can do what he wants,” Gail said. “I can do what I want. So can you.”
Connie was silent for a minute. She could see John Scanlan’s nose, beaklike and fierce, and then two more visitors knelt in front of the casket and blocked her view.
“No one can do what they want,” she said, thinking of the look on Joey Martinelli’s face when she had given him back the key to the construction trailer.
“I guess I can understand if you’re sad,” Gail went on as though she hadn’t heard. “The way he talked about you—how Tommy was the only one to marry a girl with looks, how the rest of the grandchildren, even Monica, were washed-out from too much Irish inbreeding and your children were the only ones who were halfway decent-looking or had half a brain. If I had had to hear one more word about what great legs you had, I would have screamed.”
Connie looked at her sister-in-law for a long time, and suddenly, to her surprise, she felt tears fill her eyes. She felt great pity for John Scanlan, and anger at him, too. “Well, Gail, that’s the first I’ve ever heard of the high regard my father-in-law had for me,” she said.
“It would have killed him to say anything nice about anyone to their face. He didn’t even kiss me at our wedding. I never heard him say a kind word to Mother. I don’t even believe he loved her. I think she was just a baby machine. Excuse me. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
The man and woman kneeling in front of the body rose, and Connie could see that the woman was crying. She was wiping her face with a tissue, wiping away her rouge so that one cheek was a gray-white, the other a gay pink. It was one of John Scanlan’s sisters, the one he always called Fat Marge.
“Who knows how he really felt about anything?” Connie had said, and then she had looked across the room to a corner where Dorothy O’Haire sat lost in the shadows. She was wearing a cheap black suit, clutching a black patent purse. Earlier in the evening, before anyone else had arrived, Connie had come in to make a list of the people who had sent flowers so that Mary Frances could send thank-you notes, and Dorothy had been kneeling at the casket with a little girl at her side. The child wore a beautiful navy blue dress, some gauzy stuff over linen, and a big sailor hat. When she had turned away from the casket, Connie could see that the girl had her mother’s dullish yellow hair, but her eyes were of a clear and translucent blue. They were Scanlan eyes.
“Oh, Dorothy,” Connie had said.
“Mrs. Scanlan, this is my daughter,” Dorothy had said primly. “Her name is Beth.” The girl curtsied. “How do you do?” she said, like a little girl in an old movie. On the bosom of her dress her initials were monogrammed in white: EAO. Connie knew that the O stood for O’Haire, and she was just as sure, as sure as if the name had been spoken aloud, that the E and the A stood for Elizabeth Ann. She wondered whether the girl’s mother had chosen the name, to stake her claim, or the girl’s father, to try to make amends or to live life over. After a few minutes, Dorothy had taken the child outside and put her into a car with someone, Connie could not see who, and then had come back inside alone. “I wanted her to pay her respects,” she said to Connie, finding herself that same seat in the corner, and every time during the evening Connie looked over, she had wondered if John had provided enough money for both of them. And she realized she knew another thing she would never tell her husband, and she felt weary with the weight of all the secrets it required to protect those you loved.
Now in the sunlight Connie looked over at her own father and wondered if that’s what he had done for her, all these years, if his silence was really protection from a world he found too terrible to live in. He stood silently studying the cemetery, making sure it was perfectly groomed, everything in place. His flawless world, Connie thought, where none of the people are mean or dishonest or careless because none of them are alive. Angelo left her for a moment to