Object lessons (3 page)

“On Sunday I am cleaning the linen closet,” Connie said, turning toward the sink. “Go hang up your suit.”

From the window she watched her daughter fumble with the clothespins and slip the money into her pocket. It enraged her that even without being present John Scanlan could ruin her day. “Don’t you wake your brother up,” Connie hissed, as her daughter came back through the kitchen on her way upstairs.

She looked at the sink filled with cereal bowls, coffee cups, Mickey Mouse glasses with low tidelines of orange pulp. Upstairs she could hear Joseph humming to himself. “Damn it,” she said, spraying detergent onto a sponge.

A thousand times Tommy had told her she was doing it wrong, that you were supposed to fill the sink with water and let the dishes soak. A thousand times she had shut her mouth and done it her way. She’d been doing dishes since she was seven years old, standing on the red leatherette seat of a stepstool, when there had been only her own plate and glass to wash. She’d washed her own cereal bowl before school and her own plates after dinner, while her father and her mother worked. Nobody was going to tell her how to do a dish.

Suddenly there was a stultifying silence, oppressive as the heat, as the last earth mover working in the fields behind the house quieted, rumbled once like a death rattle and was still.

Connie was a short woman, low to the ground, and even if she stood on tiptoe, she could not quite make out how much work had been done, except that there seemed to be great gashes in the reedlike weeds, and here and there a massive pile of fresh brown earth. A half dozen of the big machines stood at rest. For the first time Connie noticed that someone had placed two portable toilets at the far end of the field. The man who had been driving the last earth mover was almost at the back door before she realized he was coming to her house. Connie noticed that his gray undershirt was stained black beneath the arms with huge half-moons of perspiration. He peered through the screen at her, blinded by the dim indoors after the glare of the day.

“Hello?” he said.

“Yes?” Connie’s voice was cold.

“Could I trouble you to use the phone?” he asked, still peering through the screen.

Connie opened the door a bit. The man had glossy hair, like an animal’s pelt, and eyebrows so thick that they looked like an amateur theatrical effect. He looked at Connie and Connie looked at him; for a moment they just gaped at one another, and then both started to laugh.

“Connie Mazza,” he said, smoothing back his hair.

“Oh,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Don’t tell me, I’ll get it. Don’t tell me.”

He laughed again. “Martinelli,” he said.

“I knew
that
part.”

“Joe,” he added.

“Joey. Joey Martinelli. I would have had it in a minute. Come in. Use the phone. Do you want a beer?” She started to laugh again. “It’s nice to see a familiar face.”

“I knew you lived in the neighborhood,” he said, “but I swear to God I didn’t know this was your house.”

“You’re working on this project?”

“I’m the foreman. But we’re in such a big hurry that I’m driving the backhoe part time. We did six foundations today. I swear I thought somebody was going to have a stroke in this heat.”

“You dug foundations for six houses today?”

He nodded. “And we’re supposed to do six tomorrow. The people are in some kind of a rush.”

“I don’t know why,” said Connie. “They’ve been planning this for years.” She pointed to the phone. “Go ahead.”

She watched him as he dialed. He had the sort of muscles men developed from heavy lifting, and he stood awkwardly when he stood still. She remembered that he had been one of the good athletes when she was a girl, one of the nice boys in the neighborhood who always held the door if you left the drugstore when they did. She hadn’t known him well, although she had gone out with his younger brother a few times.

She heard him talking on the phone about dinner. “Your wife?” she said after he hung up.

“My mother,” he said ruefully.

“How ’bout a beer?” she said, even though it felt strange to be alone in the house with a man. A noise from above made her start; she hadn’t counted the children, or even remembered them for a moment.

“Thanks, but I gotta finish up and get home. We’re supposed to be done here by the end of the year. Nice houses, too. Laundry chutes. Disposals. Carpet. Not like these old ones, but nice houses.”

“An old house is a lot of work,” Connie said.

“Yeah.” He looked down at his shoes and at the grime he was leaving on the speckled linoleum. “Oh, boy, I’m sorry. My mother would kill me if she could see this.”

“You’re right,” said Connie, and they both laughed again. As she watched him cross the fields she remembered that his father had died in the excavation of a subway tunnel somewhere deep beneath the surface of the borough of Queens. Perhaps that was why she was surprised to find him in this line of work. Or perhaps it was that she vaguely remembered he had been smarter than that, one of the boys likely to break free of the Italian immigrant tradition of dirt beneath the fingernails. His brother had worn aftershave that smelled like peppermint. And Joey had delivered papers to earn pocket money; he had brought the
News
to her father every morning. It was odd what you remembered, like her remembering those bruises on Maggie’s head after all these years. It was interesting to find that one short conversation with an almost-stranger had improved her mood immeasurably.

Hot as it was, she stretched up to get the big bowl from the top shelf of the kitchen cabinets, and humming to herself, began to make a cake.

3

T
OMMY
S
CANLAN STARED OUT THE WINDOW
of his office in the gray-green cinderblock building that was the home of First Concrete. Below him was the lot where he and the other men parked their cars, and behind the chain-link fence was another, larger lot where they kept the cement mixers, great clanking beasts incongruously painted in red-and-white candy-cane stripes. At the moment there was a single cement mixer there, its hood up, its enormous greasy motor exposed like the entrails of a big animal, and next to the cement mixer was a black Lincoln Continental with a high-gloss shine.

“Ah, shit,” Tommy said aloud, looking down at the big car. There was a faint tapping at his office door, and Tommy switched off the radio atop his filing cabinet. “Ah, shit,” he said again, going to open it.

One of the mechanics, a squat, swarthy man named Gino, whose wavy hair looked like the ocean on a rough day, stood at the door in his red-and-white striped First Concrete shirt. All the men hated the shirts, but Gino was the shop steward and he never showed up at First Concrete out of uniform.

“The old man is downstairs,” Gino said. The men never used a salutation when they addressed Tommy in the office; they weren’t sure whether to call him Mr. Scanlan or not.

Tommy had failed to notice this particular semantic dilemma, but he appreciated the fact that they always said “the old man” and not “your old man.” It made Tom feel small to be reminded of his father’s power.

“Did you tell him I was here?” Tommy asked, looking out the window.

“Downstairs they told him they weren’t sure where you were,” Gino said. “I don’t think he’s coming up. He’s got us changing the oil in his car. Your brother’s with him.”

Tommy could see his father standing in one of his gray suits, in the maintenance lot, looking at the disabled cement mixer. The old man turned and said something to the mechanic working on his car, and the man handed him a rag. John Scanlan wiped the striped side of the cement mixer, then shook his head. “Oh, hell,” Tommy muttered, lighting a cigarette.

The stripes on the trucks had been Tommy’s father’s idea of free advertising; no one, John Scanlan had reasoned, would ever be able to mistake a First Concrete cement mixer for the cement mixers of Reliable, or Gatto Brothers, or Bronx River Cement. On the other hand, no one ever made fun of those other cement mixers, either. Sometimes, when Tommy handed his card to a developer, or a factory owner, or someone from the city who was looking for a couple hundred dollars in exchange for a contract to lay some sidewalks or pour the foundation for a school gymnasium, he would see a look of discovery pass over the guy’s face. No matter how often it happened, Tommy’s chest would tighten at that moment. “The ones with the stripes, right?” the customer would say. “The red-and-white stripes?” And the look of discovery would be replaced by a big grin. “Can’t miss those babies.”

Tommy was in charge of keeping the trucks looking good, but he hated the stripes so much that he would let them go until they’d faded to pale pink and dirty gray. It wasn’t the ridicule; it was the reminder. “Look at me!” the stripes seemed to shout, just as John Scanlan always did. If Tommy had had his way, the trucks would have been gray. They would have looked like what they were: trucks that carried cement, not big pieces of peppermint candy on wheels. But Tommy never had his way. Sooner or later his father would see one of the trucks, on one of his trips around the city to have lunch in some parish rectory or another—“good booze at Queen of Peace,” he might say to Tom the next time he saw him, or “one more plate of corned beef and cabbage and I’m not going back to St. Teresa’s”—and the old man would be on the phone complaining that the trucks needed a fresh coat of paint.

He never called Tommy directly. Buddy Phelan, who was the president of First Concrete and, not coincidentally, the godson of the monsignor who handled purchasing for the biggest suburban diocese in the metropolitan area, would come into Tommy’s office with a bemused grin on his face, and say, “Hey, Tom. Time to give the trucks a going over, whattaya say?” And Tommy would know that his father had called that morning to suggest that the man who owned one hundred percent of First Concrete, and who had the right to hire and fire those who worked there, did not like his clever subliminal advertising gimmick compromised by a failure of upkeep and a heavy layer of city grime.

Buddy Phelan always assumed that Tommy hated him, but this was not true. In his heart of hearts Tommy hated no one, except occasionally himself, and he was pleased to be vice president of operations at First Concrete, a big title for a mundane job. If he had been the “big boss,” as the men who drove the trucks called Buddy, he would not have been able to chat with the workers so effortlessly when they came in at the end of the day, smelly and glad to talk without the roar of the mixer or the road in their ears. He would have felt constrained from going into Sal’s at lunchtime and sitting at the bar with a sandwich and a draft beer, putting in his two cents about the Yankees, the weather, or the coloreds. It would have been impossible for him to join the pick-up basketball games that took place across the street most afternoons, when he felt free and young and extraordinarily competent: dribble downcourt, push off from the knees, send the orange ball sailing with a motion of his wrist that had become second nature in Catholic school gyms, watch it sink with only that slight lisp of a sound that had given the shot the name “swish.” Basketball made him feel simultaneously like a man and a boy. Everyone nodded to Buddy Phelan when he left for the night, climbing into his Olds 98, but no one ever asked him to join them for a beer, except Tommy, when he had nothing better to do. He felt sorry for the guy.

When he turned from the window, Gino was gone and his brother Mark was just coming up the stairs. Mark was flushed bright pink in the heat, but his tie was still tied tight, while Tommy’s was at half-mast. They looked like brothers, both mostly beige: beige hair, faded from the tow they’d had as boys, beige freckles, darker beige eyes. But where Tommy was long and rangy, Mark was solid and short. It was only after Mark had married that he had been able to convince his family to stop calling him “Squirt,” although John Scanlan, who was an even six feet tall, still felt compelled to make comments about his son’s height from time to time.

“We’re going to have to paint the trucks next week,” Tommy said.

“I don’t know why you fight him on that,” Mark said. “You know who wins.”

The two stood silent, sweating. Tommy took a great deal of satisfaction out of the fact that he didn’t work directly for his father, and Mark resented him for it, thinking that depending on John Scanlan’s largesse once removed was worse than simply facing facts and going to work for Scanlan & Co. “We’re all in the family business,” their sister Margaret always said with a grin. Mark could not understand how this could apply to obstetrics or a religious vocation, but Margaret said that was simply because he was always too literal.

In fact Tommy would have preferred not to work for any Scanlan enterprise. When he and Connie had first married they had talked of moving to California, of living where it was always warm and no one had ever heard of John Scanlan, where they didn’t care if you were Italian as long as you weren’t Mexican. But their own fecundity had laid waste to that dream. During the first five years of their marriage, when they had heard not a word from Tommy’s parents, they had learned how difficult it was to pay the bills on a working man’s salary. Then John Scanlan had taken an interest in Maggie, and Tommy had been hired, after a perfunctory interview, as a vice president at First Concrete. His wife had barely spoken to him for nearly two months after he took the job. The words she had used to break the silence were “I’m pregnant again.”

There were only two reasons why Tommy preferred being an executive to being one of the men carrying and shoveling cement. The first was that he needed the money. He and Connie had practiced rhythm since Maggie was born, and they had three sons to show for it, and a suspicion of another on the way. Saddle shoes alone ran him two hundred dollars a year. The other thing he loved about his job was his office. As offices went, it was on the small side, with a window that looked over the parking lot to the basketball court and playground across the street, and the red-brick public school building beyond that. When two trains passed going in opposite directions on the elevated line, his office shivered like a child with a high fever. Sometimes in the summer the Sanitation Department would not be quick enough about picking up the garbage, and the wholesale fruit market across the road would give off an overripe sweet smell. But Tommy had a gray desk, a gray file cabinet, a gray table that held an adding machine and stood beneath a wall displaying a full-color map of the city of New York, with pins in it for job locations, which made Tommy feel a little like a general. He kept his framed Fordham diploma, the result of two years of full-time studies and four years of nights after Maggie and Terence were born, in the big bottom drawer of his desk, along with a bottle of Four Roses and a sweatshirt to change into for basketball games. He also had a studio photograph of Connie on her wedding day, her eyes so big and black amid the whites and grays of the picture that it looked as if they’d been made with the end of a lighted cigarette. When certain clients, mainly the big boys, came to see him, he put the picture on the filing cabinet, but most of the time he kept it in the drawer. His brother Mark had noticed this once, and had gone home to report to his wife that things in Tom and Connie’s marriage were even worse than they’d imagined. In truth the picture had been put away for exactly the opposite reason; while most men considered it simply part of their office equipment, like a stapler or a striped tie, Tommy Scanlan believed that the photograph would tell the world a private thing: that he was crazy about his wife.

Like so many of their friends, Connie Mazza and Tommy Scanlan had gotten married because they were expecting a baby. It had come as a great surprise to both of them. Connie’s sole exposure to sex education had been the day before her twelfth birthday, when her aunt Rose had given her a box of sanitary napkins almost a year too late. Tommy found out afterward that it had never occurred to Connie that the surge of heat and compulsion and the aftermath of embarrassment she had felt on weekend nights in his car could result in the conception of a child.

Tommy had known better, but he had been similarly dim in not realizing that it was impossible that the answer to “Is this a safe time?” could be “Yes” every Friday and Saturday night. It was not until after they were married that he discovered that Connie had supposed he was asking only about the chances of someone catching him under her long skirts and net petticoats. Maggie had been born six months after their wedding, and Tommy’s explanation of her prematurity was for many years a great joke among his brothers, given the fact that the infant was the biggest baby in the nursery. Connie said nothing. By the time she had her baby, she did not care what anyone thought.

Even all these years later, when Tommy Scanlan looked across the kitchen table after a couple of beers and wondered who the hell this woman was, he knew that if they had not gotten caught he would have married her just the same. When they met at the YMCA jitterbug contest he had been going with someone else, a lively girl named Mary Roe, who had freckles and wild auburn curls and was a friend of his sister. He had danced with Connie only because the two winning couples in the contest had been asked to switch partners after the trophies had been given out. Connie was so small she had come only to his shoulder, her back as narrow as a child’s. She had black hair waved off her face, and black eyes so big and blank that he almost felt he could see inside her head. Her skin was white and her lipstick a pure clear red. She looked like a painting to him. She spoke not one word during the entire dance—the song had been “Moonlight Serenade,” and he thought he could very faintly hear, or perhaps feel, her humming—but as the music stopped she said “Thank you” and did not step away. He felt as though he’d been punched in the chest. When the music started again, he simply held on to her and began to dance some more. That was the way it was for the rest of the night, as Mary Roe watched from the sidelines and finally went out to a car with Mark Scanlan and let him do everything she had never let a boy do to her before.

Connie went home that night with Jimmy Martinelli, the boy who had brought her to the dance in the first place. He drove her in silence to the cemetery where the Mazzas lived, leaned across her to open the door from inside, said “Good luck” and drove away.

Most people assumed that Tommy had fallen in love with Connie because of the way she looked. The fashion of their adolescence had been for pink-skinned blondes with small noses and soft mouths, and so Connie had never believed anyone, including Tommy, when they said that she was beautiful. Tommy remembered their first Christmas, when she had brought home two boxes of cards to send to their friends and families, the message “Blessed Christmas” inside on cream-colored paper and a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary on the front. Connie had picked the cards because she thought they would go over well with various Scanlans, but when Tommy had seen the painting he had burst out laughing. “I’ve heard of people who send out pictures of themselves on their cards, but nobody who sends out paintings,” he said. And in truth the serenely beautiful Madonna, with her slightly sallow skin, dark hair, prominent nose and full lips looked very much like Connie. Tommy had turned over the card and read the fine print. “Giotto,” he said. “Did you pose for this?”