over her cupped hand, hoping for a chance to throw it away. She looked across the room and saw Monica smiling at her, and she opened her mouth and popped the whole thing in, stem and all. When she wiped her hands on her skirt, Monica laughed.
“Well, gentlemen,” said her grandfather, coming up behind Maggie and lifting his Scotch from amid the martinis on the tray, “The Roman Catholic church is going to hell in a handbasket.” John Scanlan had a tendency to choose phrases and stick with them. “Hell in a handbasket” was one of his favorites.
“Shop talk,” said Mary Frances, crossing her legs and pulling at a stray thread on the brocade chair with her index finger and thumb.
“It’s shop talk that pays for this house,” her husband said. “It’s shop talk that pays for that Lincoln Continental and the private schools for all these children.”
Maggie heard a sigh from the hallway. Monica had moved back into the shadows.
“And for your orthodontia, miss,” John Scanlan said without turning around to look at Monica, whose teeth as a child, before she became perfect, had been as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery.
John Scanlan said it nice and evenly, the way he said almost everything else. The oldtimers at the factory always said that it took a man a couple of hours after he’d been fired to take it all in, because John Scanlan said “You’re fired” in the afternoon in exactly the voice in which he said “Good morning” each morning. Maggie had noticed lately that it was a good bit like the voice in which she answered catechism questions: Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
“Today in church I see four women without hats,” he continued. “Without anything on their heads. Never mind those flimsy little black veils that all you girls are wearing”—her grandfather looked over at Maggie, whose rayon mantilla was sitting on top of her little patent handbag on the hall telephone table—“now we’ve got women bareheaded. Bareheaded! As though they were going to Coney Island instead of the House of the Lord of Hosts.
“This is all because of that woman,” he added, meaning the president’s widow, who had begun wearing the mantilla to Mass on summer Sundays several years before, “who has probably never given a thought to the millinery industry in her life.
“Similarly, Johnnie, who runs the hat shop on Main Street, tells me that business is bad. Men are not wearing hats anymore, he tells me. Now whose fault is that?”
They all knew the answer. Mary Frances, who was her husband’s straight man as well as his wife, sipped her drink, put it down, folded her hands in her lap, and said obediently, “The president.”
“Exactly!” John Scanlan slammed his broad flat hand down on the table next to him.
From behind her Maggie could hear Monica sigh again. She looked over at her mother, whose eyes were shiny from alcohol. Connie looked as though she had left her consciousness at home in Kenwood and sent her body on to the Scanlans without her. Maggie realized that that was how her mother always looked when she was around Tommy’s family. She also realized that her parents never sat together when they were at John and Mary Frances’s house. Maggie’s father was sitting on the piano bench across the room.
Variations of this conversation took place every Sunday at the Scanlan house. John hated the Kennedys, whom he saw as a bunch of second-rate Scanlans with too much hair. And he hated what was happening to the Catholic church because of Pope John XXIII, not because, like his contemporaries, he thought the changes were blasphemous, but because he thought they were bad for business. “The two Johns,” he called the men he thought responsible for unnecessary change in America, although both were now dead: the boy president and the populist pope.
While all around him in Our Lady of Lourdes people slowly, painfully adapted themselves to the Mass in English, John Scanlan whispered the Latin. It was disconcerting to share a pew with him. The priest would intone “The Lord be with you,” and from John’s seat would come a sound, like a snake exhaling, the carrying sibilants of “Dominus vobiscum.” Occasionally when they were together her grandfather, a tall handsome man with yellowing white hair, would turn to Maggie and