Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “Tom, bring the glasses 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 godforsaken Bronx.” (Brooklyn was “the slum,” and Manhattan “that hellhole.” 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 butter 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 shirt buttoned to the top button 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. “Sh
e 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?”

  “You get your tools.”

  When she came back from the supply closet she went for a moment inside the house to go to the bathroom. As always she opened the door of the medicine cabinet and peered inside, at the small cake of black mascara and the disc of rouge left behind by her mother. In the small bedroom, its ceiling sloped with the roof line, there was also her mother’s high school yearbook and a closet full of old clothes: a black suit, a red satin dress with a low neck, a checked dirndl, a peasant blouse. It was stifling on the top floor, and Maggie did not stop to look again at the yearbook picture. She knew it by heart: Concetta Anna Mazza, Chorus, 2, 3, 4; Dance Club 4. And beneath that, in italics, the quotation: “She walks in beauty, like the night.”

  Outside, over the low stone wall just behind the rose garden, was the neighborhood—blocks of clapboard row houses shining clean and quiet in the sun, like so many others in the North Bronx, the backyards filled with tomato plants and the ornamental urns filled with hydrangeas. No one had ever suggested, however, that there was another cemetery like her grandfather’s anywhere else. When Angelo Mazza had taken over the place it had seemed half empty, tombstones only on one side, although a good many of the other plots had been purchased by families moving into the area around it. It had looked a little like a golf course, satisfyingly green and yet a bit austere, with its great metal gates crowned with one enormous cross flanked by two smaller ones. Angelo had gone to work.

  On either side of the gates he had planted pink azaleas, and along the fence that separated the cemetery from a back alley and a block of backyards he had put a wisteria, a stick of a thing with three skinny tendrils. Along the fieldstone wall he had planted orange lilies he had found beside a creek one day in Westchester Country, growing wild in mats of green foliage. He put violets around his own front door, which duplicated themselves as fast as field mice, and around back he put the rose garden and a vegetable garden and herb patch. When Concetta was a little girl he had sometimes taken her upstate for picnics on Sundays, when there were few funerals and her mother liked to rest, and he would dig up wildflowers and roll them in damp sheets of newspaper and plant them when they arrived back home. Angelo had been doing this for nearly forty years, and the result was that in Calvary Cemetery in July there were flowers everywhere. People said it was more wonderful than the Botanical Garden, and once, before Maggie was born, the curator there had even come to talk to him. Her grandfather always told Maggie that the man actually knew surprisingly little about the proper care of plants.

  When Maggie knelt down next to him he was working coffee grounds into the soil with his hands. Beside him was a bowl with soap, water, and a sponge, to clean the aphids from the rose bushes. The roses he liked best were white with an edging of bright pink along the petals. There were three bushes behind the house and two on either side of Maggie’s grandmother’s grave, grown so thick in the three years since the headstone had been put in and the bushes had been planted that only MAZZA in capital letters was visible, the “Anna 1890–1963” and “Angelo 1880–” hidden beneath the leaves of the plants. The grave was in the back, near the wall, and today there was a tan canvas tent not far from it. Paul Fogarty and his mongoloid brother, Leonard, had just finished digging and were standing, sweating, leaning on shovels.

  “Who’s getting buried?” Maggie said.

  “Mrs. Romano,” her grandfather said. “She died in her sleep.”

  “Her daughter was a friend of Mommy’s.”

  “Her niece,” Angelo Mazza said, running the sponge down one long green stem, the paler green bugs leaping before him. “This one, only boys.”

  They worked together under the hot sun for half an hour, but Maggie was restless and her hair kept falling into her eyes. She went inside to wash her hands and pull her hair back from her face with a rubber band, but instead of returning to the plants she began to wander around the cemetery grounds. The older graves were in the back, the pale gray headstones blackening where the letters were cut and the roses were sculpted in the granite. Maggie’s landmark had always been an angel on a pedestal, blank-eyed as a blind man, a spray of flowers slanting over one arm as if the angel was a beauty queen, to mark the grave of a woman who had died forty years before. Her grandfather had planted azaleas around its base, but they lasted only through the beginning of May; their white flowers turned mocha-colored, then curled and dropped to the ground. The green leaves of the plants looked as though they were perspiring in the July heat. A man squatted by a monument against the back wall.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” said Mr. Gennaro, who carved the inscriptions in the stones. “You’re getting big. Bigger than your mama, I bet, by now.”

  “Two inches,” said Maggie. “She says I’m a Scanlan.”

  “Never mind that crap,” the old man said, unstrapping his leather tool belt and placing it at the foot of a square pink marble stone with nothing on it but the name JESSUP in capital letters. Maggie remembered that when she was first learning to spell she thought this was the place where Jesus was buried, and she was punished in school for insisting that the Holy Sepulchre was in the Bronx and wasn’t half as big as Joe the greengrocer’s mausoleum.

  “Who’s Jessup?” she said.

  “Old guy lived a couple blocks up the avenue, over his office. A lawyer. Nice man, no family, did house closings and things during the day, upstairs in three rooms at night. About ten years back the doctor told him he was sick and he came here and picked out a plot. Your grandpop found the guy a nice space. The stone went up about five years ago. I’m doing name, date of birth.”

  “He’s not dead yet?”

  “Nah. You know doctors. He wasn’t really that sick.”

  Mr. Gennaro squatted down and began to measure the stone. He pulled a wax pencil from behind one ear, hairy as a coconut, and made a mark here and there. Maggie jiggled her legs.

  “You look more like a Mazza than a Scanlan to me,” he said after a while, outlining letters with his pencil. “You look a lot like your mama did when she was your age. She was smaller than you are and she didn’t have so much hair. But your faces look alike.”

  “You’ve been around here a long time,” said Maggie, squinting in a shaft of sun that had suddenly cut through the trees, trying to think about a girl her age, looking like her, hanging around the cemetery, jiggling her legs in the light.

  “God, yeah,” Mr. Gennaro said. “I know your grandfather almost my whole life. Your grandmother, too, may she rest in peace. She was a tough cookie. And your mother. I remember the day she was married. There was a funeral
coming in and your mama coming out of the house in her dress, some shiny stuff with all kinds of lace, and she almost got in the wrong limo. You think they look at you funny, a kid in the cemetery, you should have seen the people in that limo when they saw your mother all dressed up like that. Ten o’clock in the morning and they thought they were seeing ghosts. Jesus, she looked beautiful, but so little, like some little bird. I told your grandfather, never mind that the boy’s not Italian, that he’s an American boy, he’s a nice boy, he’ll be good to her.”

  “What did Grandpop say?”

  “Jesus,” said Mr. Gennaro, letting his rear fall back on his heels, wiping sweat from his forehead with his arm. “I don’t remember. Nothing, probably. Your father was a nice boy. I remember one day he was out back with the old man, trying to help with the tomatoes, but your grandpop didn’t want nothing to do with him. So your father was talking to me. God, that boy got red in the sun. I thought he was going to have a stroke. And all of a sudden he says to me, ‘Mr. Gennaro, I love her with all my heart.’ Well, what the hell could you say. It was beautiful. So what if he was an American boy? All you see are Italian names here,” he added, his eyes searching the cemetery for an exception and finally coming back to JESSUP. “But you have a lot of Italian boys here married to American girls.”

  “We’re all American,” said Maggie a little primly.

  “Yeah, well, that’s one way of looking at it,” said Mr. Gennaro, digging into the marble with his chisel. “Anyway, your parents were a match. Look at all you kids. How’s your dad, anyway?”

  “Fine, I think,” Maggie said. “I think we’re moving.”

  “How come?”

  “How come I think it or how come we’re doing it?”