Object Lessons

  “Paint ’em black,” John Scanlan said with a great guffaw on one of the rare visits he and his wife, Mary Frances, had made to the home of their middle son. Maggie noticed sometimes that when her father passed the columns a little white scar above his eyebrow jumped and writhed like one of the tiny white worms that sucked the life from her grandfather Mazza’s tomato plants, and she supposed he was remembering John Scanlan’s words.

  That was what impressed Maggie most about her grandfather Scanlan: not that he dispensed down payments, tuition money, doctor’s fees, with nothing in return except everyone knowing that he’d bought and paid for your house, your children’s school, your wife’s single room on the maternity floor. It was that he could, almost magically, make his children bob and move and sway like marionettes. Tommy’s scar was the least of his accomplishments. His other four sons could be made to nod, pale, blush, shift in their chairs, pace on his Oriental rugs, simply by the words and looks John Scanlan could turn upon them. Maggie’s grandmother sometimes seemed seized with St. Vitus’s dance when her husband was angry. Only Sister John of the Cross, Maggie’s aunt Margaret, John Scanlan’s only living daughter, could sit motionless, expressionless, in her father’s presence. Maggie sometimes thought her grandfather would have stuck a pin in Margaret if he could have been assured it would make her jump. She had paid a heavy price for her composure. “Hiding behind the skirts of Jesus, Sister?” John Scanlan would sometimes say, and then Margaret would smile slowly, without mirth, and so would John, because they both knew he had put his finger on it.

  Maggie’s mother managed to remain calm when she was around her father-in-law, too, although John Scanlan would have been delighted to hear how Connie railed against his machinations in the privacy of her own small kitchen. Sometimes Maggie felt that no one ever talked about what was really going on in her father’s family, although everyone seemed to talk all the time. But she had heard enough from her aunt Celeste and her cousin Monica, and even occasionally—when Maggie was eavesdropping—from her own mother, to know that her mother’s place amidst the Scanlans was not a comfortable one.

  And she had only to look at the family gathered around John Scanlan’s mahogany dining table at any holiday dinner to know which of his grandchildren were different from the rest. All of Maggie’s many cousins looked a good deal alike—fair, even colorless, with placid faces. The children of Tommy Scanlan did not conform. Maggie herself was olive-skinned, with thick, heavy hair and curiously opaque green eyes, catlike and surprising. She had realized some time ago that no one would ever call her cute. She was thin—not slim and graceful but lanky on its way to being something else, caught in that uncomfortable place between childhood and maturity. Sometimes she felt as if her whole family was caught in some middle ground, too. If she heard that she was her mother’s daughter one more time, she was sure she would start to scream.

  Three blocks from her own house, over the railroad tracks, Maggie’s closest friend, Debbie Malone, lived with her seven brothers and sisters in a large center-hall Colonial. Mrs. Malone was pregnant again, her muscular little legs sticking out of brown maternity shorts beneath the great cantilevered thrust of her belly. In the afternoons she lay on a yellow chaise longue made of strips of rubber that was set out beneath a maple tree in the Malones’ backyard. Her calves and arms stuck to the rubber in the heat, and as the children eddied around her, demanding money for ice cream, complaining about one another, asking permission to do things they had never been permitted to do and would not be permitted to do now, she lay perspiring in the shade, staring up at the motionless leaves. Mrs. Malone was a good-humored woman who liked sports, but the heat got her down. One of her favorite activities had always been shoveling the snow off the long cement walk that led up to her front door. Her children slipped out of her as easily as if she were a water slide into the crowded pool of their household.

  Maggie never knocked when she went to the Malones; she just walked around back and let herself into the kitchen through the screen door. Mrs. Malone treated her as if she were a member of the family, which was strange considering that she had more than enough family to go round. But Maggie loved the easy feeling, and responded by being more solicitous and communicative than the Malone children, who, with the exception of Helen, the eldest, were simple machines. Mrs. Malone, Maggie supposed, was a simple machine, too. She seemed to like her family, her husband, and her house with a kind of straightforward good humor. Maggie threw herself right into this; she was constantly struck by what a welcome change it was from her own family, in which she felt as if she were moving through a carnival fun house, waiting for a skeleton to leap out from behind a closed door. Mr. and Mrs. Malone had met in the fifth grade at St. Cyril’s School in an Irish section of Manhattan, and when they were together they seemed more like brother and sister than husband and wife, at least from Maggie’s experience of married people.

  “Doesn’t all that hair make you hot, Pee Wee?” Mrs. Malone said, as she turned from the sink and looked Maggie up and down. “Nope,” said Maggie, the way she always did when she was asked that question, and she threw her hair over her shoulder, pushed her damp bangs back with the flat of her hand and sat down at the redwood picnic table in the kitchen.

  “Can we go swimming?” she asked.

  “Did you bring your suit?”

  “I left it here the last time.”

  “Is that red one yours?” Mrs. Malone said, rinsing some forks. “I was wondering where that came from. I asked Aggie and she said it wasn’t hers, but I put it in her underwear drawer anyway. Go up and get it and get your partner in crime and we’ll all go.”

  “Are you going swimming too?”

  “No I am not,” said Mrs. Malone, wiping her hands on a dirty dishtowel. “I’ll sit by the pool and put my feet in and wish it was a month from now and I was twenty pounds lighter.”

  The pool was in the next town, at what was called the Kenwoodie Club. It was really nothing more than a swimming pool and a nine-hole golf course surrounded by a chain-link fence, with an entrance gate where a guard checked laminated membership cards. Nearly all the people Maggie went to school with spent the day there, doing cannonballs off the diving board or spitting in the baby pool.

  Helen Malone had become famous at the Kenwoodie Club after a trip to California the summer before, when she had emerged from the locker room one day in the closest thing the club had ever seen to a bikini. It was an abbreviated two-piece with push-up cups, and a bottom half that rode a full two inches below her navel. Mrs. Malone had been asked to see that the suit stayed at home next time. “If they think I can control Helen Malone,” she had muttered in the car on the way home that day, “they’ve got another think coming.”

  Even her own mother talked about Helen Malone in the third person, as though she were someone none of them knew. Maggie thought that the only person who truly acted as if she knew Helen Malone was Helen herself. Her legend was considerable. At Sacred Heart Academy all anyone needed to do was mention Helen Malone’s name and the girls became stern and watchful. She was known to be terribly sophisticated, and perhaps even something more than that. But what really riveted all of them, all the freckled, pleasant, ordinary girls with whom Helen shared study hall and Bible history and glee club, were two things. The first was that Helen was beautiful. This was never agreed upon, of course; there were girls who said she was odd-looking, that her nose was thin and pointed. But they never said this in front of the boys they knew. Helen’s eyes were a clear blue, and her nose straight and small, but her lips were full, as though they’d been inflated, and her hair was full, too, full and glossy. Mrs. Malone sometimes said that at the hospital they’d given her Liz Taylor’s baby by mistake.

  But, more important, her beauty seemed to stand for something inside her, a kind of apartness, and a feeling that she knew exactly where she was going and how she was going to get there, and that she would go, happily, alone. She rarely spoke, never gossiped, was never silly, and had
never seemed young. She was grown up, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Perhaps this was what obsessed Maggie and Debbie about her most. They rifled through her drawers constantly, trying on her old prom dresses and tossing her underwear back and forth as though they were playing hot potato, embarrassed by their curiosity but compelled by it, too. There were always letters from boys they had never heard of, and some of them wrote poems. “I long to peel you like a ripe peach,” someone named Edward with an address at Cornell University had written, and Debbie had read it over and over. “What does that mean?” she said, her freckled cheeks scarlet.

  “You don’t even peel peaches,” Maggie said, and Debbie looked at her pityingly. “What do you want him to say, that he wants to peel her like an orange?” Maggie stared at the envelope. “The stamp is upside down for love,” she said.

  Last year, Maggie remembered, Sister Regina Marie had asked them to write down, without thinking, the answer to the question: Who are you? It was the only time in her school career Maggie could remember not knowing an answer. It had been a kind of psychological trick, really; Sister didn’t even ask them to hand the papers in, just told them to put the answers in their pockets and think about what they had found to say about themselves.

  “What did you write, Mag?” Debbie had asked on the playground, blinking her blue eyes, like Helen’s but paler, smoothing back her black hair, like Helen’s but kinky. In fact Debbie looked like a blurred version of Helen, angles blunted, colors muted. “I put that I am still becoming who I am,” Maggie said. “God,” Debbie sighed. “That’s why you get As and I get stupid Cs.” And she took a piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to Maggie. In Debbie’s rounded writing, with the circles dotting the i’s, was written, “I am Helen Malone’s sister.”

  Afterward, when she was in her own room, Maggie had taken her own paper from her blazer pocket, unfolded it and put it on her bureau. It was blank.

  Helen was the only Malone child with a room of her own. On its door was a small blackboard for messages. It was always full. Maggie passed it now on her way to Debbie’s room, up beneath the slanting roof of the third floor. “In by 11!” Mrs. Malone had written at the top in capital letters, and below “John Kelly called—will call again” and “Can I wear your white eyelet blouse tonight? Aggie (I’ll wash it).” Underneath the second was written neatly in blue chalk “NO.” Her neat penmanship on the blackboard and a glass in the sink were often the only signs of Helen in the Malone house for days at a time.

  Debbie was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, still wearing her nightgown. “Summer’s just started and I’m bored already,” she said as Maggie came in.

  Maggie sat on the edge of the bed, silent. Debbie shut her eyes. Her nose was sunburned. “Today she got a dozen red roses,” she said finally.

  “Really?” said Maggie. “From who?”

  “Who knows?” Debbie said. “Some guy. She stuck the card down the front of her shirt.”

  “Can we see?”

  “They’re in the living room. She said she’d put them where the whole family could enjoy them. I think that means they’re from somebody she doesn’t like that much.”

  Maggie sighed. “Amazing.” The two girls stared into space. Maggie bit a cuticle. “Your mother said she’ll drive us to the club,” she said.

  “Same old thing,” said Debbie. “Boring, boring, boring.” But she got up and started to put on her clothes just the same. “I’d better get boobs soon,” she said, her voice muffled as she dressed beneath the tent of her nightgown, but Maggie just said “Shut up” and started to look through Aggie’s underwear drawer for her old red bathing suit.

  “Sometimes you’re such a baby, Mag,” said Debbie listlessly.

  “Shut up,” Maggie said again, taking her suit and heading downstairs.

  2

  IN LATE AFTERNOON, WHEN THE HUMIDITY had begun to ebb somewhat and the sheen of perspiration on all the children to fade, Connie Scanlan sat down crosslegged on the floor of her dining room to look at her good dishes. She always waited until she was alone to do this, for she thought that if anyone saw her they would surely say to themselves, “Well, she’s finally lost her mind.”

  Her pale knees glimmered amid the china spread out in front of her, as though they, too, were porcelain. Twelve dinner plates, twelve saucers, twelve cups, twelve dessert plates, a tureen, three serving dishes, a coffee pot, a creamer, and a sugar bowl. They were all a pale, pale cream color, with purple and red flowers painted around the edge and a gilded rim, and each dish, each cup, came with its own gray chamois bag, as though they were pieces of jewelry. The china seemed to Connie the only vestige of some foolish feeling she had once had about what her adult life would be like. Day after day she washed the plastic bowls in the sink, and now and then she thought of these others, shining beneath their little shrouds, too good for everyday, for meatloaf and macaroni and cheese.

  It had turned out that her life was an everyday sort of thing, too. She did not know why she had expected something different. Perhaps it was that her own family life had been so dark and peculiar, her elderly parents rarely exchanging a word, herself the only child, that she had easily fallen prey to the images of bright domesticity conjured up by popular songs and movies. Perhaps it was that, daring as the union between Connie Mazza and Tommy Scanlan had been, flying in the face of John Scanlan and his family, it had started off as the stuff of grand opera, and she had expected it to go on being so. The bitter taste in Connie’s mouth was the residue of disillusionment.

  Her marriage was to have been her entry to a normal life, the life she imagined everyone else lived when she looked at the world from within the gates of Calvary Cemetery. She had supposed that a husband and children would teach her to be one of the group, but instead she felt more and more alone among more and more people, a woman whose universe was contained beneath her own sternum. Sometimes she wondered if the cemetery gates had grown inside her as well, closing her off from a world naturally communal and gregarious.

  Her aunt Rose had always told her that children would be the joy of her life, and even though Connie felt she had been the bane of her own mother’s existence, she had believed what Rose said. And sometimes, when the children were small, still attached to their mother by the umbilical cord of weakness and primitive need, she felt that this was true, that with a baby on her hip she was not alone. Looking at each one in the bassinet, the little fingers splayed like small pink starfish on the crib sheets, she imagined what they would become, to the world and to her. In this, too, she sometimes felt that being an only child served her poorly, and that her imaginings came from books and women’s magazine articles and movies. The eldest boy would be her helpmate and protector. The youngest would be slightly sentimental, a little mischievous, always allied with his mother. Perhaps the picture in her mind had been most vivid for the first daughter. “Now you will have someone to do things with,” everyone told her after Maggie was born, and that was what she had thought she had given birth to: her closest friend, her soulmate. Her imaginings had turned out to be as useless as her wedding china. Connie’s need and her children’s maturity combined to cause bitter disappointment, for as the children grew and moved away, from her and her dreams of them, they seemed to her strangers, Scanlans.

  She remembered the day her father-in-law had first met Maggie. He had found her playing on his lawn with her aunt Margaret four years after Connie and Tommy’s wedding. Connie had thought that the child was at the convent until she saw the little hand, still dimpled at the knuckle, clutching a hundred-dollar bill.

  “I’m sorry, Con,” Margaret had said. “They took to each other like fish to water.” Connie’s narrow chest had gone cold. A year later her daughter was in private school, her tuition paid for by her grandfather. Connie had never felt the same about her since.

  After that she had waited for the vultures to circle her marriage, but with the exception of a few obligatory holiday dinners and the o
ccasional party, she and Tommy had somehow managed to stay outside her father-in-law’s grip. She supposed that, with the exception of Maggie, he found them all beneath his notice.

  John Scanlan had gotten his son James named chief of his department at Christ Hospital by giving them new X-ray equipment, and he had chosen a house for Mark and Gail, not far from his own. His younger sons had come to work for him and without a whimper had become completely dependent on their father’s industry, and his whims.

  Only Margaret had escaped for a time, sent to study philosophy at Tulane while living in a New Orleans convent covered with wisteria and wrought iron. She had written home about a doctoral degree and the fiery food, and had bloomed in the heat.

  And then John Scanlan had taken the Mother Superior to lunch in a steak house, given her a check for ten thousand dollars for a new chapel for the order’s retreat house, and Margaret had been reassigned to a school not five miles from the house she had left for the convent. She taught first grade and read Kierkegaard on the sly. Sometimes Connie looked at all of them, gathered around the big table in John and Mary Frances Scanlan’s dining room, and thought they all were covered with blood except for her.