Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “So I say to my soon-to-be-father-in-law, the New York City police officer,” Monica began, circling Maggie, still holding the stub of the match, “I say, Sergeant, what if you had a lovely young girl who had never been in any trouble before and suddenly she joins a band of arsonists. Arsonists! And this is what he says.”

  One of the bridesmaids giggled nervously. “Monica, you are strange,” she said.

  “Shut up, Cheryl,” Monica said pleasantly. Then she continued, “He says, Monica, my dear, if the local authorities were given such information, the girl in question would go to the local juvenile detention center. In other words, reform school. And I said, my, my, my. If I had such information, should I divulge it? And my soon-to-be-father-in-law said, it is your duty as a citizen. Well, you can imagine how upset I was. I hate to tell tales on people. I think anyone who tells tales on people is a rat.” Monica caught Maggie’s eyes in the mirror. “Especially about something important. Something that could ruin their whole life.”

  Maggie had wheeled around, but the saleswoman was kneeling at her feet, pinning the hem of the dress, and she was caught halfway between the mirror and her cousin. She finally managed to turn completely. With a smile, Monica held out the match.

  “What is it like to be like you?” Maggie said, staring into her cousin’s amber eyes, looking for something inside them.

  “Don’t play with fire,” Monica said.

  “I mean it. How can you stand yourself?”

  “Maggie,” said Aunt Cass, her voice trembling.

  “Liar, liar, your pants are on fire,” said Monica in an even voice. “Just a warning, Maria Goretti. Anything you can do I can do better. You may think it’s Monica, zero, Maggie, one. But you’re wrong. We’re even now.”

  “That’s not how I am,” Maggie said.

  “Oh,” Monica said in a squeaky little voice. “That’s not how I am. I’m a good girl.”

  “You are a witch, Monica,” Maggie said.

  “Now, Maggie,” said Aunt Cass.

  “My, my, my,” Monica repeated, her smile tight.

  “And you don’t fool me one bit,” Maggie added.

  “I don’t fool you,” said Monica, and though her voice was low it somehow felt as if she was screaming. “I don’t fool you. God! With your family? With your birthday six months after your parents’ anniversary? Don’t talk to me about fooling. Don’t talk to me, Maria Goretti. All I have to do is open my mouth and you’ll be in so much trouble you’ll never know what happened. Good little Maggie Scanlan. God, if they only knew. You’re worse than everyone else because you pretend to be so good.”

  “Monica, this will stop,” Aunt Cass said.

  “Can I believe my ears?” said Monica shrilly. “We’re defending Maggie? How many times have I heard you talk about how her mother is not our sort, dear? How many times have I heard my father complain that she sucks up to Grandpop so she’ll get more of the money? God, Mother, one night when you were drunk you even called her a wop. Why are we standing up for her now?”

  “Monica, you are not yourself,” said Aunt Cass, her face crimson, her voice shaking.

  “Oh, cut the Mary Frances routine,” Monica said, falling back into the chair. “This is myself. This is it. This is me, the real me.” She pointed a narrow foot at Maggie. “Who knows who she really is.” Maggie looked down at her fingers holding the charred piece of cardboard as though they were strange to her. She threw the match on the floor. “You’d better learn the facts of life before it’s too late, Maria Goretti,” said Monica. “Or you’ll wind up like your mother.”

  “I’d rather wind up like my mother than wind up like you,” Maggie said.

  “Same difference,” said Monica.

  “No,” said Maggie.

  “May we finish fitting the dress now, ladies?” the saleswoman said.

  “I don’t think I’m going to need the dress,” Maggie said.

  “You’ll probably be in jail,” said Monica.

  “No, no, absolutely not, I will not allow this,” said Aunt Cass, who seemed close to tears. “You must be in the wedding. It will seem strange to everyone if you’re not.”

  “It will seem strange to me if I am,” Maggie said.

  “Maggie, please. I cannot cope if you make trouble.”

  Maggie turned back to the mirror. Her face was white and her eyes were glowing. The salon was completely silent, and in the silence she could hear herself breathing;. “What do you think you’ll be doing in twenty years, Monica?” Maggie said in a low voice, and she could tell by the look on her cousin’s face that the question was first unexpected, then unpleasant.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Monica said.

  “I do,” said Maggie.

  “You can tell the future now, Maria Goretti?”

  “I can tell yours.”

  “Now let us take the dress off,” said the saleswoman, and she drew the curtains and left Maggie alone again.

  18

  IT WAS BECAUSE OF THE PARKING LOT that Connie almost turned back, not because of the hospital. She still found parallel parking a problem. She had driven right past her aunt Rose’s house one afternoon because her uncle Frank’s car was in the pitched driveway and she would have had to parallel park at the curb. The hospital lot had head-in spaces: she had tried them at shopping centers twice and found that if she cleared the car on the right, she wound up with her front bumper heading straight at the side of the car on the left, and if she started successfully toward the back of the space, she was sure to see that one side of the car was in danger of being pleated by the back bumper of another. Before Connie had known how to drive she had thought it was a silly adolescent thing, much overrated. She realized now that she had made herself think that about all the things she could not do, like swimming and riding a bicycle, and that there were difficult and elaborate skills the rest of the world had that she lacked. In a way the knowledge had been soothing; the thought of some essential inferiority made her feel more at home with others than her belief in her superiority had.

  She had found herself frantic as she drove to the hospital, and she had thought at first that it was because this was only her second time out alone. But then she realized it was about Joey, about what had happened in the parking lot. Staring at her bedroom ceiling the night before, she had replayed it all in her head and felt herself flush all over again, flush and burn. And for the first time she had admitted to herself that the baby within her had saved her from committing adultery. She would have done it, in daylight, with Joseph in the back seat, if some combination of hormones and nerves had not forced nausea to triumph over lust.

  She had hung around the kitchen all morning, finding odd jobs for herself, and it was not until she jumped at the sound of a truck door slamming that she realized she had been waiting for a visitor, waiting for the visit that would ruin her life.

  She had gotten into Tommy’s car, then; he had left it in the driveway while he went off with one of the cement-truck drivers, but somehow she saw the fact that it was there as an omen, a sign, and an opportunity to save herself. She did not know why she was here, at the hospital, except that in some odd way she equated her fall from grace with John Scanlan. Just for a moment, on the way there, she had wondered if her father-in-law had planned this, had somehow arranged for Joey Martinelli to be the foreman at the project for this very reason. “I’m off my trolley,” she muttered to herself in the quiet of the car.

  She found a space all the way at the back of the lot, where there were no other cars, and pulled in, straddling one of the painted white dividing lines. She walked toward the building, its big brick smokestack sending a plume of gray-black up toward the sky. In her straw bag was the Daily News, and an airline bottle of Four Roses she had found in the back of the liquor cabinet.

  Her heart was throbbing so violently as she crossed the parking lot that she wondered if, beneath her blouse, it looked like a painting of the Sacred Heart, a red oval, fiery like a bull’s-eye
on her body. All night she had rehearsed what she would say, how she would try to persuade John Scanlan to give up the idea of moving them into that new house, how she would try to talk him out of forcing Tommy into Scanlan & Co. Tommy hadn’t told her a thing, but she had known what was happening when she saw the new key on his key ring, and heard from Joey that the word was out that the old man was selling First Concrete. She had thought at first that she would try to talk to Tommy, but then she had realized that it was useless to discuss the matter with anyone but John Scanlan himself. When she recognized this, she knew some part of her life was over, that she had grown up, and that it was not the liberation she had always thought it would be, but an acceptance of her own powerlessness.

  She was relieved, at the visitor’s desk, to find that no one else had a pass to be in John Scanlan’s room. No one would demand an explanation of why she was stopping by for the first time in her father-in-law’s month-long illness, and how she had arrived at the hospital. Standing in the doorway of the room, listening to John Scanlan snore hoarsely, she knew that her carefully rehearsed speech had been a waste of time. Looking across at his beaky profile, the hair slipping over his high forehead, she felt a frisson of fear and dislike, but she knew that he would never again be the power that ruled all their lives. His chest was too sunken, his breathing too tenuous. With a kind of sympathy she looked at the tubes running to and from the bed and realized that he was catheterized, and thought what a humiliating thing that was for a man.

  When she stepped to the side of the bed she saw that someone else was there, too, asleep in a chair. It was John’s secretary, Dorothy. Connie had only met her once, at a horrid party for John’s sixtieth birthday, but she recognized her because something about her stolid face and figure had reminded Connie of her aunt Rose. Tommy had told her that Dorothy was helping out, although the table her father-in-law had been using as a desk was empty now except for a stack of blank Scanlan & Co. stationery.

  “Dorothy,” Connie whispered, touching her arm lightly.

  The other woman slowly raised her head and looked at the bed, then up at Connie. Half asleep, she stared, and then her eyes widened with panic.

  “It’s okay,” Connie said. “You must have fallen asleep. It’s kind of stuffy in here.”

  “We were working,” said Dorothy, her fingers, with their big knuckles, twisting round one another like a tangled ball of yarn.

  Connie looked down at John Scanlan. It was clear that he was barely capable of consciousness, much less work. She tried to search Dorothy’s face for some sign of guilt or fear, but the woman was staring at her hands in her lap. All Connie could see were the big tortoiseshell pins that held Dorothy’s hair in an old-fashioned roll at the base of her neck.

  “That was nice of you,” Connie said.

  “I have to go,” Dorothy said. “I have to pick up my daughter.” Her hands twisted again. “You have a daughter, too,” she added.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Scanlan likes her. Your daughter, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  Dorothy rose heavily. She wore a cameo at the throat of her white cotton blouse. Connie thought she looked out of time, like a visitor from the last century. Her eyes were red. She picked up her purse from the floor, and a paperback book. At the door she turned and looked at John Scanlan.

  “He’s dying,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Connie.

  “I’m glad,” said Dorothy, and for just a moment there was a blaze of savagery in her eyes and an acrimony in her voice that made her seem half mad. Then she turned and left.

  “Jesus Christ,” whispered Connie, sitting down, repelled by the warmth still lingering from Dorothy’s body. “What did he do to her? How many others are there? Jesus Christ, what a life this man has led.” For a long time she sat there and watched him sleep. Twice a nurse came in, glanced briefly at the blue cardboard visitor’s pass and at the patient, then left again. The level in the IV ebbed slowly. Connie read the Daily News. She left the little bottle of Four Roses in the top drawer of the bedside table. The light outside deepened slightly, from a white to a pale, pale yellow. Finally Connie came to accept that if the key to a prison were on her husband’s key ring, he had put it there himself.

  She had nearly made up her mind to leave when John Scanlan turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes. The deep blue was masked by a rheumy film, like the shadow a dog’s eyes develop when old age has set in. For the first time that she could remember Connie looked him in the face, eye to eye, and did not flinch, did not look away.

  He stretched out his big hand, soft and dry as a snake’s skin. The veins on the back were enormous, and by some trick of the light or because of his illness, they seemed to be throbbing.

  “Franny,” he said hoarsely, reaching for her.

  Connie drew back, but he pulled her arm closer and threaded his fingers through hers, engulfing her palm in his own. “Don’t be angry, sweetheart,” he said, almost as though he was talking to himself. “You’re prettier when you smile.” And he grinned, a kind of rictus now that his face had been pared down to bone and sinew. Connie thought she had never heard his brogue so thick, even when he was telling stories at parties and had had too much to drink. His grip made the stone on her engagement ring cut into her finger.

  For a long time he said nothing, just stared and breathed heavily, as though he had been running. “The children are in bed,” he said once. “Good riddance.” A few minutes later he winked at her, and said “You’re my girl.” Connie was pink with embarrassment, although she knew that it was not her he was seeing; she was afraid, too, afraid that he would somehow suddenly snap out of it and be enraged at so revealing himself, be enraged at being duped, even if he had done the duping himself. His lids drooped and he began to breathe more evenly; then they snapped up, like shades that had been pulled at the bottom, and he began to talk as though there was not enough time to get out all the words.

  “I’m sorry you lost the baby, Franny,” he said groggily, his voice catching on every consonant. “It was the blood that did it. The doctor said it happens sometimes, but there was no blood with the boys. She was a beautiful little thing, but the doctor said ‘She won’t live, Mr. Scanlan,’ and you wanting a daughter so bad, after the three sons, wanting someone you could put in little dresses with the ribbons and things.” He fell silent but his breathing was loud. “I remember when you said ‘I’m not having any more to break my heart. You have all your boys.’ And you didn’t want to let me come near, but that kind of thing can’t be allowed to last.” Connie could hear the sounds of the hospital out in the corridor, the rattling of the gurneys, the footsteps of the nurses. Finally he added, “You can’t deny your husband, Franny. That’s God’s law.”

  He turned his head away from her and breathed so heavily that Connie was terrified and thought for a moment she should call the nurse. It was a horrible noise, and she wanted it to stop, but she was afraid that if it did he would begin to speak again. She did not want to hear any more.

  Finally he turned his head back to her, and Connie saw that the tears were running down his face. He looked at their two hands, linked at the edge of the mattress, and then he looked up, and his face was contorted with grief, his lower lip shaking as though he had palsy, the tears dripping off his chin onto his pajamas, darkening the thin cotton. He pressed the back of her hand to his lips, and Connie recoiled, but he pulled her toward him again, with all the strength of a young man. Connie thought his tears must clear away his blindness and he would see her for who she was, but when he looked up again he only whispered “Please,” and she felt the kind of sympathy for him that she always felt for her husband, the sort you feel for a small child, although she never felt it for her own children.

  “It’s all right, John,” she said softly, pressing his fingers. “Everything is all right.”

  “Say you forgive me,” he said.

  “I forgive you.”

  He turned his head away
and looked at the ceiling. Then his eyes closed. He dropped her hand, and the snoring began again.

  She sat there for a while, and then picked up her purse and left. It was cooler out in the parking lot, and the sky seemed a deeper blue. She knew it must be past dinnertime. She wished she had taken the bottle of whiskey with her; she thought she could use a drink. Driving home, hunched slightly over the wheel, she knew she had learned one thing that afternoon: she would never be alone with Joey Martinelli again. She thought of the old man lying in the bed, of all the business deals and the machinations, and of him saying, last of all, “Say you forgive me.” She didn’t want to need forgiveness at the end.

  That night when her husband came home from the hospital he told her that his father had fallen into a coma and that the doctors did not expect him to come out of it again. “My mother’s all upset,” said Tommy, sitting at the red Formica table in the kitchen, sipping his beer and staring into space, “because she says the last words he ever said to her were ‘This is the toughest goddamn roast beef I’ve ever tasted in my life’ when she brought him a sandwich for lunch yesterday.”

  “It would be in character,” Connie said, knowing that if she did not tell him now she could never tell him, yet knowing that for some reason she could not tell him now. She looked into his face, trying to find the man she thought, so many years ago, would save her. And she realized, without regret, that it had been the other way around, and that she would have to live with that responsibility, even embrace it, for the rest of her life. She realized that for years she had wanted to sit by John Scanlan’s side and say “To hell with you.” But she had moved beyond the desires of that woman now. She had become a person who could sit there, hand in hand with that awful man, and forgive him his trespasses, whatever they might be. And if her husband knew that, he would know something that would ruin his life even more decisively than his father had tried to do. He would know that his wife was stronger than he was.