“And he promised to move her,” Mary Frances said, and Maggie could see that her face was beginning to fall, as though the pouchy cheeks were melting just a little. “He promised to bring her up here so that we could all be together.” Mary Frances looked imploringly at Mr. O’Neal. Then she took Tommy’s arm. He looked around at his brothers, but they were staring down at their clasped hands. Maggie heard her father say, very softly, “He didn’t do it, Ma. Maybe he forgot.”
He put his arm around Mary Frances’s shoulder. A path opened for them through the people who were left, and he guided her to a car and climbed in after her; his long arm was the last Maggie saw of him, pulling the door closed with a loud thunk.
“This is not my fault,” Mr. O’Neal was saying as Maggie and Connie walked to another limousine. Margaret was already inside, and in silence they drove to the big fieldstone house. There were plates of cold cuts, and Swedish meatballs in a chafing dish with a little candle underneath to keep them warm, and fried chicken and potato and macaroni salad. But Mary Frances never came downstairs. Maggie spent most of the afternoon fetching Mr. McAlevy a fresh drink and listening to him tell a long story about a policeman, a bar in Brooklyn, a colored man, and an Irish gang that seemed to have no point and certainly nothing to do with John Scanlan. She excused herself when she saw Margaret climbing the stairs with a plate of food, and followed her to the door of the girls’ room. Across the hall she could see her grandparents’ room, neat and empty, her grandfather’s gray suit laid out on the bed.
“Have you seen the stone doorstop?” Maggie asked.
“What, sweetie?” her aunt said, balancing the plate of chicken and potato salad on one hand and pushing a piece of hair under her wimple.
“Remember the doorstop? The big round ball with the flat sides that always held the door back?”
“I haven’t seen that for years, Maggie,” Margaret said impatiently. “Would you go get me a 7-Up with just a splash of Canadian Club in it and bring it here?”
“A cherry?” Maggie said.
“Not necessary,” Margaret said, opening the door and taking the food inside.
When Maggie came back, her grandmother was sitting up in bed, eating chicken and patting her face with a tissue. Somehow it was the sight of Mary Frances in the single bed, Elizabeth Ann’s bed, that finally got to Maggie, so that when she handed her the drink she began to cry, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand until Margaret handed her one of her big plain white cotton handkerchiefs.
“You were his favorite,” Mary Frances said, and as Maggie looked at her grandmother, so small and raddled-looking, lying in the small bedroom with the two Scanlan & Co. crucifixes over the two beds, she knew that their lives would never be the same again. On the table next to the bed was a copy of Wuthering Heights.
“It’s really good,” said Maggie, picking the book up and sniffling. “There’s some boring stuff at the beginning and end but the main story is great.”
“As good as Jane Eyre?” Margaret said.
“Better.”
“What?” said Mary Frances querulously, eyeing them over the edge of her glass.
“Maggie was asking about the doorstop for some reason,” Margaret said loudly, as though her mother was deaf.
“The what?”
“That big stone doorstop we used to have downstairs.”
Mary Frances beamed. “You may have it, dear,” she said to Maggie.
“But where is it, Mother?” Margaret said.
Mary Frances thought for a moment. “It’s in the cabinet to the left of the stove, on the bottom shelf near the back. I put it there last year after your grandfather threatened to throw it out the window. He’d stubbed his toe on it in the dark.” Mary Frances patted her face with the tissue again. “I know he’d want you to have it, dear,” Mary Frances added.
“Although maybe some time you’ll explain to me why you want it,” Margaret added, eating potato salad from her mother’s plate.
Maggie thought for a moment. “I think it’s displacement,” she said.
Her aunt Margaret narrowed her eyes, and Maggie could tell that she was trying to decide whether Maggie was being smart or not. Margaret leaned back on the bed, the skirt of her habit hiked up to her knees, her black legs crossed at the ankle. “This family