Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  Joey Martinelli smiled. “That’s some hat you got,” he said, but his eyes were on Connie, who was stretching her legs in front of her, wiggling her toes, cramped from their afternoon in her good pumps. Her skirt had crept up her legs, and the curve of her thighs shone in nylon stockings. “I like that blouse,” Joey said to no one in particular, and Connie crumpled it up in her fist, an edge of white lace falling from between her fingers. Celeste looked from Joey’s face to that of her cousin, and then back again. “Fix me a seven-and-seven, Con,” she said, her eyes narrowed, and she patted the couch beside her. “Joe,” she said, “you come sit here next to me.”

  13

  SAL’S WAS A TAVERN A BLOCK AWAY from First Concrete. Its door was set on a diagonal at the corner of two busy streets and thrown into perpetual shade by the elevated subway line. It looked like any tavern in America at the time, with neon beer signs in the window and red plastic seats in the booths and gangly bar stools ranged around a long, long bar filled with old men in the afternoons and working men at night. Above the register hung the first dollar Sal’s ever took in, nineteen years earlier. The only thing worth mentioning about Sal’s was that they made a spectacular hamburger out of good-grade chuck that Sal D’Alessandro got from a cop who got it as part of his payoff from a wholesale butcher in the wholesale meat market. All the cops ate and drank free at Sal’s, and if any of their wives called, Sal always said their husbands had just been there and been called out on some emergency. Tommy usually ate lunch at Sal’s. He liked the company and the food.

  He took Mark there when, during the last week in July, his brother asked him to lunch. “Jesus, look at this place,” Mark said, staring at the retired guys with gray stubble on their faces watching As the World Turns on the television. Sal came over after they got their beers, a bar towel hanging from the waistband of his pants. He shook hands with Mark officiously, like the maître d’ in a bad French restaurant, and said that Mark looked like his mother. “When was Mom ever in this place?” Mark said, leaning across the table after Sal had left. “You got me,” Tommy said. “Dad used to come here for lunch when he was still down the street, but I can’t imagine him bringing Mom here.” Mark looked around again and said, “Well, she sure as hell didn’t come here by herself.”

  Tommy liked being with his brothers like this, alone, one on one, and he particularly liked being with Mark, who was only a year older than he was, and for whom he felt the slightly condescending sympathy that a man who easily fathers children feels for a man who has been incapable of doing so. (“Maybe it’s him,” Connie had said one night when they were talking about why Gail hadn’t produced a child. “My ass,” Tommy had replied, looking like his father.) Not having a family had set Mark apart. Combined with his height, it had diminished him in the family’s eyes, and so he was reduced to asserting himself by arguing with his father over the color of embroidery on cassocks. Tommy knew that given a choice between his own position of black sheep and his brother’s of barren issue, he’d stick with his own any time.

  Gail had once talked about adoption, but John Scanlan had put the lid on that one. “It’s not the same,” he had said flatly. “You don’t know what in the hell you’re getting.” Then his pale blue eyes had roved over his own family, ranged in their habitual postures of attention and apprehension in his living room. “I don’t know,” he had added, “maybe you never know.”

  Tommy had known something was up when he and his brother had met outside their father’s hospital room two nights ago and Mark had suggested they get together. “Mark asked you to lunch?” Connie had said, one black eyebrow arched, like some exotic form of punctuation. “What’s up?” Of course she knew what was up; it was either the company, the house, or her.

  Every year or so someone in his family sat down and talked to Tommy about his wife, as though she was a car that needed a paint job. There was never a question of a trade-in—Mary Frances still asked Celeste how her husband was, even though Celeste had been divorced far longer than she’d been married. “Soused,” Celeste always answered with good humor. It was only that they all wanted Connie to run more smoothly, to mix in, to blend in, to be more like them. The worst moment of Tommy’s life had been a tenth anniversary dinner Mark had given them three years before, at which Connie had become rather high on fruity whiskey sours, the taste of the liquor lost amidst all the pineapple. There had been a cake with a little bride and groom, and toasts, and Connie had turned to all of them, the bride and groom in her hand, and had said in an odd squeaky voice, “Where were all of you on my wedding day?” And she had said it staring straight at John Scanlan, who stared right back. The effect had been blunted a bit by the fact that Connie had suddenly put her hand over her mouth, and run to the bathroom. Tommy went after her, and when they returned, his parents were gone from the table. “How long has that been going on?” James had said in a professional tone of voice to Connie, whose face was gray-white, and Tommy had said, “Jesus, James, she drank too much.” But James had been right after all; she was expecting Joseph at the time, although neither of them had known it.

  Now, sitting in Sal’s with Tom, Mark said, “So your wife’s pregnant again,” and the remark lay on the table between them. Then Mark’s eyes emptied and he added, “Look, Tom, you’re going to need that new house no matter what you say. You’ll have five. You need more room.”

  “We have plenty of room,” Tommy said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Let’s not start with the house. I don’t want to move.”

  “Your wife doesn’t want to move.”

  “Her too.”

  “You know she told Gail she wants to live in one of those development houses they’re building?”

  “Mark, she says those things to get you people aggravated. She’s tired of having people make decisions about her life.”

  Sal arrived with the hamburgers. “Mr. Scanlan, medium,” he said, putting the one with the blue stick in its bun in front of Tommy. “Mr. Scanlan, medium rare,” he added, putting the one with the red stick in front of Mark. Tommy wondered where he’d found the little sticks, and how special the occasion needed to be for Sal to use them. Tommy had been ordering hamburgers at Sal’s for years and had never had a stick in his before.

  Both men ate in silence, ketchup dripping onto their plates. Then Mark said, his mouth full, “People are talking about your wife.”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Tommy said.

  “Joe says he went over to St. Pius School to drop off a case of votive candles and he sees her out back with some guy playing hopscotch. She’s jumping around like a kid with some big guinea—”

  “Hey!” Tommy said, so loudly that two of the men at the bar turned.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Anyhow, she waves at Joe like it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to be there with some guy. Now, Joe sees her, he makes allowances. Other people are going to wonder what the hell is going on.”

  Tommy was wondering the same thing himself, but he was damned if he would say anything to Mark. His brother went on talking. “She’s always out with those guys who are building those houses,” he said. “That’s where she was when Pop went into the hospital that day. People have been seeing her out their windows talking to those guys.”

  Tommy put down his hamburger, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, and sat back in the booth. “She knows the guy who’s running the project. He’s from her old neighborhood. He’s a nice person. She knows his mother. She went out with his brother.” He picked up his hamburger. “We’re not talking about this anymore. You’re all against her. All of you. Always have been.”

  Tommy was angry and perplexed. That morning he had noticed that the valleys of Connie’s face were lavender, the peaks yellow, her eyes as bright as black marbles. She was always ill when she was pregnant, as though it was an early warning. Joseph was beginning to talk in sentences; in a few years he would be saying things she neither liked nor understood. This was the way it was for her, being a mother:
a sickness and then a cleaving to her heart, a time of pure love and then the horrible moving away. Sometimes the only way she could love them was to remember them when they were small, pressing her face into the box of flannel receiving blankets in the linen closet, nappy and soft as a baby’s head.

  Several nights ago, Tommy had been watching the ball game on television, yelling insults at the Yankees pitching staff, throwing pillows at the screen, when he had noticed that Connie was not in the house. Neither were the older children; he was alone with Joseph, who was snoring through a stuffed-up nose in his crib, the night light throwing strange shadows across his fat face. There had been no one on the streets outside, no sound except for the soft murmur of people several houses down talking on their front steps. But in the backyard, just past the dusty bare spot in the center of the grass where home plate had always been, a solitary figure stood looking out toward the development. At first Tom thought it was Maggie, mooning about, but the posture was wrong, the shoulders a little too soft and irresolute, the arms cradling the midsection not angular or awkward enough. It was his wife.

  A couple stumbling from the development, a pair of teenagers who lived a few blocks away, nearly ran into her, quiet and small as she was, but they veered off at the last moment, clutching each other’s waists, the boy’s eyes as blind as a night animal’s, his shirttail a crumpled rag outside his chino pants. Connie followed them with her eyes, and then she threw back her head and stared at the stars. Tommy felt afraid.

  He went back to the television, back to the armchair, and when she came into the room with a glass of iced tea he pretended she had been with him all the time, just a little out of his line of sight. And she pretended, too. He had told his brother James that she was odd this time, mercurial and withdrawn, even from the children, although as soon as he’d said it he realized she had been that way for some time. Once he’d found her sitting on the floor, just looking at her good china. He couldn’t believe that was normal.

  “Women have these strange fancies when they’re expecting, Tom,” James had said, shaking his big handsome head and smiling, and they had left it at that. James had never been the kind of brother to whom Tommy could confess that he feared his wife’s strange fancy was for some guinea with big forearms from the old neighborhood.

  He could not believe that she missed that portion of her life. She rarely went to see her father, sending Maggie instead, and he had not found this peculiar. He remembered going for the first time to her parents’ home, those two old people, this one lovely, lonely child, and thinking that she was out of the world there, as though she lived in one of those little crystal balls with falling snow inside. He had been amazed that she had even learned to dance, had learned the melody to “Moonlight Serenade,” until later, when he had gone to Celeste’s house and seen Connie’s connection to a normal life. He had always felt a touch of pride at having taken her away from all that, the heavy silent mother with the V cut into one front tooth from biting off thread at the sewing machine, the father who took all his affection outdoors and massaged it into the ground around his beloved plants. Once he had found her, pregnant with their second child, planting tomato plants in the backyard, before one of his sisters-in-law had made a comment about how well Italians did such things, and he had seen tears fall down upon her dirty hands. “I miss my father,” she had said, although the old man was only twenty minutes away by car. “Go over and see him,” Tom had replied, but she just shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she had said, sobbing. “Sometimes people are near but they might as well be on the moon.” He thought he understood now what she had been saying then.

  “How’s everything else?” he finally said to his brother to break the silence.

  “Come into the business, Tom,” Mark said, looking up at him.

  “Oh Jesus, not this again.”

  “Maybe I’ve been going about it the wrong way. I know your wife is pissed that I’ve been bothering you—”

  “Says who?” Tommy said.

  “She told Gail to tell me to lay off.”

  “Go on,” Tommy said.

  “But I need your help. Things are changing. There’s a lot to be done.” Mark stared at his hands. “I’ve been going over the books, Tommy. They’re not good. The old man moved a lot of money around in strange ways. I don’t think we’re as solid as he always pretended. Some of the construction companies aren’t making money. He mortgaged two of the apartment buildings for that new equipment we got a couple years ago. It’s going to take some doing to make things right.”

  “What do you mean, to make them right?”

  “I think the business is in trouble, Tom. I need your help.”

  “Jesus,” Tommy said.

  “Jack and Joe are all right, but they’re not so smart. I say do something and they do it. But I need a real partner.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Tommy said. “You just want someone to argue with until Pop comes back.”

  “I need your help. I need someone to work with. It’d be good.”

  “I have a job,” Tommy said, wiping his mouth. “I have a family, I have a house, I have a job.”

  “The cement company can run itself. Besides, he told me he’s thinking of selling it off.”

  Tommy smiled sourly. “Oh yeah?” he said.

  “I figured you knew.”

  “He’d go that far?” Tommy said.

  “He says it’s never been a big moneymaker.”

  “He’s full of shit, Mark,” Tommy said. “The other day at the hospital he told me he was going to have me fired so that I wouldn’t be able to make my mortgage payments and would have to move into that house he bought. He was going to have me fired so that I’d have to work with you to keep food in my kids’ mouths. He’s got a little chessboard in his head and he’s been able to move every piece on the goddamn board except two of them. The last two. Me and my wife. And he won’t rest until the game is over, and he’s won.”

  “Jesus, that’s a horrible thing to say,” Mark said. “Jesus, Tommy, I’m ashamed of you.”

  “What’d he tell you about me coming into the business?”

  The question lay between them as Sal brought coffee and took their empty plates away. Mark took a long time putting milk and sugar in his cup. Finally he said, “The old man told me October first you start as vice president of operations. He says you make five thousand a year more than me.”

  Tommy laughed. “And you’re ashamed of me?” he said, leaning across the table until his forehead almost touched his brother’s. “God, Markey, I don’t want to piss on your life, but look at you. You’re a lackey for him. You don’t even have kids because he said adoption was no good. Do you hold it when he takes a piss, too? He’s got you just where he wants you. I thought he gave up on me a long time ago, because of Concetta, because I stepped out of line. Now I think he just waited until he knew I thought that, and then he came in for the kill.”

  “Do you hear yourself? You make your own father sound like a monster.”

  “You remember when we were kids and Sister Ann Elizabeth asked us to make a drawing of God? You remember? You made him tall and you made his hair yellow and his eyes blue. And so did I. She got such a kick out of that, that our pictures of God looked like the same person. That wasn’t just a coincidence, Mark.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mark said. “I just want you to come into the business with me. You’d be good. We’d be good together. The old man doesn’t accept reality. The world is changing. The Church is changing. He’s not far off on his jokes about the kaiser rolls. What if they decide to go to using plain pieces of bread at communion? That’s a million bucks right down the toilet.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong person about this. Go back to the hospital and talk to the owner of the company.”

  “He’s not coming back, Tom,” Mark said.

  Tommy felt a chill in his chest and, almost reflexively, his shoulders hunched in, like little wing
s. “Get out,” he said, but his voice was low.

  “He’s in bad shape. He’s much worse than anyone thinks. James says the old man will never really be the same.”

  “Get out,” Tommy said, his voice lower still.

  “You come into the business with me, Tom. Take the house. It’s a nice house, much nicer than any of those development houses. Move your wife away from there. It’s not good for her. It’s not good for you.”

  “She’s fine, Mark. I’m fine.”

  “No you’re not,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, we are.”

  “Yeah? Where is your wife right now? Right at this very moment? I can tell you that Gail is at a white sale with Mom and that after that she’s going to play bridge with some of her friends and after that she’s having dinner with me. Where is Connie right now?”

  “She’s home taking care of her kids,” Tommy said.

  “If you’re sure of that, fine. If you’re sure of that I got nothing further to say. If you’re sure of that.”

  14

  MAGGIE LIT THE FIFTH FIRE HERSELF. She felt as though the match jumped from her hand to the big wet spot where the lighter fluid had collected on the plywood wall of the garage. The house was in the back of the development, up a little rise from the old creek, and its lumber was still orangy-yellow. It was the spot on the wall and the fresh look of the wood, she thought when she was finally alone, that made her think the flames would not spread, even as they covered the walls like a dazzling cape.

  “Isn’t it incredible?” said Debbie, who was standing just behind her.

  Maggie was struck by several things at once: by the damp smell of the night, by a persistent trickle of sweat down the back of her head and into the hollow at the base of her skull, by how hot the flames became so quickly. It crossed her mind that she was making a memory, and that she would never in her life be able to communicate the sick feeling that afflicted her the moment the fire began to leap around her, the nausea that rose up in her throat as she heard the three people behind her breathing heavily in the still air. She wondered if this was the way her mother felt when she was expecting a baby. If it was, she would never ever have children.