The attic was surprisingly clean, and empty except for a big trunk, wood banded with metal. He lifted the lid slowly, afraid he’d hear the little feet again. The trunk was full. On top was a manila envelope, and beneath it a welter of lace and satin the color of tea. He could tell it was a wedding dress without even lifting it. Some dried flowers lay to one side.
He slid the contents of the envelope out and sat crosslegged on the unfinished pine floor. There was an old wedding picture, the bride wearing the sort of shapeless veil and straight, midcalf-length dress his own mother wore in her wedding pictures. There was a marriage certificate—Jean Flaherty to Harold Ryan, April 8, 1924, in Most Blessed Sacrament Church, Brooklyn, N.Y. There was a faded white ribbon, a scrap of material, and a postcard from Niagara Falls. Tommy could feel something small and hard in the bottom of the envelope. He shook it and into his palm fell a tiny tooth.
The attic seemed to have been cleaned, and the trunk stood in the center of the floor as though it had been abandoned. Did people think so little of the past? Tommy thought again of eating at Sal’s, of a lunch he’d had the week before. A shaft of sunlight had been shooting through the cheap stained-glass fleur-de-lis in Sal’s front window, so that bars of red and green and blue fell right across the plate placed in front of the third stool in from the end. Some of the men said that it was enough to give you indigestion, this big spot of color atop your corned beef and slaw, but Tommy liked it. He supposed it reminded him of church, perhaps of serving Mass when he was an altar boy, when he had felt solemn and important as he poured the water from the cruet over the priest’s consecrated fingers—his father’s cruets, his father’s chalice. As he had taken the seat, he thought of what a creature of habit he was, and it made him afraid.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Sal had said, and Tommy had found, to his great amazement and shame, that at the words tears welled in his eyes. It was dim in the bar at all hours of the day, and he hoped that Sal could not see.
“Your dad worse?” Sal asked, putting the cream in front of him, making Tommy suspect that the light was better than he thought.
“Ah, who knows,” Tommy said, playing with his teaspoon. “The doctors never tell you anything. I don’t think they know anything. Half the time he’s full of piss and vinegar and the other half he’s talking like a baby.”
Sal wiped the bar and emptied an ashtray.
“My brother’s daughter is getting married,” Tom went on, “my niece, very pretty girl, very smart, all the best things. And suddenly my mother calls and says Monica’s getting married, three weeks’ notice, with her grandfather in the hospital. I understand these things, it happens every day, but jeez, I don’t know, maybe it’s better that my father can’t come. She’s marrying a Polish boy, my brother says he’s a nice enough boy, but my father thinks that anybody who’s not Irish should get out of town, you know?”
Sal nodded. He’d heard about Mr. Scanlan from the Italian guys who worked for First Concrete.
“I guess I figured these things didn’t happen anymore, that girls were smarter, that guys were smarter. My brother was figuring on her finishing college, becoming a nurse or something. Now the boy will have to leave school, get a job.” It flashed through Tommy’s mind that the job would probably wind up being at Scanlan & Co., and that the news of the Polish grandson-in-law was going to be even more horrible for his father than he had at first imagined.
“Remember after the war,” Tommy said, “how everybody talked about how tough the changes were going to be? I didn’t fight, I was just a little kid, but I can remember everyone saying there would be changes, and there were changes, but they were all good. The wives stopped worrying, everybody bought houses, had a couple of kids, they were damn glad to be home. Now there’s no war but there’s changes, and they’re all bad. You go to Mass, the kids are fooling around, no hats, they’re changing the prayers, they’re changing the music, the rules. I go downtown the other day for a meeting, and there’s two young girls crossing Broadway in front of me, they’re wearing dresses as long as one of my shirts. No stockings. No underwear, for all I know.” He didn’t say that one of the girls was Helen Malone, that he had leaned forward and peered through the windshield incredulously, that when a stray summer breeze had lifted the corner of her short Indian sack dress he had begun to feel very warm indeed and had looked down to see the fabric at his crotch straining visibly, until a car behind him had honked to let him know the light was green. It reminded him of the new bookkeeper in his office, the one with the bleached hair flipped up on her shoulders and the little-girl dresses with the collars and cuffs and the low waists, the one who always rubbed up against him when she passed behind his desk.
Sal reached beneath the bar and brought out the coffee pot. He poured a cup for himself, and a second cup for Tommy.
“You know my sister who’s in the convent? I don’t know what’s going on with her, either. She’s reading Jane Eyre. A nun! It’s a book my daughter read in school. I never read it—I had to read Moby Dick—so I asked my daughter what it’s about. Some woman is a governess and winds up marrying the man of the house. My sister the nun is reading this? The other day she went to buy a bathing suit. A bathing suit! My sister told me I was behind the times. Maybe that’s it. I’m behind the times. I’m still back in the good times.”
The two men stared at each other. “Jesus Christ,” Tommy whispered, as though he was witnessing a miracle, “that’s the voice of John Scanlan, coming right out of my mouth.”
“It always has, Tom,” Sal said with a smile. “You just never noticed it before. I think that’s what parents are for. You need to learn to talk. They give you the voice.” In the silence Tommy could hear the television, could hear some woman on one of the soaps say stridently, “Doctor, will I ever be a whole person again?”
“I don’t know, Tom,” Sal added, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Nothing ever changes much around here. My mother died. I put the pinball by the door. I got a new TV. On St. Patrick’s Day I have corned beef and cabbage on the menu and put food coloring in the beer. Girls get knocked up, old men die. Excuse me, nothing personal. I don’t know about nuns. Your sister can’t stop being a nun, can she?”
“Who knows anymore?”
“No, forget it, I don’t think you can stop being a nun without a whole lot of rigamarole from the pope. But your father—I don’t know. It sounds like he’s pretty bad.”
Tommy looked into his coffee cup again. The sun was moving and he had to move his cup to make it change colors. He wanted to tell Sal that his father was not the trouble. In some strange way he liked talking like his father, thinking like his father. When he thought about running the company with Mark, all he could think of was reining his brother in, telling him to watch it with the crazy ideas. As he watched his father’s life ebb, day after day, he began to feel as if his father was flowing into him.
Now he sat on the attic floor and all he could think of was changes, how he hated them, how he wanted them to stop, how he sounded like the old man wasting away in his hospital bed. He looked at the wedding picture in his hand and wondered whether the people in that picture had intentionally left it in the dust, whether they had soured on their old dreams or simply had new ones. Tommy felt his own old dreams slipping away, but he was not sure what the new ones would be. He only knew that they would revolve around his wife. He walked to the edge of the ladder and looked down. He could see his wife in that dressing room, black and white and beautiful amid the roses, in her black bra and black half slip, fixing her hair in front of a mirror that would hang on the one wall.
This house felt too grand for him, like the house of an adult, not the house of an overgrown boy, but he knew she would seem at home here, small and elegant in the large, well-proportioned rooms. He remembered leaving Sal’s the other day, driving aimlessly, his eyes clouded by tears, through the Bronx to Westchester, where he was to see about giving an estimate for the foundation for a new wing of the high sch
ool. As he turned into the entrance, a sedan had almost sideswiped him, driving too close to the center of the road, and he had yelled “Jesus Christ” and raised his middle finger to the driver before he saw that it was Connie, hunched over the wheel, her lower lip tight between her teeth, with that Martinelli guy in the seat beside her. He had pulled the car over in the parking lot, next to some sawhorses, and rested his head on the wheel until the sick feeling in his stomach had passed.
For hours after that he had driven around, listening to Sinatra on the radio. The day had faded quietly into night, the way it did on these hot August days, and the back of his shirt was drenched with perspiration, but still he drove around, until finally he took a right-hand turn and found himself in the parking lot of the hospital.
“Good evening, Mr. Scanlan,” the youngest of the nurses said when he approached his father’s room. Dorothy O’Haire was sitting in a plastic chair outside, working on some dun-colored piece of knitting. Seeing her there, Tommy assumed that his father was up and around, raising hell, but when he sat down by the bed he could tell that the old man was in a deep sleep; his eyes were still beneath the blue-veined lids, and his breathing seemed to stop between each inhalation, so that Tommy thought each breath was the last. On the bedside table there was an envelope with “Ryan house” written on it in the old man’s florid handwriting, the pride of the nuns at St. Aloysius School; it had been there for weeks, and for the first time Tommy picked it up. As though the gesture had reached deep inside his failing consciousness, John Scanlan’s eyes opened slowly, and he stared at his son.
“Something important,” he said dully.
“I know,” Tommy said.
“You do it for your mother,” the old man said, breathing hard on each word.
“Yes.”
“Move.”
“We’ll talk about it when you’re a little bit better, Pop,” Tommy said, holding the envelope.
John Scanlan shook his head and fell deeper into the pillows.
“No,” he said. And then his eyes closed and the slow, measured cadence of his breathing began again.
Tommy had ripped open the envelope and slid the key, shiny as a new penny, into his palm. The one his father had tossed into Connie’s lap, that Sunday that now seemed so long ago, had lain on their dresser, untouched, all this time. The freshly cut end of this other one had left a scratch just below Tommy’s thumb. He had put it into his pocket, among the small change, and had left it there until this afternoon, when he used it to unlock the door.
Now, coming downstairs, the manila envelope from the trunk under his arm, he took the key from the mantel in the living room and held it again in his palm. Then he took out his key ring and slid it next to the keys to the car, the keys to his house in Kenwood, and the keys to his office. He expected to hear those tiny feet again, but there was only silence, and then the echo of his footsteps as he let himself out and locked the door behind him.
17
THE BRIDAL SALON WAS NOT EXACTLY what Maggie had expected. She had never really thought about getting married, although they had all discussed it enough at school. “If you could marry Paul or John, or any of the boys in class, which would it be?” JoAnne Jessup would suddenly ask her and Debbie at lunch. But that was just fooling around, and actually being married was not, at least as far as Maggie could see. Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to her to imagine being married herself than it had to imagine driving a motorcycle or having a job. She had, however, thought about being a bride, which had more to do with being the center of attention and looking inexplicably, temporarily beautiful than it did with sharing a double bed with someone with hairy legs and a drawer full of boxer shorts. Once she had tried on her mother’s veil in the bathroom, a Juliet cap pocked with pearls, its long tail of net beige and tattered. She had locked the door, and placed the little dome on her head, then stood back to survey the effect. But she could not grasp the magic. Perhaps it required the entire outfit. She could not grasp it in the salon either, although she got glimpses of what she was searching for every now and then, in the racks of white dresses, misty as ghosts, hanging along one wall in plastic bags, or in the scratchy sound of one of them being carried across the floor in a saleswoman’s arms. Monica had already gotten her dress, and they were there for the bridesmaids—Maggie, two friends of Monica’s from Sacred Heart, and the groom’s sister, who was unfortunately, as Aunt Cass had confided after Mass on Sunday, “quite large.” Neither the fat sister nor Maggie wanted to take off their clothes in front of the others.
Monica sat slouched in a chair in a pale-blue blouse and skirt, her hair in a ponytail, acquiescing to her mother’s wishes. If the bridal salon was not quite what Maggie had expected, Monica was not acting a bit like her idea of a bride. She seemed bored and anxious to get on with it.
“What about pink?” Aunt Cass said, and Monica replied, “Fine” in a tone that suggested the answer to What about yellow? Or green? Or blue? would have been “fine” too. The saleswoman brought out pinks of all shades and styles, and finally it was decided that the dresses would be high-waisted, like Monica’s, and made from some fabric Maggie had never heard of before called silk shantung. There were little pillbox hats with veils, and the dresses were rather plain, so that the bridesmaids looked very sophisticated, except for the fat sister, who looked enormous.
“Now for the little one,” said the saleswoman, a tiny woman dressed all in black, perhaps to better point up the colors of her wares. She spoke with a faint accent and had a bodice dotted with safety pins and needles trailing white and pastel wisps of thread. Maggie realized that the saleswoman was referring to her, and she followed the woman into the dressing room. But she saw at once that the dress there was different, puffed sleeves instead of cap, a big bow at the high waist in the back, even a different hat, like the straw sailors she had always had for Easter, except that it was pink, with a pink ribbon and a gauzy brim.
“Off with the clothes,” the saleswoman said brightly, and Maggie turned her back, crimson. She was wearing her slip, the closest thing she had to a bra. She had stuffed the nylon skirt into her shorts, so that she had had lumpy legs all morning. The saleslady clicked her tongue. “You will need foundation garments with this,” she said, unzipping the dress. “For the hose. And to give the line to it.” But the dress, when it was on, had no line. It fell straight down Maggie’s angular body. A carpenter’s dream, she thought. Her hair hung in big hanks where her breasts should be.
“It needs something,” said Aunt Cass, who had slipped in between the dressing-room curtains.
The saleswoman shrugged. “She is a little girl,” she said, although Maggie was taller than she was. “It is not the same here”—she grabbed a handful of the bodice—“or here,” lifting the skirt and dropping it with another shrug.
“What if we put her hair up?”
“Not with the hat. The hair, besides, is very fashionable today, for the young girls. But it has no style. Perhaps a little lipstick, some rouge.” A picture flashed through Maggie’s mind of herself on Halloween, when her mother wedged her on the vanity bench in the bathroom and expertly, seriously, her tongue snagged between her lips in concentration, made Maggie’s face up. She was good at it, and Maggie always thought she looked wonderful, her lips fuller, deep red, her cheeks flushed with the powdered rouge, her lashes spiky with the mascara, coaxed from its red plastic case with a little brush and some drops of water. But she did not look the way the older girls did, their lips disappearing into their faces in their coats of white-pink lipstick, their cheeks pale, luminous as the moon.
Aunt Cass looked at Maggie in the mirror. Maggie looked back. Her face was hot. “You look fine, honey,” her aunt said. She moved the curtains aside and the older girls crowded in. “You look so cute,” one of them said, a buxom blonde whose chest had peeked out of the neckline of the dress she had tried on. “God, you’r
e so thin,” the fat sister said.
Monica stayed in the chair, playing with a piece of her honey-colored hair, wrapping it around one long finger. Her engagement ring glittered. Her mother moved aside so that Monica could see Maggie, and for the first time that day Monica smiled. “It’s you,” Monica said, narrowing her eyes. “It’s really you.” Maggie’s eyes dropped until she could no longer see Monica’s reflection in the mirror, except for one long tanned leg swinging back and forth restlessly over the silken upholstery of the green-and-pink striped chair. Then, with a great effort, she looked up again and stared her cousin straight in the eye. The smile was still there. “I think it’s fine,” Maggie said, determined to be agreeable. “Besides, no one will care what I’m wearing. Everybody will be staring at Monica. Everyone will be interested in her dress. No one will be able to take their eyes off her.”
“It is the bride’s day, certainly,” said the saleswoman brightly, lifting the hat from Maggie’s hair.
Monica rose from the chair and came over to the mirror, and Maggie noticed that she seemed a little clumsy. She looked Maggie up and down and then she went back to her purse and Maggie heard a scraping sound. Her cousin came up behind her, a smile on her face, and held up a lighted match.
“There is no smoking in the salon, miss,” said the saleswoman primly.
“Tell my cousin,” said Monica as she stared at Maggie in the mirror. Then she blew out the match.
Object Lessons Page 19
