say something to Leonard, and then walked back slowly, his shirt glowing in the sun. She was glad she had worn a skirt, even a flimsy cotton wrap one, its ties strained by her thickened waist; her father was offended by women in pants. Her hand went to her hair to smooth it off her forehead.
“Mr. Scanlan is buried,” Angelo said.
“Finally,” said Connie.
“He was supposed to have the child buried with him?”
Connie nodded. “That’s what his wife thought. I don’t know whether it was a misunderstanding, or he just ignored her.”
“Different things are important to different people,” Angelo said. “Most people hate the bugs—your son loves them. Most people talk too much—your daughter listens.”
“My daughter is a woman now.”
“Of course,” said Angelo. “This summer it happened. Anybody could see. When your mother was her age, she was already married. One baby on the way, one baby to come. Children grow fast. Except if they are here.” And he looked around him again. Mary Frances joined them, her rosary in her hand, and Angelo escorted her in his courtly fashion back to the car.
Connie was quiet on the drive home, overwhelmed by events. She and Mary Frances fell back on their old ways for much of the drive, the older woman talking in a desultory fashion about Monica’s wedding. Connie thought it would be an interesting affair, judging from the fact that the groom’s family had wanted his name on the invitations to read Donald “Duck” Syzmanski. As they neared Mary Frances’s house there was a long silence, and then the older woman began to speak, almost to herself, so low that Connie had to bend her head to listen.
“No one ever understands what it’s like unless they’re in it themselves,” Mary Frances said. “People look at your children and they see them all in a lump. Even their father, calling them “the brood,” herding them into the car for Mass every Sunday morning, making rules to fit them all, about staying out late, about homework, about spankings if they got into trouble, even for Margaret, with her little fanny in white cotton pants, her skirt pulled up. But their mother never sees them that way. Even now, all standing together, men in their suits, too big to hug, you see them all as themselves, clear—Jimmy with his everlasting questions, following you around the house: Why does this happen, Mama, why does that happen? Why does the sun rise and set? And Mark, walking him around the living room in that little row house we had, walking him every night with the colic while he screamed and screamed, the sky so black outside that it was like the end of the world. And Tommy curling like a little shrimp next to me on the beach, pulling a towel over his little shoulders so he wouldn’t burn. “Be a man!” John would yell at him, and he’d try to lie still, so still that no one would notice him.”
Mary Frances looked over at her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she said. “The baby was stillborn and they came at me with a needle to put me to sleep and I said, damn you, give me that child. And I baptized her right there, and she was so pretty, with pink skin like flowers. And I kissed her face and she was real to me, as real as any of the others, even now. More real, maybe. Because you think of what they’ll become, and you’re always disappointed. Though they’re all good boys, all fine, they’re never exactly what you dream they’re going to be. Only she, only she never disappointed. Even today I dream the same dreams about her as when I kissed her face.” She bent her head over her hands, and then lifted it and stared out the windshield. “I kissed her, and then I let them give me the shot.”
Connie pulled into the driveway slowly because she found it hard to see through the tears in her eyes, and because she was so overcome to hear Mary Frances put into words Connie’s own feelings, the feelings about her children that she had believed were twisted and peculiar and hers alone. She felt the weight of all the wasted years, of the playacting that all of them had done while they lived with that great central figure, that star now dead. Connie supposed that that was the sin for which they would all have to forgive John Scanlan, the