Gail was driving her home from the party because Connie felt sick. She felt sick all the time now. It was a struggle to breathe in the heavy hot July air, the cannonball of her womb lodged just below her ribs, crowding her lungs. She stared out the window, knowing she must represent some kind of reproach to her childless sister-in-law.
The road was edged with black-eyed Susans; Connie could remember she and her father digging them up not far from here one long-ago Sunday. It had been the summer she was twelve, when Anna Mazza was spending most of her time in Brooklyn. The aunt who had taken Anna in when she came to America was old and sick, her belly grown big and blue from cancer. Connie had been left alone with her father, working with him in the garden for the first time. It had begun with a hollyhock covered in black bugs, its tall stem dirty and withered. It had ended when her mother came home, scowling her disapproval at the grass stains on Connie’s clothes. Or perhaps it had been when Celeste came back from the shore, walking up the drive and through the gates, her swelling behind encased in a kind of playsuit in a shiny blue-and-red synthetic print of cowboys and Indians. “Movie star,” Connie had said a little disdainfully, kneeling in front of the tomatoes. “Who are you, Lana Turner?”
“Rita Hayworth,” said Celeste, who actually did resemble Rita Hayworth, and then she gave her uncle Angelo a big kiss. He drew back as though she had bitten him on the nose, and he looked her full figure up and down with an expression of shock and horror. And then he turned and stared at his daughter and that expression was still there, the kind of look Connie imagined God must have given Eve in the Garden of Eden.
“You all dirty,” was all he said.
It was many years later that she had realized that that was the day her father discovered she was female. She had never felt close to him again, and she was convinced that he had never felt close to her.
She thought she saw a shadow of that same look pass over his face when he saw her in her wedding dress, coming down the stairs with her bouquet in one hand. She remembered what she had thought at the time: he’s just a man, an ordinary man.
She had thought that, too, when she first saw John Scanlan in the hospital, a vulnerable, ordinary, shrunken man surrounded by white cotton. She even sometimes thought it of Tommy, when she lay beside him at night, although it did not make her angry at him the way it did with his father, and her own. It only awakened her sympathy. When her father had first given her that look, it had made her feel ashamed; now she merely thought that men were somehow afraid of the things they loved best, that they were the real children of the world, without bringing with them any of the joys you had with children, at least for a time.
She knew the contours of her bedroom in the dark as well as she knew anything; the shadow of the two-pronged light fixture like the letter W on the ceiling, the pale-yellow light through the drape of the curtains from the streetlight across the lawn, the odd blotches, like old faces, made by the cabbage roses on the wallpaper, the sliding shadows of the six-paned windows as a car came up and around the street, its engine wheezing in the still night air. Against the wall was a composite picture of her three oldest children: Maggie holding Terence holding Damien, ages seven, six, and one, and then individual portraits of each, the baby a little spastic propped on a platform, the other two wearing fixed, forced smiles. Between the first two and the next two she had had two miscarriages, surges of odd clots that had made her think she was being punished for not loving her children enough, for not believing they were what she had always thought they would be to her. The pregnancies were always difficult, too, kneeling on the bathroom floor, staring into the water in the toilet bowl. The first time she had thought she was dying, or would have a retarded child, a baby with no fingers, or seven fingers, or a mongoloid like Leonard Fogarty. “Listen, kid,” Celeste had said, “everybody throws up when they’re in the family way. That’s how you know you are.” Like almost everything her cousin said, it sounded improbable; like almost everything she said, it turned out to be right.
Connie had never had a pregnancy test. One night soon after Maggie was born she had eaten a bad clam at a Coney Island clam bar and had spent the next week wondering how they would afford another baby. It had seemed sort of ridiculous until two months later, when she was sick again and it turned out that she was pregnant with Terence.
Her sisters-in-law were never ill when they were pregnant. Joe’s wife, Annette, had played tennis up until the week before she had the twins, although everyone had made such a fuss about it that Connie was more amazed by her ability to withstand the criticism than to rush the net. James’s wife had admitted to “a little gas,” but quietly and with a guilty manner, as though she thought it might be seen as some reflection on her husband’s professional skill.
This afternoon Connie had been at a card party with all of them, at one of the boys’ schools just north of Kenwood, a big Gothic building with a Latin inscription over the double doors, and they had all exchanged glances when she had leapt up to find the one women’s bathroom in the whole cavernous place. “She really has a hard time, doesn’t she?” Jack’s wife, Maureen, had said, with an air of assumed sympathy, and they all nodded and thought to themselves: God, the fuss.
But their eyes all seemed to meet in the vicinity of Gail’s long, faintly equine face. Then they looked at the cards in their hands, which they busily rearranged. “She certainly does,” Gail said, looking around. She often felt that she was unfairly lumped with Connie, that because she had been born Protestant and converted to marry Mark she too was considered an outsider. She made every attempt to show that this was not the case.
“Are you all right?” Annette had asked when Connie came back to the table, her face newly powdered, fresh lipstick dark against the white. She had not been able to find the right bathroom, and had thrown up in a stainless steel sink in the chemistry lab.
“Fine. I’m used to it.”
“What about some tea with milk?” Cass had said.
“Nothing. I think I’d better go.”
The women had looked around at one another. One of them would have to drive Connie home, and the petits fours had not even come around yet, nor the door prize been announced. The prize was a black cashmere sweater with a dyed mink collar, and everyone had exclaimed over it except for Mrs. O’Neal, who said she already had one, and Mrs. Malone, who said she’d give it away if she got it. “You could give it to Helen,” someone said. “It’s just the color of her hair.” Everyone was quiet for a moment. “Helen’s lost her mind,” Mrs. Malone said drily, “but I haven’t.”
Finally Connie said, “Gail, could you give me a lift?”
“Of course,” her sister-in-law said, and the others had leaned back and looked at their cards as the two women gathered up their pocketbooks and their white summer gloves. “Tommy looks tired these days,” Cass said, as she watched them walk away and they began to play cards again.
“Tommy looks tired these days,” said Gail as they drove along in her black sedan, Connie thinking to herself that Gail really did not know how to negotiate a corner properly.
“He is tired,” Connie said. “He works hard all day and he goes to the hospital a lot in the evening.”
“How does he think Dad looks?” Gail asked.
“Like hell.” There was silence for several blocks, then Connie said. “Tell Mark to get John to leave him alone. He’s driving him nuts with all this about the house and the company. Tom feels bad enough about his father. It’s not fair to be holding him up on this now.”
Gail touched her barrettes and smoothed back her hair. She had never heard Connie say so much before. “I think Tommy should talk to Mark about it. I don’t get involved in his business.”
“Oh bullshit, Gail,” Connie said, plucking at the fingers of her gloves. She realized it was the first time she had ever said the word out loud, and she liked the feel of it in her mouth, the sound of it, like a powerful and disdainful sneeze. “Everybody’s business is everybody else’s b
usiness in this family. Nobody’s made a decision on their own in all the years I’ve been around.”
“That may be how you feel—”
“Who picked out your house, Gail?”
Her sister-in-law’s narrow lips tightened. “I did.”
“John Scanlan did. He heard it was for sale the day after the old man who lived in it died and Mark bought it that afternoon. So don’t tell me about keeping your business private. If you hadn’t bought it, he would have tried to get Tommy to buy it. If not Tommy, Joe. Margaret gets passed over because of the convent. Pull over.”
“Excuse me?”
“Pull over,” Connie said, “or I’m going to throw up on your upholstery.”
When she was finished and they had pulled away from the curb, they were both silent again. Finally Connie reached out tentatively and touched her sister-in-law’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want Tommy to worry. He worries all the time.”
“He has to take some responsibility for the family, Connie,” Gail said primly.
“Why? Why does he have to? They’re all adults. He takes enough responsibility in his heart.”
They turned onto Park Street and the trees arched over them, a tunnel lined with brick and stucco façades, closed doors with impenetrable screens. From somewhere they could hear children yelling, and the sound of bulldozers. As they pulled into the driveway, the windows of the car a blur of reflected sunlight and tree branches, Connie thought she saw Terence sitting on the steps of the house, his big shaggy head hanging heavy between his knees. But as he looked up she realized it was Joey Martinelli, and she swung open the car door fast, feeling for the ground with her patent-leather high heels, still a little faint. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he called, not moving.
“Thanks for the ride,” Connie said.
“Is that—?” said Gail, and stopped.
“Is that who, Gail?”
“Mark said that you were—friendly with one of the—workers at the construction sight.” Gail got the words out as though she was speaking English as a second language, and Connie smiled.
“Now, I managed to figure out that workers meant greasy dagos but I’m not quite sure about friendly. Does friendly mean I talk to him in the kitchen when he comes over for a drink of water, or does friendly mean I’m meeting him in my slip behind the bulldozers?”
Gail inhaled audibly. “I don’t know why you have to be like this,” she said. “No one means anything by what they say and yet you take everything as an insult. Any other woman would be thrilled to have her in-laws buy her a big house. It’s much bigger than any of the rest of us have, but I don’t begrudge it, with all these children. But to have a family that takes an interest, and then to be so critical—I just don’t understand it. At the smallest thing you take offense, you assume that somehow you are being insulted, you …”
“What does my illicit relationship with the Carpenters’ Union have to do with a big house I don’t want or need?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Gail said, her face unpleasantly mottled with emotion. “Everything with you is a struggle. What would be just part of life for other people has to be some sort of big complicated thing with you. You isolate Tommy from his family, you make it clear you have contempt for all of us—”
“I have contempt for you? That’s a good one.”
“No one cares about ethnic differences any longer, Connie. No one thinks about those things.”
“How come John says my oldest son has guinea eyebrows?”
“You see, that’s just the point. He makes a little joke—”
As Connie climbed out of the car, a favorite expression of Celeste’s popped into her head, and without thinking she said, “Button it, Gail.” She walked over to Joey as her sister-in-law backed out of the driveway. “Sorry,” he said as she approached, pale beneath her powder, her nose beginning to shine. “It’s okay,” she said, sitting down beside him.
“You’re going to get your dress all dirty. Plus your lady friend is still watching you.”
Connie looked up and waved at Gail, then put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. It occurred to her suddenly that her heart was beating fast, and that she was having a good time. It was difficult to tell whether it was because of Gail, or because of Joey. When she looked at him she could see herself in his eyes. “I don’t know what’s come over me,” she said, talking almost to herself. “Why were you waiting for me?” she added.
“Time for another lesson.”
“I’m not sure I can right now. Are the kids inside?”
“Not so I can tell.”
Connie eased her pumps off and stretched her legs in front of her. “My sisters-in-law aren’t bad people. They just don’t like me,” she said.
“I can understand that,” Joey said.
“Thanks,” Connie said.
“It’s an old thing, isn’t it?” he said. “Women don’t get on with a good-looking woman.” Then, as though he’d realized what he said, he ducked his glossy head. “You know what I mean. I even remember my mother and her friends talking about you, how you were the best-looking girl any of them had ever seen.” He laughed. “Except that no one would ever notice it because you were a midget princess held prisoner in a deep, dark cemetery.”
Connie laughed, too, but she could tell she was still pink and flustered by the compliment. “Your mother’s nice,” she said, not knowing what else to say.
“I think she always hoped my brother would marry you. She was mad as hell when she found out you were going to marry Scanlan. She said you were just making trouble for yourself.” For a moment the two of them looked at each other, and then Connie sighed.
“Let’s go in,” she finally said.
Inside, the house was perfectly still and smelled faintly of tuna fish. She dropped her shoes on the living-room floor and stood barefoot at the bottom of the stairs. “Maggie?” she called, but there was no answer.
Outside a car stopped, idled, died. Connie opened the door to see Celeste getting out. For some reason she was wearing a picture hat with fake flowers around the brim. She waved, and wobbled up the steps on a pair of stiletto heels, white patent leather with black scuff marks. “Damn,” she said, looking down, wetting her finger and balancing on one foot like a flamingo to raise the other and try to wipe away the marks. Connie laughed and held the door open for her. At least Gail had missed this.
“Sorry to bust in,” Celeste said. “I got you a blouse on sale.” Celeste looked at Connie’s navy-blue linen sheath with the white piping. “Don’t tell me—let me guess. Lunch with your mother-in-law.”
“Very good, Ce, very good. Card party with my sisters-in-law.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
Celeste screamed, clutched her breast, fell to the couch. Then she reached inside her shopping bag. “Next time, wear this,” she said. “It’s a size four. You’re the only person in the world who could wear it.” Celeste held up a white lace blouse. Connie could see daylight through it. Joey appeared in the doorway, holding a glass of water. “Who’s that for?” he said, his big eyebrows raised.
“Whoops,” said Celeste.
“How you doing, Celeste?” Joey Martinelli said. “You remember me?”
“Now that I see you I do,” said Celeste, handing her cousin the blouse. “You used to hang out with Bobby, who lived around the block. The one who’s a cop now? With the brother who’s a cop?”
“Giambone. Bobby Giambone. Yeah, I met you at his house once. You were maybe sixteen, seventeen. I think you were engaged.”
Celeste sighed. “I was engaged all the time then. So how come I don’t see you around any more?”
“Ah, I don’t know. You know how it is—we’re all grown-up now. No more parties, no more dances. I never see anybody. I work, I go home, fall asleep. That’s about it.”
“You ever see Bobby?”
“He moved out of the
city. He has a nice place with one of those above-ground pools out on the Island. He hates the city. All the cops, they hate the city.”
Celeste reached out for his water glass and sipped from it thoughtfully, leaving a lip print on it the color of bubble gum. “So how’s it coming?” she said, jerking her head toward the window, the flowers on her hat moving as though a thunderstorm was coming up.
“Okay. We’re having a little bit of trouble with the kids out there. A lot of them are bored with vacation and vandalizing the place in their spare time. They set us back some.”
“Kids’ll be kids,” Celeste said.
“Yeah, well some of them are being a little more than kids. Somebody set fire to one of the models two nights ago. Thank God it didn’t do too much damage.”
“Which night?” Connie asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Night before last. If it happens again, we got a real problem.”
“So you’re not done yet,” Celeste said.
“We’ll be done the models soon. A lot of the others will be finished by October, the rest in November. We sold the first one two days ago.”
“You sold one?” Connie said.
“Yeah, to a young couple who live in Queens. He’s in business. They have one kid, a little girl, must be adopted. She’s Korean. I think they’re Jewish.”
Celeste started to laugh, and the flowers on the hat went wild. “What’s so funny?” Joey Martinelli said.
“She’s thinking about my husband’s father,” Connie said, and she began to smile.
Celeste let out a whoop. “Bring the old man over here in an ambulance,” she said, gasping for breath. “Jews with a Chink kid. Oh my god. He’ll move to another state.”
“My father-in-law isn’t crazy about all this,” Connie said. “He’s ready to move us to a better neighborhood.”
“Hey, I’m always for that,” said Joey, grinning.
“So you move,” Connie said. “I like picking my own neighborhood.”
“I love that guy,” said Celeste. “He’s perfect. My mother says to me last week, ‘Father O’Hearn over to Holy Redeemer gave the damnedest sermon yesterday. It was about Jesus and golf.’ I said ‘Ma, do me a favor. Call the hospital and tell Mr. Scanlan.’”