one of his friends who had lived in the suburbs before he was married; his parents still lived there, in a big fieldstone house with a gazebo and a fountain in the backyard, in a section of Westchester County a little north of Kenwood, where the houses were so far apart that the neighbors’ windows were only an occasional glint of sunlight through the trees. Tommy had lived there from the time he was fifteen until he got married at the age of twenty. Aunt Celeste had once told Maggie’s mother, when the two of them were drinking beer on the front steps one night, that she suspected the pillars made Tommy feel he had come down in the world.
“Paint ’em black,” John Scanlan said with a great guffaw on one of the rare visits he and his wife, Mary Frances, had made to the home of their middle son. Maggie noticed sometimes that when her father passed the columns a little white scar above his eyebrow jumped and writhed like one of the tiny white worms that sucked the life from her grandfather Mazza’s tomato plants, and she supposed he was remembering John Scanlan’s words.
That was what impressed Maggie most about her grandfather Scanlan: not that he dispensed down payments, tuition money, doctor’s fees, with nothing in return except everyone knowing that he’d bought and paid for your house, your children’s school, your wife’s single room on the maternity floor. It was that he could, almost magically, make his children bob and move and sway like marionettes. Tommy’s scar was the least of his accomplishments. His other four sons could be made to nod, pale, blush, shift in their chairs, pace on his Oriental rugs, simply by the words and looks John Scanlan could turn upon them. Maggie’s grandmother sometimes seemed seized with St. Vitus’s dance when her husband was angry. Only Sister John of the Cross, Maggie’s aunt Margaret, John Scanlan’s only living daughter, could sit motionless, expressionless, in her father’s presence. Maggie sometimes thought her grandfather would have stuck a pin in Margaret if he could have been assured it would make her jump. She had paid a heavy price for her composure. “Hiding behind the skirts of Jesus, Sister?” John Scanlan would sometimes say, and then Margaret would smile slowly, without mirth, and so would John, because they both knew he had put his finger on it.
Maggie’s mother managed to remain calm when she was around her father-in-law, too, although John Scanlan would have been delighted to hear how Connie railed against his machinations in the privacy of her own small kitchen. Sometimes Maggie felt that no one ever talked about what was really going on in her father’s family, although everyone seemed to talk all the time. But she had heard enough from her aunt Celeste and her cousin Monica, and even occasionally—when Maggie was eavesdropping—from her own mother, to know that her mother’s place amidst the Scanlans was not a comfortable one.
And she had only to look at the family gathered around John Scanlan’s mahogany dining table at any holiday dinner to know which of his grandchildren were different from the rest. All of Maggie’s many cousins looked a good deal alike—fair, even colorless, with placid faces. The children of Tommy Scanlan did not conform. Maggie herself was olive-skinned, with thick, heavy hair and curiously opaque green eyes, catlike and surprising. She had realized some time ago that no one would ever call her cute. She was thin—not slim and graceful but lanky on its way to being something else, caught in that uncomfortable place between childhood and maturity. Sometimes she felt as if her whole family was caught in some middle ground, too. If she heard that she was her mother’s daughter one more time, she was sure she would start to scream.
Three blocks from her own house, over the railroad tracks, Maggie’s closest friend, Debbie Malone, lived with her seven brothers and sisters in a large center-hall Colonial. Mrs. Malone was pregnant again, her muscular little legs sticking out of brown maternity shorts beneath the great cantilevered thrust of her belly. In the afternoons she lay on a yellow chaise longue made of strips of rubber that was set out beneath a maple tree in the Malones’ backyard. Her calves and arms stuck to the rubber in the heat, and as the children eddied around her, demanding money for ice cream, complaining about one another, asking permission to do things they had