Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “Grandmom, I have cramps,” Monica said, as they crossed the road in single file, looking, Maggie thought, like a row of ducks in their yellow and white summer dresses and their shiny white summer dress shoes. “Can I go in and lie down?”

  “There’s no need to be so explicit,” said Mary Frances. “Just go ahead. The rest of us will be out here.”

  They sat down, facing the ocean, the sounds dying down as the diners moved away from the boat, the sounds dying down to the slow, rhythmical boom-boom of the surf, occasionally shot through with a trill of high laughter from the beach.

  Maggie mulled over the news about a new baby, which was not really news after the day she had seen her mother being sick in the sink. One of her most enduring images of her mother was of a headless person, a small torso bent double, making strangled heaving sounds over the sink. For a long time it was the only way she thought of her mother, on those rare occasions when she did think of her when they were apart, although now sometimes there would appear unwanted in her mind the picture of her mother looking like that high school photograph, her face alight, not like a mother at all.

  Maggie knew that soon it would be time for Mary Frances to tell stories. Usually when they were at the beach Mary Frances told the story about how she had met John Scanlan. She had been small and pretty, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes, and John Scanlan had looked down at her and said, “You’re going to marry me whether you like it or not.” It was a great family story, the epitome of what they all liked to think of as the Scanlan directness and determination, character traits that in fact only John and Maggie’s aunt Margaret, Sister John of the Cross, happened to possess. But Maggie realized now that the fact that her grandfather had gotten his way said as much about Mary Frances as it did about John Scanlan. For that was how it had happened, really, and even now Maggie could hear it in her grandmother’s voice: Mary Frances had not known whether she liked it or not, whether she liked him or not; she only knew that John had taken charge of the situation, and that had been that.

  And that had been that ever since. In the first ten years she had had seven children, while her husband had become grand, feared and fawned upon by nearly everyone he met. And somehow, over those years, she had come to love him. Maggie could see that it pained her that John let the world know he thought she was silly and childish, although Connie had once said that that was part of the reason John had married Mary Frances, so that he could think she was silly and childish and manage her. Somehow the “whether you like it or not” story always made Maggie feel sad.

  “Tell about the lifeguard,” Maggie said, looking sideways at her grandmother, who was staring fixedly toward the black void of the horizon.

  “Oh, that old story,” her grandmother said.

  “I love that story,” said Teresa.

  “Well, as you all know I’m not much of a swimmer,” said Mary Frances, whose grandchildren had never seen her do anything in a bathing suit except sit on the beach. “I was with my friend Ruthie Corrigan and we were at the Alden, a guest house down the street here, I think it’s called the Grande now. We had a room on the top floor with those dormer windows and just barely room enough for two. Seven dollars a week it was, which may seem cheap to you, but was dear then, I can tell you, especially for me. Not that we were poor. But there wasn’t money to burn.”

  “And you went swimming,” said Maggie.

  “And we went swimming,” Mary Frances continued. “There was a dreadful undertow, one of those where you can just barely stand up. It was dragging us around, but Ruthie was a bigger girl than me, a very big girl, with great big bones and feet, I think they were tens, if you can imagine, and she was staying put and I was all over the place out there. And I was trying to be calm, but finally I said ‘Ruthie, I’m drowning, say your prayers and I’ll say mine.’ And she hollered, oh, did she holler. And before I knew what had happened there was this young man pulling me out by the hair.”

  Mary Frances stopped to catch her breath, her face as pink as the embroidery on her pocket handkerchief.

  “He was as handsome as Francis X. Bushman—”

  “Who’s Francis X. Bushmer?” said Teresa, who had a mind, John Scanlan always said, “like a sieve.”

  “Shut up,” said Maggie. “An actor. Pay attention.”

  “He was as handsome as Francis X. Bushman,” Mary Frances said, “with beautiful wavy hair and the prettiest teeth. I was all right when he got me up on the beach, only out of breath and a little scared, but Ruthie was screaming like a banshee and finally I had to tell her to be quiet so he could tell me his name. Roderick. Can you beat that? Roderick. Like a duke, I said to Ruthie. And right there on the beach he said, ‘May I take you to dinner tonight?’ And me still trying to catch my breath, so I just nodded. ‘May I take you?’ Like a duke, I said to Ruthie.”

  “But you didn’t go,” said Maggie.

  “I didn’t go, no,” said Mary Frances with a slight clicking noise, her mouth dry from the whiskey sours. “That afternoon I met your grandfather. And that was that.”

  Maggie waited.

  “He swept me off my feet,” Mary Frances said with a sigh.

  It suddenly seemed very quiet and the noise of the ocean seemed loud. “I have to go to the bathroom,” said one of the twins softly, as though she was a toddler who needed to be taken and helped. “Well, go then, dear, don’t discuss it,” Mary Frances said impatiently.

  “Grandmom, can I go for a walk on the beach?” Maggie asked, as her cousin slipped away.

  “In your stockings?”

  “I didn’t wear them tonight.”

  “I wish I’d known that. I would have sent you back upstairs. Well, go ahead then.”

  Maggie handed Teresa her white patent pumps and ran down the stairs. The road that separated the guesthouse from the beach was empty and the sand felt surprisingly cold. The night was so black that Maggie knew she had reached the water’s edge only when she felt the sea run over her feet. When she looked for the moon she realized that it must be hidden behind the clouds, and she wondered if it would rain, and what they would all do if it did, stuck together at the beach on a rainy day. To one side she could hear an odd whirring sound, and dimly in the dark she made out the silhouette of someone surf-casting. She began to walk in the opposite direction.

  She felt at home walking on the beach. The lonely, empty feeling in her stomach, which seemed out of place in everyday life—at the pool, playing softball, at school, with her brothers—felt suitable at the beach. She walked for what seemed like a long time, and then turned at one of the stone jetties and walked back again, looking for the lights of the guesthouse beyond the dunes. She saw them from some distance away and began to climb to the middle of the beach.

  She was perhaps a block away from the house when she almost stepped on a half-naked couple sprawled on a blanket. She drew back and then squinted in the darkness, able to make out the curve of the boy’s bare buttocks and the ridiculous welter of clothes gathered around his ankles. “Oh my god,” he kept repeating, moving up and down. “Oh my god.” Beneath him a girl seemed to be staring blankly at the sky overhead, the whites of her eyes visible even in the darkness. Maggie realized that the girl was staring at her, and that it was her cousin Monica, looking expressionless, grim, her fingernails sparkling on the boy’s shoulder as the moon momentarily emerged from the clouds. “Oh my God,” he said again, and Maggie drew back and ran across the sand to the break in the dunes.

  She kept on running across the street, up onto the porch of the guesthouse; then she sat there hugging her knees for a few minutes before she went upstairs to the room she and Monica shared. One of the twin beds was lumpy with what Maggie knew would be an artful arrangement of pillows. She pulled out her own pillow and turned on her side, feigning sleep when she heard footfalls an hour later. She spent all night wondering what to do, but the matter was settled for her the next morning, as she and Monica walked to the beach together several steps behind their gran
dmother. Monica gave her a level look, not unlike the one she had given her the night before on the beach, and said quietly, “Who’d believe you? Grandpop says you have an overactive imagination.” Then she walked ahead, her carefully oiled calves shining in the sun, talking to Mary Frances.

  Maggie lagged behind, and so it was she that Mrs. Polisky, the owner of the guesthouse, reached first as she came trotting up behind them, her fat face red. “Tell your grandmother you’ve got to come into the house,” she gasped. “You’ve got to go home. Your grandfather’s had an accident.”

  9

  JOHN SCANLAN LAY IN THE HOSPITAL bed, the left side of his face looking as though it was melting into his shoulder, a thick line of saliva edging his jawline. “Wipe his mouth,” Mark said to one of the nurses, but as soon as she had done so the spittle crept down again.

  Except for the fact that his family stood behind a sheet of glass, kept out of the intensive care unit by regulations that even now her uncle James was appealing, Maggie thought that it looked like one of the deathbed scenes of the British royal family in her book about Queen Victoria. Her grandfather did not look dead; he looked ruined, as though he would have to be renovated from top to bottom to regain any semblance of his former self. Mary Frances was sitting beside his bed, stroking his hand and clutching the cord to the intravenous feed.

  “Will he die?” Maggie asked, the only one of the grandchildren left there, the twins having been sent home by cab, Teresa sent to the cafeteria in hysterics, and Monica left in the waiting room with some of the aunts, reading an old copy of Vogue.

  “What kind of question is that?” Mark asked. “Jesus. Of course not.” Maggie noticed that a tube running from underneath the covers down the side of the bed was bright yellow, and she began to feel sick. She had been in a hospital only twice before, once for stitches in her knee, once to visit her mother when Joseph was born, her father sneaking her in past the nurses’ stations, but it had not been like this. Even the smell was different; there was still the odor of disinfectant, but it was overlaid with that of rubber and dirty clothes. She went outside into the waiting area, where her father was talking on the pay phone.

  “Did you find her?” Monica was asking him.

  “Mind your own business,” Tommy Scanlan said, dropping in another coin.

  “Maggie, honey, do you have any idea where your mother could be?” Aunt Cass asked.

  “At home.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “At Celeste’s?”

  “Your brothers are there, thank God. But Celeste doesn’t know where your mother went.”

  Tommy slammed down the pay phone and said, “She can’t even drive, for Christ’s sake. She hates the train. Where is she?”

  “Did you call Grandpop?” asked Maggie, who thought it was probably a bad time to mention that her mother might be able to drive after all.

  “He said he’d find her. How’s he going to find her? The closest Angelo Mazza’s ever come to driving is riding shotgun in the flower car at a funeral.”

  “Perhaps she’s visiting a friend in the neighborhood,” Aunt Cass said.

  “She doesn’t have any friends,” Tommy said, and Maggie flinched. “She has Celeste,” she said quietly.

  Maggie went back inside and stared through the glass partition. Looking at her grandfather was like looking at the babies in the nursery. Occasionally she would see her grandmother’s mouth moving, but no sound traveled through the thick glass, which was crisscrossed with narrow silver ribbons of wire.

  Her aunt Margaret was fingering the big black rosary beads that always hung around her waist, although whether it was a prayerful gesture or a nervous one Maggie could not tell. Maggie leaned up against her, something she would not have done with any other nun, or with any of her other aunts for that matter. “Pumpkin, pumpkin,” said Margaret, squeezing her around the waist. “Life is tough, isn’t it? You know what someone once said? ‘Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.’” Margaret squeezed her again and Maggie felt the tears fill her eyes, coaxed out by her aunt’s warm hand.

  “I don’t know how anyone could ever think this was a comedy,” Maggie said.

  Her aunt pulled two butterscotch drops from one of her seemingly bottomless nun’s pockets, handed one to Maggie, and sucked on the other herself. Maggie thought her aunt was being companionable, but she also knew from experience that in times of stress Aunt Margaret relied heavily on sweets. She had once told Maggie that she sucked lemon drops whenever she had to teach arithmetic, which was her weakest subject.

  Maggie could hear her father out in the waiting room, swearing. “For a religious family, we sure take the Lord’s name in vain a lot,” her aunt said.

  “Do you think Grandpop’s going to die?”

  “It doesn’t look good, does it, sweetie? I don’t know, lots of people have strokes and get better. Lots of them don’t die. But they’re paralyzed, or they can’t talk, or something like that.”

  “Grandpop would really hate that,” Maggie said, and she began to feel the pressure behind her nose and eyes that meant she might start to cry.

  “I know,” said her aunt, turning the big wooden crucifix at the end of her rosary over and over in her hands.

  “Do you think that crucifix is too large?” Mark suddenly asked his sister.

  “What?”

  “The crucifix. Is it too large? We’re thinking of scaling it down. I think it’s too large. I’d even like to remove the Christ figure and keep a simple wooden cross, which seems more in keeping with Vatican II to me. But Dad says he thinks the nuns wouldn’t stand for it. We could cut a good bit off the manufacturing cost of each one if we made the cross half again as big.”

  “Mark, are we actually having this conversation, here, at this moment?” said his sister, staring at him with her big blue Irish eyes, nearly the same navy as a parochial school uniform. She was wearing what Maggie’s father always called her “For Chrissake, boys” look, and Maggie thought she looked very young and pretty.

  Her uncle Mark was always saying it was such a shame that Margaret had joined the convent. Once Maggie had asked, very seriously, when she was in one of her religious phases, how her aunt had known that she had had the call from God. “That’s a complicated question, sweetheart,” her aunt had answered. But Maggie had heard her father say that the call from God was a lot of nonsense, and that when he had asked Margaret why she was ruining her life, his sister had answered a little sadly, “It’s quiet, and they’ll send me to college.”

  “So it was your father’s fault?” Connie had said, and Tommy had sighed and said, “Yes, Concetta. The flood. The plagues of Egypt. The Second World War. My sister taking the veil. John Scanlan caused them all.”

  Maggie remembered that she had not been quite sure whether her father was teasing or not.

  The door to the hospital room opened and Uncle James came in, wearing his white coat. “They won’t let anyone but Mother and I inside,” he said, sounding testy. “The director said he didn’t care if our name was Kennedy.”

  “Don’t let Daddy hear that,” Margaret said. “He’d have another stroke.”

  “I don’t find that funny, Sister,” said James, who had called Margaret “Sister” even before she entered the convent. “This is serious.”

  The door opened again and Connie slipped in. She was wearing shorts and sneakers, and she seemed out of breath. The fluorescent lights overhead turned her the color of skim milk, blue and sickly; looking around, Maggie realized they all looked that way, except for Uncle Mark, who cultivated a tan while playing golf and had only paled to a light coffee color. “Hi, Con,” said Margaret, who liked her sister-in-law.

  “Oh, God,” said Connie, who had just caught sight of the figure behind the glass.

  “Where have you been? Your husband has been worried sick,” said Uncle James, putting his hands on his narrow hips.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Connie asked, pressed
up against the glass, and for just a moment Maggie thought she was asking about Tommy. Mary Frances caught a glimpse of Connie and waved weakly. Maggie realized that her grandmother, who had made good posture her life’s work, was slumping in the straight chair. That, combined with the pathetic little whiffle of her fingers at the daughter-in-law she seemed to like least, and the helplessness of John Scanlan in the bed beside her, made it seem as though Mary Frances had suddenly been rendered old and powerless too.

  Maggie had spent the ride home from the beach staring at Monica in the seat in front of her, looking for something, anything—a bruise, a shadow beneath her wide, amber-colored eyes, a look on her face—to testify to what she had seen on the beach the night before. Now she began to wonder if her uneventful life had suddenly taken a turn for the worse and would become one impossible scene after another, leaving her, as she was today, so tired she could hardly stand.

  “It happened overnight,” Margaret said to Connie. “He called James but James didn’t realize who it was.”

  “I thought it was a crank call,” said James. “All I could hear was breathing and moaning.”

  “Oh God,” Connie said.

  Tommy came in behind his wife, and clutched her shoulders as though he would lift her off the ground. He spun her around. “Where the hell have you been?” he said, his eyes wild. “Where? Everyone was here except for you. You disappeared off the face of the earth.” He was speaking so loudly that Mary Frances turned toward them. “He could have died. Where the hell were you?”