their beers, a bar towel hanging from the waistband of his pants. He shook hands with Mark officiously, like the maître d’ in a bad French restaurant, and said that Mark looked like his mother. “When was Mom ever in this place?” Mark said, leaning across the table after Sal had left. “You got me,” Tommy said. “Dad used to come here for lunch when he was still down the street, but I can’t imagine him bringing Mom here.” Mark looked around again and said, “Well, she sure as hell didn’t come here by herself.”
Tommy liked being with his brothers like this, alone, one on one, and he particularly liked being with Mark, who was only a year older than he was, and for whom he felt the slightly condescending sympathy that a man who easily fathers children feels for a man who has been incapable of doing so. (“Maybe it’s him,” Connie had said one night when they were talking about why Gail hadn’t produced a child. “My ass,” Tommy had replied, looking like his father.) Not having a family had set Mark apart. Combined with his height, it had diminished him in the family’s eyes, and so he was reduced to asserting himself by arguing with his father over the color of embroidery on cassocks. Tommy knew that given a choice between his own position of black sheep and his brother’s of barren issue, he’d stick with his own any time.
Gail had once talked about adoption, but John Scanlan had put the lid on that one. “It’s not the same,” he had said flatly. “You don’t know what in the hell you’re getting.” Then his pale blue eyes had roved over his own family, ranged in their habitual postures of attention and apprehension in his living room. “I don’t know,” he had added, “maybe you never know.”
Tommy had known something was up when he and his brother had met outside their father’s hospital room two nights ago and Mark had suggested they get together. “Mark asked you to lunch?” Connie had said, one black eyebrow arched, like some exotic form of punctuation. “What’s up?” Of course she knew what was up; it was either the company, the house, or her.
Every year or so someone in his family sat down and talked to Tommy about his wife, as though she was a car that needed a paint job. There was never a question of a trade-in—Mary Frances still asked Celeste how her husband was, even though Celeste had been divorced far longer than she’d been married. “Soused,” Celeste always answered with good humor. It was only that they all wanted Connie to run more smoothly, to mix in, to blend in, to be more like them. The worst moment of Tommy’s life had been a tenth anniversary dinner Mark had given them three years before, at which Connie had become rather high on fruity whiskey sours, the taste of the liquor lost amidst all the pineapple. There had been a cake with a little bride and groom, and toasts, and Connie had turned to all of them, the bride and groom in her hand, and had said in an odd squeaky voice, “Where were all of you on my wedding day?” And she had said it staring straight at John Scanlan, who stared right back. The effect had been blunted a bit by the fact that Connie had suddenly put her hand over her mouth, and run to the bathroom. Tommy went after her, and when they returned, his parents were gone from the table. “How long has that been going on?” James had said in a professional tone of voice to Connie, whose face was gray-white, and Tommy had said, “Jesus, James, she drank too much.” But James had been right after all; she was expecting Joseph at the time, although neither of them had known it.
Now, sitting in Sal’s with Tom, Mark said, “So your wife’s pregnant again,” and the remark lay on the table between them. Then Mark’s eyes emptied and he added, “Look, Tom, you’re going to need that new house no matter what you say. You’ll have five. You need more room.”
“We have plenty of room,” Tommy said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Let’s not start with the house. I don’t want to move.”
“Your wife doesn’t want to move.”
“Her too.”
“You know she told Gail she wants to live in one of those development houses they’re building?”