shoes, luminous in the half light.

"Bought and paid for," John Scanlan said. "Bought and paid for." Connie raised her head, and Maggie thought her mother's hair looked like patent leather, too, and Connie's voice sounded soft and warm.

"What took you so long?" she said, and she stared right into John Scanlan's eyes, and the room was quiet. Maggie saw her grandfather look right back at Connie, as though there were only the two of them in the room, as though he loved her. "Ah, little girl," he said, "I have the gift of perfect timing."

"We're not moving, Pop," Tommy said, but his father did not look at him.

"We'll discuss it another time," John said, but he still looked deep into Connie's eyes, and he still smiled.

"No," she said, but no one seemed to hear her. Suddenly, as though of one accord, the various Scanlans by birth and by marriage rose and began to gather up their handbags and call to their children. It was as though they had come for something and now it was accomplished. Only Connie remained sitting, staring over at her husband on the piano stool.

"Tom, bring the gla.s.ses into the kitchen," Mary Frances said as she walked into the hallway, and Tommy stood up and lifted the tray, his wife watching him silently.

Maggie could hear the sounds of departure and cleaning up as she went upstairs to the bathroom. She heard the front door slam and knew her parents would be waiting for her out in the car, not speaking, the boys bouncing in the back seat.

Monica was in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, looking carefully at her face in one of the mirrors. The room had two single beds with pink spreads, two dressing tables with pink-and-white ruffled skirts, two bureaus, two bride dolls. It was always called the girls' room, but only Maggie's aunt Margaret had ever used it. The other girl was Elizabeth Ann, the Scanlan baby who had died at birth. Sometimes Mary Frances would come up to this room and sit on the bed that was never used, the better one, the one by the window, and she would stare out over the big lawn and the shrubbery like a person struck blind, holding a pillow to her chest. And if Maggie came upon her on those occasions she would beckon her to the bed, and stroke her hair until Maggie's head started to feel numb and her shoulders to cramp. All the time Mary Frances looked far, far away, staring without seeing a thing.

It was just like Monica, Maggie thought, to seat herself carelessly on that bed now, pulling the carefully arranged spread a little awry. On those few nights when Maggie had slept in this room, she had always been careful not to sleep in, even to sit on, Elizabeth Ann's bed.

"So you're moving," Monica said.

"You heard my mother," Maggie said.

"I heard your mother, and I heard our grandfather. 'Oil and water,' my mother once called them. The oil part was absolutely right for your mother, but I'm not sure about water for Grandpop. I guess your parents are oil and water, too. I guess that's what happens when you meet, get engaged, and get married all in a couple of weeks. Oil and water."

"Shut up, Monica," Maggie said.

Monica turned back to the mirror. "Just think," she said, studying her face. "We'll have a whole week to catch up on things when we go to the beach with Grandmom. My last year going, too, now that I'm out of school." She locked eyes with Maggie in the mirror. "I have so much to tell you. Just the other day, Richard Joseph's older sister was telling me how her brother and all his friends call you a carpenter's dream-flat as a board. I didn't know he was your boyfriend."

Maggie looked down at her skirt. On one side was an olive juice stain, on the other a wet mark made by gin. She sniffed and realized that she smelled strange. Then her head snapped back. She did not want Monica to think she was crying. She started downstairs.

"I can't wait to see your new bathing suit," Monica called after her in her pleasantest voice. "Or your new house."

When Maggie got to the bottom of the stairs, her grandfather was standing in the doorway, looking out upon the great sweep of his lawn, and at the station wagon in the driveway. Maggie stood next to him for a moment, trying to see it as he did. She hoped her mother couldn't see her.

"Your grandmother's right, for once," John Scanlan said, putting his big hand atop her head. "You and I can have lunch together. You've got a lot to learn, little girl. This whole kit and caboodle is going to be what they call an object lesson for you. For some other people, too."

"I don't really want to move, Grandpop," Maggie said.

"Not a question of want, miss. We're talking about a question of need." He put his hand into his pants pocket and took out the keys he had thrown into Connie's lap "Your mother left these on the couch," he said with a grin. "Give 'em to her."

"I'll give them to my dad."

"Your mother," John Scanlan said. "You heard me. Go on."

5

THE NEXT MORNING MAGGIE WENT TO the Bronx to see her grandfather-her grandfather Mazza, not her grandfather Scanlan. Her grandfather Scanlan tried to stay as far away as possible from New York City, although he had grown up there; he had moved his business to White Plains when he bought the big house in Westchester County, and he always referred to the Bronx as "the G.o.dforsaken Bronx." (Brooklyn was "the slum," and Manhattan "that h.e.l.lhole." Queens, for some odd reason, was "the home of mental midgets." John Scanlan never spoke of Staten Island.) Maggie's grandfather Mazza, on the other hand, had not been out of the Bronx for almost ten years. the Bronx to see her grandfather-her grandfather Mazza, not her grandfather Scanlan. Her grandfather Scanlan tried to stay as far away as possible from New York City, although he had grown up there; he had moved his business to White Plains when he bought the big house in Westchester County, and he always referred to the Bronx as "the G.o.dforsaken Bronx." (Brooklyn was "the slum," and Manhattan "that h.e.l.lhole." Queens, for some odd reason, was "the home of mental midgets." John Scanlan never spoke of Staten Island.) Maggie's grandfather Mazza, on the other hand, had not been out of the Bronx for almost ten years.

Maggie was supposed to take the train to his house, but she usually rode her bicycle, getting off to run beside it as she sprinted across the highways that took people from New York City to New England. She brought her grandfather groceries, and put the brown paper bag, still warm from the sun and the metal mesh of her bicycle basket, on the red table in the middle of the kitchen. Then she put all the groceries away, except for the tomatoes, which she left on the kitchen counter. Once she had forgotten to put the groceries away, and when she came back a week later they were still there, the meat and vegetables giving off a sweet dead smell, the milk and b.u.t.ter high as Gorgonzola cheese. It seemed safer and more proper to dump all the stuff in the can at the end of the drive than to ask her grandfather for an explanation. She knew of no monosyllabic explanation for such a thing, and was sure no polysyllabic explanation would be forthcoming. Her grandfather Mazza preferred contemplation to conversation.

In fact her two grandfathers would have been a perfect match-one a talker, the other a listener-except that they would have had complete disdain for each other's background, work, family and character. No one seemed to find it odd that they had never met.

Angelo Mazza was a small man, very elegant, who always wore a white s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned to the top b.u.t.ton and a pair of beige or pale gray pants tailored by his brother-in-law, a pants maker. When he had arrived from Italy after the First World War, one of his cousins, who had come over earlier, had found him a position as the caretaker of Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery nearly on the border of Westchester County and the Bronx. Angelo had taken the job until something better came along, but nothing ever did. The job paid a very small salary, and provided him with a tiny stone cottage just within the cemetery gates: a living room, a small dining room, a kitchen, one bedroom downstairs and a very small one upstairs under the eaves. To make ends meet, his wife had taken the subway to the city, as they called Manhattan, to the garment district, where she had been a finisher for ladies' lingerie.

There were some in his family who had thought Angelo would stay single all his life. He was a very private man, the eldest of five, all the other children girls; he had always had his own room, and his mother, who had been a widow almost as long as he could remember, treated him like a prince. But as soon as he had been old enough to grow a mustache his female relatives had been on him constantly, bringing this girl and that girl to the house, the poor young women turning red as they listened to the phony excuses about why they had shown up at this or that particular time. He was forty years old when he finally married: At a party at his sister Rose's he had sat next to a young woman with fat black plaits crossed over her head and a face and shape both bovine. She spoke no English and knew no one at the party; she was a niece visiting a woman down the street, who had been invited merely from politeness because she was a young widow whose husband and two children had died in a flu epidemic in the countryside outside Milan. Angelo had been so moved by the widow's discomfort and fear that he had sat beside her, not talking much, all afternoon, and had gone to her aunt's to have coffee the next day. Three months later they were married.

His only child had once turned to him, after yet another quarrel with her mother about her clothes, her manner, her schoolwork, herself, and asked tearfully, "Why did you marry her?" Angelo had turned away, begun wiping the kitchen counter, then suddenly had turned back and, lifting his silvery head, said in Italian, "Because she needed someone." "Why you?" Connie had screamed back, weeping, the tears falling onto the hands she held against her cheeks. "She needed someone like me," said Angelo, and went outside to his rosebushes while his daughter sat at the head of the kitchen table and sobbed.

Maggie usually found her grandfather by the rosebushes, kneeling on a square of cotton fabric he kept in his tool closet especially for that purpose. He believed those who tried to tend plants standing up were doomed to failure. He would cultivate carefully around the roots, mix a handful of peat moss in the black topsoil, and occasionally allow his only granddaughter to help him. It saddened him that Maggie's brothers did not seem interested, but secretly he thought of them as Irish children, children with no ties to the earth at all. Maggie he thought of as one of his people.

He never called her Maggie, always Maria Goretti, which was her full name, after the young Italian girl who had been canonized because she fought off a rapist and died rather than capitulate and live. Angelo had always thought Concetta's decision to name the first child so flagrantly was a rebellion against her husband's enormous, ebullient family, but if it had been, then the nickname given her by her grandmother Scanlan had effectively muted the protest. Not even the nuns at school called Maggie by her given name, except when they called her up to get her report card.

"Hi, Grandpop," she said, as she sat on the ground next to him.

"You catch cold," he said.

"Grandpop, it's July. It's too hot to catch cold. The ground is dry. Can I work?"