Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “I understood that the builders would not be pressing any charges, that they had agreed to receive restitution from the family of the boy responsible,” Connie said.

  “We have to do our own investigation, ma’am,” one of the officers said quietly, and Connie flinched at that last word, and felt very old. She was glad Tommy had gone over to Scanlan & Co. for the day. She called Maggie down from her bedroom. Maggie was barefoot, her hair wet from the shower, and she froze at the bottom of the stairs as she saw the blue uniforms.

  “We’re particularly interested in the last fire,” the officer said.

  They sat on the couch and Maggie sat on the floor cross-legged, her shoulders slumped, her arms limp. “Why are you talking to me?” she said.

  Connie started to speak, but before she could the officer, flipping through a spiral notebook, answered, “We talked to a Miss Hearn, who said she had no association with the fires. She sent us to a Miss Malone, who said the same. She sent us to you.”

  Connie could see Maggie only in profile. She had always known that the day would come when her daughter’s transformation would be complete, when she would not only be separate but equal, when she would become adult. Connie knew that this could take a long time; she felt that for herself it had happened just the other day, in the parking lot at the high school and in John Scanlan’s hospital room. She had expected it to happen when Maggie got her first period, developed breasts, fell in love. But it was happening here, now, horribly. There was a tightness around the square jaw, a hard glint in the eye, that was the look of a woman. It was like that just for a moment, and then it was replaced by the soft vulnerable look of a child who has been mistreated. Maggie’s mouth was open, but nothing came out. Then Connie had said, “My daughter was here with me that night. She couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

  The older of the two cops had looked at her for a long time. Connie was quite sure that they’d heard such a story from a mother a hundred times before. Finally he said, “We’re happy to know that, ma’am,” as he slapped his notebook shut and rose.

  On the ride with Mary Frances to the cemetery, Connie thought of that moment, and of the moment when she saw Maggie’s face change and watched the end of innocence right before her eyes. She still did not know how much of it was knowing that Debbie had betrayed her, and how much was what Maggie had seen the night of the fire, the things she had meant when she had said, her eyes blazing, “You’ve done worse than I have tonight.” She did not know whether her daughter had seen Joey Martinelli kissing her in the car, trying to undress her in the construction trailer, or arguing with her when Connie finally had pulled away, empowered by knowledge and not this time by nausea.

  Connie wondered, too, what Joey had seen in her own face when she handed him the key to the trailer, what had made him finally crumble and grow still after hours of argument. She knew what she had seen in his: it was that same glaze her daughter had had beneath the watchful eyes of the police, the awareness of the world the way it truly was.

  “Life is a terrible thing,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Yes, dear,” said Mary Frances. “But then, what else is there?” And she slid out of the car as Angelo Mazza came forward to greet her.

  Connie realized it was only the third time her mother-in-law and her father had met. Mary Frances seemed to have regained some of her aristocratic manner now that her husband’s illness was over, but it was a little weary and worn, like something familiar she had fallen back on purely from fatigue.

  “Good morning,” Mary Frances said to Angelo quietly. “This is very kind.”

  Angelo gave a slight bow and then held out his arm. “Shouldn’t we drive, Pop?” Connie said, but Mary Frances said, “I would rather walk.”

  In silence, under a lowered, pale gray sky, the thick air smelling of rain, they trod the asphalt, springy beneath their feet, until they came to a freshly cleared spot by the wall. Connie could see that her father had cut back the wisteria, sinuous and predatory here in the old section, and that some years ago he had planted violets around this stone, their heart-shaped leaves large and plentiful now, the little facelike flowers gone this late in the season. A small square headstone bore only the word SCANLAN, with the disembodied head and wings of a cherub above it. Time’s grime, the decades of snow and rain, summer and winter, had left black rubbed deep into the design and the letters. Mary Frances stood with her head down, still holding on to Angelo Mazza’s arm.

  “I have kept it very good,” he said quietly. “Very nice. In the springtime it is always purple, first with the wisteria, then the violets. Very sweet.”

  “Yes,” Mary Frances said. “Thank you.”

  Connie was sure that there was something strange about this, about the fact that Tommy’s sister had been in her own backyard, as it were, even before she first set eyes on Tommy. But it seemed no stranger than anything else she could think of, no stranger than the fact that two people sometimes cleaved together their whole lives long because of something they’d done in the back seat of a car, no stranger than the fact that two people could cleave together their whole lives long, while one thought she’d been made a promise and another that the promise didn’t matter much. Or that people could have hard feelings for so long and have them evaporate overnight. Connie put a hand on her mother-in-law’s shoulder. “You can have her moved as soon as you want,” she said.

  “No,” Mary Frances said. “This is fine. I just wanted to know where to come. It would be a shame to disturb this.”

  “Maybe that’s what John thought,” Connie said.

  “No,” said Mary Frances sadly, slipping her rosary beads out of her bag. “He just couldn’t be bothered. He thought it was a whim. God rest him,” she added reflexively.

  Connie stepped away from the corner, to give her mother-in-law privacy, and she and her father walked out to the road. Damien was back by the rosebushes, doing the fall fertilization. He had waved to her across the expanse of bushes and headstones, but he had not gotten up from his work. Once she saw his lips move and thought he was talking to a bug.

  There were no funerals today, although somewhere across the way Connie could see the garish display of color upon one mound that showed where a grave had been recently filled and all the funeral baskets and wreaths laid atop it. The gladiolus had always repelled her just as they had her father, but she minded them less because they were dead than that they had always been such a symbol of death itself. She remembered shuddering at her wedding when she saw those frilly spears, so unnaturally tall, standing on the altar. Between two rows of headstones she saw Leonard Fogarty running the hand mower, the skin of his flat head pale white beneath the stubble of his brush cut. He would be pleased when he turned and saw her, would come running over with his awkward gait, smiling all over his face, calling “Hi Hi Hi.” She remembered him on her wedding day, too, and the sound he had made, like a calling bird: oooooooh, as she came out of the house in her pale cream dress, the color of eggnog.

  The cemetery was a beautiful place, although she had had enough of the accoutrements of death during the past week to last her a lifetime. It shamed her to know that she was thinking of a new life as well; not the one inside her, but the one around her. They all were. Even Mr. O’Neal had been happy at John Scanlan’s wake, although he had done his best to hide it. The family had taken the heaviest, most expensive bronze casket he had for what he knew would be the largest funeral he would handle all year. The Scanlan family had printed up a thousand holy cards in anticipation of the crowd. When all of the nuns from Margaret’s convent entered at once, Mark had turned to Tommy and whispered, “Call and get more cards.”

  “Get the sewing machines converted quick for blouses and table runners,” Tommy whispered back, and Connie, overhearing, had had to stifle a laugh. Tommy turned and grinned at her, and then, very softly, he ran his hand over the down of her upper arm. She had shivered and then slowly smiled.

  For part of the evening she
had found herself alone in one corner with her sister-in-law Gail, who had never become accustomed to the lively air of Catholic funerary rites, particularly the position of the departed at the front of the room like a table centerpiece. Nevertheless she had tried to join in. “He looks good, doesn’t he?” Gail had said to Connie.

  “He looks dead, Gail.”

  “You two are certainly taking this hard,” Gail said. “Tommy has seemed so moody. It wasn’t like him to snap at Mother the way he did.”

  Connie sighed. “He loved his father,” she said, thinking of how little nuance the sentence contained.

  “Yes,” said Gail piously, adjusting the lapels of her black suit. She looked down at Connie’s belly, draped in black wool. “Aren’t you hot?”

  “It’s the only black maternity dress I have,” Connie said. “Tomorrow I’ll have to wear a blue one.”

  Gail looked down at her hands in her lap and twisted her wedding ring. “We’re going to adopt a baby,” she said.

  “That’s wonderful, Gail,” said Connie, feeling a surge of pity for her sister-in-law, her hair so carefully barretted back, her fingers turning, turning her ring. “That’s great. You’ll love it. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world, being a mother.” She wondered what it was about this situation that made her say so many things that sounded right but felt suspect. She was afraid that if she stayed here much longer, among the liverish pink and pale green brocades, she would find herself, like the head of the carpenters union now standing behind her, talking of what a good man John Scanlan was, and how much he loved his sons.

  “We couldn’t have done it while he was alive,” Gail said, her voice still lowered as though she was afraid her father-in-law would hear. It was a testimonial to John Scanlan’s vivid personality that even Connie, who had no illusions about death, had looked up several times during the evening and momentarily expected him to leap from his prone position and throttle someone who had done him dirty over the years.

  “How do you feel about all this?” Gail said suddenly, in what sounded like an accusatory tone.

  “Do you mean am I glad he’s dead?” Connie asked, and without waiting for an answer she went on, “Not really. I thought I would be, but I think it will probably upset things more than it will help them. And it will be hard to be happy at the wedding on Saturday. But I’m glad for you about the baby.”

  “Mark can do what he wants,” Gail said. “I can do what I want. So can you.”

  Connie was silent for a minute. She could see John Scanlan’s nose, beaklike and fierce, and then two more visitors knelt in front of the casket and blocked her view.

  “No one can do what they want,” she said, thinking of the look on Joey Martinelli’s face when she had given him back the key to the construction trailer.

  “I guess I can understand if you’re sad,” Gail went on as though she hadn’t heard. “The way he talked about you—how Tommy was the only one to marry a girl with looks, how the rest of the grandchildren, even Monica, were washed-out from too much Irish inbreeding and your children were the only ones who were halfway decent-looking or had half a brain. If I had had to hear one more word about what great legs you had, I would have screamed.”

  Connie looked at her sister-in-law for a long time, and suddenly, to her surprise, she felt tears fill her eyes. She felt great pity for John Scanlan, and anger at him, too. “Well, Gail, that’s the first I’ve ever heard of the high regard my father-in-law had for me,” she said.

  “It would have killed him to say anything nice about anyone to their face. He didn’t even kiss me at our wedding. I never heard him say a kind word to Mother. I don’t even believe he loved her. I think she was just a baby machine. Excuse me. I didn’t mean anything by that.”

  The man and woman kneeling in front of the body rose, and Connie could see that the woman was crying. She was wiping her face with a tissue, wiping away her rouge so that one cheek was a gray-white, the other a gay pink. It was one of John Scanlan’s sisters, the one he always called Fat Marge.

  “Who knows how he really felt about anything?” Connie had said, and then she had looked across the room to a corner where Dorothy O’Haire sat lost in the shadows. She was wearing a cheap black suit, clutching a black patent purse. Earlier in the evening, before anyone else had arrived, Connie had come in to make a list of the people who had sent flowers so that Mary Frances could send thank-you notes, and Dorothy had been kneeling at the casket with a little girl at her side. The child wore a beautiful navy blue dress, some gauzy stuff over linen, and a big sailor hat. When she had turned away from the casket, Connie could see that the girl had her mother’s dullish yellow hair, but her eyes were of a clear and translucent blue. They were Scanlan eyes.

  “Oh, Dorothy,” Connie had said.

  “Mrs. Scanlan, this is my daughter,” Dorothy had said primly. “Her name is Beth.” The girl curtsied. “How do you do?” she said, like a little girl in an old movie. On the bosom of her dress her initials were monogrammed in white: EAO. Connie knew that the O stood for O’Haire, and she was just as sure, as sure as if the name had been spoken aloud, that the E and the A stood for Elizabeth Ann. She wondered whether the girl’s mother had chosen the name, to stake her claim, or the girl’s father, to try to make amends or to live life over. After a few minutes, Dorothy had taken the child outside and put her into a car with someone, Connie could not see who, and then had come back inside alone. “I wanted her to pay her respects,” she said to Connie, finding herself that same seat in the corner, and every time during the evening Connie looked over, she had wondered if John had provided enough money for both of them. And she realized she knew another thing she would never tell her husband, and she felt weary with the weight of all the secrets it required to protect those you loved.

  Now in the sunlight Connie looked over at her own father and wondered if that’s what he had done for her, all these years, if his silence was really protection from a world he found too terrible to live in. He stood silently studying the cemetery, making sure it was perfectly groomed, everything in place. His flawless world, Connie thought, where none of the people are mean or dishonest or careless because none of them are alive. Angelo left her for a moment to say something to Leonard, and then walked back slowly, his shirt glowing in the sun. She was glad she had worn a skirt, even a flimsy cotton wrap one, its ties strained by her thickened waist; her father was offended by women in pants. Her hand went to her hair to smooth it off her forehead.

  “Mr. Scanlan is buried,” Angelo said.

  “Finally,” said Connie.

  “He was supposed to have the child buried with him?”

  Connie nodded. “That’s what his wife thought. I don’t know whether it was a misunderstanding, or he just ignored her.”

  “Different things are important to different people,” Angelo said. “Most people hate the bugs—your son loves them. Most people talk too much—your daughter listens.”

  “My daughter is a woman now.”

  “Of course,” said Angelo. “This summer it happened. Anybody could see. When your mother was her age, she was already married. One baby on the way, one baby to come. Children grow fast. Except if they are here.” And he looked around him again. Mary Frances joined them, her rosary in her hand, and Angelo escorted her in his courtly fashion back to the car.

  Connie was quiet on the drive home, overwhelmed by events. She and Mary Frances fell back on their old ways for much of the drive, the older woman talking in a desultory fashion about Monica’s wedding. Connie thought it would be an interesting affair, judging from the fact that the groom’s family had wanted his name on the invitations to read Donald “Duck” Syzmanski. As they neared Mary Frances’s house there was a long silence, and then the older woman began to speak, almost to herself, so low that Connie had to bend her head to listen.

  “No one ever understands what it’s like unless they’re in it themselves,” Mary Frances said. “People look at your children and they see t
hem all in a lump. Even their father, calling them “the brood,” herding them into the car for Mass every Sunday morning, making rules to fit them all, about staying out late, about homework, about spankings if they got into trouble, even for Margaret, with her little fanny in white cotton pants, her skirt pulled up. But their mother never sees them that way. Even now, all standing together, men in their suits, too big to hug, you see them all as themselves, clear—Jimmy with his everlasting questions, following you around the house: Why does this happen, Mama, why does that happen? Why does the sun rise and set? And Mark, walking him around the living room in that little row house we had, walking him every night with the colic while he screamed and screamed, the sky so black outside that it was like the end of the world. And Tommy curling like a little shrimp next to me on the beach, pulling a towel over his little shoulders so he wouldn’t burn. “Be a man!” John would yell at him, and he’d try to lie still, so still that no one would notice him.”

  Mary Frances looked over at her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she said. “The baby was stillborn and they came at me with a needle to put me to sleep and I said, damn you, give me that child. And I baptized her right there, and she was so pretty, with pink skin like flowers. And I kissed her face and she was real to me, as real as any of the others, even now. More real, maybe. Because you think of what they’ll become, and you’re always disappointed. Though they’re all good boys, all fine, they’re never exactly what you dream they’re going to be. Only she, only she never disappointed. Even today I dream the same dreams about her as when I kissed her face.” She bent her head over her hands, and then lifted it and stared out the windshield. “I kissed her, and then I let them give me the shot.”