Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  The next three days had passed in a welter of small details: the boxes of tissues on every table at the funeral home, the black mantillas laid on the chair in the hallway at her grandmother’s house, the holy card with the Sacred Heart on one side and her grandfather’s name and the prayer of resurrection on the other. “Accept our prayer that the Gates of Paradise might be opened for your servant,” it said. Her grandmother kept changing her mind about whether her husband should wear his blue or his gray suit, as though he was going to a communion breakfast. “For Christ’s sakes, Mother,” Tommy finally said, “if it matters so much to you we’ll dress him in the gray the first night and the blue the next. Can we drop it now?” Mary Frances had started to cry, and been helped up to her room by Margaret. Looking back over her shoulder, Margaret had said quietly to her brother, “Displacement, Tom honey. Thinking about the small things so you won’t have to think about the big ones.” Maggie had watched with a great full feeling in her throat as tears rose in her father’s eyes. For three days, she thought, they were all displacing. She had learned a new word. The only time any of it felt like real life was driving home in the car from the funeral home one night, stretched out on the back seat, her hot cheek against the cool vinyl of the seats. Frank Sinatra was on the radio, and her father was singing while her mother hummed and beat time with the toe of one patent-leather pump. “No, no, they can’t take that away from me,” Tommy roared happily. When the last few notes died away, he reached across for Connie’s hand. Maggie could see their twined fingers in the space between the seats, the lights of the dashboard making blue stars in her mother’s engagement ring. Then her father said, “Did they get whoever torched that house?”

  “I think one of the boys did it. Mary Joseph’s son. He was badly burned. They say he may lose a couple of fingers, and some of the use of his hand.”

  Tommy whistled. “Police?”

  “I think they’re handling it privately. The father has a bundle, and he’s going to need it. The construction people want $25,000.”

  Maggie saw her father look over at her mother, his profile sharp against the windshield. “Yeah?”

  “I get that from your sister-in-law,” Connie said with a wary look. “That’s where I heard it. I don’t know if it’s true.”

  Tommy grunted, satisfied. “The kid set these fires all by himself?” he added.

  “He was the ringleader,” Connie had answered.

  Maggie stared again at her mother in the limousine stopped in front of the Gates of Heaven sign. Connie’s eyes looked clear, her face smooth. This was how she always looked after the baby had settled in, once the bad part was over. The lines of her mantilla melted into the black of her hair. Everyone was stopped behind them, the cars with their headlights on, dim in the sunshine, snaking out onto Westchester Avenue. There were 111 cars in the procession: John’s children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, the workers from Scanlan & Co., the leaders of the unions that represented those workers, the leaders of the dioceses that bought what they made, a great long chain of procreation and commerce. There was one friend, a man named McAlevy who said he’d gone to high school with John Scanlan and had read his obituary in the newspaper. “A helluva pitching arm,” the man had told Maggie’s father at the funeral home. “Jesus, I’ll never forget it. A helluva pitching arm.” Maggie had seen the Malone car in the parking lot as she got into the limousine, but she knew she shouldn’t wave. She saw it again now, as the limousine inched forward and the family slid from the cars and gathered under the tent that sheltered the old man’s bronze casket from the noonday sun.

  “I am the resurrection and the life,” said the archbishop’s representative, a monsignor with a deep, powerful, effortlessly dramatic voice, which alone had ensured his elevation in the church. Uncle James had implored him to say the words in Latin, had hinted at free vestments for the cathedral. The priest had reluctantly refused. The new order was inviolate.

  Maggie could not concentrate on the words. A piece of green grasscloth was draped around the base of the casket, but it gapped near her feet and she could see the hole beneath. She knew that they would wait until everyone was gone and then the cemetery workers would lower the straps that let the box down into another box made of some kind of cement. And then they would fill the hole in and place the flowers on top. And by next year the grass would have covered it, and the scar would be gone. There was a largish headstone that said only SCANLAN. The stonecutter would come in a few weeks to finish it. Maggie was struck by the difference between knowing the routine and having it happen to someone she loved.

  There was a movement behind her, and she turned to see her cousin Monica, her hand clapped over her mouth, retreat to the lead car, the one in which her grandmother and her uncle James had been riding. Monica seemed somehow to have lost her power, too. At the funeral home they had stood side by side in the ladies’ room, and Monica had asked her coldly if she was bringing a date to the wedding. “Elvis Presley,” Maggie had said in a monotone. “Paul McCartney. Marlon Brando. James Dean.” Monica had smiled. “A comedian,” she said. “A real ball of fire.”

  “Stuff it, Monica,” Maggie said. “I’m tired of being afraid of you.”

  “Remember man …” the priest was saying, and Maggie finished the sentence in her mind, just as she would have done for her grandfather if they had been in his living room. Her lips moved: “that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” It was a good feeling, to be able to do that, like knowing the answer in a spelling bee. Maggie suddenly remembered the doorstop her grandparents had kept against the door to the house in summertime. It was a three-dimensional octagon, like a faceted ball, made of milky green stone. Maggie had loved to play with it when she was small, to turn it from side to side to side. One day she had asked her grandmother which was the top and which was the bottom, and Mary Frances had tried to explain that all the sides were the same. “There really is no top or bottom to it, dear,” she said softly, not noticing that John Scanlan was standing behind her until he reached clear over her shoulder and took the thing away. He turned it and turned it in his big hand, the hairs on the back catching the light so that they glinted silver and gold, and finally he hit on one side, identical to all the others except that there was a small nick at one edge. He crouched next to Maggie.

  “This is the top, little girl,” he said, and then he turned to the opposite side. “And this is the bottom. Top. Bottom. Bottom. Top.” Mary Frances had faded away, and Maggie had been happy. She liked answers. When they went to her grandparents’ house, after this was over, she would look for the nick. She knew now that her grandfather had been making a point, not telling the truth, but she agreed that the first was more important than the second.

  It was nearly time to go. The heat was drying the drops of holy water the priest had sprinkled on the metal lid of the casket. Her grandmother stood with her arm through Uncle James’s. The monsignor had turned to speak to her, and she blinked at him as though she could not quite place him.

  Maggie followed her parents back to the car. Mrs. Malone stopped to talk to Connie, and Debbie hung back, she and Maggie standing awkward and silent in their black patent-leather shoes, their Teenform garter belts itchy above their pelvic bones. Debbie was wearing her Easter hat, white with black daisies, and a black piqué dress that had once been Helen’s and was still too big on her.

  “I’m sorry about your grandfather,” she said to Maggie softly.

  “That’s all you have to say to me?” Maggie said. “I saved your life.”

  “You’re nuts,” Debbie said. “You got me in a lot of trouble. I fell asleep and didn’t get up till two o’clock. I had to go sleep at Bridget’s house. Now I’m not allowed to go anywhere. And my mother says you and I can’t be friends anymore.”

  Maggie looked over at Mrs. Malone. For a moment Debbie’s mother looked at her, and then she tilted her chin up in a way she had when she was angry, and stared past her. Maggie could not imagine why Mrs. M
alone would be angry at her.

  “How am I in trouble with your mom for what you did? What did you say?”

  “You should have taken me home, Mag.”

  “You shouldn’t have had anything to drink. We’re only thirteen. I could see right down the front of your blouse.” Maggie stared at her friend’s neck. There was a very faint purple mark, ineptly concealed with what looked like Max Factor pancake.

  “Oh, grow up,” Debbie said. “What are you, my conscience? If you think you can handle everything, then do it. But don’t do it halfway. If you’re going to save somebody’s life, then save it all the way.”

  There was a long silence. The two girls looked down at their shoes, hazy with dust.

  “My mother said Richard’s father is paying for everything,” said Maggie finally, not looking up.

  “He’s okay,” Debbie said. “Bridget says they’re sending him to military school. He’s going to need plastic surgery on his arm, Bridget said, and one of his fingers was burned off. That’s pretty disgusting, but at least it wasn’t his face. God, that would have been bad. It didn’t even touch his face, just his arm. And it was the arm he doesn’t use to write or throw, Bridget said. He’ll write and tell me soon. I don’t know how I’m going to see him at military school.”

  Maggie said nothing, only fingered the tissue in her hand. She looked at Debbie, her hair frizzing in the heat, and knew that she would always think of her as her best friend. She looked at Mrs. Malone, who still avoided her eyes, and knew that that was over, too, and she thought that maybe it was Mrs. Malone she would miss most. She would miss having a mother she didn’t have to push away, having a mother nothing like herself, having a family with no complications. Her eyes swam with tears, until the sunlight broke into little pink particles and she saw everything as a blur. She had known her grandfather would die. She had gotten used to the idea, little by little over the summer, that he was not invincible. But she knew that she had still believed that some things lasted forever.

  “’Bye Deb,” she said.

  “God, you’re always so dramatic,” Debbie said. “That’s what Bridget says.”

  Maggie looked away and saw that now her grandmother had the monsignor on one side of her and Mr. O’Neal on the other. Suddenly her grandmother crouched down and lifted one side of the grasscloth. “Oh, God,” Maggie heard Connie say, and the two of them moved away from the Malones and stood behind Mary Frances.

  “Could you get your father, sweetheart?” said Mr. O’Neal, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

  Mary Frances wheeled and brightened. “Maggie, these gentlemen are confused. Go get your uncle James and your father.” And suddenly all the boys were there, in their dark suits, looking so alike, so flushed and full of blood. For the first time Maggie saw the family resemblance, and saw it in herself, too.

  “I just wanted to know on which side the baby was buried,” Mary Frances said, her voice loud enough that people began to look over. “He is under the mistaken impression that there is nobody else in the Scanlan plot.” The five men, their hands folded in front of them, turned as one to Mr. O’Neal, who wiped his forehead again.

  “Perhaps one of you could show your mother to the car,” he said.

  “Is there another casket there or not?” Tommy said.

  Mr. O’Neal looked at Mary Frances, and then his narrow nostrils flared. “Absolutely not,” he said. “And I can assure you that I had a number of conversations with your father about these arrangements over the years and it was understood—twelve places. He and your mother. You five and your wives.”

  Tommy grimaced. “What about my sister?” he said.

  “The sisters make their own arrangements,” said Mr. O’Neal, as though that settled everything.

  “My parents had a child who passed away at birth,” Tommy began. “A little girl.”

  “My understanding was that at the time she was buried at a cemetery in the Bronx,” Mr. O’Neal said.

  “And he promised to move her,” Mary Frances said, and Maggie could see that her face was beginning to fall, as though the pouchy cheeks were melting just a little. “He promised to bring her up here so that we could all be together.” Mary Frances looked imploringly at Mr. O’Neal. Then she took Tommy’s arm. He looked around at his brothers, but they were staring down at their clasped hands. Maggie heard her father say, very softly, “He didn’t do it, Ma. Maybe he forgot.”

  He put his arm around Mary Frances’s shoulder. A path opened for them through the people who were left, and he guided her to a car and climbed in after her; his long arm was the last Maggie saw of him, pulling the door closed with a loud thunk.

  “This is not my fault,” Mr. O’Neal was saying as Maggie and Connie walked to another limousine. Margaret was already inside, and in silence they drove to the big fieldstone house. There were plates of cold cuts, and Swedish meatballs in a chafing dish with a little candle underneath to keep them warm, and fried chicken and potato and macaroni salad. But Mary Frances never came downstairs. Maggie spent most of the afternoon fetching Mr. McAlevy a fresh drink and listening to him tell a long story about a policeman, a bar in Brooklyn, a colored man, and an Irish gang that seemed to have no point and certainly nothing to do with John Scanlan. She excused herself when she saw Margaret climbing the stairs with a plate of food, and followed her to the door of the girls’ room. Across the hall she could see her grandparents’ room, neat and empty, her grandfather’s gray suit laid out on the bed.

  “Have you seen the stone doorstop?” Maggie asked.

  “What, sweetie?” her aunt said, balancing the plate of chicken and potato salad on one hand and pushing a piece of hair under her wimple.

  “Remember the doorstop? The big round ball with the flat sides that always held the door back?”

  “I haven’t seen that for years, Maggie,” Margaret said impatiently. “Would you go get me a 7-Up with just a splash of Canadian Club in it and bring it here?”

  “A cherry?” Maggie said.

  “Not necessary,” Margaret said, opening the door and taking the food inside.

  When Maggie came back, her grandmother was sitting up in bed, eating chicken and patting her face with a tissue. Somehow it was the sight of Mary Frances in the single bed, Elizabeth Ann’s bed, that finally got to Maggie, so that when she handed her the drink she began to cry, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand until Margaret handed her one of her big plain white cotton handkerchiefs.

  “You were his favorite,” Mary Frances said, and as Maggie looked at her grandmother, so small and raddled-looking, lying in the small bedroom with the two Scanlan & Co. crucifixes over the two beds, she knew that their lives would never be the same again. On the table next to the bed was a copy of Wuthering Heights.

  “It’s really good,” said Maggie, picking the book up and sniffling. “There’s some boring stuff at the beginning and end but the main story is great.”

  “As good as Jane Eyre?” Margaret said.

  “Better.”

  “What?” said Mary Frances querulously, eyeing them over the edge of her glass.

  “Maggie was asking about the doorstop for some reason,” Margaret said loudly, as though her mother was deaf.

  “The what?”

  “That big stone doorstop we used to have downstairs.”

  Mary Frances beamed. “You may have it, dear,” she said to Maggie.

  “But where is it, Mother?” Margaret said.

  Mary Frances thought for a moment. “It’s in the cabinet to the left of the stove, on the bottom shelf near the back. I put it there last year after your grandfather threatened to throw it out the window. He’d stubbed his toe on it in the dark.” Mary Frances patted her face with the tissue again. “I know he’d want you to have it, dear,” Mary Frances added.

  “Although maybe some time you’ll explain to me why you want it,” Margaret added, eating potato salad from her mother’s plate.

  Maggie thought for a
moment. “I think it’s displacement,” she said.

  Her aunt Margaret narrowed her eyes, and Maggie could tell that she was trying to decide whether Maggie was being smart or not. Margaret leaned back on the bed, the skirt of her habit hiked up to her knees, her black legs crossed at the ankle. “This family has a future,” she said finally.

  “What?” asked Mary Frances.

  “Nothing, Mother,” Margaret said, and she winked at Maggie.

  22

  IT WAS CONNIE, OF ALL PEOPLE, WHO had taken her mother-in-law to the grave of her daughter, back in one corner of the cemetery where Connie had grown up. Connie had called Angelo Mazza the morning after the funeral, and then she had called Mary Frances, and picked her up in Tommy’s station wagon. Mary Frances slid into the passenger seat, clutching her black handbag as though this excursion was the most natural thing in the world. There was no conversation. Mary Frances took out her rosary and said it soundlessly, the silence punctuated by the clicks of her crystal beads on their silver chain. When they drove through the gates to Angelo’s little house she let them slither back into the blue velvet pouch in which she kept them.

  “This place is very pleasant, Concetta,” Mary Frances said as she emerged from the car.

  Connie actually thought the flowers looked tired at this time of year, a little florid in their color, like a woman wearing too much makeup to disguise her age. The rose of Sharon and the hollyhocks were ragged, and the daisies had gotten leggy and fell over in untidy clumps. Most of the day lilies were gone, and the handsomest parts of the cemetery were those that had turned a deep green, in a final burst of good health before the early frosts defoliated them. As though he had been thinking the same thing, Angelo emerged from his house carrying a small pair of clippers. He looked neat and elegant in his gray pants and white shirt.

  Connie felt as tired as she’d ever been in her life. Part of it was the pregnancy, and part was the heat, and part were the events of the last few days. That morning two police officers had arrived at the front door. They were young, boys really, ten years younger than she was, and they wanted to talk to Maggie.