“He said he’d find her. How’s he going to find her? The closest Angelo Mazza’s ever come to driving is riding shotgun in the flower car at a funeral.”
“Perhaps she’s visiting a friend in the neighborhood,” Aunt Cass said.
“She doesn’t have any friends,” Tommy said, and Maggie flinched. “She has Celeste,” she said quietly.
Maggie went back inside and stared through the glass partition. Looking at her grandfather was like looking at the babies in the nursery. Occasionally she would see her grandmother’s mouth moving, but no sound traveled through the thick glass, which was crisscrossed with narrow silver ribbons of wire.
Her aunt Margaret was fingering the big black rosary beads that always hung around her waist, although whether it was a prayerful gesture or a nervous one Maggie could not tell. Maggie leaned up against her, something she would not have done with any other nun, or with any of her other aunts for that matter. “Pumpkin, pumpkin,” said Margaret, squeezing her around the waist. “Life is tough, isn’t it? You know what someone once said? ‘Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.’” Margaret squeezed her again and Maggie felt the tears fill her eyes, coaxed out by her aunt’s warm hand.
“I don’t know how anyone could ever think this was a comedy,” Maggie said.
Her aunt pulled two butterscotch drops from one of her seemingly bottomless nun’s pockets, handed one to Maggie, and sucked on the other herself. Maggie thought her aunt was being companionable, but she also knew from experience that in times of stress Aunt Margaret relied heavily on sweets. She had once told Maggie that she sucked lemon drops whenever she had to teach arithmetic, which was her weakest subject.
Maggie could hear her father out in the waiting room, swearing. “For a religious family, we sure take the Lord’s name in vain a lot,” her aunt said.
“Do you think Grandpop’s going to die?”
“It doesn’t look good, does it, sweetie? I don’t know, lots of people have strokes and get better. Lots of them don’t die. But they’re paralyzed, or they can’t talk, or something like that.”
“Grandpop would really hate that,” Maggie said, and she began to feel the pressure behind her nose and eyes that meant she might start to cry.
“I know,” said her aunt, turning the big wooden crucifix at the end of her rosary over and over in her hands.
“Do you think that crucifix is too large?” Mark suddenly asked his sister.
“What?”
“The crucifix. Is it too large? We’re thinking of scaling it down. I think it’s too large. I’d even like to remove the Christ figure and keep a simple wooden cross, which seems more in keeping with Vatican II to me. But Dad says he thinks the nuns wouldn’t stand for it. We could cut a good bit off the manufacturing cost of each one if we made the cross half again as big.”
“Mark, are we actually having this conversation, here, at this moment?” said his sister, staring at him with her big blue Irish eyes, nearly the same navy as a parochial school uniform. She was wearing what Maggie’s father always called her “For Chrissake, boys” look, and Maggie thought she looked very young and pretty.
Her uncle Mark was always saying it was such a shame that Margaret had joined the convent. Once Maggie had asked, very seriously, when she was in one of her religious phases, how her aunt had known that she had had the call from God. “That’s a complicated question, sweetheart,” her aunt had answered. But Maggie had heard her father say that the call from God was a lot of nonsense, and that when he had asked Margaret why she was ruining her life, his sister had answered a little sadly, “It’s quiet, and they’ll send me to college.”
“So it was your father’s fault?” Connie had said, and Tommy had sighed and said, “Yes, Concetta. The flood. The plagues of Egypt. The Second World War. My sister taking the veil. John Scanlan caused them all.”
Maggie remembered that she had not been quite sure whether her father was teasing or not.
The door to the hospital room opened and Uncle James came in, wearing his white coat. “They won’t let anyone but Mother and I inside,” he said, sounding testy. “The director said he didn’t care if our name was Kennedy.”
“Don’t let Daddy hear that,” Margaret said. “He’d have another stroke.”