Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “Jesus,” said Mr. Gennaro with a grin, “you are some philosopher. Answer both and let’s see what happens.”

  “I think it because my grandfather said we were, and we’re doing it because he wants us to.”

  Mr. Gennaro’s smile faded. “Your other grandfather.” Maggie nodded. “People aren’t always right, and people don’t always get their way,” he said, looking off into the distance.

  “He’s not people,” Maggie said, but Mr. Gennaro didn’t reply.

  Maggie watched him work for a minute more and then wandered down Consolation Way, her hands behind her back. It had never occurred to her to think of her parents as human beings before, and particularly as human beings with some secret and tenuous connection to one another. When they danced together, as they had last night, or when occasionally they touched, she had always felt that she was watching something artificial and far away, as though they were in a movie, acting the parts of husband and wife. Until now she had always thought of them in much the same way she thought of the house, as something that allowed her to live.

  The night before, she and her brothers had wandered through the field after dinner, counting the holes the construction crew had made, looking into them with a flashlight. Tommy and Connie were sitting on lawn chairs on the patio, and looking back in the darkness Maggie could see them, and see deep into the lighted kitchen of the house, could even see the little trivet over the stove from the Pennsylvania Dutch country that said: No matter where I feed my guests, it seems they like my kitchen best. The bulk of the house was a gray-black shadow, the yellow rectangles of windows floating within its vague borders. Maggie could see twin specks of red near the ground, the tips of her parents’ cigarettes, and occasionally the soft murmur of their voices would stop and her father would say loudly, “Be careful out there. I don’t want to drive to the emergency room tonight.”

  Damien had the flashlight, although both Terence and Maggie tried to take it from him; crickets leapt up from beneath his sneakers, and his thin legs flashed in the beam, as though disembodied. “Here’s another one,” he said, as he came to the edge of another hole; as his brother and sister edged nearer, afraid of falling in, he let the light rove around the sides.

  “They’re not that big,” said Maggie. “I thought they’d be a lot bigger than this.”

  “Grandpop said they’re only half basements and the rest is on slab,” said Terence.

  “They’re still not that big,” Maggie said.

  “There are five of them,” Damien said.

  “The man in the kitchen said six.”

  “There was a man in the kitchen?” said Terence.

  “Talking to Mom.”

  “Are you sure?” Terence said. “A man we don’t know?”

  “I saw him, stupid,” said Maggie, running away without thinking of the holes pocking the fields.

  From the back of the street at nighttime you could see into all the houses, see the blue light of the television and the heads of the people as they moved about inside. Maggie roamed the perimeter slowly, the reeds stabbing at her legs, not as a Peeping Tom might, but like someone looking at pictures in a museum. Other summers, at this time of day, she would have been cooling off after a game of Kick the Can or Monkey in the Middle on the street, or catching lightning bugs in an old mayonnaise jar, or sleeping over at Debbie’s house in Mr. Malone’s army issue pup tent pitched in the backyard. All of these things suddenly seemed dull, but she did not know what else to do with herself. She sometimes went to the day camp at the park, weaving key rings out of strips of plastic and making mosaic ashtrays, but after five years of day camp she was sick to death of key rings and ash trays. At night she had taken to wandering in the fields, seeing an argument here, a kiss there. She liked the way the houses looked from the outside staring in. The air was fresher at night, even though the heat did not let up much; it felt as though the day was shaking itself out after the still stuffiness of the afternoon.

  Through a side window of her own house she could see that her parents had moved into the living room. They were standing face to face, and as she drew nearer she could hear music playing. She recognized the song and the singer: Frank Sinatra, “Here’s that Rainy Day.” Tommy Scanlan loved music, and Maggie got a quarter from her father every time she could identify a song after only the opening notes, before anyone sang a word. “Here’s that Rainy Day” was her father’s second favorite song, after “A Foggy Day in London Town.”

  Maggie realized her parents were dancing. Their heads turned slowly, and she could see their shoulders swaying in time to the music. Sometimes her father would pull Maggie off the floor to dance with him, but she would stumble and step on his feet and he would become impatient after only a few turns. “You’re leading,” he would say, and Maggie would say “Who cares?” and leave the room. But Tommy and Connie had met at a dance contest, and they were perfectly partnered. He led effortlessly, and she followed easily. It seemed hard to imagine that the man and woman gliding around the living room were the same two people who often stepped sullenly around each other in the kitchen, bickering over who had forgotten to buy breakfast cereal and whether the screens needed to be washed. Maggie wondered if everyone was really more than one person, like Jekyll and Hyde or the woman in The Three Faces of Eve, who changed from one personality into another. She thought that perhaps there was more to the Malones than met the eye, and to her aunt Margaret, and certainly to her cousin Monica, whose manners were flawless as long as anyone over the age of thirty was around. The only people she was sure were exactly what they seemed were her aunt Celeste and Helen Malone. She had often suspected that her parents were not entirely what she saw at the dinner table, particularly since she had learned what it had required for them to conceive four children. Two very different people from the ones she knew would have had to be involved in that. She watched carefully as they spun silently to the music. She suspected she was watching those two people now, and the blood rose up into her sweaty face, heat upon heat.

  Behind her Damien and Terence were approaching, making much too much noise. “Shut up,” she whispered, all consonants, and they did, peering over her shoulder. “I think Mom is prettier than aunt Celeste,” said Damien, who still sometimes liked to climb into Connie’s lap and wordlessly touch her hair and face. “I do, too,” said Maggie, and the boys looked surprised, for Maggie was critical of everyone, particularly those she knew best.

  “They’re kissing,” said Terence softly, his sss whistling in a quiet lull in the music.

  “They’re not kissing, they’re dancing,” Maggie said.

  “They’re allowed to kiss,” said Damien loudly, turning the flashlight on and shining it in Maggie’s face. “They’re married.”

  Maggie knocked the light from his hands and both boys scrambled out into the backyard to grab it. “Maggie,” Damien whined, “it’s gone.” “Shut up,” Maggie said. The music stopped and suddenly the buzz of the crickets sounded very loud and harsh, as though they were somehow predatory. Maggie heard her father mumble something, and then Connie replied loudly, “Tell me, please, that I’m not hearing what I think I’m hearing.”

  “Maggie,” Damien whined again, his voice faint, calling from the end of the yard. Maggie leaned closer to the screen. “Over my dead body,” Connie said, pulling away, but Maggie saw her father’s stringy forearms tighten and hold her fast. Connie beat her little fists against his chest, and he laid his sandy head on her dark one.

  Damien and Terence were behind Maggie. “You broke the flashlight,” Damien said sadly, pushing the switch back and forth with his thumb, which was red and chapped from his incessant sucking. “It’s time to go in,” Maggie said, and as she moved to the screen door and opened it, the boys could see their parents move apart, their mother smooth her hair. Their father walked through to the kitchen. “Tell your brothers to come in,” he said to Maggie as he opened the refrigerator. In its white glow his pale skin was mottled pink. He reached for a
beer and held the bottle against his forehead. Terence and Damien stood outside the screen door peering in, seeing him through the wire mesh as though he was on television. “Don’t just stand there,” Tommy said impatiently as he looked over and saw them, Terence’s mouth a little open, Damien’s fair skin flushed pinker than his own. “Come on in and go to bed.”

  When Maggie went into the living room it was empty, and she wondered where her mother had gone. She had not wondered what her parents had been talking about; a distance, filled by the charged electricity of married people on the verge of a fight, had been between them in the car all the way home on Sunday. For the first time Maggie realized it was sensible for her mother to stay away from the Scanlans. Her grandfather Scanlan’s house was always full of discord. Her grandfather Mazza’s was the most peaceful place in the world. But her mother never came here, either. Maggie supposed that, like other people, Connie saw a cemetery only as a place of death.

  As Maggie went back and knelt beside her grandfather, a hearse, familiar as a station wagon, swung past the house and down Nazareth Way to the back plots. Behind it was the flower car, piled high with gladiolus. Angelo Mazza’s eyelids drooped. He hated cut flowers, but his emotions were always just a flicker across his face. From inside the lead limousine someone lifted a hand to him. Maggie made the sign of the cross.

  “Not so many cars for the old people,” Angelo said, as a dozen cars followed, their headlights shining faintly in the bright sunshine.

  “What about Mrs. Romano’s boys?”

  “Two killed in the war, one a heart attack at Mass five years ago. One left, he lives far away.”

  Across the stretch of lawn Maggie could see people begin to emerge from their cars, the view interrupted only by the DiGenova family’s obelisk and the mausoleum with the Good Shepherd stained-glass window in which the Lisa family were buried. A priest, she could not tell which one, took his place and opened his black leatherbound missal, a purple stole slung round his hunched shoulders. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he said, and everyone made the sign of the cross in unison.

  Two men in dark-gray suits stood apart from the mourners. They turned and looked across at the Mazza house, their hands folded in front of them. “ … Gives me the creeps,” Maggie heard one say, and knew they were talking about her again, and about the unseemliness of children in cemeteries.

  “Why did the Romanos go to the O’Neal’s funeral home to get buried?” she asked.

  “No Italian funeral homes,” her grandfather said.

  One of the men, the older, balder one, walked across to the road and down it toward them. He wore on his face a carefully arranged smile of welcome. “Angelo,” he said, in the voice of a professional greeter, oily and loud, pulling a breath mint from his pocket and popping it into his mouth as he towered over Maggie and her grandfather.

  “Hi, Mr. O’Neal,” Maggie said. “How’s Cathy?”

  “She’s fine, honey, fine,” Matthew O’Neal said, lowering his voice so he couldn’t be heard by the group under the tent. “Misses the girls at Sacred Heart, that’s for sure.”

  “Does she like her new school? Mrs. Malone told me there’s a pool and tennis.”

  “There is, there is,” he said, sucking on the mint.

  “Tell her I said hi,” said Maggie, although she disliked Cathy O’Neal, who was chubby and wore her hair in sausage curls and who told patently fantastic stories about the goings-on in the preparation room on the third floor of the O’Neal Home for Funerals.

  “I will,” said Mr. O’Neal. “And my best to your grandfather,” he added, meaning her grandfather Scanlan.

  Turning to her other grandfather, who was still kneeling in front of the roses, he said, “Mrs. Romano’s son was very concerned about the vines behind his mother’s grave. He thinks they really may come right over the stone.”

  “I will prune,” Angelo said flatly.

  “The plants are bothersome to quite a lot of people,” said Mr. O’Neal. “It’s the idea of them.” Maggie knew what he meant. People hated to think about what went on underground in a cemetery. When people looked at the lush growth and strong colors of Angelo’s plants, they could conclude only one thing.

  “Good soil,” said Maggie’s grandfather, echoing her thoughts, his eyes gleaming in the sunlight.

  “Yes.” Mr. O’Neal clasped his hands behind him, then in front again. He sighed. He and Angelo had had this discussion before.

  The fact was that there were very few of his customers who complained about the luxuriant growth in Calvary Cemetery, just as he had been exaggerating when he had told Angelo years before that people didn’t like to see Maggie hanging around, chewing on the ends of her braids, popping up from behind tombstones like an apparition in a gingham blouse and shorts. He was the one bothered by these things. He always thought that the child’s odd behavior, her air of watchfulness, was an object lesson in what happened when you mixed blood that wasn’t meant to be mixed, although no one could deny that she’d gotten the Scanlan brains, walking away with all the honors in her class year after year. But Matthew O’Neal knew his business, even if his daughter couldn’t master fractions, and he knew that cemeteries were not supposed to be turned into gardens, nor children permitted there. Once at a Friendly Sons of St. Patrick testimonial he had made some comments to John Scanlan about how pleasant it was to see Maria Goretti around Calvary and what a change of pace it made. But John had only chewed purposefully at the end of a large cigar and looked at him narrowly, as though he knew that the tone did not match the message. When Matthew O’Neal moved off to refill his drink, he heard John Scanlan say in the sudden silence, “Goddamn ghoul,” and then the low murmur of conversation began again.

  “Give my best to your grandfather, Maggie,” Mr. O’Neal said, as he turned to walk back to the group at the graveside, who were passing their rosaries through their fingers. Without answering him, grandfather and granddaughter bent again over the black soil, the rims of their fingernails edged with earth.

  6

  THE CHILDREN WERE ALL AT THE TABLE, its mottled red Formica dense with cereal bowls and Fred Flintstone cups, when Connie went out into the backyard to watch the construction crew begin their work. She could sense rather than hear Maggie and Terence squabbling, and she heard the clatter at the sink as Tommy went rooting around on the counter for a spoon for his coffee. She was holding her own cup, cradling it in her hands as though to keep herself warm. The sun was still climbing the horizon behind her, and her knees and elbows felt cool in her plaid shorts and white shirt.

  Little by little over the years she had begun to dress more like Tommy’s sister and sisters-in-law, more like a Catholic private school girl and less like a girl from a tough public school where the Italian boys wore shirts so starched they could stand up by themselves. Only in her evening dresses and her evening makeup, both always black or red, did she look like her old self. A man waved, circling closer on a big tractor: it was Joey, wearing work clothes and a hard hat, protective plastic glasses on a strip of elastic dangling around his neck. Connie waved back and then turned and went into the house, shivering a little, stumbling on the stones and weeds that gave way to the feeble grass of their backyard. She was still smiling as she came in.

  “That’s Joey Martinelli,” she said to Tommy, dropping into her seat next to Joseph’s chair. “Jimmy Martinelli’s older brother. I knew him in school. He’s the supervisor on this construction project.”

  “Mommy says he’s a friend of ours,” Maggie said.

  “Not mine,” said Tom.

  “He says they expect to have the models by the first week in September,” Connie added.

  “He’s nuts,” Tommy said, pouring coffee.

  “Just three models,” said Connie. “There’s one that’s a ranch house and another that’s a split-level and another that’s a Colonial like this.”

  “Not like this,” Tommy said.

  “Please, Tom,�
� Connie said, “I don’t want to listen again to how terrible new houses are. I just thought you would want to know.”

  “How did he know we live here?” Tommy said.

  “He didn’t. He came up to use the phone one day and picked our house out of a clear blue sky. I saw him out back before, and went over to say hello and take him a cup of coffee.”

  Tommy’s own mug was half full. “There wasn’t enough goddamn coffee for me,” he said.

  “Tom.”

  “Don’t ‘Tom’ me,” he shouted over the noise from the construction site. “I don’t eat any goddamn breakfast. I have one cup of coffee in the morning. I want my one cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll make another pot,” Connie said.

  Tommy walked to the swinging kitchen door. Then he went out to the hall, took his jacket and tie off the banister, and was gone. The half-cup of coffee sat untasted on the table. The children could not even hear the door slam, although Maggie was sure it had. “Grandpop’s right,” she said. “Those things are really loud.”

  Connie did not say anything. She was looking out the kitchen window and washing the coffee pot, but her shoulders rose and fell as though she sighed. She stood there for a long time as the children disappeared one by one, Maggie to the Malones, Terence and Damien to the ballfield, Joseph into the dining room, where he put a ball of crumpled paper into a plastic cup and took it out again.

  Connie was tired. She had finally gotten the curtains she liked on the kitchen windows, and now she was afraid she was going to have to pick up and move to some house she had never seen before, a house even farther away from its neighbors than the one she lived in now, even more mired in silence. She would never have enough furniture for a house that size, and she pictured little excursions to furniture stores with Mary Frances, the two of them holding swatches of brocade, her mother-in-law arguing about price.

  She realized she had been standing at the sink a long time, washing dishes mechanically, only when the earth movers stopped and the cement trucks arrived outside. Connie could tell by the insignia on the side of their doors that they were from an Italian firm that was one of Tommy’s biggest competitors. He always contended that they were owned by the Mafia, as though murder and extortion were the only way Italians could make money, and this enraged Connie, although her uncle Frank said they were Mafia, too. A truck had pulled a long low trailer to one end of the field, and the workmen gathered around it, unscrewing the lids of their thermoses, faint plumes of steam rising from the openings. One passed around a white cardboard box. She could hear the sound of their voices but not their words. Coffee break. She plugged in the percolator and started another pot.