Object Lessons Part 10

13

SAL'S WAS A TAVERN A BLOCK AWAY from First Concrete. Its door was set on a diagonal at the corner of two busy streets and thrown into perpetual shade by the elevated subway line. It looked like any tavern in America at the time, with neon beer signs in the window and red plastic seats in the booths and gangly bar stools ranged around a long, long bar filled with old men in the afternoons and working men at night. Above the register hung the first dollar Sal's ever took in, nineteen years earlier. The only thing worth mentioning about Sal's was that they made a spectacular hamburger out of good-grade chuck that Sal D'Alessandro got from a cop who got it as part of his payoff from a wholesale butcher in the wholesale meat market. All the cops ate and drank free at Sal's, and if any of their wives called, Sal always said their husbands had just been there and been called out on some emergency. Tommy usually ate lunch at Sal's. He liked the company and the food. from First Concrete. Its door was set on a diagonal at the corner of two busy streets and thrown into perpetual shade by the elevated subway line. It looked like any tavern in America at the time, with neon beer signs in the window and red plastic seats in the booths and gangly bar stools ranged around a long, long bar filled with old men in the afternoons and working men at night. Above the register hung the first dollar Sal's ever took in, nineteen years earlier. The only thing worth mentioning about Sal's was that they made a spectacular hamburger out of good-grade chuck that Sal D'Alessandro got from a cop who got it as part of his payoff from a wholesale butcher in the wholesale meat market. All the cops ate and drank free at Sal's, and if any of their wives called, Sal always said their husbands had just been there and been called out on some emergency. Tommy usually ate lunch at Sal's. He liked the company and the food.

He took Mark there when, during the last week in July, his brother asked him to lunch. "Jesus, look at this place," Mark said, staring at the retired guys with gray stubble on their faces watching As the World Turns As the World Turns on the television. Sal came over after they got their beers, a bar towel hanging from the waistband of his pants. He shook hands with Mark officiously, like the maitre d' in a bad French restaurant, and said that Mark looked like his mother. "When was Mom ever in this place?" Mark said, leaning across the table after Sal had left. "You got me," Tommy said. "Dad used to come here for lunch when he was still down the street, but I can't imagine him bringing Mom here." Mark looked around again and said, "Well, she sure as h.e.l.l didn't come here by herself." on the television. Sal came over after they got their beers, a bar towel hanging from the waistband of his pants. He shook hands with Mark officiously, like the maitre d' in a bad French restaurant, and said that Mark looked like his mother. "When was Mom ever in this place?" Mark said, leaning across the table after Sal had left. "You got me," Tommy said. "Dad used to come here for lunch when he was still down the street, but I can't imagine him bringing Mom here." Mark looked around again and said, "Well, she sure as h.e.l.l didn't come here by herself."

Tommy liked being with his brothers like this, alone, one on one, and he particularly liked being with Mark, who was only a year older than he was, and for whom he felt the slightly condescending sympathy that a man who easily fathers children feels for a man who has been incapable of doing so. ("Maybe it's him," Connie had said one night when they were talking about why Gail hadn't produced a child. "My a.s.s," Tommy had replied, looking like his father.) Not having a family had set Mark apart. Combined with his height, it had diminished him in the family's eyes, and so he was reduced to a.s.serting himself by arguing with his father over the color of embroidery on ca.s.socks. Tommy knew that given a choice between his own position of black sheep and his brother's of barren issue, he'd stick with his own any time.

Gail had once talked about adoption, but John Scanlan had put the lid on that one. "It's not the same," he had said flatly. "You don't know what in the h.e.l.l you're getting." Then his pale blue eyes had roved over his own family, ranged in their habitual postures of attention and apprehension in his living room. "I don't know," he had added, "maybe you never know."

Tommy had known something was up when he and his brother had met outside their father's hospital room two nights ago and Mark had suggested they get together. "Mark asked you to lunch?" Connie had said, one black eyebrow arched, like some exotic form of punctuation. "What's up?" Of course she knew what was up; it was either the company, the house, or her.

Every year or so someone in his family sat down and talked to Tommy about his wife, as though she was a car that needed a paint job. There was never a question of a trade-in-Mary Frances still asked Celeste how her husband was, even though Celeste had been divorced far longer than she'd been married. "Soused," Celeste always answered with good humor. It was only that they all wanted Connie to run more smoothly, to mix in, to blend in, to be more like them. The worst moment of Tommy's life had been a tenth anniversary dinner Mark had given them three years before, at which Connie had become rather high on fruity whiskey sours, the taste of the liquor lost amidst all the pineapple. There had been a cake with a little bride and groom, and toasts, and Connie had turned to all of them, the bride and groom in her hand, and had said in an odd squeaky voice, "Where were all of you on my wedding day?" And she had said it staring straight at John Scanlan, who stared right back. The effect had been blunted a bit by the fact that Connie had suddenly put her hand over her mouth, and run to the bathroom. Tommy went after her, and when they returned, his parents were gone from the table. "How long has that been going on?" James had said in a professional tone of voice to Connie, whose face was gray-white, and Tommy had said, "Jesus, James, she drank too much." But James had been right after all; she was expecting Joseph at the time, although neither of them had known it.

Now, sitting in Sal's with Tom, Mark said, "So your wife's pregnant again," and the remark lay on the table between them. Then Mark's eyes emptied and he added, "Look, Tom, you're going to need that new house no matter what you say. You'll have five. You need more room."

"We have plenty of room," Tommy said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Let's not start with the house. I don't want to move."

"Your wife doesn't want to move."

"Her too."

"You know she told Gail she wants to live in one of those development houses they're building?"

"Mark, she says those things to get you people aggravated. She's tired of having people make decisions about her life."

Sal arrived with the hamburgers. "Mr. Scanlan, medium," he said, putting the one with the blue stick in its bun in front of Tommy. "Mr. Scanlan, medium rare," he added, putting the one with the red stick in front of Mark. Tommy wondered where he'd found the little sticks, and how special the occasion needed to be for Sal to use them. Tommy had been ordering hamburgers at Sal's for years and had never had a stick in his before.

Both men ate in silence, ketchup dripping onto their plates. Then Mark said, his mouth full, "People are talking about your wife."

"I don't want to hear this," Tommy said.

"Joe says he went over to St. Pius School to drop off a case of votive candles and he sees her out back with some guy playing hopscotch. She's jumping around like a kid with some big guinea-"

"Hey!" Tommy said, so loudly that two of the men at the bar turned.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry. Anyhow, she waves at Joe like it's the most natural thing in the world for her to be there with some guy. Now, Joe sees her, he makes allowances. Other people are going to wonder what the h.e.l.l is going on."

Tommy was wondering the same thing himself, but he was d.a.m.ned if he would say anything to Mark. His brother went on talking. "She's always out with those guys who are building those houses," he said. "That's where she was when Pop went into the hospital that day. People have been seeing her out their windows talking to those guys."

Tommy put down his hamburger, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, and sat back in the booth. "She knows the guy who's running the project. He's from her old neighborhood. He's a nice person. She knows his mother. She went out with his brother." He picked up his hamburger. "We're not talking about this anymore. You're all against her. All of you. Always have been."

Tommy was angry and perplexed. That morning he had noticed that the valleys of Connie's face were lavender, the peaks yellow, her eyes as bright as black marbles. She was always ill when she was pregnant, as though it was an early warning. Joseph was beginning to talk in sentences; in a few years he would be saying things she neither liked nor understood. This was the way it was for her, being a mother: a sickness and then a cleaving to her heart, a time of pure love and then the horrible moving away. Sometimes the only way she could love them was to remember them when they were small, pressing her face into the box of flannel receiving blankets in the linen closet, nappy and soft as a baby's head.

Several nights ago, Tommy had been watching the ball game on television, yelling insults at the Yankees pitching staff, throwing pillows at the screen, when he had noticed that Connie was not in the house. Neither were the older children; he was alone with Joseph, who was snoring through a stuffed-up nose in his crib, the night light throwing strange shadows across his fat face. There had been no one on the streets outside, no sound except for the soft murmur of people several houses down talking on their front steps. But in the backyard, just past the dusty bare spot in the center of the gra.s.s where home plate had always been, a solitary figure stood looking out toward the development. At first Tom thought it was Maggie, mooning about, but the posture was wrong, the shoulders a little too soft and irresolute, the arms cradling the midsection not angular or awkward enough. It was his wife.

A couple stumbling from the development, a pair of teenagers who lived a few blocks away, nearly ran into her, quiet and small as she was, but they veered off at the last moment, clutching each other's waists, the boy's eyes as blind as a night animal's, his s.h.i.+rttail a crumpled rag outside his chino pants. Connie followed them with her eyes, and then she threw back her head and stared at the stars. Tommy felt afraid.

He went back to the television, back to the armchair, and when she came into the room with a gla.s.s of iced tea he pretended she had been with him all the time, just a little out of his line of sight. And she pretended, too. He had told his brother James that she was odd this time, mercurial and withdrawn, even from the children, although as soon as he'd said it he realized she had been that way for some time. Once he'd found her sitting on the floor, just looking at her good china. He couldn't believe that was normal.

"Women have these strange fancies when they're expecting, Tom," James had said, shaking his big handsome head and smiling, and they had left it at that. James had never been the kind of brother to whom Tommy could confess that he feared his wife's strange fancy was for some guinea with big forearms from the old neighborhood.

He could not believe that she missed that portion of her life. She rarely went to see her father, sending Maggie instead, and he had not found this peculiar. He remembered going for the first time to her parents' home, those two old people, this one lovely, lonely child, and thinking that she was out of the world there, as though she lived in one of those little crystal b.a.l.l.s with falling snow inside. He had been amazed that she had even learned to dance, had learned the melody to "Moonlight Serenade," until later, when he had gone to Celeste's house and seen Connie's connection to a normal life. He had always felt a touch of pride at having taken her away from all that, the heavy silent mother with the V cut into one front tooth from biting off thread at the sewing machine, the father who took all his affection outdoors and ma.s.saged it into the ground around his beloved plants. Once he had found her, pregnant with their second child, planting tomato plants in the backyard, before one of his sisters-in-law had made a comment about how well Italians did such things, and he had seen tears fall down upon her dirty hands. "I miss my father," she had said, although the old man was only twenty minutes away by car. "Go over and see him," Tom had replied, but she just shook her head. "You don't understand," she had said, sobbing. "Sometimes people are near but they might as well be on the moon." He thought he understood now what she had been saying then.

"How's everything else?" he finally said to his brother to break the silence.

"Come into the business, Tom," Mark said, looking up at him.

"Oh Jesus, not this again."

"Maybe I've been going about it the wrong way. I know your wife is p.i.s.sed that I've been bothering you-"

"Says who?" Tommy said.

"She told Gail to tell me to lay off."

"Go on," Tommy said.

"But I need your help. Things are changing. There's a lot to be done." Mark stared at his hands. "I've been going over the books, Tommy. They're not good. The old man moved a lot of money around in strange ways. I don't think we're as solid as he always pretended. Some of the construction companies aren't making money. He mortgaged two of the apartment buildings for that new equipment we got a couple years ago. It's going to take some doing to make things right."

"What do you mean, to make them right?"

"I think the business is in trouble, Tom. I need your help."

"Jesus," Tommy said.

"Jack and Joe are all right, but they're not so smart. I say do something and they do it. But I need a real partner."

"You're exaggerating," Tommy said. "You just want someone to argue with until Pop comes back."

"I need your help. I need someone to work with. It'd be good."

"I have a job," Tommy said, wiping his mouth. "I have a family, I have a house, I have a job."

"The cement company can run itself. Besides, he told me he's thinking of selling it off."

Tommy smiled sourly. "Oh yeah?" he said.

"I figured you knew."

"He'd go that far?" Tommy said.

"He says it's never been a big moneymaker."

"He's full of s.h.i.+t, Mark," Tommy said. "The other day at the hospital he told me he was going to have me fired so that I wouldn't be able to make my mortgage payments and would have to move into that house he bought. He was going to have me fired so that I'd have to work with you to keep food in my kids' mouths. He's got a little chessboard in his head and he's been able to move every piece on the G.o.dd.a.m.n board except two of them. The last two. Me and my wife. And he won't rest until the game is over, and he's won."

"Jesus, that's a horrible thing to say," Mark said. "Jesus, Tommy, I'm ashamed of you."

"What'd he tell you about me coming into the business?"

The question lay between them as Sal brought coffee and took their empty plates away. Mark took a long time putting milk and sugar in his cup. Finally he said, "The old man told me October first you start as vice president of operations. He says you make five thousand a year more than me."

Tommy laughed. "And you're ashamed of me?" he said, leaning across the table until his forehead almost touched his brother's. "G.o.d, Markey, I don't want to p.i.s.s on your life, but look at you. You're a lackey for him. You don't even have kids because he said adoption was no good. Do you hold it when he takes a p.i.s.s, too? He's got you just where he wants you. I thought he gave up on me a long time ago, because of Concetta, because I stepped out of line. Now I think he just waited until he knew I thought that, and then he came in for the kill."

"Do you hear yourself? You make your own father sound like a monster."

"You remember when we were kids and Sister Ann Elizabeth asked us to make a drawing of G.o.d? You remember? You made him tall and you made his hair yellow and his eyes blue. And so did I. She got such a kick out of that, that our pictures of G.o.d looked like the same person. That wasn't just a coincidence, Mark."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Mark said. "I just want you to come into the business with me. You'd be good. We'd be good together. The old man doesn't accept reality. The world is changing. The Church is changing. He's not far off on his jokes about the kaiser rolls. What if they decide to go to using plain pieces of bread at communion? That's a million bucks right down the toilet."

"You're talking to the wrong person about this. Go back to the hospital and talk to the owner of the company."

"He's not coming back, Tom," Mark said.

Tommy felt a chill in his chest and, almost reflexively, his shoulders hunched in, like little wings. "Get out," he said, but his voice was low.

"He's in bad shape. He's much worse than anyone thinks. James says the old man will never really be the same."

"Get out," Tommy said, his voice lower still.

"You come into the business with me, Tom. Take the house. It's a nice house, much nicer than any of those development houses. Move your wife away from there. It's not good for her. It's not good for you."

"She's fine, Mark. I'm fine."

"No you're not," Mark said.

"Yeah, we are."

"Yeah? Where is your wife right now? Right at this very moment? I can tell you that Gail is at a white sale with Mom and that after that she's going to play bridge with some of her friends and after that she's having dinner with me. Where is Connie right now?"

"She's home taking care of her kids," Tommy said.

"If you're sure of that, fine. If you're sure of that I got nothing further to say. If you're sure of that."

14

MAGGIE LIT THE FIFTH FIRE HERSELF. She felt as though the match jumped from her hand to the big wet spot where the lighter fluid had collected on the plywood wall of the garage. The house was in the back of the development, up a little rise from the old creek, and its lumber was still orangy-yellow. It was the spot on the wall and the fresh look of the wood, she thought when she was finally alone, that made her think the flames would not spread, even as they covered the walls like a dazzling cape.

"Isn't it incredible?" said Debbie, who was standing just behind her.

Maggie was struck by several things at once: by the damp smell of the night, by a persistent trickle of sweat down the back of her head and into the hollow at the base of her skull, by how hot the flames became so quickly. It crossed her mind that she was making a memory, and that she would never in her life be able to communicate the sick feeling that afflicted her the moment the fire began to leap around her, the nausea that rose up in her throat as she heard the three people behind her breathing heavily in the still air. She wondered if this was the way her mother felt when she was expecting a baby. If it was, she would never ever have children.

They were out in the development, in a two-car garage. The big square empty s.p.a.ce was filled with boxes: a No-Frost refrigerator, a No-Rinse dishwasher, a host of other appliances and fixtures in corrugated brown cardboard. The younger kids had been having a field day, turning empty boxes into tunnels, caves, houses, hauling them out of the big refuse pile to one side of the development and dragging them home as their mothers screamed from the kitchen windows "You take that right back where you found it." Damien had started collecting sc.r.a.ps of Formica, little punched-out circles and half moons where the kitchen installers had carved out holes for plumbing pipes or planed the edge of a counter into a curve. He had a big box full in his room, amid his b.u.t.terflies and cacti, and sometimes he would take them out and look at them, feeling the smooth surfaces, even sniffing them, and smiling. "You're nuts," Terence said.

Maggie had gone to get Debbie after dinner, but Mrs. Malone had said she was not at home. "Did you two girls have a fight?" she added, frowning.

"Not exactly," said Maggie.

"You come inside and have a Popsicle and tell me about it," Mrs. Malone said, but Maggie had gone off by herself to the development. She knew exactly where to find Debbie and the others. She could smell them now, like a tracking dog; she could smell the accelerant and the sulfur.

The second fire had, like the first, flared and died. The third and fourth had happened when she was not there; one had leveled the walls of a closet, the other had left a black hole the size of the gym's center court mark on the bedroom floor of a house that was barely a frame. She had become accustomed now to not being able to find Debbie when she wanted her, to discovering her at the pool, giggling behind her hand with Bridget Hearn. They would fall silent, their faces flat, as soon as Maggie appeared. It was halfway through the summer, and Maggie felt that the structure of her life had tumbled down around her, her safe haven at the cemetery somehow strange and unsatisfactory now, her invincible grandfather wasting away amid the white of his hospital bed, her parents absent in spirit and sometimes in fact, her best friend a stranger. She had only found out about the third and fourth fires because Joey Martinelli had told her mother one afternoon when the two of them were in the kitchen having coffee and didn't realize that Maggie was in the house. When Maggie had come downstairs for lemonade, quiet in bare feet, her mother had leapt from her chair like a mouse caught in a spring trap, and Mr. Martinelli had been so discomfited that he had asked her how school was. Maggie had felt like an intruder in her own kitchen, and, lying on her bed afterward, had wondered if she would ever belong anywhere again.

She had gone over to the Malones' that same afternoon, and found Debbie in her room, lying on the bed, still pink from a day at the club. Maggie had lain down on Aggie's bed, too, and they had talked in a desultory fas.h.i.+on for a few minutes before lapsing into silence. Finally Debbie had cleared her throat. "I think before you come over you should call and see whether I'm here," she finally said. "And make sure I'm here alone and not already with somebody else."

Maggie had continued to stare at the ceiling. There was a crack that ran across one corner that she knew as well as she knew her own face in the mirror. She traced it with her eyes, back and forth, back and forth.

"Sometimes I might be with other people," Debbie added. "There are things that I'm interested in now that you're not that interested in."

"Like what?" Maggie said.

"How should I know?" Debbie shot back. "Maybe we're maturing at different rates. Bridget says she was friends with Gigi McMenamin for years and years and then they stopped being friends because Gigi just wasn't interested in doing anything. All she wanted to do was hang around the house and read."

"I know what you're interested in," Maggie said. "You're my best friend."

"Maybe I'm interested in other things now. Maybe I'm changing. Bridget says that being out of Helen's shadow has changed me. She says I act more like I'm in high school than most people my age."

"Bridget's a b.i.t.c.h," said Maggie, getting up and walking out.

That was when she had known that the next time there was a fire, she would be there.

But she never suspected that she would strike the match and start the fire. Richard had handed her the box of kitchen matches, his eyes flat, and when he had said, "Your move, Maria Goretti," she knew there was no way back to the way things had been before, to the times of Indian clay in the creek and Ouija boards. She sniffed the air and thought that the scent was an amalgam of what had been and what was still to come, of the old smells of cut gra.s.s and plastic toys and stew cooking and the faint ripe odor of standing water, and the new smells of plaster and linoleum, cement and concrete, all nice smells somehow. Sometimes she tried to close her eyes and imagine the field the way it had been only two months before, its reeds hiding the earth and the field mice and the occasional discarded soda can. And when she did, she could envision a field, but it was her imagined idea of one, like an ill.u.s.tration in a book, perfect arcs of gray-green laid on a bias, and not what had really been there at all. She wondered sometimes whether she was doing the same thing to her memories of her own life.

"Your turn," Debbie said.

Maggie knew why Debbie was angry. The day before, they had visited Helen in the city. They had put on summer dresses, because they always wore dresses when they went to the city, and they slipped out of the Malones' front door, which was only used by salesmen and for important parties, while Mrs. Malone was busy warming a bottle for the new baby. Maggie carried an umbrella. It was still wet from the day before, and the day before that. It had been one of the rainiest summers on record, Mrs. Malone said. The weather was making all the mothers feel that perhaps they would lose their minds. "I'll make you a deal," Mrs. Malone had said to the children one morning at breakfast, after Maggie had spent the night. "I'll stay out of your hair until Labor Day if you'll stay out of mine." No one stopped eating. The baby was in a corner, sucking noisily on his hand. He was a large boy, with no hair and an enormous mottled face. It often occurred to Maggie that what pa.s.sed as an offhand remark from Mrs. Malone would have been a turning point for either of her own parents.

For days at a time there had been no work on the development, and water ran down the raw brown slopes that stood for lawns in great streams, until ridges were worn into them and piles of silt lay in front of all the new houses. The ones that were only framed in turned a henna color, and the water in the bas.e.m.e.nts grew stagnant on those rare afternoons when the sun shone. Even the negligible little creek, which Maggie and Debbie had been able to negotiate with one good broad jump since second grade, rose and covered its steppingstones, slos.h.i.+ng aggressively up over its banks and whirring around the stanchions of the railroad trestle. After the fifth day, three workmen from the county public works department had come and stared silently at the foot of one of the stanchions, where a narrow groove of earth had been worn away to a depth of three feet. They brought a dump truck full of gravel and filled it in. Maggie was so bored that she went outside to watch; she had put on her yellow slicker, and her wrists poked like sticks from the wide sleeves. She had outgrown it in three months, and outgrown, too, watching workmen shovel stones. Sometimes she took the nail Bruce had given her out of her jewelry box, placed it in the palm of her hand and looked at it, as though at any moment it would turn into something else. When Connie was home, Maggie tried to stay out of her way. When her mother was gone, Maggie stayed in her bedroom, peering out through the window, looking for fires in the rain.

Maggie and Debbie had taken the subway to Helen's building, walking three blocks from the station beneath one umbrella, and by the time they reached the apartment house, an ugly brick rectangle with a keyhole of an air shaft excised from the middle of the yellow-brown facade, their skirts were wet almost to the waist. "Nasty day, ladies," the man mopping the marble floors of the lobby had said pleasantly, eyeing their s.h.i.+ny, skinny legs.

Maggie had a.s.sumed that Debbie had asked her to come along because she had realized that Bridget Hearn was a jerk, and that Maggie was a much more suitable companion for such an important excursion. This was not true. Debbie had told Helen that she might come by, and Helen had said that if Debbie brought Bridget she would not let them into the apartment. "Maggie saves you from yourself," she had said.

Debbie had been to visit Helen three times before, each time with Aggie, and she was affecting an air of great nonchalance, although she was terrified. Nearly every apartment in Helen's building was occupied by the widow of a Columbia professor, and the ladies all bore a great resemblance to one another, all small, slightly humpbacked elderly women with round hats like toadstools and p.r.o.nounced foreign accents. When they spoke to one another in the elevators, they talked mainly of the price of produce, which they purchased in small quant.i.ties each day as part of their daily routine. When they shared the elevator with Helen or her roommate, they usually kept silent, their mouths as tight as the snap closures on their handbags.

One of them, who had herself been an anthropologist in Germany before her marriage, had written several letters in her ornate, rather spindly handwriting to determine how the girls had come in possession of the apartment, and whether they were old enough to be legally permitted to live alone. She was the one who entered the elevator with Maggie and Debbie now, staring down at the puddle on the floor their skirts made. Maggie noticed that the woman was wearing the same sort of shoes and boots that the nuns at school wore, low-heeled, black lace-up shoes with perforated uppers and translucent plastic boots that fitted the contours of the shoes exactly. Maggie's aunt Margaret had once told her that she had found those shoes the greatest impediment to remaining in the convent.

The elderly woman looked at Maggie. "Alone?" she suddenly spat out.

"Excuse me?" Maggie had said.