all these children?” He reached into the bottom drawer of the bedside table and drew out a Mason jar that glowed amber in the hospital lights. “They would have killed me days ago if it wasn’t for the Scotch,” he said. He poured two fingers’ worth into a plastic cup and added water from a pitcher. “Don’t tell on me,” he said to Maggie, as though his children were not there, and drank it down.
“You better watch the booze, Pop,” Margaret said.
“You watch your mouth, Sister,” John Scanlan said. “I’m still your father even if you are a bride of Christ. I need some time alone with your brother here. Take your niece to the cafeteria and buy her a chocolate bar.”
When they were gone the old man leaned back and closed his eyes.
“Jesus, Dad, you’re killing yourself,” Tommy said, moving empty glasses to the windowsill, but his father just lay there and looked at him, his eyes dull. With the departure of his daughter and his granddaughter, John Scanlan seemed to shrink and grow gray. Tommy sat down in the visitor’s chair and waited for some sort of tirade.
“I don’t know, Tommy,” John finally said, sounding half asleep. “I don’t know what the hell to think. I’m tired of this damn hospital. Father McLeod came in here today to talk to me. Scots-Irish, for God’s sake. Who the hell ordained him? He says I’ve had a rare treat in devoting my business life to the business of God. He’d been practicing that one all the way over in the black Buick, right?” The brogue was beginning to creep into his father’s voice and Tommy inhaled deeply. The room felt close and smelled of Clorox. “I said ‘There’s my problem, Father. I should have been devoting my business life to the business of making money.’ Now I’ve got your brother in here, wants to have one of the Manila factories making little blouses for girls. Says that down there in the city the girls are dressing up like fortunetellers and buying embroidered blouses. Big market. I said ‘Jesus Christ, Mark, why don’t we just change over to dresses?’ He thought I was serious. Told me he wanted to discuss that next. Jesus Christ. I’ve wasted my life.”
“Stop,” Tommy said.
“The priest asks me if I want the last rites. He said there’s nothing to be afraid of, that he knows I know the rewards of life eternal. Life eternal, shit.” The old man’s face was beginning to redden, his long fingers on the sheets to shake. Tommy came over to the bed. He thought about taking his father’s hand, but instead held onto the button that summoned the nurse. “I don’t give a good goddamn about life eternal, I told him. I got everything in my life the way I wanted it, everything all lined up right, and I want it to stay that way. Everything. It’s not the dying I mind, it’s the changing. You see what I mean.” He looked up at Tommy, and the younger man began to cry at the terrible light in his father’s eyes, as though John Scanlan was seeing visions. “Everything the way I want it. After all this time. You want to keep it just the way it is. Right? Right?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Tommy said.
The big head fell, the silver hair looking greasy and gray. John Scanlan reached over for a jelly glass on the bedside table and sipped slowly. “Stop whimpering,” he said without looking up. “Your daughter’s a funny girl. Takes things too seriously. Always stewing over something. Not like that Monica. She’s a slick one, that Monica. She’s not pulling anything over on me. I knew a girl just like her once. Went off to Hollywood and took a screen test. Married a man old enough to be her father who owned half of Los Angeles. What was I telling you?”
“Connie apologizes for not—”
“Ah, don’t give me that crap, Tommy,” said the old man, waving his hand. “Where’s your mother?”
“She’s coming over later with a piece of pie. Rhubarb pie that your sister Anne made.”
“Oh Jesus. The kids must really think the end is near, they’re sending me pie.” John Scanlan always called his younger brothers and sisters “the kids.” He saw them once a year, at a party he held in the reception room of Scanlan & Co. Last year his youngest brother had gotten so drunk that he had approached John, jabbed him in his red boutonniere