Object Lessons

  24

  TOMMY WAS NOT DRUNK. NEITHER WAS he sober. Dessert had been taken away—it was, as was customary, ice cream and a slice of wedding cake that tasted like sweetened cotton balls—and now a gnarled little man with a cart filled with liqueurs had stopped by his table. Tommy looked at the candy-colored bottles and almost sent him on, then thought better of it and, feeling vaguely English, asked for a brandy. Connie shot him a sidelong look, and he laughed. He was having a good time.

  Monica’s wedding reception was being held at a country club just north of Kenwood and several rungs above the Kenwoodie Club. The banquet room was paneled in knotty pine, and the chairs and restroom walls were covered with green-and-red tartan. It was what John Scanlan always referred to disdainfully as “high Episcopal,” and the fact was that James was the first Catholic they’d ever admitted. The membership committee had postponed a decision on his application until after the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election to see which way the wind blew. James had certainly planned a high Episcopalian reception, with meager food and a bad band, all overpriced, but his plans had gone awry. For one thing, the groom’s family had persuaded the band, Jimmy Jones and the Lamplighters, to play a number of polkas, which had been received with much screaming, whooping, and lifting of women old enough to know better into the air. For another, the groom’s father had taken off his cutaway jacket early in the evening, exposing his service revolver, which, he explained to Tommy, he always wore off duty, “just in case.”

  “Jesus, in this world, Tom, you never know,” he said feelingly.

  “The God’s truth,” Tommy said, having the time of his life and his second Scotch.

  Finally, there were John Scanlan’s brothers and sisters, all eleven of them. James spent most of the cocktail hour trying to lay blame—and Tommy suspected that he was prime suspect—for it turned out that after the funeral, someone had mentioned to all of them that they were welcome at Monica’s wedding. Coming down the aisle to take her seat on the arm of one of the ushers, and already concerned that her daughter was going to be sick at the very sight of Communion, poor Cass had been astounded to see almost two dozen people she had not invited sitting in pews very near the front of the church. She had called the country club from the vestry after the service, and asked that two more tables be set up. It was a tight fit.

  Tommy spent most of the cocktail hour talking to his aunts and uncles, whom he had never seen very often. None seemed remotely put out that their brother had given them the back of his hand, except for one cut-rate party a year, for the last forty years. “A prince,” John Scanlan’s brother Brian, a sanitation dispatcher in the Bronx, kept repeating with tears in his eyes. “If he had been born twenty years later, he would have been the first Catholic president, mark my words, Tom. That smart he was. Our mother used to tell us, ‘Boys, when your brother’s elected pope, don’t do anything to embarrass him.’ Little did she know about his way with the ladies. But president he could have had, Tom, if the time had been right.”

  “He would have made an interesting president, Uncle Brian. We probably would have gone to war with the British.”

  Brian narrowed his eyes, and then grinned. “You’re a great one for joshing, son,” he said. “It’s a grand affair, isn’t it?”

  “I’m going to go dance with my wife,” Tommy said.

  “Bless her,” Brian said, staring into the depths of his drink.

  “Ten thousand if it’s a penny,” Tommy said to Connie as they danced to “Strangers in the Night” sung by as bad a Sinatra imitator as Tommy had ever heard. “Country club, open bar, prime rib, six-piece band. For something they threw together in a month, my brother did some job on this wedding.”

  Connie hummed along with the music, and Tommy pulled her closer. Her stomach felt like a Tupperware bowl placed between the two of them. Suddenly Tommy remembered how the priests had made them slow dance at high school sock hops with a dictionary wedged between their pelvises. If anything, it had increased the consciousness of the near occasion of sin.

  “Love was just a glance away, a warm embracing dance away,” sang Tommy so loudly that couples near them heard him over the electric din of the overeager organist, and several of them smiled.

  “Maggie looked beautiful coming down the aisle,” said Connie. “But somebody should have told her to hold her bouquet up around her waist.”

  “She did fine,” said Tommy. “Who did her hair? You?”

  Connie smiled up at him.

  “It’s the first time I’ve seen her face in three years,” he said as the music ended.

  Now, adrift in that happy haze somewhere between sobriety and the point at which he started to cry uncontrollably at things like “Danny Boy,” Tommy saw his daughter across the room, laughing with a boy in a blue sports coat. The kid was skinny, with dishwater-blond hair that stuck up at the crown and a big mobile mouth full of teeth; he ducked his head whenever Maggie turned to look at him, but as soon as she turned away he would stare at her profile as though it was a crucifix and he a new seminarian. He reminded Tommy of someone, but he could not tell who. Maggie looked strangely grownup, perhaps because he was indeed seeing her face, seeing the lines of her square jaw, sharp now as the baby fat disappeared. “Still flat as a board,” he muttered to himself, sipping at his brandy, not meaning to speak aloud. “What?” said Mark, dropping into an empty chair next to him.

  Another polka was ending, and suddenly, as if in some primitive hostile response, his aunts and uncles had risen to their feet at their tables, wedged in by the swinging kitchen door, and commenced an a cappella version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” They all had fine voices, and had been well trained in the choir of St. Aloysius School; the singing was so loud that men playing golf on the nth hole, not far from the huge plate-glass picture window of the banquet room, turned, perplexed, looking for the source of some melodious buzzing that had reached their ears. Tommy could not contain his glee and joined in at the end, hoping the groom’s family would not offer some folk song as a rejoinder. But instead the groom’s father leapt to his feet with a cheer. “Erin go Bragh!” he cried, clapping his big slab hands.

  There was much clapping, and the singers took bows, laughing and hitting one another on the back. “Jesus,” said Mark. “Oh, relax,” Tommy said, grinning as the band started on “Danny Boy,” the Lamplighters recognizing a good thing when they saw one.

  “Tom, I need you to help me out,” Mark said, lighting a cigar.

  “Not now,” Tommy said. Mark had been pressing him about Scanlan & Co. since the night of the wake. He thought it was the perfect plan for him to take over John’s job and have Tommy take over his own. “I’m thinking about it,” Tommy added, as his brother continued to stare at him. “I am giving it serious consideration. Honest to God.”

  “I need you to look at the books,” Mark said.

  “I’ve looked at them.”

  “What!” Mark said, and Tommy loved the look on his face so much he threw back his head and laughed.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” Tommy said. “He was careless about some things, but the bottom line isn’t as bad as you think. On the other hand, it’s nowhere near as good as they think.” And he motioned to John Scanlan’s brothers and sisters, who were singing “Danny Boy” and sobbing happily.

  “How the hell—”

  “I took the keys from his dresser and let myself into the office one night after I went to the hospital.”

  “And it’s okay? Everything’s there?”

  Tommy laughed again, this time without pleasure. “Jesus, Mark, what did you think? That Dad cooked the books? That we were bankrupt? That John Scanlan had been playing the ponies on the side and buying fur coats for his secretary?”

  Mark tightened his lips and looked away.

  “Holy God!” Tommy said. “You really did. You’re incredible. Goddamn incredible.”

  “Things looked suspicious to me,” Mark said.

  “So he moved mone
y around a little bit more than he should have. So on some things he robbed Peter to pay Paul. But more than that—forget it. Only in books, Mark. You don’t wake up one day and find out that Saint John of the all-cotton cassocks is leading a double life.” Both men looked toward the bandstand. Their aunt Marge had just poured a beer all over one of her brothers. James got up from the dais and hurried toward her. Monica’s nostrils were flaring. The bridegroom was laughing and she gave him a look that Tommy imagined could turn a man to stone. Something about its intensity reminded him of his father, and he pitied the young man in his rented tuxedo sitting, chastened, next to his niece. “I did always wonder about him and Dorothy,” Tommy said absently.

  “Jesus!” said Mark. “You think he was doing Dorothy?”

  “Ah, who cares now?” Tommy said, watching Marge wave her finger in his oldest brother’s distinguished face, knowing as surely as if he could hear her that she was reminding James Scanlan that she had once changed his diapers.

  It was the wrong time to tell Mark that the company had been paying Dorothy $1000 a month for years, putting her on the books as a paraffin supplier. Tommy had been oddly unsurprised. Mary Frances already knew. Tommy had been sure of it when he watched his mother seat Dorothy in the third row at the funeral Mass. Connie had met the little girl at the funeral home, and when Tommy saw she was not at the Mass he had asked his wife what the child looked like. “What’s her name again?” he asked, and Connie had replied quietly, “Beth.” Then she had added, “I think she’s like Maggie, a combination of her mother and her father.” And Tommy let it go at that. He would keep the checks to the bogus paraffin supplier coming, and he would try not to think about the rest. He had known what his father was really like all those years, but he had never had to stare it in the eye until that moment in the hospital when the old man had tried to suck the soul out of his body as his dying act. Tommy would never choose to look that in the eye again, and he would never expose it to the eyes of anyone else. He looked at Mark and added quietly, “The point is that people are different than you think, but they’re not that different. Dad wasn’t Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He was just the guy you saw, and then the real guy. And they’re never the same thing. He did good work. But he wasn’t the Second Coming of Christ, like he wanted us all to believe. You’ll have some cleaning up to do, some loans to consolidate, some changes to make. But things are good.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “I didn’t say that. Besides, maybe I want the top job.” His brother’s eyes grew big, and Tommy laughed again. “Just kidding you, brother. We’ll talk about it soon. But not today.” The two of them sat silently as couples whirled around the dance floor. Tommy’s uncle Brian and aunt Maureen danced by, both with tears in their eyes. Tommy remembered that even his father, that most unsentimental of men, had sometimes teared up over “Danny Boy.” Tommy himself had never liked it; it was difficult to sing along with. James went by, dancing with Margaret, his face red from fighting with his aunt. Margaret was still light on her feet, even in her heavy black Cuban heels, her horrid nun shoes. “Dad’s turning over in his grave at that sight,” Mark said, but his brother had already moved away from him. Tommy tapped James on the shoulder and cut in, grabbing his sister with a grin. “Oh, good,” Margaret said. “You’re a much better dancer.”

  Tommy and Margaret had learned to dance together, in the basement of the big house, with Tommy Dorsey on the radio. Lightly they circled the room. “Are you all right?” he finally said.

  Margaret frowned. “I think so,” she said. “I think I was going through a little temporary insanity this summer. Or puberty.”

  “I thought we already had puberty,” Tommy said.

  Margaret looked up into his flushed and boyish face. “I think our whole lives are puberty,” she said. “I think we all have to grow up again and again. Isn’t that depressing?”

  “It’s crazy, is what it is.” Tommy dipped her so her veil hung straight to the floor as the last notes died away. “Leave the convent. Come back and be my sister again.”

  “You’re drunk, Tom,” Margaret said, laughing. “Beside, you just want me to move in with Mother. Go dance with your wife.” But when the band began to play again, Tommy recognized the song after the first few notes, and shook his head. He kissed his sister, smoothed his hair with his hand, and crossed the room to his daughter. He was just drunk enough to feel like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

  “They’re playing our song,” he said to Maggie.

  She flushed an unbecoming red and turned to the boy, who ducked his head again. Tommy was surprised when the kid looked up suddenly, his lip with its fuzz of facial hair working, and thrust out his hand. “Hello, Mr. Scanlan,” he said. “I understand you are a fine basketball player. Maybe some day we can have a game.” Without waiting for a response he turned and walked away, disappearing into the great expanse of tables, chairs, flower arrangements, and drunken Irishmen. Once he looked back over his shoulder at Maggie. “Jesus, what the hell was that all about?” Tommy asked. And turning to Maggie he said, “Isn’t that the kid whose mother died two years ago?”

  “His name is Bruce,” Maggie said.

  “Can he really play decent ball?” said Tommy. Then he remembered why he had gone to her and he held out his arms. Monica and her father were already dancing, the bride’s train thrown over her arm, a little soiled where it had dragged on the ground on her way into church. Monica looked over her father’s shoulder, and he looked over hers. They looked like an illustration in a woman’s magazine: That Special Day.

  Tommy turned to Maggie and gathered her up, gliding around the floor, circling the other couple with long, graceful steps. Every fourth step he would spin, holding Maggie’s fingers in his lightly. He felt good, covering the polished parquet, his shoulders squared. He looked down at Maggie, whose pink dress belled out behind her slightly, but she was looking down at her feet.

  “Don’t look at your feet,” he said.

  “I can’t follow if I don’t,” she said.

  “Stand on mine,” Tommy said. “I can take it.”

  “Daddy, I’m wearing high heels. I’m too big to stand on your feet.”

  “Then close your eyes,” he said. “Close your eyes and don’t think about it.”

  Maggie tilted her head back and shut her eyes; the lights made copper spots on her hair, and little sparks shone from the amethysts dangling from her earlobes. Tommy kept his arm tight around her waist and turned again, and now she was finally following him. She could not dance like her mother, but she was making a creditable show. As his eyes passed, only half-seeing, over the tables ringing the dance floor, he could tell that people were watching them. He dipped her once, spun, dipped her again, and still she kept her eyes tightly closed and her torso limp and pliable. Tommy began to sing along with the band:

  You’re the spirit of Christmas,

  My star on the tree,

  You’re the Easter Bunny to mommy and me,

  You’re sugar,

  You’re spice,

  You’re everything nice,

  And you’re Daddy’s little girl.

  He sang all the way through to the end of the song, and when it was over James and Monica walked away from each other and Maggie and Tommy just stood there for a moment. Even after the music ended, she waited a full minute before she opened her eyes.

  “You did good,” Tommy said.

  “I liked it,” said Maggie. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that before, just to close my eyes and not try so hard?”

  “I never thought of it before,” Tommy said. Suddenly there was a loud crash, the drummer giving his cymbals a good whack. “It’s hokey-pokey time,” the lead singer called. “Go dance,” said Tommy, and when he got back to his table he saw that the boy had claimed her again, standing opposite her in the hokey-pokey line. He tried to figure out who the boy looked like, but he could not. Tommy turned to look at his wife, who was watching the dancers with a small smile on her face, and
then he glanced over at Maggie, who had the fixed and exhausted smile of someone who has been having a wonderful time for hours. “I’m a lucky man,” he said out loud, and he finished his brandy, took Connie’s hand and led her onto the floor.

  25

  WHEN MAGGIE WOKE UP THE DAY AFTER the wedding, she could hear voices coming faintly from the back patio. From her bedroom window she could see her aunt Celeste and her mother outside, sitting in lawn chairs, coffee cups on the cement at their feet. The clock said noon. Maggie had missed Mass for the first time since she had had the mumps three years ago. She noticed that the earrings, which she’d taken off and put on her bureau, were gone. She put on a pair of old pink shorts to match the ribbons in her hair and went downstairs.

  “Hi,” she said softly, stepping out into the backyard.

  Celeste grinned. “Boy, were you right,” she said to Connie, and then to Maggie, “Honey, you look like a million bucks with your hair like that. I can’t wait to see the pictures of you yesterday.”

  Maggie went out the sliding door and sat crosslegged at Cece’s feet, her head down. Her aunt was wearing a hot-pink dress that consisted of one tier of ruffles atop another. She had on hot pink plastic earrings and her engagement ring winked at Maggie. “Happy birthday,” she said to Maggie. “Your present’s inside. It’s a diary.”

  “Celeste!” Connie said. “You couldn’t wait and let her open it?”

  “What the hell.”