Object Lessons Read online

  “The twelve apostles.”

  “John,” Maggie began, as she always did.

  Her grandfather had something on his mind. She had known it as soon as she’d seen him that morning, his blue eyes dim, as though turned within. For just a moment, when he saw Connie and Tommy enter the house together, Maggie’s father’s hand held protectively at the small of Connie’s back, John’s eyes had brightened, blazed, danced. Now he seemed preoccupied.

  Maggie had been able to recite the deadly sins since first grade. The apostles were a throwaway question. Most recently her grandfather had asked her to recite from memory the Passion According to St. Mark, and Maggie had been amazed when she had learned it successfully. She was even more amazed to be corrected by her grandfather on two small phrases. When she got home and looked at the New Testament, she had seen that he had been right. She wondered who had made him memorize the Passion; she couldn’t imagine anyone making her grandfather do anything.

  John filled the glasses from a silver shaker with his initials on it which his wife had purchased because she thought it might make a good heirloom someday. He picked up the matching silver tray and turned to Maggie. “Come into the living room for the entertainment,” he said, and his eyes glistened, his wide mouth creased into a humorless tight-lipped grin.

  “What entertainment?” Maggie was still going after the olives.

  “Ha!” her grandfather said, pushing through the swinging door.

  Maggie heard a little stage cough behind her and knew that her cousin Monica had entered the room. She was wearing the moiré taffeta dress with the high waist and enormous puffed sleeves she had worn the week before for her high school graduation. In it she looked beautiful and virginal, her honey-colored hair flipping up on her shoulders, her nails polished the same color as the add-a-pearl necklace her parents had completed as a graduation gift. When Maggie had stopped after the commencement ceremony to congratulate Helen Malone, who had been in the same graduating class as Monica, Helen had smiled slowly and said, “Your cousin wins the award for best disguise.” Looking over her shoulder at Monica now, Maggie thought she knew exactly what Helen meant. With her pretty face and her curved smile, Monica looked kind and sweet. She stared at Maggie with the cool, direct look she did so well. Then she looked pointedly at Maggie’s fingers in the olive jar. “How attractive,” she said, and Maggie withdrew her hand so quickly that the jar toppled over onto the counter, and brine splattered onto her flowered skirt and the linoleum floor. “Most attractive,” Monica said, leaving Maggie to clean up the mess and wish she was back home in her shorts.

  On Sundays, when Maggie went to her grandparents’ house, it was usually with her father. Her mother stayed home with the younger children. Maggie had known everything she needed to know about her mother and her father’s family when she had started to page through Tommy and Connie’s big white leatherette wedding album when she was four years old. She could never understand what had moved the photographer to go up into the choir loft, look down, and take a picture of the congregation, which showed a great massing of relations on the bride’s side of the church and no one behind the groom except his brothers, the ushers, who had appeared in their cutaways in defiance of their father’s wishes. She could never understand why her mother chose to put that picture in the album. “It’s a sad picture, Mommy,” Maggie had said once when she was young, before she had begun quietly to take sides.

  “It shows something,” her mother had said, her lips closing like a red metal zipper. Maggie supposed that whatever the something was, it was long-lived, for her mother came to her in-laws’ home only when a special invitation was issued.

  Maggie was there often. She liked the order, the cleanliness and the smell of polish, smells that were absent from her everyday life. In her grandmother’s living room there was a baby grand piano, a painting of flowers over the fireplace, a corner cabinet filled with china statues of characters from Shakespeare, and enormous quantities of brocade in a color her grandmother called mauve. There was a big kitchen with geraniums on the wallpaper, and curtains that matched, and a pantry with glass-fronted cabinets. All the food behind the glass was arranged in alphabetical order; the family joke was that Mary Frances Scanlan never served mixed vegetables, because she wouldn’t know whether to file the cans under M or V.

  It was the house of people who had money. “Mag, are you rich?” Debbie had asked her once when they had ridden up the long driveway on their bicycles, the lawn stretching away on either side. Maggie had answered, honest as always, “They are. We aren’t.”

  Now the brocade furniture in the living room was full of people. Her mother was sitting in the corner of the couch, Joseph slumped against her, his eyes half closed as he sucked his middle fingers. Next to her mother was her aunt Cass, Monica’s mother. Uncle James was sitting next to his wife.

  “Delivered twins last night, Concerta,” James said with a grin.

  “Oh, God,” Connie said, her stomach fighting the martini her father-in-law had pressed upon her. “That poor woman.”

  “No, no,” said James, waving his left hand, his wedding band sunk a little into the flesh of his finger, “Very easy delivery. Just popped right out, one after another.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Mary Frances Scanlan, putting her drink down on a coaster on the coffee table. “It’s bad enough, shop talk, but your shop talk is the worst, Jimmy.”

  “Sorry,” said James pleasantly. “All part of life, Mother. No sense denying it.”

  “No sense discussing it,” said Mary Frances as Maggie came in with another tray of drinks. “Maggie, here’s your cherry. Come quick or I’ll give it to one of your brothers.”

  Her grandmother held a maraschino cherry by the stem, dangling it, dripping, over her whiskey sour. Maggie always ate the cherry from her grandmother’s drink, trying not to feel the bite of the liquor before she got to the syrupy taste of the fruit. Like so many other customs in her family, it had continued long past the time that those involved enjoyed it. In fact, Maggie could not remember that she had ever enjoyed it; it had simply become tradition and could not be tampered with. By the time she had eaten the thing, the back of her tongue was usually numb. For a moment she thought of refusing, but instead she took the cherry and held it over her cupped hand, hoping for a chance to throw it away. She looked across the room and saw Monica smiling at her, and she opened her mouth and popped the whole thing in, stem and all. When she wiped her hands on her skirt, Monica laughed.

  “Well, gentlemen,” said her grandfather, coming up behind Maggie and lifting his Scotch from amid the martinis on the tray, “The Roman Catholic church is going to hell in a handbasket.” John Scanlan had a tendency to choose phrases and stick with them. “Hell in a handbasket” was one of his favorites.

  “Shop talk,” said Mary Frances, crossing her legs and pulling at a stray thread on the brocade chair with her index finger and thumb.

  “It’s shop talk that pays for this house,” her husband said. “It’s shop talk that pays for that Lincoln Continental and the private schools for all these children.”

  Maggie heard a sigh from the hallway. Monica had moved back into the shadows.

  “And for your orthodontia, miss,” John Scanlan said without turning around to look at Monica, whose teeth as a child, before she became perfect, had been as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery.

  John Scanlan said it nice and evenly, the way he said almost everything else. The oldtimers at the factory always said that it took a man a couple of hours after he’d been fired to take it all in, because John Scanlan said “You’re fired” in the afternoon in exactly the voice in which he said “Good morning” each morning. Maggie had noticed lately that it was a good bit like the voice in which she answered catechism questions: Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

  “Today in church I see four women without hats,” he conti
nued. “Without anything on their heads. Never mind those flimsy little black veils that all you girls are wearing”—her grandfather looked over at Maggie, whose rayon mantilla was sitting on top of her little patent handbag on the hall telephone table—“now we’ve got women bareheaded. Bareheaded! As though they were going to Coney Island instead of the House of the Lord of Hosts.

  “This is all because of that woman,” he added, meaning the president’s widow, who had begun wearing the mantilla to Mass on summer Sundays several years before, “who has probably never given a thought to the millinery industry in her life.

  “Similarly, Johnnie, who runs the hat shop on Main Street, tells me that business is bad. Men are not wearing hats anymore, he tells me. Now whose fault is that?”

  They all knew the answer. Mary Frances, who was her husband’s straight man as well as his wife, sipped her drink, put it down, folded her hands in her lap, and said obediently, “The president.”

  “Exactly!” John Scanlan slammed his broad flat hand down on the table next to him.

  From behind her Maggie could hear Monica sigh again. She looked over at her mother, whose eyes were shiny from alcohol. Connie looked as though she had left her consciousness at home in Kenwood and sent her body on to the Scanlans without her. Maggie realized that that was how her mother always looked when she was around Tommy’s family. She also realized that her parents never sat together when they were at John and Mary Frances’s house. Maggie’s father was sitting on the piano bench across the room.

  Variations of this conversation took place every Sunday at the Scanlan house. John hated the Kennedys, whom he saw as a bunch of second-rate Scanlans with too much hair. And he hated what was happening to the Catholic church because of Pope John XXIII, not because, like his contemporaries, he thought the changes were blasphemous, but because he thought they were bad for business. “The two Johns,” he called the men he thought responsible for unnecessary change in America, although both were now dead: the boy president and the populist pope.

  While all around him in Our Lady of Lourdes people slowly, painfully adapted themselves to the Mass in English, John Scanlan whispered the Latin. It was disconcerting to share a pew with him. The priest would intone “The Lord be with you,” and from John’s seat would come a sound, like a snake exhaling, the carrying sibilants of “Dominus vobiscum.” Occasionally when they were together her grandfather, a tall handsome man with yellowing white hair, would turn to Maggie and inquire, “Confiteor deo?” and Maggie would be expected to answer “omnipotenti,” or, on occasion, to finish the entire prayer. “A plus,” Monica sometimes called her, and, like everything else Monica said, the tone was pleasant, the smile ubiquitous, and the meaning mean as hell.

  John Scanlan had started manufacturing communion hosts when he was twenty-one, a newlywed with two years of college, eleven younger siblings, and a mother dying of the same lung cancer that had killed her husband ten years before. For a week after he quit school John had thought about growth industries and then he had rented a pressing machine and space in a garage on a back street in the South Bronx and begun to stamp out little wafers of unleavened bread. The Jews who rented him the place thought he was crazy. Two years later he had his own factory and twenty-two employees.

  He began to make holy cards, vestments, and assorted communion veils and confirmation robes, and the three sons who worked in the business knew how to market them all: buy from a Catholic. It was as simple as that. John Scanlan’s only real competitor had been a company in Illinois owned by a Methodist; the year Maggie was born it had gone out of business, only six months after its founder had gotten drunk at a convention and made a joke about Scanlan & Co., the Irish, and booze.

  John Scanlan now had a plant in Manila doing machine embroidery on vestments and altar cloths, a plant in White Plains that employed 160 people, and a not-so-hidden interest in three construction companies, two garment factories, and the cement company for which Tommy worked. He was very, very rich.

  He was rich enough to retire and be rich for the rest of his life, but he had no wish to. All he wanted to do was to manage the lives of his children, and to be left alone so he could become richer still. Already there were a few parishes in progressive suburbs which were simplifying their altars and the rites that took place upon them. John Scanlan predicted that by the year 2000 priests would be saying Mass in Bermuda shorts, handing out kaiser rolls at communion, and Scanlan & Co. would be bankrupt.

  “Now he’ll say ‘Then, good-by easy street,’” Maggie thought, looking down at her skirt.

  “Then, good-by easy street,” said John Scanlan, picking up his drink.

  “Pop,” said Mark, “we can diversify. We can modify. If the Church decides to simplify the vestments, change the altar cloths, it would take us three days to change the machines over from the old lamb motif to a simple plain cross. The church changes, we change with it.”

  “We are not talking about embroidery. We are talking about disaster.”

  “Jesus, why do I bother?” Uncle Mark said, refilling his glass from the cocktail shaker.

  “I often wonder the same thing,” his father said flatly.

  Maggie’s father pumped the piano pedals and stayed out of the way. His glass was empty but he made no move to refill it. Connie’s glass was still half full. She had a sheen of sweat on her upper lip, which even for early July seemed a bit extravagant.

  “Concerta?” said Mary Frances, leaning forward with a pleasant smile, like a woman in a magazine. “Another?”

  “No. Thank you. Really,” said Maggie’s mother, who had never been able to think of a term of address for her mother-in-law and so for thirteen years had called her nothing at all.

  “Well, let’s talk about Tom here,” Mr. Scanlan said, without looking at his middle son. “They’re ripping Tom’s backyard up. Making a shantytown. I have knowledge of this only secondhand, because no one saw fit to give us any of the contracts for this development. Be that as it may, it will be all over in that part of the world by next year.”

  “They dug six foundations in one day,” Maggie said.

  “Good girl,” said her grandfather. “Six foundations. Soon it’ll be thirty-six. They’re planning seventy-two houses for that site, and not houses I’d want to live in. That plasterboard stuff you can put your elbow right through. Maybe even septic tanks. Cheap kitchens. You know the idea: Come live where the other half lives.”

  “Maybe the development will bring property values up,” Tommy said. “Nice new development behind the old houses. Lots of people think those houses are better than the old ones.”

  “I think they’ll be beautiful,” said Connie. “I heard they’re going to have laundry chutes and garbage disposals in the kitchens. And sunken living rooms and patios.”

  There was a long silence. Maggie picked at a cuticle and avoided looking at her mother. It was a canon of the Scanlan household that old things were better than new ones. It was not to be argued with, like eating the cherry. Maggie chewed her little finger.

  “The first thing a man looks at is your hands,” Mary Frances said softly to Maggie, pulling at her granddaughter’s fingers, frowning at the dried blood in the corner of each bitten nail.

  “I heard they’re very nice houses,” Connie added, and Maggie could hear the anger in her voice.

  “No such thing, little girl. When you see them you’ll tell me different. Half basements. Wall-to-wall on slab. Property values over there will land in the toilet. Sheenies to the right of you. Sheenies to the left of you.” John took a big sip of his martini and smiled, a smile Maggie noticed was oddly like Monica’s. Maggie thought her grandfather’s eyes looked like the sapphires in her grandmother’s big sapphire-and-diamond earrings. She remembered when she was a little girl thinking that she could see through the blue of her grandfather’s eyes into his head, see wheels and cogs and clicking things, like the inside of a watch. She could almost hear the clicking now.

  “But you two won�
��t have to worry about all that,” John said, pulling something from his pants pocket, tossing it with a grin into Connie’s lap, where it made a little metallic sound as it hit her engagement and wedding rings. Maggie turned to her father, but he was looking down at the piano keys. The room was very still.

  “Congratulations,” Mary Frances said brightly, but still Connie had not lifted her hands from her lap. Joseph murmured softly in his sleep and turned to tuck his head into his mother’s side. Finally James said, “Those look like keys to me.”

  “Oh, brilliant,” John said under his breath, and aloud he said, “And the door they open is oak, four inches thick with a mullioned window in it, and the rooms inside, none of them are smaller than twenty by fifteen, not even the kitchen. Six bedrooms, four baths, a fireplace you could stand in in the living room. The prettiest azaleas on the block.”

  “Remember the Ryans, Tom?” Mary Frances said brightly. “They’ve moved to Florida. Only three houses down from us. Maggie could walk up the hill to have Saturday lunch with your father.”

  “We could never afford that house, Mother,” Tommy said quietly, and Maggie looked down at her patent-leather shoes, luminous in the half light.

  “Bought and paid for,” John Scanlan said. “Bought and paid for.” Connie raised her head, and Maggie thought her mother’s hair looked like patent leather, too, and Connie’s voice sounded soft and warm.

  “What took you so long?” she said, and she stared right into John Scanlan’s eyes, and the room was quiet. Maggie saw her grandfather look right back at Connie, as though there were only the two of them in the room, as though he loved her. “Ah, little girl,” he said, “I have the gift of perfect timing.”

  “We’re not moving, Pop,” Tommy said, but his father did not look at him.

  “We’ll discuss it another time,” John said, but he still looked deep into Connie’s eyes, and he still smiled.

  “No,” she said, but no one seemed to hear her. Suddenly, as though of one accord, the various Scanlans by birth and by marriage rose and began to gather up their handbags and call to their children. It was as though they had come for something and now it was accomplished. Only Connie remained sitting, staring over at her husband on the piano stool.