Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  When he turned from the window, Gino was gone and his brother Mark was just coming up the stairs. Mark was flushed bright pink in the heat, but his tie was still tied tight, while Tommy’s was at half-mast. They looked like brothers, both mostly beige: beige hair, faded from the tow they’d had as boys, beige freckles, darker beige eyes. But where Tommy was long and rangy, Mark was solid and short. It was only after Mark had married that he had been able to convince his family to stop calling him “Squirt,” although John Scanlan, who was an even six feet tall, still felt compelled to make comments about his son’s height from time to time.

  “We’re going to have to paint the trucks next week,” Tommy said.

  “I don’t know why you fight him on that,” Mark said. “You know who wins.”

  The two stood silent, sweating. Tommy took a great deal of satisfaction out of the fact that he didn’t work directly for his father, and Mark resented him for it, thinking that depending on John Scanlan’s largesse once removed was worse than simply facing facts and going to work for Scanlan & Co. “We’re all in the family business,” their sister Margaret always said with a grin. Mark could not understand how this could apply to obstetrics or a religious vocation, but Margaret said that was simply because he was always too literal.

  In fact Tommy would have preferred not to work for any Scanlan enterprise. When he and Connie had first married they had talked of moving to California, of living where it was always warm and no one had ever heard of John Scanlan, where they didn’t care if you were Italian as long as you weren’t Mexican. But their own fecundity had laid waste to that dream. During the first five years of their marriage, when they had heard not a word from Tommy’s parents, they had learned how difficult it was to pay the bills on a working man’s salary. Then John Scanlan had taken an interest in Maggie, and Tommy had been hired, after a perfunctory interview, as a vice president at First Concrete. His wife had barely spoken to him for nearly two months after he took the job. The words she had used to break the silence were “I’m pregnant again.”

  There were only two reasons why Tommy preferred being an executive to being one of the men carrying and shoveling cement. The first was that he needed the money. He and Connie had practiced rhythm since Maggie was born, and they had three sons to show for it, and a suspicion of another on the way. Saddle shoes alone ran him two hundred dollars a year. The other thing he loved about his job was his office. As offices went, it was on the small side, with a window that looked over the parking lot to the basketball court and playground across the street, and the red-brick public school building beyond that. When two trains passed going in opposite directions on the elevated line, his office shivered like a child with a high fever. Sometimes in the summer the Sanitation Department would not be quick enough about picking up the garbage, and the wholesale fruit market across the road would give off an overripe sweet smell. But Tommy had a gray desk, a gray file cabinet, a gray table that held an adding machine and stood beneath a wall displaying a full-color map of the city of New York, with pins in it for job locations, which made Tommy feel a little like a general. He kept his framed Fordham diploma, the result of two years of full-time studies and four years of nights after Maggie and Terence were born, in the big bottom drawer of his desk, along with a bottle of Four Roses and a sweatshirt to change into for basketball games. He also had a studio photograph of Connie on her wedding day, her eyes so big and black amid the whites and grays of the picture that it looked as if they’d been made with the end of a lighted cigarette. When certain clients, mainly the big boys, came to see him, he put the picture on the filing cabinet, but most of the time he kept it in the drawer. His brother Mark had noticed this once, and had gone home to report to his wife that things in Tom and Connie’s marriage were even worse than they’d imagined. In truth the picture had been put away for exactly the opposite reason; while most men considered it simply part of their office equipment, like a stapler or a striped tie, Tommy Scanlan believed that the photograph would tell the world a private thing: that he was crazy about his wife.

  Like so many of their friends, Connie Mazza and Tommy Scanlan had gotten married because they were expecting a baby. It had come as a great surprise to both of them. Connie’s sole exposure to sex education had been the day before her twelfth birthday, when her aunt Rose had given her a box of sanitary napkins almost a year too late. Tommy found out afterward that it had never occurred to Connie that the surge of heat and compulsion and the aftermath of embarrassment she had felt on weekend nights in his car could result in the conception of a child.

  Tommy had known better, but he had been similarly dim in not realizing that it was impossible that the answer to “Is this a safe time?” could be “Yes” every Friday and Saturday night. It was not until after they were married that he discovered that Connie had supposed he was asking only about the chances of someone catching him under her long skirts and net petticoats. Maggie had been born six months after their wedding, and Tommy’s explanation of her prematurity was for many years a great joke among his brothers, given the fact that the infant was the biggest baby in the nursery. Connie said nothing. By the time she had her baby, she did not care what anyone thought.

  Even all these years later, when Tommy Scanlan looked across the kitchen table after a couple of beers and wondered who the hell this woman was, he knew that if they had not gotten caught he would have married her just the same. When they met at the YMCA jitterbug contest he had been going with someone else, a lively girl named Mary Roe, who had freckles and wild auburn curls and was a friend of his sister. He had danced with Connie only because the two winning couples in the contest had been asked to switch partners after the trophies had been given out. Connie was so small she had come only to his shoulder, her back as narrow as a child’s. She had black hair waved off her face, and black eyes so big and blank that he almost felt he could see inside her head. Her skin was white and her lipstick a pure clear red. She looked like a painting to him. She spoke not one word during the entire dance—the song had been “Moonlight Serenade,” and he thought he could very faintly hear, or perhaps feel, her humming—but as the music stopped she said “Thank you” and did not step away. He felt as though he’d been punched in the chest. When the music started again, he simply held on to her and began to dance some more. That was the way it was for the rest of the night, as Mary Roe watched from the sidelines and finally went out to a car with Mark Scanlan and let him do everything she had never let a boy do to her before.

  Connie went home that night with Jimmy Martinelli, the boy who had brought her to the dance in the first place. He drove her in silence to the cemetery where the Mazzas lived, leaned across her to open the door from inside, said “Good luck” and drove away.

  Most people assumed that Tommy had fallen in love with Connie because of the way she looked. The fashion of their adolescence had been for pink-skinned blondes with small noses and soft mouths, and so Connie had never believed anyone, including Tommy, when they said that she was beautiful. Tommy remembered their first Christmas, when she had brought home two boxes of cards to send to their friends and families, the message “Blessed Christmas” inside on cream-colored paper and a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary on the front. Connie had picked the cards because she thought they would go over well with various Scanlans, but when Tommy had seen the painting he had burst out laughing. “I’ve heard of people who send out pictures of themselves on their cards, but nobody who sends out paintings,” he said. And in truth the serenely beautiful Madonna, with her slightly sallow skin, dark hair, prominent nose and full lips looked very much like Connie. Tommy had turned over the card and read the fine print. “Giotto,” he said. “Did you pose for this?”

  “For your information, we invented the Renaissance,” Connie had said in a huff, going up to their room until he came and kissed the frown from between her eyebrows.

  But it was not her looks that had so compelled him. Tommy had never been able to put it int
o words, but it was the blankness of her he was so mesmerized by, the feeling of an empty bottle waiting to be filled, and filled by him. He had been waiting for so long for someone to take him seriously, to listen to him. Looking at her great bottomless eyes he got the feeling that that was what she was doing, although as the years went by he would sometimes wonder if it was simply that nobody was home in there. He could never get a word in edgewise with his family, and he was a little afraid of both his parents, his mother with her patently false patina of elegance and control, his father with his seemingly effortless ability to rise in the world and his disdain for those who did not. It had not escaped Tommy’s notice that Connie Mazza would rise in the world simply by moving to a place where people lived, instead of one where they were buried. He was also sexually enthralled by her. When she would lean forward to tune the car radio and he would get a whiff of her, his blood felt as if it would burst from his body.

  He had suspected that there would-be trouble when, after a highly public breakdown by Mary Roe in the ladies’ room at Sacred Heart Academy, his sister Margaret had come home and asked him, meaning no harm, whether he was really going with a Puerto Rican girl from Spanish Harlem. But there was little talk of the affair until, six weeks after they had begun dating, and five weeks after Tommy decided he meant to marry Connie, he had brought her home for Sunday dinner.

  Connie had shopped for a week and had spent all the money she had saved from her secretarial job on a red satin dress with a sweetheart neckline and a tiny tight waist from which her bust loomed like a stretch of cream crepe de Chine. As they drove up the long driveway to the Scanlan house and saw Tommy’s sister and one of her friends sitting on the steps in navy-blue skirts and pale-blue sweater sets, Connie had known she had made a dreadful mistake.

  At dinner no one spoke to her except Mary Frances, who handed dishes across the table and said “Peas?” and “Potatoes?” as though she and Connie were characters in The Philadelphia Story. After Tommy had driven Connie home, he had come back to find his father sitting in the living room in the dark, his cigar burned to the nub at one end and chewed to the nub at the other. “If you think I busted my ass so you could marry some goddamn guinea from the Bronx, you’ve got another think coming,” said Mr. Scanlan, who was quite drunk. Tommy went upstairs while his father continued to talk; the only other word Tommy caught was “wop.” The following Friday Connie told him that her period was late.

  And that had been that. They had gotten caught, and Tommy had felt that the ties had tightened with each of the babies, each of them unplanned, each of them making the ties more fast, each of them keeping them from—what? He did not know. His feeling about what their lives might have been were as vague as his feelings about Connie, formed of odd, intense, momentary yearnings. He sometimes wondered what they would have been like as a couple, what life would have been like had they not instantly become a family, had not his empty vessel been filled year after year with the babies she loved so much and watched grow so sadly. Sometimes he would wake in the morning, the sky blue-gray as a dolphin’s back, and for just a few moments he would wonder who this was in bed beside him, and whether he was going to be late for his nine o’clock class. It would come to him slowly that the house was filled with people, created by him, connected to him for life, and he would be weak with incredulity and fear. He knew what it meant to be a father; it meant being sure, outspoken, critical, bold, controlled. It meant being John Scanlan. This life of his was a masquerade.

  Then he would roll over, embrace his wife, lift her frilled nightgown and straddle her narrow body, as he had this morning. And he would be all right again, throwing off the sheets afterward, pulling on his shorts, going to the bathroom, thinking only for a moment of another baby next year, wondering if it was a safe time, putting on his T-shirt and his suit pants and going down to breakfast.

  “So I hear you and your boss drove a half hour out of your way to get his oil changed,” Tommy said to Mark, running his hand along his damp forehead. “What did I screw up now?”

  “Is it a possibility that the owner of this company just might want to stop in occasionally and see how things are going?” said Mark, who had flushed at the words “your boss.”

  “Is it a possibility that he wanted to see how things are going? No,” said Tommy. “Is it a possibility that he wants to give me a hard time about something? You know it. What’d I do this time, except let the goddamned candy canes get dirty?”

  “He says you and Connie and the kids should come to the house Sunday,” Mark said, running his finger around the inside of his collar.

  “Why?”

  “Would he tell me?” said Mark. “I’m just carrying the message. He was smiling when he said it.”

  “That’s the worst news I’ve heard all day,” Tommy said. “That means something’s up. Maybe he finally got my marriage annulled.”

  Looking out the window again, his back to his brother, Tommy watched his father climb into the cab of the cement mixer. There was a low rumble as the engine turned over, and then John Scanlan began to drive the thing around the lot in circles, like a child with a new bicycle.

  Tommy began to examine his conscience. Before confession you were supposed to consider your sins; as a boy, Tommy had tried to do this, and come back time and time again to petty theft, disobedience, and self-abuse. But when he had to face his father there always seemed to be an infinite number of sins to consider, although lately he had felt as if he might be in a state of grace. First Concrete was not losing money. Maggie had justified John Scanlan’s investment in her school tuition by getting the highest average in her class. Connie had actually agreed to attend a card party with the other Scanlan wives. He was trying to figure out why his father wanted to see all of them at once when Mark added, “He said something about some new construction behind your house. I think he’s pissed we didn’t get any of the contracts. Particularly cement.”

  “I didn’t know a thing about it until all hell broke loose this morning,” said Tommy. “The company’s in the Bronx. Who says we have to get work in Westchester? We’re plenty busy with city work.”

  “Come to the house on Sunday,” said Mark. “What’s the harm? The kids can play outside. Maybe he’s just trying to be sociable.”

  “Get real.”

  “We don’t see you enough, anyhow. Gail never sees Connie. She asked her over for bridge last Thursday but she said she couldn’t come.”

  “Connie’s not feeling too well.”

  Mark’s mouth narrowed into a bitter line, making him look as if he was trying to hold his teeth in. “What, again?” he finally said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. It’s too soon to tell.”

  Below them the cement mixer was still circling the lot. John Scanlan narrowly missed taking the passenger side off his own freshly waxed car as a mechanic backed the Lincoln out of one of the bays. The old man laid on the horn, which gave off a deep throaty honk, like some big water bird.

  “I have to go,” Mark said. “I’ll see you Sunday.”

  Tommy did not reply. He watched his father climb down from the cement mixer. The old man stopped to talk for a moment to the mechanic, and Tommy saw the man begin to grin and bob his head.

  So many people were drawn to John Scanlan—drawn by his power, and by his personality, too; by the big voice, the vigor, the gift he had for colorful language, the sheer force of the man. On the wall behind his desk at Scanlan & Co., he had hung a framed copy of a quotation about Teddy Roosevelt: “The baby at every christening, the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.” No one who knew John Scanlan had to ask what it meant. Anyone who had ever been to a christening, a wedding, a funeral he attended knew he outshone the baby, the bride, the corpse. He could inspire love in an instant from anyone who happened to be in his good graces. It was just that so few people ever were.

  Tommy could not remember a time when he had ever been in his father’s good graces. As he watched, Mark loped across the park
ing lot and got into his father’s car.

  Tommy turned the radio back on. Sinatra was singing “A Foggy Day in London Town,” Tommy’s favorite song. He closed his office door and sat down at his desk. From his file drawer he took out the photograph of his wife and placed it on one corner of the desk. Another baby. More saddle shoes. Another place at the table to be filled. His stomach had turned sour and his head hurt.

  In a half hour, he would go over to Sal’s for lunch. He could think things over. Not whether he would go to his father’s or not; he’d be there, and he’d have Connie with him, even if it meant another argument. It was a question of what he’d do when he got there. He looked at the photograph, at those beautiful eyes. Another baby. He could only push his father so far. The last time he’d taken him on had been the now unimaginable night when he’d won his wife. Tommy would always think of that as his greatest triumph.

  “Shit, what can it be now?” he said, as the strings swelled and Sinatra finished singing.

  4

  NAME THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS,” JOHN 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. “Lust.”